Let’s just say that comrade George Bush’s $700 billion no-speculator-left-behind bailout of U.S. financiers – perhaps the most significant wave of government takeovers since Castro’s in tiny Cuba – undermines the neo-con insistence that unregulated markets are the balm for all problems.
“I’m a market-oriented guy, but not when I’m faced with the prospect of a global meltdown,” Bush told admirers at the loony-right Manhattan Institute last week on the eve of his efforts to forge a coalition of the willing among the G-20.
Some actually thought a variant of the $700 bil could be found to help people pay their mortgages or put food on the table. To be honest, that idea even occurred to me.
Don’t bank on it. History shows that “the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement..., but too much,” Bush told Manhattanites.
He concluded his plea to leave financial markets largely unregulated with a message about leaving world trade unregulated (actually, “free” is the synonym he used for deregulated). Meaning the outgoing president believes in unrestricted greed as a tool of public interest planning.
But I digress. Bush’s swan song to the world does more than give the wrong impression of free markets and free trade. It gives the wrong impression of the real legacy newly ?elected U.S. president Barack Obama (weirdly, my Microsoft wordcheck still shows the correct spelling of that name as “Osama”) will confront.
If truth be known, Bush inherited, as Obama will soon, deregulated financial, agricultural, trade and social policies. Put in place by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, these were the achievement of the 1990s – a period that needs to be understood not, as greens once hoped, as the “turnaround decade,” but as the “regression decade.”
1 comment:
anyone that thinks that the financial crisis didn't come from the last 8 years of sheer lunatic spending and deregulation is an absolute drooling idiot.
If Clinton had done anything that could be flagged as bad for the economy, Bush had control over the senate and congress for years and could have, or should have done something.
Sorta like the conservative we have now. Go into a recession after they've spent themselves silly.
I remember who opposed bank regulation some time ago too. Good thing spendin Stevie wasn't PM then.
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