LET’S PUT AMERICA’S HOUSE IN ORDER

Here we are facing an economic recovery that is being held back by greedy investors and bankers willing to run the country back into the ditch. Speculators are driving up the price of gasoline while storage tanks are overflowing with supply. We hear the drum beat of the right and the uninformed screaming “drill baby drill.”  It doesn’t seem to matter that the oil companies have 68,000 acres of oil leases that are not being utilized.  I encourage all of the drill baby drillers to write to the big oil companies and demand that they begin drilling in those potential oil fields. I’m sure they will begin immediately to drill baby drill. Believe me if the Tea Party and Rush Limbaugh get behind this effort it will be a sure winner.

There’s another problem that I think needs tackling by these folks and that is telling the business community that they need to use some of that two trillion dollars they’ve been hording and start to invest it in America not China. Again all it will take is some righteous indignation by the Republican Party and its affiliates like the Chamber of Commerce to get them moving. The goal being to destroy the working man’s right to organize, discontinue healthcare benefits and do away with worker pensions—that seems to be what they are aiming for. After all, as the Tea Party is famous for saying, “have you ever heard of a poor guy creating a job”, how about Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, just to name a few of those poor guys who started companies that employed millions of people. The myth that the rich guys who fund these “grassroots movements” like the Tea Party, etc. have successfully conveyed to the masses is that the middle class needs to stop complaining and pay more taxes, so that the rich can get richer and the middle class will cease to exist. As Charles Dickens so aptly portrayed in his novels we have got to appreciate the efforts of our betters.  

Everybody knows that as soon as we can get rid of all those pesty regulations business will be able to flourish. Why just look at what they did to the economy over the previous ten years. I know--the real problem was Fannie May and Freddie Mack. + Those guys just pushed the banks and Wall Street to lend money to anybody who wanted it for a home mortgage. It’s common knowledge, as reported by Fox News, that Congress forced the investment community to make risky investments and over-leverage the market.  If not for that fact, we would be in great shape.

Alas, we need more right wingers in Congress so they can pass the Ryan budget which will do away with Medicare and Medicaid as a government program and give it to the private sector in the form of vouchers. Can you imagine how wonderful it will be for some 85 year old widow to have a choice of what insurance company she might want to deal with?  The possibility of that scenario makes your head spin. Not to worry--these folks have all the answers--cut federal taxes, cut the federal budget and raise a bigger army, problem solved. Who needs Liberals? 

Submitted by Bob Rann