March 26, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THE FREE MARKET IS FOR SUCKERS

Guys who ran medicine shows would promise wondrous results from their elixirs. Unfortunately, the elixirs were a sham, and when the buyers discovered they'd been had the medicine shows had moved on. It's that way with the free market. We're told it's this wonderful process that can make us rich. But only a few people get rich, often at the expense of others. The people who advocate the market the most look down on the poor and the working class. We're just not smart or thrifty enough. But when they need a bailout, guess who foots the bill? This column by Ellen Goodman is at www.chron.com:

I grant you that moral hazard is not a myth. But most of the sermons railing against the harm of helping others are directed at the poorer pews.

We don't seem to worry about the moral hazard of, say, protecting a CEO from his failings. Need I remind you that Robert Nardelli got $210 million in severance after he hammered Home Depot? Or that he now resides at the top of Chrysler? What lesson did other chief executives learn from the Citigroup CEO who had $64 billion in market value evaporate on his watch and nevertheless exited with a $68 million package and a $1.7 million pension?

This leads us right into the den of Bear Stearns. Last weekend, while its chief executive was off playing bridge, one of the most aggressive, cowboy firms in the mortgage securities business collapsed. The government brokered a deal with J.P. Morgan Chase to buy the firm and guarantee its loans with your tax dollars.

Bailout is too strong a word for what happened. Teaspooned-out would be better. The Bear Stearns worker bees looking at their life savings and pensions disappear are not flitting off to the beach, although I was charmed to note that the company will have grief counselors at hand. But it is true that the government went to the rescue.

WHAT DO WE BECOME NOW?

It may take decades to undo the damage from the Bush administration. Some of the damage will never be undone. We can't raise the dead. We can't take back the torture. We can't restore the lost limbs or undo the horrible visions of an unnecessary war. Bush has taken us to a dark side, but where do we go when we find ourselves back in the light? If we learn anything, maybe it's that the time of empires and superpowers is past. As JFK said, we all breathe the same air. We all inhabit this small blue marble of a planet. This article by Mark Morford is at www.sfgate.com:

Some say this pain, this fiscal crisis, this enormous instability will last a few years. Some say no way, it will be at least a generation or two before we can right this ship of state again, so deep are the wounds and so insane is our national debt and so violent the damage to our reputation, our identity, our enfeebled infrastructure.

But I'm more with those who say, no, the truth is we will never truly recover, that America's former ranking as Gilded and Irreproachable Empire No. 1 is dead and gone. India and China are dramatically changing the game, peak oil is nigh, fresh water is the new gold, the planet itself is in paroxysm, Mother Nature is quickly revealing her hand — or rather, maybe just that one big, stormy middle finger.

But maybe this is the best news of all. Because the sort of gluttonous empire Bush so disgustingly represented was doomed to failure. The center could not hold. Dubya may not have hastened the apocalypse like the evangelicals desperately prayed he would, but he certainly is hastening the end of the bloviated American ego.