The election of
Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate by Democratic voters in
Massachusetts sends President Obama a message. Voters perceive that Obama�s
administration has morphed into a Bush-Cheney government. Obama has reneged on
every promise he made, from ending wars, to closing Gitmo, to providing health
care for Americans, to curtailing the domestic police state, to putting the
interests of dispossessed Americans ahead of the interests of the rich
banksters who robbed Americans of their homes and pensions.
But what can Obama do other then spout more rhetoric?
The Democrats were destroyed as an independent party by jobs
offshoring and so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA. The effect of �globalism� has been to destroy the
industrial and manufacturing unions, thus leaving the Democrats without a power
base and source of funding.
Obama and the Democrats cannot be an opposition party,
because Democrats are as dependent as Republicans on corporate interest groups
for campaign funding.
The Democrats have to support war and the police state if
they want funding from the military/security complex. They have to make the
health care bill into a subsidy for private insurance if they want funding from
the insurance companies. They have to abandon the American people for the rich
banksters if they want funding from the financial lobby.
Now that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court have
overturned decades of U.S. law and given corporations the ability to buy every
American election, Democrats and Republicans can be nothing but pawns for a
plutocracy.
Most Americans are hard pressed, but the corporations have
only begun to milk them.
Wars are too profitable for the armaments industry to ever
end. High unemployment is now a permanent state in the U.S., thus coercing
job seekers into military service.
The security industry profits from the police state and
regards civil liberties as a hindrance to profits. By announcing that he
intends to continue the Bush policy of indefinite detention, a violation of the
Constitution and U.S. legal procedures, Obama has granted the Democratic
Party�s consent to the Republicans� destruction of habeas corpus, the main
bastion of individual liberty.
Jobs offshoring is too profitable for U.S. corporations for
Obama to be able to save American jobs and restart the broken economy.
Americans are being squeezed out of health care not only by
the loss of job benefits, but also by corporate takeover of medical practice
from physicians. Today medical doctors are wage slaves of corporate
health providers that leverage doctors by turning them into supervisors of
physician assistants, lower-paid people without medical degrees who perform the
services that doctors once provided. As neither doctor nor physician assistant
has any independence, there is no one to represent the patient�s care against
the profits of the corporation.
Even environmental concerns are being used to create �cap and trade� rights to buy and sell
the ability to pollute. Wall Street is licking its lips over a new source of
leveraged derivative instruments.
The American public cannot even get reliable information
about their plight as the �MainStream
Media� has been concentrated into a few corporate hands that do not
permit independent reporting. The media is as dependent on corporate money as
are politicians.
How can President Obama restart an economy that has been
moved offshore? Millions of manufacturing jobs are gone, as are millions of
jobs for college graduates, such as software engineering, information technology
-- indeed, any intellectual skill the product of which can be conveyed via the
Internet. Even those intellectual skill jobs that do remain in the U.S. are
filled increasingly by foreigners brought in
on work visas.
The wipeout of blue collar and middle class job growth has
stopped the growth of American incomes except, of course, those of the super
rich. For a decade, American consumers substituted increased personal
indebtedness for income growth. In order to maintain and to increase their
consumption, Americans consumed their assets, such as their home equity.
Americans reached their maximum debt load just as the real estate
bubble burst and just as the banksters highly leveraged, toxic financial
instruments brought down the stock market and the values of Americans�
pensions.
The enormous damage done to the U.S. economy by jobs
offshoring, work visas, and financial deregulation cannot be offset by
government stimulus plans, which expand the debt burdens that are crushing
Americans. The federal government�s massive budget deficits and the Federal
Reserve�s easy monetary policy are setting the stage for an inflationary
depression to follow a deflationary depression.
The Federal Reserve chairman says not to worry about
inflation, because the Fed can take the money back out of the economy. But can
the Fed take the money out without contracting the economy?
The Federal Reserve says not to worry about financing the
federal budget deficit. Banksters are buying the Treasury bonds with the
proceeds from their sales of their toxic derivatives to the Fed.
So what is happening to the Federal Reserve�s balance
sheet? And when will the Fed have no recourse but to print new money in
order to finance the federal deficit?
How long can the dollar retain its reserve currency role in
such circumstances, and how does the U.S. pay for its imports when this role is
lost?
Don�t look to Washington for answers to these questions.
Paul
Craig Roberts [email
him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President
Reagan�s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has
held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair,
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University,
and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was
awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the
author of Supply-Side
Revolution : An Insider�s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown:
Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M.
Stratton of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the
Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for
Peter Brimelow�s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent
epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.