Dean Baker: The Numbers Game

Dean Baker, economist and Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has an opinion piece in the Huffington Post that is a clarion call about the economic "numbers game" that has been run by the architects of the new Gilded Age.

He asks the basic question:

If this disaster was preventable and we know how to get out of it, why didn't our leaders try to stop it before it happened? Why don't they take the steps necessary now to get the economy moving again?

The answer is obvious:

The answer to both these questions is simple; the politicians work for someone else. On Election Day, the politicians might need our votes, but they won't get to be serious contenders unless they've gotten the campaign contributions of the big money crew. And the moneyed elite has been using its control of the political process to ensure that an ever larger share of the economy's output is redistributed upward in their direction.

He goes on to explain that over the past 30-years, corporations and the wealthy, have bought politicians at the local, state, and federal levels who have crafted legislation that promotes inequality, reduces safety networks for middle class and poor citizens, and marginalizes the earning capacity of the middle class via globalization.

He explains:

For example, they wrote trade rules that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of the bulk of the U.S. workforce by placing manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in China and other developing countries. This had nothing to do with a belief in "free trade." They did not try to subject lawyers, doctors or other highly paid workers to the same sort of international competition. They only wanted international competition to put downward pressure on the wages of workers in the middle and bottom, not those at the top.

This elite has instituted a system of corporate governance that allows top executives to pilfer companies at the expense of their shareholders and its workers. Top executives are overseen only by a board of directors who owe their hugely overpaid sinecures to the executives they supervise. And of course the Wall Street barons themselves are given a license to gamble with the implicit promise that government picks up their tab when they lose.

As this blog has written (here, here, here, and here), neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are interested in providing a sustainable framework, where the majority of Americans can get a quality education, pursue meaningful life long employment, and engage in building a dream of a more equitable and fair world.  Instead, both parties pursue a scorched-earth policy against the majority of the country's citizens, by providing greater benefits to the top 1% of the population, while pushing the remaining middle-class into perpetual debt and eventual pauperdom.

Unfortunately, the propagandists keep the masses well agitated and entertained through truly mind-warping concepts like:

• Did Bill and Hillary kill Vince Foster?
• The OJ case.
• 9-11 was a conspiracy committed by the Bush junta!
• Was Barack Obama born in the USA?
• The rise of Barack's Socialist/Fascist/African dystopia!
• Obama is a Muslim terrorist sympathizer!
• Anything said by Sarah Palin
• Anna Nicole's drugged corpse
• Kate and Jon's idiotic children and their ridiculous lives.
• Octo-Mom
• Michael Jackson's court cases, pedophile accusations, and finally his drugged corpse

Only when the masses realize how they have been completely sold out by the politicans and their own citizens, will anything meaningful begin to occur.