Singing the Banker Bailout Blues – Where is your rage, America?
This article is meant to be a kick in the ribs to a sleeping America. So, I hope you don’t like it. I hope it annoys you and jars you awake.
Six years of economic struggle, and America has learned nothing from the Great Recession. Congress just passed a bill that assures cash-bloated banksters that the government will bail them out when their greed destroys their banks all over again. Yet, Americans sluff it off as if they are all zombies or stuck in some mass hypnosis. Nearly all are silent. They barely care!
It is your money that will be spent when the day comes for this law to be used, but do you care? Are you too dull-witted to know there is a better path? With over 300 trillion dollars in derivatives, that’s a lot of money you could be potentially guaranteeing. That’s why Citigroup drafted the legislation that was inserted into the budget to provide protection for failed derivatives. They know a bailout from such high-risk gambling could be an essential lifesaver for them, or they would not have worked so very hard to sneak it in there. (See Zerohedge.)
Even as the banksters do exactly those things that caused the Great Recession, your government that you just elected has now enshrined a promise that it will do exactly those things it did to make bankers rich from their errors last time around. These are the errors of greed that caused these many years of economic malaise. Your chosen leaders have, in other words, put into law a recovery plan that has already failed! Do you care?
Banker bailouts are a plan that already failed
When the government first considered bailing out major banks at the start of the Great Recession, many people opined about the moral hazard of such action, stating that bailing out failures would only encourage bankers to continue their high-risk ventures by removing the risk. And that is exactly what has happened.
These weren’t smart bankers that got the bailouts; they were failures — idiots who know how to shake hands but who knew nothing about what they were buying. They bankrupted massive institutions and hurt the entire world with their careless behavior. They bought haphazardly and should have died hard. Capitalism is supposed to finish you off with a fool’s death if you’re foolhardy and run your institution off the rails. The fools are supposed to die, not get rewarded by an interventionist government. Yet, rewarded they were,  and handsomely, for they are richer than they were before the crash of ’08.
Years later, they continue to run their banks and investment firms in the same irresponsible manner. They continue to buy derivative investments that they don’t understand much better than they did the first time around. They still offer adjustable rate mortgages to seduce people into loans that they will not be able to afford once the interest goes up.
As they are doing all the things they did before, clearly, those who stated the government was creating moral hazard by bailing these people out were completely correct. People who are bailed out from their immoral behavior will continue that behavior because it was rewarded.
Has there ever been a more foolish nation of people on this earth? What a bunch of dumb lemmings the masses are to remain so mum right now about the prospect of following their business leaders and politicians over the same fiscal cliff all over again. It is one thing to have made such blind errors the first time, another to enshrine the protection of greed by legislatively removing the risk of those same kinds of bad decisions. Are you going to accept that?
Are the vast majority of Americans really so dull that they cannot see that most of the bankers who brought financial collapse upon the entire world are wealthier now than they were before the crash of 2008? Are Americans so dead between the ears that they cannot figure out that absolutely none of the government’s newly created money has trickled down to them? Do you still think it is going to trickle down to you when it never has?
Republicans remain so adamant in their desire to assure their obscenely wealthy bankster cronies of a future bailout if they repeat their failures that Republicans risked shutting down the government by stuffing a banker bailout mandate in a bill that is supposed to be a budget, not a law to insure bankers against their own risks at taxpayer expense. It was the Republican way of holding the government hostage once again if Democrats would not agree to bail out banks next time around.
Where is your vision for avoiding future banker bailouts?
Why is the vast middle class so willing to see its own money used to bail out failed banks? Why are you so afraid to let the fat cats fall? Is it because you believe the lie that the only way to save the nation from banks too big to fail is to make them even richer and bigger than they were before they failed? How can you even buy such self-contradictory thinking? It’s completely illogical.
Is the Great Middle unable to see that all of the banks that were too big to fail are now even bigger? How was the merger of the largest failing banks an answer to a problem of banks being too big to fail? Can you not see that that is not recovery?
Recovery from total economic catastrophe requires building a new economic framework that is free of the problems of former structures that collapsed. Are Americans really too dumb to do the math and figure out that merging failing banks only makes the risk and cost of failure greater down the road? Are you one of the naive who thinks all of this could never happen again? Are you still willing to lap up the lie of trickle-down economics even though none of it has ever trickled down to you? Where is your rage?
Why would you ever think that we are better off for having made big banks bigger? Why would you ever think that creating trillions of dollars of new money and giving it all to bankers who created the problem is better than letting those banks fail and then creating the same trillions of dollars of money in new accounts for those depositors in smaller banks that didn’t fail? Wouldn’t it have created moral fiber, instead of moral hazard, to reward those institutions that conservatively avoided dare-devil risks?
Does size matter so much to Americans that they can only conceive of success coming by rewarding the giants? I say that, if Congress had any vision, if it had any moral courage, if it had any creativity, and if Americans had any wisdom, they’d order that all new money pushed into the system as economic stimulus go to the small-town banks that are doing a great job of serving their customer. They’d also require that large banks be broken up and that the successful parts of failed banks be parted out to intermediate-sized banks that are large enough to be able to take over such major operations but not so large that they will become the next banks that are too big to fail. None of that has happened. None of that is even close to happening; but that’s a solution that builds a stable economic foundation.
Never has a nation spent so much time learning so little from so much grief. All these years wasted, and we still have no plan in place or even visualized that builds a more sound and equitable economic structure. There has been no Great Recovery to offset the Great Recession because no one has any vision for how things can be done differently. Everyone is blinded by the lie that we are all beholden to wealthy banksters because we think wealth proves intelligence and leadership. In fact, sometimes all it proves is corruption — a system that is so corrupt at its political core that it rewards the corrupt with even greater wealth for having helped to destroy it.
Americans, you just elected a gaggle of politicians who have no vision, no ability to see any way of doing business other than the way they have been doing it for the past thirty years of trickle-down economics. Your chosen leaders just enshrined the exact plan that already did nothing to end the Great Recession. In fact, it is the plan that caused it!
Let’s sing the Banker Bailout Blues
Not all of the problem, however, is corruption. A great deal of it is that people are ideologues. The leaders of this country and many of its people have proclaimed certain ideas for so long that their egos keep them from admitting their ideas are as bankrupt as the nation. The ideas are, in fact, WHY the nation is bankrupt.
So, wake up, America! Stop doing the same thing over and over and pretending it will accomplish something different when it has already failed so miserably. Look for people with new ideas, not those who preach the same old party line. Start thinking for yourself. Stop voting by party just because you need a club to belong to because you’re afraid to stand alone.
Use your own brains to think your own thoughts, and have the guts to stand alone and let your old party friends think you’ve betrayed the common cause that you once fraternized over. Stop caring whether someone is Republican or Democrat or nothing at all, and vote only for people who have creative vision and moral courage. Both parties have failed this country miserably, so why do you keep voting for them?
Let the dinosaurs of power die upon the ground like dry bones, while you become the new mammals who walk the earth.
Why do you keep thinking wealth will trickle down to you when it never has? Or why do you keep thinking you need welfare? Quit bailing out the rich by giving them welfare. Quit protecting corrupt corporate leaders with corporate laws that insulate them from personal responsibility for their own greedy actions.
Wipe away the fog of economic denial that clouds your own eyes with the courage to recognize there has been no recovery at all! Wake up and realize that you are not one bit better off than you were years ago.
Think outside the party box.
Here’s my own audio version of the Banker Bailout Blues. Share it with others to build outrage against the corrupt monsters who created this mess before they do it all over again. Better yet, create your own better creative expressions; but sing out, speak out, do something!
After you join me in singing the song and sharing it with others or writing and singing your own, join me in sharing this article, too. Start rousing people to the reality that this economic recovery is a farce.
Most of all, start getting upset enough about rampant corporate injustice, the disproportionate protection of the wealthy, corporate welfare, laws that shelter corporate leaders from personal loss that results from their own corruption, an economy of false wealth that is really nothing but mountains of debt, charging the cost of our failures to future generations while giving them absolutely nothing to show for it.
Get upset about all of that, and stop it!
And read my next article for a plan with promise — something that takes some real work and some major redrafting of the way American law works. In other words, get mad, and then put your anger to constructive work, rather than destructive riots. My next article will be a short one showing what real vision for economic recovery looks like, instead of the tired old ideas that dinosaur politicians keep retreading.
Wake up, America! Wake up!
How to get beyond banker bailouts to real economic revitalization:
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