Is there anyone following the ongoing economic debacle that would seriously contest Taibbi's contention here? Not only is it no secret that any austerity measures will come solely out of the hides of the peons, they scarcely bother to conceal it anymore.
And why should they? They barely bothered to hide the model that ruptured the economy in the first place, the "we fuck it up, you rebuild it and give us all fat bonuses" racket they dumped on us a few years back. As many folks (including, of course, yours truly) wrote at the time, the bailout completely disincentivized them from avoiding the same sort of bad behavior down the road.
It ain't rocket science. If you catch your kid poaching cookies from the jar and lying about it, you don't beat him, but you also don't just whistle a happy tune and bake another few dozen cookies to replace the ones he took. Except in this case, Junior was stealing cookies from every house in the neighborhood, and all you did was just replace the cookies to placate the neighbors, and not even talk to Junior about his bad behavior. So again, why wouldn't he continue to do what he was doing?
I dunno. It is weird and counterintuitive to watch how economic issues don't unfold here, how they seem largely inert, or maybe they're just being ignored, because no one wants to read about how someone gets their job sent to Shenzhen, then loses their house on the subprime ARM adjustment, then either murder-suicides his family or ends up in a tent city scavenging cans for cheap vodka. One would hope that if enough people were exposed to the magnitude of the human damage that a rapacious financial has instigated and perpetuated, they might rise up, get on their hind legs and be men when it counted most.
The main thing to keep in mind is that there is enough to go around, but in a plutonomy, the players at the table never know when -- or even how-- to say "when". It takes a certain type of person to take money that they didn't even earn -- that they inherited, or stole, or coerced, or simply got lucky on -- and presume a sense of entitlement, a mission to simply hoard and push the peasants around.
Keep taking their shit, until you realize you really don't have to.
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