Recently, we witnessed one of the singular events of our time. The Inauguration of President Barack Obama was as spectacular as it was welcome. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions gathered on a bright, cold day on the plain between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol to witness the installation of our 44th President, the first African-American President in our troubled political history.
Now, of course, the right wingers are back on the attack against the middle class. The best and brightest minds in the country having been brought into government, people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are already calling the new economic programs “failed.”
Limbaugh, in an interview with Hannity, which in itself is an amusing idea–much like interviewing himself–seems to have finally lost touch with reality. He says that programs like the economic development program “have not worked in the Soviet Union” or, he says, in China or in Cuba. Of course those are all three governments completely different not only from us but from each other.
Limbaugh will not be satisfied until another disastrous President like his hero, George W. Bush, is back in Washington. And the American People should not be satisfied until this self-serving charlatan, a man who has enriched himself by spending every day working for big interests in media, for every lobbying group in Washington, pandering to the worst elements of our society, and living a totally disreputable personal life has been drummed out of any kind of media position. He serves no valuable purpose in society.
The American People are hurting. No amount of ranting by Rush Limbaugh against the strong economic measures that are necessary to put society back to work again will stop our progress. Even though the Republicans now claim, after the largest government spending spree in our history, creating the largest deficit on history and creating the second great Republican Depression…which it is quite clear we are now in…that they want to become stewards of our money, they do not. Even though they maintain that they want to be more prudent, they do not.
We must judge our representatives by what they do, not what they say. Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s Neocon friends in Congress have literally bankrupted the country by taking over the financial system and removing all the money, putting it in the hands of a few Wall Street insiders.
Billions of dollars in bonuses have been paid by the Bush Administration to Wall Street executives with no accountability. And the point is that it is our money. Treasury Secretary Paulson has given our money to Wall Street with no strings attached. Free. No way to recoup it.
And Rush Limbaugh has the audacity to compare our program to restore this country to sanity to recreating the Pilgrim society. He has gone completely off the planet. And Sean Hannity, in a Fox “News” interview sits and agrees with him, while our country is being destroyed by the Neocon Republicans who remain in Congress and whose Party was soundly rejected by voters in most of the country.
Many people make excuses for these kinds of commentators, suggesting that they should be given some credit for some small amount of objectivity. That is a waste of time.
We know by now, with our country in tatters all around us, that this is what they have worked for as they have enriched themselves. The people may not know that these people have been paid and continue to be paid millions of dollars to promote these ideas to help the rich and large corporate interests from paying their fair share.
The top one percent of society now owns 90% of its assets. We are basically in a plutocracy, a few families owning a large percentage of the wealth and preventing others from earning enough money to be free of their authority. Warren Buffett, a populist billionaire, has said that he is dismayed by the fact that he and others at his income level pay a smaller percentage of their taxes than his secretary.
Congress need to launch an investigation to find out to whom the first traunche of $350 billion dollars was delivered and to whom other money given out secretly by the Federal Reserve was given, and why. If we cannot obtain that information, there is a remedy. Simply tax income on capital gains at a 75% rate until others in the Wall Street community come forward to provide clarity on what took place.
If you are a Wall Street insider faced with being retroactively taxed on your capital gains income, or a hedge fund manager who will be taxed “back into the stone age” you will probably come forth and begin to untangle this web of lies and looting by the Bush people.
It is time to get serious about the destructive criminal actions of the Bush Administration. It is mere justice. The treasury of the American people has been looted by the Bush Administration and their associates in the private sector. We want restitution.
Of course it is not only Limbaugh and Hannity. John Podhoretz of the publication COMMENTARY, with no suggestions or recommended solutions, simply refers to the government as a “blunt instrument” in dealing with generating a resurgence in the economy. This self-styled authority on economics, whose heros have most recently bankrupted the country now wants to leave the American People destitute. If not, he like Limbaugh and Hannity, assume that we will somehow–despite several hundred years of Democratic capitalism–suddenly become devoted to the Cuban or Soviet political system.
Podhoretz’s solution is that everyone put their noses to the grindstone and “work hard” and everything will turn out right. He apparently is unaware that we no longer have a manufacturing base in this county. Only by making and selling things can we provide the jobs that need the kind of services that will provide employment for the service sector, which has become our largest source of employment for the average U.S. citizen.
Limbaugh, Hannity and Podhoretz prove that the Republicans are not only out of ideas but that they have for the last 30 years been out of ideas. The good news is that our educational system has finally delivered a new generation that is not deluded by all this nonsensical chatter. These people, and others like them, such as Newt Gingrich, simply talk in circles. And our younger generation recognizes it for what it is–nonsense.