So these rich guys put on nice faces and persuade poor people that the American dream is at their fingertips. All they have to do is take out a subprime, adjustable-rate mortgage that amounts to about 90 percent of the property's worth at the time of purchase, when the interest rate is low. But when it rose, POW!!!
Everything whirled around and then disappeared, down the tubes, so to speak.
Those derivatives, big bunches of subprime mortgages bundled up and sold to pig financeers who bet against them and won big-time, lost their value when they could no longer produce income because those poor suckers were stuck not only with the mortgage, but inflated interest rates that made their total debt far larger than the price they "paid" for their American dreamhouse. Only one, not ten.
So whom did the government help? Those poor shnooks foreclosed on, out in the street or squeezed in with hapless relatives? Those poor shnooks whose entire retirement savings were sucked into the whirlpool? Those poor shnooks standing in breadlines because their jobs no longer exis?? Some Americans were afflicted with all of the above whammies and more. Some of them used to wear suits.
No matter. They can be spared. Shark bait.
Two bailouts worth hundreds of billions, and now a recent third of $600 billion from the Fed, were fed to those sharks, not the shnooks.
So it's trickle-down time again, only a very slow trickle this time, because we rebuilt the skyscrapers on Wall Street and they are giving each other salaries and bonuses even BIGGER than before the crash.
Is such an amount conceivable? The audience gasped at this point. No wonder the rest of us average thirteen credit cards each with such high interest rates that we can never even reach the principal to pay it off.
The Fed said its recent bailout was for job creation. The people are so angry they even voted in a Republican majority in the House, forgetful of who got us into this mess in the first place.
So Bar, taking that as a mandate, will compromise with the sharks, as if they don't have enough already.
But there's not much of him in the film. He did try to regulate Wall Street behavior by way of some legislation passed earlier this year--his best given the composition of the Senate Finance Committee--Max Baucus still the chief, John McCain still one of the grinning minority members who can't relate to anyone who earns less than $100 million a year. Then there's Olympia Snow the renegade who changed her mind about voting for Obamacare, unlike Arlen Specter, who left the party instead and then was voted out of the Senate by Joe Sestak, who subsequently lost the race to a local fat cat.
So who's in the film? White men in suits. A few token females and one each of an Asian American and African American. Those Icelandic guys were so pretty. But after that it became sort of 50-50, with dragon-faced Larry Summers and others among his ugly buds.
Matt makes sure to point out how many conservative economists were drafted into Obama's inner circle in 2009.
What if he'd drafted Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz instead? What if the dough had gone to us other 99 percent instead of the sharks?
Would we have become a huge flesh pile of sharks chewing each other to bits for a piece of the carcass? Carcass being a metaphor for ethics, not money really, which turns us all into sharks. Sorry for the cynicism. I'd still have been ecstatic if Bar had appoint Krugman, Stiglitz, and their buds instead of the Wall Streetpeople.
If it's so bad, if most of the rich people are so evil, why not do away with money altogether and either go back to a barter system or invent something new? Some solution is out there or up there waiting to be discovered.
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