Back to '08--and How We Got There

I noticed a fairly inane comment--where else but on Facebook?--saying we needed to have someone who would get us back to where we were in 2008, meaning of course that Obama should go. Tempted to respond--always a reaction that should be repressed re Facebook--I might have noted: sure, tax breaks for the rich and the corporations, who either spend or invest their cash abroad, moving jobs there simultaneously. And oh yes, the market tanked--and it was Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, who led the bailout, yes supported by the Dems in Congress, but it truly was a rare bipartisan effort. We are left as it happened with banks still too big to fail, which means they can continue to invest anywhere but here and then be rescued by Uncle. And there were no jobs created in those years. That was the GOP legacy.

The continuing story, however, is far more insidious. We have been told we can't afford to spend on what we need to spend on, for among other things to get the country out of the recession, which for all too many people off Wall Street, has not ended yet. Our governments are starved because the hidden persuaders--not the ad men but the rich men--convince people that too much is spent and get them to vote for dumbass stuff lile Proposition 13 and when revenue drops, they then claim there's no money for anything--except to give them more tax breaks. The media do their bidding--wittingly and unwittingly--by giving all this attention to the carefully-created phony movement called the Tea Party. They try to make their prediction of a Republican landslide come true.

It does look like the Dems are finally waking up. Maybe it won't be too late--like 1968, when we got Nixon for our sins. Nixon, though, really was an outsider. He had a few rich backers but he really did annoy the Establishment. And we thought it couldn't get worse than him. Reagan served the purpose of the hidden persuaders by convincing every yokel that government was the problem. The Bushes just did the bidding of the rich. And then they finally got the Supreme Court majority--far more dangerous now than when FDR tried to take on the Four Horsemen of Reaction--to allow the hidden persuaders to stay hidden, so no one knows who's sponsoring the total b.s. you see all over the airwaves and the phony news stories, etc etc.

I suppose I find it amazing--even after all this--that people don't respond with outrage to the GOP defense of tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. Even Bill Gates's father campaigns to restore the estate tax as a fair measure of what those folks owe the rest of us. I guess that old lottery trick--refined on a million midways of carnival America--that you will be the big winner so don't vote to take anything away from the big boys--still works. The marks are still there to be taken--on a national scale now.