Who's In Charge?

The nerve of these bums, asking me to give them the hard-earned money my parents send to me every week. --Bill Hicks

When I moved to Baltimore in 1988 to attend my fourth institution of higher learning in two years, there was a panhandler who regularly worked my neighborhood around the 1100 block of Calvert St. No crouching over steam grates, no sign, no cup. This guy worked on foot. He was clean and well-dressed and even wore a sharp cap that matched his outfit. He was soft-spoken and polite. His whole angle was that he needed to visit his mother at the nursing home and didn't have bus fare. He had a horrible memory because he hit me up nearly every time he saw me, despite the fact that I would berate him as loudly and viciously as possible before heading to my third-floor walk-up to eat a sub and watch Letterman. One day my roommate and I were walking back from our table-waiting jobs at the Inner Harbor and saw the guy - driving. And it wasn't a beater. And there was no Miss Daisy in the back. At the time we probably cursed his "lazy ass," but in hindsight it's hard not to feel at least a little respect for him - he had found a way around the system and "worked" a lot of long nights in a questionable neighborhood, enduring the righteousness of a mouthy white boy who thought he had the world sussed out and that his future was secure.

Now, twenty years later, we have a different kind of bum. The Wall Street bum. The AIG bum. The Goldman-Sachs bum. The Lehmann Brothers bum. No crouching over steam grates, no sign, no cup. This bum is clean and well-dressed. Soft-spoken and polite. But this bum didn't find a way around the system, this bum is the system.

I don't care about the AIG bonus money itself. Yes, a few hundred million dollars is more money than most people will ever see in ten lifetimes, but it's a tiny fraction of the total bailout. It's the principle of the thing. It's the fact that companies who produce nothing - not necessities, not products you can hold in your hand, not art - will shamelessly ask for hundreds of billions of dollars in tax-payer money and just give any of it away to the same people who contributed to our current problem.

"Financial products" are not products. They're not cars or washing machines or books. They're smoke and mirrors. A lot of people have been saying for a long time that we live in a corporate-ocracy (i.e. a fascist state) where business rules and elected officials are puppets. If we don't live in a corporate-ocracy but rather in an actual free market democracy, and our elected officials are worth a goddamn, then AIG and other financial institutions don't deserve a dime from anyone. They fucked up, end of story, right? If we do live in a corporate-ocracy then AIG and other financial institutions are guilty of treason, right?

Right?