democracyforcalifornia.com

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE GOP AND OTHER FANTASIES

Republicans live in a parallel world where opinion passes for fact, history is a work of fiction and the denial of compassion is acceptable. How else do you explain their slavish devotion to Fox News, their child-like reverence for Ronald Reagan and their gleeful obstructionism regarding health-care reform and climate change?

Sadly, the party of Abraham Lincoln has today become the know-nothing, do-nothing, feel-nothing party of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin — a multi-millionaire talk radio blowhard and a quarter-wit ex-governor/VP candidate turned best-selling author, respectively.

But despite the folly of the GOP's political agenda — built on a subprime foundation of tax cuts and unlimited military spending — it still rings true for a large segment of the public due to the failure of invertebrate Democrats to offer real solutions to today's complex problems. And because it enriches the few at the expense of the many, the stage has been set for greater economic and social turmoil in an era of celebrity worship and gossip as news.

As The New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman writes of last Friday's House of Representatives vote on financial reform, "every single Republican...voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses." Krugman goes on to describe a conservative narrative that "reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy."

"Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

"Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative."

Krugman traces the roots of the current crisis to a pattern of financial deregulation that removed the safeguards to the system put in place after the Great Depression, which had worked effectively for nearly four decades since World War II.

"The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess."

While Krugman concludes that GOP's obsolete belief system could lead to another economic meltdown, Chris Hedges warns that our obsession with the "trivial and the absurd" in "a world of make-believe" make it nearly impossible to face reality and address society's ills.

"Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working class into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of demagogues and charlatans... Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise these dispossessed workers, insert them back into the economy, unless we give them hope, these demagogues will rise up to take power. Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age."

In other words, contrary to the Obama administration's military build-up in Afghanistan, it is time to withdraw from the American empire and rebuild the republic...Holding those responsible for the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes accountable for their incompetence and greed is a good place to start.

Posted by Alias at December 14, 2009 10:01 AM