It’s amazing how the media can talk itself into a frenzy and still never manage to actually say anything of merit. I’ve been reading and observing all sorts of reports that purport to explain why the midterm elections went so bad for the party in power, and almost every time I read a newspaper article, watch a television broadcast or avoid a crazy person screaming on the streets, I’m left with the same conclusion: These people don’t live in the real world with the rest of us. Well, the crazy guy on the corner screaming does, but his view of our world is a completely different story.
No, what I’m talking about is how two economists can go back and forth about the economic bank bailout and not understand a single thing about why the consensus of the country was negative. One economist will talk about how there was not enough money invested (and there needs to be more), while the other argues that too much money was spent on the banks, but it was spent improperly. And yet another will argue that the wrong banks were bailed out, or shouldn’t have been bailed out so that nature could have taken its course.
The problem they don’t perceive is that the average person looked at billions of dollars being spent on very rich people and very rich organizations, and they don’t feel like the solution ever impacted them in any way, shape or form. Banks still forclosed on people regardless of how much money was spent propping up the banks that had invested unwisely in real estate adventures.
I’ll repeat that. NOT ONE single penny was spent on bailing out people who were losing their homes through faulty mortgages. Instead, they were the ones who were thrown into the streets and forced to make do with nothing while the banks were given billions of dollars of taxpayer money to prop up their bad investments. When not one cent was spent on propping up the average voter who lost his or her home, then that whole “bailout” thing seems like it happened to people who didn’t deserve it in the first place.
The solution would have been for the government to have stepped in and propped up bad mortgages instead of the banks themselves. By coming to the rescue of banks, the very rich were the ones who were sheltered by the government, and not a single “normal” person received a single bit of benefit from the government. So when Obama gets on the soapbox about how the people just didn’t allow enough time to let things settle, or they were too focused on other things, perhaps Obama needs to realize that he’s focused on the wrong things, if he’s at all interested in why the country has turned 180 degrees against him.
People have a really hard time being told that they’re wrong for feeling one way or another, especially by someone who is not suffering in any way whatsoever. A lot of people were hurt by the economic turn around, and being told that it’s their fault and they just need to own up to their own failures is never going to go over well, especially when Wall Street entities were told the exact opposite and given huge cash payouts to make sure they didn’t feel bad.
What has happened is that a lot of centrist thinking people in this country are coming to the realization that they don’t matter to the government of their own country, and that’s a really sobering throught when you get around to thinking about it. But instead of facing that dilemma, we ignore it and sort of hope that it will just go away. Or throw more money at rich people and hope that somehow that will trickle down to those who no longer believe the powers that be are interested in the people without power. Unfortunately, neither alternative leads to anything but class division, and as more people in the class with the most people come to the realization that their disenfranchisement also brings along a lack of care by those in power, then you’re going to end up with a very pissed off electorate.
The real problem is that as that electorate gets more upset, and votes out the “bums” over and over again, eventually they’re going to realize that their angry votes aren’t getting them anywhere. And as long as government entities continue to think that rewarding the rich with more riches is the way to a better nation, we’re going to end up with a very pissed off group of citizens who have realized they have no way to institute change in a system where elections reward those who are already in power. And once we reach that point, there’s no telling where we go from there because institutional anarchy has no way of being predicted, no matter how much the smartest guys in the room keep believing otherwise.
Essentially, we’re playing a game of hoping that we can gain enough riches before the whole system comes crashing down, not once thinking about the ramifications of what happens immediately after that moment. Because once the system crumbles, there’s no telling what you inherit after. And if that’s not scary to the average citizens, then I don’t know what else would be.