Don't get fooled again

When the shit hit the fan the other day about the financial crisis on Wall Street the Dow Jones industrial stocks dropped 500 points. Then the next day they rose 400 points. Crazy huh?

You're damned right it's crazy. And you are just as crazy if you think this is all over because of a one day rebound in stock prices. The fact is the fundamentals of our economy are not strong, no matter how many times a rich white man tells you they are.

If home ownership is out the reach of millions of working class families then the fundamentals of our economy are not strong.

If retirement accounts and 401K's are shrinking every day then the fundamentals are not strong.

If politicians who once championed deregulation with every breath they took are now against that very same deregulation they championed then the fundamentals are out of whack.

If you can't make ends meet after working two or three jobs then there is something fundamentally wrong about the current state of our economy.

If the only people who can get welfare in this country are the heads of huge corporations that gave tons of money to the politicians who are now bailing them out, then the fundamentals of our economic system stink like a fresh steaming pile of crap.

The fundamentally rotten nature of conservative Republican economics has finally culminated in this current meltdown. Just a few months back they were blaming all this on a few people who had gotten home loans they could not afford. Now they're blaming it on the institutions that made the bad home loans, but they have refused to lay the blame where it really lies: on the politicians who deregulated the banking and financial sector and the free market economic zealots like Milton Friedman and his acolytes.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 the conservatives began to systematically tear down and dismantle FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. The fiscal conservatives had always wanted to bring down those programs that FDR and LBJ built which had helped so many crawl out of poverty and had helped reign in the power of greedy bankers and businesses but they didn't have the clout to do it until they joined forces with the religious conservatives of the so called "Moral Majority." United at last in their hatred of "left wing" social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and of the Great Depression era laws that kept the banks and stock markets in check the newly powerful conservative movement began working day and night to turn America back into the country it was before working and middle class people had protections from predatory banks and financiers.

And under George W. Bush they finally got their wish.

And look where it's gotten us.

And now they want us to think that everything is going to be okay now that the Dow Jones Industrial stocks have rebounded. That's bullshit. When more people shop at stores that are locally owned rather than shopping at big box retailers, then our economy will rebound. When more people grow their own food and they sell their surplus to their friends and neighbors, then our economy will rebound. When people who work blue collar jobs can afford to buy a house, then our economy will rebound. When we have the kind of strong and vigorous regulation and oversight of banks and the financial sector like we had in the wake of the Great Depression, that when our economy will rebound.

Don't listen to Mike Huckabee, Rush Limbo, Laura Inghram, and other Bush McCain campaign hacks, the market will not correct itself. The market did not correct itself during the Great Depression, nor did it do it in Wiemar Germany, nor did it do it in Chile after we installed Pinochet in a coup. Free market economics are a sham. And as we are finding out the hard way, deregulating the banks and financial markets was a bad idea. Corporations will do anything they can get away with to make money for a few shareholders, it's the job of the government to protect the millions of us who are not shareholders in corporations from them and their greedy business practices.