We'll Make Great Pets

Americans listen while congress grills the Big Three about the automakers' plans to cut expenses, re-think, re-tool, and re-wire... and the majority of us common folk don't think the companies deserve a dime because they failed to adapt production fast enough to survive these rocky economic times. $34 billion dollars, we tell our congressmen and congresswomen, is a completely ludicrous amount to spend on the idiots from Detroit. That's $100 for every man, woman and child in the country! We'd have to be stupid to give them that money!

But at almost the same time, in the same town, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke rushed congressional permission to spend $750 billion to boost the economy, and in only six weeks time that number became $8.5 trillion in cash and guarantees. Much of this money went to banks that said 'no thank you,' but were forced to take the money anyway. If the bank didn't really need it, the bank simply bought other banks. And why not? All that money was pushed on the banks with no strings attached, not even a wink and a nudge! So I guess you can lead a bank to money, but you can't make it lend. Boy, are our faces red or what??

Somehow all our eyes are on the (relatively) inexpensive Detroit loan requests while the REAL money (our money and our children's money and our children’s children's money) gets spent on nobody-knows-what because the plan changes every three days to the tune of about $25,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It must be the best magic trick in history, because the biggest cube of money anyone could imagine has just disappeared.

Why does no-one seem to notice or care about the obvious contrasting standards? Congress browbeats Detroit and makes car manufacturers get on their knees and beg while showing us how they'll fix a broken manufacturing model, while the same Congress quite literally forces taxpayer dollars at the same greedy bunch that got us into this financial crisis in the first place.

The cold truth is that we Americans will blindly give blank checks with no strings attached to banks who charged us $17.5 billion in overdraft fees in 2007 while we tell Detroit to go piss-up-a-rope for selling us the gas guzzlers that greedy American consumers demanded they provide.

To the rest of the world, we must look like monkeys humping a football.

Reason simply no longer applies, and the irony of our insane and contradictory thinking is not lost on our benefactors. Countries like China, for example, upon whom we rely to purchase our debt so that we can sustain our otherwise unsustainable bone-headed lifestyles, are beginning to realize that investing in American debt is no longer in their best interests. China's disastrous investments in Blackstone, the private equity fund, Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, and Barclays Bank appear to have dulled the appetite for further gambles. Like congress watching Detroit, China is watching the befuddled and bewildered ways our best and brightest financial experts are dealing with the ongoing bloodletting of American capital and liquidity. With China risking massive social turmoil next year as their economy slows and the number of angry jobless grows, a leading Communist Party scholar has warned, it can no longer keep dumping trillions of yuan down American rat holes.

China, and most of the other countries from which we’ve borrowed so heavily, must now deal with rat holes of their own.