The Bank Bailout Plan

Of course, that taxpayers are going to basically shell out another $1 Trillion-plus to create a bubbly new Ponzi scheme to save us form the bubbly old Ponzi scheme is disheartening. Certainly, there has been much rending of shirts in certain quarters all weekend long. Others, though, have argued that it even if it doesn't feel good and populisty, the Administration's bank bailout plan will "work" to "fix" the economy.

But, if "fix" means "repair," and implies that we will go back to the same-ole-same-ole of circa 2006... well...

[W]e can't possibly return to the easy credit and no money down "consumer" economy no matter how many nominal dollars get shoveled into the fiery furnaces of banks too-big-to-fail. As Treasury Secretary Geithner's underling, Stephanie Cutter, said last week, "Our singular focus is on increasing lending to support economic recovery. Everything we do to stabilize the financial system is done with that goal in mind."

Lending on the scale that became normal over the last decade is for sure the one thing that we will not recover. We turn around in 2009 to find ourselves a much poorer nation than we thought we were a year ago, especially among that broad range of formerly middle-class wage-earners who lived so luxuriously until yesterday. The public can't process this reality and the president, for all his relaxed charm, is either not ready to articulate it, or can't process it himself.

Everything that we're doing right now is engineered to avoid reality, to sustain the unsustainable, to recover the unrecoverable, when the mandate of reality compels us to face our losses in order to move on to the next chapter of a collective American life. The next chapter would be a society that runs on a much more local and modest scale, centered on essential activities like growing food, requiring harder physical work, and focused attention -- in other words, the opposite of a society lost in abstractions, long-range daisy chains of off-loaded responsibility, and incessant pleasure-seeking. (emphasis mine)