Economy Held Hostage

Goldman Sachs has just reported multi-billion dollar half-year profits, to be distributed as usual to the usual suspects. By this time everyone knows that Hank Paulson, recruited by dumb George Bush who was apparently all through dispensing as much as he could to his oil and war-profiteering buddies, got the taxpayers to pay AIG off so they could pay Goldman Sachs off, from whence came Paulson. Privatize profits, socialize losses - no change there.

So outrage is building, as it totally should, as well as realization of having been played for the patsy. If you don't know who the patsy is sitting around the table, it's you.

So, we read the papers and boil, and realize that Obama has the Wall Street stooges in place who are aiding and abetting. But I'm also reading The Ignorance of Blood, the third of the Seville Trilogy by Robert Wilson. It is another police procedural crime book, featuring the Russian mafia in Spain. So - this gives me insight to Goldman! Not that anyone else didn't see it.

We are in a hostage situation. "Too Big to Fail" is essentially a hostage setup. If we fail, they say, the economy goes with us. Go ahead, stick it to us - you will cause your own demise and everyone else's. Your only chance is to pay us to continue to exist and function, and it will be on our terms. What can one do? We ARE hostage. We WILL fail. Everything WOULD collapse. So we pay the money.

But, if you are in a hostage situation, you also realize that the getaway is pretty important. You can pay the money, you can get the hostage back - but the Mafia then has to get away with it. They can do that. They can have so infiltrated the police and the politicians that they will be protected. The few good souls can be emasculated if the whole society is rotten. Or, after the hostage is returned, there can be a bona fide effort to find the culprits, punish them, kill them if possible, and change the situation so that organized crime has no more standing, or at least much less.

So that will be the test for the Administration and the politicians. I'm not so sanguine about the future. Do they see the full extent of the problem? Are there too many stooges paid off within the body politic? Can they use anti-trust? Can they change the rules that should never have been changed in the first place?

They have to wait until recovery is in place. Then we'll see.

Budd Shenkin