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It's Bozo The Clown's Fault, Not The "Free Market"
Yes, to begin, let's posit that a president with the lowest approval rating in the history of polling has no credibility about any subject of importance -- and, in fact, most of the country would like, as David Letterman joked, to let Barack Obama start his new job right away. But, the current president's pronouncements that the "free market" isn't at fault for the financial meltdown -- a position no doubt held by many in government and business -- led me to dig deep, investigate and discover the real culprit: Bozo The Clown.
You see, if the mess that we have endured -- that we, our children and their children -- have lived with for the past few decades and will live with far into the future is not the fault of the so-called "free market", then, it has to be the fault of Bozo The Clown. Only Bozo The Clown could have screwed this up so badly.
Here is what the president said:
"The crisis was not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system," Mr. Bush said, in a 24-minute speech at Federal Hall in downtown Manhattan.
He added: "Free-market capitalism is far more than an economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility, the highway to the American dream."
Very helpful.
Now, I get it. The fact that wages have not kept pace with productivity for the past 30 years -- and, if they had, the minimum wage would be $19.12, not $6.55 -- because profits and CEO pay were more important than in fact putting people on the "highway to the American Dream", is not the fault of the "free market".
It's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
The fact that actually our country's economy did better when it was a "closed economy" from 1946 to 1973, in terms of raising living standards, then, it has in the past three decades under the mania to have an "open economy" is not the fault of the "free market".
It's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
The current financial crisis was not the fault of the love of the "free market", which allowed people from Robert Rubin to Alan Greenspan to preach about the wonders of debt and leverage and for companies like the Robert Rubin-lead Citigroup to create the secondary markets for predatory mortgages.
It's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
The reality that, rather than being on the "highway to the American Dream", more than 30 million people have been pushed out of jobs since the early 1980s, and only a third held of those people found new jobs two years later that paid as well as those that were lost, another third found work paying 15 to 20 percent less and the other third just dropped out of the workforce all together -- that isn't the fault of the "free market".
It's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
Executives piled on tens of millions of dollars in compensation and pay, gave themselves stock options worth billions of dollars and arranged for pensions that often equaled more than the combined pensions of the rest of a company's workforce. But, that greed was not the fault of the "free market."
It's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
The idea that hedge fund managers only pay 15 percent tax rates on their income, not the 35 percent other top earners pay, is not the fault of the "free market" and lobbyists who fashion it.
Nope, it's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
And, since everyone, including the president, likes to talk about what the wonders of the "free market" has brought to the rest of the world, the fact that growth in Latin America has basically been nil for the past 25 years, robbing an entire generation and more of a decent living standard, is not the fault of the "free market".
Nope, it's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
And the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, the wonders of de-regulation of the airline industry, the Internet bubble and now the bursting of the housing bubble, which wiped out trillions of dollars of peoples' savings (either in stocks or their home equity) -- all those are not the fault of the "free market".
Yes, it's the fault of Bozo The Clown.
So, it is Bozo The Clown who should be fired from his job. All the other wizards, business leaders, pundits, economists and political leaders who cheer-led for the "free market" should be re-upped for more service, promoted, encouraged, given Cabinet jobs and higher compensation.
Because they did such a great job.
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We do not have a free market system. We have a oligarchy with gain being private and loss being socialized. This is because we are the only advanced industrial nation with a single pro-business party with two wings (the pro small government intervention in your private affairs Democratic wing and the government in your bedroom religious zealot Republican wing).
is homeownership really that great? all of my neighbors "own" their home but are never there. always working or going out because they don't want to sit home alone
maybe that whole pride of ownership dream is really a myth. give me a small mobile home and no debt. yeah, sounds good.
The only hope is maybe, maybe a green economy can help us grow. Without the potential for growth, we are stuck spinning our wheels. Our materialism/consumerism is just as bad as corporate greed.
In 1986 two people began a contest with 10K each. One put the 10K into the stock market in a 70 stock/30 bond fund highly rated mutual fund still alive today and still highly rated. The other put the money into CDs which they renewed over and over again at different institutions.
Guess who has more money?
"Freedom is just another word, for nothing left to lose."......................JJ. Maybe she was a Prophet?
Kris Kristoferson wrote that tune.
the "free market"
"bozo the clown"
the "leftist"
the "rightest"
and now the "centerist"
some of these are not like the other, but they are what 'they' like us to think = 2 our GREAT FREE MARKET.
ok; lets do the math
free market = 1
bozo the clown = 1
leftist =
rightest =
centerist =
hmm. . . . the math used to be easy till all those other BOZO's got involved.
whatever happened to free market, free trade = on both sides.
oh yeah. When Wal Mart sold it all to them, and we bought it all.
pay more, get less,
free trade . . . i guess . . .
Always remember, boys and girls.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4_WHBNskc
Nothing changes until those who own the most are threatened by losing it all. FDR and perhaps Obama (yet to be seen) come along to save the System by slight recalibration, which is in turn fought at every turn by the Capital. Obama's chances of success are lower simply because there is no real threat that the Capital will lose it all. There are no more communists, socialists, anarchists,... and other pesky pests to threaten the Capital. Until there is a credible threat the chances for recalibration are slim.
Don't worry, unbridled Capitalism is the fastest route to Socialism. It will trickle down to we the people and become a torrent that will not stop. Right now capital as you call it is working hard at putting a finger in the dike, but it will not be enough. It's just starting to rain.........................
No threat? I've got a threat for you. It's called greed. Do you know how many people are grabbing your money right now and jumping ship?
Firesign Theatre provides the nugget of wisdom: "We're all Bozos on this bus."
We had to be; letting the same clowns, decade after decade, spew the same uber-capitalist mantras in order to take us to the cleaners time after time. "Consent of the governed" seems to have been replaced with "There's one born every minute." The essential role of government should be to keep the snakeoil salesmen at a well regulated distance from the rest of us.
Plus, we've been told, "Everything You Know is Wrong."
Mr. Tasini is absoluttely correct. The cause of today's economic problems is very simple. The productive capacity in the world is very great, but the average person does not have the income level to purchase these goods in large enough numbers (to keep the system going). This is the direct result of
a generation-long war on labor. Labor can no longer afford to buy what it so efficiently produced. I have lived my entire life in the heart of the "rust-belt" so I have seen this first-hand.
What did you expect when the top 2 percent of the people received all of the increases in productivity? I am continually amazed that those who caused this problem, now seem to have no idea how it happened. All we hear are continued platitudes to this wonderful and mystic "free market."
As an aside, slaves lived better in 1850 than they did in 1650. That was due to continual improvement in technology, not becasue slavery as an institution made any improvements. So, to say that the poor today live better than the rich of 100 years ago is simply a red-herring.
Free Market? Call it what it really is: Capitalism, a two-tier socio-economic class system. Per Sweezy, "...under capitalism ownership of the means of production is vested with one set of individuals while work is performed by another ... the buying and selling of labour power is the differentia specifica of capitalism."
It is difficult to imagine a change in terminology more fortuitous to those whom money accords power as they now have the functional anonymity of the "Free Market" as opposed to the time-honored moniker "Robber Barons".
Capitalism is actually composed of four substantially different types of markets: commercial, financial, resource, and labor. The trick to selling "free market capitalism" is to get people to consider only commercial markets -- the exchange of goods and services -- when evaluating an ideology that has been extended to completely distinct kinds of transactions.
When it comes to satisfying demand, promoting innovation, and creating opportunity, nothing beats a minimally regulated commercial market. Command economies have failed so consistently and decisively that it's difficult to find socialist intellectuals that still believe in central planning, and the last gasp of anti-market activism, parecon, is even more difficult to imagine working in a real economy than the central planning it strives to replace.
Economic progressives should focus on the other three markets. While the value of goods and services can be defined relative to one another, any market is always going to demand more credit, more consumption, and less labor. These markets are not "self-regulating". They are inherently unstable and destabilizing. They don't match production to capacity of work or consumption. They only match production to however much we want to consume and however little we want to pay workers, leaving in their wake financial, environmental, and social crises.
Amen brother/sister
AHH THE FREE MARKET.
THE SAME MARKET THAT ALLOWS THE TOP 4% IN BRAZIL TO OWN 99 % OF EVERYTHING.
LOVE THAT FREE MARKET.
Does anyone besides Bush really really believe that the US has, or ever had a 'free market' economy?
Reagan is credited with defeating Communism and proving the superiority of unimpeded free markets. Now our unregulated free market is collapsing and a great irony is that China -- a communist state -- is bolstering up our faltering, failing economy. Maybe the only salvation for capitalism will be to go hat in hand to Communist China.
we had a quasi free market between 1944 and 1971. we had a closer to real free market in the 1800s when the treasury was closed to the banking elite. the u.s. has the closest framework for one to succeed and we've benefitted throughout history when it has been allowed to work.
but no, we haven't had one in 37 years. one can't exist within a centralized bank run on fiat currency. its impossilbe.
www.endthefed.us join us across the nation on november 22nd.
The free market ain't really free....it's costing tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars. But hey, Wal Mart is still posting profits, so all is right in the world....live better than the homeless of other countries.
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