Republicans: Bad People?
Posted on July 29th, 2011 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
The Times reports that House Republicans are loading up an appropriations bill with so many anti-environmental amendments, you basically might as well go live in a sewer.
One would prevent the Bureau of Land Management from designating new wilderness areas for preservation. Another would severely restrict the Department of Interior’s ability to police mountaintop-removal mining. And then there is the call to allow new uranium prospecting near Grand Canyon National Park.
Yeah—because there’s no reason why any regulatory body should be able to get involved when a mining company blows up a mountain on public land.
The Republicans say that over-regulation by the EPA is torpedoing the economy—which is funny, because right now, it’s the House Republicans’ determination to start a financial crisis by refusing to raise the debt ceiling and driving our country into default that is smashing a fragile recovery to smithereens.
This all goes back to what I call the Rhodes Scholar theory of inequality—the fact that not all representatives in a particular body are of equal standing even if the process by which they get there is theoretically the same. It comes from my belief that Rhodes Scholar applicants from Massachusetts, New York, California and other states with a highly educated populace face far stronger competition than do, say, Rhodes Scholar applicants from Alabama, Idaho and Oklahoma—which is to say, Red States.
Congress is much the same way: You come from a poor, uneducated state where the intellectual and business elite are tiny and there’s less competition to get there than in, say, Manhattan, and you’re less likely to know a damn thing when you get to Congress. I mean, think about it: These people take their marching orders from the Tea Party….
4 Responses
7/29/2011 10:22 am
And Chuck Schumer takes his marching orders from Wall St. Wall St. has profited from a Fed which has decided in its infinite wisdom to reward The Street and screw Main St. and savers.
Of course, when you couple that with what my friend LHS (someone who never met a private payroll in his life) did in proposing a fiscal stimulus package that had no chance of working (and he didn’t think it was enough… a la Krugman), is it any wonder why we have 9% unemployed (the real number, U6 is about 16%), an economy that shows little sign of being robust (see today’s numbers), and yet investment banks will continue to pay their employees large bonuses this year (last year was close to a record year). Hey, I’d like to borrow from the Fed using their ZIRP. Hey, if you’re a hedge fund you can still borrow three, four, fives times your capital from Goldman, Morgan Stanley and the others. Nice if you can get it. Non productive players get the money and small business can’t catch a break from the banks. Shameful.
7/29/2011 10:57 am
Yes, I think these are all fair comments, Sam, and do take what I write above with a grain of salt—especially because we all know that the best and the brightest make plenty of mistakes, and they are often very large ones. And yes, Chuck Schumer does indeed take his orders from Wall Street.
That said, this debt ceiling crisis is so pointlessly manufactured. This country has big problems and big challenges; we don’t need to make more.
7/29/2011 12:08 pm
The debt ceiling “crisis” is just another way for Congress to avoid the real problem. Both the Republican and Democratic parties, and their leaders, are just flat out lying to the American people. Is there a current problem; sure, but it will get solved rather quickly, one way or the other. There are many ways for The Fed to solve it with The Treasury. It’s a headline grabber and allows the leadership (what an oxymoron) to posture 24/7 and play all sorts of political games. It’s an easy thing for these people to do; it’s what they do best and in fact that’s pretty much the only thing they do… posture.
They certainly aren’t will to solve the real financial problem facing the country. That problem is very simple. The government will take in during the next decade (and now I’m going to use conservative numbers and will round off) 1.2 trillion dollars a year less than it spends. That’s if everything goes extremely well, which it probably won’t. We have 14.5 trillion in debt (actually much greater than that if you look at unfunded liabilities).Over the next decade debt will increase by 80% if nothing is done.
Now the exalted leadership of both both parties are proposing to cut the deficit by 2-3 trillion over the next decade, with most of the cuts being back end loaded… but of course backendloaded, what else would one expect. The 2-3 trillion is meaningless, but they think it the most fantastic thing and want to be glorified by their consituents for solving” the problem”… not. It is simply a lie that they are foisting on the American people i.e. a reduction of 2-3 trillion is meaningful.
The gullible American population (half of whom that are eligible to vote don’t) want something done, but they can’t even manage their own finances, let alone understand that they are being hoodwinked and are allowing the Republican and Democratic parties to mortgage their future, as well as their children’s, grandchildren’s and great grandchildren’s futures. Meanwhile, The Republicans never met a project they didn’t want to fund; and they scream the loudest about waste. The Democrats are just as bad.
And so it goes on. The major problem is not solved. And it won’t be solved until the people resolve the same problem that needed resolution 215 years ago. Then it became a question of whether the country was going to follow a Jeffersonian/ Madisonian (after he essentially disavowed his Federalist papers) vision or a Hamiltonian vision.
And that’s my screed for today.
7/29/2011 9:36 pm
Great comment,Sam Spektor!