Bankers, bureaucrats and bailouts … oh my!

I don’t know about you folks, but all this sturm and drang over the Wall Street bailout has me questioning the viability of the U.S. federal government now that it has abandoned any pretense of responsibility, accountability or respectability.
Government is a shell game — big government even more so.
We have all heard the term “Wild Wild West.” Well, welcome to the “Wild Wild East,” where laws are manipulated to maintain order and bankers are the ones robbing the bank. Adding to this epic failure of ethical integrity, the federal government is rushing to rescue bad bankers from the mortgage mayhem they created. Lawmakers in Washington have decided to buy out $700 billion worth of bad debt to keep lenders from sharing the fate of the lendees.
Rewarding greed and graft with more of the same is hardly in the best interest of anyone, other than those involved in the financial mismanagement that has brought us to the brink of economic collapse.
I guess my biggest issue is that the federal foxes want the homeless hens to pay for their pillaging, without any say in the matter. And when I say federal foxes, I speak of both the Republican and Democratic varieties. Although I’m not the type who sees this as a case of creeping socialism, I do see this as another example of the corporate kleptocracy having its way with Washington, D.C.
What concerns me most is the two-tier system of letting individuals lose everything to bad loans while corporations making the bad loans are protected by the policymakers who allowed for the deregulation of the banking and mortgage industry in the first place. Why should taxpayers bail out the industry that has brought the American economy to the brink of recession, depression and deeper debt?
Call me a fiscal conservative, but I don’t think the bailout is anything but a license to fraud and fail again. To cover their bad loans, the federal government is rewarding the bad behavior of bankers and bureaucrats.
Enough is enough.
Gone are the days of lavish spending, bottomless credit and “I’ll pay later” mentality. If there is a lesson to be learned from this mortgage mess, it is how to prevent it from happening again on a larger scale.
It’s time for state, county and municipal government to adapt to leaner and meaner times, and the best way to accomplish this goal is through fiscal restraint and a clear sense of priorities. Economic self-sufficiency should be one of those priorities, as should resource conservation, environmental restoration and lifestyle preservation. We the people have to take care of ourselves.
We must move beyond the philosophy of build, borrow, bank and bail. Borrowing from the future has proven to be a plunderous blunder. It is proving to be what will eventually break the bank once and for all.
Responsibility, accountability and respectability are the changes we need.
Throwing money at a systemic problem is not change. Rewarding greed and incompetence is not change.
It’s time for change.