IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORKING CLASS
You can categorize the population of the United States in lots of ways. You can divide us by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by sexual orientation, by martial status, by religious affiliation and so on. But one thing the most of us share is that we are working class. Economics matter. I hope that Democratic candidates will not focus so much on "identity politics" that they lose sight of the working class. This article by E. J. Dionne is at www.washingtonpost.com:
Still, there will be inexorable pressure on both candidates to use identity politics for their own purposes. Gender solidarity was important to Clinton's campaign-saving victory in New Hampshire, and it could help her again. African American support will be valuable to Obama, especially in the Democrats' South Carolina
But the long term is another matter. To build a majority this fall and make history, both candidates would need a lot of help from a group with its own reasons to be discontented: the white working class.
"Working class" seems an antique term, but the people it describes still exist, more now in the service industries than in manufacturing. Demographers often use education levels as a surrogate for class position, and the past three decades have not been kind to Americans who are not college graduates.
BAD ECONOMICS 101
The Bush administration and Republican administrations in general demonstrate how not to run an economy. We've seen trickle down economics in various forms in all Republican administrations. In the Reagan and two Bush administrations we've seen trickle down economics on steroids. The country has been transformed from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation. We've seen our manufacturing sector mostly disassembled and sent abroad. We've seen a growing middle class under attack and starting to disappear. We've seen stability in our financial sector undermined. This article by Larry Beinhart is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The idea under which Bushenomics was sold is this:
The rich are the investor class.
If the rich have more money, they will invest more.
Their investments will create more business.
Those businesses will create more wealth, thus improving everyone's lives and making the nation stronger. They will also create new and better jobs.
Whether or not the people who say such things truly believe them, I cannot say. But that's their pitch, and the media certainly seems to buy it, as do most of the establishment economists.
A more realistic -- and less idealistic -- view of Bushenomics is that the Bush administration and its cronies came at the economy with the attitude of oilmen.
They inherited a vastly wealth country.
They looked at it like the oil under the Alaskan wilderness. They craved to pump it out, turn it into cash and grab as much of that cash as possible.
Wherever possible, they literally sold off the assets. This was called privatization. Our biggest asset -- in terms of size -- is, of course, our defense establishment. With privatization, one dollar out of every three for direct military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan goes to private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. So when someone says, "Support the troops!" with budget appropriations, they should really yell, "Two-thirds support to the troops! One third support to Halliburton, et al.!"
