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I think as long as people fall for the "framing," and present the current situation as a "new" "crisis" involving several "industries" or "markets"--such as mortgage, credit, investment banking, etc.--then you not only lose the larger sense of the problem, but lose the fact that this is long-term, and not at all recent. Here in the Midwest and also Northeast, we have been suffering from a deep recession, with increasing unemployment and stagnant and falling wages, for many years, since Bill Clinton's NAFTA/GATT, and worsening since, and no one has helped us; we no longer have manufacturing/union jobs, we have underpaid, no-benefit sales/cashier jobs.
The larger trend under Republican rule--which they always, always do!--is to kill unions and consumer protections, outsource, kill wage growth, lower the kinds of taxes that will benefit only rich people to have lowered (income, capital gains, luxury, stock dividend, etc.) and increase the kinds of taxes that will hurt/kill middle class and poor people (sales tax, property, payroll, etc.). They also change laws and regulations so that wealth/income is more and more concentrated, a smaller and smaller percentage of the population owns and controls a larger and larger percentage of the total National wealth (as now), CEO pay/bonuses/stocks, etc. are more and more out of line compared to the flat wages and cut benefits of those who do the work, etc., and the kinds of Government programs that help the middle class and poor, (Medicare/Medicaid/S-CHIP, anything that helps with the cost of health care; LIHEAP and other programs that help low-income people with home heating costs, etc.), are cut, and the programs that help only the rich, (corporate subsidies and tax cuts, bailouts, etc.) continue. All of this long-term redistribution of wealth--and debt--and total deregulation of one commercial system after another promoting nothing but crime and abuse, is the constant, time-after-time result of Republican rule.
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