The Republicans are already bragging about how they will take back the house and how that will allow them to have hearings on everybody and everything that the Democrats have touched. That would be a good thing if the object were to make sure the Democrats were running the country correctly but that’s not the reason the Right is looking forward to having this subpoena power. What they are really looking to do is create the same kind of gridlock that they accomplished during Clinton’s second term. That’s when they wasted four years of the country’s progress in order to try and show that Clinton and his people were corrupt. The only thing they proved was that he was horny and from later revelations across the board, it seems the same is true for most politicians.
But is that kind of grid-lock what the country needs right now? Is the only thing the Republicans have to offer another version of their current policy of “No”?
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Frustration with the economy is the leading element in the country’s current antipathy toward their government. This is as it should be. There is nothing more important to a family than being able to feed and house itself. Washington can’t ignore this frustration and they know it but so far they have not been able to solve the problem. The Republicans are claiming that Obama owns the problem and to a great extent they are right. He is the president and so he owns all the problems that the country faces. But he didn’t create the problem so he shouldn’t be blamed for its existence only for its continuity. The people who should be blamed for its existence are the same people who are now trying to block Obama’s efforts to solve the problem. Why, because they don’t want him to succeed… at anything. They don’t care how much the country suffers as long as Obama fails. This is the same situation that prevailed during Clinton’s second term. That led to Bush & Cheney getting into the White House for eight years of lies, inefficiency and general screw-ups.
The background is simple. Eight years of Bush policies promulgated two bad wars, unregulated chaos in banking, real estate and Wall Street, along with errant tax policies which led to economic collapse and mass unemployment. That’s what Obama found when he walked into the White House. On January 20th 2009 what had been Bush’s problem, became Bush’s legacy. It was now Obama’s problem and he set about to solve it… along with health care, which had been ignored by a list of previous presidents long enough to fill a page.
The problem of the economy had to be solved fast because some of the biggest pieces of the economy, many of which had created the collapse, were about to crash and burn, dragging the rest of the economy down with them. Bush had seen this coming and so had created Tarp but it was too little to late. Obama wanted to stop the bleeding, and the only way that seemed logical was to give transfusions
where they were most needed and so he pushed through the Stimulus package. The object was to accomplish two things. One to give industry and Wall Street a shot in the arm with funds that would keep them operating until they got their balance back. The second was to give individuals the same shot by supporting salaries for essential workers who would otherwise be laid off and by extending unemployment for those who lost their jobs. This worked but as soon as it passed, without the help of one Republican, the Republicans discovered the national debt, something they had ignored for the last eight years. They began screaming that we had to reduce it and that the only way to do that was to cut taxes and cut programs like the Stimulus. Of course when they are asked what programs should be cut they can never come up with an answer. That was proved on recent weekends when Cornyn, Sessions and Boehner all drew blanks when asked that specific question.
Of course at this point the Stimulus has worked. It hasn’t eliminated unemployment but it has certainly stopped its rise. Yes, it went higher than Obama thought it would but without the Stimulus it could have crashed to the 35% levels of the Great Depression. A good part of the Stimulus money has been paid back by Wall Street and its temporary injection indeed helped keep companies like AIG and Goldman Sachs and GM in business, so stopping the disaster bred by the Bush administration has not bankrupted the American people. But that still leaves the big problem: what to do about the economy.
Going back to the economy of 2008 is impossible. We were in a binge spending cycle but the binge has ended. Current policy wants to get people to start spending again but that is, I think, unrealistic. They have been terrified by the recession and are exhausted by the constant fluctuating predictions and arguments. Giving them tax breaks will not accomplish spending. Tax breaks will be used for savings and paying down personal debt so no matter what we do now consumption will stay low. That means that another way to stimulate the economy must be found. That way is employment, getting people off the dole and getting them back to work.
To do that we need a long-term strategy based on employment rather than consumption. Our infrastructure is in a shambles, our roads are falling apart, our bridges are falling down, our water is getting less and less potable, our power grid no longer supports the needs of the country, our energy is being created by the wrong fuels, our high speed rail is almost non-existent, our broadband is in desperate need of expansion and we need money for higher education and technical training to support all these services as well as blue collar workers to build them.
Regardless of what the Republicans contend, the Stimulus worked. It stopped the economic free fall and stabilized the economy. What it hasn’t done is help the economy recover. For that we need to invest in our infrastructure and the new technologies being created in the fight against global warming. The banks and Wall Street have the money to do that but instead of lending the Stimulus money they were given to create jobs and spur the economy, they sat on it and created outrageous bonuses for their employees, proving that they haven’t learned anything and are still nothing but a bunch of greedy slobs who desperately needed the recently passed regulations and more. Despite their self serving, thoughtless actions they and the Republicans were surprised and bent out of shape when Obama forced said regulations down their throats in hopes that they could be restrained from gambling away the country’s future.
So even though tax -payers dollars bailed out Wall Street and big industry they aren’t willing to help get the country’s workers back on the job. Banks won’t lend to small businesses, the biggest creators of jobs in the economy. Wall Street won’t back new industries that will create new employment and help solve the ecological problems that the world is facing because these big time entrepreneurs who are supposed to be leading our country’s recovery are wetting their cowardly pants and blaming it on not knowing what taxes they will have to pay in the coming months. This is pure BS. The difference between profit and loss is never taxes because you don’t pay taxes until you have profit. Taxes account for the difference between profit and huge profit and the greedy bastards of the business community refuse to be satisfied with a decent profit. They want a huge profit even if it means that others have to go without.
So where does that leave us? With the only solution that the Republican’s say they hate. Government spending. A new Stimulus package, which will fund infrastructure programs that will create instant work. A new Stimulus package will fund industries that will build the products of the 22nd century, products that will hasten the elimination of the use of fossil fuels, empower the expansion of broadband and allow for a huge expansion of mass transit. By fueling these industries we will be accomplishing three things. We will be creating work for our unemployed, we will be creating industries that can supply not only us, but the whole world, and thereby increasing our share of worldwide business and we will be helping to thwart the impending global warming disaster. I know, the shamans of the Right say there is no global warming happening but the real scientists assure us that there is. Who ya gonna believe the scientists or the faith mongers?
So what’s the big problem? What is holding us back from pursuing this path? If we don’t build solar panels the rest of the world will and instead of manufacturing windmills in Colorado someone will be manufacturing them in Beijing and that goes for every single product of the new economy, and all the jobs will be filled by people who don’t live in the United States. But still the Republicans, who never worried about increasing the debt when they were in office, are screaming about bankrupting our children’s future. If we don’t spend the money now, if we don’t buy our way out of this economic disaster created by the Republicans, our children won’t have a future to bankrupt. We need to spend money now and if the private sector won’t finance this expansion of new technology the government has to. I’m not saying the government has to go into the technology business. What I’m saying is that the government has to finance companies that will.
How would that work? The same way the banks are not making it work now. The government would give the low interest loans that the banks aren’t, to businesses that want to create manufacturing jobs in new technologies. Sure some of them will fail. Some business always fail but many of them will succeed, just like in real life and those that do succeed will make up for the losses of those that fail just the way they do in any successful economy. But the money has to come from someplace and that place will have to be in the form of a second Stimulus package. Many people are against this, terrified of increasing the deficit, but if increasing the deficit now when interest rates are as low as they are ever going to get, helps create jobs then that is an increase that will pay itself back. There will never be a better time for the government to borrow money than now.
So who is against this, who is telling people to be afraid of increasing the deficit despite the advantages of doing it now? The Republicans. Why? Because the Republicans have no agenda of their own, no solution to the unemployment problem they created, and the only hope they have of ever getting elected anything more than dog catcher is to have Obama fail. Of course if Obama fails, the country fails but they don’t care about that. They don’t care about the guy who lost his job, feeding his kids. They have and have had only one objective since Barak Obama took office. They want Barak Obama to fail. That is the most disgustingly un-American position any group of politicians have ever held in the history of the nation..