Deliver your message to thousands of readers every day.
Our readers are influential opinion makers, community activists, local business owners, and politicians.
Learn more about ads with our Rate Card.
Call our office at (310)519-1016
or email us for more information.
Today we have reached the fifth memorial anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, and things are a fine mess, indeed. Not only have we found no weapons of mass destruction, nor built a sustainable free market in Baghdad, nor done anything close to building a durable democracy, but we have seen nearly every reconstruction project fail miserably as American subcontractors rip-off the government with wild abandon, corruption and greed. This doesn’t even take into account the 4,000 US soldiers killed, the estimated 35,000 Iraqi civilians murdered inadvertently or the torture and imprisonment of some 70,000 Iraqi citizens. The $9.4 trillion dollar debt grows daily by some $2 billion per day spent on the war—with an ultimate price tag of $3 trillion, according to a new book co-authored by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz--and yet the Bushites find a way to bail out the Wall Street banks, mortgage and sub prime hedge funds by loaning these corporate bandits $200 billion in good US Treasury securities in exchange for nearly worthless sub prime loan paper. No wonder the country is heading toward a recession!
The headlines spin this as a “liftoff for stocks,” but more appropriately it is a rip-off of the public treasury and in the end only adds to the mounting fiscal crisis that Sacramento, Los Angeles, and states across the Union are now experiencing. This is one of the biggest bank robberies ever pulled, for it has affected the value of every single dollar you thought you have by devaluing it. And Bush smiles blithely telling us our financial markets are strong. Hell, if you dumped $200 billion of public money into any sector of the market place you would undoubtedly find a resounding jump in the economy of that sector. These are the guys who keep telling us that the “free market” is the ultimate solution, that government should not regulate or manipulate the marketplace and that privatizing social spending like Social Security would be both safe and sound. Hardly!
Just imagine what your Social Security 401k retirement account would be worth if it was invested in a Bear Stearns hedge funds backed by sub prime loans? A year ago it was worth $173 per share and this week sold in a highly risky buy-out by JP Morgan for $2 per share– backed by your friends in the White House who don’t believe in government intervention in the market place.
If the Washington Consensus, meaning the free market neo-cons, invested this much of our US Treasury notes in, say, national health care or public transportation, just think of the economic benefits that would be generated to the nation as a whole, and not to some narrow sector of the financial market that, when unregulated, dabbles in highly questionable lending practices. This is the same kind of fiscal mismanagement that we experienced when President Reagan, another free market monetarist, presided over the deregulation of the Savings and Loan industry over twenty years ago. This had the same disastrous results. This kind of fiscal mismanagement is the reason why we can’t afford national health care. It is the reason why we have a crumbling transportation infrastructure and flawed public transportation.
When you hear the conservatives complain about our public schools failing to meet our expectations, ask them why they so enthusiastically support going to war destroying schools over there and then rebuilding them in Iraq, but can’t figure out how to fund them in South Los Angeles?
The laughable part of this whole crisis is that it was completely avoidable, if not for the complicity and hypocrisy of the Bushites and their not-so-conservative neo-con free market operatives.
What is so conservative about mismanaging the home mortgage business? What is so conservative about trading Treasury Securities for worthless sub prime lending notes? What is so conservative about pursuing a never-ending war that costs $2 billion per day? One that, contrary to propagandized media reports, we are still losing.
If this is “compassionate” conservatism, then frankly we should be looking back at something the people can trust–like the liberalism of FDR–to fix what Bush has screwed up. Oh, if we only had schools that taught the history of the Great Depression so that we could see that this nation has been down this road before!
