What have we come to? Isn’t this inhumane? Isn’t it criminal?
October 21st, 2010 3:24 PM
(Credit: flickr user dvs)
So how do the Wall Street boys feel after destroying the world economy while pocketing billions, and then getting bailed out by everyone else in America? I’m sure they’re filled with remorse and desperately trying to make it up to us. Right?
“The first thing that needs to happen, I think, is to get these people out of their homes,” a man wearing a bespoke blue-striped shirt, a Hermés tie patterned with elephants and Ferragamo loafers said recently. “Correct! I’ll explain,” the veteran member of a bank restructuring and advisory team said…
“The question to me is not do you foreclose or do you not foreclose. The question is when and with what philosophy you foreclose,” the man on the bank restructuring team said. “If you want to reduce the amount of leveraged homeowners you have, you need to ultimately kick them out of their homes.” A colleague walked up: His recommendation was to burn houses. “It would lower the supply.”
That’s from a new article about Wall Street in the New York Observer, the newspaper for Manhattan’s richest people. It’s the only paper I’ve ever seen that’s printed on pink newsprint — except for the Financial Times, the paper for the world’s richest people. (I don’t know whether rich people are naturally attracted to pink paper, or whether it’s really expensive and only they can afford it. Whatever the reason, it’s meant to say fuck you to everyone else.)
Anyway, here’s what I’m wondering: Millions of people are getting kicked out of their homes who need a place to live, millions of homes are sitting empty and their value decaying along with their neighborhoods, and all this banker can say — with a straight face, I presume — is to burn down the houses? Isn’t that insane?
It is — because capitalism is insane. It doesn’t matter that we have a giant oversupply of something, and a giant number of people who desperately need that specific thing. The only thing that matters is: can this something be sold at a profit? If not, the obvious solution is to reduce supply by setting it on fire. And maybe this will create a business opportunity for the Koch brothers to sell tissues to America’s newly-homeless as they watch the empty houses burn down.
read more (including props, “h/t Paul Krugman for the New York Observer article”)
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