Spiraling Downward

Dear President Obama,

I was as shocked as you said you were today when I heard on NPR that the banking executives were using federal bail out money to give themselves bonuses.  Actually, I was more then shocked.  I was enraged.

How am I to make sense of this act as anything but a crime against all the American workers, whose tax money went towards this coup?

I am enraged for all of those who had  real jobs they did every day, making and selling real products, and then lost those jobs because of the economic downturn that was spurred by the insatiable greed and grandiose personalities of those very executives. I am enraged because these people who reward themselves with bonuses when others are saving every penny to stay afloat have no conscience, no sense of right and wrong.  

Perhaps those executives are believing that this is another form of trickle down, that their bonuses will benefit the nannies, housekeepers, personal chefs and all 200,000 domestic workers that the New York Times (12/10/08) reports work in the NY metro area. 

It is true, these domestic workers are impacted by the finanical industry meltdown and its trickle effect of downsizing. The article quotes the Domestic Workers United, a nonprofit advocacy group dscribing these workers who  "unlike other sectors getting hit have not safety net" and calls them "the invisible, untold story of the crisis." 

 But believe me, these bonuses are not a solution for those who labor for the executives and for all the rest of us who have been hard hit by the recession.

 I suggest instead the executives should pay back what they have taken from all of us, and be given real consequences for the failures of their business. Please take swift action and send them off the way those other laborers have been set off, without a safety net (although I am quite certain the safety net that their salaries bought them already  is quite large.)   Teach them by giving them real work to do, in the labor camps of the service sector, caring for children, cooking, cleaning.

Then let it trickle up, some relief for the rest of America. 

I can think of many ways that bonus money could be better spent.