All about money

Every so often, it comes back: the Americans left the United Empire too soon.

The latest occasion to bring this to life is the $700 billion bailout for Wall Street highrollers.

It underlines the 225th anniversary of the end of the American Revolution and the arrival on our shores of tens of thousands of Loyalists.

The “revolution” wasn’t so much that: more a tax revolt. Certain well-off people didn’t want to pay their taxes. It wasn’t about freedom; the perpetrators already had that, though they were quite willing to tolerate large numbers of their countrymen from enjoying any. In all, the rebels’ victory was one of self over community, even family.

Ever since, the U.S. economy has had disturbing predatory undertones: the habit of eradicating First Nations’ cultures, if not populations; then relying on bonded labour, first European, then African. Waves of subsequent immigrants took the places of the bonded labour after the Civil War.

This brings us to the current situation. It’s not only people’s labour exploited, but their homes and property. Lenders made loans to people, some of whom had no income and no jobs. The loans were sold to others, who batched them up and resold them. Just think of the properties that represents – and the foreclosures and losses to families.

There was little regulation to stop it. There was no moral obligation to protect fellow Americans from potential catastrophe.

Americans don’t have public healthcare, but they have literally hundreds of billions for bailing out folks, many of whom were out to gouge the rest of their countrymen.

The rub is the $700 billion (and the more than $300 billion that preceded it in recent months) is not going to families losing their homes, but is going directly to some of the alleged perpetrators.

What a travesty.

I’m one of those who believes the current welfare programs enjoyed by the British - and, by osmosis, by Canadians - is due in part to the continued observance of a somewhat formalized class system. Despite all the drawbacks of the class system, though it’s said to be disappearing, it at least put forth the idea of noblesse oblige and the idea that, regardless of station, you belonged somewhere. That sense of duty lives on with the princes’ military service, something the Americans have only begun to match with the Biden and Palin boys heading to Iraq.

Where duty and the economy meet, I think certain things need strong regulation – as well as a whole lot of moral teaching and team making, and a hefty review of treason laws.