What a motley crew of spineless, visionless dolts our political elites have turned out to be, from Boehner to Bachmann to Obama (three heads of the same vampire hydra).
Obama, each and every one of his aspiring Republican challengers, and the entire D.C. establishment are all humming the “Austerity” tune played by the Pied Pipers of Wall St.
The “too big to fail” banks we bailed out (to the tune of $20 trillion) now seek to break the middle class using the same weapons they’ve traditionally deployed in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond: debt, austerity, downward pressure on wages, and generally taking an axe to the public sector and all social spending (not to mention plundering natural resources for pennies on the dollar).
Unfortunately, none of our best and brightest political minds seem to have any familiarity whatsoever with ECONOMICS (outside of the “Shock Doctrine” variety).
They seem particularly oblivious to this moment’s historical precedent, the 1930s, failing to grasp the primary lesson of the Great Depression — namely, that America can’t SHRINK its way to growth, but can only INVEST its way to long-term recovery (which solves our revenue problem, down the road).
They also overlook the rather obvious lesson that conservative regulations for banks and a strong social “safety net” provided America with 50 years of widely shared economic prosperity — bookended, now, by decades of boom, bust, and bailouts (thanks to the deregulatory craze beginning in the 1980s).
If our so-called leaders, from the Tea Party “Right” to the Obama “Left,” weren’t a bunch of Wall St.-enamored rubes, then maybe ONE of them would be shouting from the rooftops that the urgent threat to our economy is NOT the deficit but CHRONIC UNEMPLOYMENT!
It’s time to tax the obscenely wealthy and SPEND: modernize our infrastructure; put millions to work; make America less dependent of foreign oil, and birth the new economy. (End the wars, for another no-brainer, including the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs.”)
But no — not an FDR in sight.