Upcoming
June 12
Call of the Wild 3D
Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love
June 16
June 19
Dead Snow
Whatever Works
June 24
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
June 26
Cheri
Fireflies in the Garden
July 1
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
July 3
The Girl from Monaco
I Hate Valentine's Day
July 10
July 15
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
July 17
July 24
All Good Things
The Answer Man
In the Loop
July 29
July 31
The Cove
August 7
When in Rome
August 14
A Perfect Getaway
District 9
The Goods: The Don Ready Story
Ponyo
Pool Boys
Spread
The Time Traveler's Wife
August 21
Five Minutes of Heaven
Goose on the Loose!
It Might Get Loud
World's Greatest Dad
August 28
The Boat that Rocked
September 4
Amreeka
Carriers
Citizen Game
Shanghai
September 9
September 11
The Red Canvas
Tyler Perrys: I Can Do It All Myself
September 17
The Burning Plain
September 18
Brand New Day
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Jennifer's Body
Splice
September 25
October 2
A Serious Man
Toy Story/Toy Story 2
Stocks and Pillories
Wall Street had a grotesque party, the lavishness of which has never been seen or experienced in the history of economically developed civilizations, and now the people who cruised along on the backwash of that party are going to have to pay for it. You, me, our children especially...sucking it on our knees for years to come, coping with annual deficits of $1.2 to $1.5 trillion on top of the usual burdens. Awful.
Taxes are going to have to go up and entitlement programs are going to have to scalpeled down. "If we do nothing," Barack Obama has told the N.Y. Times, "then we will continue to see red ink as far as the eye can see."
But without a sense of justice in this process, average middle-class citizens -- especially the seniors -- will be beside themselves with rage. Obama needs to go after the greedy bad guys and make them suffer for their misdeeds in ways that are vivid and theatrical and dramatically satisfying. Send the worst of the Wall Street scalawags to jail. Make the greedheads who don't go to Sing Sing or Danbury or Leavenworth pick up trash in public parks while dressed in orange jumpsuits, and not just for 30 days -- make them do it for two or three years, day in, day out. And take their money -- take it right out of their bank accounts the way Charlton Heston led the Hebrew slaves to the grain silos of the high priests in The Ten Commandments -- and distribute it to struggling small banks, deficit-plagued municipalities, crippled companies and the desperate poor.
People understand that everyone is going to have to make do with less, but they want and need to see justice meted out in a way they can see. All governments know that a failure to dispense and demonstrate an appropriate sense of justice will sooner or later result in a citizen's revolt against the government. Make the bad guys suffer, President-Elect Obama, or else.
Posted by Jeffrey Wells on January 8, 2009 at 5:43 AM
comment #1
TheCahuengaKid
says ...
Economic meltdown and preventable 9/11 tragedy are the perfect symbolic bookends to W's horrible presidency...
Posted by TheCahuengaKid
at January 8, 2009 6:28 AM
comment #2
SaveFarris
says ...
Average middle-class citizens aren't exactly blameless in this mess. They were the ones maxing out credit cards, buying more house than they could afford, and refusing to squirrel away for the inevitable rainy day.
Posted by SaveFarris
at January 8, 2009 7:56 AM
comment #3
Joel
says ...
Yes, and when the average consumer decides, hey, maybe I SHOULD save, the economy tanks because the entire thing is based on Americans buying things they don't need. Which wouldn't matter as much if any of them were made here and could be sold overseas. But they are all made in China.
Even a World War II situation wouldn't pull us out of this one, since there aren't any factories to fire up the war machine anymore.
Posted by Joel
at January 8, 2009 10:38 AM
comment #4
deadre
says ...
i'd love to see an really thorough expose on hedge funds. i think most of the criminals like within this group. if anyone has seen one, can you please guide me to it. i want names and everything. it is the perfect symbol of greed that I'm sure, at some point, will figure out a way to continue....
Posted by deadre
at January 8, 2009 10:52 AM
comment #5
Midwest Doug
says ...
Everybody's got blood on their hands on this one. This whole crisis is the other shoe dropping from 9/11. The economy was teetering, but what sustained it was consumer spending, which was fueled by the housing bubble. And almost everyone was in on the game. You make 50k a year? Hell yes, you should have a 400k house and two HDTVs and a pool and 2 SUVs with DVD players. Ridiculous.
Posted by Midwest Doug
at January 8, 2009 10:52 AM
comment #6
Hickenlooper
says ...
Jeff, well said! I couldn't agree with you more. I'd like to see a lot of these Hedge Fund guys cleaning porto potties in Central Park or better yet the South Bronx. Can they even afford porto potties in the South Bronx?
Posted by Hickenlooper
at January 8, 2009 11:35 AM
comment #7
arturobandini2
says ...
[Warning: Soapbox Alert]
Too much blame is put on all recent homebuyers. Not everyone who bought during the bubble was a speculator or trying to pull a fast one. Some of us had been saving 20 years or more to buy a house and suddenly saw the cost going up at an alarming 25% annually. (Real estate is only supposed to appreciate at 2-3% annually in a healthy economy.) No one -- and I mean NO one, save for maybe Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini -- was throwing up red flags. Alan Greenspan encouraged first-time buyers to put zero down. The media and advertisers (remember those painful "lost another loan to Ditech!" commercials?) created a sense of mass panic, that if you didn't already own a home, here was your last chance to get in the game. For those of us watching our dreams of someday owning a house recede, we looked to government for a sense of regulation. Instead, we were told, in essence, "This is the new economic reality, get used to it. If you can't afford a $400,000 starter home, you'll never own one, because next year that same home will cost $500,000." Then you had banks giving away home loans and HELOCs without any proof of collateral or job security (see WaMu). Some of us made painful, agonizing decisions to invest our entire nest eggs as down payments on tear-downs and fixer-uppers, and sacrifice dining out, taking vacations and buying iPhones/Blu-Rays/HD TVs for the rest of our lives. Just so we'd have a place to live rent-free after retirement. Now we find that our property values will have depreciated 50% by 2011 (that's the projection in CA), basically because everyone in the financial sector was greedy and a big fat liar. Adding insult to grievous injury, when anyone in the government even brings up the possibility of bailing out homeowners, they only mention the subprime customers who put zero down. Those who tried to act responsibly are just shit out of luck, and god forbid we lose our jobs on top of it.
To sum this up, not everyone has blood on their hands.
Posted by arturobandini2
at January 8, 2009 11:55 AM
comment #8
TheCahuengaKid
says ...
I agree with Arturobandini 2.
He nails it...
Posted by TheCahuengaKid
at January 8, 2009 12:58 PM
comment #9
D.Z.
says ...
"Wall Street had a grotesque party, the lavishness of which has never been seen or experienced in the history of economically developed civilizations,"
Someone hasn't seen Caligula...
Farris: "They were the ones maxing out credit cards, buying more house than they could afford, and refusing to squirrel away for the inevitable rainy day."
But when Wall Street does it, then it deserves a break.
Posted by D.Z.
at January 8, 2009 6:37 PM
Post a comment