The Bedrock Beneath Our Feet
2012-01-04 - by
While General Washington camped in New York waiting for the British to attack, fifty-six men in Philadelphia – who said they not only had a Creator but that He’d given them what they called inalienable rights – crossed the Rubicon and told the King of England they were done being colonists.
Then, years later, after two wars with England and the Civil War, our grandfathers and their grandfathers set to work building small towns with shops and corner drugstores and one room churches and if each town had its own Henry Potter it also had its own George Bailey.
Those small towns survived the Great Depression and D-Day then after Hiroshima Henry Potter turned into a Harvard MBA (with stock options) at a multi-national corporation and the chain-store buried the corner drugstore and the international banks put George Bailey out of business.
The same change (or, maybe, a different devil with the same face) rolled through politics.
After Hiroshima the politicians got into the happy business of giving things away and it was like cocaine – the temptation was more than they could resist and, truth be told, hardly anyone wanted them to stop. In the boom after the Cold War the politicians were handing out cold hard cash to the biggest corporations in our country and to the biggest corporations in other countries and that barely scratched the surface – they were also paying a hundred million people Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and if you weren’t old or sick or poor you could get a college loan, a home loan or a home loan down payment and if you were lucky enough to farm you could get one check for raising crops and another for not raising crops.
Then the politicians handed out a couple of trillion dollars in home mortgages. Housing boomed, Wall Street made billions, then the Bubble burst. And the whole country hit the skids.
Which left the politicians in a fix.
Because suddenly they found themselves in the business of taking back rather than giving away and that wasn’t any way at all to get reelected.
So, last Spring, the Republicans announced they’d made the biggest spending cut in history; then, last summer, Obama topped that saying he’d cut even more – a trillion dollars. There wasn’t a word of truth in any of it. Instead the politicians actually increased spending by $18 billion last year.
So how on earth do we get out of this mess? Pray we’ve seen enough of greed and deceit to learn they lead to grief.
The Bedrock Beneath Our Feet
2012-01-04/
While General Washington camped in New York waiting for the British to attack, fifty-six men in Philadelphia – who said they not only had a Creator but that He’d given them what they called inalienable rights – crossed the Rubicon and told the King of England they were done being colonists.
Then, years later, after two wars with England and the Civil War, our grandfathers and their grandfathers set to work building small towns with shops and corner drugstores and one room churches and if each town had its own Henry Potter it also had its own George Bailey.
Those small towns survived the Great Depression and D-Day then after Hiroshima Henry Potter turned into a Harvard MBA (with stock options) at a multi-national corporation and the chain-store buried the corner drugstore and the international banks put George Bailey out of business.
The same change (or, maybe, a different devil with the same face) rolled through politics.
After Hiroshima the politicians got into the happy business of giving things away and it was like cocaine – the temptation was more than they could resist and, truth be told, hardly anyone wanted them to stop. In the boom after the Cold War the politicians were handing out cold hard cash to the biggest corporations in our country and to the biggest corporations in other countries and that barely scratched the surface – they were also paying a hundred million people Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and if you weren’t old or sick or poor you could get a college loan, a home loan or a home loan down payment and if you were lucky enough to farm you could get one check for raising crops and another for not raising crops.
Then the politicians handed out a couple of trillion dollars in home mortgages. Housing boomed, Wall Street made billions, then the Bubble burst. And the whole country hit the skids.
Which left the politicians in a fix.
Because suddenly they found themselves in the business of taking back rather than giving away and that wasn’t any way at all to get reelected.
So, last Spring, the Republicans announced they’d made the biggest spending cut in history; then, last summer, Obama topped that saying he’d cut even more – a trillion dollars. There wasn’t a word of truth in any of it. Instead the politicians actually increased spending by $18 billion last year.
So how on earth do we get out of this mess? Pray we’ve seen enough of greed and deceit to learn they lead to grief.