Saturday, October 04, 2008



Bailed out

The US Congress has passed the billionaire bailout bill. So, the Wall St shysters who crashed the economy get to laugh all the way to the bank, their bonuses, megayachts, and mansions intact. Meanwhile, the US taxpayer gets to carry the can for their gambling habit - and sacrifice their future hopes for a working health or education system to do so. You couldn't get a clearer example of the way the US is set up to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. And I'm surprised that the US people are putting up with it.

The bailout was supposedly necessary because the banks had stopped lending to the real economy. The "solution" was to buy their bogus assets at vastly inflated prices in a dirty backroom deal cooked up between the US Treasury Secretary and his former workmates at Goldman-Sachs. A better solution would have been to cut the banks out entirely, and instead get the government into the lending business by setting up or buying their own bank and providing credit directly - bail out the real economy, and let Wall St burn. But that, apparently, would be "communism".