Friday, February 27, 2009

Heads I Win; Tails You Lose

I remember my older brother trying to pull this stunt on me when I was six or something. I'm pretty sure I didn't fall for it then. So why are the American people falling for it now?

This is exactly the game corporate America and the bankers have been playing with us. When the housing market was booming, bankers were making money hand over fist trading derivatives and playing roullette with their depositor's own money. Did depositors ever see any of those winnings? Not hardly. They went to top execs and big bonus checks.

Now that the wheel has landed on double zero, who swallows the loss? The US taxpayer. While our neighbors get tossed out into the street and the average Joe's property value plunges, rich corporate fat cats keep their jobs, their obscene salaries, or drift on down to a private island courtesy of their golden parachutes.

Stuff like this is happening in Europe and the people are outraged (here's an amusing action taken on the Bank of Scotland). Meanwhile the American people just don't seem to get it.

When companies and services that were considered part of the "commons" became privatized, what's really happening is a natural monopoly and its accompaning resourses are being *stolen from the people.* This was done with reckless abandon starting with the Reagan administration. The argument was that it would make these services more effecient and offer Americans more "choice." In the end, all it did was make it more efficient to fire, cheat, and lie to Americans as they lost their oversight, and Americans got to choose whether they wanted to work at McDonald's or Wal-Mart after their good jobs got outsoursed to India.

So Joe Burgerflipper loses his house when he fails to pay his skyrocketing mortgage, but when banks and corporations fail, they're bailed out with taxpayer money! Yet where's the oversight? Nothing's changed -- the foxes are still in charge of the henhouse.

This is what's happening in America: They're privatizing all gains and socializing all losses. Heads I win, tails you lose.

What are they putting in our water, that most can't figure this out?

1 comment:

Jeff said...

The most infuriating part of this is the financial industry folks who stand there and shrug their shoulders as if to say, "Who'd a thunk it?"

I bailed out of the stock market with my paltry savings well ahead of the crash because I THUNK IT!

Now all modesty aside, I'm a pretty bright guy, but I'm just a computer techie from Wisconsin. The fact that I saw it coming should say something about the matter.