Damn Good Questions--Fed Bailout

Athenae at Firstdraft.com has written an amazingly powerful essay entitled "It's A Small Crime" reflecting on our passive acceptance and lack of outrage about massive federal bailouts for uber-wealthy corporate types versus the nasty judgments we reserve for poorer Americans.

Excerpts:

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Let me ask a couple of questions here. Does Bear Stearns have a big screen TV? What about bling? Any bling they could sell?

. . .

Let me ask those questions, those questions we ask of every beneficiary of the smallest drop of government assistance. Let me ask why this is the ONLY scenario in which our parsimonious bullshit about personal responsibility, about choices and consequences, about "survival of the fittest" and other forms of sicko math, need not fucking apply.

. . .

Let me ask how on earth we can take all the time it takes to think up all the ways we think up to sit in judgement on every individual case we hear about, about how that person just didn't work harder, didn't suffer enough, didn't earn "our" money, didn't deserve "our" charity, didn't bleed in front of us enough, and all the while, all the fucking while, we give it away by the millions and never ask where it goes. All the while.

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I think we should ask with the same nasty assumptions at the back of our throats, the same willingness to believe that somebody else is running a scam on us to get a fat government check, the same nasty, mean, small little pinchingness we use toward individual human beings. I think we should ask those questions. . . .