Letters to the Editor
smartalec
Published Letters: 51 Editor's Choice: 4
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well...
[Read the article: Moody's lament: Our job is too hard]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Some day conservatives will recognize that a reasonably well-functioning economy is worth the price of ideological compromise. Until that day we are going to have crisis after crisis and government bailout after government bailout."
-- pwoxby
Thursday, January 10, 2008 03:50 PM
Much as it would be nice if this were true, it ignores the most significant part of our current reality -- a part that is not likely to change in the near future. The "conservatives" (scare quotes because they're not really, they just use conservative rhetoric to cloak their true identities, beliefs, and agendas) make out like bandits under the current system, and thus have no incentive to change their behavior. (See, economic analysis does have explanatory and predictive power!)
As long as the corporatocracy / kleptocracy currently holding all the levers of power -- the goverment, the employer/producers, the financial system, and the media -- continue to do so, there will be no change to a system by which they have done very, very well.
I'm surprised the thread has gone this long without that lovely phrase, "privatized profits, socialized costs," which is almost all we need to know to understand the current problems, and those yet to come.
That -- not any "conservative" "free market" system -- is what we have. So while it might be theoretically correct to say, "until that day...," the problem is that day will never come without radical change to the polity -- and radical change to the polity is very unlikely with the current distribution (read: lack thereof) of power.
And I don't see either a Pres Clinton or a Pres Obama doing anything about that either, do you?
(This also helps explain why the media utterly ignore Edwards. Ignoring him is doing much more damage to his prospects than attacking him would have. I never said the powers that be were stupid -- just evil.)
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can't laugh, can't cry
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I used to take some comfort from finding that I wasn't the only one thinking that there'd been a literal coup, and that there was a corporate junta in control of our country. But with the way this election's playing out -- with the media and "our" own politicians colluding in the takeover (or rather, the leveraged buyout, with our children's children's incomes as the lever) of our economy, our military, our freedoms, and our futures, there's no comfort to be found in any validation that it's all too real.
I had a friend in the 80s who defended his voting for Ray-gun on the grounds that it would hasten the revolution. Maybe we really do need literal blood in the streets before Americans wake up to what's being done to us.
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For crying out loud
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Listen to yourselves for one freaking minute -- this one will be too easy for the Rethugs to beat; that one's the one the Rethugs want to run against. Do you let other people make your decisions for you in every other aspect of your lives as well? If so, go to your bank right now and wire me $1,000. Do it now, or I'll call you a defeatocrat on the TeeVee.
Don't you get it? They don't hate Hillary because she's Hillary, or Obama because he's Obama. They'll hate and slime anyone we nominate because they're the one we nominate. They have no choice; they clearly have absolutely nothing on which to run but hate and fear of the Other. They have utterly failed in every aspect of their control of all three branches of the gov't, and everyone this side of a lobotomy knows that to be true, including themselves. So of course all they have to peddle is lies, slime, division, discord, distrust, disdain, and deceit.
Remember all those polls that showed that many of the voters who pulled the lever for W and Cheney believed that they held positions and favored poicies that were the direct opposite of what they actually supported? That's why they can't run on anything but manufactured fears and complete fabrications; nobody other than the top-5% of wealth-owners would ever vote for them otherwise. That's also why we get Orwellian-named "Clear Skies" and "PATRIOT Acts" -- they can't win if they don't lie.
This is really very simple: they've been demonstrably, clearly, inescapably, and proveably wrong on almost everything over the last seven years, and we've been right about almost everything. But how the hell do we expect to elect leaders who recognize this to be true, and have plans and policies based on these uncontestable realities, if we don't act as if we believe it ourselves?
If we don't -- all of us -- start picking candidates that we actually want to win (wotta concept!), instead of ridiculous and counterproductive criteria such as who we think is going to piss off the reichwingers the least, when it should by now be abundantly clear that whomever we nominate will be the one they hate the most *because* they're whom we nominate, then we'll deserve just what we get. And after seven years of this devastation, letting it go on for even one more minute is a luxury that far too many of us -- in the US and the rest of the world -- cannot afford.