HERE COMES THE BAILOUT

The Stray Cats and the Pretenders are playing the County Bowl tonight, and right now, as the baby boomer crowd streams in, a band I’ve never heard of is warming up the folks, getting them primed for the main acts.

The American economy is primed as well – for an ugly fall that might finally expose the foot-wide cracks in its foundations. The stock market plummeted yesterday amidst worries about the meltdown in the sub-prime mortgage market. The news reverberated from Asia to Europe. President Bush wrote the sharp decline off to feckless borrowers – rather than the predatory, not to mention shoddy, business practices of lenders. When a lender grants a huge mortgage without verifying that the borrower has the capacity to pay it back, should we condemn the lender or the borrower? In our ass-backwards nation, where Capital is provided every advantage and given the benefit of the doubt at every turn, we naturally blame the borrower.

The real estate boom of the last ten years drove housing prices higher than the majority of buyers could afford. Traditional mortgages got chucked out the window and mortgage “creativity” was born. And why not? This is America, Inc., the “free” market is our true religion, and money is our God, so why shouldn’t buyers with less-than-sterling credit get in on the boom? Fuck FICO scores, income verification and all that logical shit – just get in the game by any means necessary and grab your share of booty.

When the sub-prime scheme was diagrammed on a white board in a big corner office of a tall office building it made perfect sense. Real estate was red hot, money was cheap, and average folks were panting for homes. It was beautiful. Home ownership for everyone – even if they can’t afford it. Here was American Capitalism at its finest, the great entrepreneurial spirit that Conservatives are always crowing about in action, creating and dispersing the spoils to our best and brightest and most highly deserving citizens.

The regulatory agencies that should have been monitoring these shenanigans were taking a forced siesta, their budgets gutted, their powers retarded. Conservatives assure us that Business can police itself and that the titans of industry can be relied upon to keep one another honest. And it goes without saying that the titans and moguls and Wall Street princes keep the public good uppermost in mind…

Sure, and four-hundred pound sows will sprout wings any day now and fly like falcons. If something looks, feels, sounds or smells too good to be true, it probably is.

Sooner rather than later, Wall Street and the big mortgage lenders will run, sobbing and moaning, to the Government for “temporary” assistance and relief from all those feckless borrowers. Yes, the titans and moguls who preach self-reliance at every turn, who preach the fairness and efficiency of the Market, who preach the evils of Big Government, will run to Government with their hands out -- and the Government -- devoted servant of the special interests who own it, will put on a public relations blitz about protecting the American economy from recession, blah, blah, blah. The talking heads on Fox and Conservative radio will echo the message and ignore the hypocrisy, and even little Katie Couric will repeat the party line word for word…

Yeah, I can see it coming because I’ve seen it before. The way this country is wired, we can always afford wars and taxpayer-funded bailouts for wayward financial institutions.