Although President Obama describes the Republicans has having driven the car of the US economy into a ditch, perhaps a more apt analogy is a collapse of a gold/copper mine. The miners (Wall Street but without its culpability) were rescued by a massive effort, with everyone working together and with appropriate oversight.
The miners patiently waited for nearly 70 days. As rescue approached, they argued over who would be -- last. The miners and families demonstrated solidarity and deep appreciation.
While waiting for rescue, they decided to make a pact. No one would benefit from their experience without all the others benefiting as well. They even had a legal document prepared that they each signed.
Contrast Wall Street. Just for starters, has a single major bank or banker ever even thanked the people of the United States for their rescue? If so, it has escaped my eyes and ears.
Wall Street's behavior has certainly not provided any evidence of gratitude. They even thought it was proper to pay themselves large bonuses with US taxpayers' money. Using taxpayers' money to pay an army of lobbyists, Wall Street fought financial reform designed to reduce the chances that their behavior could tank the entire economy again. And, of course, they successfully fought a tiny "FAT" (financial activities tax) that would have provided money from their enormous profits to reduce our budget deficit, or invest in long-term projects that would have enduring value (like the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, built during the Great Depression).
Had the Koch Boys or Lloyd Blankfein been with the trapped miners, would either of them have tried to be rescued last? Would they have signed a pact so that they all benefited from subsequent "deals"? Would they have agreed to limit their food intake so that everyone could survive?
On the other hand, just think of where the US could be now if Wall Street, and people like the Koch Boys, had the same character as the Chilean miners.
America could be at work on building a solid foundation for its future, rather than hurtling toward a mythic view of its past. And, no, to knee-jerk rightwingers, this is not a suggestion for "communism", the Koch Boys' fortune arose from Daddy's relationship with Josef Stalin, so that is hardly a direction I suggest we head. Just a "new deal" for the American middle class is all I am talking about.
Before voting this November, Americans ought to give serious thought to whether they want to elect people who will operate in the spirit of the Chilean miners, or of Wall Street and the Koch Boys.
If it is the latter, than one wonders just why you cheer the Chilean miners.
NPR's program "This American Life" did a segment a few weeks ago titled "Crybabies" about just exactly this phenomenon. The Planet Money Team went into a few bars in NYC to interview Wall Street financiers in their off time on the public perception of their profession, after they'd consumed a few beers. Apparently the hoi-polloi are treating them "like pinatas."
The consensus amongst all the interviewees featured was that they'd kept their banking/finance jobs because they were smarter, better, and more deserving than the average person. It was pointedly NOT because they were bailed out by taxpayers who propped up their banks, businesses, and brokerages, rescuing them from certain doom in the so-called "free market with negative consequences" that the rest of us must negotiate with decreasing amounts of help and minimal to no resources. Nope. They kept their jobs because they're blessed. Unbeeffinlievable.
The "Crybabies" title came because these parasites are unhappy with the fact that the rest of the nation sees them as sickening warts, cancerously draining energy and resources from the real economy most of us live in and concentrating it at the top.
No gratitude needed or implied by the Wall Streeters. They're doing God's work after all. The rest of us can go...
Gee I don't know. But what if it had been George Soros? (Oh wait, we already know what he's made of from his time as a kapo in the concentration camps, selling out his own people.)
A Nation’s honor is defined whether it saves lives or wars for profit. Let’s grow up to be like General Don Luis, Jeff Hart, President Pinera and Michelle Rhee who rescues children’s lives in DC. Being too “Right†does not a Great America, make.
And, this person may be Speaker! What a desecration of that job.
I truly wonder what WFB,Jr, would say if he were alive today. Although I think he was nearly wrong about nearly everything, I would like to believe that he would have found the modern-day John Birchers, aka Tea Party leaders, to be unacceptable, unless he could justify a faustian bargain that would accept intelletual dishonesty to achieve what he called the purpose of conservatism, "to stand athwart history".
The Koch Boys' father made their initial fortune helping Josef Stalin. Switching to Birchism is not a surprise. Studies of fanatical left and fanatical right wingers show they are quite similar. The ideas are of less importance than the blind faith to which one can adhere to them, the comaraderie that one can feel, and the ability to spin conspiratorial yarns about the rest of the world arrayed against them.