The next in line for a Bailout

It has been a year since the Dow Jones industrial average index reached 14 thousand points. The outcome of the speculative fever that spread throughout America (and elsewhere) since 2003. What took 4 years to gain has been lost in just 1 year. In this last year, the Dow has dropped from 14 thousand to 8 thousand 5 hundred points. A loss of almost 40%. 40%. If this does not seem too bad, then look at some companies: for instance, in the last year GM stock has decreased 88% in value. Crazy!

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After bailing out greedy Wall Street banks and investment firms, and after bailing out soon-to-be-homeless home owners, the next in line “should” be in-the-near-future-retirees who have lost their life savings in the stock market. Right? You think? Who do you think will be the first one to propose this? Obama or McCain? I bet my money on Bush!

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"While you're at it, why not bailout defenseless consumers that can't control their credit card debt or helpless gamblers that enrich the casinos? And what about horse race fanatics? Or porn addicts? Or drug addicts or ... you name it! After all, the government does collect substantial taxes from almost all these ... human activities. Right?"

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Today I heard "Iceland is bankrupt". Bankrupt?! Hum ... so all that thing about becoming the country with the highest Human Development Index, an example to other countries, all that effort was yet another bad example of living-above-your-own-means? Unaffordable and probably unsustainable??? Should Iceland also get bailed out?

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After reading what I have just written, why does it sound like I-am-kind-of-pissed-off? Am I? Should I be? Maybe I am pissed off with myself ... after all, I have no addictions, I don't live beyond what I can afford, I haven't lost my savings ... but if I had, if I had gone mad and done a whole bunch of crazy things and lived a rock star life, it wouldn't be a problem because maybe someone would bail me out! I should have lived more! ... This might be a part of the reason, I admit, but the most significant reason is responsability. What ever happened to personal responsability? You know, to be responsible for ones decisions and actions? If-I-gamble,-I-am-willing-to-take-the-wins-AND-the-losses kind of thing! Again and again, someone else is to blame. It wasn´t me! I am a victim. I just bought a house, a car, a vacation and a boat I can't afford and bought stock when the market was in a bubble and maxed out my eight credit cards and now I'm screwed. I blame the faceless businessman in Wall Street! Really? I guess I am pissed off because this lack of responsability may well end up screwing all of us. Right now, things are starting to look a little scary. Starting to look like 1929 ... and very very strangely, seems like Palin has family ties to FDRoosevelt. How wired is that! Look it up in Yahoo!: Candidate ancestry traced. Fate is not without a sense of irony ...