Saturday, September 20, 2008

The Sky is Falling: American Capitalism on Trial

From my friend Austin Thompson:
For those few remaining skeptics who doubted the magnitude of the financial crisis, the pandemonium on Wall-Street is a deal maker. The recent takeovers and bailouts of major investment banking firms were demanded by the people who brought us large scale de-regulation, welfare privatization, and "the government that governs least." Of course all this tough love was aimed at the American worker and the underclass but now that it's the American corporation and the dominant class the government is offering billion dollar food stamps faster than you can say "you f****** hypocrites".

Remember the invisible hand? Well its visible now, balled up with the middle finger extended at me and you. When they win they keep it for themselves, when they loose they get the rest of us to pay the tab. But wait wouldn't we all be worse off if these companies went out of business? American workers and the poor are already struggling as corporate profits have outpaced wages for the last decade, food and gas prices have increased, and the cost of a college education nearly impossible for folks making under $50,000 a year---and they have to pay their debt back with no government assistance.

The reality is a government that has been compliant with the greed on Wall-Street is not suddenly concerned with the functioning of the economy or the well-being of ordinary American people. They realize that since the manufacturing sectors were stripped and sent abroad, the financial sector has been the bread and butter of American capitalism and the only thing standing between them and the emerging economic powers in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. There is no one to blame but the conservative republicans and centrist democrats who neglected the base of the economy (the American worker) and decided to side with the big money interests who fund their political campaigns.

Be assured American capital will bring us more of the same after the crisis leaves national headlines. On college campuses professors are still teaching the obsolete economic theories which got us into the mess in the first place. There is only one alternative--for the rest of us to get organized and remind our government where the soul of the American economy lay. The only special interest that should matter.

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