President Chimpy cries out for help
The term “free market” seems to be code for a Darwinian, survival of the fittest FU mentality. The “greed is good” mantram of the Reagan years has, under George W. Bush, gone into overdrive, precipitating a worldwide economic meltdown.
Here is what the most incompetent and reviled president in US history had to say about the matter this week before the conservative clowns at the Manhattan Institute:
“The crisis was not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system…Free-market capitalism is far more than an economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility, the highway to the American dream.”
Make that the American nightmare.
Tasini over at Daily Kos has identified the real culprit– Bozo the Clown.
Now, I get it. The fact that wages have not kept pace with productivity for the past 30 years–and, if they had, the minimum wage would be $19.12, not $6.55–because profits and CEO pay were more important than in fact putting people on the “highway to the American Dream”, is not the fault of the “free market”.
It’s the fault of Bozo The Clown.
The fact that actually our country’s economy did better when it was a “closed economy” from 1946 to 1973, in terms of raising living standards, then, it has in the past three decades under the mania to have an “open economy” is not the fault of the “free market.”
It’s the fault of Bozo The Clown
Yeah. That guy behind Boosh has got it covered.
Read the whole thing here.
Though capital has tended to liberate man, it has greatly complicated his social and industrial organization. The abuse of capital by unfair capitalists does not destroy the fact that it is the basis of modern industrial society. Through capital and invention the present generation enjoys a higher degree of freedom than any that ever preceded it on earth. This is placed on record as a fact and not in justification of the many misuses of capital by thoughtless and selfish custodians.
—The Urantia Book
Update 1: Former NY state Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, the scourge of Wall Street criminals, offers some penetrating insights into the corruption of the “free market” in today’s Washington Post. It begins thusly:
President-elect Barack Obama will soon face the extraordinary task of saving capitalism from its own excesses, much as Franklin D. Roosevelt had to do 76 years ago. Up until this point in the crisis, policymakers have appropriately applied the rules of triage — Band-Aids and tourniquets, then radical surgery — to keep the global financial system alive. Capital infusions, bailouts, mega-mergers, government guarantees of unimaginable proportions — all have been sought and supported by officials and corporate chief executives who had until now opposed any government participation in the marketplace. But put aside for the moment the ideological cartwheel we have seen and look at the big picture: The rules of modern capitalism have been re-written before our eyes.
First, we must confront head-on the pervasive misunderstanding of what constitutes a “free market.” For long stretches of the past 30 years, too many Americans fell prey to the ideology that a free market requires nearly complete deregulation of banks and other financial institutions and a government with a hands-off approach to enforcement. “We can regulate ourselves,” the mantra went…
When my office, along with the Department of Justice, warned that some of American International Group’s reinsurance transactions were little more than efforts to create the false impression of extra capital on the company’s balance sheet, we were jeered at for attacking one of the nation’s great insurance companies, which surely knew how to balance risk and reward…
Read the whole thing here. Makes you wonder about that whole government eavesdropping thing that got him canned for employing a prostitute.
