![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
I am watching Smallville Season 4 on DVD tonight because I can't bear the minute-by-minute coverage of every state's early results. Yes, Obama already seems to have won Pennsylvania but McCain has taken Oklahoma and Tennesse which leads me to wonder what kind of goofy-juice they're putting in the water over there.
I've developed a sort of hobbyist interest in the Great Depression and the Dustbowl years in particular (blame the duststorm research I had to do for Lazarus Came Forth) and I wish Oklahomans would remember how the conservative/Republican mindset abandoned the "Okies" to poverty, starvation and exploitation back in the "Dirty Thirties" -- and how anyone who tried to help them achieve even the most basic dignities of decent housing and honest wages was accused of being a subversive, a rabble-rouser, a Communist. American memories are short indeed. The Republicans, then as now, love to talk about "personal responsibility" but that's conservative code for "sink or swim." Or for "go fuck yourself" if you want to be vulgarly Cheneyish about it. Is that how a humane society, a moral society, a Christian society treats its citizens?
The progressive policies that Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted during the Great Depression saved this country and created the greatest and most prosperous middle class the world has ever known. Since the Reagan years, the policies and protections of the New Deal that allowed the middle class to flourish have slowly been dismantled, bit by bit. We're now facing the greatest disparity between rich and poor that this country has known since the early 20th century. We're going backwards, not forwards. A country with a tiny but powerful wealthy class, a large poverty base and a just-getting-by middle class is not a First World country. It is a shabby country, a second-rate country. Is that what we want to be?
Wealth does not "trickle down." It never has and never will. Rich people enjoy getting richer and hold onto what they have. They do not use their wealth to "create jobs" for the rest of us unless you consider groundskeeping and chauffeuring to be promising growth industries. Republicans work in favor of the rich, and in the interest of ensuring that the rich get richer. Allowing all Americans to have a greater chance at prosperity is not "wealth redistribution." It is not "socialism." It is the mark of a first-rate country. That is what we should want to be. First rate.
I've developed a sort of hobbyist interest in the Great Depression and the Dustbowl years in particular (blame the duststorm research I had to do for Lazarus Came Forth) and I wish Oklahomans would remember how the conservative/Republican mindset abandoned the "Okies" to poverty, starvation and exploitation back in the "Dirty Thirties" -- and how anyone who tried to help them achieve even the most basic dignities of decent housing and honest wages was accused of being a subversive, a rabble-rouser, a Communist. American memories are short indeed. The Republicans, then as now, love to talk about "personal responsibility" but that's conservative code for "sink or swim." Or for "go fuck yourself" if you want to be vulgarly Cheneyish about it. Is that how a humane society, a moral society, a Christian society treats its citizens?
The progressive policies that Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted during the Great Depression saved this country and created the greatest and most prosperous middle class the world has ever known. Since the Reagan years, the policies and protections of the New Deal that allowed the middle class to flourish have slowly been dismantled, bit by bit. We're now facing the greatest disparity between rich and poor that this country has known since the early 20th century. We're going backwards, not forwards. A country with a tiny but powerful wealthy class, a large poverty base and a just-getting-by middle class is not a First World country. It is a shabby country, a second-rate country. Is that what we want to be?
Wealth does not "trickle down." It never has and never will. Rich people enjoy getting richer and hold onto what they have. They do not use their wealth to "create jobs" for the rest of us unless you consider groundskeeping and chauffeuring to be promising growth industries. Republicans work in favor of the rich, and in the interest of ensuring that the rich get richer. Allowing all Americans to have a greater chance at prosperity is not "wealth redistribution." It is not "socialism." It is the mark of a first-rate country. That is what we should want to be. First rate.
no subject
no subject
At that point in the conversation, they begin to plan what to do when Obama comes to take their guns away. *sigh*
btw, I saw a documentary on the Dust Bowl, and apparently the High Plains are experiencing the same drought conditions as during the Depression, and the only thing preventing dust storms is irrigation from the Ogalalla Aquifier. But dust storms have been observed in China (by satellite.)