There Is No Quick Fix
By David Truskoff
14 October,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Capital
is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,
and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. Karl Marx
I am amazed at how the pundits
and so-called experts continue to offer opinions on how to fix the
economic worldwide meltdown. No one seems to want to go back and see
what started it or explain how it started. Trickle down economics
does not work and never did, but no one is willing to admit that and
so we keep hearing band-aid ideas of how to fix the problem.
When my wife went to work for a brokerage firm (she was an information
specialist) she was given a book to read titled simply "The Stock
Market." The book is dated 1963 and on page 473 we read, "Part
of the activities of the Security and Exchange Commission are concerned
with the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Other acts of regulation
include the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, (rescinded
2007) the Investment Company Act of1940, the Banking Act and the Glass-Steagall
Act. (rescinded 1999) All of these acts, put in place to control greed
and prevent the robber barons from destroying our economy again, have
been either rescinded or tampered with or outright gutted by congress.
Ronald Reagan, the "de-regulation president", dealt a near
death blow to unionism by firing the air controllers and then having
their union smashed. He then imposed a moratorium on all new federal
regulation enforcement. Reagan is often called the president that
saved the world from Communism and given credit for restoring the
economy to the real free market. The term "Free Market"
has become a joke today in the bailout era. The fact is that by the
end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted,
indicted, or subject of official investigations for official misconduct
and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved,
the Reagan administration is American history's most corrupt administration.
Republican Reagan decimated the Roosevelt structure put in place to prevent another 1929, but let's not forget that Democrat Carter also caved in to right wing pressure by deregulating airlines, trucking, railroads, oil and interest rates, The results were disastrous.
Reagan
based his economic program on a theory known as supply-side economics,
(Trickle down Reaganomics), a re-wording of the theory that if you
benefit the rich money will filter down to the middle class, with
a fat and satisfied middle class. Corporate America would have no
oversight at all. That kind of fix only lasts until the next needle.
Reagan's Economic Recovery Tax Act called for huge tax cuts for upper
income people and large corporations. It was the beginning of the
Capitalist system slide into the world wide economic bust of 2008.
Congress also passed the Garn-Saint Germain Depository Institutions
Act, which tried to help struggling savings and loan institutions
by allowing them to make much riskier investments. The act preempted
state restrictions on enforcement by lenders of due-on-sale clauses
in most mortgages for a three year period ending October 15, 1985,
and authorized state chartered lenders to offer the same kinds of
alternative mortgages permitted nationally chartered financial institutions.
Stock market
crashes do not happen overnight. They are created by blind greed over
the years. When I heard both of the abominable 2008 presidential candidates
say they would welcome billionaire Warren Buffet as the new Secretary
of the Treasury, I thought that I had fallen through the rabbit hole
into never-never land.
Buffet began trading stocks at age eleven. His father was a broker
and congressmen. Warren is not a carpenter that builds the houses
we live in. He is not a farmer that grows the food we eat. He is not
a doctor that cures our ills. He is the "vampire-like, (who)
lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor
he sucks." Can anyone in their right mind believe that he who
is perhaps the captain of the sinking ship, the one who helped run
us aground, be the one to save us?
Young students today must look back on all this and put aside the
fear of the words Liberal, Socialist or Leftist and try to restore
FDR's America or face the reality of an unstoppable worldwide move
to socialism.
