Abandon Mythology

Michelle’s husband gave a speech on Wall Street today. Check it:

Marking the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, which set off a series of events that led to last fall’s financial crisis, Obama cautioned Wall Street to step lightly as the economy and financial sector recover.

It was a “series of events” alright, but it started long before Lehman went under. Over the course of several years, our nation’s financial industry perpetrated a fraud on the entire financial world by creating extremely complicated (bogus) investment securities and their accompanying massive — albeit temporary — profits, all from thin air. Then, when the inevitable happened, and the bottom fell out, the right-wing noise machine rushed in to blame it all on niggers borrowing more money than they could afford to repay.

No one went to jail over this crime. In fact, when our government ponied up a trillion or so taxpayer dollars to stave off the next depression, the people who ran the whole system into the ground began passing out bonuses like frat boys pouring tequila shots. (Woo-hoo, make mine a double!)

So today our preznit stood before these titans of finance and told them a thing or two:

“Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we are still recovering, they are choosing to ignore them. They do so not just at their own peril, but at our nation’s.”

That ought to teach them. I just hope he didn’t go too far and do anything uncivil like shake his finger at them.

This time I made it through two weeks of training before I outed myself as a liberal. Pretty good for me, I guess. I finally got tired of listening to my classmates and instructors regurgitate hate-radio talking points. It was a daily round-robin of bullshit, with no more genuine discussion, or thought, than a group of monkeys throwing turds.

Depending on which millionaire pundit from the right-wing-noise-machine my peers have been listening to, Michelle’s husband is either Hitler or Mao, Stalin or Satan. If they are to be believed, he is the most evil man to ever grace the planet. (And by extension, I must necessarily be shithouse crazy for not recognizing that.) All for trying to put health insurance on the forty-some million Americans who don’t have it.

I had to call bullshit when they began prattling on about the problems with our health care system being caused by the uninsured using emergency rooms because “they can’t refuse to treat them.” I couldn’t resist pointing out how they had so lost the point of the health care reform argument while discussing the preznit’s evils, that they could no longer see the obvious; the most basic purpose of health care reform is to put an end to emergency rooms providing primary health care.

I’m sure I came across as an asshole (again), but it just gores my ox to hear people who have everything blaming people who have nothing for society’s problems. Under our capitalist system, there must be losers as well as winners. In some ways the losers define the winners, and yet the winners seem to resent the very existence of the losers. In the America I grew up in, it was the responsibility of the most powerful among us to protect the powerless. How did modern conservatism make it acceptable, even profitable, to attack them instead?