Oh, I have a blog. heh. Well. Lots to catch up on, which I'll do later. For now, there's the bailout thing going on.

this is from something I just wrote to my dad about the process going on about it.

He was mentioning a friend's take on it, mainly that this whole thing is just another huge handout to the wealthy+powerful.

In response, I wrote:

With everything that has gone on in the last 7-8 (or more) years, at
this point I wouldn't put it past them to try anything. And it looks
almost like they are. In Senate negotiations, the bailout seems to
have devolved to business as usual, and gained an additional 150
billion in price. A lot of that is due to a change to AMT, but there's
numerous other tax breaks accumulated in it.

We're watching out government lose it's legitimacy. The Republicans
finally proved that government doesn't work, really proved it, in so
many ways: planning and intel failures around 9/11, the destruction of
FEMA and all the Katrina troubles following that, several bubbles due
to deregulation-related shenanigans... blatant theft, massive transfer
of wealth to defense contractors and financial managers (the whole
investment business has basically become a way for investment banks to
enrich themselves at everyone else's expense), and so on... AND
THEY'VE TRIED TO STOP GOVERNING. The government has, it sometimes
seems, tried to dodge out on it's basic functions. Especially ones
unpopular with the administrations supporters (in other words,
anything which prevents big business from extracting more money from
the world).


It's being asked all over, but it's worth asking again: how is it that
we can give this huge blank check to the financial establishment and
yet we can't provide basic health care to our citizens? And in the
process undermine our employment cost base because it costs employers
as much to provide health insurance as it does to pay someone's
salary? Or any of the other things that 700 billion could do. We could
put off several of the likely mass disasters we're likely to have in
the next 20 years. We could provide basic healthcare to the entire
planet. We could do coastal restoration to lessen the impact of
hurricanes, and floodplain/riverbed restoration to lessen floods. We
could rebuild our cities so that we didn't have to drive so much,
reducing the demand for gas. We could re-engineer the power grid and
build next-generation power generation systems that would reduce air
pollution and improve reliability and safety. And so many other
things.

But we won't, because none of those things have a profit margin.



We could save the world, but instead we're going to make a buck or
two. So we can watch the world end from the penthouse.


Or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, "The good Earth- we could have saved it,
but we were too cheap and lazy."