Donald Kaul: Americans have loose screws

[marmar]

from the Des Moines Register:



My feeling continues to grow that somewhere deep in the psyche of the American people there is a screw loose.

We entered the 21st century as the most powerful nation on earth. There was nobody second. We had our problems, certainly, but we also had a budget surplus, a reasonable foreign policy, and a bright future.

At which point the American people, in their wisdom, elected an ignoramus from Texas to lead them. He led them into two wars, a crushing public debt, and a financial crisis of historic proportions.

Having been barely recovered from that folly, a good many people - Republicans, mainly - seem ready to do it again, Texas ignoramus and all. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110710/OPINION01/107100318/-1/gallery_array/Kaul-Americans-loose-screws

[XanaDUer]

1. I agree except

the election was handed to Bush. But the American psyche does seem to have been deteriorating since then.

[polichick]

2. We elected Al Gore - the Supreme Court installed its preferred corporate tool.

[pansypoo53219]

6. bush's annointment was inevitable-conservative power on the

supreme court to be PRESERVED!

[polichick]

8. True - democracy is really an illusion, a tale we tell about ourselves...

Funny how neither party has fought to put a uniform and verifiable voting system in place since 2000.

Actually, not so funny - more like tragically telling.

[GoCubsGo]

3. Thanks for that!

I love Donald Kaul's writings, and hadn't seen much of him over the past several years. Great to know he's still around and fighting the good fight.

[lunatica]

4. Bush was not elected. He was selected.

When arguments are based on lies that just nullifies the argument right there.

[marmar]

5. Even though Gore really won, the fact that it was that close, even in a period.....

...... of relative economic prosperity (illusory in retrospect, but that's a different discussion) indicates more than a few loose screws.

[hfojvt]

7. seems to me that Pravda has really kicked into high gear in those years

The media did not blame Bush for the deficit, for the wars, or for the economic collapse. They all just sort of happened despite that good hearted idiot's best intentions. Now the media is all doom, gloom, blame, blame, blame. Ooooh, woe, the economy. Oooh, woe, the deficit. Ooohhh, woe, the debt, why doesn't the President do something? Oooohhh, woe, gas prices.

It's now Obama's recession, in spite of the fact that 6 million jobs were lost before he had been in office for five months (including 3 million lost before he even took office, but such was the campaign that it sorta seemed like Obama was President in 2008 too, since the news was mostly about him, and the Bushler was shuffling off to a life of making millions from speeches.

See here, for a history of the job losses http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hfojvt/155

(although looking at it again, I see I mis-remembered. It was 7 million jobs in the first 5 months, including 3.56 million in 2008.)

[lapfog_1]

9. we didn't elect the ignoramus from Texas

but we did allow enough lies to be told about the legitimate winner so that enough low information voters voted for the ignoramus to allow the real evil doers to steal the election for the ignoramus. Democrats now have to win the Presidency by something like 10 percentage points (55 to 45) just to win by a small margin (the scale is weighted by rampant cheating on the other side to make 55-45 look more like 50-50.

After that... 9/11 9/11 9/11



Another thing that happened is that the geniuses on both sides (Dems and Repukes) decided almost 2 decades ago that we needed to allow other countries (so-called 3rd world) to "come up" in the world (to get some of what they were now seeing on TV as the western lifestyle) by outsourcing a lot of "industrial economy" jobs to those countries. The theory being that the US middle class would be "retrained" to be information technology workers for the new "information economy jobs" and that we could safely outsource those manual dirty industrial jobs to these 3rd world countries (China, India, Brazil, etc). That would allow us (the US, Europe, possibly some of the former Soviet Union) to have nice clean IT and finance jobs. Of course, what these idiots didn't take into account is that it was actually easier to outsource low level IT jobs (the ones that our blue collar workers were going to retrain for but never had a chance to keep) AND that there would be this "race to the bottom" for wages/workers. The race to the bottom also removed some of the consumer class that kept the whole ball of wax going... which was papered over by the fact that we had a housing bubble that allowed the US consumer to continue to pretend they hadn't lost all of those well paying manufacturing jobs and IT jobs to other countries. They were able to do this by refinancing their housed and using them as "credit cards" but with no way (except by sustaining the fast rising house prices) to pay for everything. When the housing bubble burst... oops... no more credit card, no consumer buying ( the Chinese and Indians did not replace the American consumers, even though they had the middle class former American jobs ). Recession / Depression results.

That was going to happen no matter who was in office (unless we stopped the outsourcing and instituted a *LOT* more controls on the greedy financial industry). Bush only made the problem a lot worse with the wars and the tax cuts. But our problem is NOT deficit spending or the debt. Our problem is that there has been a great reduction of middle class purchasing power in the WORLD (not just the US). No consumers equals no jobs. The race to the bottom is nearing completion.