Say the Secret Word, “Stability”
By David Glenn Cox
http://theservantsofpilate.comHome foreclosures have exceeded 250,000 for the tenth straight month, or 2.5 million in less than a year. Home prices fell in 134 US metropolitan areas by an average of 12 percent. Loosely calibrated at four members per household, that’s ten million American men, women and children thrown out into the road in ten months. Also, with many states facing budget shortfalls, now even the elderly in nursing homes are being shown the door.
The Commerce Department announced a surprise jump in retail sales after six consecutive months of declines. The sales jump of 0.9 percent followed last month's 3 percent drop leaving CNBC’s Erin “Black Widow” Burnett to ask, “Could it be that the market is stabilizing even without the $800 billion dollar stimulus package?”
Sure, that’s it. They scored runs on you in each of the first six innings, but they didn’t score any runs in the last inning, so maybe now we’re starting to win!
Retail stores are slashing prices on inventory and slashing employment numbers in order to maintain profitability. Macy’s has or will soon eliminate 7,000 jobs, Circuit City laid off 30,000 workers after filing for bankruptcy. But, following the “Burnett” theory, they have not laid off any more workers since so it must be getting better?
China passed a stimulus package in November, so did Australia, Great Britain, Germany, France and Japan, but here in America we debate whether that is what is needed. Republicans argue that we need more tax cuts, but aren’t the Bush tax cuts still in place? Weren’t we promised that if we passed those or made them permanent, prosperity would be ours to reign over forever?
As I was having my breakfast, I watched Republican Congressman Paul Ryan interviewed on CNBC. “This is the wrong plan! Our Republican alternative of targeted tax cuts for business and entrepreneurs would have generated twice as many jobs at half the cost to the treasury. Obama made the mistake of letting Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress write up a wish list of Democratic pet projects.”
Carl Quintanilla: “But Obama said that this was the bill he wanted.”
Ryan: “Well, I don’t know anything about that.”
Having had enough of that, I switched one channel over to Fox Business and there is Republican Congressman Eric Cantor. “This is a bad bill, it costs too much. It is nothing but a laundry list of pet Democratic projects. Obama would have been much better served if he had let Larry Summers and the people at the Treasury write this bill instead of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. We offered viable alternatives to this massive spending with targeted tax cuts…”
Gee, I thought, that’s the same thing that Ryan said.
So, just for laughs and giggles, I turned it to Fox News, and guess what? Mike Huckabee was talking with Geraldo Rivera about the stimulus package.
Huckabee: “It’s just too much wasteful spending; what they needed to do was to offer more in the way of targeted tax cuts for small business and entrepreneurs."
Rivera: “The problem, Governor, is that Obama let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid write this bill, and they’ve filled it up with eight years of pent up Democratic wishes."
It’s amazing! The exact same conversation three times in five minutes on three different channels with only one question and no follow up. It’s not amazing that Republicans speak in unison and repeat their same talking points. What is amazing is their market penetration, that our so-called free marketplace of ideas has become a pinhole of ideas. Unquestioned ideas from the minority party that receive a majority of air time.
Just like with Burnett’s assessment of the economy, it is all about stabilizing public opinion. I can't stand Dennis Kneale because he is just too much of a corporate sex toy for me to watch, and at lunch I only caught ten seconds of him before I could find the remote control. He was asking, “Could the markets be stabilizing?” Amazing, like Pee Wee’s Playhouse, the secret word is "stabilizing!" Ahhh!! Ha, ha!
The reasons are darker than partisanship, although partisanship plays a part. They must lead you and direct you to a point. The same people who told you that it wasn’t a recession and that it could all be contained now tell you it is a recession, and though it may be a hard recession, it is still not a depression. They use cute little euphemisms like mini-depression, but what else can they say, when they can’t tell you the truth?
The truth is too dark and too frightening to face. The Republicans don’t want the spending because they don’t think it will do any good. They see no reason to throw good money after bad; the die is cast. Why waste trillions trying to resolve an impossible situation? Their plan is to let the economic brush fire burn itself out in a year or two, or maybe three. As they see it, raw materials and foodstuffs constitute most of America’s exports. So until those foreign purchasers' economies recover, what point is there in trying to mitigate America's economic woes?
That is, other than you? But, as you can well imagine, your wellbeing doesn’t keep them up nights. This their greatest fear, that Obama and the Democrats will squander the nation's wealth by trying to prop up Joe six pack or Sally office worker and their snotty little brats, Billy hooligan and Mickey dirty sleeves.
Already plans are in the works, as the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, went before Congress and testified. “That global economic turmoil and the instability it could ignite have outpaced terrorism as the most urgent threat facing the United States.”
Mr. Blair singled out the economic downturn as “the primary near-term security concern” for the country, and he warned that if it continued to spread and deepen, "it would contribute to unrest and imperil some governments.”
The government of Iceland has fallen; the people have taken to the streets just as they’ve taken to the streets in Bulgaria, France and Greece. Great Britain is described as one step behind Iceland, and British banks have lowered interests rates to 300-year lows.
Meanwhile the media talks about stability and tax cuts instead, because they don’t dare tell you the truth. When Blair says “some governments,” who do you think he is euphemistically talking about Wilbur? Some pig?
In 1932 Detroit police used guns and the fire department turned on high-pressure hoses in sub-zero temperatures to try and stop 10,000 hungry protesters from marching to Ford’s River Rouge factory. Three unarmed marchers were killed and seventeen were wounded. At their funeral 20,000 Americans removed their hats when the Communist anthem, “The International,” was played. The caskets were draped with the Stars and Stripes on one side and the hammer and sickle on the other.
In Lawrence, Kansas, 400 hungry farmers marched on a Red Cross warehouse and threatened to overpower the police if relief supplies were not distributed by five o’clock. There were food riots in almost every major city in America and the media of that day spoke of stability as well.
President Hoover himself said, “Prosperity is just around the corner!” He said that, not because he meant it, but because he couldn’t dare speak the truth. He was saying the secret word, “stability,” as the truth was just too awful.
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