Imagine having a magic wand you can wave and make things
talk – things that tell you their stories in their own voices. And so, it
happens that a hurricane hits your town at which time you wave the magic wand
and ask the hurricane to tell you why it is destroying the town. Instead of
answering your question, the hurricane complains about the folks who are not
cleaning their town fast enough.
If you think this is a hurricane with gall the likes of
which no human can acquire, think again. Think because there is at least one
human that's endowed with this kind of gall. He is Karl Rove who tells you all
about his mentality in an article he wrote under the title: “The Messes Obama
Will Leave Behind” and the subtitle: “The list of unsolved problems is long and
growing – and that's not counting foreign policy.” It was published on April
30, 2015 in the Wall Street Journal.
The title suggests that America is currently plagued with a
multitude of problems that the Obama Administration will most likely not solve
but leave behind when its current mandate expires in a little more than a year
and a half. But when you read the body of the article, you realize that Rove is
talking about one problem only: an economy that is not recovering fast enough.
But you know that this is the economy which crashed as a
result of the hurricane that hit it toward the end of the George W. Bush
Presidency; the one in which Karl Rove served as “Bush's brain.” Thus, the
problems that Rove enumerates are those he left behind when, at that time, the
American economy experienced a financial crash like it never experienced
before, not even at the time of the Great Depression.
The trouble with Karl Rove is that he does not understand
economics. He is not aware that creating wealth and representing wealth are two
different things. The people that create wealth are those who produce goods and
those who use their skills to serve others. The totality of the goods and
services they create at the end of the day constitute the wealth of the nation.
On the other hand, all that wealth is represented by the
amount of money that the central bank (the Fed) prints and distributes among
the population, using a network of financial institutions to do so. The problem
has been that under the Bush/Rove Administration the network was corrupted in
two ways. First, the printed money did not go to the people that earned it; it
stayed mostly with the financial institutions that were supposed to distribute
it. And a great deal of it went to their cronies: the media moguls, the
international wheelers and dealers, the gamblers and the like.
Second, the Fed failed to do the job of restraining the
financial institutions that asked it to hand them more printed money than was
warranted by the size of the economy. The reality is that the people behind
those institutions were no longer doing business in America ; they were competing
against the moguls of overseas using the dollars they sucked from the American
public and the American Fed. One way they competed against the foreign moguls
was to dismantle America 's
industrial base and rebuild it in places where labor was cheap.
Unable to sustain this kind of financial anarchy much
longer, the American economy reacted as would a human being that has just been
kneecapped with a crowbar. It went down on its chattered knees – an event that
was literally played out by Henry Paulson who dropped to his knees in front of
Nancy Pelocy, begging her to pass the legislation that would save the day
before the entire American system implodes.
This being the economy that Barack Obama inherited from
George W. Bush and Karl Rove; he was able to bring it back to a reasonable
state of steadiness without panicking and without dropping to his knees. In the
end, it turned out that his performance was better than most economies of size
could accomplish during that time.
Thus, for Karl Rove to come now and attribute to the Obama
Administration the Bush failures, and attribute to the Republican House of
Congress the success of the Administration, is to continue playing the same
sort of political games that almost imploded the American system of governance.