One can only hope

It has been a busy week in politics what with a proposed bank bailout, a presidential candidate debate and at least two overseas terrorist bombings. Economic hardships always seem to bring out the worst in people. Understandably, I suppose when the certainty of your next meal is in doubt. Why we, as a species, insist on treating our fellow humans worse than we treat the lowest feedlot animal is beyond my comprehension. (Not really, I have my convictions and if you read between my lines they become obvious) For most Americans, the economic downturn is the premier issue of their daily lives. In truth, the daily inconveniences and terrors of our domestic lives are almost all directly associated with economic concerns.

Since the Democrats abandoned the no bankruptcy provision of their proposal in response to Republican demands I am inclined to side with the House Republicans who flaunted their free market ideology by pulling out of the bailout negotiations on Thursday. Let the bastards who created the present stew cook in the juices of their own making. Why the Democrats did not counter with a repeal of the Republican backed bankruptcy reforms passed a few years back is beyond me. And, since the Bush administration wants to let foreign banks, foreign institutions that were all too wiling to profit from the speculation, participate in the bailout I am experiencing another knee jerk reaction against a national government dedicated to serving its citizens bailing out wealthy foreign nationals. The whole bailout stinks of corporate and class-based socialism.

Contrary to global, free market ideologues, government intervention in capitalist market policies is as old as capitalist empire building. In the US alone the unprecedented period of economic growth we are seeing coming to an end is the direct result of government policies that began in the Great Depression. When Wall Street capitalists screwed the pooch through excessive market speculation on very small credit margins in 1929 the US government under the presidential administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began direct infusions of government capital in massive and not so massive infrastructure projects, such as the Hoover Dam and the WPA. The onset of WWII created more economic opportunities for US industry, initially through the Lend Lease Program and eventually through the massive production of war material.
After WWII, the US began the unprecedented period of national economic growth that we are now seeing end. For the first twenty-five years after the end of the War the US supplied the goods and material needed to rebuild the infrastructure of both Europe and Asia that was nearly completely destroyed during the conflict.

In the thirty five or so years since the end of the period of reconstruction, the US has pandered to industrial and financial capitalists whose only goal has been to feed their own pockets and the purses of Wall Street coupon clippers. Ideologues conveniently forget that the US had an efficiently functioning health care system prior to the Reaganization of US politics. Consumer savings and spending were in a satisfactory balance prior to the Reagan era free market deregulation of banks. I can name a dozen other areas of economic disaster we presently deal with that began as ideas and lobbying campaigns of powermongering influence peddlers in the Nixon administration and came to actuality during and following the Reagan years.

As a nation of independent and free citizens we have stood by and allowed the rich and powerful to dismantle the largest and at one time the most efficient manufacturing complex in the world in order to funnel ever larger percentages of the world’s wealth into their own pockets. The Democratic demand that caps be placed on executive compensation and “golden Parachute” buy out programs be eliminated in those companies doing business within the bailout’s legal provisions is a step in the right direction, but so much more needs done.