Reply #21: Yarp. ANY economy that relies on financial institutions as it's rock is destined to fail.

[HughBeaumont]

Would you put your trust in, by all rights, a glorified casino where the house almost always wins?

For the past 28 years, the economy has been primarily built on war/defense, pharmaceuticals, insurance, debt investment, technology and risky financial instruments; with the exception of technology, all unstable, speculative sectors and concentrate wealth and security on the top of the chain.

All of the easily led angry white men and nervous women out there were too busy buying that "Democrats = COMM'NISM"/"Reds Undah th' Bed" bullshit. "Thet guy with the Gumby har on TV sez if I vote Democrat, that's as good as lettin' the secund Bolshuhvik rev'lution in. WHUT will muh neighbors think if I did that?" Then for the next 30 years, they were either too scared or too stupid (or both) to realize that all of their jobs were being shipped overseas and all of their tax dollars were either siphoned off to corporations or used to build a war machine that only invaded and not defended. Just like corporate America, "peacetime" militaries can't just get paid and funded to run drills. They gotta do SOMETHING, so why not bomb small sovereign nations that did nothing to us?

The Republicans who ran this country straight into a chasm, in all of their furious energy to compartmentalize and cheapen business, kind of forgot the notion of replacement. They never replaced the resources they gutted. They never replaced the occupations/careers they destroyed. They never wanted to update the factories to accommodate new technologies. That was never part of their plan.

They didn't care about infrastructure, health care, education or social safety nets, because it didn't represent direct profits to THEM. Since they don't see direct benefit to raising our wages, they've stagnated them for three decades straight.