It’s all only make believe.

It’s as if we’ve all signed an agreement to ignore reality. We’re ignoring the ever growing pile of evidence that points to the fact that our current economic troubles were not an unforeseeable bump in the road, but the inevitable result of decades of corruption on the part of our country’s elites.

We’ve been making believe that all of our problems are simply the result of the last eight years of republican rule and that redecorating the White House was going to ‘fix’ it.

The trouble is, our problems did not develop in just the last eight years, in reality they’ve been festering for at least the last thirty years and they are rooted in the almost total corruption of our financial elites and their almost complete ownership of our political class.

About half of us have been making believe that all we had to do was elect a democrat and pretty soon, everything would return to “normal”. The trouble with that is, what most of us, even those of us who think of ourselves as progressives would prefer to think that normal means those prosperous Clinton years, when we didn’t seem to have a care in the world and even those of us at the bottom of the economic pyramid were doing ok.

The trouble with that belief is that the prosperity of the Clinton years was for the most part an illusion that masked the fact that what we were enjoying was the up side of a bubble economy that inevitably would, and did, fail.

The other half of us, the one’s that don’t believe a democrat in the White House will fix everything, have an equally illusory belief that more tax-cuts and even less regulatory oversight is necessary if we are to get our economy moving again and return to “normal”.

The trouble is, none of us understands that the “normal” that we’ve come to accept, and that we’re longing to return to, is not normal at all.

In reality, the radical deregulation of our financial markets that has occurred at the behest of business leaders over the last thirty or so years has led to an increasingly dynamic cycle of boom and bust in our economy that we’ve pretty much decided to accept as “normal” even though it is anything but normal when compared to the fifty years of slow-growing, but widely-enjoyed prosperity that followed the imposition of much needed regulation on our economic markets in reaction to the collapse that was the Great Depression.

In reality, the ever-increasing reduction of taxes for the very rich has meant an ever-increasing burden for everyone else.

In the face of our confusions and frustrations, it would appear we’ve chosen to live in a world of make believe.

The republican politicians are making believe that the policies they’ve worked for so tirelessly for the last thirty years are not the obvious cause of our economy’s collapse and the looming extinction of our middle-class.

The republican voters are making believe they weren’t misled by politicians in the pockets of business interests, who preached fiscal responsibility and individual accountability while practicing piracy and depraved indifference.

The democratic politicians, including our president are making believe that frustrated with years of loosing up-hill battles with well-funded republicans, they didn’t abandon the interests of their historic constituencies, and sell-out to the same business interests who owned their republican opponents.

Finally, democratic voters exhilarated by their recent election victories, are making believe that our new president is not surrounded by, and in the control of, the same crooks that destroyed our economy, and are right now engaged in looting our treasury in a brazen show of unprecedented impunity.

We must stop making believe.

The people who are robbing us will not stop robbing us until we stop making believe that we are not being robbed, and our new president is not going to help us with this until we explain to him that we’ve stopped making believe, and we want him to stop making believe too.