Babies, America's in big-time money trouble.How'd we get here?
In a word, I give you -- tah-dah! ... "de-reg-u-la-tion"!
De-reg-u-la-tion is a fancy Latin word from "reg," meaning "rules," and "de" meaning "to pitch out on the noggin."
So de-reg-u-la-tion means "pitching rules out on their noggins." But the rules for the rich only. The other 95% of us still have to follow *our* rules.
When you hear the word "deregulation," a picture should pop into your brain: tumbling down a sewer drain in a city street gutter, is a steady stream of rubies, diamonds and emeralds.
Glittering, blood reds, sparkling deep blues, hypnotic night greens -- all gone, night-night.
Each one of these jewels are rules that have kept us Americans safe from Rich people who've sucked up so much money they can whomp anyone or anything -- and get away with it scot-free.
It's like we're all playing on a big monopoly board. Ninety-five percent of us have to pay up when we land on the Rich dude's Park Place. But let the Rich dude land on our Marvin Gardens -- and he gets to sail on by without forking over a dime.
The dude who started deregulation was Ronald Reagan. Every morning Ronnie woke up, yawned, brushed his teeth, and then pitched a rule out the window -- a rule that kept the rich and their big companies and corporations from whomping anyone or anything anytime they wanted.
By the time Ron waltzed outa the White House, hardly any Rich-rules were left.
What was left was pitched out over the last eight years by Dubya Bush.
Deregulation also means The Old Wild West, when dudes in black hats rode into town on a regular basis, guns blazing, shot everyone up, and rode off with everyone's money. Oh sure, eventually the towns hired a few sheriffs. But for a long time, the sheriffs were big-time outnumbered by the black hats.
And if the black hats lost that sack of money (maybe they dropped it into the Snake River), they'd just ride back into town and take whatever was left: the last sacks of corn meal, all the peoples' clothes, etcetera.
And that's where we are now, babies. The rich dropped their money in the Snake River, and have come sobbing, saying they need the clothes off our backs.
They say if we don't fork over our clothes, the whole world is going up in flames.
Unfortunately, this time they probably ARE telling the truth.
Like a chain of dominos, our banks could fall. And then, whatever money you had in banks or the stock market would go Poof. Without money, how would you get food, heat or your weekly copy of Newsweek magazine? And if the banks fall, would all that cash you stashed under your mattress even be any good any more?
So the upshot is, I think we need to fork over our clothes. We the American people need to hold our noses, bail out these Big Dorky Dudes, and get it over with.
Not for the Dorky Dudes, but for ourselves. So our way of life, like a house of cards, doesn't fall in on our heads.
But -- and this is a Big But -- after giving them our clothes, we need to rope in the Rich, hog tie them, and jump around on them a little. Bring back all those Rich rules that Reagan and Bush pitched out the window. Toss a few new ones into the mix.
In other words, if and when we get outa this mess, we need to stomp all over de-reg-u-la-tion. Bring back those diamond, ruby and emerald rules that kept us safe from the wild-wolf rich. We need to stuff those wild dogs back into the bottle. Make 'em say "Pretty Please" before they can come out.
Remember too, though, it's our wild-dog rich who've made us all "rich" -- compared to most of the rest of the world, anyway. So we might not want to throw away that bottle we've stuffed 'em into. We do, however, need to teach them how to jump, sit and beg on command.
And we can't ever again let them run around without leashes and muzzles.
My dog Duncan says he approves this message. Arf, arf.
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thnx to Idreamfoot for the foto; go HERE to see more.
well said!
ReplyDeleteHowever, I heard two economists on the BBC World Service saying that the current mess was because of "too much" regulation and that the long term answer was further de-regulation. I've always thought of myself as reasonably intelligent but I could not follow their logic at all.
Go figure
Well, brian, I haven't really heard any U.S. economists saying that the *current* mess was caused by anything but too little regulation -- of the home mortgage industry mostly.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be general agreement here that it's massive numbers of home foreclosures that began the whole shebang.
Used to be a bunch of rules about how much income you had to have before you could get a home loan. Those rules were tossed out. Everyone got loans. But soon, people who couldn't afford their loans defaulted. So billions of dollars in mortgage payments that should have gone into our banks, suddenly *weren't* going into our banks.
There's more to the picture, of course, but the above is a very central part of it.
I'm sure that more deregulation would help Wall Street make more money. There's no question about that. But I think what many economists tend to forget is the rest of us. Like true YAJites, they're prone to thinking in black and white, and in straight lines.
We Goddess people on the other hand are used to thinking in circles, spirals, shades of nuance, and webs. Everything's interconnected. We the people are playing Monopoly on the same board as Wall Street. If Wall Street gets to play with fewer rules than the rest of us, the rest of us suffer.
Over the past 20 years, tons of safety rules have been relaxed here for companies making everything from medicine and food to toys and ceiling tiles. Of course this means the companies can get richer. But it also means that we the people are gettting sicker faster and more often.