Americans are a deeply weird people when it comes to outrage. Of course, what gets expressed is filtered through a media owned and operated by large corporate interests, but I seriously wonder whether a rant like this by Rick Santelli at the Chicago Board of Trade would be labeled a “populist” uprising (a description I heard several times) anywhere else in the world but here in Jesusland? We must combat the “moral hazard” of “rewarding irresponsible Americans” by “bailing them out”, we hear screamed and yelled and lectured from screen to screen to digital hi-def widescreen on CNBFAUXMSNN … on the ever-present scrolls at the bottom of the glass teats, too.

A hyperventaliating rich man, who got rich by gambling with other peoples’ money, standing on a trading floor full of rich men gambling with other peoples’ money, is a “populist” uprising? Can’t wait to see them marching in their designer suits, with their hired immigrant gardeners and maids and nannies holding expensive torches and stainless-steel pitchforks aloft as they march on working-class suburbs looking for some vengeance.

Then again, we all know they hire paramilitaries masquerading as police forces to go to those places to kick some ass, don’t we?

As for “moral hazard” … no one working in modern corporate America has any right using the word “moral” in any sentence. We have built a society that is constructed on the idea of protecting people from being held responsible for their bad acts, as long as the destruction they’re causing is done in the name of profit. The whole point of the various corporate structures is to allow people to act immorally. INC, LLC, LLP … an alphabet soup that has been cooked up to allow people to act as agents for non-born persons in the pursuit of profit. Turn down that medical procedure or go ahead and polute local waters … you have a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for the company, NO MATTER WHAT.

Where is the “moral hazard” line drawn? Apparently it only applies to people willing to take a chance to grab that myth, the American Dream, who’re willing to believe the cons and inducements spun out for them by financial professionals and their own government and the screaming morons called “business reporters”. Those very same hopeful schlubs who reached for the ring as the US merry go round spun them ’round should have been smarter/less greedy/more “responsible” are the source of all of our problems … even though the entire economy and tax structure is set up to reward overconsumption, social structures are in place that encourage grasping for just a little more if you want to fit in. If you want to have something to talk about around the watercooler at the job you got by going deeply into debt for your education, buying the required dress clothes, paying the payments on that house and car that zoning and water use decisions encourage you to have, you had better get that credit line and try to maintain a good FICA score. I suppose monkeys living in the shrinking forests could have been more responsible about the amount of fruit they were eating as it disappeared, too. We hairless apes, most of us anyway, are just trying to get by, and maybe get a little more for our families and friends. We may be stupid, but the decisions that got us into this mess are part of the general structure of things, and the assholes yelling loudest about “moral hazard” are the very ones who profited the most from it.