I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
As I remember the story, U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, a traditional big-business Republican, emerged from a session with newly elected Gov. Gary Johnson, a Libertarian Republican, and said to an aide, “I didn’t understand a word he said.”
Having checked with a couple of veteran political reporters who don’t recall it, I suspect the anecdote is apocryphal. But fiction isn’t necessarily untrue.
For the last 30 years, the center right and far right have shaped the economy. The (bipartisan) Domenici party funds corporate enterprise with our taxes hoping wealth will trickle down. Johnson’s sect dreams, alternatively, of an economy free of government intervention.
So why this sudden, “populist” outrage at the AIG bonuses?
Perhaps some Americans have just realized the nature of Wall Street, but I suspect the loudest protestations come from folks who brought us disaster and prefer we forget their great achievements.
• Like when Ronald Reagan broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers union, the first shot in a war on the middle class.
• Or when geniuses Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm and Larry Summers blocked regulation of Wall Street wheeler-dealers.
• When the Gramm-led GOP repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999 and Democrat Bill Clinton signed it. (In 1933, Glass-Steagall separated banking and securities industries after hearings revealed conflicts of interest and fraud.)
• Or when Clinton promoted so-called “free trade,” enabling export of middle class jobs.
• When George W. Bush wasted a surplus, replaced it with debt, unbalanced budgets and lowered taxes on his class.
• Or when St. Pete and former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson privatized Medicare via a wildly expensive prescription drug benefit (including a bonanza for Big Pharma) and never paid for it.
That Medicare meal — admit it — was a delicious mélange of corporate welfare spiced by a soupçon of free-market fundamentalism.
Grover Norquist, a link between corporate and libertarian camps, said he wanted to shrink government to “where we can drown it in a bathtub.”
Instead, corporate America purchased Washington.
(Buying with it the modern distaste in executive suites for linking pay to the organization’s profitability. Thus, the AIG horrors.)
Ah, but we know better now, don’t we?
No, we don’t.
Jon Stewart’s popular evisceration of CNBC (disclosure: I once worked there) was entertaining but atypical. Despite the global crisis, mainstream news mediums remain uncritical of our degraded capitalism — subsidized and unregulated.
The proof lies in how the networks and many newspapers couch the debate on President Obama’s stimulus plan. They pit the administration against rightist critics who say it’s too expensive. Economists who find Obama’s plan too timid to turn the recessionary tide don’t get much airtime.
That Establishment tilt is blatant in treatment of the president’s (still shapeless) health-care reform. We get horror stories galore about its (potential) cost. And in every account health care is considered a commodity — like pork bellies or West Texas crude.
No matter that our for-profit, corporate health system crushes families and handicaps big and small business.
So when AIG, Citigroup and other Wall Streeters legally loot us, I don’t get excited. It was predictable, a product of a system elaborated for 30 years by corporate America’s most favored lawmakers.
Call it “unfettered-except-for- the-welfare capitalism.”
Don’t call it new, though. This is the 1930s redux. Like Obama today, Roosevelt worked to mop up a “laissez-faire” mess and save capitalism. For his efforts, the Establishment called FDR “a traitor to his class.”
Which was accurate — he was. And class war exists.
To restore national prosperity, we must face up to that. Our failure to do so is what outrages me.
