Posted on 10/05/2008 6:21:45 AM PDT by vietvet67
My cohort, the sainted Boomer generation, now rules this country and its institutions. The elite of this generation, graduates of the finest schools, cosmopolitan in taste and sensibility, and left-liberal in political and cultural allegiance -- have always been counted the smartest people in the room (just ask them).
Now these new Masters of the Universe have made a shambles of the US and world financial system. This is, to be sure, not the construction put upon things by the main stream media, but it is plainly the case. The current market turmoil is a product of every bad trait the Boomer Elite has long exhibited in other social and political contexts: unbridled greed and hubris, exorbitant self-regard, breathtaking recklessness, insatiable appetite for immediate gratification, and a rollicking sense of entitlement.
We are seeing in the Wall Street implosion the inevitable result of the Boomer Elite outlook and the behavior it spawned. Storied investment banks were being run on 40 to 1 leverage. Fancy new securities were designed and widely disseminated whose terms are opaque even to highly knowledgeable and experienced hands. Mortgage securitization techniques were developed which, our bettors assured us, would magically spread risk and thus stabilize the financial system. However, simultaneously with these brilliant innovations, lenders were being forced -- by Boomer Elite congressmen with an aching love of the poor and oppressed unique to themselves -- to loan to uncreditworthy borrowers at subprime rates and without adequate documentation. These loans, packaged into securities together with standard, performing loans, rendered unknowable the value of the securities, leading to mandatory write downs and drastic capital impairment or outright insolvency for many very large firms. Given the high degree of integration of the international financial system, critical destabilization was the real result of this confluence of Master of the Universe genius and Boomer Elite turpitude.
The unwillingness of the rest of us to underwrite the moral excesses of the Boomer Elite perfectly enrages them. So, today, the rest of us are being screamed at. In fact, the barrel of a gun is being pressed to our temple. It is demanded that we play our accustomed role of sheep to the slaughter. We are told we must funnel the better part of a trillion dollars to the fantastically imprudent, self-dealing Wall Streeters that gave us the mess, and that we must also chip in the odd tens of billions more on pet lefty projects with which the Boomer Elite, with characteristic cynicism, lard up the package.
Our efforts to be responsible citizens in this crisis are ridiculed and shouted down: exclude from the bail-out the pork and the payoffs to interest groups? How dare we! Include measures that might actually spur badly needed growth in the tough times now surely coming, like cuts in capital gains and corporate taxes? Leave the room!
This is all merely typical of the smug, cocksure Boomer Elite. This is a group that breaks things. It has set the wrecking ball to institutions that are the essential glue of our society (marriage and the family), the basis of our political system (federalism and the separation of powers), the engine of our prosperity (the free market), the guarantor of our freedom (the military), and the glory of our history (the Constitution, participatory democracy).
Although our Masters of the Universe insist we credit them as moral paragons, they are among the most luxury loving, wealth flaunting population ever seen in the world. Whenever a Hollywood celebutard mouths some perfect imbecility in front of a camera, it is sure to be done from a five star resort hotel or on the red carpet of one of those absurdly frequent self-congratulation festivals. The silk tie, moussed hair crowd on Wall Street is no better. If the extent of the naked short selling, self dealing and market manipulation that has actually gone on these last few years were ever to become generally known, it would indict this crew all by itself. And it cannot be said enough: this crowd is heavily on the left and mostly in the Democratic Party. The cigar chomping, pin-striped caricature of a GOP money man has been false to the Wall Street facts for some time, though the left continues to furiously peddle that image.
The Boomer Elite's tired liberal nostrums are continually falsified by reality but, more and more embittered by the refusal of the world to conform to their dictates, they double down, trying to impose more lefty palliatives upon us, measures sure to be flatly unconstitutional, un-American, and disastrously counterproductive all at once. This is a blindly and viciously destructive cohort. They have degraded our common culture, warped our constitution to suit their purposes, and stand ready to subvert our very nationhood to the pipe dream of the Euro-left. Now they have brought our economy to the brink.
This crisis is, at bottom, about self government in two senses and the Boomer Elite is against both. On the macro level, they don't want the American people to govern themselves under the terms of the Constitution of 1789, preferring to rule over us by anti-democratic means wherever possible, and to the full extent possible. On the micro level, being Rousseau's children, they abjure governing their own appetites, and bid everyone act likewise. The Boomer Elite ideal is a sort of Directorate in the political system and economy, moral anarchy in personal conduct, and a quasi-totalitarian PC regime in societal relations. It is bad character as a manifesto, and tsarism as a mode of governance.
Some of the sane knew it all along, but for many others a stunning realization is only now dawning. Much of the vaunted wealth creation of the last 20 years was a mirage, and the ballyhooed processes of wealth creation were themselves largely a scam, no more than the discounted cash flow of the borrowed future.
We must shudder to think how little of our civilization may remain standing when the Boomer Elite finally, mercifully, passes from the scene.
Absolutely true...there will not be enough money now to sustain them in their old age unless they totally try to kill the American dream of individual home ownership for future generations and nationalize health care as an insurance ponzy scheme to put more money into the hands of the government.
I watched these boomers from not to far a distance as a kid. They were and still are the most selfish a$s spoiled humans to ever walk the planet and you can be absolutely sure that they will not care one iota what they will be doing to the few grandchildren that they did have. As long as the "me generation" lives they will just keep taking and taking and taking.
I am a boomer. I am not a trust fund baby. I went to work at 13 to help buy necessities for my household. I worked my way through college and helped my husband get his college degree.
I did not have health insurance during this time, and arranged payments whenever my family needed dental care or hospitalization.
I have never had a student loan, or been on welfare. I saved money to send my children to college, and for my retirement.
I also helped my parents pay their bills. I retired 5 years ago to take care of my elderly father who would otherwise have to be in a nursing home.
I do not appreciate comments which lump me in with trust fund babies.
These people haven't a clue
LBJ: Great Society
LBJ: Federal aid to education
LBJ: War on poverty
In 1964, upon Johnson's request, Congress passed a tax-reduction law and the Economic Opportunity Act, which was in association with the war on poverty.
LBJ: Medicare and Medicaid
LBJ was born in 1908
I would guess LBJ was no baby boomer.
Maybe you didn't follow with the "crowd" and I'm sure there were a few of you but your generation will not have a very good name when the history books are written...unless of course we become a full blown Communist nation.
“You seem to have missed the main point. No one is talking about the entire generation, merely the ‘elite’ of the generation.”
Elitism doesn’t age-discriminate.
Exactly. I guarantee a much higher percentage of non-boomers will be voting for Obama than McCain. A much higher percentage of non-Boomers voted for Kerry over Bush four years ago. Typical boomer-bashing.
“the boomers didn’t lose the Vietnam war (WW II veterans did).”
Dittos!
“He will refuse to believe [the Communist plan for America] until he gets a kick in his fat bottom....[There will be ] psychological shock at what the beautiful [social justice] society will mean...they will become dissidents...they will be shot like cockroaches...nobody is going to pay them for their beautiful noble ideas...”
Then you can feel free to discuss politics with my dyed-in-the wool Dems-until-death elderly parents who grew up and lived through the Great Depression and will run (actually limp) to the polls as fast as they possibly can to pull the lever for Obama. My fellow boomer brother (Vietnam vet) bro are the only siblings to reject the socialist paradigm. Oh yes, my youngest sibling (non-boomer) is also a full-fledged Obamaniac. All the people who with Roosevelt created the welfare state and voted in LBJ's Great Society scam of the sixties were non-boomers. Try reading some history.
Your huge mistake is to believe that all Boomers are huge libs. Of course there are boomers libs. But there were huge numbers of non-Boomers libs who voted in the welfare state in the thirties and the Great Society in the sixties. Tell me how many Boomers voted for those things? The answer is zero. Was the worst president in American history, Jimmy Carter, a Boomer? You know the answer to that.
Oh sure..the young people are being taught to vote for the likes of Obama but it was your generation that started massive programs to infiltrate the schools and create little commie robots that are now numb to what is about to happen to them.
I'm glad that you are not like the rest but there are too few of you.
We boomers have enjoyed the expansion of affluence and ease, and the arrogance that accompanies them. What I think this writer--and he's a good one--ought to realize is that human frailty is universal, not a generational attribute.
Generation Gap bookmark
I am hopeful that there were enough baby boomers that didn’t smoke pot and wear love beads who can salvage something to pass on to the next generation.
-snip-
I do not appreciate comments which lump me in with trust fund babies.
You, my dear, are a minority. :)
Looking back on what I said, I realize that it may seem I was talking about the entire generation. That wasn't was meant; merely most of it.
How does it make you feel to see most of your generation act like spoiled brats?
And if you think Gen X and Y (the Parentless generations) are mad at Boomers now, just wait till we go into nursing homes.
I think the average life expectancy is going to go down.
This is another ‘corporate greed’ hit piece at it's core. Congress has destroyed our industrial base with it's social engineering policies, minimum wage, high corporate taxes, etc. The American ingenuity has been directed towards new methods of success in the financial fields since manufacturing is no longer a viable field of endeavor for the truly visionary.
The current meltdown is the result of congress establishing and protecting Fannie and Freddie which have no penalty for failure since they are government secured entities. They were able to assume huge risk and forced the markets take that risk with them or abandon the playing field. Many smart ones like Wells Fargo did just that. If any private corporations had locked up 50% of the mortgages in the country congress would have screamed to high heaven.
To blame this on one generation is short sighted, lazy and arrogant. My father was in the Navy in WWII. My oldest brother graduated from high school in 1974. I graduated in 1987. We are not boomers, I am not generation X, my brother is a pastor with a doctorate, not a 70’ hippie or radical. Blame the ideology of the culprits, not their age.
Too late to learn from “The Greatest Generation”, as most of the ones still alive have lost their marbles.
I speak from the experience of a Boomer who took care of her Greatest Generation parents.
To set something clearly out does not necessarily make it a meaningful distinction.
Baby Boomers vs Elite baby Boomers are different because...you fill in the blank.
No, he is placing the blame on a certain segment of the BB generation, the elitist, liberal types. The same ones who love blaming every little problem this country has had on previous generations, and the ones most responsible for pitting one generation against another. And now that these idiots are in charge of things, they are getting a taste of their own medicine. This financial bailout mess can be laid squarely at the feet of the elitist boomers, whether it is those on Wall Street or in DC. You can't keep blaming previous generations for everything as most of them are dead, old, or retired.
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