Monday, November 03, 2008

No Currency Left to Buy the Big Lies

One of the reasons I keep thinking that the Republicans are dead in their present form is because the system that they have spent thirty years extolling - that the market is always right and self correcting and one must deregulate in order to allow the market to function - has been proven totally false.

Everything these guys have been telling us for three decades has turned to mush. They will have to construct a new lie to ever convince people that throwing money at the wealthy really is the most reliable way to ensure prosperity for the rest of us.

John Cusack has an excellent article in today's Huffington Post which makes the point brilliantly:

The era of market idolatry is over.

This is the end of Milton Friedman, Reaganomics and supply-side theory. This ideology has never been about free markets but a fundamentalist vision that is a cover for naked aggression and a social contract based on fear and greed. The government's job is to create optimal conditions for corporate profit, to privatize everything in sight and to sell off its own body parts. To literally devour itself.

So we have laws that allow borrowing money against derivatives -- basically a bet between two people who create nothing without collateral. They leveraged the public financial health on something you wouldn't be allowed to do in Vegas. It illustrates the corruption that has become institutionalized through deregulation and a culture of predatory greed. Alan Greenspan testified that he was shocked: business didn't regulate itself. The common good was not achieved by greed. Naomi Klein read him the definition of crony capitalism and asked if it fit the description of the Bush administration's relationship to its favorite corporations.




I suppose he was shocked about that too.
It's well worth reading the entire thing. You can do so by clicking the title at the top of the page.

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