First of all, this is the definition from which I am working, from dictionary.com:
Appease (v) 1. to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of justice or other principles.
Someone was offended by a comment I made calling "appeasers" those supporting the latest TRILLION DOLLAR giveaway to the rich.
What else would you call them? They are acceding to the demands of the monied class to fork over more of our money. It doesn't matter if it's the Fed printing more money or the Treasury printing more money. Either way, it's your money (and your children's and grandchildren's) that is being diluted and wasted.
This course is being sold as the only way to "save" "our" financial system. There are two fallacies here:
- That saving the financial system can only be done in one way
and
- That it is necessarily desirable to save this system
The first point is absurd on its face, but it is the one being pushed by those who stand to lose the most should the financial system be saved in another way. What if instead of printing more money, we simply recovered the money that has already been stolen? What if we taxed retroactively the hundreds of billions of dollars in Wall Street bonuses that have been handed out over the past five years? What if we took that money and put it in its proper place: in the vaults of the institutions that were looted. Think that might shore those institutions up a bit? Another possible solution not involving appeasing the "your money or your life" tactics of the banksters would be to simply let those institutions go bankrupt, bail out small depositers, and watch the deposits flow to other institutions that have been more prudent. The point is that there are other ways of saving this system if that is what we want to do.
But is it what we want to do? Is it worth saving? Can we envision nothing better? We could look at this crisis as a blessing if we chose, a bit of creative destruction allowing us to completely re-jigger the financial system and tilt the playing field back so that it is more fair to the working people of the world. Does that sound scary and socialist? Good. Damn good. Maybe it's time for working and middle class people to stop being so afraid of that word. Maybe there is a reason that the owners of teeveeland were so tenacious into turning a reasonable economic/political viewpoint into the very Screed of Beezlebub.
Socialism is not the only replacement for the current system, either. We could build a capitalist system that rewarded entrepreneurial endeavor and rewarded hard work. The point is that the latest fancy acronym "solution" involving shoveling more money on the bonfire is just more of the same. Those who unquestioningly accept these "solutions" are correctly labeled appeasers because that is exactly what they are doing.
God forbid "our" financial system should collapse! It's been so good to us! There is only one solution: have the government send massive amounts of money to those who caused the problem. If we don't, we are doomed! Doomed I tell you!
Appeasement. Yes. It was the right word.