Thread: $700-billion: Isn't risk risky if you're peddling bad debt?

http://www.thespec.com/go/living/article/440686

Boo-hoo neo-cons' $700-billion bailout: Isn't risk risky if you're peddling bad debt?
September 25, 2008
Jeff Mahoney
The Hamilton Spectator


I've heard it said that if you were to let a dog eat without restraint it would continue to do so until it literally blew up.

Of course, such a thing has never happened. The possibility that it could have been dreamt up only by a human -- someone, perhaps an investment banker, projecting his or her own elastic appetite onto a so-called dumb animal. Some way to talk about your best friend. There's investment bankers for you.

Wall Street right now reminds me of those hopelessly large people you read about whose houses have to be ripped open by the fire department so they can be brought to the hospital.

They've let themselves go. If Wall Street were a human being, its corpse would have to be buried in a piano case. But there was never much human about Wall Street, and the executors of its will are going to make sure its poisoned ashes are ultimately sprinkled over the nest eggs of millions of ordinary taxpaying Americans.

I wonder if the Chinese are looking at this the way we looked at the Soviet Union when it was starting to come apart.

Perhaps they're thinking that all the contradictions in the system are playing themselves out, the way Marxists like to predict they finally must.

America has had 28 years of deepening conservatism, starting with Reagan -- deregulation; free market propaganda; so-called small, non-interventionist government.

You thought you knew all the furniture in the room. But you go to the ideology dresser and open this old drawer called conservatism and sort through the clothes. Nothing fits.

There, beside the boot straps that everyone's supposed to pick themselves up by, lies a familiar pair of Small Government socks. They're folded together and you can see the darning of frugality on the surface, but when you turn them out ... oops, what's that? A multitrillion-dollar American deficit drops out, almost all of it accumulated under neo-conservative administrations.

And, wait, there's more. A quarter-billion dollars a day spent on foreign adventurism in Iraq? That's small government?

Turns out that there's a State Interventionist sock, a big woolly accidentally folded in with the Conservative Small Government pair. The laundry must've got mixed up with the Communists'. We'll just pull it off and ... funny, it won't come. Oh, no, look what Conservatism is doing now. An $85-billion bailout for the lunch-takers at AIG?

And that's just a drop in the bucket. The industrywide bailout (imagine, calling investment banking an "industry") is pegged at $700 billion.

American treasurer Henry Paulson is like the rescuing knight in that Monty Python movie, slashing away at taxpayers with his sword, saying, "Sorry. So sorry. Hate to do it. The alternative is worse." Yeah, Henry, I'm really sure it's hurting you more than them.

This is Conservatism? And Capitalism? Where is its pride? Adam Smith would be rolling over in his bank vault.

Wall Street had all this chimerical stuff up its French-cuffed sleeves -- financial products, financial instruments. Vapours. Illusions. The stuff nightmares are made of. And now Wall Street has nothing in its turned-out pockets.

Basically they were selling bad debts. It's like antimatter or dark mass in physics. You can't get your head around it. A bad debt is a financial "product"? (The Chinese lace products with lead and toxins, and they're made by cheap labour. Yeah, they're really looking after the proletariat.)

Boo-hoo neo-cons with their bailouts. Shouldn't risk be risky? Where are their so-called gonads? Let's look for them in the drawer. Maybe they're in the Traditional Values Man-of-The-Family pants, under the Father Knows Best cardigan. Yes, there they are.

Wait, these aren't men's pants. They're Sarah Palin's hunting breeches, with the words Hurry Up And Die across the butt.

Nothing makes sense in the dresser any more. The ideology drawers are all mixed up. Conservative America as a pseudofeminist matriarchy? Who's gonna take care of the baby? Bill O'Reilly? And you think he says Shut Up a lot now?

Madness. Look in the Feminism drawer. Knickers. And they're in a knot. Must be Hillary's. She was supposed to be wearing Palin's pants.

And the Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank. Because they are the bank. Guess who owns most of America's debt?

Will the real capitalists please stand? The fake ones just blew up.

contact your congressman HERE

They want "Cash for Trash" ... not no but "Heeeeeeeeeeell NO!