(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The current economic troubles in the US can be explained as a simple case of policy inversion. Because our government is a plutocracy, controlled by the wealthy, its response to economic distress is to provide aid disproportionately to those who need it least. What we are witnessing is a zero-sum struggle between the 1 million people who run America and everyone else. Bankers, realtors, lawyers, lobbyists, and corporate executives are using the Federal Treasury to maintain their incomes, and this is being done at the expense of the vast majority of the American public.
An elaborate propaganda campaign has been created to persuade the people that the world will explode if the earnings of the plutocrats diminish. But the continuation of this reverse-Robin Hood policy is far more dangerous than cutting Federal subsidies to the wealthy. It is the American citizenry that provides the economic base that supports the affluent elites. By sinking the population under unsustainable debt to win a few more quarters of big bonuses and golden parachutes, the plutocrats are risking the total collapse of the US economy.
The correct course for US fiscal policy is for the government to stop being the lender of last resort and instead to become the EMPLOYER of last resort. Only by restoring a secure income stream to the working class and middle class can America’s prosperity be rebuilt. It is objected that government employment programs are wasteful. But just how efficient have our private employment markets been? How efficient has Wall Street been? How efficient has General Motors been? How efficient was Enron?
What Obama needs to do now is throw out his economic team and commit to a populist agenda. We need to stop grinding the US people down to keep champagne flowing on Wall Street. Corporate executives with myopic vision restricted to the next quarter are not going to rebuild America’s transportation network, energy infrastructure, and educational facilities. Our government needs to put people back to work making the things America NEEDS. Instead, it is piling on more debt so that we can continue to consume the garbage that makes unsustainable profits for corrupt corporations.
When the private sector fails to allocate resources properly, the government must step in. We have witnessed a massive failure of resource allocation in America, and attempts to persist in that misallocation are doomed. The wealth of the people should be spent on the welfare of the people, not on the aggrandizement of a predatory elite. This is the change that America needs, and it is the change that Obama has failed to deliver.
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political action is a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder. As political actors, then, our politicians can be rented by those with the most money, who then parlay their investment in said political actors by having them print lots of money and distribute it to the purchasing special interests.
We live in a country in which the top 1% of richest Americans owns half of all non-home capital assets. There isn’t a lot of competition between the members of that top 1% for the purchase of government favors, and there’s plenty of collusion. Each party has its favored fraction of capital: Republicans are attached to big oil, Democrats to telecommunications firms. Usually the largesse coming out of the US Mint (via the Fed, and by order of Congress) is large enough that any prospective dissenters can be paid off.
This pretty much describes the past thirty years of government here in the US. As with any moving object, government inertia will move it in the direction it’s been moving, momentum remaining at a constant, until it encounters resistance.
wrong way economy.
I worked for a global company.
The executives attend Bilderberg Group meetings
The layoffs happened to perfectly coincide with the economic collapse.
The layoff packages were prepared and studied months in advance of the economic collapse
plus they eventually hired a just out of school “compliance kiddie” to replace my and a coworkers combined 50 years of experience.
Note “compliance kiddie” refers to that generation after the dumbed down one(if there was an end to that) meaning a generation taught to comply with shit, whatever shit that is. How did I get this cynical.
The best we can expect from the federal government is to avoid the worst ravages of a collapsing society that the very same government is causing.
The government should not be expected to do anything but serve the oligarchy. There is no effective counter-force politically. The “left” in this country is practically non-existent as an effective political force despite all the rhetoric coming out of the blogosphere. The only option for us is to try to carve out a place within what is left of civil society by forming formal and informal networks to create some seeds of new possibilities when the inevitable collapse occurs.
Obama has failed to deliver because he has no muscle behind him. All he can do is to try to nudge competing interest groups to support a more humane and civilized policies at the very time when the power-elite are becoming increasingly brutal and corrupt. I don’t blame him–there’s nothing much he can do. The sad part is that even people who are pretty smart don’t get the political reality of our time because they have swallowed the propaganda memes of the PR/Media spectacle which is based on utter fabrications.
I think that virtuous elites may well emerge–well they’ll have to that is the only chance we have to avoid a new dark age.
reading the blogs today or any day for that matter, as this just sums up the situation we are living in. All this effort fighting for the new reformed version of heath or financial ‘industries’ that sell/mandate us to by products that are not products but extortion and bribery along with plain old strong arm robbery. What I don’t understand is how they expect to get blood out of the turnips, when they have eaten everyone.
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.