by David Cooper

Created on: August 21, 2007

As we moved into the new century, the conservatives gained control of the White House and the Congress. The president and his top advisors from the corporate world began to dismantle industry regulation and appoint supporters and former industry executives to run government institutions. It was record amounts of corporate money that funded their campaigns.

The conservatives immediately began giving huge tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest among us based on the laissez-faire economic theory. At the same time they oppose unions and minimum wage legislation. These economic policies and their trade policies have created huge challenges that an ever shrinking middle class is finding harder and harder to overcome.

They started a war based on arguably faulty intelligence if not completely fabricated intelligence for reasons that had nothing to do with what the American people were told. A compliant, or more accurately, a complicit press followed without question, repeating simplistic, nationalistic slogans in their headlines.

After the worst natural disaster to strike the Gulf Coast, the conservatives failed to provide Federal relief and showed a complete lack of interest ignoring the plight of the victims.

These policies are not only responsible for the erosion of wages moving the middle class, in increasing numbers, into poverty but are creating a liquidity crisis in the banking industry as well as more people are carrying more and more debt they can not afford. The answer of the conservatives is to bail out the corporations, once again leaving the middle class to fend for themselves.

It is the policies of the conservatives that are putting the country on a collision course with disaster. But under the advice of shrewd political operatives and close advisors all issues are determined based on political gain rather than on sound policy.

This may sound like a tired critique of the George W. Bush administration we are all painfully familiar with by now. It is not. All of the events above occurred in the early part of the 20th century; just before the Great Depression. History matters. The cause and effect of the policies implemented by our elected officials should be continuously scrutinized through the lens of historical hindsight.

[Paragraph one: Mark Alonso Hanna raised a record amount of corporate dollars to elect McKinley, a rubber stamp president to promote the corporate agenda. Hanna was McKinley's Karl Rove.]

[Paragraph three: There was an expansionist movement during the McKinley administration that wanted war with Spain to acquire Spanish territories. It is not clear what sunk the USS Maine that started the Spanish American war. The press created the slogan, "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain," repeated over and over. The pejorative used to describe the press of the time was "yellow journalism."]

[Paragraph four: The Great Mississippi Flood was the largest natural disaster until Hurricane Katrina.]

[Paragraph five: The government did all the wrong things prior to the Great Depression with regards to the banking crisis. The comparison is the melt down in the sub-prime mortgage industry. The fed today is repeating the mistakes of the past by bailing out the industry that created all the bad loans.]

[With the exception of Woodrow Wilson, and possibly Theodor Roosevelt, the conservatives held the White House from 1893 until Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1933.]

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