The
world financial order, and in particular, the United States Empire, collapsed
in 2008. At least, that is how
history will record it. Everything
that followed will ultimately be seen as the natural consequences of collapse,
including the confusion, denial, looting, panic, and fraud that followed, which
is what we have been observing the over past 5 years and which has been
generally described in contemporary (and official) terms as, "recovery." It should have been obvious to everyone that when the
President gets on television and tells the country that we need to give someone 800 billion dollars on short
notice or the financial system will fail catastrophically, the event is already
occurring or rather, has already occurred. While many find it remarkable that the President of the
United States pops up in an unplanned TV appearance to make such a request, and
question just exactly how was it that
all of the Ivy League geniuses, elected and unelected, charged with keeping an
eye on such things, didn't see this coming, I find it more interesting to
question why they even bothered to pretend that the public was going to be in
on the decision about the bailout or that it's permission was necessary. One has to believe that the experts
actually did not see the disaster coming; otherwise they certainly could have
arranged a Presidential appearance that would not be quite so humiliating in
historical context. The bumbling
idiot who amazingly inhabited the White House for 8 years and presided over the
annihilation of international respect for the United States, its squandering of
resources, its abandonment of moral authority and the rule of law, the
institutionalization of torture as a tool of national policy, and the murder of
an untold number of civilians in distant countries, had to, with one final
admission of criminal incompetence, go panhandling on national television. They might have made him wear women's
underwear, a dunce cap and a rubber ball on his nose to visually underscore his
final monumental failure.
One
wonders if the appearance was necessary for some reason other than to give the
populace the impression that it's opinion mattered, since that clearly was not
ultimately necessary. Had there
been a popular vote, there would have been no bailout. Americans may be stupid, uneducated,
uninformed, prone to beliefs not supported by science, etc, but they are
sufficiently cautionary in their daily lives that they will not give a large
cash loan to a complete stranger at the request of a distant brother-in-law
known to be a retard; they would
have presumably wanted to know a bit more about what?! and, to whom?!
and, for why again!?? before opening
up the wallet. "I can't
explain now, but it's really important!" would not have sufficed. All of the principals certainly knew this, but the fix was
in with the politicians, as they were told that their expense accounts and
access to Congressional pages and interns would have been curtailed if the
bailout were not passed. There was
never any question that Congressional votes would be affected by public
sentiment.
I
think probably the idea was to get Bush out there to punctuate the moment and
give a historical face to the instant of collapse. They knew that they were fortunate to have an imbecile in office
who was willing to stand in front of the television cameras and make the most
absurd request in history. I
remember thinking at the time, "WTF?
Haven't they been emphasizing for quite some time that we are broke
already? That we need to cut back on
Welfare and Social Security and Medicare because we don't have enough
money? Where the fuck is $800
billion going to come from?"
"Bush was the one that asked for it! Check the tapes. And you guys agreed to it, so don't
look at us." That was the point,
I think; fix blame on the idiot who was the face of every other failure for
most of the preceding decade.
Copyright 2013, Michael R. Moore
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