Senator John McCain has decided to suspend his campaign for the Presidency to return to Washington to work on a solution to the financial crisis. What? Can you do that? Can you suspend your campaign for the presidency in what is one of the most crucial turning point elections in American history? Guess so, because that’s just what he did, even canceling the first of 3 presidential debates this Friday. He did this, he said, “to put politics aside” in his quest to serve his nation, even though he is on record as saying that he knows very little about the American economy. So how’s he supposed to help the Senate wrangle with an issue he knows nothing about? One supposes that’s what politicians do; never let their ignorance stand in the way of putting their 2 cents worth in on any issue, no matter how complex and beyond their grasp it might be.
And to Republicans, this crisis is real and dire. It’s rich people losing money this time, not your usual working class chumps getting screwed by their kind. Like the movie voice-over guy says: “This time, it’s personal.” So personal that John McCain drops everything to help his fellow super- wealthy people when they are in danger of becoming somewhat less wealthy. Not injured, not destitute, not horribly maimed or infected with some dread disease. Nor being made poor, or middle class or even moderately well off, but less wealthy. Well, boo friggin’ hoo! What we have here is the unbridled greed of corporate princes coming back to bite them in the ass. It’s only an emergency to them, not regular people.
So why would they let McCain sit in on this latest attempt to use the United States Treasury as an ATM for wealthy corporate princes? The doddering old fool just might say something honest about his Republican puppet masters and screw up the whole process, maybe wonder out loud why super-rich former investment banker Henry Paulson gets to have control over the $700 billion to be distributed amongst his former colleagues, no questions asked, no oversight or appeal allowed, with not a nickel of that dough going to worthwhile social programs like medical coverage or education. Why should the Treasury re-line the pockets of rich guys who just gambled away a trillion dollars of their fellow wealthy people’s dough? Now they want ours too?
Why not suspend this Paulson guy from his job as Secretary of The Treasury? Being a former Goldman/Sachs partner who built a $700 million personal fortune, can he really say that he didn’t see any of these banking collapses coming? Or was he hoping he’d be out of office when the dominos started falling? Either way, like most Bush The Younger appointees, he wasn’t up to the job and should not be the guy administering a solution, that solution basically being to give the rich guys back the money they lost. Doesn’t seem to be any thought given to the other 99.5% percent of the population who aren’t in their (no)tax bracket.
The rest of us are being asked to suspend our powers of reasoning and deduction. We are being told that this banking crisis is going to affect our lives dramatically. Exactly how has yet to be explained. Perhaps the Republicans think that most Americans would be demoralized if we had fewer billionaires next year that we have this year. Maybe it will come as a flash to them that most of us don’t give a rat’s ass about the super wealthy, since no worry need be expended on people who are insulated from reality by thick blankets of money. Most people tend to worry about people who are hurting and vulnerable, and multi-millionaires and billionaires don’t qualify for our sympathy. Even if they do lose millions, they’ve still got millions more to keep the wolf from the door.
You have to figure that if regular people were going to suffer, it would have happened already since they’re always the ones to take the first hit in hard economic times. And you further have to wonder how much these rich people are suffering, what with the sky-high salaries they’ve been enjoying and the bonuses they kept awarding themselves out of their stockholders’ money. Angst doesn’t count. Last year alone the financial industry awarded their executives $55 billion in bonuses in an industry less than a year away from collapse. So how bad a crisis is this scandal? If it’s that extreme, shouldn’t there be some criminal investigating going on? Some corporate heads rolling? The way it’s shaping up it’s simply a bank robbery with the aid of an inside man named Henry Paulson. Call the police and let them sort it out.
Other than a few rich guys bounced from their jobs with millions in severance pay, everybody’s lives are pretty much the same, nobody’s starving and no enemy is threatening our borders. So maybe we should suspend our belief in what others tell us is a huge calamity and save ourselves $700 billion. If John McCain decides that saving the fortunes of the super-wealthy is more important than being president, well, we can accommodate him and elect the other guy, the guy who’s not one of the super wealthy and forgets how many houses he owns. The guy who’s not suspending his efforts to put his case for election before the American people.
Let’s elect the smart guy, Barack Obama, the guy who’s not in the pocket of the people trying to shove a $700 Treasury heist down our throats. Welfare is for poor people, not the wealthy, and when poor people gamble their money away on lottery tickets the government doesn’t trip all over themselves to replace it. Let the chips fall where they may and let the super wealthy become merely wealthy. Then we ought to greed-proof our banks so they can’t use these public institutions as personal ATM machines. Until then maybe the government can suspend all this talk of a dire crisis where none exists.
