Economic Collapse: US Economy Broken by Corrupt Political System

The economic collapse of the United States has its roots in a political failure in which politicians serve the interests of their sponsors on K Street and Wall Street, rather than the American people.
 
Dec. 6, 2009 - PRLog -- As the far-from-finished Dubai World drama makes clear yet again, economics and politics are two sides of the same coin – the rulers of oil-rich sister Emirate Abu Dhabi MAY help their debt-ridden brothers to the north, but if they do, they’re going to extract a stiffer price than they have in the past.

So it’s hardly surprising to conclude, after a nearly two month American sojourn – mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the New York and Washington DC metro areas as well – that the biggest economic problem now confronting the US is its blatantly broken and corrupt political system.

The American people remain generally creative and innovative, constantly seeking new ways to make the best of what – aside from the “hallowed” precincts of Wall Street & K Street, where DC lobbyists swarm – is a disturbingly / increasingly / near-universally grim economic picture.

But at nearly every point, those efforts are stymied by a political system that went acutely off the rails with the imposition of Cheney / Bush by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in December 2000 – a maneuver made possible by the long-term deterioration of American politics and public discourse since the disastrous year of 1979 and the rise of Ronald Reagan/ism.

In the aftermath of Black September 2008 – when the Cheney / Bush regime made crucial choices about which big banks and insurance companies were “too big to fail”, and which could “safely” collapse … choices Team Obama obediently ratified before even coming into office – it should be crystal clear that government is intimately involved – on a daily basis, at all levels – with the workings of the US economy.

And as the current absurd and frightening debate about health “care” makes clear, that political system is in a state of advanced breakdown:

totally hijacked by corporate interests at the micro-level, where the votes of Senators and Representatives nakedly reflect the desires of their biggest campaign contributors, in a way that would make even Karl Marx at his crudest blush with embarrassment;

and, at the macro-level, completely unconstrained by a public discourse in which the most transparent nonsense is taken seriously, not just by a slavishly compliant and equally corporate-dominated media, but in conversations among ordinary people.

Put bluntly, America today is a place characterized not by dynamism and optimism, but defensive paralysis.

A small number of people at the very top – significantly, if not exclusively, affiliated withgun-toting Goldman Sachs and other too-big-to-fail “winners” on Wall Street and K Street, including insurance & drug companies / the AMA & hospitals, and other members of the health-“care”-industrial-complex – are showering in champagne.

But most people are warily circling the wagons – aghast at the precipitous fall in the value of their homes, the total lack of / radical limits on their health “care”, and what they see every day on their various plasma screens, but feeling powerless do much more than moan about it on Facebook, let alone able to do anything to stop it.

Sadly and predictably, the symbol of this reeling and hope-killing political system is Mr. “Change” himself, Barack Obama, who has delivered anything BUT the shift from Cheney / Bush so clearly wanted by the millions of people who voted for him.

Instead, in every major issue area, Obama has continued the main policies of his ignominious predecessors – and in the process, is destroying any prospect of significant improvement in the American situation, not to mention his chance to go down in history as the FDR of the 21st century, which, as we all know, is what the US and the entire world so urgently need.

From coddling “too-big-to-fail” banks and insurance companies / through his incomprehensible “double down” in the sinkhole of Afghanistan / to the undignified haste with which even the most weak-ass “public insurance option” was dropped – Obama has mystified and dismayed supporters, while delighting opponents who correctly realize that the more they pummel him, the more willing he is to please them.

Indeed, perhaps the most shocking observation of my time in the US – whose Jeffersonian political / cultural elements remain as legitimate and valid as when first articulated in the late 18th century – is how fundamentally irrelevant Obama seems in the lives and minds of most Americans.

During the nightmare Cheney / Bush years, it was impossible to escape the stupidly grinning presence of the front man, whether in the media or daily conversation.

Obama, however, barely seems to register in people’s consciousness, whether collective or individual – and this less than a year after his glorious Inauguration.


Read the full article at EconomyWatch.com:

http://www.economywatch.com/economy-business-and-finance-...

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