My piece on the UAW and Bush’s stuttering admission that the free market is not, in fact, infallible is up at Global Comment.
But Friday morning, Bush announced a $13.4 billion loan to the auto companies from the TARP funds—better known as the $700 billion bailout. The loans are for a three-year period, but will have to be paid back immediately if the companies do not show themselves to be “viable” by March 31.
Lucky for the auto companies, there’ll be a new president by then.
Bush said, “Government has a responsibility to safeguard the broader health and stability of our economy. If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation for the automakers.”
I don’t know about you, but I have to smirk at least a bit each time a Republican has to admit that the free market doesn’t always do the right thing. I also giggle each time Bush has to use the word “responsibility.”
While we’ve been watching the Republic Windows and Doors protest, the kind of successful workers’ action we haven’t seen in years, some of us have been reminded of what solidarity actually means. Politicians from Barack Obama to Rod Blagojevich stood up for the workers, and workers around the country demonstrated outside of Bank of America offices and threatened boycotts until the bank gave in and paid the workers their compensation.
Yet the UAW appears to get nothing but scorn from America.
as always, read on.
Yeah, catchy title, eh?
I started to think about this stuff the other day when talking with my mother about Michael Phelps. See, I love to see people excel at things. I like athletic competition of many sorts because I like to see what people can do when they really put themselves to it, and yes, I believe that some of that is innate–I don’t think that everyone could be Michael Phelps. Or Georges St. Pierre. Or Serena Williams.
I tend towards socialism in my personal philosophy not because I want to see everyone exactly the same–the “vanilla world” argument or the Harrison Bergeron one, depending on which angle you come from–but precisely because I think humans are such beautiful, individual things and I think that with the basics provided for, we could all be free to develop in whichever ways we wanted to. I want to see everyone able to reach their potential. And I think that if we didn’t have to worry so much about making a living, we’d be able to.
Octo has an excellent post up at Feministe about being a capitalist. I agree with many of her points, and of course disagree on the basic one–I’m not a capitalist. I’m in graduate school in part because I fled the retail world because I hated working for nothing but money. I made good money for a while. I could be running the entire business by now, and I could own my house and be well on my way to financial security, but I gave it up for a job I love (as a grad assistant) learning about things I love, writing all the time, and living in a city I love (while cheating on my city with THE city, NY).
I beat myself up constantly because I’m 28 and I’m already interviewing people who are younger than I am and already have what I want in life. I wish that I hadn’t made decisions based around money. I wish I’d been able to just hole up somewhere and write until I was good enough at it to make a living at it.
And I’m privileged. Most people wouldn’t have even been able to make the choices I did. Capitalism tends to tell us that if we’re good enough, we’ll get what we deserve. It just takes work, right? Yeah, George W. Bush is a good enough argument for that system being completely broken (though one could say that Barack Obama is a good argument for that system working, but we’ll see how November turns out, eh?).
There’s been plenty of talk about the Chinese athletes and the Chinese system leading up to the Beijing games, and hell, we can even look back at the parable that is the Miracle on Ice (posited of course as the victory of Us over Them in the Cold War, because the Soviet hockey team was supported by the state and the US team was a rag-tag bunch of athletes who hated each other–and a bunch of privileged college kids). Read this mostly-related post about the relative ages of women gymnasts, too.
This post isn’t really anything but me thinking out loud. It doesn’t offer any coherent arguments, so please don’t even try to poke holes in it. I just think…governments would serve us better providing things that we need, rather than trying to control what we do and say, and certainly better than blathering about what other governments shouldn’t do.
