19 million US homes stand vacant today. 600,000 people lost jobs in December, 2 million in all of 2009. The layoff rate only accelerates. Soon, public services will founder and homes will be re-valued, taxes unpaid. Every bit of this is coded with the sharpest end of many sticks aimed at those who were born with the leastBbut encompassing everyone who must work to live. It=s whirlwind that is not going to end soon. In schools, we will see more and more kids homeless or moved by foreclosures, more hungry, sleepy kids, more incoherent delinquency, made reasonable only by a grasp of social circumstances.
The One who I named The Obamagogue seeks to use Keynesian measures to solve the waterfall of economic collapse and lost wars. Keynes was an elitist and an active racist who despised working people, who thought only the most favored should rule, but he sought to save capitalism. The myth is that he did.
He didn't. Henry Morganthau, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury recognized that in the late thirties when he wrote that all that Keynesian spending had done little or nothing.
What ended the Great Depression was WW 2. Capitalism loves outright destruction. Thrives on that kind of chaos, and as an utterly fickle system, goes off and lets who ever wins at a given moment ride it.
What The Obamgogue's spending will do is to bring out the lowest forms of opportunism in every sector of society which will, in effect, be saying, "what about ME!" That is why we see, right now, the AFL-CIO backing the most reactionary of the bailout measures, US protectionism.
It is also why we see the California Teachers Association leadership demanding a 1% sales tax hike, the most regressive of all taxes which will hit poor people hard, abandoning school workers= most valuable allies, parents of children who need those educators the most.
So far, depending on which source one likes, maybe a trillion dollars has been doled out or will be doled out to the banksters by their procurers, the politicians. That number will double, and another one or two trillion will go to the wars, which the US is going to lose (Afghans drove 300,000 Soviet troops out of their country, with help from the US---are we to think the Russians and Chinese don't remember?). |
