Reply To: Political Statements
I was thinking this past week, in the wake of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac business, about how big business has basically hijacked our economy. It’s funny how things converge, because by chance I picked up some ultra-liberal mag while waiting at the Red Cross today and came across a review of this book, The Squandering of America by Robert Kuttner, and one phrase just leapt out at me: “Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.” And it seems to me that that has happened repeatedly over the course of my adult life. The conservatives clamor for deregulation, claiming that what’s good for business is good for the economy, but that philosophy just hasn’t panned out. What I’ve seen is big business repeatedly sacrifice just about everything – ethics, environment, even the long-term sustainability of their own companies – in the name of short-term profits and stock price increases. Then when things go sour, as they inevitably do, it’s the taxpayers that have to bail them out – for the good of the economy – because these businesses have become so bloated that their failure pulls the whole damn economy down with them. Don’t we have anti-trust laws in this country?
I realize that I may have gone to the ignorant, rhetorical place on this one, but this is an issue that has sort of just surfaced in my consciousness, and I’d like to know more. Are people thinking about this? Talking about this?
P.S. I wouldn’t call the Christian right a distraction, because I believe that they constitute a clear and present danger to personal liberties.
ETA: Bry said…
honestly, I’d be willing to trust either set of candidates with the keys to the country
I have to disagree with you on this one, my friend.