"No term exists to describe the current spiraling fiscal situation..."
The phenomenon of a 789 billion dollar stimulus package has quite simply exceeded the necessary vocabulary to be in any way adequately understood and encompassed.
So I hope you'll forgive this writer coining the term "Astronomics$!."
No, it hadn't yet existed in modern parlance, but I, like most Americans, am dwarfed by the idea of it all, with its unparalleled price tag.
It's way out there, in the Milky Way somewhere. And were it not from a great distance mentally, we couldn't possibly conceive of it at all.
I sat, stunned, with my mother watching the news, as CEO Vikram Pandit of Citigroup - which in the form of CitiMortgage owns the lien on my home - testified before testy Senators. They gnawed at him as if they were the old lady in the familiar Wendy's hamburger commercial in search of the patty of beef on the proverbial bun. So, "Where's the beef?"
And there's a beef all right, carnivorous in its intensity, angrily pervasive in this country of ours. Folks are hungry for help, but, politically and psychologically, and where their wallet is concerned, they're looking at accumulating lint. If they are nourished at all, it is with sarcasm, because they're all fed up!
And this sandwich, however, comes in the huge form of a sum hitherto unheard of.
A stimulus package. It boggles the mind of any who try to wrap themselves around it.
It actually approaches a zillion dollars! Frankly, I'm surprised the spell-check let that one by me. But, apparently the word does legitimately exist.
If you, like I, am used to rounding cents upward to dollars in your checkbook in the best of times when the budget allows, then you cannot fathom this ridiculously high amount of money.
My research took me to multiple sites, all with the information below a matter of public record.
The author has now published nearly 100 articles for the Pueblo Chieftain, archived at http://www.cheiftain.com
Just take a look of the summation below to see how the Treasury has thus far disseminated our tax, and as yet unearned, dollars:
TARP AID - Participants in Troubled Assets Relief Program
How Treasury has spend/committed the $350 Billion so far.
1)$168 billion in varying amounts to 116 banks
2)Committed another $82 billion to capitalize more banks
3)Bought $40 billion in preferred shares of American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500) so the troubled insurer could pay off an earlier loan from the Federal Reserve
4)Committed $20 billion to back any losses that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York might incur in a new program to lend money to owners of securities backed by credit card debt, student loans, auto loans and small business loans
5)Committed to invest $20 billion in Citigroup on top of $25 billion the bank had already received
6)Committed $5 billion as a loan loss backstop to Citigroup
7)Agreed to loan $13.4 billion to GM and Chrysler to get them through the next few months.
8)Invested $5 billion in GMAC
9)BofA to Get $20B More From TARP, Plus Backstop on $118B
Below, see a list of participating companies.
Date Announced* Company Headquarters Capital, in millions Status**
10/28/2008 Citigroup Inc*** New York $25,000
10/28/2008 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co New York $25,000
10/28/2008 Wells Fargo & Co California $25,000
10/28/2008 Bank of America Corp N. Carolina $15,000
01/9/2009 Bank of America Corp.** N. Carolina $10,000
10/28/2008 Goldman Sachs Group Inc New York $10,000
10/28/2008 Morgan Stanley New York $10,000
That boils down to just six mega-banks when the various names are combined: Citigroup, Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley.
They've already gotten our money once, and are looking for more. Bucks we haven't yet earned, and yet have still invested in them.
In the first round of payouts, executives blatantly thumbed their noses at the American public, taking ridiculously high bonuses - many millions of dollars apiece. But none of this so far has caused them to loosen their grip on loan resources for John and Sally Q. Public.
Now it remains to be seen if the current astronomically high amount of investment infusion will produce the desired results: more jobs, a revived economy, and the salvation of American home owners in danger of foreclosure.
One Corporate bank CEO told Barney Frank's congressional committee that his bank had so far saved 60,000 debtors from foreclosure.
But thousands of homes have already been lost.
My dear old bungalow house is among those remaining, badly in need of repairs and a lower interest rate should I wish to survive.
My credit? I recently sent for a "free" credit report, but it didn't include sufficient detail to completely review my status and rating, so I ended up purchasing the reports in their entirety from Experian, Transunion, and Equifax.
Turns out I haven't incurred any registered reports of late payments, because my bills have always been paid within ninety days.
But as to the status of my credit, I have watched as my open to buy was downgraded by the ever cautious and conservative American Express, and then upgraded by Discover and Chase. It has been a teeter-tottering experience, if not a mad merry-go-round,
Still, from day to day and week to week, the figures of my credit worthiness on charge cards have varied wildly between $10,000 to $30,000.
In a conversation with a Wells Fargo customer service representative, I was told that I should refinance my bill payer mortgage loan with them, and that they were "the most solvent bank in the country."
I responded to this pomposity by saying, "fine, send me the application in the mail, and I'll take a look at it." But the information has yet to appear.
It's the same old story. Major banks have yet to put their money where their mouths are.
I've grown all too weary of just scraping along. The irony of it all was brought home, as I was completing this article, by comedian Bill Maher this Fegruary 12th evening on the Larry King show. He offered the same analogy as I have in my past writings: "The foxes," in effect the Republicans, "have been in charge of the chicken coop too long!"
He went on to observe that the disparity between the very few wealthy two percent of Americans and the increasing debt of the middle and lower classes has worsened the situation. He spoke of stagflation, but also observed that the living wages of American workers have hardly changed at all in the past thirty years. Yet they continued to charge on their cards, and buy homes with ever more inflated property values.
Now the boom, or balloon seems to have burst and spilled out on my baby-boomer generation.
Today, adding the most historical of ironies to our national and world situation, is the two hundredth anniversary of the births of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.
When one considers the politically divided United States and the status of a world torn by war, famine, and disease, it isn't at all a very secure situation. Survival of our species is not something for which mankind has ever been able to purchase a guarantee.
One wonders in this crisis what such a president as Abraham Lincoln would do. President Obama has been stumping the country for his policies, speaking to the common people, just as Lincoln once was the first to do - drawing crowds numbering in the tens of thousands, city by city, traveling by train..
Lincoln has come to be seen in refreshed, detailed, and more balanced terms these days, with the observations of historians on two National Public Broadcasting shows which on February 11, 2009 cast new light on the great emancipator.
It turns out that he was a white supremacist, and that he had, according to latest research, mostly had economic factors in mind in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln's personality is now in retrospect thought to have been flawed by deep depression and the common white prejudices of his day. But he was a person who struggled against poverty early in life. He remarked that his early years could be summed up in one phrase: "The short and simple annals of the poor."
Could today's CEOs survive on even a hundred times the per diem expense of seventy-five cents, as did Lincoln and his three hundred pound, lawyer partner when making the rounds of Illinois circuit courts?
I doubt it.
Atop his horse, Old Tom, Lincoln rode through prairie grasses that grew as high as his high altitude head all about him as he was cantered along.
A brilliant litigator, he urged townspeople to, if at all possible, avoid the expenses of the legal system.
Still, he had to earn a living, and took cases both for an escaped slave and later for a Kentucky slave owner, both in the affirmative - and won them.
He never truly knew financial prosperity, despite rising to the highest executive office in the land. He felt fortunate enough just to manage, and had difficulty keeping his wife, southern belle Mary Todd, happy.
But he successfully traversed troubled times, determined to keep the American Union intact. That also reminds me of the sea of growing debt we are now attempting to navigate, hoping to escape drowning or an economic firing squad.
Having a temper just like you and I, he even became involved in a sword duel which was narrowly averted by the two people who acted as seconds negotiating a settlement. And, if he were around now, I firmly feel he'd be angry as hell, and cursing. Yes, Lincoln did curse, and also visited a prostitute, as well as indulging in "blacky" jokes.
Struggling as a young lawyer, when he finally won a big Illinois Supreme Court case, he had to sue merely to recover his fee.
Would he be chasing an economic ambulance these days? Perhaps. Or maybe he would be among the senators or their aids who are peppering Bankers and corporations with questions as to how they are using and misusing public stimulus and TARP funds.
He agonized over the Civil War and its consequent cost in human lives.
We are now at war upon fronts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And surely the most major cause of our national debt has been the horrendous military expenditures, as well as corporate greed by civil contracts acquired without benefit of bidding and oversight. That has left former Vice President Cheney and his Halliburton far more wealthy than before.
Nothing is free. Everything innately in this life has its cost, whether in money, in patience, in labor, or in stress.
Which brings us back to the present day stress of bail outs and their price tags. To our dismay, we are now discovering it's no national political and economic issue, but a geo-political problem, and it's repercussions will likely be felt long and hard the world over.
We're not multiplying numbers, but entering into exponential equations, with the entire planet holding its breath as it waits for what we Americans decide to do.
In our times adults responsible in the economic crisis have come to resemble children in a puerile war of words.
Recall how, as kids we would try to outdo our playmates?
"You have a million of them? Well, I've got a billion!" Then the retort would be "a trillion" and following that a ba-zillion" and a "ga-zillion!" So went all the lofty taunts in a childhood game of fantasized Monopoly.
If money were humor, one could do a Jimmy Durante impersonation: "I've got a million of 'em, folks - a million of 'em!"
But it's greenbacks were talking about here, folks, not play money.
Not jokes. And not astronomy either.
Yet we've had to put the subject of fiscal peril in terms that can only be viewed at such a great distance as to be cosmic in scope and described by astrological euphemisms. Thus it is that financial slavery has taken on the face of debt, rather than color.
Even the traditional national pass-time, baseball has been tainted.
The Yankees will soon be playing in a stadium which replaces the "house that Ruth built," and its new name? Citibank! This sponsorship will benefit the team annually with its top heavy all-star payroll, to the tune of twenty billion dollars a year. Besides this, the steroid scandals could easily be likened to an economic, steroid driven debt.
So one cannot help but draw the inevitable conclusion that poverty, with its attendant long term indebtedness, is strewn with equal opportunity mortgage bankers - present day Shylocks - fixing the books, and embezzling the tax dollar. It's now a racetrack full of economically careless drivers.
Hey, it’s just an accident, looking for a place to happen, and it may soon resemble a veritable multi-vehicle auto collision resulting from drunken veering about, and finally disastrously crashing. Or perhaps this has already occurred in terms beyond our wildest nightmares - and we are only just starting to realize it!
We've substituted dollar signs for stars in the process. Or are they planets - all of them red as Mars like the ink with which accounts note, penny by penny, our burgeoning budget?!
So, to quote the song from "My Fair Lady," "Are the stars out tonight? I don't care if it's cloudy or bright, 'cause I've only got eyes for you."
Unfortunately, it's not a love affair at all - if it ever was one - and it seems as though in point of fact our bankers only have unashamed lies for you.
They're at the top of the world, or out in the firmament, and they're looking down on us now.
But we've reached an impasse, and can no longer hold them in such high, starry eyed respect.
Maybe educators will one day thank our society for introducing a new area of study. After all, we've created a potentially innovative academic field of research to be taught soon in our schools and colleges: "Astronomics$!."
