As if their service charges were not enough, banks now want the money we collect for schools and hospitals and roads and all that other stuff we pay our taxes for. This morning on CNN Senator Chris Dodd, when questioned about the 700 billion dollar bail out package passed by the U. S. Congress in September, reminded us that that was just the latest in a string of injections of public money into the financial sector. The total now is somewhere around 5 trillion dollars according to Senator Dodd. But hey who’s counting. It’s just numbers on a computer screen. Of course they are the accumulation of the numbers that represent what we don’t get on our paychecks. And I don’t think that most of us thought ‘Gee, those poor bankers and Wall St. tycoons. I can’t live with myself knowing that there are people living in multi-million dollar high rise condos, eating fish eggs and drinking fermented grape juice to stay alive. Why they barely have enough to feed their cocaine habits. This must not be allowed to continue in our midst one more moment.’
But, hey! These are the guys who drive our economy right? So we need to keep them in business, right? Of course they are also the one’s that dug themselves into this hole. But, okay, everyone makes mistakes. I am sure these guys have learned their lesson and are putting all the public money to good use helping people renegotiate their mortgages and generally getting credit flowing again. Well no. Actually the first thing they did after the September package was through themselves a huge party to celebrate. Since then they have been using the money to buy each out in an economic version of the game Risk seeing who can become the biggest empire and dominate the world. The rest of the money they have just been hording.
Now we are going on to the auto industry. It’s their turn to be massaged with our money. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler can’t survive without help. Those nasty Asians have deceptively undermined the U. S. automaker’s market by producing vehicles that work. The fiends! Of course the media emphasizes that the real problem is all those union contracts. Those workers are just sucking the industry dry. It couldn’t possibly be that the executives made some executive size mistakes in product development and marketing. Or it couldn’t be their multi-million dollar salaries or all those bonuses. And heaven forbid anyone bring up golden parachutes. Executive jobs are the only ones I know of that reward you for screwing up. If I screw up I am rewarded with a pink slip not a porsche and a condo in Hawaii.
Every corporate executive that makes a decision that costs jobs should be forced to personally apologize to each laid-off employee and their families. Maybe having to tell a seven year old why Santa won’t be visiting this year will instill some humanity into these spoiled brats.
So where does it all end? Maybe some of these corporate geniuses will come up with an answer at one of their company retreats but I doubt it. Maybe it is time for all of us members of the great unwashed to pick up our pitchforks and torches and give them something to retreat from. Capitalism doesn’t work. Our current crisis is what happens whenever capitalism is left to its own devices, unregulated. It happened 80 years ago and it is happening again. We face the same choice they had in the 1930s. Do we patch the old girl back together, put a new frock on her, some makeup and get her hair done? Or do we move on to something new, something different? In the Great Depression, after much tugging and pulling the powers that be chose the first solution. Let’s be smarter this time. Let’s learn from our mistakes. I know, how about an economy that serves the people rather than forcing the people to serve the economy. And those poor bankers and executives that would be left out in the cold by such a system, don’t worry, we can retrain them and make them work for a living instead. It would do wonders for their self-esteem and bring a smile to these old lips to see them toiling in the salt mines.
