Where We are- What We Should be doing

 

 

 

Well, the Republican pundits have stopped braying about how we should get off all the small stuff and get on the big job of creating jobs. They obviously felt that way during the election because Obama’s record on it is anything but sterling and they saw a chance to make a big score. Unfortunately they couldn’t let go of all those socially embarrassing little obsessions like gay marriage, illegal emigrants and abortion that made a majority of the country vote against them.

 

I agreed with what the Republicans wanted, but couldn’t bring themselves to do. We should have forgotten about the dog on the car, the birther nonsense, the Olympic gaff, the ass kissing in Israel and all then other little things that showed Romney as the inheritor of Bush and push on to the important issues this country will have to deal with in the next ten years.  We have massive unemployment, we have had it for four years and not much has been done about it. Those are facts. We have to stare them in the face and find out why and what can be done about them; so let’s get down to it.

 

If you are one of those Republicans who think that we should all forget about the havoc and chaos that George Bush and his neo-com cronies wreaked on this country, just because he is on permanent vacation, then you should stop reading now. The rest of this will, only piss you off.

 

When Obama campaigned, he promised us a lot of things that he hasn’t delivered but he thought that he was going to inherit a

normal country and instead, when he took the oath of office, he was faced with the second greatest depression in the history of the world.. It pushed aside a lot of stuff, maybe not all it should have, but let’s take a short historical look at the first great depression, just for balance.

 

The first great depression happened in 1929 and twelve years later, in 1941 we were still suffering the effects of it. Twelve years!  Roosevelt tried all kinds of stuff that Obama wanted to try like the Stimulus but he was a better politician and he inveigled and strong armed his policies into law and so we had the CCP and the WPA and all kinds of jobs programs in place that actually created the American highway system, most of our parks and many of our bridges, those same highways, parks and bridges that now, eighty years later are desperately in need of repair or replacing.

 

Then the war came along and the nation mobilized and those who normally wouldn’t care who starved, were strong-armed by Roosevelt into getting on the bandwagon. Henry Ford was a great example. A farsighted entrepreneur, who was also a racist and a bigot, but an accomplished businessman, Ford was already paying better than average wages to his factory workers. He did this, because as he stated, he wanted them to be able to afford the cars they were making. He fought the unions because he wanted no interference in how he ran own company, but Roosevelt brought him in for a personal fireside chat and explained how the American public would look on him and his cars if word got out that he was slowing down the manufacture of desperately needed tanks just because he didn’t want his workers to join a union. Ford saw the light, and so did all the other millionaire industrialists, and America went to war.

 

But full recovery took twelve years and we needed a war and the deaths of over a million American kids to really end it. Is that what we want now? Is that why Afghanistan is still going on? Is that why the Republican neo-coms are salivating over Iran, hoping desperately that they ignore Obama’s pleas for a containment of their nuclear program?

 

We are overt four years into our depression, not twelve and hopefully we will not engage in another war to try to solve it. I say hopefully because that will not be the solution this time. WWII was a different kind of war, fought a different way with hand made, non-high tech, grind ‘em out tools that encouraged the growth of labor and with a million more troops than we will ever deploy in any current war. All those people were working, earning salaries. That will never happen again. Now we must find new ways to solve the same kind of problem, and we have to do it now.

 

 

Our depression was created; by two unpaid for wars, by tax breaks for the rich and by housing and credit bubbles, which were seen by many but ignored by most. The housing bubble was easy. Value just kept going up and no one would, or wanted to believe that it would ever stop; this, despite warnings, from all over the economic world.

 

So how did it happen? Too many banks sold mortgages to, too many people who couldn’t afford them, even in that expanding market. Those people were destroyed when the value stopped rising. Then those same greedy bankers packaged the bad mortgages with a few good ones and sold them on the bond market to other banks and insurance companies. Then the criminal bastards sold their own securities short, undercutting the entire market and the goliaths began to crumble. And, thank you Eric Holder, not one single criminal prosecution.

 

Money tightened up, those who needed liquidity to continue their manufacturing closed up, people were out of work, without money to make purchases so the consumer market shut down and there was, no place for manufacturers to sell their goods. That’s where we are right now.

 

When Obama took office we were losing 750,000 jobs a month, the auto industry was on the brink of collapse and no one was lending money to anyone to create jobs.

 

In three and a half years Obama’s administration has changed that waterfall of job loss into a slow trickle of job growth. It’s not world shattering but it is positive as opposed to what was happening when George Bush walked out of the White House and returned to full time, instead of only part time vacation.

 

The big complaint is that Obama put other programs before job creation and that this schedule has hurt America.  That’s true, maybe. When he was campaigning, Obama obviously had certain things in mind that he wanted to accomplish; a bill to regulate the wild, criminal contortions of Wall Street, that had all but destroyed our economy, a universal health care bill, that everyone for 60 years had been trying to get done and finally when he realized what was going on, a Stimulus bill to spark the collapsing economy.

 

The only bill that was aimed at creating jobs was the Stimulus bill but it was far too little, even if it wasn’t too late. The problem with the Stimulus bill was that it didn’t do what it was supposed to do, mainly because it was underfunded. It should have been twice the $800 billion that it was, but Republicans blocked it, with the help of some short sighted Democrats until Obama reduced it down to a number too little to win. It did accomplish a lot. It saved the auto industry and thereby 1.3 million jobs. It paid extended unemployment insurance payments to those who had been thrown out of work with no chance of a new job on the horizon, it put additional monies into food stamps and it gave the states money to help pay for teachers, police and firemen who the Republicans didn’t seem to think were necessary to the national well being. What it didn’t do was create jobs in infrastructure rebuilding and the Right just can’t understand why. Hey guys, look at the numbers.

 

Obama did put together a jobs bill but it has been sitting in the Republican controlled house for over a year without even getting to the floor. To be fair, the Republicans have put together many jobs bills that have met the same fate in the Senate as Obama’s did in the House, but most if not all of those bills also included tax cuts for the rich, and what that has to do with job creation is contained only in Paul Ryan’s fantasy world.

 

So, four years into our depression we have made some small progress, nowhere near enough, but a start. It would have been a better start if the Republican’s had been a little more interested in helping the country and a little less interested in screwing Obama but we had already seen that during the Clinton years so why were we surprised? A WPA or a CCC would have been a great help but then you have to have two parties who want to help the country not just one.

 

The panic over what had not been accomplished in the first two years of Obama’s administration led to the after birth of the Tea Party and if they are successful, that will truly be the end of democracy, as we know it.