Posted on 09/27/2008 6:28:40 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Katrina not much different than Al Hunt. He was their D.C. correspondent. Blech.
WSJ has gone further and further over to the dark side.
IBD is a better bet these days. More consistent with the principles of capitalism.
That is why playing moderate frequently won't pay off politically. You got smoked from both sides, which can be pretty vicious. You can see it from the vitriol they leveled at Bush.
0bama mentioned in the debate last night that FDR bought up houses. Is this true? If so, how did it work?
Your used car analogy is spot on, right down to getting locked in a little room. Americans have been trained to be wise consumers and many, we can hope, will recognize a
phoney sales tactic when we see it.
I’m glad the WSJ printed this. People need to wake up to the political dynamics of all this.
I would first point out that we’ve already had at least the first part of our “New New Deal.”
A government-instigated misallocation of national resources in an amount numbered in the trillions of dollars. I hope everyone here by now knows the story of the nationwide destruction of sound lending standards in the name of affirmative action, the turbocharging of the process by the easy money low interest rate environment propagated by the Fed and the jumping in with both hands by market participants along the entire chain of activity.
A stall and then decline in housing prices began to reveal the extent of the problem, all the more disturbing in light of the fact that the problem has emerged even as unemployment has remained at a relatively low level from a historical perspective.
And now, our weakened banking and credit system is on the verge of creaking to a halt and failing, for which a massive bailout is planned.
The question isn’t whether the American people are getting screwed by the bailout plan. The American people have already been screwed. The question is whether it is possible to get unscrewed, or whether it will get much worse.
Here, with the tremendous anger of the American people at the size of the bailout, there is a unique opportunity – we now, for a brief moment, will have the attention of the American people on the matter at hand. Most people have a distate for politics, and their attention to political matters is brought only with reluctance. Even in hotly contested presidential races, the focus of a large part of the population is typically less on substantive issues than on matters of style, emotion and feeling, and the horse race aspect of the process.
Will the massive cost of the crisis and a look over the precipice at potentially very serious economic damage lead the American people to the conclusion that the root cause of this was socialism by stealth imposed by corrupt politicians on our housing and mortgage system?
Or will they be distracted by know-nothing class warfare populism which explicitly or implicitly identifies the root problem as an “excess of capitalism” and “markets run amok,” personified by wealthy Wall Street miscreants?
With the leftist indoctrination of antipathy toward the founding principles of our Constitution and toward free markets having been extended in recent decades beyond colleges and universities into the public schools down to the kindergarten level, and constantly reinforced by the toxic and ubiquitous popular culture propagated by our national entertainment and media industry, the susceptibility toward this latter narrative is very high.
What is a new development is that this message in the current crisis isn’t just coming from the Left, but now from the Right. Not just from Daily Kos, but from the class warfare wing of Free Republic.
There are historical parallels for this, and one of them is the Weimar Republic. In Germany, a constitutional republic was discredited and fatally weakened by a combination of two powerful movements, both of which relied on facile demagoguery. The Nazis and the Marxists were bitter enemies but they did agree on one thing – that the economic crisis which devastated Germany was brought on by greedy “international capitalists,” with the Nazis going further and identifying the capitalists with Jewry.
The inclination of the American people is not going to tend to the result in Germany, but, because of the leftist drumbeat of popular culture and the leftist indoctrination in the educational institutions, rather instead toward the pied piper of social democracy.
The hundreds of millions of dollars looted from Fannie and Freddie by corrupt political hacks and irresponsibly granted by corporate boards of directors to executives who have left a legacy of failure or even bankruptcy at their financial institutions, is only outranked by the literally billions of dollars reaped by the Oprahs, the Streisands, the Hollywood studio heads and celebutard actors and musicians who daily inject their poison into the American bloodstream.
Undoubtedly, there will be the trials of at least a few of the greedy Wall Street financiers. Of course there will be no trials of the poisoners of our popular culture, or the indoctrinators in our schools. And the trials of the greedy capitalists will be an object lesson spun daily in our media/entertainment leviathan.
And the main culprits in this disaster, the Carters, the Clintons, the Dodds, the Franks, the ACORNs, the Obamas and the cast of thousands, where will they be in all this?
If the narrative of the “greedy capitalists” spun by Ms. Van Denheuvel and by the FR class warfare populists, they will be in charge of stages two, three, four and so on of our “New New Deal.”
This leftward tilt has been there for years.
Often enough it spills into what should be straight news articles on the front page.
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