Fix the Economy by Ensuring Human Needs

Fix the Economy by Ensuring Human Needs
By Gil Villagrán, MSW

As a hyper-partisan Congress and broadcast pundits blather incessantly about the economic meltdown and the plutocrats on Wall Street who perpetrated it by their fraudulent financial manipulations grab billions from taxpayers, working class Americans are losing their jobs, homes, health care, and hope for any secure retirement. Our nation faces diminished prospects for our children, grandchildren and generations to come. 
Though some honest elected and appointed officials seek solutions to the pathetic state of our nation, financial corporate vultures insidiously circle the meltdown with keen eyes on evermore opportunities to transmogrify defaulting home loans and 401K retirement and other investment accounts in free fall into opportunities for their multimillion dollar bonuses.

It’s the Iron Law of Unregulated (read: lawless) Capitalism: for every loser there is a winner. In fact, for thousands of losers, those losing their jobs, their homes, their retirement savings, their so-called prudent/safe/conservative investments in the stock market of American free enterprise, there are handfuls of winners who are winning BIG. These winners are not just the bonus recipients of AIG recently laid bare by media, exposing the lifestyles of these rich who did not want to be famous in their excess. No, the really big winners have been with us all along, called the Masters of the Universe, who's Wall Street "financial paper" exploits netted them millions per year, billions for really big players such are Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson. These Masters, so-called self-made billionaires, were the foxes let into the henhouse as Clinton's and George W. Bush's Treasury Secretaries, where they sharpened their expertise on how to turn the American economy into a never empty piggy bank for their Wall Street ruling class.

Yet the most obvious solution to the meltdown has been on our horizon all along: fix the economy by serving human needs. Rather than give billions to shore up defaulting banks that instead of lending to employers to get Americans working again, are actually buying other banks in Europe and Asia. 
We must spend our tax dollars on rebuilding our own civil society.


How? At the end of World War II, when most of Europe was devastated by five years of the most destructive war in history, our nation created the Marshall Plan to rebuild the infrastructure of European nations' transportation, water, sewage, and power generation systems.

Today America desperately needs its own Marshall Plan to rebuild our infrastructure which is in great disrepair, evidenced by preventable yearly disasters such as falling bridges, failing levees (remember New Orleans after Katrina?), and the shameful reality that we are the only developed nation on Earth without universal health care and preschool to graduate school education. What keeps America in such a state of disrepair and inequity? A Congress with too many mini-demagogues more interested in remaining "in the game" by serial re-elections financed by industry lobbyists, rather than serving the public by actually solving our nation's problems. What are your state and national representatives doing to fix our economy? Go ask them!