The title of this post should say it all, but I doubt that Americans will learn their lessons for long. The most we can hope for is that they at least have gotten tired enough of them to throw them out of office for at least a couple of terms. But I seriously doubt they will vote them out of office for much longer than that. Not the presidency anyway.
It's not all the people's faults, actually, the Democrats have a way of adopting some of the stupidest, most asinine policies you can imagine, and then wondering why the average American gets sick of them and they therefore lose election after election.
And the Republicans come along and play on the fears that the Democrats have in many ways failed to address at best, and at worse, have unintentionally created and/or compounded. And so, the Democratic Party, the party who fought and won two World Wars, as well as a regional European war, without a single American life being lost, has the reputation as the party that is weak on national defense, as the party who seems to care more for our standing within the International Community than they do America's independance and national sovereignty insofar as it's own laws and internal affairs are concerned. The party who cares more about the rights of criminals than the rights of victims, the party that wants to enact strident, unneccesary and intrusive gun control laws, the party that wants to respect to the point of kowtowing to every minority religion even at the point of seeming to marginalize Christianity. The paryt that wants to support gay marriage or at least civil unions while keeping intact tax laws that penalize traditional marriage. The party that wants to tax initiative and productivity at the expense of supporting and funding programs for the unproductive members of society. The party that cares for the rights of the minority to the point that it becomes politically incorrect to question any policies or laws for their benefit. The party whose main concern when appointing federal judges or Supreme Court judges seems to be insuring the nominee will support or at the least agree not to oppose abortion rights.
I could go on and on. And sometimes I do, to the point that a goopd many people probably are left with the impression that I am a Republican, or at least am damned sure no democrat.
Actually, I am. I am a traditional liberal Democrat, though certainly not in any way on the Far Left of the spectrum. As a traditional liberal, I am pro minority rights, pro union and labor, pro environment, pro gay rights, pro choice and womens rights. I believe that the wealthy have an obligation and actually a patriotic duty to pay taxes, yes, at a greater rate than the middle and lower classes, maybe to the tune of one third of their income, maybe a little more. Especially since it is the wealthy who are responsible more than any other sector of American society for the majority if not all of the wars we tend to become engaged in.
When an American president asserts the need to go to war to "protect our interests", that is usually portrayed as meaning our security interests. And this is true up to a point, but by the same token those security interests seem to revolve around the security of our ability to import needed materials and goods, at least to some extent. When we are said to be "protecting our allies"-our allies in what? Well, it would seem to be our trading partners. That's where the money is. In the Middle East, of course, it was oil, in Korea it was nickel (a necessary component of the steel industry at the time), etc.
And it is the Republicans more so than the Democrats who are willing to go to war at a moments notice to protect thsoe trade and security interests-those economic interests, and to that end are responsible more than any other party for the bloated military budget which most Democrats by now have figured is their Third Rail every bit as much as Social Security is to the Republican Party.
The Pentagon needs to go on an extreme diet, the bloating is the result of kickbacks and graft, the typical corruption. Mind you, not all the fat has to be trimed, and probably shouldn't. Like a physical human body, the pentagon probably needs a degree of fat. But too much and it suddenly ceases to grease the wheels, and the arteries start to clog.
In the meantime, in order to support this insane diet, tax cuts become necessary, but it seems now they are never enough, and never will be sufficient. Thus, we now have an eight trillion dolar national debt. Our yearly deficit is around 500 billion dollars, so that debt grows by this amount, plus interest, every year.
And thanks to the trade agreements,such as NAFTA and others, we now are faced with a ballooning trade deficit as well. Suppossedly, this is the only way American companies can compete with foreign ones, by sending their work offshore to compete with the foreign companies who flood our markets with their cheap goods, a good lot of which is produced by way of cheap ass, practically slave, labor.
But the cheap goods, they keep coming here, and the cheap foreign labor as well, while the good jobs continue to be sent overseas. Where will it all end? I wish I knew. Bu if I did know, I would probably wish I didn't.
GM is just the latest of the casualties. It probably won't be the last. But it is a milestone indeed, that one of the companies most responsible for America's greatness as a manufacturing nation, and for contributing to the swelling of the ranks of the American Middle Class has now seen fit to announce, before Thanksgiving at that, that it will be cutting some 30,000 jobs and closing a number of plants across the country, plants that to a large degree were the life's blood ofthe communites in which they were located, for more than fifty years, sixty years.
America's Middle Class is rapidly dissappearring, and all the coutnry is left with is a rapidly expanding Middle Age Spread, a midriff bulge that is a sure sign of advanced age, decadence, and, unfortunately, seeing as to the undeniable ability of the majority of America voters to vote against their own best economic interests-advanced senility
