Flat

[Daveparts still]

Flat
By David Glenn Cox


A government that cannot maintain the wellbeing of its people cannot be called anything but a failure. The American people have lost over seven trillion dollars in national wealth. But sleep well for the banks which lost most of this wealth for them have all been reimbursed. Seven trillion is a lot of bass boats and new cars; more importantly is was college tuition for Junior and retirement seed money for Gramps and Mawmaw, and their government has left them flat.

The failure of the healthcare debate illustrates the failure of a government and its institutions. Senators and Representatives knuckle under and assume the position in the face of a naked corporate power play. Into the face of a people in need they spit the ejaculate and then look up at their corporate masters for approval. The President, either because he wanted to share the glory or the infamy, has left the issue in the hands of the corporate parliament. He has tried to stay above the fray which is what either a king or a what a great equivocator would be expected to do.

Nature abhors a vacuum and in politics weakness of political leadership encourages your enemies and undercuts your friends. There is only victory or defeat as moderation is doomed to failure. It is impossible to attack the enemy with a lance under one arm and peace treaty under the other. Your enemies will swear fidelity and willingness to negotiate while laughing at you under their breath. You will trade strength for a paper success, a success that will leave corporate power in place, the medical industry still in power, and those most in need flat.

The reactionary right is encouraged with tea baggers and Pillsbury shoot offs while the left is abandoned. President Obama campaigned as a progressive but has thus far governed as a moderate Republican causing a polarization of conventional political thought. This is metastasizing itself as a cancer to both the left and right as the only point on which they agree is that both political parties have abandoned the people and left them flat.

There is something very wrong going on in this country. This is why Obama’s message of nondescript change so resonated with the public. He must now deliver on it or he will discover that he holds no patent on that policy. Fear is the main ingredient in desperation and millions of Americans are becoming desperate. With falling wages and so few new jobs the clock is ticking and it is only a matter of time. While China drifts towards recession, who will fund our new debts? The new government in Japan signals its intentions to turn inward which could leave the American government with few friends in Asia, and Obama could find himself left flat.

After the 1929 stock market crash the market began to recover, but it was only the illusion of recovery. It was created by the consolidation of losses and the picking up of bargains. People saw a recovery on the horizon because they were desperate to see a recovery. They saw smoke and sails on the horizon because they couldn’t fathom the actual dark reality. The government of that day proposed a two billion-dollar fund to make loans to banks and industries and still the slide continued. The plan gave the money to industry when the problem was under-consumption not underproduction; feeding the rich to help the poor left the bulk of a struggling people flat.

Not since czarist Russia has there been such a clueless political class. That remark is intended as a full spectrum comment, from Commie pink to Fascist blood red. Who will figure it out first? Calls for state secession, calls for armed rebellion, and slitting of wrists are not the answers but symptoms of the problem. These are signs of a people going mad with worry and with doubt and with fear, the legitimate and ever-present fear of a people who are being left flat.

Holed up behind the bastions in Washington the political class tries to score points instead of solving problems. Attempting to negotiate a cure for a hole in the bottom of the boat with maybe a little more glue or one more nail, but it's just too difficult and too expensive to decide so let's go home and we’ll talk some more next month. Hoping in the meantime to cause a fumble.

If you superimpose the Dow average from 2007 to 2009 over the average from 1929 to 1932 some of the bumps are different but the actual line is identical. What are the plans? Where is the rescue? How is the public option going to help the homeless or the millions now unemployed? However noble the plans, in the face of our current economic problems this is only adjusting deck chairs on the Titanic. Healthcare reform must be a component in an overall rescue plan for the economy just as Social Security was a part of the New Deal. Social Security without the New Deal would have fallen flat.

In Sacramento, California, Mayor Kevin Johnson has declared war on the homeless, offering neither adequate shelter nor succor for the economic refugees. He instead sends in the cops to confiscate their tents and the meager belongings of the least among us. He worries that a homeless camp in downtown Sacramento might give his city a negative image, and like for most politicians, image is everything. He is surely destined for higher office as his solution is to try and make the problem disappear rather than to try and solve it.

Unlike his national counterparts he is unable to use the media to distract his audience, and so the question becomes what will the national political circus do when those left behind, abandoned and outsourced, grow hungry and begin to make their presence felt. They are open season for the gifted orator or the demagogue or for anyone offering to pick them up after the conventional parties have left them flat.

What George W. Bush did to the Republican Party is exactly what a failed Obama term is likely to do to the Democrats. Obama idolizes Lincoln, a president who caused as much consternation to his own party as he did to the others, and at the end of his first term Lincoln was reviled by all. Lincoln saw as his destiny saving the Union and bruised egos and hurt feelings and party politics didn’t mean a damned thing as Lincoln had a goal on which he would not compromise.

Obama is far too an intelligent man to think that his goal is any less. We cannot keep going in the direction that we are going. Free trade, outsourcing, tax cuts for the rich have robbed us of all but a meager existence. It is time for the President to set forth a clear vision of the future and not just a piecemeal approach of a little here or a little there. We need a vision not unlike the New Deal with a host of solutions to solve the host of problems. A failure to do so leaves the republic in jeopardy and leaves the people flat.

“In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.”
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

[DemReadingDU]

1. There is something very wrong going on in this country.

and throughout the world. It's been the most wild best party for the last 30 years, and now we all are going to suffer the worst hangover ever. Afterwards, then we can try to fix all the wrongs.