March 12, 2009
Thursday

On a nice, sunny day a rich man goes for a walk down a sandy beach. The wind gusts suddenly, and up ahead are three children; a middle class child, an upper middle class child, and a lower middle class child; who in the course of playing five feet off the shore have fallen over a shelf into deep water and are drowning. Noticing that the gusting wind has chilled him a bit, the rich man turns and goes home to get a sweater. Once home he gives his dog a bone, just for being such a good, good boy. The three children, of course, drowned.

I choose words carefully always, so when I call someone or a group of someones unpatriotic whores, I have thought about what I am saying. The rich in this society are so self-absorbed that in figurative terms they have long since let the children drown. When the government bailed out the investment banks, what they did with the money is pay out bonuses to themselves and to their cohorts, and gave the dog a bone. Their customers all drowned, and as those trusting fools bottomed out and disappeared from sight, the rich not only gorged themselves, but also re-filled their empty coffers at the expense of those trusting fools' children's children's children. The implications of such unbounded entitlement are grotesque.

Without the trillions of dollars randomly tossed to the markets in the past six months there is no stock market, let alone any value in anything traded there. Madoff's ponzi burned up $50 billion, Stanford's a mere $10 billion; pikers compared to the scammers in the banks and on Wall Street. The best one-liner describing what has happened (on a global scale, no less) that I have found comes from a recent Vanity Fair article about the collapse of Iceland, as a country as well as an economy. "They created fake capital by trading assets among themselves at inflated values." It does miss one point. Over time via high salaries, bonuses, etc. they then basically stole all the real wealth.

Paper money invites speculation and manipulation. Lacking regulation, unfettered capitalism has created a class of wealthy individuals who have divorced themselves both from their country and from this society, have neither allegiance nor loyalty to either, and for no other purpose than obsession with personal greed have effectively destroyed the monetary and the financial system not only of this country, but also the better part of the world. I am not the first person who has called that high treason. I can certainly think of little less patriotic than destroying the financial well-being of your whole country just to sate your personal greed.

Mitt Romney, again among the early front-runners to be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, pointed out during the past election cycle that for his sons their patriotic duty was getting richer, not serving one's country. It is the duty of some other mother's son to take a bullet for the heartland, so that Mitt's offspring and the offspring of all those other rich folks can spend their time getting richer. And don't forget to give the dog a bone. Yes, all you ethnics, multi-linguals, southern crackers, take that oath and take that bullet for all those rich peckerwoods who appreciate your peonage so much, those fantastic patriots who will burn down your whole neighborhood just to make a buck.

Yes, just a couple weeks ago it was, Hershey's burned down another neighborhood of 300 jobs making Peppermint Patties, shut down the factory, and sent it all to Mexico. So now 300 Mexicans work for a few pesos a day making Peppermint Patties, which we now import back into good old USA in order to consume. Our balance of payments gets screwed, 300 American families are out jobs (and futures of consequence in many instances), main street businesses have 300 fewer families with whom to do business, and a small handful of rich bastards pockets the difference between what a Mexican peon makes and what an American worker makes. That is the conduct of a small group of unpatriotic whores. The resources of this country should never be used to aggrandize a small collective of thieves or rent seekers at the cost of the jobs and the well-being of other Americans.

These folks are so invested in their own country that they try to hide their money in overseas bank accounts, to avoid paying taxes on all those squillions of dollars they have extracted using the resources of this country. They love their country so much they expect someone else to die defending it, while they get richer. They love their country so much they deprive tens of thousands of other Americans of their jobs, just so they can get richer. When it comes to the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression, they are not the solution, but rather the cause. They have no social contract with us. They are a bunch of unpatriotic whores.

At that I consider myself being polite; work at it awhile I could come up with a lot better than that. But that would be a waste of time. Don't forget to give the dog a bone.

David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, AK

Received March 12, 2009 - Published March 12, 2009

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