ECONOMY - Truth in One-Line

"Unregulated markets lead to greed, greed leads to carelessness, carelessness leads to collapse" by Andrew, Northwest Progressive 3/2/2009

Excerpt

Newspapers are running big headlines on their websites this afternoon about the precipitous drop of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which has fallen below 7,000 points for the first time since 1997.

The breathless coverage of investor angst on Wall Street ceased to be fascinating to us a long time ago. Every week, it's the same story: Some big company is laying off a lot of people, going out of business, or reporting a huge drop in earnings, while profits have vanished and many large financial firms continue to bleed money.

We continue to be told that "what happens on Wall Street affects Main Street" (Wall Street/Main Street, by the way, is a Banished Phrase for 2009) but the federal government continues to throw bucketfuls of money at massive conglomerates like AIG, hoping to prop up companies that are deemed "too big to fail", while small businesses - the real engine of our economy - are left out in the cold.

Now, it's true that the Obama administration has only been in charge for a few weeks. The stimulus/rescue plan should save jobs, and the budget that the President has rolled out looks good. The House of Representatives last week passed an omnibus appropriations bill that increases funding for many important priorities, like renewable energy and scientific research.

So we're starting to get back on track.

But we are still suffering the consequences of fealty to an ideology that proclaims the unregulated market is king. The Washington Policy Center, a local right wing think tank founded by John Carlson, continues to use the slogan "Improving lives through market solutions". Apparently, it hasn't yet become obvious to them that markets are currently destroying lives, not improving them.

The linguist George Lakoff has observed many times in his written works that all markets are constructed for somebody's benefit. And the somebodies that have historically benefited from the big markets are a small number of people, not most American families, as Daily Kos diarist kubla000 ranted today:

I just got to thinking...

The Dow has never helped the middle class get healthcare... instead the continuous drive for "profit" created death by spreadsheet.

The Dow didn't give me or you or my mom a raise... instead the continuous drive for "profit" capped the income of the working class

The Dow didn't create my job... instead it caused my neighbor to lose his job as it was shipped to India in the [pursuit] of "profit"

The Dow won't save my job... instead it may kill it...

Kubla adds:

The Dow created a false sense of security, a false hope of riches, a fools chance of getting ahead.

We were asked to join the party and send them our small dollars, and we always end up being the last fool at the table. The last one to sell... the one to take the biggest loss.

The Dow - which is an index of major United States stocks - is no barometer of American prosperity. The Dow doesn't measure how many families have healthcare, how many kids are getting a college education, how many people are impoverished, or how many workers have good paying jobs.

The article title says it ALL. Truth in one-line.