It’s the Economy Stupid!
Last night it was AIG. Who’s next? The government has bailed out Fannie and Freddie, Lehman tanked, Bear Stearns went bye bye and the Merrill Lynch bull has gone to pasture. The age of corporate socialism in America is upon us. The administration is clueless. I don’t think George Bush even knows how to spell BAILOUT.
Meanwhile, John McCain and Sarah Palin inch closer to the White House despite demonstrating the fact that they have no clue as to how to handle the biggest financial mess this country has experienced since the Great Depression. McCain’s plan to fix the economy is to create a commission to study the problem. Great! by the time the commission publishes it’s findings we’ll all be working for the Saudis and cashing our paychecks in Riyals. Do we really need a commission to figure out what went wrong? We need a leader who understands economics and business. As far as I am concerned, marrying a woman who became one of the wealthiest women in the country by inheritance does not make you an economic scholar. If he thinks the economy is still strong, as he declared in a campaign speech on Monday, Cindy should give him a nudge before he falls asleep in front of the TV.
McCain says his healthcare plan will pull 25 to 30 million people out of the ranks of the uninsured and yet the leading health care economists in the nation say that his numbers are off – by 25 to 30 million! This is not the sign of solid economic leadership. This is the sign that the guy can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide. To be fair, Obama’s economic policies may not be a slam dunk at this point either but I don’t see giving the Republicans 4 more years of control so that my retirement plan can continue to wither away and our national wealth can continue to solidify into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of zillionaires while the middle class washes away like a Galveston trailer park in a hurricane.
But I don’t blame George Bush for the current state of the economy. He is just a cog in the wheel as far as I am concerned. This has been coming for a long time. The man I place at the top of the blame pile is Ronald Reagan. When Reagan became president I was a young man starting out on the career path. At the time I worked for a scoundrel named Norman. Norm was not “uber-rich” but was very comfortable, a former lawyer who had become a producer with a trophy wife and a big house in tony Westport, CT. Norm and I had many interesting arguments but one that stands out now was about the long term effects of the Reagan administration’s “Trickle Down” economic policy. Norm’s response was that Reagan would go down as the greatest president in American history. My take was exactly the opposite; that over the long haul, the lack of oversight in the private sector would allow greedy business men to rip off the country and that the difference between rich and poor would only become greater. That was OK with Norm as long as he was rich. The policies that Reagan began and have been carried out through 12 years of Bush presidencies are what led us to this critical juncture in our nations economic history.
We need change in Washington that goes beyond the rhetoric of both Obama and MCain. We need truly fundamental change and that means not just new ideas but new people. We need businessmen to run the business of our government. We need HONEST politicians and bureaucrats who will put the interest of the people first. We need to toss out the lobbyists and we need some government oversite to keep the private sector honest. We don’t need assholes like McCain’s top economic advisor, the former Senator Phil Graham, who is quoted as saying “the United States is only in a mental recesion and has become a nation of whiners.” This is who we want running our economy?????
McCain vows to clean up Wall Street but how? Will he grab and broom and go down their and pick up trash off the sidewalk? Because so far his solutions are no more potent than that.
Money corrupts and from the halls of Congress to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange there are some very corrupt players handling some unimaginable amounts of our money. Those people want to not only keep that money but they want more of it in their own pockets. It is very similar to the business philosophy that old Norm lived by. One day we were riding to a job site in Norm’s car and he shared with me his theories on success. He told me he had learned everything he knew about business and life from his father, whom he hated passionately. The only thing his father had left him, he related to me, was a simple approach to dealing with people:”fuck ‘em before they fuck you!”
Unfortunately there are way too many people in positions of power who also live by this philosophy. This is what we are up against and this is what we really must change in the coming election.
