Barack Herbert Hoover ObamaSomebody on the left has to challenge Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. Another four years of Obama means four more years of bumping along the bottom in the Great Recession.
From today’s radio address:Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.Yep, the false government-family equivalence, the myth of expansionary austerity, and the confidence fairy, all in just two sentences.
Read this and this to see why he’s wrong. This is truly a tragedy: the great progressive hope (well, I did warn people) is falling all over himself to endorse right-wing economic fallacies.
Read Krugman's blog to stay on top of the slow self-strangulation of the US economy by Hooverbamanomics. People thought 1970-2010 were stagnant with children growing up not exceeding their parents economic situation (which caused a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing). That is nothing compared with what people will be saying in 10 or 20 years when children will be living 20% and 30% below the standard of living of their parents in a Republican-dominated banana republic where morals will be legislated by the religious right and the corporations and the ultra-rich will be partying wildly in a bash that will make the Roaring Twenties of the Great Gatsby generation, the last Gilded Era, look like teetotalers and pennypinchers.
2 comments:
Challenging Obama from the left means a repeat of 1980, when Kennedy did so to Jimmy Carter and gave us Ronald Reagan. Not that Kennedy was ever all that leftist, mind you.
We seem to forget the the 1929 crash came at the beginning of Herbert Hoover's administration, not at the end of it. The country slid into depression because he did nothing to stop it. He did everything, in fact that the Republicans are attempting now.
Roosevelt came along three and a half years later, and started to get us back on our feet, but then reneged on even more spending, and sent us back into a tailspin.
Our problem is that the left in this country lacks the courage of it's supposed convictions, and won't engage in the partisan warfare being fought with blitzkrieg tactics by the other party. It is also plagued with a lot of people who distract it from it's traditional agenda, fighting for the rights of working people. Until the Democrats grow up and realize everything is at stake here, not just a few favorite benefits programs, but every inch of progress that working people have fought and died for over the past 100 years.
The more I see of the "Liberal" Dems the more I realize Spiro Agnew was correct in what he said about them. They've been under an all out assault from the right for the past 40 years, and all they've been able to counter with is lovely sounding pieties to education and health care, as if they really cared about yours, so long as they and their kids have theirs.
All it takes to shut them up is two little words, "class" and "warfare," as if to remind them where their money is coming from, and how easily it could stop coming.
The left does not have the answers any more than the right does, it has proven to be as corruptible as anyone else in politics.
Tim:
When you say "The left does not have the answers any more than the right does, it has proven to be as corruptible as anyone else in politics" then I get disheartened. This is a very bleak, nihilistic assessment.
I prefer to think that the left-right divide is more a spectrum than a discrete them-versus-us split. I'm willing to admit there are a lot more "them" than "us", but if you say "a plague on both your houses" and stamp off in disgust you've left the field open to those you claim to despise.
Social changes is a Sisyphean task. Every generation must re-fight the old battles. There is no "final victory". Life is a continuous struggle.
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