THE PRESENT DEBACLE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/14/08)

The seeds of George W. Bush's debacle can be laid at the feet of the Ronald Reagan who wanted to unleash corporations unfettered by government regulation on the American public. Unhappily, he succeeded with the result of an energy fiasco, a housing meltdown, a health crisis, and countless examples of corruption in corporate American and incompetence and corruption in the federal government. Ronald Reagan's genial, nice-guy façade masked a pitch-man for a ruthless, sociopathic corporate America whose only purpose is rapacious greed.

A prime example is ExxonMobil which has reaped unconscionable profits on escalating oil prices without investing in new and renewable sources of energy. The executives at ExxonMobil have done nothing but sit on their hands, watching the money roll in.

The argument that Ronald Reagan and the Republicans put forward was that American capitalism was thwarted by governmental regulation, and that if governmental regulations and oversight were relaxed, prosperity would result. The result was rapacious profits and the dismantling of industrial America.

A trust in corporate management was in part to blame. The theory was that if people successfully climbed the corporate ladder, they must by competent. Not so. The executives at the American automobile manufacturing companies have demonstrated an unbelievable incompetence, initially churning out automobiles of inferiority quality and then gas-guzzlers in the face of an oil shortage. Stupid City.

The fact is that corporate ladder-climbers achieve their success politically rather than by competence. Ronald Reagan's legacy was not unleashing old-fashioned American know-how, but old-fashioned American greed.