Goats, Bread, and Circuses

"You have two goats. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four goats back, with a tax exemption for five goats. The milk rights of the six goats are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven goats back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight goats, with an option on one more. You sell one goat to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine goats. No balance sheet is provided with the release. The public then buys your bull.

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"First of all, here's what made all this such a surprise. For years, when we've wanted to fund Head Start, children's healthcare, higher education, job training programs, or infrastructure maintenance, we've heard endless arguments in Congress concerning the scarcity of funds to pay for these things. We don't even have money for disaster relief, one of the basic services for which taxpayers in any country expect a return on their investment in their government.

"So here we thought we hardly had any goats left, let alone enough for everyone to have milk and cheese and cabrito, and we were all going to have to learn to live much more austerely. Then we discovered that we did have goats, but only very briefly.

"We have, or had, as it turns out, 700 billion goats that we did not know about. We never would have known of the existence of this veritable windfall of goats except that the financial sector in this country wanted them. They demanded them, in fact, claiming a complex and dire emergency in which a cataclysmic economic meltdown would occur if we did not turn them over, immediately and without question."

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"'Bread and circuses' (or Bread and games) (from Latin: panem et circenses) is an ancient Roman metaphor for people choosing food and fun over freedom. It often appears in commentary that accuses people of giving up their civic duty and following whichever political leader offers to satisfy their decadent desires." -- Wikipedia.

Translation: Goats = our hard-earned dollars. Circuses = the corporate media, including sports, Brittany, etc. Bread = what they're now making the mistake of taking away from us.