Democrats Tie The Donkey to Trickle Down

The cat is out of the bag. President Obama and his new friends have settled on an old friend as their Agent of Change. While the Fed’s Commercial Paper Facility continues to Rescue GE and thus keeps the Country safe from economic intelligence by insuring that the Prostrate Parent will continue Bringing Good Things To Light on its Business Disinformation Network, the Administration has now committed irretrievably to trickle down through the Hedge Fund Rehabilitation Initiative (TARF), which will provide 93 cents of public money for every 7 cents of Hedge Fund loot dedicated to the purchase of Zombie Mortgages from the Nation’s Zombie Banks.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Forehead waltzes into Congress again today with more smoke for the Nation’s Congressional Zombies, not one of whom had the savvy yesterday to ask about the credit derivatives problem which still makes every giant institution an accident waiting to happen and every corporate balance sheet a post modern fiction no more penetrable than William Gass’s Tunnel. For the past two weeks, the Nation’s Money Managers, they being essentially the same geniuses who were fooled relentlessly on the way up and utterly confounded on the way down, have begun plowing into stocks, especially financial stocks, and in the case of JPMorganChase have driven the share price of that goliath from a low of 15.93 to an interim high of 28.33, solely on the strength of a claim by the bank’s presiding honcho that it is now making money in an economy where business remains pretty much at a standstill. But if JPM is now making money it must be by engineering trading profits out of all this chaos since with no borrowing going on it is unlikely to be doing any lending to speak of. The thing about trading profits is their unreliability. Win today, lose tomorrow; that is how we landed in this mess in the first place.

Of course, what this may mean is that we are now back to business as usual, as if the crash had never happened, and with all the same self aggrandizing idiots happily in charge and fattening on the Nation’s distress. Some day perhaps the Country will find a way to elect Senators and Representatives (and Presidents) who are capable of something more than spreading ignorance and collecting campaign money, talking nonsense out of both sides of rapacious mouths, and doing amazingly well personally while the ratatouille is splattered through the fan over everyone else mired in doing the actual work which keeps all of them in the designer life styles to which they have no trouble adjusting just as soon as the election returns are in.

For those now rushing into the stock market, my question is: what has changed? Do you really think setting top tier banks free once again to gamble in the currency markets will reenergize a real economy in which every large company continues to lay off workers right and left, in which the only business being done is the business of destroying labor’s right to organize, in which the Hedge Fund Bailout will result at best in an artificial prop to housing prices for the sole benefit of those who will remain unable to afford the payments even after the chump change payment reductions are disgorged by hedge fund plutocrats who will remain fully secured whether or not the poor chumps now imprisoned in these houses can make the renegotiated payments or not? Is it unfair to suggest those houses will remain beyond the reach of anyone telling the truth about his income, or that the much ballyhooed stimulus bill will be largely wasted on high speed trains from Disneyland to Vegas and for all I know chateaux for Nancy Preposterous and a new highly placed sinecure for the latest boyfriend of Barney Fumble and God only knows what other boondoggles buried in the fine print for the benefit of this or that Solon for whom a public flogging would be the ideal justice but let’s not demand the impossible?

Personally, I will keep my money in the mattress for just a while longer. Having no income is something of a drag, but at least you don’t have to pay income taxes.