Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

My darlings, I do believe it's pitchfork-and-torch time.  These dumbshits just aren't getting it:

Now that major banks and financial institutions are seeing huge profits, and paying out multi-million-dollar bonuses, President Obama has proposed a new "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee." The industry is not fond of the idea.

The president believes the banks accepted the bailout money when they were on the verge of collapse, but have since recovered nicely, so it's time for the industry to pay Americans back for the money we loaned them.

To show their gratitude for Americans bailing them out after their irresponsibility brought the global system to its knees, Wall Street executives are considering a lawsuit to fight the fee proposed by Obama.

It's takes a lot of fucking nerve to turn to the government to bail you out of your own reckless stupidity, then sue that government when the government proposes a modest tax to make sure at least some part of your obscene profits go to paying off your debt to the taxpayers who, because of you, are still losing their homes, jobs, and hope.

And yes, let's stifle their fucking creativity:

I don’t always agree with Naomi Klein, and I don’t always disagree with David Frum, but Klein wins this one hands down: Frum worries that financial regulation might crush “the creativity of the system,” Klein counters that “we could all do with them being a little less creative.”

This is usually framed, less colorfully, in terms of “financial innovation”, but the point needs to be repeated again and again: at this point, there is no reason to take it on faith that cleverness in the financial industry is a net social good. Unless you can provide some clear evidence of productive innovations since regulation began to unravel — and ATMs don’t count — the balance of the evidence suggests that smart people have been devising ingenious ways to concentrate risk and direct capital to the wrong uses.

I don't want these fuckers being creative at all anymore.  They want to be creative, let them go take art classes.  Their financial "creativity," enabled by the Con idea that regulations aren't necessary, just about destroyed us, and is still causing untold pain.

Yet the bankers think they're entitled to go right back to gambling, without penalty and without restraint, and some fucktards want to revise history entirely:

On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Time's Mark Halperin raised a fairly provocative observation about President Obama -- that the knock on him from the 2008 presidential campaign was largely backwards.

As a young senator running for the White House, Obama was derided by detractors as someone who could inspire people with a great speech, but wasn't prepared to lead an administration. Halperin argued that one year in, the opposite appears to be true.

"He's done, I think, an extraordinary job running the government ... under difficult circumstances. He managed the economic crisis and kept the world from going into a depression. He staffed the government with very quality, quality people. He showed he could be commander-in-chief and manage these two difficult wars. What I think, ironically, the problem has been is he's not inspired the country to feel a sense of optimism and renewal and to be unified in a bipartisan way. Those are the things I think people thought he would excel at."

[snip]

But what was especially interesting was the knee-jerk partisanship of former Bush aide Karen Hughes, who responded to Halperin by saying, twice, that Obama "misread the country" by trying to enact the agenda he ran on, thereby "exacerbating" the public's "anxiety." She added:

"I have to disagree with you, Mark, about rescuing the economy, I think that happened before President Bush left office when they took the action that they did on TARP, and the banks have now repaid much of that money, but that's what stabilized the economy and prevented the collapse of the financial system."

Be on the lookout for this one -- as the economy improves and the Bush Recession ends, Republicans will try to convince people that Bush, not Obama, deserves credit for rescuing the economy. While the evidence is overwhelming that it was the stimulus that created economic growth and pulled the economy bank from the brink, Karen Hughes -- and soon, her cohorts -- would us believe that the economy had already been rescued before Obama took office.

And if that's true, then why did job losses remain in freefall until Obama's stimulus package kicked in, eh?


You know the saddest thing?  Far too many Americans believe all this bullshit.  

I despair for my country sometimes.  Now is one of those times.  I don't know how we can turn this ship around when so many in the public are so quick to blame the wrong fucking people, listen to the wrong fucking talking points, and vote for the fucking Cons who jumped right to the banks' defense when a modest little tax to get taxpayers' money back got proposed. 

If anyone has any ideas for shaking sense into people, I'm all ears.