CONfidence, Part Two

So everyone's all like, Whoa, the government is totally going to take hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars out of the treasurey and use it to purchase the phony assets and bad debts of huge finance-sector firms, thus enabling them to go and sin, uh, some more. As an onanist, let me toot my own horn, for here I was, circa March of this year:

[T]he people who run all those "financial services" know that there's no such thing as economic escape velocity. That which goes up must come down. Anyone who knew anything, admittedly a vanishing category these days, knew not only that housing prices could go down on a national basis, but banked on the fact that they would. The run-up was all smoke, mirrors and profit-taking, and the downturn, even in these early stages, will be all about the massive transference of wealth from the public coffers into the so-called private sector.

Hey Thoreau! There's room in the hot tub. Why don't you slip into something more comfortable and join me.

Prog-bloggers seem to believe that their legislators are getting steamrolled once again by a false sense of urgency, but just as their gang voted for the war in Iraq because they supported it, they're going to come to Jesus and throw cash at Finance because they support it. Who the fuck do you think they're talking about when they talk about restoring Confidence in the Market? You? Proggie please. Whose confidence? Yours?

How can I make this into a metaphor that everyone can understand? Remember in mob movies, how they'd set up a front business to launder money, run as much through as they could, run the business into the ground, torch the place, and then collect the insurance? Well. There it is.