Angels Dancing on a Pinhead

Dear George,

Damn, you guys are good! I mean you’re really good! First you create an atmosphere that allows Wall Street to royally screw up, and then you stampede our congressional wimps into using taxpayer money to bail the fools out.

It never ceases to amaze me how an administration with absolutely no credibility can continue to con Congress. You cry meltdown and they loosen their purse strings. Paulson’s estimate of a $700 billion tab for the bailout borders on high farce. This from the same administration that said the Iraq enterprise would only cost us $50 billion (the cost to date is $580 billion with estimates of the final cost in the trillion-plus range).

Last week, your administration assured us that our economy was fundamentally strong; now it is collapsing. And Iraq still has WMDs.

So you gathered Congressional leaders together and gave them their marching orders. According to one article, “There was also a ‘healthy debate’ about whether this action would finally stabilize the market. ‘They [Paulson and Bernanke] couldn’t answer that question.’”

Some Democrats are making noise about using a bailout bill to help the unemployed and people who might lose their homes. The same article said they are floating a plan that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages for distressed homeowners. The banking industry is violently opposed to such a plan, so you admonished the Congress that the operative phrase for the proposed legislation is “the cleaner the better”

So there is the Congress in a position to hold finance capitalism’s feet to the fire and get any concession they want in a bill you couldn’t afford to veto even if it demanded a full withdrawal from Iraq by the next full moon and, “Still, it is not clear that Democrats would insist on such concessions at the expense of passing the plan quickly.”

Meanwhile, Obama continues to campaign for McCain, by cooing sweet ballads of non-partisanship, a tune no doubt music to DLC ears.

Our meltdown proves what happens when a scientific model is applied to a field as chaotic and unpredictable as economics. One expert pointed out that they “believed in extraordinary profits based on supposedly flawless computer formulas…”

I assume these are the same formulas that tell us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Not that the bailout makes any difference; the public is screwed anyway. Another article points out that, “The US is now a subprime economy of life support. There is only $53 billion of FDIC insurance to cover $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits. Of the $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits, the total cash on hand at the banks is a mere $273.7 Billion.”

The truth is that nobody knows what the fuck is going down. The same article quotes that brave warrior, Sen. Harry Reid as saying, “We are in new territory, this is a different game…No one know what to do.”

When in doubt, politicians fall back on the tried and true solution to all problems—impoverishing our grandchildren.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones