Let us just for a moment say our national economies are like a big tree, the leaves on the tree are money. Let us suppose that in an economic crisis like the present one the tree has become sick. It is full of dead wood, pests, blight, shoots and diseased branches that have to be pruned to make the tree healthy once again so that it will blossom with enough money for everybody.
The money tree is sick but the question is where do we start pruning? In the real world if you are going to prune a tree, especially a great big tree that has gotten completely out of control you have to start at the top and work down. For our politicians though, who live in their own corrupted little world with little common sense they start hacking away at the bottom.
There many definitions for politics; and a favorite of mine is that it is the triumph of vested interests over common sense and the common good. Even though we are in a time of crisis and an epidemic of professed good intentions we must be on guard that the money tree gets a proper pruning and all the blighted branches are clipped, trimmed and burned. Maybe the larger branches should be used for stakes to burn the bastards who caused this calamity, because, whatever else we are told there should be people held accountable. There should be people going to jail and there are many reputations now considered good that must be downgraded.
Maybe reputations should be like credit ratings downgraded and upgraded according to good works performed or atrocities committed. We might call it the repurating or earning brownie points. If you’re a war criminal like so many of those in the Bush administration your repurating bottoms out around 399. If you are Mother Theresa, Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela you get a repurating of 899, an embossed heraldic platinum card with unlimited indiscretions and generous monthly dispensations. . If you are Edward Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, you go directly to jail, no card, no bail, and no brownie points. If you are Stephen Harper you lose one hundred points and your job for being politically malicious and causing a completely unnecessary constitutional crisis. If you are Governor General Michaelle Jean you get a slap on the wrist for bailing out a political subversive. If you are Bob Rae you get an increased rating for personal sacrifice in the cause of party unity and necessary expedience in dealing will political subversives.
Collectively, the US Senate loses a whole truckload of points on their repurating for trying to trim the tree from the bottom up. They refused to bail out the big three auto makers because the unions were not willing to take massive wages cuts. Well, why should the unions take wage cuts when the average CEO is making 485 times what the average worker is making? The aging senators should get off their butts look up into the money tree where the real excess is and start chopping there.
President-elect Barack Obama also loses points on his repurating. Several weeks ago he stated that there would be cuts to health care and farm subsidies. He too is charged with bottom chopping. If he really wants to cut back government spending he is going to have to go after the military-industrial complex which is costing the
Obama is also going to have to reregulate the money markets in a very big way as no investor with any brains is going to go near them knowing that the pirates of Wall Street are skimming off all the profits and paying themselves obscene wages. If Obama wants to get anywhere near platinum on his repurating he is going to have to rope-up, climb the tree with a very big chain saw and start delimbing in a very brutal matter.
Of course, closer to home Stephen Harper and his lobotomized troglodytes are not faring well. Their answer to this crisis was to first of all put the screws to the opposition parties by cutting off their funding, nail the civil service with wage controls and start a massive sale of crown assets- not a good time to be selling real estate Stephen. It’s a buyers market and we taxpayers want a good return on our properties. None of these measures addressed the economic crisis in any meaningful way but of course had they passed the PM could gloat for pulling a fast one on the Opposition as is his spiteful and petty nature.
A further vote of none-confidence for Harper and his lobotomized troglodytes is that when they came to office in 2006 one of the first things they did was to introduce sub-prime mortgages to
Collectively, the repurating of politicians is at an all time low. They, in very large part, created the crisis as when lobbyists said jump, their reply was how high? Charged with being custodians of the capitalist system and the public trust politicians and government administrators have done a deplorably bad job. Politicians have been more than willing to be indifferent to the public good as they line their pockets and sustain the corporate welfare state.
The money tree is a now an ugly freak of nature. It is top heavy. That is where the money is, along with the blight and disease that has to be chopped. There are some big limbs that have to come down and I doubt politicians have the balls to get up in the tree and do the job that has to be done. They are unlikely to address their collusion in creating the corporate welfare state persisting in half–measures, hodgepodge and subterfuge; in which case the economic crisis will have a chronic persistence. The sickly money tree will become an enduring symbol of their various corruptions and pathetic ineptitude.
Stumble It!