In the past month, the administration of George W. Bush has finally shown its hidden hand.
Following upon seven years of skillful manipulation of market conditions and mind-conditioning of the American people into a consumer economy based on illusions, the economic collapse which had begun in the prior year really took off. Such a collapse would not have been possible without non-productive international military engagements (non-productive in terms of the economy as energy prices rose steeply rather than fell as the US tried to control the Middle East) and the staggering debt accumulated to accomplish this.
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and now AIG (accompanied by the intentional depreciation of Lehman Brothers and Merrill-Lynch) have folded their capitalist tents.
Their free-market, capitalist places have been replaced with new control and ownership. Billions upon billions of our dollars spent to take over these institutions and place them in the hands of government. All justified by saying that a lack of such take-overs would cause too much turmoil in the life of the average American.
It would appear that this has been the Bush agenda for his entire term. To use the needs of the average person as the justification to nationalize and socialize the key banking industries of this country.
His administration's socializing in the past month makes prior eras in France and Italy look like a poor dress rehearsals. While those countries nationalized infrastructure but left the investment and banking industries independent, Bush's socialism strikes at the heart of the capitalist economic system by nationalizing (or destroying) investment, banking, and insurance giants.
One of the most cunning of Bush's ingenious methodologies was his seeming support for a privatization of the Social Security System, in which he argued that citizens would do better if they could freely invest their money in the various financial institutions that he has now nationalized. By promoting this ploy, he could lure the financial giants into thinking that they were the favored financial institutions of the future, but Bush had a larger plan.
Bush can now expect that history will deal more gently with him as his long-term plan is now evident and fulfilled. He will be able to be ranked with FDR and other great Presidents who used nationalization as a means to bring us closer to a working American socialism, one which will make the average citizen be the nation's real owner and not the elite, wealthy few.
And who knew that was Bush's great, grand, visionary agenda. I don't think he even knew himself.