Looking back on my 69 years, many long-gone images jump into mind.
One that is still relevant is the image of Henry Paulson on the tube. He was Treasurer of the US in 2008.
During the financial crisis, which, at that time, initiated our Great Recession (it’s been really great hasn’t it?!), Henry was pleading with the US Congress to bail us out.
The top dogs in our financial industry had screwed up badly with their MBS-CDS-CDO-driven speculative frenzy in the stock market.
So Hank and the other major players got together and tried to figure it out—just how they might rescue our whole damned economy from disaster.
Well they couldn’t figure it out, because they couldn’t assemble enough pieces of their newly-configured financial wizardry to get a fix for the cataclysm that was going down—even as we speak, or . . . as we spoke, or as they were speaking, or, anyway—crashing and tumbling on wall street and main street and easy street and park place and broadway, not to mention mediterranean ave and baltic—God only knows what they were going through.
Well the head honchos couldn’t figure it out so they went to Congress and pleaded the 5th—or, rather, pleaded for money.
Well Congress kicked it around a little bit and they couldn’t figure it out either so they said No.
They said what ?
They said no. Congress said they would not bail out the formerly hyper-inflated financial industry.
Well this would never do, as everybody knew.
So Hank went back on the tube and begged for money again and so they twisted a few arms over on the hill and made some deals and wheel’n’dealed a bit and came up with some appropriations and the Congress of the United States bailed the bankers out.
TARP it!
So, this image of Hank on the tube pleading. . . I’m not sure if I actually saw him doing that at the time, because we are not TV people, we never had cable or even a TV itself. I was a radio guy and I remember hearing about all this and remembering now that i was sitting in my car in a parking lot at 7:55 in the morning before going into our local elementary school to help teachers with special children. And it was Chi Risdall or Bob Edwards or some speaking voice explaining what was going down at the time, which was just about everything or so it seemed . . .
So I don’t know if I ever actually saw Hank’s pleading at that time.
But later . . .
Much later, years later, after we’d amplified all our online connectivity and gotten the big mac and signed into netflix and prime and all that . . . I happened to catch a documentary on netflix about the Financial Crisis that brought on the Great Recession (it’s been great hasn’t it?)
So I think it was on that documentary that the image of Hank pleading with the American people—but mainly the Congressional portion of the American people—sticks in my mind.
Good ole Hank, God bless ‘im.
Anyway, its funnny how these images float around in mind now during the Age of Online, since imagery is everywhere now, even in the palm of your hand and on your dashboard and every waiting room and blahblah . . .
And as I approach the bottom line here, I do remember Hank and our Congress bailng out wall street. Welfare for wall street.
Money tossed—via the US Treasury and hocus-pocus US Federal Reserve—money deposited into our financial system at the very highest level . . .
So it trickles down.
Now since our big money guys got on welfare back in the day and this trickle down thing has been keeping “our economy” on fiat life support with greenbacks but mainly supercharged electrons and and. . .
And right now that’s not really working out so good for folks in the rust belt and the sun belt and even inside the beltway maybe we should do a replay and try another bailout, only this time from the other direction.
This time, instead of going GOP trickle-down, we’ll do Dem percolate-up.
Toss the Repubs out and bring the Demmies in for awhile and let them throw money at poor people for awhile so it can percolate back up through the system to where it always ends up anyway, at the top instead of just starting up there to begin with.
Ever since the big bailout in ’09 when wall street went on welfare— now everybody’s on the Fed-Treas hot-air gravy train and so republicans and other former conservatives can no longer complain about po’folks doin’ nothin on welfare after Nixon said we’re all Keynesians now and glass-steagall is forever shattered and from which direction the money moves it doth no longer matter . . .
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