Financial bailout

For days now, I have been more angry than I’ve ever been about this financial bailout. It strikes me as being caused by the housing crisis, which was caused by unethical lenders taking advantage of the poor. They made unsafe bets, pushed poor people in front of the foreclosure bus, and lost their own shirts because of it. And now the poor that got taken advantage of (because let’s face it, compared to them we’re all poor) are going to pay for it with this bailout, getting twice screwed by the rich.

What can I do about this? Not much. This bailout is going to go through whether I want it or not. But I sent a text to most everyone I know, saying to mobilize your friends in New York for the protests they had there. I posted a bulletin on MySpace with much the same message, telling people that if I lived in New York City I would do everything I could to take my chance to spit on some bankers’ faces. What else can I do about this? I’m not sure, but I think I’ll start with a letter or angry phone call to my congressman. I think you should do the same. Be vehement! Make your voices on this heard and take the chance to scare some congressional representatives. The nation is overwhelmingly against this and we can mobilize or at least make our opposition heard.

I’ve heard people from opposing sides say that if the other side wins, foreign investors will just buy up our nation’s financial institutions and America will be sold. What’s new? We already knew that the Saudis own 11% of the nation – or maybe only some of us knew that. Who else owns what? To me this argument is a ruse.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the need to post lyrics to punk songs, but what I listened to on my commute in this morning sums it up: Stand up and fight because tomorrow belongs to us. These financial criminals are taking advantage of us. Whether or not you think it’s hopeless, there’s no excuse for not fighting this.

Here’s the letter I sent to Oregon’s senators and congressional representatives. Feel free to copy, distribute, whatever, as long as you’re making noise about this.

Dear senators and congressional representatives,
I’m writing this in vehement opposition of the financial bailout. As I’m sure you know by now, the nation is strongly against this, across all demographic groups. The masses from all political sides, all races, all income brackets (except the wealthy), and all ethnicities have spoken to say that they should not be held responsible for the misjudgment of wealthy financial leaders. Now $700 billion is going to be spent on “fixing” the financial sector, under the ruse that it will help Americans obtain loans, but instead it will simply bail out bad leaders on the unwise decisions they made.

$700 billion is a lot of money (and we know it is not all that is going to be spent). The Oregonian recently put that number into perspective, by quantifying how many large projects could be done with that money. One example was how many Sears towers could be constructed for that price tag (it was around 1,000, I believe). That got me to thinking what else we could do. If we were constructing Sears towers with that money, Americans would be employed in every aspect of construction and that money would be brought into the active, tangible economy, instead of where it is going now: into derivatives of derivatives; theoretical money with no tangible aspect. But if we built these structures, it wouldn’t do the nation much good, since no entrepreneurs would be able to get start-up loans. We would wind up with a lot of empty high-rises. So I asked myself, what else could we do with $700 billion?

1. The OECD average per capita expenditure on health insurance is $2100. If we implemented a similar model, we could insure every American with $58 billion to spare.
2. Light rail costs on average $35 million per mile. We could construct 1,000 miles with $23 billion to spare.
3. The average cost of a bicycle is $385. With $23 billion, we could give 62.3 million Americans an alternative method of transportation with the balance. This would funnel money into the bicycle manufacturing industry, much of which is still based in the United States.
4. This taps the fund. But what about the social security system, that we purportedly cannot afford to fix. Wouldn’t $700 billion go a long way toward this? Let me ask, how much can thrifty seniors consume in comparison to luxury jet-flying, five-star restaurant dining, mansion-residing CEOs?

Healthcare is not a luxury, it is a right. The nation has demanded healthcare for years and it is an outright shame and tragedy that wealthy congressmen, for whom the government supplies quality healthcare, would vote against this for the poor and middle class. I reject this bailout of the irresponsible, those that gambled their financial futures, in defense of the poor who never gambled and were instead taken advantage of. If we have the money to bail these people out, I will not stand to hear that we don’t have the money for schools, hospitals, homes and mental hospitals for the homeless, and basic social services that are routinely denied for the common people.