On the Wundervoll World of Bailouts

I was listening to NPR earlier this week, and the station was airing the third and final part of a "Planet Money" segment that chronicled the ever-evolving role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the U.S. real estate industry.

All three segments are worth a serious listen – the origin of Fannie and Freddie's quasi-public status, which the first segment deals with, is particularly fascinating* — but what I found interesting about the stories, though, was the utter seriousness in which NPR and its sources treated the quantitative nature of the Fannie/Freddie bailout.

Now, don't get me wrong, a billion dollars (that's a thousand million) is a gargantuan sum of money, and the taxpayer cost of the Fannie/Freddie bailout currently stands at a whopping $130 billion (and don't worry, kiddies, the sum will only rise higher); however, in the wundervoll world of bailouts, $130 billion is not so much minuscule as it is chump change.

Courtesy of a recent audit of the Federal Reserve's balance sheets (we can thank Bernie Sanders, one of the seven honest men working on Congress, for that), we now know what had been suspected for quite some time: that the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve dropped TRILLIONS of taxpayer funds from helicopters in a desperate attempt to shore up the world financial markets after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

For instance, according to the data that Sanders uncovered, Goldman Sachs received just under $600 billion in bailout funds; Morgan Stanley? nearly $2 trillion; Bear Stearns? the first mega-bank to collapse? nearly $1 trillion; Citigroup? the ultimate zombie bank that is still on the verge of collapse? $1.8 trillion; and Merrill Lynch? which failed and was absorbed by Bank of America? $1.5 trillion. In case you weren't counting, that's just shy of $6 trillion. And while we're on the topic of bailouts, we should be equal-opportunity corporatists — GE, McDonald's, Caterpillar, Harley Davidson, Toyota, and Verizon also received bailout funds.

A billion's not cool. You know what's cool? A trillion.

The true costs of the bailouts are anybody's guess, but there are brave individuals who have made substantiated estimates at where the totals lie. Neil Barofsky — who was, until his resignation, the Inspector General of TARP — estimated that the bailouts could total as much as $23.7 trillion, while Nomi Prin, one of the most savvy financial journalists working today, has exhaustively chronicled all known guarantees by the government. She places the bailout sum at a more manageable $14.6 trillion.

What Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did was reprehensible. They took advantage of their public/private stature, a privilege unmatched in the financial sector, and made substantial risks on the taxpayer's expense. But it's beyond naive to act as if the $130 billion needed to support Fannie and Freddie represents some kind of grotesquery, especially in light of the stratospheric sums our government has already provided to a myriad of companies.

The Thing(s) about Libya

The president's speech on Libya just concluded, and I'll admit first and foremost that I did not watch it. I was far too busy baking a superlative batch of chocolate chip cookies. But seriously, what's the point – when you actually view politics with the omniscience of experience – in even bothering to follow what the president says, or what barbs are exchanged during press briefings, or what story Brian Williams decides to open "Evening News" with. All of them, regardless of their medium or message, communicate the same basic subservient attitude regarding Washington policy, particularly when the issues of warfare are concerned. That's one of the main reasons that I am wholly apathetic regarding the erection of the Times' pay wall. Why would I care about a supposed block to the news of a rapidly deteriorating news corps?

But anyway, back to Libya – the content of the speech, so far as I can tell, is nothing new. America is special, we're defined by certain rights and privileges, and we'll defend those at all costs. Thank you sir, may I have another? When will we finally begin looking through all this rhetoric and see those kinds of messages for the muddled, hypocritical rhetoric that they are? The US is not content watching the poor citizens of oil-rich Libya die at the hands of their lunatic leader, but we're perfectly content stationing our Fifth Fleet on the docks of Bahrain, a country that recently sniped peaceful protestors from rooftops.

Go down the line of US foreign conflicts, and you find similarly jarring contradictions. We invaded Iraq because Saddam killed his own people, even though we actively supported those efforts in the '80s, and, even worse, completely ignored a Shia uprising in Basra following the Gulf War, an uprising that Saddam Hussein brutally quashed with helicopter fire, killing of Shias. The people of Iraq are not stupid. The people of Bahrain are not stupid. They know full well the extent of American privilege, and the sad truth that, given the circumstances of their violent repressions, neither country presented a valid enough reason for the US to dirty its hands with the cruel dictators of their world. And we Americans seem to be ignorant to realities of these issues.

Chris Hedges has said that one of the reasons that so many Americans can flippantly disregard foreign losses in American conflicts is because they have not, as he has, stood over the piles of bodies that result from such squabbles. Naturally, he's right (Hedges is among the more brilliant men of his generation), just as Adorno and Horkheimer were right 70 years ago. We are enshrined in a culture of illusion that is far too potent to think otherwise, a culture where spectacle and greed far outweigh substance and empathy.

And there seems to be no way out.

The Wonders of Inexplicable Mathematics

Don't look at me for an explanation. I loved mathematics in high school, if only because the controlled atmosphere of finding one correct answer (as opposed to all my AP English and history courses, where interpretation and originality were continuously insisted) was both calming and empowering. That does not, however, make an image such as this check any less hysterical!