- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
If you note the footnotes to the present crisis, all the economic forecasters from Barney Frank to Hank Paulson (from Frank to Hank ... a C&W song) are predicting a market and economic resurgence in, oh, late 2009 or 2010.
This is what you call optimism without a factual basis. Others call it faith. So I'd love to see the plan, as John Lennon once sang.
Perhaps there is another analysis, and that is that the present model is broken. Both Parties refuse to look at this. A debt-based economy is no longer possible when debt grows too large. And that is where we are at. Making things, and not just consuming things, will have to become our model. And it will take YEARS to rebuild the productive infrastructure in the U.S., even on a capitalist basis. We've been running on debt since the productive economy was began to be destroyed under Reagan. The damage done - by global warming, the wars, the oil peak, the debt bubble economy - is too great to expect a 'normal' recovery.
Of course, happy talk works because people want to believe. "I do believe, I DO believe, I DO Believe" as the Lion said in The Wizard of Oz.
