Image Improvement

A collection of robber barons and blackmailers met with President Obama this week. Obama was attempting to bring some restraint into an industry that is jammed full with mobsters who are disconnected from reality, "Show some restraint. Show that you get that this is a crisis and everybody has to make sacrifices."

In the case of banks and large corporations, that "somebody" is, as usual, middle class taxpayers. The executives will still take home their overstuffed pay envelopes. Most of them will keep flying corporate jets to exotic business parties all over the world. When they completely trash their businesses, get caught stealing from customers, and are faced with jail time, they run to Canada where they get hired by Canadian brokerages to do it all again. The rest of us will be left to clean up their mistakes and outright theft.

The bankers hoped that standing next to Obama would "clean up" their images. In a world where image is reality, I supposed that is possible.

Disgusting, isn't it? If human intelligence were a reality, Obama would be afraid to stand near these wolves out of fear for his image. Nothing could clean up the reputations of the corporate crooks, in that ideal world. We're not in that world, though. Humans, who pride themselves as "the thinking animal," have the long term memory of ants. Twenty minutes after cursing the names of bankers and the financial sector, many Americans began railing about "socialism" and the "restriction of fundamental rights" when Obama's regulators began to investigate bankers and brokers. All it took was a little proding by Rush and O'Reilly and half of the country went ballastic over the idea that the federal government might be doing its job.

Obama said, "It's very difficult for me as president to call on the American people to make sacrifices to help shore up the financial system if there's no sense of mutual obligation . . . and mutual help . . . There's no separation between Main Street and Wall Street. We're all in this together."

No, we're not. The bankers and CEOs are in it for themselves. The rest of us are in it because we have no choice. Wall Street is on one side of the battlefield and we are on the other. If they win, we lose. If they survive, we'll die. We don't need them. They do need us. This is, face it, a class war and has been since the founding of the nation in 1776. Working Americans, however, quit the fight in 1814. The ruling class have been at war, without pause, for hundreds of years. If we don't fight back, we deserve the government, economy, and country we get.