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Nouriel Roubini shares my outrage at the Bush/McCain Corporate Welfare boondoggle.

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.

2005 Dodge Durango

On the heels of the Federal Bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Detroit automakers drove into Washington in their largest SUV’s pleading for Federal Loan guarantees in order to “transition” to more energy efficient fleets. This is nonsense and would be a government payoff for years of stupidity on the part of the managements of the Big Three automakers. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter believed that almost all businesses, no matter how strong they seem to be at a given moment, ultimately fail and almost always because they failed to innovate. He called this process Creative Destruction. To compare the management of Toyota and Chrysler over the past 15 years is to realize that Chrysler “deserves to die”. They brought their destruction on their own heads by spending more money on lobbyists to prevent the government from raising CAFE fuels standards than they did on R & D for efficient engines. As Schumpeter said, “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.” Toyota and Honda manufacture efficent cars in American factories employing American workers. What is it about Chrysler that makes it worthy of an American taxpayer bailout?

The ultimate exhaustion of the neoconservative philosophy that has ruled the Republican Party since the ascension of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is that it ended in building the greatest Corporate Welfare State in the history of this or any other Republic. By the time George Bush limps out of office we will have seen trillions of the tax payers money invested in propping up brain-dead bankers, automakers, airlines and military contractors.

If the American public and the press are unwilling to realize that the last 8 years of Republican rule was the greatest corporate raid on the treasury ever, then it will be as much the fault of the Democrats for their complicity and their refusal to make this the campaign issue, as it is the fault of McCain and Palin and their lobbyist managers who can’t wait for their turn at the public trough.