Wrecking, wrecking, wrecked; how Republican conservatives destroyed the U.S. economy

huffingtonpost I assume.

Just to show you how venal and stupid the wealthy are in America, they ignored the first principle of parasites; "don't kill the host."

How true. They depend on buyers of their products or services, yet insist in keep wages so low that working people can't afford to buy them.

Henry Ford was very smart, except for his anti-semitism, because he paid his employees enough so that they could afford to buy the autos they produced for him.

BBB

As a student I mused about obsolete laws and regulations that needed have sunset clauses as any law student could tell you that there are thousands of laws that are in the books but never enforced or obsolete owing to progress, technological advancesment and general social improvement.

Never in my wildest imagination did I think the Conservatives would take that musing to such extremes as to eliminate regulations altogether and risk removing safety.

Turns out they may have done the ultimate and shot not only their feet off but the body and the tail too.

A must read book for anyone who is uneasy about having Treasury Secretary Paulson in charge of fixing the US economy collapse. I've singled out just one small section of the book given today's economic crash. ---BBB

Casting his eye back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. Washington itself has been remade into a gold landscape of super-wealthy suburbs and gleaming lobbyist headquarters---the wages of government-by-entrepreneurship that has been practiced so outrageously by figures such as Jack Abramoff.

It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservaties have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state.

This excerpt from The Wrecking Cren; How Conservatives Rule, by Thomas Frank page 264:

And then, act 3, George W. Bush proceeded immediately to plunge the budget into deficit again. Indeed, after seeing how the Reagan deficit had forced Clinton's hand, it would have been foolish for a conservative not to spend his way back into the hole as rapidly as possible, That deficits defund liberalism was no longer just a theory; it was a historically tested reality, a plan that got results.

Besides, think of the possibilities that opened to our conservative friends as they realized they were not free to taxcut-and-spend their way deep into the red. Oh, the earmarks they could hand out to people working on privatizing outer space or building experimental jet airplanes. All the different ways they could reward the right lobbyists, the right consultants, the right contractors. And after they'd burned through the bank account and brought on the crisis, think of the points they could win by screaming about too-generous "entitlements," the insolence of publicly funded art, and all the fat and lazy bureaucrats who needed a pay cut.

If, along the way, all this idiotic spending happened to bump up public cycicism toward deficit spending a notch or two---why, that's just gravy. "It's perfectly fine for them to waste money," says former labor secretary Robert Reich, summarizing the conservative viewpoint. "If the public thinks government is wasteful, that's fine. That reduces public faith in government,, which is precisely what the Republicans want." It's not just sabotage; it's win-win sabotage, a charming addition to win-win incompetence and win-win corruption.

Put simply, takeovers constitute the key solution to the most serious problem inherent in the operation of publicly traded corporations, namely, the failure of corporate management to keep the shareholds' interest foremost in the decision-making, wrote two experts in corporate law in 1988. With the advent of the leveraged buyout or hostile takeover, this situation was changed: 'Thus, to reduce the risk of being swept out of office, managers are constrained to keep stock prices as high as possible by running their companies efficiently and in the interests of the shareholders."