Hurricane Katrina
The mainstream media are revving up with echoed statistics generated by the titans of finance about how our nation’s economy is finally turning the corner. Their message is that we are on way our back to business as usual. They want you to think of recent events as a kind of natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina. Sure a lot of lives were ruined and it’s going to take a while for things to get back to normal, but the storm is now dissipated and time will heal the wounds. As with all natural disasters, some people get hurt more than others. So it goes. Now get out there and start playing again!
Of course, what really happened had nothing in common with a natural disaster. It was a disaster wrought by human greed, fueled by an ideology of free market forces in which some people gain advantage over others and press their advantage until the losers can no longer afford to ante up. Each collapse produced by such greed is more cataclysmic than the one that went before it.
it seems to me that Obama was not elected to set the game in motion again. He was elected to change the game, but it’s looking more and more like he is caving in to the casino owners. Bill Moyers has done a series of interviews with some credible commentators on Obama’s current trajectory. These people make sense and I urge you to listen to what they have to say.
Moyers Interviews
Simon Johnson
Former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), MIT Sloan School of Management professor and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Simon Johnson examines President Obama’s plan for economic recovery.William Greider
For years best-selling author William Greider sounded the alarm about Washington’s unholy alliance with Wall Street and the failure of the Federal Reserve and other regulators to take preventive measures to avoid disaster. Now, he offers some suggestions to the question everyone is asking: “What do we do now?”Robert Johnson
Bill Moyers talks with economist Robert Johnson, who decodes this week’s news on the bank bailout, with a hard look at the international ramifications of the plan and a discussion of why nationalization has become a flash point.
