The heart grows heavy with the grapes of wrath

I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath last night. The ending was quite uplifting, but first it dazed me a bit until I could think it through. Then this morning I read Mr. Drum, over at his blog with Mother Jones, endorsed the $700 billion bailout package for Wall Street. I have not been this depressed since March 2003, when President W. Bush ordered troops into Iraq. The bailout will impoverish America. The bailout is the equivalent of the bankers suckling at the teat of the young Rose of Sharon, whose baby was born dead, instead of a starving stranger.

The rational for the bailout is that banks are frozen with fear about the underlying assets of their banking trade partners, making them unable to trade amongst themselves, which stifles the flows of capital to the business markets and stops economic growth. This lack of capital availability for business, it is explained, will mean a long recession with high unemployment.

My objection to the bailout is that it will not work. Banks will take the money and trade amongst themselves, but they will not loan money for business expansion because they have now become risk averse. Even with the bailout, the economy will sink into a long recession with very high unemployment. But the bailout will empty the nation's cookie jar, leaving nothing to stimulate the economy or relieve the suffering of the millions of Americans who will be suffering from a lack of work. The bankers will have the money and they will tell America those who are hungry should work harder. They will have to work harder in order to pay the interest on the national loans the bailout will require.