Hold On A Minute

Ordinary taxpayers heaved a sigh of relief when it was announced that the government was putting out $700 billion to rescue the foundering financial system. The stock market staged a furious rally and we suckers felt better when our meager investments recovered a little bit.

Those who cheered the loudest however were the financial wizards, routinely paid tens of millions of dollars in bonuses, who are specialists in crafting arcane transactions that assign value to otherwise worthless negotiable instruments.

$700 billion is plainly a lot of money. Managed properly, the sum can handle the healthcare needs of the entire planet for 50 years--I’m referring to obstetric care, vaccinations, antibiotics, screening tests, angioplasties, chemotherapy--the works. Instead, I pity the next President of the United States because he won’t have any funds left for improving education, upgrading infrastructure and increasing the efficiency of healthcare delivery.

And the din from all the cheering is deafening because the overwhelming majority of US taxpayers including all the contributions coming from outcast illegal immigrants, will be covering the ill-gotten wealth amassed by these greedy money lending criminals.

This disaster wouldn’t have happened if Reagan had not been so successful in demonizing government that resulted in massive deregulation which allowed the well-connected (read as those who lobbied through monetary contributions for favorable rules that lavished undue advantages to those who already had a lot of money to begin with) to get away with nothing less than criminal avarice. While we were tricked into believing that our tax cuts were proportionally as large as the upper echelons of society making more than half a million a year, when we were distracted by social issues that tactically divided us from collectively asserting our rights, these villains kept on piling up their profits.

We need to think long and hard before we commit this breathtaking amount of money to bail out common criminals. In a just society, they need to be punished, they need to return the loot. The collapse of the US economy is a terrifying, almost unthinkable prospect. But the destruction of the nation’s moral character will be a fatal consequence.