Look Who's Arrogant Now

This could be a first, watching someone on television and become infected. In this breakthrough case, George W Bush demonstrates how a tv screen is unable to stop fear from spreading rapidly. Months from now, a retrospective study should establish how many people stroked-out during that performance.

Who put that guy and Cheney up there in the first place? How they succeeded in convincing millions that a Vietnam veteran was less patriotic than somebody who used his connections to stay out of harms way or got out through multiple deferments is the great question now haunting all law-abiding taxpayers.

Bush gives a simple description of how we got to this mess but takes absolutely no responsibility for the utter failure of his administration to regulate the abuses that could occur in an environment of untrammeled capitalism. How the very wealthy and billion dollar corporations continue to benefit from inequitable tax laws. How the billion-dollar-a-day war in Iraq has siphoned off much needed capital for improvements in education, healthcare delivery and infrastructure.

He did succeed in scaring the living crap out of everybody and asked us to blindly trust him with a blank check for $700 billion. Just what is a retiree who depends on some dividends do? Or someone nearing retirement with a portfolio that is 45% smaller than what was projected? Or couples looking to secure a loan for a house, a vehicle, tuition?

This crisis should decrease the super-saturated climate of arrogance prevailing. Whenever we reduced social services because we wanted our own little tax cuts, whenever we began blaming immigrants for our societal ills and restricted them from working jobs that nobody else wanted, whenever we thought we could save entire nations by violently deposing their leaders, whenever we thought we were doing things for the very first time and putting order in the world through our measly efforts.

“What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, ‘See, this is new!‘ has already existed in the ages that preceded us. There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.” Eccl 1: 9-11

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.

Meltdown

Who says the China Syndrome was pure fantasy? In the event of a total meltdown, molten nuclear products from a reactor in the US would eat its way through the earth’s bedrock all the way to China.

Stock markets in Asia predictably mirrored the heavy losses sustained by the Dow. The contagion spread all over the world.

It was bound to happen. Who was going to pay for all those $100 million yearly bonuses of those executives from Lehman, Bear, Morgan, Goldman? This phenomenon has gone on for too long, a cruel caricature of capitalism gone mad. While a laborer in India or China would work under the sun for 12 hours or more and get paid $2, these hotshot moneymen would be managing all these financial transactions online, producing nothing of value and be paid very hefty commissions.

To those who were in the game, it was easy to make a lot of money. These people made it so easy for others to acquire loans with no down payments, 50 years to pay without disclosing that the money was ultimately coming from China or Saudi Arabia and other nations we had become dependent upon for “cheap” commodities and services. And that’s why a carpenter in Vermont could make $45 an hour while his counterpart in Vietnam would earn $4 a day. Because Grandpa and Grandma Vermont accumulated enough capital for their descendants to live far more prosperous lives than they ever dreamed of living.

Stewardship is all about acknowledging responsibility. When you begin feeling entitled to a different standard: working less, paying fewer taxes, going on more vacations, achieving less training and education and expect to be paid the same or even more, you are in for a meltdown surprise.

Those brokerage firms turned out to be wildly successful. They succeeded in making a lot of us broke.

Obscurantism

Word for the day is Obscurantism, defined by the dictionary as opposition to the spread of knowledge: a policy of withholding knowledge from the general public (Latin obscurans, "darkening"). Plato was an early advocate of selectively restricting the propagation of knowledge, justifying the concept of a “noble lie” that a philosopher-king may sometimes commit “for the own good of the people”.

Totalitarian societies extensively depend on obscurantism whenever it allows dictators to decide on what is best for the people. Our colonial status for close to four centuries was maintained largely because of obscurantism. Because we were deemed unworthy of knowledge, we were also considered unprepared for independence. Whenever our greatest and most effective heroes saw another order when they were permitted to travel abroad was the beginning of the end of our subjugation.

Nietzsche wrote: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”

Obscurantism as a tool of public policy does not respect the right of individuals to make informed choices. Thomas Aquinas wrote: "...anyone upon whom the ecclesiastical authority in ignorance of true fact imposes a demand that offends against his clear conscience, should perish in excommunication rather than violate his conscience." Jose Rizal in his two novels repeatedly railed against the near absolute obscurantism reigning in his day. He ascribed most of the blame to the one sector in Philippine colonial society whose presence remained fairly constant, the various religious orders. An ironic situation, considering Matthew 10:24 “Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known”.