Fear Itself 2: Fall of the Masters of the Universe

I'm not as smart as Paul Krugman.

I know, I know, it's hard to believe. Sometimes I don't believe it myself.

But then I do something like wash my cell phone because I forget I put it in my pocket and I get that face-palm moment of "Fuck, goddam, I'm an idiot..!" and I fall to earth.

So I could drone on and on about the Great Recession and how we, and the greedy, venal rat bastards we elected helped make it, smooth it's way and sell it to each other as the Bestest Most Wonderfullest Shiny Pretty Thing Evah. I could give you chapter and verse about how a nation, a people and an economy that deliberately warps itself away from growing and making things into spinning paper profits into more paper profits is in a mug's game and will, as surely as picking up skeevy people in sleazy bars, come to grief sooner or later.

But why? Paul Krugman (the guy who is smarter than me) has already done it. Just go and read his column for this Friday.

Here's his money graf, and the reason I'm increasingly unhopeful for and unimpressed with my country and the so-called "leaders" who run it by proxy for the Rich, the Well-Born and the Able:"But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules. As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good."

The bottom line on this entire debacle is that the point of the past 20 years has been to transfer wealth from the bulk of the population to the top 1% to 10% that have the ear of the congresscritters and the wealthy insiders who serve at the top of most of the executive agencies.

It's worked.

Despite the "populist rage" at things like the AIG bonuses, what odds what ANY of these malefactors of great wealth will lose so much as a nickel? Or that they will spend so much as a night in jail?

Watch. I'll bet that Madoff's family walks away with millions, that the very same Wall Street Masters of the Universe that engineered this immense derivative and securitization Ponzi scheme will still be beavering away, spinning money from nothing, years from now.

Nothing will change.

Except we just won't know about it because there, under the bridge where we'll be huddling out of the cold rain, we won't have CNBC, we'll be sleeping on the newspapers instead of reading them and, anyway, we'll be too fucking busy trying to eat bark to care.