Hope And Change

Looks like the installment of Hope and Change will cost about seventy million dollars tomorrow.

I find it odd that when my state is forty billion upside down, and when my federal government is 1.2 million million upside down, we somehow find the way to throw 70 million+ on top of it to inaugurate another president. Odd that a couple of million people can comfortably fill up their tanks on cheap gas to drive cross country to participate.

It doesn't matter that these are private funds. Private funds come from the public nowadays, what with our government "owning" large swaths of Wall Street where these funds originate. It makes perfect sense for AIG to throw inaugural money at Obama -- and when the lights dim, when the band plays their last note, when the podiums and grandstands are dismantled, and when the millions return home to rising unemployment and punishing deflation, AIG will be first in line for the second round of your TARP monies.

I live in a state where, on the first of February, Change and Hope will come first to the blind and disabled who will lose state disability payments and/or caregivers because the California legislature can't govern. They'll be sorta pissed about the Change part. Maybe they'll lose some of that Hope part, too.

I suppose I'm quite unreasonable to use the blind in my post, to hang them up as victimized poster children in a morally fiscally bankrupt society. Quite unreasonable to assume the state can't pass a balanced budget sometime in the next twelve days to avert this scenario. And...quite unreasonable to assume that any of us will have to sacrifice or give up anything, ever, to get us to [collectively] stop spending 3 times what we earn.

Nope. We expect certain things from our governments and refuse to pay for them. Just like underwater mortgages or crushing consumer debt burdens -- we buy, then default. Let's just continue the Merikan ethos of unearned riches, shall we? Defaulting on debts, pissing away money at Indian casino tables, let's not change a thing, no. Fuck Change. Let's just print more money and make the problems all just go away.

All the policemen, all their overtime, all those oboe players and violinists, the grandstand carpenters and the blue room caretakers, the formal ballroom waitresses, the high priced call girls...will any permanent job come from this inauguration? Does security detail time-and-a-half count towards our national GDP? Is this seventy million ever expected to trickle down, or is it only expected to just grease the palms of the influential, of those who donated? No Change here, folks.

I must just be facetious, you say. Surely, within weeks our new president will have things turned around...home prices will start anew at renewed 20% per annum growth, incomes will rise, Change will spring eternal, we'll each be driving electric cars powered by the wind on roads paved with our new found wealth and Hope. Within weeks, everyone will find a job they love, racial repressions will evaporate, the foreign wars will end, and the drunken buzz of the inauguration will linger for years to come.