Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts On The Rule Of Greed

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, has written a sad, but true, article about what has become of the American economy in the last thirty years. He discusses the health care issue and the lack of funding for Medicare, the prison industry and the huge population of people who are incarcerated there, and the financial scandals of the last few years. Then he gets to the punchline:

Today the interests of American capitalists are as far removed from the interests of the population as the bureaucrats of state owned firms under socialism. Neither can fail, no matter how incompetent or inefficient, as they have the public purse as their backup.

Greed, Be Thou My God: How Wall Street Destroyed Health Care

This is the America we live in. We are ruled by the people whom the greedy people who run our television networks, financial institutions, and other powerful interests support. Our government, far from being the infinitely powerful controlling force in our lives that many fools imagine it to be, is increasingly helpless in the face of the power of the greedy. If it doesn't serve to balance out those people, we are all at their mercy.

You can either embrace that truth and learn how to change it, or continue to live with it.


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