Jim Kunstler on the current financial crisis
So, to begin this process, and to clarify the situation, I urge readers of this blog to identify the Republican Party by its new brand-name: the party that wrecked America. At least, then, we can reinstate one cardinal value into the juddering structure of what we claim to believe: that actions have consequences, that you can’t just swindle and loot a society and walk away with the swag.
PS
The man most responsible for the financial services and banking deregulation that made today possible, fmr. Sen. Phil Gramm, is the man John McCain wants to put in charge of the whole economy.
It’s time to end the looting of this country by a tiny fanatical elite who use their extremist political philosophy to justify greed and plundering. Look, lots of them belong in prison. Once we get Obama, a centrist adult, in the White House then perhaps we can start to clean up the mess these thieves have left us. But none of that will happen with McCain in the White House as the thievery will simply continue.
Thank You !! It is so nice to see someone else also calling Gramm the father of the mtg meltdown. I make sure that anyone who talks to me about McCain for president learns that bit of info. What really frosted me the other day was seeing an ad on tv with Jon Kyle stating this mess was the democrats fault because they kept preventing the republicans from setting regulations in place. He must think we are idiots. It was a republican congress that destroyed the regs that had been in effect since the crash of 29 and I have never seen a republican yet that promoted regulation of business.
Last night I pre-empted my conservative friends with an email appeal to get it out of their systems and blame the whole mess on Barack Obama. “You know you want to…and you know you’re going to.” In two years or less the storms spun off by Hurricane Lehman will be called “the Obama Depression” by the vandals who caused it. Foxy of them, no? I’ve been working the “Reps are the mens’ room/diaper sex party” angle with them for two years, but they all just seem to agree. “Yes, Steve? And…?” Now that their retirement funds are wafting away like so much dry ice on a hotplate, they are left with nothing for shelter but lipstick. Rebranding is a good way to get people to change their minds and I support it. But you know what’s better? Sticks and stones, my friends, sticks and stone. And this time, they are conveniently maked, “Courtesy of Phil Gramm, R-Wall Street”.
All, as much as I despise the enemy (most Republicans and Conservatives) we have to recognize that facts do not matter to these people. Their agenda is entirely driven by faith, ideology and emotion. That is it. You cannot reason with them. You cannot compromise with them. And you cannot “win” a discussion with them. Even your most reasoned, fact base argument will end with them saying “…so, what does that have to do with…” And then they will drag it round to Clinton and terrrorists and God and abortion and then you have lost. Not because you were wrong. In fact you lost, because you were right but they didn’t care.
Not to sound bleak but I have not much hope. We keep up the good fight for as long as we can. Long live the revolution!
Dan, it sounds like you’ve fallen into the same trap as the Christian Right. The neocon leaders are NOT faith-based, nor are they driven by emotion or even ideology (except so far as it suits their desire for power). The fact that one segment of their base has fallen for their BS does not mean that segment represents those leaders’ views. Ask yourself: if the neo-cons are really faith based, why is it that it’s the oil companies and military-industrial complex that gain time after time, while the Christian Right still largely languishes in unchanged economic state? How did mortgage bankers loot the financial system, when the Bible forbids lending money at interest? Christianity (even our current twisted version of it) has nothing to do with the current politics.
The neocons have led a brilliant campaign against democracy, beginning with Reagan-Bush’s dismantling of the already-stressed educational system. Keep’em ignorant and they’ll believe your lies. Keep’em focused on two issues that don’t matter (abortion & marriage) and you can run the table. But it’s not the Christian Right driving this steamroller– it’s a power-hungry, well-plotted juggernaut of amoral greedheads whose only belief is that they should be rich and powerful.
BJ,
Sorry, perhaps I should have drawn a distinction between faith in a God and faith in a system. For example: Free Market mavens do not necessarily have faith in God but they sure do have faith in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The will swear that every collapse, every calamity is merely the fault of regulation and that the cure is to let markets be completely free. They believe this as a matter of faith (not in God but in Markets). A similar example would be the Neocons who believe in a heavy mix of the Free Market and Military Might, thrown together with American Exceptionalism. Nothing to do with God but there sure is a lot of faith going on there. Look at how they all reacted when Iraq just didn’t magically turn into a Free Market Paradise after the fall of Baghdad. What did they do? They blamed the Iraqis. They blamed various corporations and everyone else but themselves. I deal with these people all the time. It is not necessarily a faith in God, but certainly a faith in something. Coupled with an inability to question those things logically. That was my point, sorry if I didn’t make a better case the first time around.
“Free Market mavens do not necessarily have faith in God but they sure do have faith in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.”
Once again, that’s just rhetoric. They’re about as much inclined toward Adam Smith as they are toward Karl Marx. When they believe in anything (which is only when it suits them), they believe in Ayn Rand. Not capitalism (a regulated market with graduated taxation), but economic anarchy. On the other hand, oh how they love regulation when it keeps those pesky European and Japanese businesses out of their backyard!
As for Iraq, once again you’ve accepted their rhetoric, but their actions say something different. They may be blaming everyone else for their “failure” in Iraq, but I believe it wasn’t a failure at all from their perspective. They took Iraqi oil offline, jacked up the price, and made fortunes. And they gave billions of dollars of taxpayer money to their cronies (e.g. Halliburton) in the process. Where’s the failure in that? They got exactly what they wanted. And maybe it’s just an accident that they took a country with virtually no opium production (Afghanistan under the Taliban) and made it the supplier of 90% of the world’s heroin– but I suspect that’s somehow filling their coffers, too.
Follow the money: they don’t want victory in Iraq because there are profits to be made as long as the war continues.