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Monday, September 15, 2008

"The Fundamentals of This Economy Are Strong"

McCain says it all the time. Just this morning -- this morning! -- he said it again.



Aren't the causes of the current disaster pretty fundamental? What does it mean to promise to "Clean Up" Wall Street if one believes "The Fundamentals of This Economy Are Strong?"

And why is McCain still talking of "fear" and turmoil so much, rather than criminality, greed, fraud, and skewed priorities? Could the problem be that those also happen to be the priorities that drive the ethos of his party from top to bottom? Perhaps the Republicans can declare a War on Turmoil and Economic Naysaying, with the list of necessary curtailments of civil liberties "to maintain our way of life" forthcoming.

And how about those of us who are actually most vulnerable here? Those of us who have never behaved in the transparently reckless, fraudulent, greedy, short sighted ways facilitated by the neoliberal deregulation and financialization and wealth concentration of our economy? Those of us who are sure to be the ones who suffer the most from the resulting catastrophes? And, indeed, those of us who are sure to be the ones expected to pay for bailing out all the bad guys here? What about us?

Are we still "whiners"? Are our fears and turmoil still signs of a facile "psychological" perspective on this economic meltdown, as against the solid stolid he-man perspective of John McCain and his corporate-lobbyist cabal, who know, come what may, that "the fundamentals of this economy are strong"?

How strong do those fundamentals look when you've gone bankrupt paying for healthcare costs that every other respectable society provides as a basic right? How strong do those fundamentals look when you've lost the home which you were encouraged to buy beyond your means and which represented the whole of your life's work's assets? How strong do those fundamentals look when you're still practically a kid looking up from the bottom of a well of credit card debt acquired when you literally were still a dumb kid and not thinking particularly straight? Or confronting a home-mortgage scaled mountain of student loan debt and a degree that, come to find out, won't get you a job that can pay it off because all the nonprofit sector jobs that seem meaningful in the least don't pay squat since they are so disvalued in this society whatever their actual indispensability?

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