Bailouts & Sellouts (Edward Herman / ZMag)

[struggle4progress]

It is amazing to see sums now running into the trillions being allocated almost entirely to substantial market players, many of whom were heavily involved in producing the financial debacle we are now suffering. The priorities of the U.S. establishment, including both the leading Democrats as well as the Republicans and mainstream media, are clear—at the top for funds and solicitude are the military-industrial complex and those involved in the imperial projection of power, along with the country's overlapping business and financial elite. There is a big gap then before we get to the middle class; and much of the lower middle class and poor are treated as disposable and even threats.

What follows is, first, that the military and imperial-expansion budget, now greater than a trillion dollars, larded with incredible waste and fraud as well as overkill, and provoking a global arms race while funding the destabilization of the world, is for all practical purposes outside the orbit of discussion about how we deal with a financial crisis and serious shortage of resources for the civil society.

In the case of the financial crisis and bailout, it is remarkable how much money can be mobilized very quickly to rush to the aid of the big boys—at the expense of the taxpayer—in contrast with the invariable struggle and pain to provide relatively small sums for the benefit of ordinary citizens and even more struggle and elite anger to provide resources for the disposables and poor. Of course this is a crisis that threatens systemic disaster. But there are many crises involving millions that are chronic and serious—such as the condition of the urban poor, of the New Orleans refugees, even a wide swathe of the middle class, and the fantastic growth of imprisonment—that don't produce an aura of crisis or financial resources to cope (except with police and prisons).

One must also be struck by the fact that management of the crisis was left in the hands of people who urged policies that led to the unfortunate result, and failed to see it even as it gathered steam. There is also the matter of gross conflict-of-interest in centering management of the financial crisis in the hands of Henry Paulson, straight from one of the crisis producers, Goldman Sachs. Mister Conflict-Of-Interest even doled out public money to his own firm as well as to that firm's clients; Mister Steady Bungler also made policy misjudgments and shifts on a weekly basis, without threat to his authority. This is a manifestation of power, displayed throughout this business society, where, for example, labor funding or sponsoring of a PBS program can be ruled out on conflict-of-interest rules, but massive and regular business funding is not questioned. Business conflict-of-interest is normalized across the board ...

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/20142

[acmavm]

1. And once again someone points out the obvious. Meanwhile, Obama

and Paulson want to give these jackals another 350 billion.

Rod Serling must be somewhere laughing his ass off.