Email of the Day:
Unfortunately
We Are ALL one Banana Peel Away.
No Matter what our Current Situation is Today!
My 87 Y O Father has declared this a Depression, I believe him
Scar-Ree
I posted this also at Democracy Cell Project and Richard Bell has weighed in:
It is hard to know what to do under the nasty circumstances we find
ourselves in. On the one hand, the argument that we should just stand aside
and let the economy crater is a brutal argument. Millions of people are
already losing their homes, jobs, and health insurance, and things may get
worse. But that's the hard-core "let the market decide" approach that the
House Republicans adopted the other day.
I'm convinced that it is possible, given the right circumstances, to use
govt spending to stimulate a sour economy. But it's not at all clear to me
whether Obama's stimulus is big enough, or whether any stimulus could be
big enough, given each day's new revelations of the fiscal madness which
our country's leaders have allowed to happen.
I'd like to see the whole kit and kaboddle kicked out of their offices and
high paying jobs, stripped of all of their wealth and worldy goods. The
fact that the Wall Street crowd went ahead and awarded themselves billions
of dollars in bonuses after last year boggers the imagination. These people
are incapable of learning even under the most extreme conditions.
The problem here is that almost the entire decision-making structure of our
society, indeed of the entire world decision-making apparatus, is complicit
in the economic disaster we now face. The bankers, the insurance companies,
the financial advisors, the economic professors and the universities who
employ them, the accountants, every federal and
state legislator, all of the elected executives at the federal and state
level, the relevant cabinet officers....
There are hundreds of thousands of
people who have demonstrated that they are completely unfit for public
service, or for any kind of work at all, who ought to all be fired and
sentenced to work, if they work at all, at minimum wage jobs for the rest
of their miserable lives.
But it's not going to happen. That's the conventional wisdom. We're going
to let all of these jerks stay in place, keep giving themselves bonuses,
and never ever even offering an apology for having fucked up the world so
completely.
The student of history must interrupt here: there are times when the
conventional wisdom is wrong. Not because the people who create the
conventional wisdom in order to protect their privileged positions in
society decide that they've been mistaken. No, because the masses of people
find it in themselves to defy CW and throw the bums out, nonviolently or
violently.
It is axiomatic that "no one," that is no one in the ruling class, ever
anticipates or predicts such uprising. How could they? The entire society
is structured to prevent such things from happening, from the soft power of
commercials and propaganda to the iron fist of the police and the military.
I have no more of a crystal ball about what's going to happen than you do.
The Obama stimulus package may be enough to pull us out of the precipitous
slide we're in now.
But if not, then we're entering territory we have been in before, most
recently in the first years of the Depression, but about which our schools
tell us little. I saw a film snippet the other day of the U.S. Army being
unleashed on the "bonus marchers" who had come to Washington in 1932
looking for help. A young army officer named Eisenhower led the assault,
which involved terrorizing the bonus marcher's encampment along DC's
Anacostia River, and burning down or otherwise destroying the structures
the marchers had built.
Are you feeling at all angry?
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