Letter 2 America for October 3, 2014

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Dear America,
English: President Obama had called on the two...

English: President Obama had called on the two former Presidents to help. During their public remarks in the Rose Garden, President Clinton had said about President Bush, 'I've already figured out how I can get him to do some things that he didn't sign on for.' Later, back in the Oval, President Bush is jokingly asking President Clinton what were those things he had in mind. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


I know that I'm repeating myself, but exclamation points keep getting added to the notion that President Obama--in spite of a reactionary, obstructive congress--has brought us from the brink of a disaster to relative economic health in less than six years.  The latest demonstration of my contention is the current unemployment rate, which is below 6% for the first time since June of the last year of George W. Bush's second term.  Given that we were losing as much as 750,000 jobs per month in the last months of Bush's second term and continuing into the first six months of President Obama's first term...given that the unemployment rate was as high as ten percent at one time early in Obama's first term...that is a remarkable comeback.  Add to that the fact that by consensus the Obama-Democratic stimulus package was what turned the tide and saved us from the abyss, you would think the American people would be thanking the Democrats and The President, but that is far from what is happening.  And now there's ISIL.

If George W. Bush had been in office when those heathens raised their collective ugly head, he would have put on his Texas ten gallon and we would have sent a hundred thousand men back to Iraq to start all over again.  But President Obama is trying to do what the first President Bush did and raise an army from the nations that are, and should be, truly involved in the fight.  We are providing air power to the cause, but there will not be American combat troops on the ground, and thus, this time there won't be names with dramatic music played after every news cast reminding the bereaved of their losses and the futility of fighting for our values in a part of the world that we truly don't understand prevailing values there are not like ours.  Again, you would think you would hear cheers in the streets because one of our leaders finally understands that we cannot bring American democracy to the rest of the world whether it wants it or not, but no.  That isn't what is happening.  What appears to be happening is that perhaps a majority of the American people are preparing to go to the polls in November and vote Republican, as if they are responsible for something good that has happened to the vast majority of us in the recent past.

The economic reports that have come out this month demonstrate a phenomenon that has been slowly undermining our economy and our way of life for three decades.  The rich are getting richer, and in fact, the wealthiest 3% of Americans now own more than 50% of the nations wealth, which might be tolerable but for the fact that such inequity in our society is eroding the quality of the lives of the rest of us while the richest of us resist paying more taxes even though they are paying only slightly more than the least they have paid in a century.  Wages stagnate month after month, year after year, and we Americans keep coming back for more of the same.  It is incomprehensible to me that so many people can be fooled all of the time.  So many people believe one of the conservative mantras that amounts to indictment of the 5 million unemployed Americans for their failure to go where the 1 million available jobs are.  So many people work their $15 per hour jobs and blame the Democrats when the reason that their individual economies are bad isn't that the nation isn't being led to recovery by our president, but rather that someone who owns them--almost like equity in that there aren't good jobs available to go to--is taking more than his share while they do all the work.  It might be comprehensible if the numbers I'm citing were made up, or they were matters of opinion, but they aren't.  They are reported at least once every month so everyone is reminded of them regularly, and the cause and effect relationship between and among those facts is not disputed except by vague Republican rebukes based on nothing but the theory that if you make the rich richer, it will trickle down on all of us despite the fact that we now have thirty years of proof that such is not the case.  For how long will the American electorate be satisfied with self-serving rhetoric that is plainly contrary to the facts of which we are all aware.  Ten million jobs have been created since President Obama took office, which is more in six and a half years than George Bush created in eight, and may approach the sixteen million created by the Clinton administration, which left Bush more than a one hundred billion dollar budget surplus, which he quickly turned into deficits run every year for his entire term of office.  Yet, the Republicans continue to hang deficit spending around President Obama's neck as if he didn't inherit it from his predecessor.

I believe, and I have said before, that the Republicans have hijacked the political discourse in the United States by claiming that they can't be wrong because they also claim to be on the moral high ground.  As to that moral high ground, we can, and we will, always have differences among us because we are not a monolithic nation, but as far as I am concerned, as long as our political system doesn't force someone else's values on me, I have no problem with those other people living by their values as long as they don't hurt me and I don't hurt them.  But as to the connection between moral systems and economic ones, there is obviously no morality in capitalism or in our financial institutions.  So once we get past the illusory claims of capitalism being synonymous with morality, we should be free to consider what is abundantly clear in the real world.  Our society is being stratified along lines drawn parallel to wealth quantification, and we will all be the losers if the trend goes much farther.  Our only remedy is through our political system, and our only recourse regarding what that system has done to us for decades is to change course and vote for other kinds of people.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on October 4, 2014 3:36 PM.

Letter 2 America for September 30, 2014 was the previous entry in this blog.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on October 4, 2014 3:36 PM.

Letter 2 America for September 30, 2014 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for October 7, 2014 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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