Category: Politics

And here we go.  I think this election expresses, above all, the hatred, the astonishing hatred, we all feel for George W. Bush.  And, to be sure, he’s earned it.

So now the question becomes: what happens with Obama in office and Democratic control of both houses when they continue to carry on the same policies that Bush has carried on?  More military adventures, more attacks on personal freedom, more support for billionaires on Wall Street, no solution for the mass forclosures and unemployment.  What happens?  Rage, or apathy?  I’m betting on apathy and hoping I’m wrong.

Now they’ve arrested a 13-year-old boy because a 13-year-old girl sent him a nude pic of herself. The charge? Child Pornography. Does the phrase GMAFB seem appropriate? Here’s the link.

I don’t think a 13-year-old girl exploring her sexuality by taking a picture of herself and sending it to her boyfriend is worth so much as a raised eyebrow, except perhaps to her parents. And the term for a 13-year-old boy who would enjoy getting such a picture is, I believe, “normal.”

I think someone in this scenario is sick. So if it isn’t the girl, and it isn’t the boy…

Can someone please turn down the insanity a notch?

James Cayne, through his management techniques, was one of the people who has caused the current financial crisis, and bears some responsibility for hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes.

G. Richard Wagoner, Jr. is a master of the art of the mass layoff; tens of thousands of auto workers are without jobs thanks to him.

David J. Lesar has done as much as anyone to see to it that Americans are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; not to mention the countless Iraqis and Afghans. How many hundreds of thousands of people are in mourning thanks to his work?

Lee Raymond also did as much as anyone to bring about the invasion of Iraq, using his economic clout for political influence.

Rupert Murdoch has probably done more than any other single individual to create and sustain this war, and is largely responsible for permitting G.W. Bush to steal the 2000 election, and to encourage the anti-democratic Patriot Act, and domestic wiretapping.

Isn’t it reassuring to know that each of these people has only one vote on election day?

Years ago, when I first became politically active, I liked to speak of reformists in general and the Democrats in particular as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It was a nice, vivid metaphor, and I was young and a sucker for anything that sounded clever. Alas, I can no longer use that metaphor, because I’m older now, and unwilling to grab simple sounding answers. And also because the Democrats are no longer trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, they’re just arguing with the Republicans over who gets to sit in them.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed,–that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor.  Hence . . . labor is the superior–greatly superior–of capital.” — Abraham Lincoln