Well now why isn’t the economy turning around? Why is the combined unemployment and underemployment in this country topping twenty percent! Why is Wall Street booming? Why is Goldmans posting record profit and giving out record bonuses? Why does the average American have no credit? Why does no money trickle down at all? Why is the housing market still in the dumps? Why can no one qualify for a mortgage? Why are the insurance companies launching an all out counter attack to stop healthcare reform? The answer is easy: we live in a plutocracy where the economy serves only one group of people…the top one percent.
We gave them seven hundred billion dollars. They have taken that money and made themselves richer. The bonuses of Wall Street are in the billions again. Well now why wouldn’t they be? If someone gave you seven hundred billion dollars and said go put it in the market and you are the market and you know that buying treasuries or stocks with billions of dollars will send them skyrocketing then you would clean up also. It’s like we gave the OWNERS of the casino the money to bet on their craps table. Talk about a stacked deck.
But here is the real problem. TRICKLE DOWN DOESN”T WORK. Newsflash right. But is it ever more apparent than with the TARP money? None of that money is making its way down to the middleclass. John Q Public still has no credit. He cannot buy anything. Houses or cars or appliances. The banks do not want to lend to the middleclass anymore. They don’t have too. They can just spin the money around on Wall Street and make a killing.
‘We have to go back to that moment Hank Paulson ran in and demanded seven hundred billion. Here was the moment where we saw our country as it now is. Wall Street had infected Washington. We know this. That is how they got their hands on our money. They turned over the money to the banks who turned it over to Wall Street who made a killing.
Here is a scary thought. If the one percent is doing just fine and the one percent makes all the decisions and has all the power—do they really care about high unemployment or lack of credit for the middleclass? Maybe this is just the way it is now.
William Hazelgrove writes in Ernest Hemingway’s attic. His latest book is Rocket Man.
