Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

What is the point of electing a conservative president who will give big business everything they say they want to make massive profits at the expense of consumers, when they are just going to come calling on the federal government for a bailout when they fail anyway?

If giant financial investment firms and global insurance companies can’t stay in business and make a profit with the corporate welfare offered them by the likes of the Bush administration, isn’t it time to start searching for a different business model?

The Bush neo-conservatives gave them every tax break they asked for and allowed them to merge with each other at will over the past eight years without any government regulations or intervention from a Republicanized Justice Department.

Yet somehow, they managed to lose money anyway and are now asking to be bailed out by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of more than $900 billion!

Profits ‘Privatized,’ Corporate Losses ‘Socialized’?

For that amount of money, we could have provided free health care and a free college education to every man, woman and child in America. And we would be a smarter country for it.

Instead, the under-educated masses of people in this country are on the verge of electing another team of neo-conservatives to take over the White House, neither of whom know anything about economics or how to run a company or a government.

Let’s just go ahead and call a pig a pig. All the years of anti-intellectual liberal bashing by the corporate and Christian right in this country has now driven us completely over the edge of sanity. America is insane and needs a pill. Like Huey Lewis sang in the 1980s, maybe we need a “new drug.”

All the Budweiser and the Jack Daniels and the cocaine has taken its toll. Maybe it’s time to legalize marijuana. It may screw with your memory now and then, but at least it makes you think. And the taxes on the pot smoked by 50 million Americans might just eliminate the Bush deficit.

We are a country that simply does not think. We listen to the sound bites and vote our prejudices and we end up with dimwits like George W. Bush in the White House, just so we can feel like he is one of us, as dumb as us. And Sarah Palin fits that bill to a tee.

In a conversation with a certain college professor at the University of Alabama yesterday, we spoke of the state of American politics, and specifically the state of mind of the redneck voter.

The most-often-heard phrase from the brainwashed Republican crowd of late, since the nation’s conversation turned almost exclusively to the new political star with Tina Fey glasses who eats mooseburgers, is that “she is hot.” The phrase that follows is: “She gets my vote.”

And this professor made a good point.

“I want someone way smarter than I am to run things,” he said. “All the people I come into contact with just want some average Joe like them to be in charge. That’s insanity.”

Just a few weeks ago many in this same crowd were not so high on Senator John McCain, the fake “maverick” who has not exactly marched in lockstep with the Christian conservative agenda over the years. But now they are willing to vote for him because he picks a redneck woman who can hurl anti-intellectual, right-wing insults as well as Bush and his former brain, Karl Rove?

And there’s not one single news organization in this country willing to try and raise a red flag on all of this and say “enough corporate welfare is enough!”

Even Alexander Hamilton must be rolling over in his grave these days at the current definition of run-amok corporate capitalism that dominates the discussion.

The United States of America was not supposed to be a religious monarchy ruled by an unregulated oligarchy.

The idea that all people are created equal and should have an equal chance of finding happiness in this world does not jive with the idea that corporations and their CEO’s get all the benefits, while workers languish in poverty without health insurance.

The idea was to create a level playing field in a society of middle-class Americans. This land is not supposed to be a playground for the rich filled with peasants who can’t afford to buy gas for their pickup trucks.

So why do the rednecks with pickup trucks who can’t afford the gas still support this kind of government?

That is the big American mystery.

Perhaps we need a blue ribbon panel of psychiatrists and sociologists to diagnose the problem and propose a cure.

Or maybe the pharmaceutical industry, with all the tax breaks from Bush and company, should spend some of those billions we give them on developing a new “smart” drug.

We should test it first on the editors and publishers at the nation’s news outlets. If they sit by and let the dumbasses run the White House for another four or eight years, they will soon be asking for a government bailout themselves. Printing newspapers catering to people who don’t read cannot go on for a profit much longer.

If they want run-amok corporate capitalism, they should be allowed to fail and go out of business and to hell with the consequences.

Where is the political candidate who will stand up and say this? “What we need in this country is a welfare reform program for corporations.”

If Congress wants to do some good at this juncture, rather than granting the oil companies the right to destroy our beaches and the tourism industry with offshore drilling within three miles of the nation’s coastlines in a move that will do nothing to lower gas prices for years, if ever, they would be better off standing up against the corporations and for workers and “just say no” to more corporate welfare.

At the very least they should tie any federal bailout to a promise to slash the salaries of do-nothing corporate managers and raise the salaries of workers. Now that might actually help the economy out of this hole.

For all the talk about giving working families in this country tax breaks so they can “keep more of their money to spend,” what about supporting policies that would actually give people more money to spend?

Nah, that would just be socialism, eh?

And we don’t believe in that, do we?

Unless a Wall Street investment firm fails or an insurance company goes bankrupt. Then they are the first in line at the federal government welfare office.

I say let them eat cake.