The Failed Prophet by Senator Bernie Sanders

[Joanne98]

As Wall Street collapses, so does Milton Friedman’s legacy.

The late Milton Friedman was a provocative teacher at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. He got his students involved with their studies. He was a gifted writer and communicator. And he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to economics.

But Friedman was more than an academic. He was an advocate for, and popularizer of, a radical right-wing economic ideology.

In today’s political and social reality, the University of Chicago’s establishment of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute (in the building that has long housed the renowned Chicago Theological Seminary) will not be perceived as simply a sign of appreciation for a prominent former faculty member. Instead, by founding such an institution, the university signals that it is aligning itself with a reactionary political program supported by the wealthiest, greediest and most powerful people and institutions in this country. Friedman’s ideology caused enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and around the world. It is not an ideology that a great institution like the University of Chicago should be seeking to advance.

Those who defend the Milton Friedman Institute will assure us that it will encourage a free and open exchange of ideas. That may very well be true. But if the goal of the institute is simply to do non-ideological research, there are a lot of names that one could come up with other than that of the most polemical and ideological economist of his time.

My suspicions only deepen when I read on the University of Chicago website that donors who contribute more than $1 million to the project will have a special relationship with the Institute as members of a Milton Friedman Society and will be expected to facilitate the institution’s “connections to leaders in business and government.”

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4193/the_failed_prophet

[antigop]

1. Wow! Go get 'em, Bernie. n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

2. OMG. Thank you, Bernie.

[Peace Patriot]

3. This is the kind of fascist crap of which FUTURE Bush juntas are made--

billionaires using millions of dollars stolen from us--in tax cuts, in deregulation, in war profiteering, in outsourcing, in reduced services to the poor and middle class, in massive bailouts for the rich, and sometimes in outright criminal theft--and plowing our money into "think tanks" to devise the next decade's stolen elections, massive theft of our state and federal coffers, fascist media "talking points," shreddings of the Constitution, "doctrines" of preemptive war, laws by presidential fiat and the next set of attacks on "New Deal" programs and civil and human rights.

If the Obama administration is able to turn thngs around, whatever we gain in improved government revenues, retired debt, new economic activity, and good government, they will come in and loot. And it will be all "thought out" in the "think tank" of the Milton Friedman Institution of Bad Ideas.

Hasn't the "Chicago School of Economics" inflicted enough horror on the world? Chicago has to add a second horror show? But maybe Chicago likes its gangster reputation. That's what Friedmanism and Neo-Con-ism is--gangs of torturers and murderers roaming the world, killing entire generations of leftist politicians in some countries, draining all wealth out of lands already afflicted with vast poverty, stealing other peoples' resources--oil, gas, minerals, water--pulling the very food out children's mouths and slitting their parents throats if they object, and, perhaps worst of all, killing every progressive gain of the poor, killing hope, killing the future, and, if that was not enough, killing the planet--with deforestation, pesticides and pollution.

There should be crime scene tape around that building--and if the theologians in the next door seminary have any conscience, they will protest and persist in protest until the name and the mission of this Institution of Future Horrors are changed.

[underpants]

4. Kicking for later read

:hi: