Bailout plan passed, but we’re still poor

‘ ‘ ‘ Considering all the attention that national media have been paying to our current… ‘ ‘ ‘ Considering all the attention that national media have been paying to our current financial crisis, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American like myself who doesn’t understand the issue inside and out by now. Although common sense would thus dictate that our legislators refrain from playing us like Tina Fey plays Gov. Sarah Palin, it seems that they are doing just that. ‘ ‘ ‘ According to President George W. Bush, the primary goal of the government’s $700 billion bailout of the financial system was to ‘ease the credit crunch that is now threatening our economy.’ As far as I’m concerned, you can’t get more clear and tangible than that. However, nearly a week after the bill’s passage, discernible improvements are nowhere to be found. I’m still poor. You’re still poor. Your parents are still poor. Their annoying neighbors, the Smiths, aren’t so much poor as slowly melting into a large vat of credit lava in financial purgatory. ‘ ‘ ‘ I’m not an economics major, but if my memory serves me correctly, I have taken quite a few courses on the economy ‘mdash; though it may have been ecology, which as the prefix suggests, is a nearly identical discipline to economy anyway. Nevertheless, I attended them religiously and totally passed. Frankly, nothing about them was particularly difficult, aside from this one tricky unit on coral reefs back in that marine economy class. ‘ ‘ ‘ In fourth grade, a bully named Jimbo practically demolished an awesome economical diorama of the rainforest that I had cleverly fashioned out of a shoebox and some toucan-shaped Christmas ornaments. I was able to fix that, no problem ‘mdash; all it took was some rubber cement and some dental floss, both of which you could buy a lot of for $700 billion. ‘ ‘ ‘ At all the Senate and House hearings I’ve been reading about in the papers, politicians always seem to be throwing around the axiom ‘Cleaning Up Wall Street.’ As a native New Yorker, I know how filthy the streets can get, especially this time of year. We are, after all, talking about a reasonably popular tourist attraction and a huge commercial center. Keeping an area like that sanitary shouldn’t be so complicated. The sidewalk outside my South Oakland apartment is pretty well-maintained, even though 70 percent of our pedestrians are drunk anyway and wouldn’t know the difference if they were walking through a trough of owl vomit. ‘ ‘ ‘ Remember in ‘Showgirls,’ when Elizabeth Berkley’s character gets arrested, but then her friend gives the jail some money so she can get out and go to Las Vegas, where she’d finally make it big? Well, that’s what I think of when I see the word ‘bailout’ in a newspaper article. But how exactly does one bail out a bank, as the Economic Stabilization Act supposedly outlines? I don’t see the feasibility here. My one banker friend is still employed by the same bank as he was before the bill was passed. If you’re bailing out the banks, shouldn’t their employees finally get to be free from the dungeon of anguish that is a job in a bank? ‘ ‘ ‘ And because the banks are indeed still staffed by the same personnel, where exactly in these institutions is the $700 billion going? After I heard that the bill had passed, I checked my savings account balance and found no difference. So if we’re not the ones getting this money, then who is, exactly? ‘ ‘ ‘ Purely by process of elimination, it’s pretty obvious that the beneficiaries here are the bankers. After all, who else really works for the bank besides those soulless effigies behind the glass who won’t respond to your cries unless you have your account number on you? Nobody is who. ‘ ‘ ‘ This doesn’t seem very fair. Even if they’re in debt just like the rest of us, let us not forget that they work for the bank, which is where money comes from. I take office supplies from my job all the time ‘mdash;I’ve never been caught.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ When we all sit down for breakfast every morning, we are surrounded by reminders of our threatened livelihoods. I refer not only to the rising prices of eggs, bread and donuts, but also to Wall Street Journal headlines. What could be more telling, more comprehensive, more concrete and more utterly informative than ‘Bailout Passes, Economy Slips?’ There’s no escaping these reminders, unless of course you just choose just to disregard it all. After all, ignorance is bliss’mdash;especially if you have to eat it three meals a day. Thought that the credit crunch was a candy bar? E-mail Ben at bek25@pitt.edu.