Don’t Blame Yourself for the Economy. Blame Bush and His Corporate Cronies

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/11/30/dont-blame-yourself-for-the-economy-blame-bush-and-his-corporate-cronies/

by Tula Connell, Nov 30, 2007

There has been so much bad news about the economy in the past few days, it’s hard to know where to start. But amid the piles of data, two things are clear: Corporations are getting the assistance they need to deal with the nation’s financial crises—and working families are left to fend for themselves.

Big banks got another helping hand from the Bush administration this week when the Federal Reserve announced it would provide them $8 billion in low-interest loans. They also got a longer time period than usual to pay back the loans.

Meanwhile, a small handful of home owners faced with foreclosure—often because they took out subprime loans whose ramifications were not explained to them—are getting some assistance from their mortgage lenders. But this scattershot approach does nothing to help the millions of families who face foreclosure or who will in coming months. No comprehensive Bush administration assistance here.

So, no surprise that four in 10 members of the public surveyed last month by a USA Today/Gallup Poll say they expect a recession in the coming year—and that poll was taken a full month before the latest economic news. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers agrees the odds favor a recession. This week, the Consumer Confidence Index showed consumer confidence has sunk from 95.2 to 87.3—the fourth monthly slide.

The effects of Bush economic mismanagement have taken a long time to register because of a confusing paradox: The economy, that amorphous entity underpinning our national health, keeps growing. So, like the good “pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps” Americans that we are, we’ve tended to blame ourselves if we can’t pay the mortgage every month because our health care costs are so high or if we file for bankruptcy because we’ve lost jobs that pay well and can only find work that pays little and offers even less in affordable health care or retirement benefits.

But the facts show otherwise. The economy can be growing overall, while dramatically unequal distribution of that growth means that most individuals or families are struggling to make ends meet. The structural soundness of the nation’s economy is crumbling, and when we fall through the cracks, something bigger is at work than an individual’s inability to balance a checkbook.

FULL story at link.

...I'm grateful someone is finally writing about it