Worldview Item of the Day
The current bailout plan will fail–all of it–because it relies on one specific element to be true to succeed: the good intentions and will of the people running the companies that receive the bailout. FoxNews is reporting the latest reason we should all be skeptical of that good intention and will in the form of the arrest of Bernard Madoff, former NASDAQ chairman and, apparently, swindler who may have cost his “investors” as much as $50 billion.
I understand that people are flawed and prone to greed, but I wonder why so many people are so willing to ignore the avalanche of evidence over the past several years that many people in positions of power and wealth in the United States are basically self-serving autocrats seeking to take advantage of us all as they take our money from us and dump it into deep dark holes. How can any self-respecting American taxpayer be in favor of a bailout whose ultimate cost may likely reach into the tens of trillions of dollars when the evidence is so clear that a significant fraction of that money will go to line the pockets of people whose ethics and morality in no way reflects his own?
Yet, somehow a lot of Americans are ignoring this fact and even encouraging the system that is so clearly failing them to continue. Meanwhile, the nation is accruing a debt in dollar deficits and morality that it will take generations to pay off, and when that debt comes due, many people will act like they had no idea it was coming. From my point of view, they will deserve every consequence that occurs when it does.
It almost seems that this is a form of the old feudal system. A few living very well off of many. It is safer for the many to sit back and do nothing than to take a chance. Standing up may be risky and most people are not willing to take such a chance.
The problem that I see with the unwillingness to take risk is the assumption that the status quo will remain as it is. The current economic situation, which is a direct result of people assuming the status quo will remain when it, in fact, failed, is a perfect example of why the people need to do something.
Consider the consequences if we do not act: billions of dollars in investments have and are being proved to be frauds (not just Madoff; think Enron and Worldcomm) while trillions more are being promised, not to help anyone like the taxpayers, but to keep business whose products have already been proven to be unprofitable or fraudulent themselves (think subprime mortgages) in business.
From my perspective, I have no choice but to act. My future is being directly threatened by the self-centered choices being made by greedy and immoral politicians and businesspeople who obviously do not care what the country might look like thirty or fifty years from now. I cannot afford not to act if I do not want to live like a peasant.
Historically, these are exactly the kinds of conditions that caused our Founding Fathers to toss tea in Boston Harbor and draft a Declaration of Independence. I think we are getting really close to needing to do those very kinds of things again.