Let’s hope he means it
From Obama’s op-ed to those attending the G-20:
But I also know that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people.
“Unforgiving capitalism”? WTF is he talking about? Capitalism isn’t the problem, greed is. When the financial industry (who elected Obama, don’t forget) gets their lobbyists to write the laws, allowing them to stand common sense and economic reality on its head for a short-term gain, thats the problem. We’re supposed to sympathize with the people who had all their money “invested” with Bernie Madoff? Really? Here’s a group of people who looked around at all the options available to invest, and found one guy who promised returns 10 or 20 times higher than whatever anyone else was paying, tossed all their money at him, and then surprise surprise Gomer Pyle, it’s a con? The only way to get that return on your money is to sell something illegal- which of course you can only do with the governments help (see War On…well, fucking anything). And these people, deep down, knew that. So we’re supposed to wring our hands for Kevin Bacon’s greed? This is the mentality that poisoned our economy from the top down, the notion that if making 5% on a loan was good, then repackaging that loan to 30 people down the line is, well, 30% better! Who cares that 4th grader with a sidewalk lemonade stand can see its a scam that will eventually eat itself, since its not based on anything other than what sustained Madoff- a pyramid scheme that only takes a small handful of “bad loans” to default to trigger a complete meltdown.
Ok, how about the “oppressive government-run economy” bit? Uh, what the hell do we have now? Our health care costs are staggeringly high, with 40% of each dollar going to administrative costs- because the health care, insurance and pharmaceutical companies wrote the fucking laws to make it so. Or a tax code that is completely arbitrary and numbingly complex, that rewards companies for off shoring jobs and gutting businesses, until the point that the company withers and dies, at which point we toss billions and trillions of unprinted taxpayer dollars at them, because they are “too big to fail”. Or gobs of dollars down a black hole called the defense department, off the books, even Congress can’t see the details, paying for useless weapons systems and military bases in any country with more than a handful of brown people- or oil.
So yeah, Obama, really hope you mean it, but it seems to me that you’re just a hyped-up version of the same “bidness of America is bidness” jackals that got us to this point. Because until he- and the rest of DC, and the media, begin to understand that the business of America is people, then we’re going to continue to rot until we’re all speaking Chinese or watching endless Bollywood epics.
