Why This Bailout Pisses Me Off

I understand that the bailout is necessary to free up the credit markets and to prevent the economy from going into a free-fall. But it still pisses me off.

First off, there is a rule of business (and life) that the financial gurus neglected to follow, and this is it:


Second is a bit more personal. Some time ago, I was involved in a new small business. It wasn't any of those "I need 400 tons of plaster and two tickets to Tokyo" businesses that you see in those moronic AmEx ads for their small business credit cards, it was a local business. I'm not going to go into any details, just that you know the rule that "half of all new businesses fail in the first five years?" We fell into that half.

One of those Wall Street fucktards responsible for the current collapse probably gets paid more between his first coffee at work and his lunchtime than we all lost when that business failed. What we lost was probably chump change to one of those putzim (not to us, though).

We were not "to big to fail." It was our money, our time and our risk.

What bothers me is that those Wall Street thieves were not playing with their own money (like we were), they were playing with everyone else's money. And some of them made out extremely well; the guy who was the president of WaMu for all of 18 days walked away with just shy of a million bucks for each day on the job. (Nice work if you can get it.)

Those guys get us to bail them out of the consequences of their own folly. They are the Mothers of All Welfare Queens. Compared to what those guys are grabbing, the "welfare queens" of the 1980s that Reagan and the Wingnuts used to rail about seem almost quaint.

It may be necessary for the good of the country. But don't expect me to like it. And don't expect me to feel anything other than a fine disregard for the greedy fucks that brought this about with their "mortgage-based securities" and "collateral debt obligations" and "credit swaps" and all of the other financial legerdemain, for the ideologues who blinded themselves to the reality of human greed and for the politicians who made it their life's work to strip away all regulations of the financial industry.