WHODUNNIT? Crooks, maybe?
I once figured out what causes economic slumps. It was a dream, which is where liberal arts types have to go to perform massive calculations that they couldn’t begin to fathom in waking life. But the dream had been brewed in the real world, where a serious recession filled the news.
It was a startling discovery, and I’m going to reveal it here because now that we’re back in a comparable mess, only worse, all the pundits who didn’t see it coming are back on their soapboxes, telling us how we got here and whose fault it is. Never theirs, needless to say – they’re doing god’s work.
In Sunday’s Times, the Op-Ed section overflows with post-mortems on the crash while the business section lavishes its front page and 5 inside pages on the grotesque incomes of the top 200 executives – their rewards for blowing up the economy and putting 6 million innocent people out of work and 4.5 million families out of their homes.
True, Larry Ellison ($85 million) didn’t bundle any subprime mortgages, nor did Samuel J. Palmissano ($21 million), but their companies (Oracle and IBM) did lay off many thousands of people who were working harder than they were, and for a thousand times less money.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch got $18 million (that we know of) for spreading an incessant torrent of lies via Fox News, the Wall St. Journal, and the New York Post, blaming Obama for the meltdown that took place under George Bush – aided and abetted by Fox News – while Obama was still a junior senator from Illinois.
Sunday’s Op-Eds blame Greenspan, the Fed, hedge funds, and federal regulators (Under Bush, they weren’t allowed to regulate), and now it looks like the Senate – a wholly-owned subsidiary of the banking industry – plans to keep it that way by enacting a pantomime charade of toothless regulatory reforms.
Oddly, none of the columnists were blaming the banks (who are big advertisers), and there was no news whatever of pending prosecutions.
If you were to do something – say, start a forest fire – that turned 1,000 families out of their homes (never mind 4.5 million), if discovered you would expect to be prosecuted. But do the same thing in plain sight with toxic mortgages, sent out bundled with the garbage into the securities markets with crooked AAA ratings, and, oh well, that’s just business. Prosecute? Lord, no, we’ll bail you out with the money we were going to waste on clothes for our kids, and then we’ll let you keep all the money you stole.
But back to the dream. My study was piled high with financial reports and statistical graphs. Big charts were pasted up on the walls. I was working much harder than I ever do when awake, and suddenly – in a flash – I had it!
It was such an overwhelming eureka surge that I sat bolt upright in bed, wide awake, reaching for pen and paper so that this stupendous discovery would not be lost in the fog of goose down comforters and snooze alarms.
Next morning, there it was – in one word – the answer to what causes economic slumps. “Stupidity.”
Of course senators, bankers, brokers, even pundits are extremely well paid to act stupidly when it finally comes time to take your interests and mine to heart instead of just their own.
Let’s see how stupid they can get this time before we finally wise up and put them all in jail until they give back our money.
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