Jumpstarting Limos

Got a new plan, Stan

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
1/19/08

Putsch’s economic stimulus plan – which is mostly plan and no stimulus – works like this.

He approaches the gleaming black limousine that is the American economy, which is sitting with its hood up. He has some jumper cables in his hands. He leans into the engine compartment, which prevents anyone from noticing that the engine is gone. He slaps the cable clasps together, producing some bright sparks. He makes some engine sounds with his lips, and steps back, hurriedly slapping the hood down. He then announces to the waiting media types that it’s purring like a kitten, and invites them all to hop in for a ride. They do so, and their added weight causes the limo, which is on a slight downhill, to begin inching forward. Putsch jumps in behind the wheel and invites the reporters to examine the gleaming and lavish appointments, the televisions and leather seats and above all, the well-stocked bar. They ooh and ahh in admiration, and a few glance out the windows and observe that they are, in fact, moving forward, albeit slowly. They all then pronounce Putsch to be an economic genius who has, once again, saved the American economy while giving them free booze, except for Paul Krugman, who cranes his head looking to see if the limousine might crunch harmlessly off a brick wall instead of going over the approaching cliff.

I was overstating the case when I said the stimulus package was “mostly plan”. It’s not even that at this point. All we know about it is that Putsch wants it to be $145 billion. Apparently Bernie Bernanke thinks that a package that is 1% of the GDP is the precise amount needed to get the economy chugging forward again. Bernanke, a libertarian acolyte of Alan Greenspan, is an expert on these things because he was an aide to Greenspan who, um, got us into this mess in the first place. That’s good enough for Putsch, who apparently has already realized he can’t fix the economy by bombing it.

There are rumors, of course, that the admin wants it in the form of tax cuts and “rebates” (read: loans) to corporations and the wealthy. The republicans are intellectually and morally unequipped to deal with the economic implosion for much the same reason that the board of directors of Enron were unable to deal with the implosion of their company: they largely caused it, and can only cover that up with lots of lying and dancing.

Given that the credit collapse might total as much as $40 trillion dollars (a lot of the big boys, such as insurance companies haven’t even begun to default as the granite base of their existence turns out to be cotton candy), the package is preposterously small.

To put it in a perspective, imagine you make $45,000 a year, and live in a house worth $450,000. You’ve borrowed about a half a million, using the house as collateral, along with your income.

Suddenly, the house loses $135,000 in value overnight. The money you used to base your loan on has suddenly had nearly a third of its value just evaporate.

Oh, wait. Tens of millions of people are already in that exact position right now!

Well, that’s what’s happening to the economy at large. Only to use my homeowner example, Putsch has just offered to tide them over with a temporary loan of $4,500.

Only, being a Republican, he won’t give the money to you. He’ll give it to the bank, so it has more tools to dun you with. The Democrats, at least, would give you the money and tell you to paint the house as a stop-gap measure.

There’s another factor that nobody’s talking about yet.

In Norway, they have what could be described as a deregulated incarceration system. If you are convicted of a crime, they hand you a card with a date on it and tell you to show up on that date to begin serving your sentence.

Recently, they were disturbed to learn that nearly 20% of convicts weren’t showing up at the appointed time. They’re debating what to do about that now.

Norwegians have a much higher sense of social duty than your typical corporate gangster.

The Putsch junta brought with it a tidal wave of corruption. Scratch a free marketeer, and most often you’ll find a rogue whose entire philosophy is making the government step back so he can steal with both hands. That’s exactly what’s been happening over the past seven years, Enron writ huge. As a result, somebody jacked the limo engine.

How bad? Nobody knows. The government sent cash to Baghdad a few years back. One hundred TONS of hundred dollar bills. It simply vanished, and it was nearly two years before anyone even noticed. The military says that they can’t account for over a trillion dollars in materiel over the past 20 years. That doesn’t include losses already written off: that is just the stuff they can’t even say for sure is missing.

The corporate rape of America is in the tens of trillions of dollars. Enron. Halliburton. MobilExxonTexacoShellChevron. Every pissant industrialist who moved to Mexico or Vietnam so he could employ near-slave labor while freely dumping raw poisons at will. Not only have they stripped the nation of its industrial core, but they have taken the world’s wealthiest nation and turned it into a pauper state, where the standard of living of the citizenry is rapidly dropping behind the rest of the third world, and people are unable to get decent health care, or have any safety net if they lose their jobs. And workers in America have no rights.

The corporations, and their pet Republicans, simply stole that from the American people. Trillions and trillions of national wealth, gone. The greatest rip off in human history, the fall of the mightiest country.

Now, do you want to ask me if I think Putsch’s fucking economic stimulus plan is gonna work?

Thought not.

The Dow is down about 2,000 points since it peaked in October, and the weeks coming up will have a whole passel of earnings statements. It could well be under 10,000 by the end of January. In the meantime, I notice that after dropping 300 points on Thursday, it listened to Putsch, flanked by Dick Cheney and the apparently-not-dead Henry Paulson, outline the stimulus plan. It then dropped another 60 points on Friday.

Even the captains of industry know Putsch isn’t going to make this go away with another giveaway to the wealthy.

The fact is, it’s just getting started. And no dinky little $145 billion bandaid is going to stop that raging cancer.