Wednesday, September 17, 2008
AIG Gets 85 Billion, Needy Get the Bird
So, I just read about the feds bailing out AIG with a whopping $85 billion. Amazing! All of this because "A disorderly failure of AIG could add to already significant levels of financial market fragility".
Now, I know the "financial market" is important but what about real people? It occurs to me that if our government can drop $85 down AIG's g-string in a crisis ($300 billion when combined with similar bailouts), it should be able to help our poor and starving in a much bigger way.
Let's do some quick math. I just read here that our homeless population is at around 3.5 million (but I didn't look for multiple sources). Let's say instead of saving some mal-run financial mogul, we put that directly in the hands of the homeless to get them back on their feet. Just taking AIG's $85 billion, that would amount to $24,285 per person! I think that'd go a long way in helping America be what it always says it wants to be.
Dramatic Aside
What's that you say, Johnny McWallStreet? Oh yeah! I forgot! Homeless people would just waste it on booze and crack cocaine! That's why they're homeless in the first place. They're just lazy and need to get a job. That's so silly of me.
Ok, I've got a better idea. We need to get these lazy sobs some jobs. But it's tricky, because they're REAL lazy. We need to find some jobs where they wouldn't have to do much. Real work is too demanding.
Ah! ¡Solución magnÃfica!! Let's put them on Wall Street! An infant could make those decisions and let's face it, how much worse could it get?
End Scene
I suppose what bothers me most is the amount of effort we exhaust for the sake of saving money. We have huge businesses dedicated to nothing more than handling money, trading money and spending money. We pay people to watch those people who watch the money. But money isn't actual wealth, it's a damn symbol.
To paraphrase Alan Watts (again), "money is of the same nature of reality as inches or grams, it's a unit of measurement". We're letting people starve and die for the sake of a symbol, a referent and we're all to blame.
I'm not a Christian, but seriously, what the hell would Jesus do? More on this later...
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This whole thing blows my mind! AIG is the same company who paid a European soccer team over 1 billion dollars to have their logo on the teams jersey. And that wasn't even that long ago. They are just pumping more money into an already broken system. Here's a bright idea; why don't they try and fix some of the obvious issues in the system, instead throwing a band aid on the problem. How about someone hold the executives accountable? The greedy executives at these financial institutions who continue to receive record salaries and bonuses, they live the good life as they screw everyone around them. They screw the people who work for their company and will most likely loss their jobs. They screw the people who have trusted their assets to this company or have loans out with them. And they screw our economy as a whole. The whole system is flawed, and needs to be overhauled. I just love though how every time a company is in trouble like this, no one looks at the people who were ultimately in charge and set the policies. Their level of greed astounds me.
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