Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Why do they hate us?

Here's one reason.

He said it best...

I don't agree with Tom Friedman about many things (especially his favorable view of economic "globalism"), but I must admit he's a hell of a writer, with whom I agree on this point: Our national discourse has become ruinous of serious and effective democratic reflection. After a finely-pointed comparison to a similar condition in Israel some years ago, he concludes:

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.
I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

What bullshit!

Multiple signs of recovery? My ass. Job losses continue unabated, as do the hours of work and amount of pay. Income disparities are growing, not shrinking; gas prices are headed upward again, inflation is on the way and the value of the dollar is tanking.

Obama was sold a bill of goods by his Wall Street advisors that counseled unmonitored "trickle down" economics. The worst is still to come, brothers. This "recovery" is a chimera, a fake boom fueled by the government's infusion of funds into banks and big corporations, who are reporting big profits rather than trickling the money down into the hands of the people.

You heard it here first. Actually, not first. Seven-hundredth. We're in for years of ugly recession, and in the short term for another deadly bounce off the bottom.