“Brother, Can You Spare $22 Billion?”
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This is an excerpt from Rosa Brooks’s column in the Los Angeles Times from Feb. 19. Click on the link below to read entire column:
“Brother, can you spare $22 billion?
Back in the Great Depression, the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” epitomized all the hurt that was going around:
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
There’s been some inflation since the 1930s. Today’s panhandlers don’t humbly ask passersby for a dime. Instead, they go to Congress and ask for a spare $22 billion or so.
That’s what General Motors and Chrysler demanded Tuesday on Capitol Hill, in a form of panhandling that felt more like a stickup: “Give us another $22 billion or hundreds of thousands of autoworkers get the ax!”
If the iconic images of the Depression were of individuals — a scruffy child in castoff clothes, a hollow-eyed mother in a bread line — the iconic image of the current economic crisis is likely to be that of the ravenous corporation insisting, every month or so, it needs just a few billion dollars more. …”
Tags: auto bailout, bailout, Rosa Brooks