September 17, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


FREE MARKET NOT SO GREAT AFTER ALL


You wonder how history might have been different if Ronald Reagan had been defeated in 1980 in his run for the presidency and sent back to spouting right-wing ideology on the rubber chicken circuit. When Reagan won the White House in 1980 it set in motion the extreme right-wing free market ideology that has resulted in the mess we see now. We've heard it from right-wing politicians, right-wing evangelicals, and the right-wing loudmouths on talk radio: free markets can cure anything that ails us. We have to get rid of big bad government. Social programs are horrible. Things like the minimum wage, national health insurance, and Social Security are "socialism." It always was nonsense. Letting business govern itself is like letting wolves loose among the sheep. This editorial looks at John McCain's attempt to distance himself from the Bush administration and the free market ideologues, even though McCain has been a proponent and supporter of those same policies. The editorial is at www.nytimes.com:


For decades, typical Americans have not been rewarded for their increasing productivity with comparably higher pay or better benefits. The disconnect between work and reward has been especially acute during the Bush years, as workers’ incomes fell while corporate profits, which flow to investors and company executives, ballooned. For workers, that is a fundamental flaw in today’s economy. It is grounded in policies like a chronically inadequate minimum wage and an increasingly unprogressive tax system, for which Mr. McCain offers no alternatives.

As for Wall Street, Mr. McCain blamed the meltdown on “unbridled corruption and greed.” He called for a commission to find out what happened and propose solutions. His diagnosis and his cure are misguided. The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices.