Republican Vandals Invited to Loot the Treasury

For the 50 years of my adult life I have heard, jaws agape, that Capitalism creates democracy, girds personal freedoms, demonstrates the unwavering effects of something called The Market, which corrects itself and solves all human problems except, well, maybe, poverty. (After all, doesn’t God ordain who shall surfeit and who starve for their sins?)

I kenned that like Religion, Capitalism is an excuse peddled by ruling classes to justify what they must do to remain in power. Put another way, Capitalism and the Market are abstractions to cloak greed. They are not the only such–Communism is another, Socialism is still another. In human hands, as opposed to the hands of the angels, all such systems grind away, under a cloud of lies, to distribute wealth in such a way that it ends up mainly in the pokes of a small number who use it to control the rest of us.

Yes, to keep the peasants from sharpening their sickles before they take to the streets, some shekels must trickle down to keep us underlings in bread and amusements, nowhere more so now than the United States where, until lately, Mammon provided his skilled devotees with wealth never before dreamt of.

But, alas, the golf-club regulars who run Wall Street and related gambling dens have so lied and cheated not only the lower orders but, inevitably, each other that now, thanks to a Republican regime representing the rich, they howl that to avoid disaster they must loot the Treasury to pay for their mistakes.

The President and his Secretary of the Treasury, himself until recently one of Wall Street’s most successful three-card monte dealers, have jettisoned all the conservative crap about the Market Correcting Itself and have sashayed forward in panic, crying the world will end unless the taxpayers give to Wall Street the biggest hunk of boodle ever grabbed in history with permission.

If the nation survives this monetary blooding, we and our offspring unto untold generations enjoy the pleasure of paying off this “legal” debt.

In an world where now and then justice occurs, such rapine of the public’s future might stir a decent public uprising, to decorate light poles with tarred and feathered bankers.

But no, the mainstream press and the Congress have prostrated themselves to the untested notion that if we let Wall Street banks fail the world will end. Neither reporters and editors nor members of Congress truly understand what’s going on and think we all must bow to the cries of anguish emanating from a White House that has showed unerring talent for lying, ignorance and error.

Republicans in Congress of course feed off the rich and support anything that resuscitates their patrons. Democrats, alas, know that if they do not go along with the Republican skin game and the economy coughs and wheezes, Republicans will blame them in these final days of endless presidential and congressional politics. So Democrats drop their pants to pleasure their conservative colleagues.

Our two presidential candidates have lashed themselves to the panic rocket. Obama agrees to the bailout, even though, if he becomes president, he won’t find a pfennig to spend for the social and economic reforms the country cries for.

As for McCain, my God, when he is not sounding like a high-school sophomore babbling about Americanism to the American Legion, he mutters like the village idiot. Yep, bail out the banks will all the money we can beg, borrow, steal or, worse, print; cut taxes on the rich and expand our wars against the infidels.

(War, finally, is cheaper than something else in American government. The bank bailout will cost more in a few seconds than wars have cost since the dunderhead now in the White House ordered our troops to attack Iraq five years ago. Of course, like the ancient Romans, we may find that we’re broke and we can’t afford to lift a sword anywhere against anybody.)

Yes, the politician mutter: Don’t let the bank boys pay themselves big salaries while they haul all those sacks of bucks out of the Treasury. Don’t pay any more to each than to support four or five families while in return they hand us all the failed mortgages they dreamed up or bought in hopes they could peddle them off to greater fools.

Well, the Greater Fools now are us, powerless citizens, who can only watch and groan while the mighty plunder our country.