It is a terrible thing to become as old as I am, and to have to admit how stupid I am.
I have been walking around on the earth, and going up and down on it, assuming that banks were places where fiscal ignoramuses like me could put their paychecks, and pay bills with almost all of it, where we could borrow money to build a house or buy a car, and where the sober, grown-up Republicans who run the banks could manage to reward such little savings as I might accidentally accumulate with a little bonus for letting the bank use my pittances for the common good.
Nah! Banks are demonstrating that they are complex financial institutions, using our money to invent assets that vaguely rest upon bad investments in hopeless projects, in a system that shuffles ownership of those lets-pretend investments like peas under cups on a circus scam-artists come-on. Banks are really designed to be profit-making schemes for the owners and executives of the banks. Nothing more. Absolutely nothing more.
Right now, banks preach to idiots like me that we should suck up our courage, tighten our belts, save a bit more, and find some way to pay the mortgages that are bigger than the worth of our houses. At the same time, the banks themselves are abandoning monstrous housing, office, and development projects that they bought into, and leaving them for the rain and the wind to inherit, because the projects are bad investments,
and it is just better business to abandon them than to pay the bills. At the same time, they are awarding themselves huge bonuses for doing such a good job.
It is not just the banks. Hints are that the Supreme Court is about to rule, not just that one man should equal one vote, but that one dollar should equal a vote, too, and that the more dollars you have, the more political influence you should have. Dollars buy votes: everybody knows that.
We have allowed the disparity between the very rich and the incredibly poor to widen to proportions once thought obscene. During these last years, wealth has ansconced itself in the hands of a tiny minority. What is worst, idiots like me have learned to recite what the rich are teaching us about the evils of big government, and public education, and taxes, and middle-class jobs, and we sit around waiting for all that wealth to come trickling down, something like turkeys in a sudden rainstorm. The turkeys are dying of drought.
Oddly, the anger being expressed in our society is not from people who are furious at the destruction of the hope of a more equitable society, but by people like the Tea Baggers, who deserve the name they have chosen for themselves, whose hatred for a strong government to control the muscle of accumulated wealth, and to provide for us all what simple greed cannot even understand--roads, jobs, schools, better teachers, social services, public services, pensions, social security, health care for everybody--who fight against taxes to do the jobs, scream invectives at the victims of the wars they admire, accuse the President of being an alien, and advocate the resussitation of Ghengis Khan to lead them back into political office.
We have gotten completely screwed up, thinking that a lottery ticket will lift us up into the ranks of the filthy rich, and the unlucky be damned!
We don't have to be a Great Society. But we should try to be a fair one.
I have been walking around on the earth, and going up and down on it, assuming that banks were places where fiscal ignoramuses like me could put their paychecks, and pay bills with almost all of it, where we could borrow money to build a house or buy a car, and where the sober, grown-up Republicans who run the banks could manage to reward such little savings as I might accidentally accumulate with a little bonus for letting the bank use my pittances for the common good.
Nah! Banks are demonstrating that they are complex financial institutions, using our money to invent assets that vaguely rest upon bad investments in hopeless projects, in a system that shuffles ownership of those lets-pretend investments like peas under cups on a circus scam-artists come-on. Banks are really designed to be profit-making schemes for the owners and executives of the banks. Nothing more. Absolutely nothing more.
Right now, banks preach to idiots like me that we should suck up our courage, tighten our belts, save a bit more, and find some way to pay the mortgages that are bigger than the worth of our houses. At the same time, the banks themselves are abandoning monstrous housing, office, and development projects that they bought into, and leaving them for the rain and the wind to inherit, because the projects are bad investments,
and it is just better business to abandon them than to pay the bills. At the same time, they are awarding themselves huge bonuses for doing such a good job.
It is not just the banks. Hints are that the Supreme Court is about to rule, not just that one man should equal one vote, but that one dollar should equal a vote, too, and that the more dollars you have, the more political influence you should have. Dollars buy votes: everybody knows that.
We have allowed the disparity between the very rich and the incredibly poor to widen to proportions once thought obscene. During these last years, wealth has ansconced itself in the hands of a tiny minority. What is worst, idiots like me have learned to recite what the rich are teaching us about the evils of big government, and public education, and taxes, and middle-class jobs, and we sit around waiting for all that wealth to come trickling down, something like turkeys in a sudden rainstorm. The turkeys are dying of drought.
Oddly, the anger being expressed in our society is not from people who are furious at the destruction of the hope of a more equitable society, but by people like the Tea Baggers, who deserve the name they have chosen for themselves, whose hatred for a strong government to control the muscle of accumulated wealth, and to provide for us all what simple greed cannot even understand--roads, jobs, schools, better teachers, social services, public services, pensions, social security, health care for everybody--who fight against taxes to do the jobs, scream invectives at the victims of the wars they admire, accuse the President of being an alien, and advocate the resussitation of Ghengis Khan to lead them back into political office.
We have gotten completely screwed up, thinking that a lottery ticket will lift us up into the ranks of the filthy rich, and the unlucky be damned!
We don't have to be a Great Society. But we should try to be a fair one.
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