Morning Roosevelt

At bailout-happy General Electric’s cable channel, MSNBC, all the multi-millionaires were baying for auto bailouts this morning, at the expense of the average Joe. The other Joe, Scarborough, was in his Bill O’Reilly mode, shouting down the lone dissenter against GM welfare. She called him a socialist, but that’s not right. Joe is a corporate statist, advocating right-wing central planning and government-business combines. Joe even held out as an example to follow FDR’s totalitarian wartime economy. He defended mercantilism, and praised Pat Buchanan’s long advocacy of it. Pat hailed bailouts as “economic patriotism,” i.e. an economy run for the benefit of the American state and its special interests. He even pulled out the old chestnut about Reagan being a free trader, but wanting government intervention to bailout Harley Davidson for “patriotic” reasons. Of course, Reagan was not a free trader any more than he was a cutter of government. He just talked that way. Say, who were Harley’s investment bankers? Oh, and Jeffrey Sachs was there — the power elite’s former fixer against laissez-faire in Russia and Eastern Europe after the socialist collapse. He too defended the bailout. Say Jeff, any of those firms your clients?

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7:27 am on November 17, 2008