经济广角:年经济救助的后见之明
The big bailout of ‘08, or hindsight is blind
Sometimes you just don’t know what to think.
On the one hand, there’s Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, which takes an outraged look at the havoc that the financial crisis has caused on your basic, working (or now non-working) American citizen. Yeah, I know, a lot of you folks would drop Mr. Moore off a mountain made of his own money if you had the chance. But the guy can make a case.
His point is that our economic system is controlled by idiots, con-men and selfish, greedy SOBs who don’t give a damn about us and run the system for their own benefit. I don’t think you have to be a flag-waving leftie like Mr. Moore to agree with that one. I think a lot of Glenn Beck people would sign on to that premise.
The fat man in the hat is also righteously peeved that the Government bailed out all those big banks and insurance companies that nearly brought us all down. And again, there’s a fair chunk of right-thinking America that’s hopping mad about that, too. So maybe Moore’s anti-capitalist screed is actually an interesting nexus at the point where right and left converge in hatred of the system that rewards failure and lets the bad guys run the next iteration of the machine. Nobody ever lost money at this point underestimating the anger of the American people.
And of course we all have plenty to be angry about. We could spend the next decade yelling at, prosecuting and punishing the moral morons and stupid geniuses who gave us our recession.
But then there’s James B. Stewart’s exhaustive, exhausting look at the “Eight Days” that shook the world back in September of 2008, in the September 21st, 2009, issue of The New Yorker. It’s a tick-tock about the week that the guys who run global capitalism bumbled their way toward the decision to go socialist for a while and bail out the system that pays for their limos.
What you see is how close we all came to losing pretty much everything — our collective life savings, our homes, the insurance that protects us from disaster (subject to acts of God and any other consideration they can think of to avoid paying you). We get a worm’s-eye view of familiar figures like Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, Lehman’s clueless Dick Fuld, pre-bonus John Thain of Merrill, the gang from AIG, thrashing around trying to figure out how to prevent the entire mess from going down the drain it was circling.
If you haven’t looked it up, you should. If it shows nothing else, it demonstrates how in a crisis the false divisions that separate one global behemoth from another, and private enterprise from Government, dissolve, leaving a management team all working for the same big corporation. You know it. You work for it too.
So that’s where I’m stuck, another year older and deeper in debt, as the old song goes. On the one hand, you’ve got to hate the fact that the miscreants wriggled off the hook, and that in many ways — just like after the fall of Communism in eastern Europe — the same creeps who screwed things up are back running the store, the new boss same as the old boss. All those big bailouts make a lot of people want to scream, and truly, there are so many things to despise about Wall Street. On the other hand, where would we be if the so-called free-marketplace had been allowed to go down, to be righteously allowed to fail? Every single person now reading this, and even those losers who aren’t, would be up the creek.
I don’t know where I come out. I’m confused. So I guess I’ll just handle that like everybody else these days. I’ll get mad! Ah, that feels better!
有时候真的不知道该如何想。
从一方面来说，迈克尔•摩尔（Michael Moore）的新片《资本主义：一个爱情故事》用一种愤激的眼光来看待这场经济危机给美国公民(无论是有工作的还是失业的)带来的大浩劫。 是的，我知道，如果有机会，你们中的很多人都会想把摩尔从他积累的金山上扔下来，但是这家伙有自己的论证。
他认为现今操纵经济体系的人是一群自私而又贪婪的白痴和骗子。他们不管我们的死活，只为自己的利益来操纵一切。我不认为如果你同意他的看法，就说明你和他一样是个极端狂热的左翼分子。我觉得支持格伦•贝克（Glenn Beck）的人都会同意他的说法。
这个戴帽子的胖子同样义正言辞地对政府的行为表示愤怒，指责政府给大银行和保险公司提供的救助金险些让我们大众垮掉。再者，还是有很多脑筋正常的美国民众对此暴跳如雷。也许摩尔反资本主义的长篇大论其实是一个左、右翼人士思想的整合，表达他们对于整个体系的憎恶，痛恨整个体系带来的失败，并且让很多坏蛋继续操纵下一轮的运作。没有人会因为低估美国人民的愤怒情绪而遭受损失。
当然我们有充分的理由感到愤怒。我们在未来十年里会不断声讨，检举惩罚那些带给我们这场萧条的那些愚蠢的“天才”和泯灭良知的笨蛋。
但是詹姆斯•斯图亚特（James B. Stewart）又在2009年9月21日的《纽约客》杂志中，发表他对2008年9月震惊世界的“八天”冗长无聊的见解。大约就是在那一周，操纵经济体系的那些人开始慢慢地的使用社会主义的方法，给支付他们豪华轿车的经济系统以援助。
你将看到我们是如何接近失去几乎所有一切的——我们毕生的积蓄、我们的房子、我们用以抵御灾难的保险（像是天灾和其他能免赔保险的事故）。我们仰视那些熟悉的角色：保尔森（Paulson）、伯南克（Bernanke）、盖特纳（Geithner）、美国银行的肯•刘易斯（Ken Lewis），雷曼无能的迪克•富尔德（Dick Fuld），美林的约翰•塞恩（John Thain）还有美国国际集团的那伙人，他们在拼命地寻找防止一切向更可怕境地发展的办法。
如果你没有观察过他们，那么你真应该看看。即使没看到别的，至少也可以看到在这次经济危机中，将各大全球化的企业、私人企业与政府分开的错误分割被取消，只留下一个管理团队为同一个大公司工作。你知道这是什么公司，你也在为其工作。
这就是我的痛处，就像那首老歌里唱的那样，我又老了一岁，而且负债更多。一方面，你必定会憎恨的事实是，那些混蛋还是会以各种方式挣脱枷锁卷土重来——就像东欧剧变之后一样——把一切搞糟的那群人回来了，经营着商店，老板还是以前的老板。所有的救助计划都会让许多人难以忍受，华尔街确实有太多地方让人瞧不起了。但另一方面，如果不救助这个所谓的自由市场，任由其垮掉，顺其自然地垮掉，我们又会如何呢？正在读这篇文章，甚至还有那些没在读的失败者们，都必将处于窘迫的困境。
我不知道自己该怎么办了，我很困惑。我想目前我可能会和其他所有人一样去对待这一切，我要发脾气了！啊！这样感觉好多了！
