Pandemic bailout blues

Michael Shulman posted some seriously insightful analysis on Seeking Alpha today, and it set me to thinking. But before I tell you about my molehill thoughts, I'll tell you about his mountainous observations. He wrote:

"If Greece defaults – they will, next year – most European banks, including the Germans, will take a huge hit on their balance sheets and will need to raise capital, which will not be available from private investors so they will need to be bailed out. This will anger taxpayers more than bailing out those wayward Greeks. So, to date, the politicians have put off the inevitable, more money for the banks."

Sound familiar?
This is just the sort of bailout with which our government set its regrettable precedent back in 2008, after the Lehman/BearStearns/AIG et al collapse and/or we'll-never-know-how near collapse. Although our present Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner, implies this week that European debt problems could lead to negative repercussions here in the good ole USA , in fact we are merely facing the boomeranged consequences that we ourselves set in motion (haha) with our frantic escape from shredded red-ink bank balance sheets, through taxpayer-fueled faux liquidity, three years ago.

Today in the USA, all those angst-ridden "occupy wall street" people out in the streets, along with their democratic sympathisizers and labor union manipulators--they're clueless about the fundamental issues here--the long-wave cycle of economic expansion/contraction and the inevitable conflicts of wage differentiation between developED and developING naions. They're failing to appreciate their own heretofore high-flying lifestyles , which have been enabled by fat-n-happy debt-fueled free-lunch bubblebath corporate-couched, union-padded opulent prosperity.

And so, now that the party's over and the punch bowl has run dry, they're out in the streets, pawns in the game instead of being free-will mainstreet initiators, wanting to pull down the "greedy capitalist" powers that be, mainly because they have nothing else to do since they're unemployed, or horror of horrors, underemployed. They've had all they can take of the Would you like the combo with that BigMac, sir? blahblah.

This month, the Occupiers will be be further empowered by news from across the pond, angsty tidings from their wobbly European comrades who are now being given an excuse to take to the streets. After all, the Europeans, especially les Francais, are old hands at this. The Germans and French doppelganging crowd will be charged up because their resources are being diverted to bail out the too-big-to-fail bourgeois financiers who have carried the Greeks, who've been retiring early and consuming ambrosia and soaking up euro-drachmas in their Mediterranean sunshine.

What's lamentable is that in the midst of all this, Steve Jobs passes on to that great apple grotto in the sky. Now, due to the thick veil of media mourning and igadget reminiscing, we'll be caught up into the cloud and never know what kind of deal really will have gone down this coming weekend. Since the neutrinos in Cern have been clocked at a speed faster than the speed of light, Steve's visionary past will eclipse our hyper-leveraged future, even as his foresight had earlier overshadowed Microsoft's (and everybody else's) present debt-fogged windows on the world.

Soon we'll have another Western ideology identity struggle on our hands. But this time it won't be between Apple and Microsoft; it won't pit Ford against Chevy. This time, the battle will be waged between the liberté egalité fraternité mob and the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness militia.

I'm headin'for the hills; actually, I'm already there.

Glass Chimera