Eden Hill Journal

Ramblings and memories of an amateur wordsmith and philosopher

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Location: Maine, United States

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

No Clue

So today it was another how much? 800 billion US dollars? For what? The credit card industry? The mortgage industry? The lenders? Again? And are they lending what we handed them before? Has that money run out already because Americans are just borrowing so much these days? Not.
I've recently been hearing the Diane Rehm show on Public Radio in the afternoons. Yesterday they were talking about the Citibank thing and today it was this new $800 billion bailout. She takes calls but also has a panel of "experts" to answer questions. What I noticed yesterday and today is this growing uneasiness and even disgust with the way that even the experts have absolutely no clue where this money is going or what it is doing to help the economy. There is zero transparency and so far, no results. "It could have been worse" is the best anybody has come up with so far and even that comes without references to support the claim.
But doesn't it strike anyone yet that it is ironic the way Middle Class America is loaning all this money to the rich so the rich will agree to loan Middle Class America enough money so they can afford to go to work tomorrow? I mean what in Hell is going on here? The banks have money. The wealthy are still wealthy. If the point of going through this economic slide-down is to rid us of "easy money," then what's the point of working-class America investing our future prosperity trying to keep easy money flowing? The economy will recover when the wealthy want it to recover and not one day sooner. What's so hard about that to grasp?
But we go on and on about how this or that bailout kept it from getting worse while all around us it keeps getting worse and there's nothing to show for all the bailouts so far other than that the corporate executives are still getting their bonuses and living high on the hog.
No, these "stimulus" bonuses that the Fed (a private bank, if you recall) and the US Treasury are giving away to the wealthy aren't about saving the economy. These are just payback from the Republican Party as this Reagan wave of conservatives fades away. Consider this an investment in the future of the Republican Party. This money raised on the backs of working class Americans will finance the next wave of right-wing politics which is coming closer and closer to inevitability the more we send taxpayer money off into the abyss. Between this (stimulus) tax burden and direct conservative obstructionism, Obama doesn't stand a chance, or so the thinking goes. And when conservatives rise again, this money will be there waiting for them.
They wanted to rob us blind by using our Social Security withholdings to pump up Wall Street. They failed at that, but they aren't failing this time. The wealthy have Middle Class America by the balls this time. The squeeze is on. And when Obama moves in, watch out. There are a lot of people in this country who have a lot of money and influence who don't want Obama and the Democrats to succeed. Obama's stated goal is to bring the Middle Class back their wealth. There are a lot of wealthy people in this country who see working class wealth as socialism. A lot of wealthy conservative Americans don't believe that working class Americans deserve good pay.
These last few months of Bush economics are contributing hard to that goal.

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