The bank bailout amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at institutions that made poor decisions, while rewarding their executives with millions of dollars in cash, stock options, and perqs. Precisely what the banks are doing with our money, no one knows. Transparency seems to have been engineered out of the legislation.
Meanwhile, the Big 3 automakers come with their hats in the their hands, warning of the direst of fates for millions of workers in their supply chain and the workers they employ that enjoy so much the benefits of having a job.
Then there is Iraq, a place where American contractors have squandered $100 billion on infrastructure that is coming unwound as quickly as the checks are cashed, and falls to bits like so many sand castles in the desert wind.
The US, where bridges collapse periodically, where children are schooled in out-buildings. where the rail system is as modern as the Edison light bulb, gets nothing. Worse, the standard of living is falling for all but the wealthiest of Americans. They get paid less and less to do more and more. They live with the constant threat that their jobs may simply be erased, that their health care may bankrupt them, that they might lose their house because their American dream arrived with a poison pill of readjusting interest rates, that their government, which dutifully collects their taxes with brutal efficiency, will be incapable of meeting its contractual obligation to help them when disaster strikes in the form of a hurricane, an epidemic, a terrorist attack (which they promise is already gift-wrapped and in the mail), or one of the countless other threats from a planet that is being plundered and swathed in the muck of industrial production.
The model has outlived its usefulness. Even the 'Maestro', Greenspan, has to scratch his head and wonder aloud 'I never knew this could happen.'
Let's have the government do something for the citizens. I know it's a radical idea. It's not even my idea. The Obama economic stimulus package seems to be aimed at the goal of rebuilding the infrastructure of the nation, and modernizing our decrepitude. I applaud this. We must be vigilant, however, and proceed with our eyes wide open, with the GAO keeping its pencils always sharpened, with careful Congressional oversight, because, where large sums of money are being doled-out, corruption and graft are attracted like buzzards to road-kill.
