Annihilation Recession

Washington works only when both sides keep the same secrets, ignore each other's excesses, and join together to save the fiction that American democracy has become.

In the recent recession, $9 trillion dollars of household wealth was lost. That money secured the hopes and future of everyday American families. They were flim-flammed by a market whose promise of diversity was a mask for its broad greed. Within two years, those firms were again reaping record profits. Yet America's families, hoping for unemployment extensions, were depressed deeper than their housing values (the majority of which were upside down), and watching their nest egg shrink to a widow's mite.

Now Washington tells us government spending is the real problem. Never mentioned is the blow to families, the elimination of jobs, wealth and savings, and home values. In a macabre twist, Democrats now fight to save safety net programs, having failed to save American families from the scavenges of business institutions that take away their personal margins of safety. Default will not only increase costs but increase profits; Republicans know that banks and institutions will benefit from the instant rise in interest rates they blame government. But government did not cause a recession, put millions out of work, turn housing values on their head, and laugh all the way to the bank pockets flush with public money.

The reality is neither side has the real interests of the people at the center of the agenda; both are working to preserve power. But the Republicans are willing to gain it by annihililating the system and scorning the sacrifice of families already at wit's end as to how to survive a country whose logic is backward and whose forward steps are propelled by greed. They attack the government as a straw figure of burden while enabling those who made off with the keys to the public treasure chest.