Debra J. Saunders is a columnist who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. My opinion of her may be summed-up in the text of a letter to the editor I once wrote: “Editor: I am sorry to read that ‘Debra J. Saunders is on vacation.’ I had hoped that she was gone for good.” The Chron didn’t print it.
Saunders is annoying because once in a while she’s actually right about something. It would be much easier to just plain hate her. She’s one of those people, like Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, who can push a noun and a verb together successfully while espousing political views ordinarily held by morons.
She got issued the equipment, but in Saunders’ case it appears that something went tragically wrong.
This column is not about Saunders. It is about sub-prime idiots, and I am not referring to the folks who got suckered into playing the latest corporate shell game.
I’ve been thinking about the sub-prime situation, not in any scholarly depth because I don’t understand either commerce or money, which many people can attest to by now, but as would a visitor from Andromeda happening upon this planet and America for the first time.
As I see it, the entirety seems to be starkly and incredibly upside-down.
Last Thursday, Saunders wrote a column entitled “Some days, you get the Bear.” In it, she criticizes Hillary Clinton and, to a lesser extent, Barack Obama for supporting emergency assistance to home buyers screwed by industry-wide predatory lending.
The government bailed out Bear Stearns to the tune of thirty billion dollars of your money. Well, not YOUR money entirely; also your kids’ money and their kids’ money and... so on. That’s $30,000,000,000.00.
We could theoretically wipe out childhood malnutrition on the entirety of Earth for that kind of dough.
Since the Bear Stearns bail-out effectively gives government insurance, at minimal cost, to the biggest thieves on that same Earth, a few questions have been raised.
Saunders writes: “The ugly fact is that some businesses are too big to fail when their demise would shake confidence in the market and assuming $30 billion of Bear Stearns debt could twart a recession.”
As for you, the individual sucker, you are not too big to fail. You can go face down in the mud and Washington will not give a damn, as a lot of New Orleans residents can attest. New Orleans, you may recall, is also not too big to fail.
A recession, which we’re already in, is nothing compared to depression, which is where we’re headed, thanks in no small part to the economic practices of the most corrupt federal government in history. Paying off crooks does not strike me as a way of averting economic collapse.
Saunders hits Clinton for proposing a similar bail-out of the victims. Obama has also offered that suggestion, albeit with elements of foreclosure counseling and money for people who have to sell homes they cannot afford. Her ‘argument’ is that, basically, two wrongs don’t make a right and thirty billion is all we can manage these days. She does not mention the Iraq war, which she ardently supported.
McCain, meanwhile, calls for “improving accounting practices.” By God, there’s a man of action for you. Saunders thinks McCain is correct. After all, those who lost their homes were likely to lose them anyhow. I am not making this up.
To me, the most curious thing of all is the utter failure of Saunders, not to mention the vacuous talking heads of television Snooze, to consider what this all means in systemic terms. That is not a small question.
The government might well, legitimately, assist individuals who have been burned by these corporate thieves. Those people are citizens. They pay taxes. Maybe they even vote. Among the responsibilities of the government is to “provide for the general welfare.” But the corporate clowns “too big to fail” are not citizens other than through a legal fiction, and they do not pay taxes to speak of because they run everything through the Cayman Islands, and the politicians they’ve bought give them tax breaks on the rest.
But we are through the looking glass here, my friends.
The government in a democracy, it may be said, can legitimately bail out citizens. It cannot legitimately bail out corporate thugs. If the best case for covering thirty billion dollars in theft is that it is necessary in order to reassure Wall Street, then the ballgame is certainly over.
