Author: Larry Jones

Posted on

Big Day, 2008

People are standing in line to vote in Los Angeles.

Earth

Here in the most nonchalant of states, there is a sense of history in the air, and the coolest kids in school are doing their dorky civic duty. Never mind that California is the bluest of the blue states, the House of Blues, and the presidential outcome here is foregone. People want to be counted.

The place where I work is a polling place, and I have seen three presidential elections here, not counting this one, and numerous state, local and congressionals, and I have never seen crowds like this. When I arrived today there was a line out the door and across the parking lot. One of the poll workers told me that there was already a line when they arrived to set up for the 8:00 AM opening. The polling area remains busy still, in midafternoon.

I’ve received calls from friends around town, reporting the same thing everywhere. On the news they’ve been talking about a record turnout, 130 million voters nationwide, but I didn’t really consider what that would look like on the ground. What it looks like is little “D” democracy.

I’ll be excercising my California right to take time off to vote by leaving here an hour early. I wouldn’t do it except that I have it on good authority that my own polling place has been swamped with voters most of the day already.

I harbor no illusions. This is a historic moment. This election, and the man we are electing, will change this nation forever. At the same time, we face greater challenges than ever before, both as a nation and as a world. After this long, strange, hopeful campaign it feels as if we are at the end of something, and we can finally exhale.

But we’re really at a new beginning. There is a lot of work to do. The problems we all face — the financial collapse, climate change, tribal hatred and war around the world — are bigger than at any time in my life, and make no mistake: we all face them, and there can be no solutions without the work, sacrifice and cooperation of every one of us, regardless of how we vote today.

So please pardon me now, as I go get in line myself. I’ll see you on the other side, and we’ll push on together.

__________________________________________

UPDATE, the morning after: Obama’s acceptance speech — It’s almost too much. I feel as if I have been eating nothing but sticks and dirt for eight years, and I have suddenly been given a spoonful of pure maple syrup. (McCain’s speech wasn’t bad, either.)

Share this:
Posted on

Salad

The ground turkey had been pebble-gray right after it was cooked.

She didn’t know anything about browning meat, thought the only important thing was to kill the e coli bacteria. Two days later, having been served at a couple of meals and returned to the refrigerator, the meat was white.

That stuff tasted funky last night, he thought. I’m not eating it again. His plan for dinner was to microwave a tasty burrito out of some canned frijoles and some extra sharp cheddar. But she had somehow covered every available countertop in the little kitchen with stuff, leaving no place to work: Plates, bags of produce, saucepans, utensils, paper towels, her purse, a stack of books.

He shoved a pile of junk on the table out of the way and sat down there with a plate and a tortilla.

He was carefully smearing beans on his tortilla when she started in asking him what he was going to put in his burrito. “Do you want some lettuce? How about cilantro?” He declined it all, he just wanted beans and cheese, so she started making him a salad, using all the stuff he didn’t want in his burrito.

He decided not to grate the cheese. The grater was too hard to clean, all the little cheese bits in it, and a million sharp edges. He always grated a little bit of himself trying to clean the damned thing.

She was standing at the counter, blocking the silverware drawer, so he yanked it out a little faster than usual, to show her that she was in his way. She was always in his way. The knife he wanted to use on the cheese, a cheap black-handled four-inch supermarket paring knife, wasn’t in there. The kitchen is full of knives, he thought. Who needs that one? He put his hand on the front of the drawer thinkng to slam it shut violently, but she would jump, and maybe scream, so with some effort he held himself back, and slid it gently closed.

Of course she was using the knife for something else. He found a substitute and went back to the table to slice cheese. The Cabot Extra Sharp was one of his favorites. She had told him the softer cheeses were better for him, but he loved this cheese, its strong smell and taste. Real Mexicans would have used a milder cheese, but fuck them. They would have put a bunch of chilis in it and ruined it anyway. This was his burrito.

He knew his hands were a little shaky because of the drawer thing earlier, so he was extra cautious slicing the cheese. He wanted it to melt without having to nuke it for five minutes and get it all bubbling so it would either burn his tongue or, if he waited for it to cool, congeal into a mass of cheese-like plastic. This meant it had to be thin, since it wasn’t to be grated.

She was going on about what she was putting in his salad. Lettuce and cilantro, of course. He had just explicitly said no to both of those. Cucumber, tomato wedges, diced onions. Sculpting his fine, fine slices, he only knew she was talking, not what she said.

He thought about the receptionist at work, so young and tender, the skin on her face like a baby’s, her smile so sweet and guileless. She seemed, in fact, like a baby to him, her pudgy little fingers poking at the phone buttons. Sometimes he would lean on her desk and try to make small talk, and she was always agreeable, with that baby smile, but there was nothing he knew how to say that made any real sense to her. The only time they ever connected, the two of them, was once when a little boy was hanging around her desk, pretending he could make himself invisible, and she was playing along with the kid, and she turned and said “I don’t see anybody, do you?” and he had gone along quickly and smoothly, agreeing that, no, there certainly was no little kid anywhere around, and she had lit up in genuine delight. That baby smile!

Once he had his burrito assembled he realized that it wasn’t really a burrito. No Mexican would be caught dead with it. It was just a tortilla. not even rolled up or anything, with some beans and pieces of cheese on it. He put it in the microwave at 40% power for two minutes and stood there, getting irradiated, until the thing beeped. As he sat back down at the table she brought over his bowl of salad and looked at his dinner.

“Aren’t you going to put some ground turkey on it?”

Share this:
Posted on

Main Street, Next Day

I feel ragged and depressed today.

As I type this my friend who got fired yesterday is cleaning out her office. All morning people have been dropping by to commiserate and pay respects. Everyone wants to keep in touch, everyone wishes her the best. She has dragged the industrial-sized trash can from the kitchen down the hall, and through it all she keeps tossing stuff into it. Once it is all gone, she will be gone, too. I can’t imagine how this place will work without her.

Main Street

Way back in time when the first person tried something that could not be accomplished by one person alone, he must have thought for a while, and then came up with the idea of getting a helper. Maybe they needed to take down a large animal so they would have something to eat. To get help with that project, he probably agreed to share the food. However it was arranged, it had to be understood that the goal could only be achieved through teamwork, that both sides — chief and assistant — were of equal importance in getting the job done.

Economic evolution led to more clearly defined roles between employer and employee, but I’m sure that for centuries in rural settings and small shops it was understood that the workers and the boss were doing essentially the same job, and if the farmer showed no respect for the hired hand he might not get his crops harvested before they rotted in the fields.

People being what they are — thoughtless, greedy and cruel — it eventually became necessary for workers to form unions, as a way to enforce the respect of Capital. Workers supported each other and the thinking was an injury to any of us is an injury to all of us. That era didn’t last long, and the funeral was held as Ronald Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union in the 1980’s.

Now we don’t stand up for each other. We let corporations make all the rules, and we meekly agree to them, and sign documents saying we agree to be on time, never do anything to harm the corporation, wear nice clothes, watch our language, go the extra mile, keep Company secrets and oh, by the way, we can be fired at any time with no notice, no severance, no reason and no recourse.

When the axe falls, the victim knows nothing about it until he sees his head rolling on the ground in front of him. Those who are spared, like me, express regret, but secretly breathe easier, knowing that we will get some unknown number of additional paychecks for some unknown number of future paydays.

This is what I’m doing today, standing in shit up to my neck, waiting for the boss to yell “Break’s over! Back on your knees!”

Share this:
Posted on

Main Street

I’ve tried and tried to get my brain around the “economic crisis” we are in.

Main Street

I’ve read the straight news and dipped into the financial news. Literally all network news programs on television cover it as the lead story every night. My eyes glaze over with the concepts: recapitalization, credit default swaps, toxic assets, equity stakes, mortgage-based securities. I think I have the big picture, and I can, if pressed, recite a simplified but more or less accurate description of the history, the current problem and the solutions that will now be attempted by the governments of the world.

But I didn’t really feel it until today.

Yesterday HugeCorp, the obscenely ginormous company that employs me, shut down one of their offices near mine. Ten people came in to work that morning, and went home midday without jobs. They were fired by people they didn’t know, executives from the district office, who were carrying out orders from national headquarters.

This is what it feels like on Main Street. It’s not “downsizing.” It’s going home without a job, and realizing that you have to try to find another one at a time when all the companies are firing people. It’s having to decide if you’ve got enough money to keep your health coverage, now that you have to pay the full amount out of your savings, if you have any.

The downsizing arrived today at my office. It turns out I get to keep my job, but my friend K. does not. She’s younger than me, but when I started working there she was already a fixture. Over the years at different times she did most of the jobs that we do. No one can remember a time when she wasn’t there. She was as disgusted as I was when HugeCorp took over our company despite not knowing how to run it, but she never stopped looking for ways to make things better. She always made the best of the situations we were stuck with. She became a counselor to younger employees and reference librarian to old hands. She knew our business inside and out, and if she had a “flaw” it was her insistence that her coworkers at least try to do their jobs as well as she did hers. We laughed together every day, and some days I didn’t think I could take that place if she wasn’t in the office next door.

She had been with the company for 21 years, since long before HugeCorp even existed. The HR person who fired her had not started college when K. started working there.

She wasn’t the only casualty. Tomorrow when I go to work I’ll be almost alone in my department. Those who weren’t fired got relocated, and I won’t see most of them again. I will have to face a couple of managerial types who told me today how hard they “fought for her.” It will be an emotional day, as I try to find a way to keep my own gig together, while in the office next door my old friend clears out the memories of 20 years.

K. left an hour early today, one of the very few times I’d ever seen her do that. I called her cell phone a couple of hours later and she told me she’s a big girl and she’ll be OK but she couldn’t talk right then because she was getting her nails done.

Share this:
Posted on

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

UPDATE: The simple version of what I’m saying in this post is that regardless of Obama/Biden’s big lead in the polls, not everybody who says they are going to vote Democratic will be allowed to vote. So the outcome might surprise us.

_______________________________________

John McCain looks like a loser in this election, but don’t think the Republicans have given up.

Voting BoothThe New York Times reports today that tens of thousands of voter registrations in swing states have been purged, apparently illegally. The Times is careful to say that they can’t tell if one party or the other is orchestrating the mass removal of names from voter registration rolls, but when you are the (Republican) party of the elite wealthy minority, it stands to reason that you’ll benefit if fewer of the rabble get to cast their votes. The Republicans have been trying to make an issue of “voter fraud” for decades, but the truth is it’s not really a problem in our democracy.

The problem is vote suppression, (seriously, watch this 30-second video by one of the leading neocon thinkers, Paul Weyrich) and the Republicans have made an industry out of it, from jamming Democratic phone banks on election day to challenging peoples’ legal right to vote to rigging electronic voting machines. Low voter turnout translates into greater success for Republicans, and according to the Times article, these vanishing voter registrations are all taking place in swing states, so forgive me if I get a little suspicious about this. Even if this is not an orchestrated plan by the Republican National Committee, as the article points out, the Democrats have registered huge numbers of voters during this election cycle, and in some states for every new voter added to the rolls, two have been removed. Advantage — and suspicion: Republicans.

Meanwhile, across the nation Republicans are raising outraged cries of “voter fraud.” If you are a real wonk for details, you can read Columbia University professor Lorraine Minnite’s excellent paper, “The Politics of Voter Fraud” (PDF). The bottom line is “…the available evidence here suggests that voters rarely commit voter fraud.” The claim is simply a smokescreen to give cover to Republican operatives who know that they have a better chance of winning if the turnout is low.

Normally this is where I’d tell you that the solution to this particular problem is to make damned sure you get out on election day and cast your ballot, thus thwarting those who would prefer you stay home and watch John McCain eke out a narrow victory November 4. Unfortunately, if your name has been taken off the voter registration rolls, maybe because you’ve moved in the past year or so, maybe because you didn’t answer a letter from the RNC that looked like junk mail and so went directly into the recycle bin, the solution will be much more complicated than that.

You’ll be given a “provisional” ballot and told that it will be counted after proper verification. These are often called placebo ballots, because their main purpose is to get you to leave the polling place without making a fuss. The odds are that they will never be counted. You won’t know that, of course, and the only way all the votes will be counted is in an elaborate judicially-mandated recount, kind of like what happened in Florida eight years ago, and we all know how well that went.

I still think Barack Obama will be our next president. I’m just not sure how many lawyers and recounts it’s going to take.

_____________________________________

RECOMMENDED READING: The Bradblog, for all sorts of voter fraud and machine-rigging stuff.

Share this:
Posted on

Sarah Palin: Just the Start?

Sarah Palin is a dangerous woman.

Electoral Map, 10/07/2008

As you can see from the map (which appears today at pollster.com), she won’t be Vice President this time, because McCain won’t win.

But the wingnut Right has found their new George Bush, and you can be sure we’ll see her again. Maybe she’ll be a senator from Alaska next, which will give her a national platform and greater recognition, and then she’ll be running for President in 2016 or even 2012, maybe against Hillary Clinton.

For all I know the fundamentalists may be sincere in their screwball beliefs, but they sure don’t know anything about reality, nor do they have any interest in learning. They could never get elected on the basis of their “every-egg-is-sacred, evolution is just another theory” platform, so in order to get into a position where they can impose their thinking on the rest of us, they have made a deal with the devil, namely the demonic, scorched-earth “New American Century” gang, whom we shall call the Neocons.

Here’s the deal: The fundamentalists provide the empty vessel — know-nothing social conservatives like Reagan, Bush and now Palin, and in exchange the neocons provide the muscle (and the computer hacking) needed to win elections. The Christianists get a President (one of their own) who will appoint right-wing Supreme Court judges to reverse Roe v. Wade, oppose gay marriage, etc., and the neocons get a President who will let them make endless war on the rest of the world, while eliminating government regulation of business and robbing the Treasury of every last dime.

The Left, rightly convinced that their own programs and policies benefit the largest mass of voters, gets whipped every time, and they can never figure out what happened.

If you think this is far-fetched, I refer you to the cases of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, a senile old movie actor and a congenital fuckup. They spoke to the religious right directly and unabashedly, stood right up and called other countries “evil,” and claimed Jesus as their role model. Neither of them had any particular presidential skills or aptitude. Most of us on the left laughed at them pretty much the same way we are laughing now at Sarah Palin.

But it turned out that being clueless did not disqualify them from being President. The hardcore right-wing power structure, which had taken over the Republican Party, saw in them attractive candidates, dummies who’d be able to talk the Jesus talk convincingly, and who’d go along with whatever fiscal and military policies the Party handed them, because hey, who understands all that economics and diplomacy stuff anyway?

Palin is the political descendant of Reagan and Bush: attractive, zealously religious, folksy and vacant. She can be molded by campaign handlers such as Karl Rove (and Lee Atwater before him), and she can plausibly pose as presidential material, easily mouthing platitudes, slinging personal attacks and avoiding serious questions on substantive issues. Merely by virtue of who she is she can deliver the votes of the religious right, a coveted and loyal bloc.

Once in the Oval Office, like Reagan and Bush she’ll be content to let the serious ideological thinkers within the Party set policy and run the show. She’ll make good on her Supreme Court promises and other just-for-show religio-political stances, but important decisions about whether Halliburton gets all the contracts (they do) or what country needs invadin’ will be made by unelected guys behind the scenes.

There has been speculation that there was backstage neocon maneuvering to force McCain to put Palin on his ticket. I don’t know if any of that is true, but I’ve been saying for at least a year that the Republicans don’t have a chance in this election. It’s obvious to the voters who is responsible for the horrendous mess we are in, and they are ready to dish out some well-deserved punishment. Party insiders don’t really like McCain, so he was the perfect guy to sacrifice this time around. Nonetheless getting Palin on this ticket will give her the name recognition and credibility to be a believable candidate in the next election or in 2016.

We are about to emerge from eight years of Rove/Cheney/Bush darkness, and won’t it be a relief to see a little daylight for a change! But don’t turn your back on Sarah Palin. She’ll be back, and tougher than ever.

Share this:
Posted on

I’m Back

Yesterday this blog disappeared for a while.

Unbeknownst to me, my web host had locked my account. I didn’t try to look at the blog or post anything on it for most of the day, and by the time I realized something was wrong, the billing department was closed for the day. It did seem a little odd that I wasn’t getting any email, since I was expecting something important, but with working at my crummy job and the excitement over seeing Sarah Palin on the teevee, I failed to make the connection.

Apparently what happened is that my bank was swallowed by some other bank, and they canceled all the old credit cards (incliding mine) and issued new ones, and since my payment to my web host is a quarterly automatic hit on the old card, I didn’t know I was in arrears, because, you know, defunct credit card.

So, while it’s safe to say that almost nobody missed me, I apologize to any who did, especially Adorable Girlfriend, with whom I was hoping to watch Biden v. Palin while she was here in LA. She claims she wouldn’t hit on a married man, particularly a goy guy, but I assumed that would change once she met me, so I was prepared to defend my honor.

Why so chaste, Mr. Jones? I get migraines sometimes, and I read this article yesterday, indicating that I might die if I let AG into my pants:

… the strain of juggling married life and a secret lover leads to stress and tension for the cheating partner.
That can lead to migraine headaches which can cause a potentially fatal aneurysm, or ballooning in a blood vessel in the brain.

Of course it’s debatable whether I’d be able to keep our trysts secret, and in any case I may be close enough to heaven without voluntarily putting myself at any greater risk. This is the caution borne of tragic experience, and it may indicate that I am no longer a Fun Guy, but on the other hand I may represent a powerful, stoic challenge to Bad Girls everywhere. Lucky for me my email was down and Adorable Girlfriend and I didn’t connect at all while she was in my town.

AG: I hope we get to meet some day. But no funny business.

Share this:
Posted on

Bailout Blues

My biggest problem with the Bush Administration’s bailout plan is the Bush Administration.

I don’t want the economy to collapse. I’m pretty cranky about the greed, dishonesty and outright stupidity that got us to this point, but I do agree that something probably needs to be done. I say “probably” because I don’t really understand the problem, and the more I read and hear about it, the more I wonder if anyone understands it. Certainly there’s no one on CNN who’s been able to explain it to me in anything better than third grade terms.

So, sure, let’s do something, but here’s the problem: I don’t trust the Bush Administration. Of course, I just generally dislike them for all the usual liberal reasons — I won’t go over them again. But the real problem is that they might be lying. I mean, after the selling of the invasion of Iraq, in which the administration simply made up a bunch of shit, spread the lies vigorously through compliant and supposedly “objective” media, and acted like it was a great big emergency and we had to hand over unilateral war powers to Rove/Cheney/Bush right away and don’t be asking any questions, why should I believe them now?

I can think of various reasons why they might be lying. They might be simply continuing their policy of destroying the federal government because neocons just don’t like the federal government. They might be trying to stall the collapse just long enough for John McCain to get elected. They might already know that John McCain can’t be elected and they might be trying to hand President Obama a big steaming plate of shit sometime next Spring. Hell, George Bush might actually be thinking about his “legacy,” as if he has a chance of salvaging anything there.

But after eight years of this administration playing fast and loose with the truth, why should I swallow their latest cries of impending doom and pony up my share of seven hundred billion dollars? Somebody needs to convince me that Hank Paulson won’t just tuck it into his vest and apply for his old job at Goldman Sachs. You might think that’s pretty far-fetched, that such a thing couldn’t happen in the United States of America. I refer you to the “election” of 2000, in which a barely literate nincompoop got picked to be President despite not getting as many votes as his opponent. Things can happen, folks.

I don’t know exactly how this could be handled in such a way that we won’t have to wonder if it’s just a gigantic bank robbery, the equivalent of George Bush and cronies grabbing the silverware and the chandeliers on their way out of the halls of power. But until somebody smarter than me in Washington has an idea, I’m OK with this bailout not going forward.

Share this:
Posted on

Senator McCrazypants

OK, I’ll say it: John McCain is ridiculous.

His campaign is in trouble, and he wants to stop and . . . what? Go back to the beginning? Start over and try a different strategy? He never had a serious chance to win this election in the first place. God bless him, he’s too moderate for the right-wingers who now control the Republican party. When the current president has screwed up as badly as George W. Bush, it goes without saying that the next president will not be from your party. McCain was the sacrificial lamb, an expendable candidate that the party didn’t really like anyway, so who cares if he loses? After they threw him to the wolves they decided to get a little fundamentalist mileage out of the campaign by throwing Sarah Palin into the mix. She’s somebody they can use later, maybe in the next election, once they’ve established her “credentials” as an actual player on the national stage.

But McCain is just doing crazy shit now. He’s like a guy in a board game who — realizing he’s too far behind to win — spends the rest of his time in the game making unpredictable suicide plays, screwing everything up for those who are still serious about the outcome. Picking Palin was crazy. He’d be doing much better now if he had a running mate who knew his ass from page eight about. . . well, anything. But he wanted to spoil Obama’s convention, and the Palin choice did do that.

Then he essentially canceled the first day of his own convention, saying in effect that you can’t do politics during a hurricane. A hurricane a thousand miles away. As if the Republican Party is somehow in charge of emergency preparedness for the Gulf Coast. WTF?

And now he has “suspended his campaign,” so he can rush to Washington to help solve the current economic crisis. And he wants to postpone the long-scheduled first debate. Never mind that he hasn’t found anything in the Senate important enough to warrant his presence since sometime in April, or that in a time of crisis the voters might actually want to hear what the candidates have to say about it, or that ranking members in both houses say they’re doing fine without introducing presidential politics into the wrangling, or that (as Obama has said) it is possible to do two things at once. Never mind that McCain has solidified his place as one of the nuttiest major presidential candidates in history.

I probably live in a liberal bubble here in California, and I watch MSNBC and listen to Air America, but I can’t believe Middle America is going to think this latest move is anything other than proof that John McCain is just too volatile — or kooky — to be president.

Share this:
Posted on

The Sky is Falling! Or Is The Bottom Dropping Out?

A look at my personal bank account will quickly reveal that I am not a financial genius.

Million Bucks

Still, even without a degree in economics or any investment track record, I want to go on record right now as saying that something stinks about this 700 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street companies. For starters, let’s all admit that the 700 billion is just… for starters. When has the government — no matter who’s been in charge — brought anything in within budget? Say it with me now: Never. But that’s not my real complaint. Heck, 700 billion here, 700 billion there — once you get the numbers up in that category, what’s the difference, unless they’re literally trying to see if they can spend all the money in the world?

At first I had the typical knee-jerk reaction: “Who the hell do these assholes think they are? They’re making millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses, rockin’ and rollin’ all over Wall Street, operating with no restrictions or government oversight, and all the profits are private, and now that they’re in trouble — trouble of their own making — they want me to pick up the tab for the party, and put the empty cognac bottles in the recycling bin?”

But then I admit I took a pretty big pull from the “too big to fail” kool-aid. You know the argument: These financial institutions hold so much paper, and so many homeowners and business owners and banks and corporations are interconnectedly dependent on their stability that we must save them, just this once, and then we’ll figure out some new regulations and get back to business and this will never happen again and we’ll all be part of The Ownership Society and everyone will be happy.

But now I’m back to my original “what the hell?” position. Over the weekend, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson jotted down a three-page memo that he would like to have Congress pass into law. The law would give him a metric buttload of cash (see above, 700 billion dollars) to do with as he pleases. What he says he wants to do — I think — is buy a whole bunch of bad mortgages, which — I think — will ease the “credit crunch” (sorry, don’t know what that is really), which will in turn restore stability to the economy, and then everyone will be happy. I haven’t read the whole thing, but here’s my favorite part so far:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Nice, huh? No pesky legislators or — AARGH! — judges nosing around and asking questions. Every hedge fund manager knows those guys don’t know squat about money and shit. They’d have everybody in three-piece pin-striped suits, and reading credit applications all the way through before granting loans. How can you make any money that way?

Speaking, as I am, from a position of not really knowing anything for sure about this big money meltdown, I can only say that I am freaked the fuck out.

  • Bear Stearns out of business.
  • Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalized.
  • Lehman Brothers out of business.
  • AIG bought by the government.
  • Merrill Lynch sold to Bank of America.
  • 4 million homes foreclosed (no one knows how many more are at risk).
  • No one seems to know which lenders are holding whose loans and whether the borrowers are willing — or even able — to pay.

That last one is another way of saying that we haven’t seen the bottom of this plunge yet and we don’t know how far we are going to fall or even how close to the bottom we are. Don’t try to argue with me on that. Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen next is bullshitting.

So if that’s true, what is Paulson going to do with the 700 billion, really? I think we can stipulate that it would only be a down payment on what is really needed. It’s probably enough to prevent total global economic failure at least until November 4, which might or might not help John McCain get elected. It seems like a lot of money, doesn’t it? I know it does to me. But if you estimate the world’s total global production at around 60 trillion dollars, which a lot of smart people do, it’s only 1.17% of that. Barely lunch money.

So who’s kidding whom? I agree that something must be done. Maybe the 700 Club is the way to go, maybe not. But not without some adults watching to make sure Paulson doesn’t just use it to help his friends on Wall Street, while stiffing everybody else. Hey, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was the Treasury Secretary, right? And guess where he’s going when he’s done with this little government job?

Bail all you want, Henry. But I hereby require that Congress amend your little memo to include some accountability to me, one of your bosses and one of the ones who’ll be paying the bills you run up. Also, I want those profligate CEO’s, hedge fund managers, investment brokers and other Wall Street ne’er-do-wells all to be given $40,000 a year jobs, and when they need a bailout, they can call their parents.

____________________________________________

For a nuts and bolts history of what has happened, check out this post, and thanks to Kathleen for the link.

Share this: