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Economic Recovery in Review

Thursday 29 October 2009

by: Bill Moyers Journal  |  t r u t h o u t | Programming Note

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(Photo: Donald Clark / flickr)

Airtime: Friday, October 30, 2009, at 9:00 PM (EST) on PBS (check local listings here).

The Dow's up, but why are Main Street Americans still reeling from last year's economic collapse? With Americans still facing rising unemployment, foreclosures and declining property values, renowned economist James K. Galbraith speaks on whether we've averted another crisis and how to get help for the middle class. James K. Galbraith is the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. chair in government/business relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Galbraith has authored six books, most recently "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too." And, National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser talks about his mentor William F. Buckley Jr. and today's conservative movement.

  

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One of the most fateful

 Fri, 10/30/2009 - 06:56 — INTEGRAL TRANSFORMATION GROUP, INC. (not verified)
One of the most fateful error of our age is the belief that if there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, environmental sanity or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. If human vices such as greed or envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. The cultivation & expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war. The world recession and its ill effects was caused by "greed". Economic prosperity does not guarantee a great civilization. Rather, the discipline of building a great nation is what generates wealth and economic growth, and the foundation of which is a new paradigm centered on spirituality. By spirituality, it means pure acceptance that we are here on earth to serve, first God and then service to people. Central to service is our role of being stewards of this planet earth. BUDS MOLINA FERNANDO, Philippines

The government caused the

 Fri, 10/30/2009 - 14:28 — Anonymous (not verified)
The government caused the recession by making home mortgage qualification an entitlement instead of an earned benefit. Then they bailed out the financial organizations after the Carter-Clinton home mortgage entitlement program with taxpayer money, totally ignoring the taxpayers who were being pursued by the very institutions that were being bailed out with their tax money. The public now has no faith in the federal government when it comes to the economy. The best thing they could do is to get out of it. How about starting the process by taking back the shares of GM and Chrysler they gave to the unions and distributing them all proportionally to the individual taxpayers of record for 2008? Then we get our tax money back and bail out the auto makers at the same time.