This is perhaps the final crisis, in a line of crises, of the Bush/Cheney administration, which at best, has been a sour lesson to us all in “failed crisis management.”  The root of all of this stupidity is their fundamentalist belief that less government is better government! Sounds great but that isn’t what they’ve done. They’ve expanded the national debt by 72 percent, simply by outsourcing the government services, paying more for them in the process and then cutting taxes on those who benefit the most with little or no oversight on regulations or contracts.

The bailout of the Wall Street crowd is like a form of conservative socialism, where the state nationalizes the bad debts of bond speculators who have been gambling with leveraged money in the bullish expectation of an ever-expanding free market.  This in resolute defiance of the natural laws of physics, that what goes up must come down. Anyone want to buy a half eaten apple?  

The master mind of this Free Market mythology behind the collapse is the venerated Chicago School of Economics guru, Milton Freedman, who died in November 2007 just days before the death of fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile. I would have danced in the streets except for the long shadow that each of them cast on our times with the myth that unregulated free market capitalism builds democracy. As most of you can now see by the collapse on Wall Street, deregulated capitalism is more of a threat to our republic than it is a birthstone of democracy.  And we have been living under the failed policies of this myth since President Reagan introduced “Reaganomics” into the national nomenclature in the 1980s.  

Some of you have been around long enough to remember the Savings and Loan (S&L) crisis of this era, which caused the last great dive in real estate prices and forced our government to bailout the last bunch of crooks who learned that the best way to rob a bank (or an S&L) is to own one!  That financial crisis was glossed over and the neocons blithely continued down their path of selling Americans the Free Market myth until we hit the proverbial bump in the road with energy deregulation in California 2000 and the implosion of Enron. By the way, our current state budget fiasco has its very roots in the energy crisis, which we are still paying for. That is why the budget can’t be balanced.  And now they are back this year with Proposition 7 to do it all over again.

Long before Ronald Reagan became the “great communicator” as President, he was governor of California, another in a line of B actors playing politics in Sacramento.  He is most noted for his politically incorrect comment about our State tree, “if you’ve seen one Redwood you’ve seen them all.” But what few remember was his calling out the National Guard to teargas demonstrators at Peoples Park at UC Berkeley and his subsequent de-funding of the state college system and his closure of the state mental hospitals, which resulted in placing thousands of mentally ill patients into private care facilities––most at public expense in communities all over this state.  Another fine example of less government is more democracy!

What we have witnessed over the last 30 to 40 years is the cascading effect of downsizing government, de-funding the essentials of our core governance, like education and health care, and the opening of the flood gates for uncontrolled capital monopolizations– which are the antithesis of building democracies– particularly our own.  The singular expression of the Free Market myth is the continuous expansion of mergers, buyouts and consolidations during this era. Even unto this latest debacle with JP Morgan/Chase swallowing up WaMu and Wachovia consumed by Citibank. These recent examples just further the obvious conclusion that free market capitalism will always devour its competition regardless of the outcome or the ultimate benefit to the nation. We have seen this in the media consolidations, we’ve seen this in the aerospace and defense industries, where workers were displaced and their pension funds are either raided or their guaranteed health care plans were privatized.

All along this path to the Bush espoused “ownership society,” controlled by the “laws” of the free market, the fundamental reforms of the New Deal–which saved us from the causes of the last great crash of 1929, and of the Great Depression–have been slowly dismantled and thrown out like so much scrap metal on the trash heap of good governance.  Can you imagine what would have happened to the Social Security trust fund if we had allowed the Bushites to privatize it? But all along the neocons are crying and complaining about socialization of healthcare and the failure of public education. Can you imagine how much universal health care and free public education–even unto four years of state college–we could afford as a nation by funding them with $700 billion?  

This latest crisis, like Hurricane Katrina before it, and the boondoggles of the Iraq War exemplify the failure of the neocons prime philosophy and the idiocy of believing in unregulated capitalism. Will Congress cough up the money to stave off a depression? Probably, but they should demand $700 billion in equity, to fund universal health care and education in the future and a return to the tried and trusted New Deal regulatory controls of the only President the American people ever trusted to solve this problem–FDR!   

Anybody got a dime?