Richard Heinberg: Bailout blues

Ever since Hank Paulson made his pitch for a $700 billion slush fund to prop up teetering Wall Street financial institutions, the wails from thousands of American advocacy groups have reached an ear-splitting fortissimo.

Most of these groups have spent decades working patiently to influence one or another line item in the Federal budget amounting to a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars


And now King Henry waltzes in, announces that the bankers have gotten themselves into a bit of a bind as a result of their own greed and stupidity, and insists that each American taxpayer immediately take out a loan for over $2,500 so that he can distribute the funds secretly, with no oversight, to a bunch of financial wizards who typically make several thousand a minute in salaries and bonuses–wizards who introduced us to the wonders of derivatives and adjustable-rate mortgages.

Sounds like a great plan to me. Why would anyone balk? Just think of the futility of spending a few billion of that treasure on things like building bridges or railroads, projects that might actually hire real workers, when we can instead buy up mountains of toxic debt from a bunch of bankrupt hucksters. Now that