Socialism for the Rich, Naked Capitalism for Everyone Else

[ProSense]

Joseph A. Palermo

Socialism for the Rich, Naked Capitalism for Everyone Else

For twenty-eight years, since the beginning of Ronald Reagan's first term, we have been subjected to a steady stream of Republican propaganda claiming that if we just got government out of the way and "off our backs," deregulate the economy, and let the market work its magic, prosperity would "trickle down" to the average American citizen. In the mid-1980s, corporate lobbyists descended on Washington, threw huge amounts of campaign cash around, and told us that deregulating the Savings and Loan industry would be a great idea. John McCain and his good friend Charles Keating from Arizona were big advocates of this scheme that turned out to be a disaster that cost taxpayers $500 billion. Phil Gramm, when he was Senator from Texas (and John McCain's choice for president in 1996), worked up another "deregulation" bill that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1999 that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, thereby destroying a key firewall between commercial and investment banks.

We witness the same over-confident, smug market fundamentalists and laissez-faire devotees, businessmen and women who hate "government" when it provides aid to families with dependent children, or food stamps, or health coverage for poor people -- businessmen and women who denounce as creeping "Socialism" any attempt by the government to redistribute some of the nation's wealth to the working middle class or to the poor -- now come to Washington, hat in hand, begging the federal government to fix their self-created problems brought on by their own unbridled greed and recklessness and demanding massive infusions of tax-payer dollars in the form of bail out after bail out.

It's Socialism for the rich and laissez-faire capitalism for everybody else.

What Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and now American International Group Corporation have in common is that they all hired Washington lobbyists and lavished campaign donations on politicians to push through with no public support the radical deregulation of the financial sector. Then they proceeded to create entire new categories of "financial products," derivatives and the like, that amounted to nothing but a giant Ponzi scheme. And when it all collapsed due to their Wild West, shoot 'em up, freebooting, 19th Century-style rapacious business practices, they turn to the government for a hand out to keep the whole goddamned system from descending into another Great Depression.

For historians like myself, and for people like Kevin Phillips, William Greider, and other observers, this collapse of our financial sector was like watching a slow motion train wreck. The laissez-faire proponents for the past thirty years have perpetrated the biggest lie ever told to the American people. And George W. Bush, as with everything else, took this lie to its extreme. He gave the financial industry everything it wanted, and he appointed their lackeys and puppets to run the regulatory agencies that were set up in the wake of the Great Depression to avert exactly the kind of catastrophe that we're witnessing on Wall Street today.

George W. Bush spent the first months of his second term on a 60-city tour where he answered prefabricated questions in phony "town hall" meetings claiming that privatizing Social Security -- taking $1 trillion out of the trust fund and throwing it to his backers on Wall Street -- would be a great idea. And even though the Republicans ran the House of Representatives with Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay, and the Senate with Bill Frist, and the presidency, the American people did not fall for this legalized form of grand larceny. And it's a good thing they didn't. Had Bush been able to get his way and throw a third of the Social Security trust fund at these same damaged, greedy firms we would be witnessing with the current financial meltdown the demise of Social Security.

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(emphasis added)

Bingo!

Edited to add:

Bush, McCain plug Social Security



President Bush and Sen. John McCain,
R-Ariz., right, embrace as they wrap up
two days promoting Social Security reforms.

[ProSense]

1. Shorter John McCain

Shorter John McCain:

“Wall Street is filled with robber barons and thieves, that’s why I voted for us to put your social security in their hands!”

[ProSense]

2. Unable to Understand Economy, McCain Suggests 9/11 Commission-Style Probe He Opposed

Unable to Understand Economy, McCain Suggests 9/11 Commission-Style Probe He Opposed

John McCain doesn't understand the economy so with the U.S. financial system in turmoil, he called for a "9/11 Commission-style" probe into Wall Street.

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Ironic since McCain opposed the 9/11 Commission:

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In 2004, Nancy Pfotenhauer, a McCain adviser who regularly appears on television on behalf of the campaign, ripped the 9/11 Commission as "a gift to our enemies."

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McCain also opposed commission probes into the failings after Hurricane Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Doesn't understand the economy + bad judgment = dangerous for America

[ProSense]

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