People are pissed off. This in itself is no real news as the public disgust with the news media, politicians and Wall Street has been on the increase every year. But now they are really pissed off. People are so angry that not even their Prozac and Zoloft, and the other mood enhancers, can fend off the seething desire to retaliate against the charlatans they believe have done them wrong.
People want justice. They have lost their savings, and they have lost their jobs. They have seen their pensions cut in half. Their houses, if not foreclosed upon are underwater. What equity they had is gone. They have been lied to, bamboozled, and moved around by the sound byte media and the sound bitten politicians. The had put their faith in their civil and social leaders, their financial advisers, and they have been led astray. The economy has become a fiasco and the state of the nation is regarded as but one more news event to be commented on by the spurious and insipid who through media magic have been qualified as experts. A reinvigorated Wall Streets continues its efforts to make a buck off the public’s ignorance and apathy.
But people are pissed off. Certainly, some of the responsibility for this national debacle must fall upon their shoulders. For it is the public that overbought and extended itself. It is the semi-literate public who disregarded the large print, yet alone the fine print, on its mortgage contracts, never bothering to ask why am I paying so little for a house that is worth so much? Instead, they bought into the snake oil sales pitch that they should overlook the balloon payment due in a few years, as they will always be able to get another mortgage. And the real estate con artists most used phrase, ” housing prices will always go up,” resonated with millions, much like we take comfort in our being watched over by angels, or global warming will be corrected by forces other than ourselves.
We are a nation that doesn’t read too well. Forget about the languages of other nations. Approximately half of us our functionally illiterate with our own language, and that’s when we bother to read. Much of our more significant correspondence has been truncated down to pithy little phrases that hinder the scope of any detailed thought or definition. We utter sound bytes that are fed to us and believe wholeheartedly that this is original thought. Anything more than a few sentences to a paragraph forces us to give up what little element of concentration we still possess. And critical thinking, true critical thinking, is far too demanding to warrant our attention.
So, in short, our ignorance and laziness can turn us into victims. We are easily bamboozled. We take lies as truth on face value, as long as those lies come from our own segment of social and political belief. We give more credence to our celebrities and are suspicious of our scientists. A crackpot with a theory gets more attention than the knowledgeable with the facts. Especially if the fact is bad news.
We believe for some reason that we have the inherent right to be safe and free of any slights or contrary opinions or perspectives that would make us uncomfortable. We think of our children of geniuses in the making and believe they will prevail and prosper by virtue of their American heritage and their legacy of a two car garage. We believe we can buy anything and pay for it later. We take out home equity loans on our houses with inflated values and then use that money for trinkets and beads and other crap we don’t really need. We buy boats and overpriced designer clothing. We buy gourmet foods for our pets and dress our four-year-old’s in $300.00 blue jeans.
Instead of being a producer nation, we are a consumer nation. Two-thirds of our economy is based in consumerism. It is a hell of a lifestyle, and to support it we borrow money from foreign countries, borrow against our house, our credit cards, and, lately, we melt down our own crappy old jewelry and sell it off for its weight in gold. We do this for one of two reasons. We are either in love with ourselves; we are special people who absolutely deserve to garner all the material offerings that the world can provide. Or we hate ourselves, have the kind of esteem issues that compel us to buy these baubles and trinkets so that we can feel better about ourselves. Feel that we measure up to the people next door.
In short, we have set ourselves up as suckers. We are ripe for the plucking. We are semi-literate, prescription drug indulged individuals who worship celebrity while eschewing any kind of critical or cognitive thinking in favor of our own distorted view of the world. We are the perfect mark for any group of slippery sliders wishing to sell us a bill of goods. And that they did. Our government gave Wall Street a license to steal. And that is what they did.
First came the panic. We were on the verge of a depression. Enter the federal government as those surviving companies, paragons of what is loosely labeled free enterprise and free market conditions, took bailout money by the trillions to shore up their companies. Those those that took the bailout money, or stimulus money, were supposed to use it wisely. Stimulate the economy. Pass it from Wall Street to Main Street. It didn’t happen. Instead the money was used for consolidation, for shoring up financial institutes and for buying companies that should have been left to die. A trillion bucks later, and unemployment remains high, businesses are closing, and there are millions of foreclosures.
There is constant talk that America is in the economic downturn from which it may never recover.. We have stopped our buying, most of us anyway. Suddenly, we realize we really don’t need those extra trinkets and beads and that Fluffy the Cat doesn’t need gourmet food that children in a developing nation would kill for. Little Child can make do in a $50 pair of Levi’s, in fact it is chic again, and the two luxury vehicles in the driveway, the $20 thousand dollar vacation, the caviar and custom made $500 shirts, the ski mobiles and snow mobiles and the RV that drags them to places where we can overrun the landscape may not have the cachet they once did.
Then came the anger. We are trying to save our money. We are watching every buck. We are eating in and ordering movies with a couple of pizzas for our rich and robust entertainment on a Saturday night. We have no credit left, so cash is king. We try to make the best of a bad situation, knowing that we were left stranded by political and financial chicanery and that the vaunted promise of change is like other campaign promises, fading in the light of a harsh reality. We are tightening our belts and punching new holes in the leather, because we can’t afford to buy another belt.
And we are very pissed off. In response to our anger we have voiced our concern by claiming we are lapsing into Socialism though few really know much about that economic system and what it really means. We make noises about a free market, but corporate welfare leaves the rest of us struggling. We become tea baggers and in tepid attempt to express ourselves conduct insipid reenactments of the more stalwart at the Boston Tea Party by flinging our Lipton’s into the rivers and lakes. We are angry and it is vented in misguided ways with little direction that will promise little results.
We are frustrated and we have few channels for its expression. In the past couple of decades we have been indoctrinated with the belief that anger and frustration are by their nature bad things and shouldn’t be expressed in polite society. As colonialists in our nascent stages and in quest of our independence we dragged our scalawags into the streets where they were summarily tarred and feathered. Now we just whine at them. We are admonished that we shouldn’t act out, that we shouldn’t raise our voices, that we shouldn’t complain. So when we do act out and raise our voices, we do so with meaningless displays. We wear our guns to a healthcare meeting and consider this a show of resistance.
We immerse ourselves in nonsense. We conduct meaningless debates that are exploited by the media and the interest groups who manipulate our deeper emotions. We are turned against each other over petty discord, and we allow our prejudices to condemn us to the kind of narrow thinking that obfuscates the real demons among us. It is in the best interests of the special interests that we continue this nonsensical rancor, allowing time for the real criminals to continue to rob us blind.
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We are a nation that believes in justice. We are a nation that believes in accountability. At least we used to. We believe someone should be responsible for transgressions against society. We went to war and fought the Nazis, then conducted the Nuremberg Trials to show that leaders must be accountable for their actions. At Nuremberg, we listened to one Nazi after the next claim they were only following orders. And then we hanged the bastards. We hanged them high.
But no more. Our leaders are anything but accountable. They screw up and get promoted. They run their companies into the ground and they get bonuses for their efforts. They break the law and rob and steal, and receive bail out money from the government, which is best described as public money misused and misdirected. We bail them out and absorb the disaster, and they pat themselves on the back. The New York Times just announced that Wall Street is preparing to give itself even more bonuses, after taking government money for bailing out of a debacle they created and then leaving us in the lurch. Who could be more deserving of a hefty reward than a collective bunch of failures?
There has been predatory mortgage lending, falsification of documents, and the fraudulent act of according toxic financial packages mythical value. There was insider trading and the illegal shuffling of money. There were crimes committed. And yet the government in its implacable wisdom has deemed it fit not to investigate or prosecute any financial wrongdoings. While it has been broadly acknowledged that a fair portion of the financial dealings were indeed criminal acts the government while wrangling over partisan politics can not be bothered bring these white collar criminals to justice. Sure, they brought Bernard Madoff to justice, ad a few others, but their few billions in stolen funds are mere drops in the bigger bucket, compared to the trillions stolen by others.
We are not accountable. We do not suffer consequence for our actions. We allow criminals who screw up royally and drive this country into the ground to walk off with the the spoils of their ill gotten gains. We endure one of our few remaining industries were the media discusses the crimes ad nauseum, and books are written. But no one stands accountable and no one goes to jail. Remarkable.
I realize that out of the thousands of people in the financial sector, Wall Street, if you prefer, only a portion committed criminal acts. The rest merely climbed in on a rare opportunity, universal deregulation, perpetrated for the past twenty years by idiots in government who failed to see the catastrophe the end game would bring. But then, among the high paid toadies there are the criminals, the ones who robbed this country blind. These are people with no conscience that raided pension funds and pillaged the economy worse than any group of gangsters. While we arrest a couple of grocery store robbing fools and put them in jail with vapid pronouncements that we are fighting crime, we allow the true criminals, the ones that took our retirement money and the futures of the children to live in luxury.
This is what we are pissed off about. Underneath the spurious nonsense about Socialism and the loss of our old America, we are seething that everything we believed in has been delivered as one big lie. We are enraged that all those Western Movies, Cop Movies, where the good guys defy the odds to bring the bad guys to justice is just a lot of crap. Because we have not just been robbed of our money. We have been robbed of our culture and our sense of justice and fair play for all.
Had either this administration, the past one possessed half the insight it claims it has, then they would prosecute these white collar criminals. They would bring them to justice. We would take back the money they stole and give them long and harsh prison sentences. We would make examples of them by making it more costly to commit the crime than to endure the moderate penalty that, if ever, are now being handed out. We would hang them high.
Making white collar criminals accountable would promote the true healing of this country. Here is where at least partisan populist cultures can converge in rare mutual agreement. This would ease the anger and the pain. This would give us justice. And justice is what we deserve.
