Bail Outs, Wealth, Cronyism, and Rightwing Stupidity

It's late and I'm a tad tired, but I'm also beginning to get well and truly pissed off. A bunch of greed head ratbastards wrote $60T of paper on $6T worth of mortgages and when that paper pyramid fell apart everybody acted surprised and since that kind of 'fall apart' exceeded the nation's ability to absorb it Uncle Fed rode to the rescue. Well, kind of. The idjits in charge of that fiasco take those Fed ducats and write themselves bonus checks for their fine performance and buy banks. Yes, we're not only financing failures buying solvent banks, we're giving them a great big tax break to do it. How in the hell I expected BushCo to look the devil in the eye and flinch from being his crony I don't know, but I backed this mess - or at least the idea of keeping the show going. There isn't any money back in the system, they're eating it for their gain - a real big goddam surprise consider the ongoing criminal enterprise in charge of our government. They've made a socialistic expenditure dwarfing all the third rate countries they scoff at and turned it into a wealth welfare program. You've gotta love it - even as you think murderous thoughts - the absolute hubris is so astonishing that a novel written with it as a premise would be laughed off the shelves and would be too sad to make the humor section.
PJ O'Rourke was funny at one time. Karla at BlueOregon pretty much blows a gasket at PJ's "We Blew It" article offering up her behind for some rightie kissing. PJ is a child of privilege and a high class education and he's wasted a fair intellect on comic book versions of Ayn Rand's pot boiler novels based on a surface understanding of the right. Ayn has an excuse, compared to her experiences of the failures of Communism even a shallow understanding of capitalism looks better. A high school freshman all stoked up on self-indulgent egocentricism will immediately get the hots for the unexplained but glorified characters and hopefully get over it well before graduation. If not they'll vote for a third term for GeorgeII because he looks soooo masculine in a flight suit and talks soooo tough. Never mind that historically every shot this bunch has at it leaves things in some degree of ruin to be fixed by the other side until a recurring memory lapse happens and they do it again. In PJ's world the only thing worse than the people who messed up the good idea is the people who oppose it - and they really are a mess. Just never goddam mind that those people kept telling them that you can't do it like that with getting a mess, nope - ask Rush as he calls this the Obama Recession/Depression or read one of the right-tard blogs where they ask how to prove the left set this off to win the election. Really, no damn kidding and no I won't link to them and give them credibility. PJ was funny once, a very long time ago, but his outfit has so damaged humor that all PJ is left with is the Don Rickles version of rude insult. How can he do irony with the Rush statements standing there? How can he exaggerate into satire in the face of right-tard idea that the evil liberals set off this economic whirlwind to win an election? Honest to god the right should leave humor alone, it isn't that there's no talent, it's just that their material can't match their own stands for humor...black humor.
***bn at P3 deconstructs poor PJ in a fitting manner.***

Here's the deal, things are going to get worse and a lot of people who shouldn't be at risk are going to find themselves going under. They'll have worked real hard and gotten a little ahead and be sunk because some wealthy assholes couldn't get richer fast enough that they could pay attention to what they were doing. Years ago financial planners were warning that derivatives were real risky not understood by more than a handful of people, so between them and swaps built on them they ran up ten times the value of the assets and exploded it in our faces. Not theirs. Ours. The ones walking away will be wealthy and the ones staying are gaming the Fed to get wealthier. I suppose you think you ought to have recourse? Maybe political or criminal? Make me laugh. There's recourse alright, but it's frowned upon and illegal because they don't issue ratbastard tags...there'd be a hell of line if they did. That's flatly the damn truth and you can get along with it or you can go howl at the moon because either will do as much to fix it.

Am I advocating burning them out of their homes and hunting them down like rabid skunks? It's a fun sort of thought in a very dark way, but it'll get you into a lot of trouble and ensure that their ilk institutes a really repressive government that GWB only dreamed of and half-assedly instituted. Expecting Barack Obama to actually fix what's broken is like thinking you can plug the Hoover Dam's turbine chutes with your index finger. Remember where Insurance Companies put their money and then think you're going to see actual health care reform and yes it is named single payer universal coverage and called socialized medicine by the beneficiaries of this bail out.

Some of you get pretty limited sympathy from me, you engaged in magical thinking regarding the stock market and the housing market. Prices are going up so they have to keep going up, even though you could see that it was buying pressure that was driving the prices rather than the actual assets. There's no end, the right assured you, free market rules and it isn't wrong. But there was your mistake, you listened to their horseshit about a market that has never, ever existed. Not once, not even in Adam Smith's own writing because he stated clearly that unfettered capitalism would eat itself through killing its own market. If you have pretty pictures of Dickens's Industrial Revolution or our Robber Barons then you have to love the right's ideas because that is them in operation. You like children in rags working 14 hour days for starvation wage while gold plated mansions are built for their exploiters you'll love trickle down economics because there it is in operation. Not St Ronnie's goddam fantasy world, in real concrete terms that is how it works. Or maybe you'd like something contemporary? Fine, Monday morning's financial news ought to give you something to chew on.

Sure, I'm kinda pissed off. Twenty years of clean and sober working like a pig doing quality work and this will probably sink me. What? You're surprised that people aren't spending money on big ticket items? You have some idea that the roof replacement that is needed isn't going to get put off, oh yeah, most people have several thousand dollars laying around that isn't doing anything and they aren't spooked. You own a car dealership and you can't sell a car because nobody can get a loan so you have me temporarily fix that roof and we both know it's not adequate but $30K just isn't there and so he prays I can keep him dry by nickle and diming it. Those nickles don't cut it on my end, there aren't enough of them and and my insurance companies and bonding agencies don't give a rat's patoot if I make a dime this month, they need their payment and it ain't small. Let's not even think about building a house...

The Republicans are starting to fight over whose going to run their Party. The Christianists have both hands on its throat and they will have their theocratic agenda flogged. They've paid their dues and now you goddam heathens are gonna get right with their god or they're gonna know why. You betcha. You can take your damnable science and stuff in a heterosexual way because you going to get along with the idea that dinosaurs were ridden by people six thousand years ago and that devil's cheat of millions of years is strictly a test of your faith. And if you get funny ideas about what goes where or who does what to whom you're going to learn better. Where you ever got this misguided notion that this isn't a Christian nation isn't just open to question, you'll be shown the errors of your ways. You'll find out that any policies that reduce abortions like good sex education and access to contraception are the devil's handiwork and just banning them is how it's done. Private education will fix your socialist notions, god will see to it, and oddly enough the corporate wing isn't all enthused about being stuck with ignorant savages for technical positions, though it's not such a bad idea on the work floor. These are the folks that are in competition for the electorate and they wonder what the problem is.

The world watched us stomp Iraq and a big chunk went, "What the hell?" and they'll shout, "Victory!" and have not the least damn clue what it is supposed to be. So we burn and spend our dedicated and professional military as though it were cheap fuel. Lies be damned, the world will recognize our Christian greatness and bow down to the light. Or maybe hate us like poison? They don't talk about fixing what's wrong with them, they talk about how evil the "left" is and how to beat them. There's nothing wrong with what they think, it's just that they didn't get it quite right - again. Goddamned again, and this election was won by six points, not twenty. That is the hold this half assed lie has on the electorate, that and hate and fear. What ever you think of the rapt attention of some Obama people it holds no comparison to the spit flecked rage of a Palin orgy. Now just what the hell do you propose to do with that? The people who just brought you the world's biggest socialization program scream socialist at Obama.

You betcha, this is going to be one big exercise in singing Kumbayah. My friends, you're not even real Americans, oh there's a lot of names for you but none that have anything to do with that red-blooded god-fearing American dream of the right. Republicans are having a fight, I keep thinking of ways to help them amp it up real good because this bunch isn't going to fix themselves until there's a hell of smash up.

Oh yeah, I'm pissed off. I'm not going to do well out of this but a lot of people are going to get it a lot harder and that's just multiples of more wrong and me more pissed. Here's the real pisser, you've got Boehner and Cantor in leadership just champing to screw the works as much as possible because the exact and only hope they've got is a disaster and with power in the balance you could measure how much they care with a very small thimble.

But hey, we won...