Sunday, February 8, 2009

The financial elite in this country just don't get it.

We are on the brink of a financial calamity in this country. This crisis was caused by the religion of Reaganism and it's believers in the "trickle down" economic philosophy of Milton Friedman. Their god was money and their gospel was the "free market", deregulation and a government dedicated to serving the interests of ruthless giant corporations, the greedy speculators and the super wealthy. This year the Republican party put on numerous celebrations of Ronald Reagan's legacy. The Republican senators who are trying their best to gut the Obama stimulus bill keep preaching the same bankrupt gospel.

That is even though that philosophy is responsible for our bankrupt economy littered with failed banks, insurance companies and brokerage houses. In the Savings and Loan failures of the 1980's the bill to taxpayers was in the billions and it kept this country in a recession that lasted for at least two years.

The truth of that not to distant reality has been drowned out since then by the Republican lie machine. They told us it was essential that we deregulate Wall Street and let the free market solve all of our problems. Their candidates preached to us like the converted that the free market was the only way to fix health care, Social Security, unemployment, inflation and even our failing environment.

Because of the tenants of their free market religion over the past decade social programs have been cut to the bone and the minimum wage was not raised for ten years, even as the real value of those wages went down. Privatization of countless federal agency services was an unfortunate result of this belief in the free market. One stark example of the wisdom of this approach is the case of Walter Reid Hospital's outpatient rehabilitation services for wounded veterans. The "Walter Reed Scandal" was nothing of the kind. Instead it was the private company (a Halliburton subsidiary) in charge of outpatient rehabilitation that failed our troops. Privatization of government services was a pillar of the Bush administration's management agenda that was declared in 2002. Given the ubiquity of this policy and the hundreds of government agencies involved we can safely assume that lucrative contracts have been channeled to Bush and Cheney cronies and that they have not been held accountable.

The Bush era drove our country into the ground using Ronald Reagan's spirit to guide as many of our tax dollars into the war machine and other big businesses and draining as many dollars as possible out of the maintenance of our physical and social infrastructure. Because of that perverse management of our wealth as a nation we have come to this point. Not only are businesses going bankrupt by the dozens but the social safety net is in taters. We must restore what has been robbed from our social infrastructure. We must take care of children, the disabled, the elderly, our nations health care system and our educational system. That the Republicans see restoring these basic programs as threatening is just one more piece of evidence that they just don't get it.

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