Kamala Harris is the political correlative of the infamous mortgage derivative products — the CDOs, or Collateralized Debt Obligations — spotlighted by Michael Lewis in The Big Short.  In that book, Lewis analyzes the conditions in the mortgage industry that created the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and contributed to the election of Barack Obama.

Lewis suggests that the Establishment had failed the common man.  What he did not say was that Establishment fear over possible repercussions for their failure had prompted them to support the election of a political fresh face, someone who would offer them forgiveness and cleanse the landscape they had polluted.  In retrospect, that backing may have been seen by them as a necessary addendum to a shattered social contract.

But the Establishment hadn’t necessarily failed the common man; they had offered their usual menu of abuse and profiteering.  Rather, the common man had deluded himself and suspended common sense.  He had gotten a deal too good to be true and had failed to be properly suspicious.

Lewis describes the CDO financial instrument thusly:

Goldman Sachs created a security so opaque and complex that it would remain forever misunderstood by investors and rating agencies: the synthetic subprime mortgage bond-backed CDO, or collateralized debt obligation. Like the credit default swap, the CDO had been invented to redistribute the risk of corporate and government bond defaults and was now being rejiggered to disguise the risk of subprime mortgage loans. ... In a CDO you gathered one hundred different mortgage bonds — usually, the riskiest, lower floors of the original tower — and used them to erect an entirely new tower of bonds.

The innocent observer might reasonably ask, “What’s the point of using floors from one tower of debt to create another tower of debt?” The short answer is, “They are too near the ground.” More prone to flooding — the first to take losses — they bear a lower credit rating: triple-B. Triple-B-bonds were harder to sell than triple-A-rated ones on the safe, upper floors of the building.

The long answer was that there were huge sums of money to be made, if you could somehow get them rated as triple-A, thereby lowering their perceived risk, however dishonestly and artificially. ... But never mind: The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold (pp. 72–3).

In 2024, voters faced a reprise of the CDO, this time in human form.  First, voters were sold the image of a unifying, energetic Joe Biden rather than the reality of a doddering, rapidly aging elderly gent with memory issues.  The small barking dog of the first debate between Trump and Biden drew the curtain aside and exposed Biden for what he was.

Democrat power brokers then opted for a curious choice. Rather than use an open convention as a visible and swift exercise in representative democracy, they chose to select, then market a second human CDO, somehow assuming that no one would notice or object.  They anointed Kamala Harris, barely tweaked or re-engineered, and demanded that the mainstream media praise their second deception, whose consequences, if elected, may rival or exceed that of the housing crash of 2007–2008.  Greed for money, greed for power — if you can slip a playing card between the two of them, count yourself talented.

Marketed as a Triple-A candidate despite a career vouchsafed by extensive political patronage, Kamala Harris’s deficiencies became rapidly visible.  Intellectual shallowness and vapidity, rumored laziness, and an irritating cackling laugh drew scrutiny and criticism.  An empty résumé as vice president (she was assigned little and did less) dovetailed nicely with her bungling of jobs she did and didn’t have during her previous career stops.

The real world in 2007-08 descended into bankruptcies, foreclosures, joblessness, and other assorted economic miseries.

To soften the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, the government promptly printed money and rescued financial firms that deserved to collapse.  Translation?  The government passed on the due bills to the American people.  Many suffered.  Some, especially who had succumbed to the lure of the CDOs and the subprime mortgages they fueled, suffered heavily.  Their homes were underwater.  But everyone felt the repercussions in some fashion.  

This time, given the many promises made by the Democrat party and the dangers we face abroad, the suffering is likely to be both more acute and more widespread.

The real world in 2024 is torn by conflicts and peopled by clever, tested leaders of adversarial countries.  Presidents Xi and Putin, for example, are formidable personalities and, dare we say, intellects who have tested their experience and wisdom on international chessboards for years beyond what is attainable by our two-term presidents.

Look at the hostile world Kamala, if elected, must face.  The Middle East remains a powder keg, trailing multiple fuses of deep hatred.  Ukraine lies shattered, its economy and its military playing ditties they cannot learn, tunes mandated by far-off warlords eager for a second Kindermord (the World War I massacre of young soldiers at Ypres).  Long overdue payments cannot be postponed.  She cannot hide or laugh her way through this dangerous modern world.

America needs something better than a sham candidate whose brain swirls with inane platitudes attended by ample empty spaces.  American voters need to recognize Kamala for the anthropomorphic CDO she is and deeply resent that she is actually the second CDO foisted on them in less than a year by a corrupt Democrat party interested only in clinging to power by mortgaging America’s future.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.