My Goat Ate the Economy
Marty Kaplan
Huffington Post
If George W. Bush had read "The Pet Goat" to his Economic Club of New York audience on Friday, his speech would have been no less infantile. If the first 9/11 was caused by a massive failure of intelligence about terrorism, the second 9/11 -- the slow-motion collapse of the American, and maybe the global, economy -- has been caused by a catastrophic failure of intelligence about Wall Street rapacity. If the now five-year-old Iraq war was the inevitable, tragic consequence of the neoconservatives' Project for the New American Century, then the subprime mortgage quagmire, the Bear Stearns bailout, and the foreclosure fiasco are the foreordained outcome of the Republican ideology which holds that regulation of corporate financial behavior is the domestic equivalent of Islamofascism.
The economic meltdown is the new 9/11, and it's George W. Bush's fault -- his, and the fundamentalist free-marketeers who have been living high on the hog, feeding at the public trough, intimidating Democrats, and getting away with capitalist murder ever since Ronald Reagan made "government" a dirty word.
"An interesting time," Bush called it at the Economic Club. That's the financial version of Rumsfeld's "stuff happens" analysis when rioting and looting engulfed Baghdad. (Will the media celebrate that five-year anniversary, too?) Every cocky corporate titan who has been caught in flagrante delicto has been written off by Republicans as an isolated exception. Every ingenious, computer-assisted Ponzi scheme has turned out, Milton Freedman be praised, to be legal. Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling? A couple of bad apples. Pump and dump? In the eye of the beholder. Slice-and-dice derivatives? As patriotic as a flag lapel pin.
(Continued here.)
Huffington Post
If George W. Bush had read "The Pet Goat" to his Economic Club of New York audience on Friday, his speech would have been no less infantile. If the first 9/11 was caused by a massive failure of intelligence about terrorism, the second 9/11 -- the slow-motion collapse of the American, and maybe the global, economy -- has been caused by a catastrophic failure of intelligence about Wall Street rapacity. If the now five-year-old Iraq war was the inevitable, tragic consequence of the neoconservatives' Project for the New American Century, then the subprime mortgage quagmire, the Bear Stearns bailout, and the foreclosure fiasco are the foreordained outcome of the Republican ideology which holds that regulation of corporate financial behavior is the domestic equivalent of Islamofascism.
The economic meltdown is the new 9/11, and it's George W. Bush's fault -- his, and the fundamentalist free-marketeers who have been living high on the hog, feeding at the public trough, intimidating Democrats, and getting away with capitalist murder ever since Ronald Reagan made "government" a dirty word.
"An interesting time," Bush called it at the Economic Club. That's the financial version of Rumsfeld's "stuff happens" analysis when rioting and looting engulfed Baghdad. (Will the media celebrate that five-year anniversary, too?) Every cocky corporate titan who has been caught in flagrante delicto has been written off by Republicans as an isolated exception. Every ingenious, computer-assisted Ponzi scheme has turned out, Milton Freedman be praised, to be legal. Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling? A couple of bad apples. Pump and dump? In the eye of the beholder. Slice-and-dice derivatives? As patriotic as a flag lapel pin.
(Continued here.)
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