Hearing about the filthy, rat-infested conditions in the Peanut Corporation of America plants, first in Georgia and now also in Texas, has turned my stomach big time. I am on the verge of swearing off peanut-related products, which will be a major blow to the sales of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Where in the world were the regulators and inspectors?
Nowhere, that's where. Under the Dubya administration, the attitude about both business and banking was "we trust you to do the right thing." ["We don't trust everyday working citizens at all," but that's another story.--Ed.] The result? A nationwide salmonella scare that's more than just a scare--it has already caused nine deaths we know about.
Didn't anyone in the Dubya administration ever read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle? Apparently not. Either that, or they didn't take it seriously. Or they drew the wrong lesson from it. The lesson was not that there will always be isolated aberrant business owners and managers. The lesson was that absent sensible AND ENFORCED regulations, the general public was at risk from those whose only concern was making as much money as possible for themselves.
Yet the GOP is still pushing the same tired old agendas. I wonder whether any of the GOP's members listened openly and honestly to President Obama's speech last night at the annual Illinois Lincoln Day Dinner. It was a masterful essay, reminding us that nationwide problems require nationwide solutions, which Lincoln--the first Republican president--knew well. After all, he signed the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and the Act creating the transcontinental railroad . . . all while other matters threatened to suck up all his time and energy.
I guess it's too much to expect GOP die-hards to shift their attitudes even an iota, and that's a real shame. It is not too much to expect, however, that they get their facts straight. How anyone can claim, as some GOP members have, that FDR caused the Great Depression is inexcusable. The Great Depression started in October, 1929. FDR didn't take office until March, 1933. What made the Great Depression so horrible is that the president in office when it started, the Republican Herbert Hoover, insisted that economic downturns were normal and that the system would eventually right itself on its own. He did precisely NOTHING to help that process along. The upshot? An ever-worsening downward spiral of layoffs, lower sales, more layoffs and business closings, still lower sales, and so on, until eating even The Jungle's hot dogs containing human remains seemed preferable to starving.
Yet some GOP members in Congress now are claiming the current economic meltdown will right itself and we don't have to do anything.
Those who don't know--or who deny--history are doomed to repeat it. But why should those of us who know better be forced to be dragged down with and by them?
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On a related note: for anyone who still claims financial markets are rational, I have the ultimate proof that even those who say so know better. Marketplace, a very pro-business program aired on NPR, has on its web site an examination of how the Dow Jones and other markets have behaved over time on Friday the 13th.
If markets were truly rational, whether the day was Friday the 13th would not matter. Not one whit. So to recognize that superstitions affect the behavior of market traders is to recognize that markets are NOT, at some fundamental level, rational.
Yet in the next breath, the Marketplace toadies are extolling the virtues of Adam Smith's "invisible hand."
Puh-leez!
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