on 09-28-2008 21:55

Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

Now is the time for the leaders of this country to pledge us, to pledge themselves, to a new deal for the American people.
Simply stated, the time has come for the citizenry to take this country back.

I always hated the smug bozos who say "don't think of it as a problem, but as an opportunity." But that is precisely what we should do now with the calamitous financial disaster that threatens to plunge us into a second Great Depression.
For far too long now, this once great nation has been utterly under the thumb of an unelected, tyrannical dictator that has called all the shots and determined what kind of lives each of us will live - corporate America. It has brought itself low, so we should seize the moment to put it back in its cage and revert to the natural order of things, where corporations and the financial system serve us, rather than the entire population of the country serving them.
There is plenty to blame President George W. Bush for in the current crisis. The eagerness of his administration to let "free" trade and "free" markets run amok certainly allowed this disaster to deepen. But this mess is not of his making.
No, this debacle of Biblical proportions was authored by President Ronald Wilson Reagan.
It was Reagan whose messianic mission was to "get government off the back of business." As a result of his success - and he managed to buffalo the overwhelming majority of the middle class into thinking that this was a good idea - anarchy reigned in boardrooms all over America. I don't mean anarchy in the chaotic, disorderly sense of the word; I mean that the business sector existed in a society with no laws or government.
If you think about it, that could end no other way but with the near total collapse of the U.S. financial system we are faced with today. I'm just surprised it took this long for the spit to hit the fan.
From World War II to right about 1980, this nation built an economy that was the envy, and in many ways, the master of, the entire world. A burgeoning middle class bought homes, filled them with consumer goods considered luxuries almost everywhere else in the world, and sent the largest generation of young men and women in history to college. Our businesses were muscular and hugely profitable.
Today we go on about how important it is for the people who put up money and "take the risk" to be rewarded financially.
Back then, it was the men and women who actually did the work - for all intents and purposes, the middle class - who were thought to deserve rewards for their work. They were paid fairly and well, with annual increases and sometimes yearly bonuses at Christmastime. They were covered by health insurance and had pensions to provide for them after they got old.
They built an economy and a country that was unmatched in the history of mankind. We sent men to the moon, for God's sake. And for most of that time, it was with just one member of the family in the workforce.
Then Ronald Reagan came along and took government off the backs of business. Nothing good has happened since then. OK, maybe the stock market had a giddy ride for a while before crashing and a handful of people made several gajillion dollars. But I mean nothing good - nothing! - happened for you and me and the middle and working classes across the country. The people Richard Nixon called "the great silent majority of Americans," and who Bill Clinton described as folks who "work hard, play by the rules and pay the taxes."
Almost immediately after government was taken off the back of business, our wages started to stagnate if not downright shrink; certainly our pay no longer kept up with inflation. Many of our jobs were shipped overseas where workers could be paid poverty wages and no benefits, while safety and environmental laws could be ignored or did not exist in the first place.
Our pensions were the next to go. Nowadays if you don't want to spend your golden years eating dog food, you better put your own money into an IRA or 401(k) and hope for the best. (Have you checked your 401(k) in the last couple of weeks? Remember when Bush and the Republicans wanted to privatize Social Security so everyone could enjoy the benefits of the free enterprise stock market? I haven't heard anyone mention that idea recently.)
Now our health insurance is being taken away as a benefit of our labor by CEOs who are rewarded with seven-or-eight-figure "compensation packages" if they enhance the bottom line by any means necessary.
Even with two parents working, dwindling salaries mean many if not most families today don't have a prayer of being able to afford to buy a home - this is a MAJOR cause of the subprime loan and foreclosure crisis that precipitated the economic collapse we see now - and in far too many cases sending kids to college is becoming just a dream (and I don't mean the American Dream).
It is time to take our country back.
Greed is not good, jerk. Look where it has gotten us. And "government," "regulation" and "protectionism" are not dirty words.
America is a free country, right? Therefore, if I want to, I can pull out a gun and blow you into next week, right? Whaddya mean no? How can you possibly say I am free if I can't shoot you if I want?
Well, even with that and the many other reasonable restrictions on our behavior established by the rule of law and consent of the governed, Americans are a free people. Just as free enterprise and free markets also can be free without being completely immune from outside control that acts to restrain excesses. A little more regulation would have allowed our economy to avoid the cliff it is now careening toward.
The absolutist theory of a free market is just that, a theory, it does not fully account for reality. If the free market were an inanimate machine that operated on pure economic theory, or a computer program into which we could input all economic information and get the "right" answer, that would be fine. But it isn't. Free enterprise and free markets are made up of, and run by, people; people who know how to rig the system to their advantage. Enron executives are one example. Another is the people who, for instance, write you a mortgage that they know full well you won't ever be able to pay, and who, before the ink is even dry on your signature, have sold your nearly worthless mortgage and a lot of other nearly worthless mortgages to someone else who "securitized" them and parceled them out all over the world. Those people have made their money, they have bought their Lexuses and McMansions, so your lousy mortgage and all the other lousy mortgages became Someone Else's Problem. Now, in a breathtaking leap to socialism for plutocrats, they are about to become the problem of the American taxpayer. It is safe to say that Adam Smith never anticipated such a thing.
Protectionism is now portrayed as some kind of evil, but with it we had jobs, and America had a manufacturing base to make anything we wanted or needed. Since government was extracted from business' back, jobs have gone away to foreign countries and even sensitive components of military weapons have to be bought overseas. A high school graduate can no longer go to work at the factory near where he lives and provide himself and his entire family with a comfortable middle class living. You call that progress?
What's wrong with slapping a confiscatory tariff on any business that has the nerve to move its operations overseas, and then try to sell its goods back here? If you are happy paying someone 30 cents a day to make your sneakers, you should be happy to sell them to people who earn 30 cents a day. Don't ship them back here and charge $150 to some guy whose job just got moved to Malaysia.
This economic crisis is a shining opportunity for us to finally fight back, to tame the corporate Frankenstein that has turned on us, as we should have known it would someday, and almost destroyed us. A government of the people, by the people, and most importantly FOR the people should get back up on the back of business and start controlling the reins again before it is too late.