RESCUE SQUAD
Usually, when we think of a "Rescue Squad", we envision emergency response vehicles and trained professionals, Fires, accidents, natural disasters. Those brave men and women who regularly put themselves at peril in the interest of saving someone else. I'll tell you who I don't think of when someone utters the word "rescue" is Congressman Barney Frank. Nor do I think of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid. Come to think of it, there is barely any politician that comes to mind when I hear the word "rescue", "brave", or "courageous". Well, from what I understand, it may be time to re-tool the paradigm, because all of those mentioned above, and hundreds of other similar specimens, are about to "rescue" the rest of us from financial ruin. If you're reaching for a bottle right now, I don't blame you.
This unprecedented financial mess we're in actually began years ago, when Barney Frank & Co. brought forward legislation that in effect, forced financial institutions to give credit of all kinds, including mortgages, to essentially anyone who walked through the door. When I say "Barney & Co.", by the way, I'm not referring to the small army of gay prostitutes that were dispatched from his basement with the help of his former "room-mate", but instead to the equally morally-corrupt politicians that he has laid with for so many years.
Of course, it wasn't just Barney, but a host of others who stacked and stacked the chips, added more and more cards to an impossible house, and sat blindly by while the entire thing came to a rapid boil and finally blew the lid off the pot last week. Just a few months ago, the failure of IndyMac Bank in California sent a shockwave through the banking community. This, on the heels of Bear-Stearns and other smaller failures, would have seemed to be an ample smoke-signal to the folks in Washington who are supposed to protect us from such things, but apparently not. One has to wonder just what, exactly, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission does each day at his desk. Is the bottom drawer filled with whittled ducks and waterfowl? Is his closet packed with hundreds of hours worth of doodlepads? In a perfect world, he is already hanging from the flagpole atop the Capital, but this is not a perfect world. In our world, it will soon be us, the work-a-day taxpayers and small business owners who will be hanging from the nearest pole.
After Lehman Brothers folded, then AIG, then Washington Mutual, I found myself shaking and stuttering along with the rest of them and joining in the "do something now" chant. Over the last few days, I have listened to other economists, but moreover, have been unable to get past my own pragmatism, and I find myself currently in the "let's wait and see" column.
Pragmatism, of course, demands that we rise and fall on our own accord, and hold ourselves accountable for our decisions and their consequences, good, bad or otherwise. After 27 years in business, with nearly every imaginable agency, federal, state or otherwise, emptying my pockets as fast as I can fill them, I find myself with no pity whatsoever for the Wall Street crowd. This is all the consequence of greed and corruption, pure and simple. The thought that working folks who have played by the rules should now sacrifice their children's college funds to help recover mortgages assigned to crack-addicts is just a plain no-go for me. Literally, mortgages were given to people who hadn't worked for five years and who listed "welfare payments" as "income" on their applications. Where's that "Approved" stamp?
There is some irony in the notion that we, the taxpayers, the "little guys", are, in a convoluted sort of way, in the drivers seat. As I write this column no deal has been reached, and with a scant 17% of the population supporting a bail-out and a high-stakes Presidential election just over thirty days away, the politicians are having heat strokes. Who dares to make this wildly unpopular call? It will be interesting to see.
This may also be the only time in history for folks like me, who have seen savings and portfolios turn into a thing of the past, to be able to safely say we have, literally, nothing to lose. There may also be a large segment of the population that, like me, is so disgusted with Washington, D.C., that I would volunteer to live in a tent for a few years and eat nuts and berries, just for the pure enjoyment of watching thousands of these weasels suffocate under their own deflated golden parachute.
However this turns out, we should all take pause at this moment to consider the myriad ways our government has let us down in just the recent past. Oil prices. The War. Katrina. Homeland Security. What a dismal track-record. If failure was the goal, they're scoring 100%. And now, they come to us, not even with hat-in-hand, but demanding that "we" bail them out, and urging us...I'm swallowing hard here...to trust them. I'm beginning to know how Charlie Brown felt every time he landed on his ass, after trusting Lucy not to move the football, just one more time.
Karl From New Hampshire