At a Salon.com article entitled “The corporate financiers are wrong [1],” Joe Conason says the obvious about “free market” fanatics because it is necessary to say the obvious about “free market” fanatics, given that they’ve been so successful at promulgating their drivel. What is the obvious thing we now need to say?:
Now that we’re all about to take on hundreds of billions or perhaps a trillion dollars in new public debt to redeem the nation’s super-smart corporate financiers, there is one thing I hope we can expect in addition to postponing the apocalypse. Will they all please shut up about the wonders of the unfettered free market and the horrors of big government?
For decades, the investment class and their mouthpieces in the conservative movement have been telling Americans that if only we repealed all those musty old New Deal rules and programs, then we could enjoy unprecedented prosperity. Repeated endlessly by the think tanks, magazines and academics of the right-wing machinery, this message eventually drowned out the reality-based ideas of the American liberal tradition. Although those were the ideas that had actually built this country over the past century, they were erased from public consciousness by a combination of amnesia and propaganda.
There is no commercial fishing in the North Atlantic–we’re over-fished it to the point of ruin. Thousands of people have died or suffered great injury due to defective pharmaceuticals and tainted foods. There are thousands of other reasons to reject the facile idea that the “free market” will take care of us. What more proof do we need that the “free market” will automatically take care of us than the economic meltdown we are now experiencing? Consider these chilling words [2]of testimony given by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to Congress today:
As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”
For more of my ongoing aggravated skepticism regarding conniving and/or naive claims that the almighty, benevolent “free market” will automatically take care of us, see here [3].
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