It's not often I find myself in agreement with George Bush, but lordy lord, the dogmatism of those "fiscal conservatives" in Congress and elsewhere who don't seem to want Bush's Government to do anything to stop the economies of the West collapsing astonishes me. Sometimes, fellers, even when you hold a principle dear, you just have to admit that the game is up (even if it's only temporarily up); that people are more important than abstract ideologies. The American Communist Party did it in the 1940s when they threw their support behind the American Government in the war against Hitler. If the American economy goes down, half the economies of the world go down like a line of electricity pylons being dragged down by the fall of one in a lightning storm. And then there's darkness everywhere.
Of course, fiscal conservatives may be known for plenty of things, but compassion isn't one of them. What do they care about your suffering, as long as they keep their nice houses and big shiney cars?
6 comments:
The bailout's a scam, Bruce. It has little if anything to do with helping poor people stay in their homes, and everything to do with making sure rich people stay rich. With a national debt as large as the United States has, why on earth would it buy up bad debt? Bush used the same fear tactics used to sell Afghanistan, his tax cuts, Iraq, The Patriot Act, etc. that if Congress didn't give him power then something dreadful will happen. What will happen is that some bad companies will go out of business. Other companies, who presumably won't be as inclined to try such creepy, greedy tactics because they know the government won't bail them out, will replace them. The only way the world economy would fail would be if everyone in the world stayed home in bed all day and did nothing for weeks on end. Don't worry, they'll still pass some nonsense so that Wall Street investment bankers don't have to go out and get real jobs, but for one day it was a grand day: the American government didn't do something stupid just because Bush told it to. Savor the moment.
Well, I don't really get the ins and outs of it--if I understood money I wouldn't be so broke--and I'm no friend of the greedy bastards who have taken us to this point, but isn't it the banks that government is trying to prop up, as in the UK? And isn't that partly to stop the housing market going into freefall? And companies little as well as large going bust putting ordinary people as well as greedy capitalist fuckheads on the dole? And won't people HAVE to stay in bed all day if they don't have jobs? (If they can afford to keep their houses, that is?)
This is what we're hearing over here.
The banks who made sane decisions will survive; those who didn't will go out of business. That's the way it should be. People's savings are already insured by the government. The U.S. did something similar to this proposed bailout in the 1980s with the Savings and Loan crisis, but basically this just enabled rich people (Neil Bush, the president's brother, for example) to walk away with considerable amounts of money while the taxpayer had to cover the costs of S&L incompetence and greed. The current bailout is just a larger version of that. I live next to Cleveland which is one of the subprime mortgage hotspots. People have been losing their homes for years, and not much in this bailout is going to help them. The housing market in the States is overvalued; this will bring the prices down to earth (though they'll still probably be overinflated somewhat). Unemployment we already have. Despite what the media say, I haven't noticed much of a change since when Bush got in. It's steadily getting worse. If the bailout was more about investing in infrastructure and paying Americans to do that (like in the new Deal 1930s programs) it would be better, but it's basically just a handout to Wall Street, who have contributed to Bush, McCain, Obama, Clinton, etc. and now are calling their chips in. Don't believe the much of what you hear on the mainstream media. They're fairly constrained by their commercial interests, and desire to please authority figures (such as politicians and banking CEOs). I recommend reading Bad Money by Kevin Phillips, or even his earlier book American Theocracy to get a feel for what's going on over here. If someone doesn't have a job, then he or she should take a week off, then spend 40 hours a week looking for one and I bet it won't be long until he or she has a job. Of course, having a job is only slightly better than not having a job. It's all a racket, innit?
Sorry for all the typos in that last post--I hope it still reads okay despite them!
Cheers!
Oh, I don't notice typos.
You show an impressive knowledge of economic matters there Wred, but I'm not sure you have it right in your interpretation. Still, to some extent I think it boils down to American versus European cultural orientation in how you read the current situation. To us sometimes it's hard to tell American liberalism from American conservatism: that determined get-off-my-land individualism which mistrusts all government intervention has a touch of selfish indifference to a European liberal. (Doesn't mean they ARE selfish or indifferent, it just looks that way.) I don't believe that the market, left to its own devices, will settle in a sensible place and provide a good, equal, average deal for everybody. THAT'S the true con, and it's being put out there by those fiscal conservatives I was talking about, who are reaping the rewards of other people's naivete. That's Reaganomics; that's Thatcherism. And in the society they propound, the poor get stood on, fucked in the arse and then thrown under the nearest wheel.
A little bit of Government intervention is a good thing. After all, what are they there for? To let business do what it wants, or to protect the people who are suffering as a consequence of the free market you APPEAR, Wred, to be advocating?
By the way, your assertion that everybody who's unemployed could get a job if they looked for one doesn't appear to put you in bed with the Republican/ Conservative element; it actually DOES put you in bed with them. Reminds me of Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher's premier bully boy, saying the 3 million unemployed during her premiership (one of whom was yours truly) should do what he did as a boy and "get on their bikes and keep riding until they found work" or whatever it was. Dangerously callous words which made him a national hate figure for an entire generation.
Bruce, Yeah, I'd say most of our disagreements have to do with our backgrounds. When I visited England in 1992 I found myself transformed from being usually the most liberal person in the room to being the most conservative. I didn't change, only the setting did. That was under Major, but I think England was still far more liberal in many ways than America was then. In other ways, not so much, you still have royalty, still mindboggling to an American even if they are figureheads now, and your libel laws are noxious to an American raised under the First Amendment. But back to the main issue, this bailout plan has little to do with helping the poor. It has to do with helping the rich. My congressional representative, Dennis Kucinich, may be the most liberal member of Congress, and he voted against it twice for those reasons (you can hear him discuss why on a videoclip currently on the front page of his website at kucinich.us). My opposition, like his, has nothing to do with any philosophical opposition to government involvement in the economy. This bill is socialism for the rich, not the poor. Socialism for the poor I could probably live with, though I've seen a few too many people in my firsthand experience destroy themselves with the welfare system, so I probably do have a suspicion of government assistance that you don't. That's also partially due to our backgrounds as you surmise; almost all Americans have a libertarian streak through them, from being raised on pioneer stories of self-reliance and myths of rags to riches through hard work. Most of that is propaganda, but I'd rather have a belief system that encouraged me to take action when faced with problems, then the reverse. In any case, the bailout plan is bad policy, and, once again, the American government, to paraphrase your Churchill (a conservative with major flaws, but who got a few things right), will only do the right thing after exhausting every other alternative. The bailout plan is still one of the bad alternatives.
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