My Howard Beale moment

By Edward Copeland

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. ... We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. ... All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

I'm getting to that point people as I listen to idiot after idiot either report the news or comment on it. I think the valve started to blow this week when it was reported that AIG, the recipient of two previous payment of billions, who has been caught after those payments spending money on lavish junkets for its executives instead of trying to save their company, was about to report a huge loss and go back to the government with their hand out again. Screw em. Let's start practicing a little Darwininism here. If they can't save themselves, let them fail and sell them for spare parts.

Today, the steam shot the valve clean off my head as Obama introduced his budget and all the coddled members of the media started worrying about whether it was a good idea to let Dubya's tax cuts on the highest earners in the country expire in these economic conditions and return to the rate it was under Clinton. Oh dear, they cry, won't this make the big earners less likely to create jobs. Hmmm...exactly how many jobs have they been creating under this current tax rate? Another 600,000 some unemployment filings in the last week alone. (5 million jobless total, an all-time record.) Thousands upon thousands of job cuts announced each week. The fat cats aren't ever considering cutting their wages to save some workers' jobs but Chip Reid is afraid they won't create jobs if they have to pay a little more in taxes. At the same time, they seem to forget the majority of the country actually will be getting more of their money back.

CNBC has been particularly ridiculous as they told the story of the bank that received a billion or so from the TARP but used money to sponsor a golf tournament and send loads of its execs on swanky trips to the event. Larry Kudlow was turning red with anger. THIS WAS MARKETING, he declared. Labeling these banks this way will have a ripple effect. They WILL RUIN GOLF. Say it ain't so, Larry. Here, I thought Rick Santelli was the most irrational one at CNBC for acting as if the Obama Administration was about to ship him off to Gitmo because Robert Gibbs mentioned his name at a press briefing.

It's time for tough love with these assholes. Hank Paulson made a lot of these banks take money to hide which banks were really in trouble. Now everyone knows that it's Citigroup that's in trouble and the stronger banks want to give back the money they got, money they didn't want. Let them. The most infuriating thing I've heard is that the stimulus package had $75 million for FBI investigators to probe this economic meltdown and it was removed by Congress from the final bill. As Dylan Ratigan compared it, this disaster is the economic equivalent of 9/11 except we're only trying to help the victims, no one is going after the terrorists. I WANT YOU TO GET UP OUT OF YOUR CHAIR...