"Crime and Punishment'
by Joel Bowman
"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country."
~ Mary “Texas” Guinan
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Many are the brave, the patriotic... and the easily led. Barely a year ago, working Americans were urged to ignore what they saw before their eyes and felt in their pocketbooks: That prices were rising and, moreover, that they were rising faster than wages. Back in July, when the inflation rate was running at a “mere” 5.4%, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown charged his colleagues with a peculiar kind of monetary hypochondria, for seeing a mountain where there was but a molehill. “They won’t say aloud what this ‘inflation alarmism’ is really about,” observed the democratic senator from Ohio, “they simply don’t want workers to have more power.”
Chairman Brown, a career politician backed by an arts degree in Russian studies from Yale University, added insult to inanity when, at the very same meeting, he exhorted his fellow congressmen to “join the fight to make housing more affordable” and to help “curb Wall Street greed and excess.” Now, we’ve never met Chairman Brown. For all we know, he could be even dumber than he sounds. But surely even a Yale graduate must recognize that the quickest way to disempower the average worker is to undercut the purchasing power of his savings.
That is to say, generation-high inflation may seem like “alarmism” to multi-millionaire senators like the tone-deaf Chairman, but it’s a daily, sobering reality for the middle and working class Americans he so earnestly affects to serve... and whose taxpayer-funded salary he so breezily banks. Indeed, Chairman Brown has been serving his constituents - good and hard - for his entire adult career. Since entering public office, at the cocksure, world-improving age of 23-years old, Sherrod Brown has amassed a personal fortune estimated at roughly $10 million. Nice work, if you can get (someone else to pay for) it.
But how does a humble public servant - one who has made a career railing against “greed and excess,” no less - build an eight-figure pile, 83+ times the median US household net worth, on a dot.gov salary? Ah, that’s a question for another day, dear reader. Maybe an upcoming Sunday Sesh...
Suffice to say, working class “inflation alarmists” barely had time to digest the insult when they were told, in quick succession and from multi-decamillionaire politicians, that rising prices were merely “transitory,” then that they were actually good for the economy and then, most recently, that they were after all part of one’s patriotic duty... the “price we must pay”... you know, because... Ukraine.
Nothing to do with $800 billion dollar federal boondoggles junky stimulus “recovery” programs, the likes of which senator Brown cast the final vote in favor of back in 2009...
Nothing to do with the Fed “quantitatively easing” $8 trillion dollars into the economy’s track-marked veins since then...
Nothing to do with pinning interest rates to the floor... or $1.9 trillion candy scrambles to fight The Covid... or $2 - $5 trillion in Build Back Whenever programs... (Manchin’s apparently ready to trade horses again...)
Yippee! Spending other people’s money has never been so easy! Of course, one doesn’t need a bachelor’s degree in Russian studies from a fancy college to understand that, even if it is Brown and his gilded ilk doing the crime, it will be honest, hard working Americans copping the punishment."
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