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Right this moment we’re being scammed by the Republicans. And we’re letting them! “Here, I just got paid and it’s full of tens, twenties and it has a few one-hundred dollar bills — take my wallet, please.”
The Republicans have made no bones that they want Obama to fail. Their goal has nothing whatsoever to do with any principle other than their unquenchable thirst for the power that will enable those at the pinnacle of the economic peaks to further enrich themselves. What happens to everyone else are not concerns that concern them the least.
Here’s how the plan is designed to work.
Unless heretofore unimaginable sums are infused into AIG, the company will collapse. Around the entire globe, it made one dollar against 30 bets — those credit default swaps — when everything was looking as if everything would keep going up forever, that guaranteed against loss that the financial risks the world’s financial institutions were taking. As is now clear to everyone who hasn’t been lost deep within one of the Amazon’s rain forest swamps for the past year, things stopped going up, things started to head down like one of the Mafia’s cement-booted victims in the East River. AIG ain’t got the dough to cover the bets. And unless and until the market begins to feel some level of confidence that just maybe they haven’t been tossed into the middle of the river, that just prayerfully they’ve been hurled towards a shallow part that will land them with some breathing room, the panic will only intensify, things will get worse, possibly much worse. Propping the company up with sufficient funds to mitigate the most virulent sense of panic is the only palliative anyone knows of right now.
If the panic calms and things begin to ease toward recovery, Obama wins, the Democrats win, the country wins, the world wins, and the Republicans lose. And that they cannot abide. How to prevent the preceding is to slam the door on any proffered effort that might wend toward an administration success. Currently, that’s slamming the door shut on any and all further expenditures of assistance to AIG.
But, how to do that?
Well, you take the country’s anger over $165 million to $210 million bonuses and whip it to a rage. No politician is going to vote to facilitate a plan that has so much of the country so up in arms against it. Voila, success . . . if you’re a Republican. The world’s economies collapse. Countries collapse. And in rush (Or, is it Rush?) the GOP, and unless you missed law professor John Yoo’s comments, how constitutional guarantees were really just privileges the executive could negate at its discretion, out goes “America,” qua the spirit that is America.
But maybe you don’t care enough. Maybe all you want to do is watch the standard televised fare, and believe what you hear via the evening news. Maybe you don’t want to invest those few minutes necessary, to search the Internet for some basic facts. Maybe you’re content to ask someone else to explain something to you that you could have learned on your own by spending a few minutes to researching the subject. Here’s just one more “truth” for you: No one can make of fool of us, that’s something we individually do 100% all on our own.
— Ed Tubbs
