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Debt Clock – Invented and bankrolled by New York real estate developer Seymour Durst, the 11-by-26 foot National Debt Clock was erected in 1989. When it first was plugged in, the odometer-style clock whirred furiously as the national debt rose by $13,000 a second. Often the last few digits increased so fast they were just a blur. And at one point in the mid-1990s, the debt was rising so fast the clock’s computer crashed.

Money Crisis in America – The BIG I-O-U Wall Street Bailout

by Stack Kenny

America is in crisis.

The world is in crisis.

As Wall Street congratulates itself on the $850 billion bailout of elite financers, the people of America will wait to see what effect this great experiment in the bankruptcy of the country will have on peoples’ everyday lives.
We are in a holding pattern, and who knows what will happen next? Not the economists. Not the politicians. Not the Wall Street gamblers – and certainly not the American working class. The dollar amount of the bailout is so abstract (have you found the extra “0”s on the calculator?) that it feels as if it belongs in a different reality.

We are unable to fathom the consequences this may produce for the stability of our country, our families, and our collective future. As economist Joseph Stiglitz flatly stated, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch, a free war, or a free bailout. Someone has to pay.” That would be the American people.

 

So just how did we get to this point of crisis?

The Shock Doctrine

In her best selling book of 2007 “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein authenticates the claim that this
massive crisis is not happenstance but instead the result of a
meticulously orchestrated plan by a group of free market corporate
capitalists initiated almost sixty years ago at the Chicago School of
Economics. As a counterattack to corporate regulations put into play by
Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to stop the Great Depression, the Chicago
economists called for a return to the practices of the industrial
robber barons of the early 1900s.

Led by the ideological theories of Milton Friedman, these economists
looked at Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, and the emergence of a secure
middle class, as a hindrance to the free enterprise system they
believed should run the world’s economy. They preached strict adherence
to a pure form of free capitalism that would replace Roosevelt’s New
Deal of cooperation with its exact opposite, a system of financial
individualism: if you will, a Raw Deal for the common man.

Friedman, the “Guru of Greed,” soon developed his theory of Disaster
Capitalism, claiming that because common people would not easily go
along with a plan for unchained free enterprise, there had to be a
“shock” to the system in order to change the economics.

The problem was that Americans liked the New Deal: it gave them jobs
and tried to close the enormous gap between the rich and the poor that
had existed right up until the Depression. They would not easily let go
of Roosevelt’s social programs. Friedman insisted that drastic
circumstances would have to be initiated to change the environment back
into a totally unregulated state of capitalism. The Chicago economists
plotted and theorized for twenty years until they got their big break
in 1980: the election of Ronald Reagan.

During Reagan’s presidency (1981-88), the New Deal was dismantled and,
with the beginnings of deregulation, the philosophy of the new
economists, termed neo-liberalism, began to spread through the country,
the government, universities, and the world. Economists of the “Chicago
School” helped orchestrate coups in Chile and Argentina, Indonesia and
Bolivia. As Communist countries began to falter, the new
regulation-free capitalism found its way into Poland, Russia, and
China. The bloody coups in South America were replaced by a new
strategy of bankrupting countries into submission. The saddest example
of all is South Africa, where despite a mandate from the world, Nelson
Mandela was forced to give up land reform and economic equality in
order to borrow and try to pay the nation’s debt to the World Bank.

The scenarios now are all the same. A struggling country is forced to
sell off its assets at a low price just to survive to pay its debt. The
corporations move in and take over basic services and resources. What
follows is a dramatic rise in the number of millionaires and
billionaires, but an even higher rise in the number of people falling
into poverty. This is called “redistribution of wealth,” and it is now
operating at full throttle in the United States. As Rep. Dennis
Kucinich said after voting “No” on the bailout bill, “This is not about
Left vs. Right, Republican vs. Democrat. This is about Up vs. Down.”

The soaring fortunes of the super-rich have coincided with the fading
notions of the Great American Dream for the rest of us. Last year, at
the height of deregulation, the richest 1% of Americans held a combined
worth of $16.8 trillion, almost $2 trillion more than the bottom 90%.
While most workers struggle to survive on $10 an hour, the top ten
hedge fund managers in the U.S. last year personally cleared a combined
total of $16.1 billion dollars.
What Next?

We’ll wait and see where the bailout leaves the other 90% of Americans.
Social programs, the first to be cut in times of economic crisis,
already operate at minimal functional ability. Bread lines,
homelessness, and tent villages sprout and spread all across the
country, out on the edge of most major cities. Which programs will
survive? Which will go down? We wait and see, and we’ll work to stay
together.

We will need to elect leaders who put the needs of the people above
their own greed. We need to immediately restructure mortgage loans for
those in jeopardy. We need to immediately regulate this renegade world
market and tax corporations and wealthy individuals at the same rate as
during the New Deal. We need to create jobs. We need to change the
alarming rate of incarcerating our own citizens.

We need to fix the decaying infrastructure of our country. We need to
address global warming and unsafe environments. We need to give a sense
of hope to our children. But mostly, we need to change a culture that
tolerates and even admires the concentration of private wealth into one
that honors the dignity of all humans, rich and poor.

We will have to count on each other to get through this treacherous time, to keep the spirit of goodness alive.