Our economy can't survive as it stands

In times of crisis the big shots will occasionally cut through the fog of lies and let slip nuggets of truth.

Remember when Alan Greenspan wrote that the Iraq war was really all about oil? The Right Wing shouted him down, but the cat was out of the bag.

Now Ben Bernacke tells us - finally - that the real cause of the Wall Street financial mess is "unbalanced trade patterns" by which he means the system of producing all our goods in China and selling them in America and paying for them with money borrowed in Japan and China. Squaring this circle requires the constant inflow of funds for lending not based on a balance of trade. It is this absurdity that led to the practice of selling debt instruments based on hot air and voodoo, and any fool could have told the "geniuses" in Washington that it could not last.

In fact, the Left has been screaming about this for almost two decades: see Bill Greider's great book, One World, Ready or Not, which came out back in the 1990s. The race to the bottom has knocked the bottom out of the economy, and everyone not in the pay of big business knew it would happen.

We now expect recovery to follow the borrowing of yet more billions and trillions.

The time has come to face the fact that we cannot survive as a society if we do not, ourselves, manufacture a large proportion of what we consume and sell to others to pay for what we buy from them.

If this requires tariffs and the end of outsourcing subsidies, then so be it.

If it means we must abolish NAFTA and the WTO, then so be it. We really must choose between the triumph of transnational corporations and the survival of our society, because we cannot have both. They are mutually contradictory.

Anthony Nelson

Rolling Meadows