Dialing for Dollars

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends
--Mercedes Benz, Janis Joplin

Your commander would never lie to you.
That's the vice president's job.
--Henry Rollins, on USO tour in Kyrgyzstan

We've got to get those people with bad mortgages
less afraid so they'll get out and spend more money
--Joseph Stiglitz, on Charlie Rose

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To the esteemed Mr. Columbia economist Stiglitz -- Huh? Are we nuts? The nation's economic COIN policy is as ineffectual as the military's. The Federal COIN policy transfers funds from working American's pockets and the national treasury and puts it in the pockets of bankers, car executives and Iraqi and Afghan "gangsters and weasels" as the Time's Bob Herbert put it Monday.

It is a huge transfer of wealth that does not foment forward momentum and lacks oversight and effective controls. Is this sanity? For the taxpayers, not.

On the bailouts, Treasury Secretary and former Mr. Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson said:

"What we've been doing here is moving, I think, with lightning speed to put necessary programs in place, to develop them, implement them, and then we need to monitor them while we're doing this. So we're building this organization as we're going" (Where'd the Bailout Money Go? Shhh, It's a Secret.)

Heckuva job, Paulie. Paulson's words could just as easily have issued forth from Paul Bremer's or General Petraeus's mouth. It's hither and thither, but mostly, it's benefiting them that has. This is the New America: Programming on the fly. The economy, like the run-up to war, is now all emergency, all the time. Fear and incredulity is the lubricant that keeps this perpetual motion machine running.

The economy has been melting down during the entire Bush administration, yet one day: Mayday, mayday!, and Congress snaps to its usual posture of administration lapdog. Where is reasoned response and long-term planning considerations? What is sanity vs. insanity?

America is living a national psychosis called COIN. The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) and the buyouts are the largest transfer of wealth in the nation's history with no forseeable benefit to the U.S. society at large, and we don't say a peep. One thing is for sure -- the COIN is no longer in our pockets; we have been taken to the cleaners.

In this case, our abusers are not the terrorists we fear, but our elected leaders who have perpetrated or tolerated such criminality.

Note: for The Onion's exquisite take on the problem, see "Should the Government Stop Dumping Money Into a Giant Hole." Nobody does it better.