Aiding and Abetting.
Aide de Camp. A betting woman. That isn’t aiding and abetting? You’re tired of camping? Well there are no Hessians close by. Ever since I mentioned the Baha men and their songs I’ve been getting bit by fleas. Goddamned blood suckers.
Ok look, those last two essays were a gut punch. I am here to make this a bit more… lighter. This essay too is actually about something non trivial like people’s lives. Still there is only so much policy jargon you can take written in a technocratic doomscript. In other words, what I am about to write about is deadly serious stuff, except I’ll try to make it funny. I have done that a lot. And some of you have misunderstood it for a lack of seriousness. So here goes:
There is aid to the poor. There is aid to the rich. The aid to the rich is provided by institutional bulwarks that one simply doesn’t question seriously. The aid to the poor is provided as aid and is often subject to oversight and the passions of xenophobia or us v/s them. The most obvious examples of aid to the rich are the financial bailouts of the 2009 Great Housing Bubble Crisis and the ongoing Fed Swap Lines, Fed’s Balance Sheet and the Fed’s interest rate setting mechanism. Those are the obvious, easy to see and understand aid examples. The not so easy to understand examples are the re-engineering of the stock markets from it’s original intent: providing capital for new industries. The even more not so easy to understand examples are vulture capitalism that masquerades as private credit extensions. The truly not easy to understand aid involves financial instruments that are very exotic in nature in markets that themselves are opaque.
It is however very easy to understand aid to the poor. USAID. Why are we funding the poor people in Africa? Cut it. You see what I mean. Those things above? My head hurts trying to understand it. Therefore it must be okay. This stuff? They are not Americans. I get that. Why are we helping poor people in Africa with medicines when our healthcare costs are so high? Medicare and Medicaid to disabled and poor? Why can’t they work? We are paying them from my tax dollars. I pay so much in taxes. Cut it. Programs to help the homeless get back on track? Just put them in a big cell somewhere and get them off my streets. We don’t need to pay for it. Cut it. Programs to help prisoners get education and lead a better life after parole? Come on! They’re criminals. You get the idea. It’s easy to understand aid to the poor.
What if I told you that aid to the rich was 100 times the aid to the poor. Would it matter? It wouldn’t because the common man or woman in America doesn’t understand what I described above in the third paragraph. What if I told you the aid to the rich was 1000 times. Would it matter now? What if they are providing 10,000 times more money in aid to the rich than to the poor. And the rich are a very small fraction of the poor. Would it matter? What about 100,000 times? What about 10 million times? Still wanna cut aid to the poor though right? It’s easier to feed that hatred monster. Than to workout our brains to understand exactly how we are being fleeced.
I dunno this showed up on my YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSUxP71L3gI
Is that an actual movie or AI just creating stuff now just for me?
