The front-runner merry-go-round for the Republican nomination continues. I try to pay it no attention but it's hard to do given the non-stop coverage by the news stations. All you can be sure of is that whoever the eventual candidate is he (or she) will be in favor of the same policies that got us into the ongoing financial crisis. After the New Hampshire debate, Robert Scheer posted an article on Truthdig and The Nation that notes "It’s as if the sound government regulation of the financial industry implemented in response to the Great Depression—not its polar opposite, the radical deregulation fueled by Republican free market zealots—was the source of our banking meltdown...It was precisely the legislation that their party pushed through Congress, and that Democrat Bill Clinton shamefully endorsed, that launched the era of unregulated credit default swaps and mortgage-based securities that came close to destroying the entire economy."
Meanwhile Congressional Republicans continue to ignore and oppose the American Jobs Act but rather push for funding cuts to government programs they oppose as the price of avoiding a government shutdown. Sickening behavior. We can only hope that they will be defeated in 2012 and that the fear mongering, outright lies, and election rigging and vote-denying proposals (identity cards, registration restrictions, changes to electoral college procedures) don't succeed this time around.
In the New Hampshire candidates' debate, as the WSJ reported, the candidates all strongly supported "the dismantling of government regulations drawn up over 40 years, using a candidates’ debate here to call for the scaling back or elimination of environmental, labor, financial and health-care rules." This is what a Republican victory would mean in 2012. But I think it would turn the clock back even further - maybe to pre-Depression conditions. In the words of George Santayana:
"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
No comments:
Post a Comment