Posts Tagged ‘Speaker’
Blame the Market, Everybody’s Doing It
I think it’s safe to say that our country is going through some very challenging times. As if a war half way across the world isn’t enough, we have now been hit with a recession touted as being the worst since the Great Depression. While the US has weathered other recessions that could arguably be considered worse than the current one, none of those were near as threatening. The US has never been in such terrible financial shape while going through such a crisis. This is not to say that we were in good shape at the time of the Great Depression. However, our current national debt, which makes the debt of the early 20th century seem like chump change, is threatening this country in ways never before experienced.
There is a lot of finger pointing going on, mainly by our politicians who don’t want blame to fall on their shoulders. The government’s main culprit thus far has been the greed of corporate executives. Our situation has transformed into another blame game where the free market is destined to lose. The strategy of big government during recessions is to blame capitalism in order to gain support for more governmental regulations. If the market gets better, the politicians cheer the effectiveness of the new regulations. However, if the market should go deeper into recession, the government claims it is because not enough regulations were instituted. Do you see how this is a tad bit unfair to capitalism? How will the free market ever get a chance under these unjust critiques?
Anybody claiming the free market caused this crisis should seriously reconsider. The US is not a free market economy. We haven’t had a free market since the Federal Reserve (a.k.a. the Fed) was established in 1913. A free market cannot exist in a society where interest rates are controlled by a central bank.
Greed, War, and their Visit to Ole Miss
The world is too astonishing for me sometimes. I usually end up with my hands being thrown in the air screaming, “They did WHAT!!” The most recent news with the ability to elicit such a response from me is that Colin Powell was picked to speak on our campus about, “A World of Opportunity and Challenge” as part of Black History Month. He has also been touted as being, “an extraordinary human being who has reached the top ranks of military, diplomatic and political circles,” by the Honors College dean. It’s a nice attempt to characterize the extremely expensive guest speaker as better than he actually is, but don’t be fooled.
In order to grasp the horrid picture I have of Colin Powell, I must first describe the events in which he played a major role. According to Richard Cummings and his article Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a meeting occurred in November of 2002 between Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security advisor, and Bruce Jackson where they discussed how to get American citizens complacent with a needless war that they were about to start. Hadley reportedly told Jackson, “they are going to war and are struggling with a rationale,” to justify it. So Jackson’s job was to do just that, create a reason to have innocent American soldiers and Iraqis murdered.
