http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12268The New York Times made it official. The Economy is a problem!
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It's blamed, mostly, on the subprime crisis.
But that's not the problem. It's a symptom. It is the logical, and probably one of the necessary results, of Bushenomics.
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A more realistic -- and less idealistic -- view of Bushenomics is that the Bush administration and its cronies came at the economy with the attitude of oilmen.
They inherited a vastly wealth country.
They looked at it like the oil under the Alaskan wilderness. They craved to pump it out, turn it into cash and grab as much of that cash as possible.
Wherever possible, they literally sold off the assets. This was called privatization. Our biggest asset -- in terms of size -- is, of course, our defense establishment. With privatization, one dollar out of every three for direct military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan goes to private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. So when someone says, "Support the troops!" with budget appropriations, they should really yell, "Two-thirds support to the troops! One third support to Halliburton, et al.!"
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But for the most part, the assets of the United States, our collective wealth, could not be sold off in such a direct manner.
In order to turn them into cash, what the administration did was borrow against them.
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The spending was -- to the degree possible -- directed to themselves, their friends and their supporters: Big Pharma, the medical industry, insurance, banking and financial, among others. And, of course, Big Oil, from whom they have spent close to a trillion dollars of our money to conquer a big oil field for private exploitation.
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read on - see how they did it and are still doing it - got to get that last penny before they run for the hills and before america collapses completely.