In April 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out while he was dealing with the wreckage of the Great Depression:
"America a century ago was regarded as an economic unity. But as time went on the country was cut up, bit by bit, into segments. We heard about problems of particular localities, the problems of particular groups. More and more people put on blinders; they could see only their own individual interests or the single community in which their business was located. . . . Economists are still trying to find out what it was that hit us back in 1929. I am not a professional economist, but I think I know. What hit us was a decade of debauch, of group selfishness -- the sole objective expressed in the thought: 'Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.'"
During the 1920s a political-economy experiencing increased productivity did not allow its benefits to "trickle down" to the broad mass of working people. Too much money went into too few hands too quickly. America in the Teapot Dome-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years, was a lot like America in the Abramoff-Bush-Cheney-Greenspan years.
Now that Wall Street has finally hit the skids as a result of the disastrous class-warfare policies the investor class and its puppets in the form of George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan unleashed on the American people, maybe -- just maybe -- all of those Republican charlatans who were pushing hard for Social Security privatization will finally shut their traps and admit that their ideologically-driven assault on the vestiges of FDR's New Deal was a failure and a fraud.
I just wish David Brooks and Richard Stevenson and Steve Moore and Grover Norquist and George W. Bush and the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform and the Cato Institute and the Wall Street Journal and all of the other class warfare enthusiasts will have the guts to finally admit that their economic forecasts and predictions were wrong. I wish they would admit that their radical privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthiest people and corporations, and all of the other neo-liberal claptrap they've rammed down our throats in recent years -- from Reaganomics and Rubinomics to Bush's kleptonomics -- have resulted in huge budget deficits, record national debt, scandals and rip-offs, trade imbalances, stock market sell offs, and inflation.
Welcome to the world of the George W. Bush recession!
Hey, David Brooks, What happened to your "ownership society?"
And the only thing the brain-dead Republican presidential candidates, along with Bush and his gang, can come up with is making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Yeah, that's going to work.
If you weathered the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the puncture of the mortgage bubble, stay tuned for the next big pop: the credit card debt bomb.