piggies

Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Leading piggy lives;
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives,
Clutching forks and knives
To eat their bacon.

--Lennon and McCartney
"Piggies"

Frank Rich's column in the New York Times this morning should be chiseled into granite and erected in a public place somewhere. It dispels most of the smoke and fog that's been deliberately manufactured to conceal the origins of our various ongoing national catastrophes, caused by piggish policies created by the swilling classes.

Its theme is established by Rich's puncturing and lampooning of Alan Greenspan's ludicrous and wormlike assertion that his policies as Fed chairman had nothing to do with setting off the economic meltdown of 2008-2010 and counting, which the former Pope of Wall Street asserts nobody could have predicted anyway. To Greenspan's contending that he was "right 70 percent of the time," Rich drily notes that so was the captain of the Titanic.

Likewise, when Rich turns to Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, and nearly single-handedly responsible for key elements of financial deregulation that enabled Greenspan's laissez-faire, hands-off policy toward banking and real estate, we discover another major player trying to duck responsibility, and maintaining that the current recession is "a crisis virtually nobody saw coming."

That, of course, is totally false, and Rich supplies a raft of juicy, sausage-like links to prove it. They include this Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone article on the crimes of Goldman Sachs which everybody should have read by now, and testimony from Michael Burry, an investor who saw the bubble coming as far back as 2005, predicted the catastrophe, and identified the political and economic motivations of the people whose policies enabled it.

Attempting to dodge responsibility is in fashion these days as the consequences of criminal policy decisions rebound back into the offices where those policies originated, from Washington to Rome. Even Pope Ratzo the First -- yes, Rich has him in there too -- is going to now have to answer for what he's done, and his weaselish attempts to duck the hard questions will only make the final accounting more painful.

The architects of the Iraq War, which even Republicans now say was "a mistake," likewise try to evade responsibility for the blood of the innocent, which now cries out from the ground for justice. "It’s remarkable how often apologists for Wall Street’s self-inflicted calamity mirror the apologists for Washington’s self-inflicted calamity of Iraq," Rich says. "In the case of that catastrophic war, its perpetrators and enablers almost always give the same alibi: 'Everyone' was misled by the same 'bad intelligence' about Saddam Hussein’s W.M.D. Hence, no one is to blame and no one could have prevented the rush to war."

What Rich doesn't get into is how the unraveling of our national political, economic, and ethical fabric is accompanied by a non-stop roar from the right-wing noise machine (think Fox News and innumerable internet sources), who make every attempt to deflect the guilt of the perps onto the victims. For example, they'll scream in your ear while wildly jumping up and down that the recession was caused by subprime real estate loans which banking regulations passed by "liberal" Democrats required all banks to make. If at all possible, right-wing media tries to blame anything and everything on people who are preferably poor and/or non-white; if possible, the rule of thumb is to find a way to hang it on ACORN, and if that's too big a stretch there's always George Soros.

All of this has the one advantage of clearly communicating who the piggies are afraid of -- the very people who would benefit most from their overthrow, and the institution of policies which are the diametrical opposite of what we've seen in the U.S. since 1980.

Unlike right-wingers, Frank Rich is an equal-opportunity saboteur of weak excuses, and the whiny evasions of Michael Steele, Charlie Rangel, and David Paterson all appear in this morning's tour-de-force. Even Tiger Woods makes an appearance.

All of these weak denials ultimately avail the responsible parties absolutely nothing, and will only increase the anger felt by those hurt by the results of criminally bad policies. The victims of bad policy are also, when all is said and done, the final authority on the fate of the perpetrators of those policies. I'm not much of a carnivore, but I think it's time to fire up the smokehouse, and get ready to cure some hams.