chuckmore - So Ms. West, a stylish woman with a penchant for shiny lipstick and glittering jewelry, wound up camping in her car. She listened to the radio to drown out the voices of prostitutes trawling the street. She meditated. (“Just blank out everything in your mind,” she said. “Just go to a place that’s peaceful, like a beach.”) She prayed.

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So Ms. West, a stylish woman with a penchant for shiny lipstick and glittering jewelry, wound up camping in her car. She listened to the radio to drown out the voices of prostitutes trawling the street. She meditated. (“Just blank out everything in your mind,” she said. “Just go to a place that’s peaceful, like a beach.”) She prayed.

That paragraph put some tears in my cereal this morning…

I had the argument about the bailouts and the profits and the bonuses with a few different people over the weekend. In his column today, Krugman makes the point better than I ever could:

Ask the people at Goldman, and they’ll tell you that it’s nobody’s business but their own how much they earn. But as one critic recently put it: “There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to the guarantees extended to many of Goldman’s bonds.

We were told that these companies were being bailed out not so they could return to shoveling out record bonuses one short year after they explosively shat the bed, but so people like Ms. West would not have to live into their cars. If the taxpayers hadn’t propped up the financial institutions, they either wouldn’t not be here today, or they’d be a shell of what they once were. Would I want that to happen? Probably not. However, if Ms. West had been given the unlimited supply of government loans the banks received in her time of need, she wouldn’t have had to sleep in her car. She could have kept on her feet through her darkest times, gotten her shit sorted, gone through her three-month training course, and be back to making a paycheck and paying her mortgage before she had to become a second-class citizen.

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