Please stop doing me favors
November 24th, 2008 by Jim JustFrom Bloomberg:
The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago. . .
The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
$7.4 trillion – on behalf of American taxpayers? I’m so glad Wall Street’s “masters of the universe” and their cohorts in the lame-duck Bush administration are looking out for me.
Then Citibank got $300+ billion over the weekend (here is the Summary of Terms) in a deal Paul Krugman describes as an outrage:
. . . a lousy deal for the taxpayers, no accountability for management, and just to make things perfect, quite possibly inadequate, so that Citi will be back for more.
So make that $7.7 trillion -for a bailout that can not, will not, and should not work.Jim Kunstler calls this the campaign to sustain the unsustainable and says it’s worse than futile: it represents a squandering of our remaining scant resources. These failing things have to get out of the way before new productive activities can get underway. The housing and car industries – the two major ingredients of an economy based on building suburban sprawl – are over. But no political leader is yet willing to tell the public the hard truth.
At Alternet, Orion Kriegman and Richard Rosen point out that the over-consumption of material goods, such as cars, is in large measure the cause of our environmental problems. The collapse of the consumer society is both good and necessary. We need to become responsible citizens instead of heedless consumers and give up GDP growth as our prime indicator of success.$7.7 trillion would buy a lot of clean, renewable energy. Maybe we should stop worrying so much about the financial system and start paying more attention to real things. We’re treating the symptoms rather than the causes.