There’s a saying in business that goes “eat what you kill”. It seems Wall Street believes in this mantra, right up until they become the prey. Nonetheless, Wall Street is currently dining out on the U.S. Taxpayer. Thank your congressman in a month or so, would ya?

In one graceless arabesque, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that does little more than delay the inevitable, seamlessly nationalizing risk while privatizing benefit. I didn’t think it was possible to achieve this, but it is at once a perversion of both of the two dominant political and economic systems on the planet: Socialism and Capitalism.

Said economist Bill Spriggs:

“The folks on Wall Street scream louder, which is why their problems were attended to, but the American people don’t know how to scream, becasue they have been told throughout the Bush years that the market will clear all this, this is no a problem, but it has oviously manifested itself into a huge problem.”

Ya don’t say?

Of course, in voting down this bill on previous occasions, your representatives were safeguarding your best interests, right? Well, uh… apparently that’s not quite the case. What really seems to have held up this legislation is the absence of a bunch of pork which various congressmen slid in under the wire while nobody was looking — to the tune of billions of dollars. These are ridiculous provisions such as tax reductions for wooden arrows used by children and income tax breaks for the owners of racetracks (oh how tragic the suffering of those folks must be during this downturn).

I’ve gone soft on U.S. politics of late but this bailout, itself an epic mistake, has got me apoplectic. Heaping all of these pet pork barrel projects onto this pivotal piece of legislation is just taking the piss.

America, your government has ceased to function. It is little more than very expensive dinner theatre, and a mechanism by which taxpayer dollars are siphoned off to the rich. Unless you take steps to change this, you’re fucked.

And while your candidates cumulatively spend more than two billion dollars in a race to star in this grand ponzi scheme, you’ll be lucky to hang on to your home.

Frankly, I’m not sure anything can be done to fix it. I think your opportunity to correct a grievous error of democracy was in 2004. But you all were still too pissed off about the twin towers to think straight, weren’t ya?

“Mission Accomplished” indeed. Shame on you.