Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies-for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies and almost no regulation. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower. On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisers whose zombie economic ideologies should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks. Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread. On Wall Street, we have zombie executives-those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. It was only a year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they've spurred "zombie walks" in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knock-offs like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit "Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead").įrighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back to pre-eminence in books like World War Z, video games like Left 4 Dead and blockbuster films like Zombieland. WHAT'S WITH all the zombies lately? That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days.
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