Chris Hedges: No Bailout Can Stop the Sinking

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Democracy is not an outgrowth of free markets. Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic entities. Democracy, like individualism, is based not on personal gain but on self-sacrifice. A functioning democracy must often defy the economic interests of elites on behalf of citizens, but this is not happening.

The corporate managers and government officials trying to fix the economic meltdown are pouring money and resources into the financial sector because they are trained only to manage and sustain the established system, not change it.

John Ralston Saul writes that the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy, and France during the 1920s, those that went on to become part of the fascist experience, were “to shift power directly to economic and social interest groups, to push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies” and to “obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest – that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.”

It sounds depressingly familiar.

The working class, which has desperately borrowed money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now faces years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes without access to new credit. The national treasury, meanwhile, is being drained on behalf of speculative commercial interests.

The government – the only institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough to protect their rights – is becoming weaker, more anemic, and increasingly unable to help the mass of Americans who are embarking on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s. Creative destruction, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter understood, is the essential fact about unfettered capitalism.

<snip>

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/no-bailout-can-stop-the-sinking/article1238242/

[intheflow]

1. Chris Hedges is brilliant.

Not that many of us haven't been saying the say thing right along, but his writing is so simple and eloquent he really spells it out in a way others can understand as well.

K&R

[Lorax7844]

2. K and R

[truedelphi]

3. K & R number twelve for Hedges. n/t

[galileoreloaded]

4. Devolution front and center. K&R n/t

[troubledamerican]

5. No bailout can repair the $1.4 Quadrillion dollar derivatives hole

No bailout can repair the $972 Trillion dollar credit card hole if the economy fails and the house-of-cards collapses.

No bailout can repair the worthless currency being propped-up by external creditors.

Thanks, Ronald Reagan. Thanks, Gramm-Bliley-Leach & Bill Clinton who signed it into law. Thanks Dumbya. Thanks for conceding, Gore. Thanks for not pouring into the streets to protest Bush V Gore, America.

[longship]

6. K&R

:kick:

[HamdenRice]

7. No logic, no facts, can stop teh stoopid. nt

[progressoid]

8. Huh? Individualism is based on self-sacrifice?

How's that work?

[Rex]

9. So all the profit the banks, insurance companies and credit card

companies made (that made it) off us the taxpayer STILL won't save the fucking economy? No shit? :eyes:

[Skittles]

10. nor was it ever intended to

it's all been one big giant fucking scam

[Rex]

11. Yes the fucking ponzi scam of all time.

And we are always the sheep.