The Rich Man's Socialism

Rise up, my fellow oligarchs! Rejoice! The long-awaited day of our messiah is at hand! The work that those before us poured their labors into for centuries has finally begun to reap its benefits, and the fruits are more succulent and appetizing than we ever could have imagined.

The news for the last week has been unavoidable. Bailouts. Bailouts. Bailouts! To the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars! With seven hundred billion more to come.

$700,000,000,000.00! Never in our wildest dreams have we even concocted such a hefty sum.

I want you to stand up, wherever you are, right now, as you read this. Stand up at your plush executive chair, in the board room meeting on the hundreth floor, at the home office in your eigth vacation home on the coast. Stand up with me, brothers, and shout, "The Rich Man's Socialism has arrived!"


I am so glad that the charade can end. It has been truly difficult to play the game, to "free market" this and "consumer choice" that, to belittle the federal government as something that should ultimately be gutted. You, my friends, as well as anyone know just what kind of a rhetorical game of chess it takes to make common men and women support NAFTA as you move their manufactoring jobs to Guam. To make people support trickle-down economics all while inflation reduces their life savings to mere pittances.

Trickle-down. I thought it too harsh a pill to be swallowed, but thank God I was wrong.


Senator Bernie Sanders recently recalled our great harvests this season:

While the middle class collapses, the richest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s. The top 0.1 percent now earn more money than the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The wealthiest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion while Bush has been president. In the midst of all of this, Bush lowered taxes on the very rich so that they are paying lower income tax rates than teachers, police officers or nurses.

And now, the senator rages, McCain and Bush have the audacity to claim that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong."

You're damned right they're strong. $520 loafers strong, by my estimate. We'll be getting a free 700-billion-dollar check from Uncle Sam this Christmas.

And the icing is already on the cake. Now that we have the evangelical vote back in our pockets we can ensure that the policies which brought this great windfall upon us remain in place. McCain even wants to extend the same policies recently applied to banking to the health care industry:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

When I read that I nearly spit up my hundred-dollar glass of bourbon. Extending the same "privatize gains, socialize losses" mentality to health care has the potential to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in profits, and deregulation coupled with the guarantee that the taxpayers will end up footing the bill means absolutely no risk of netting losses. As Senator Jim Bunning recently said, "The free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America."

And not a moment too soon. I was becoming concerned, what with all of the talk of people wanting to go trust-busting again, people saying that if a company is "too large to fail" than it's "too large to exist." Thankfully we have such a handle on the media, congress, and presidential candidates that that kind of talk will never extend beyond the fringes, and if it does we can just have commentators denounce it as "left-wing hysterics" and remind the religious voters that the gays want to marry and steal their children. Everyone will fall in line and we'll be there to reap the inumerable benefits.

So remember, my fellow 1%-ers, keep playing the game. It's working! We are now almost to the point where everyone below the middle class line will be in constant debt, and with the precedent now being set we can be sure that even if they stop paying we'll have our losses covered by Uncle Sam. And if that's not the greatest economic upheaval since the Bolsheviks, I don't know what is!