Why is this 2008-2012 financial crisis worse than 1929 and the great crash that lead to the 1929-1939 depression?

"Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urged Congress this morning to authorize a $700 billion bailout of struggling financial institutions. Although the congressional leadership has indicated its willingness to get onboard with the plan, rank-and-file lawmakers from both parties are balking at what's been called the largest bailout in U.S. history."

Well, 1929 was peacetime. All previous depressions that had occurred approximately every generation from 1769-1921 were not during wartime. This financial collapse has come in the midst of a war. We are waging now a two front war. Wars that we are not even trying to pay for. Previous President G. H. W. Bush had the right word for what is son this President practices --when he said in the 1980s certain ideas then about government spending amounted to-- "voodoo economics."

We have today a runaway executive government, an ineffective Congress, and a Supreme Court that is divided and filled with pre-industrial mythology about the rule of law. Original intent doctrine is so off-point at this juncture that the Court has become ludicrous in decrying "judicial activism." Even the Bush administration ignored their decisions involving the rights of prisoners we had accused of terrorism and hold in the Guantanamo prison.

Much like 1929, the US now has lost the world's respect in international relations. If even the conservative writer Kevin Phillips can see the deeply misleading duplicity that Clinton and Bush administrations have engaged in, one can be sure that this Congress will not protect our money. Today the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve System and Congress may seriously fail to redraft this proposed legislation sufficiently well. If the proposed new commercial banking bill is not corrected by Congressional committee oversight, we will lose ever more money. Without strong Congressional investigative power, the new law's effectiveness will be diminished.

The prospect of losing even more money is demoralizing, but even more so is the current leadership in Washington. Jail is the logical place for people who take and then lose other people's money. Because that is -- we are told-- not an option today. This administration has asked the public to pay for corporate excess, with money that only Communist China can afford.

In 1929 there was a competent --though unpopular-- President who kept the nation at peace. He was an engineer, and a philanthropist, and had been Secretary of Commerce.

It is worse today than 1929, because we have a President who has never done anything except lose other people's money and repeatedly deceive the republic. Herbert Hoover was honest and accountable. I wish Bush and Cheney had half the intelligence and a quarter of the heart that Hoover did -- he helped feed Belgium with War Relief. Clearly these two men -- President Bush and Vice-president Cheney are not accountable men, they are clearly frauds, and Congress is afraid to say that they are indeed "naked emperors."

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"so the bailout is equal to roughly $2,300 per person."

The Iraq War "is estimated, so far," to have cost "about $600 billion."

 

Previous depressions

Recent recessions

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138

September 23, 2008.

J. Siry, 437 words