In the October 2, 2008 edition of The Black Commentator, guest commentator Wesley E. Profit writes along similar lines in criticizing the present plans to bail out Wall Street. Profit's prose cuts quickly to the hypocrisy of them that's got.
...[C]onservatives, neo-conservatives, free-market capitalists, and their ilk toast the values of capitalism - no government interference with the market, let the market regulate itself, etc. - as long as it works for them. And when it doesn’t work for them, as is now the case, with a wink of their eyes, they become corporate communitarians marching under the banner “From the government according to its ability to us according to our failures.” Theirs is the logic of a modern Animal Farm: “Corporate capitalism profits good; failed corporate capitalism profits better.”
In truth, it is kind of a religion whose illogic must be taken as an article of faith. “And on the fifth day, Manna made the banks and the mortgage companies and all manner of financial instruments did it make and it told them to go forth and multiply so that your progeny may cover the earth and all the international markets as well. And on the sixth day, Manna made capitalism and it saw that capitalism was alone and from the rib of capitalism it made the government to be a helpmate of the capitalist. And on the seventh day, Manna bailed out.”
And from that day to this and ever since, capitalists have celebrated the “bailout.” In the “bailout”, capitalists give thanks to Manna without having to acknowledge that they have perverted the institutions that Manna created. The bailout is a ritual for anesthetizing failure without resort to blame. It is the golden bull of hypocrisy worshiped whenever capitalists fear that the gods of the true free market may abandon them.
