Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic entities
Democracy, like individualism, is based not on personal gain but on self-sacrifice. A functioning democracy must often defy the economic interests of elites on behalf of citizens. But this is no longer happening in America. The corporate managers and government officials trying to fix the economic meltdown are pouring money and resources into the financial sector because they are trained only to manage and sustain the established system, not change it, and the system has by this time evolved into a proto-fascist corpocracy.
For the reasons already cited, the working class, which has desperately borrowed money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now face years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes without access to new credit. The national treasury, meanwhile, is being drained on behalf of speculative commercial interests. Our (now corporate controlled) government -- the only institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough to protect their rights -- is in that respect becoming weaker, more anemic, and increasingly unable to help the mass of Americans who are about to embark on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s. Creative destruction, Joseph Schumpeter understood, is the essential fact about unfettered capitalism. But is our "democracy" any longer strong enough, real enough, and wise enough to ameliorate this destruction in such a way as to prevent incredible amounts of suffering in the lives of ordinary Americans?
"You are going to see the biggest waste, fraud, and abuse in American history," Ralph Nader recently said about the bailouts. "Not only is it wrongly directed, not only does it benefit the perpetrators instead of the people who were victimized, but they don't have a delivery system of any honesty and efficiency. The Justice Department is overwhelmed. It doesn't have a tenth of the prosecutors, investigators, auditors, and attorneys needed even to deal with the previous corporate crime wave before the bailout started last September. It is especially unable to deal with the rapacious ravaging of this new money by these corporate recipients. Rather than lending it to businesses in need, the big banks have parked billions of the dollars loaned to them at the Fed, to collect interest on the money. http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/21/kucinich-is-the-fed-paying-banks-not-to-loan-money/ They have also used some of it for acquisitions or to preserve their bonuses and their dividends. As long as they know they are not going to jail, and they don't see many newspaper reports about their colleagues going to jail, they don't care. If they quit, they quit with a golden parachute."
There are a handful of former executives who have conceded that the bailouts are a waste. The former chairman of American International Group Inc. (AIG), Maurice R. Greenberg, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the effort to prop up the firm with $170 billion has "failed." He said the company should be restructured. AIG, he said, would have been better off filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection instead of seeking government help.
Will a second stimulus package save us?
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