thanks Rik
EXCERPT: (because the whole list would make you ill):
But then I realized what a fool I was being. Then I saw that I needed to stop whining so much. I realized it was time to buck up for Barry.
The president said, "Everybody out there has to be thinking about what's at stake in this election". And he's right. And so I did. I thought about what's at stake, and I realized that this is a really important election after all. I realized that things could be one helluva lot worse next year if we progressives don't stop whining and if we don't start bucking up, and fast!
Think about it.
We could end up with a government that instantly responds to the five-alarm fire of economic meltdown by bailing out the very Wall Street banks that created the mess, one hundred cents on the dollar, while doing next to nothing for the other ninety-eight percent of us in the middle and working classes.
We could have a government that is populated by proteges of Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs wonder boy whose enthusiasm for deregulation while he was Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary has now crashed the global economy.
We could have a government that refuses to seriously reform the deregulatory policies that got us into this crisis. Maybe it would pass a "reform" bill, but you can bet the law wouldn't actually deal with key threats like derivatives. Nor would it separate ordinary banking from market speculation. And it would probably leave us with banks that are more gargantuan than ever, and more 'too big to fail' than they were in 2008.
We could have a government that doesn't spend any political capital whatsoever on creating temporary jobs to keep people afloat during a crisis, and doesn't even care much about extending their unemployment benefits during the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
We could have a government that runs a mortgage relief program supposedly designed to keep people from losing their houses, but instead leaves sinking homeowners worse off than if they hadn't applied at all.
We could have a government that continues the Bush era legislation that actually gives tax incentives to corporations picking up their manufacturing plants and all the jobs associated with them and exporting everything overseas.
If we don't buck up, we could wind up having the kind of person George W. Bush might pick for running the Pentagon as our Secretary of Defense.
We could find ourselves mired endlessly in some Asian war whose purpose can't even be identified. Heck, if you thought Bush was bad, the next government might go so far as to triple the number of troops in Afghanistan.
Or it might dramatically increase the number of Predator drone attacks being launched against our "ally", Pakistan.
We might get a government that still won't close down Guantánamo.
We could wind up with a government that does nothing (other than to continue to send billions in support) when Israel builds illegal settlements in the West Bank that further damage the prospects for peace in the Middle East.
We might have a government that continues Bush's policy of claiming the "state secrets" privilege in cases involving torture, rendition, or other violations of Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties even worse than those (see below), asking courts to dismiss them without even hearing any evidence.
We could have a government in which the president actually claims the right to assassinate American citizens.
We could have a government that won't do anything about ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", continuing to dismiss from the military patriots willing to die for their country whose only crime is having a minority sexual preference.
If we're not careful, the next government might actually go to federal court, asking that suits against Clinton's anti-gay "Defense of Marriage" act be blocked from even being heard.
We could have a government that sics the FBI on non-violent anti-war peace organizations, searching their premises and seizing their property on the basis of ridiculous trumped-up charges of abetting terrorism.
We might get ourselves a government that continues to increase "defense" spending, even though the US spends more on its paranoia budget right now than all the other countries of the world combined – all 200 of them – and even though we are currently in a massive fiscal crisis due to egregious over-spending.
We could have a government that would appoint a fiscal commission stacked with appointees focused on denying benefits to American seniors in the name of balancing the budget. This new government might even appoint a lunatic like Alan Simpson as the commission's co-chair, even though he has publicly described Social Security as "a milk cow with 310 million tits".
We could have a government that immediately fires any civil servants who are attacked by Glenn Beck or similar monsters, even when they completely fabricate allegations against those people.
No comments:
Post a Comment