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Breaking News: BSN‘s Lew Daubs announced tonight a real scoop, the real reason that the US economy appears to be doing a replay of the sinking of the Titanic.
He began broadcast by quoting economist Paul Krugman on the crisis.
“How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.
This time, market players seem truly horrified — because they’ve suddenly realized that they don’t understand the complex financial system they created.”
Now, most of us might think that a bunch of wealthy investment bankers, stock jobbers and hedge fund artists foisted sub-prime loans on unwary, usually poor and uneducated people. A simple case of corporate greed and capitalism run amok.
But “this is not the case at all,” Daubs intoned, peering into our living rooms sternly. His crack investigative team, a key part of the best political softball team on television, after extensive surveillance and a few quick cases of extraordinary rendition, extracted confessions from a well-organized gang of Mexican janitors that they had in fact been totally responsible for the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.
How did they do it? “It was easy,” janitor and leader of the “Al Rahan,” Jose Rodriguez told Daubs from behind a screen. “We work at night in every office building in New York City. When the bankers went home, we simply turned on their computers and inserted a few lines of code that rewrote every mortgage they were selling. We’ve gotten away with it for years, ever since Alan Greenspan opened the discount window and let us in back in 2001.”
Why would a bunch of Mexicans janitors do such a thing? “Hey, compadre,” Rodriguez said, “your government foisted NAFTA on us back in the nineties, with the result that hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers were turned off the land, driven out by the dumping of cheap US corn and grain in Mexico. Now I have to come here and clean your toilets? This is our payback.”
The reaction to the Daubs report was immediate and intense. Hundreds of Minutemen rushed into the streets of Arizona, brandishing mops and brooms, threatening to “sweep away every beaner janitor we find. Not only are they stealing our cleaning jobs, now they want our homes!”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board promptly seized on the report as proof that the legions of upstanding, wealthy Episcopalian bankers and mortgage brokers were being crucified on the alter of multicultural liberalism, whose theories would open the US borders to the riffraff and terrorists of the world.
All leading Republican and Democratic candidates promised investigations and harsh measures to end the possibility of janitorial subversion of America’s vital economic fluids. Rudolph Giuliani promised to make Daubs Secretary of State in his administration. Not to be outdone, Mitt Romney said he would make Daubs Secretary of Defense and the Homeland Security combined. Hilary Clinton chimed in, saying that Daubs would be her Ambassador to the UN.
When told the awful news, George W. Bush said, “Damn, I can’t even find the power switch on my computer, you suppose we could get one of the janitors to help me Google?”
Lost in the din were a few solitary voices of dissent in the media. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman demanded that she be allowed to interview the Mexican janitors herself, but Daubs told her they had already been whisked away to Guantanamo Bay, where they were only permitted to view one Mexican novella a month as punishment.
“A few months of this,” said Sergeant Joe Locemmup, “and we’ll know for sure the real owners of every mortgage sold to a hedge fund anywhere on the planet.”
Jon Flanders is a member and former president of IAM LL 1145 and a member of the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO.
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