last year, when obama said in speech after speech “if you want change, please make a few phone calls for me, knock on a few doors for me” in his unique and compelling cadences, i took him at his word.
i made phone calls. i knocked on doors. i sent money.
but not for him to hand wall street and the banking industry carte blanche over government (taxpayer) funds. tim geithner? are you fucking kidding me?
not so that we could leave it up to spain to prosecute bush administration officials for the role they played in legitimizing torture.
not for this in afghanistan and iraq.
and not for this at home.
i would’ve voted for obama no matter what — a mcpalin administration would’ve been a disaster this country probably couldn’t survive. but i didn’t just vote for the man, i FOUGHT for the man. i talked to strangers and debated with coworkers and wrote post after post about why he should be president.
not that he hasn’t already done a lot of good things. he has. healthcare reform, guantanamo shutdown plans, legalization of stem cell research. etc. but war & the economy are long-term deals; any missteps on either account will be with us for a long time to come.
using taxpayer dollars to fund wall street and the banking industry could well be the domino that kicks off total collapse of our financial system. and we’re going in the wrong direction. dead wrong.
too sad to rant.
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Wonderful, wonderful blog today, Ms. Sheeler…. I happen to know what you did for the campaign- you approached it like everything else you believe in, with a full heart and soul….and action, because you are never just blogs…you walk the walk. I hope people realize this about you.
I suppose i am so jaded I didn’t have high expectations for ANYONE coming into the White House. I wanted him in because I figured he was younger, not as much a part of the
‘Boy’s Club’
and would understand more of what the average American needed. I still have some hope, but I never had a full bucket like you had.
It’s quite sad, isn’t it, when you have to keep your expectations low so as not to be crushed. That’s where we have come at this time in American politics. I find it heart breaking.
How about we (gradually) close down the Federal Reserve? There’s a great video I watched last night about how they operate. They just create more debt out of money. It’s like a mafia. I have to get the link and post it to you Jackie. It’s very eye opening.
At this point I wish I could feel sad; I am in fact terrified. If the United States had never gone through a depression, I might feel differently.
I remember when they repealed Glass-Steagall, and have been expecting this kind of dread since then.
It is sad that our president seems to want to be accepted by the ruling class, just as Bill Clinton, who signed off on repeal of Glass-Steagall, did. Whatever happended to working-class heros like Big Billl Haywood, the fierce labor radical who said, “The working class haven’t got anything. They can’t lose anything,” in urging a general strike, or Eugene Victor Debs, who, like Haywood, went to jail for his radical politics. Whatever happend to the word “radical,” that “root” word that the corporate press used to chastise any labor leader with fire in his belly? Given that we can’t depend on government, even led by the seemingly benevolent Obama (and Paterson), we need to radicalize ourselves and our protests against the ruling class, who continue to sit comfortably on their nest eggs and hold the reins of power.
The collapse of the financial system would bring terrible suffering to most workers and even more degradation to the impoverished and the homeless, with no end in sight. An alternative would be to regulate markets to curb high-stakes gambling in securities, to encourage investment in a “green” economy, and to help us in downsizing to an environmentally-sound society in the new world of scarcity.
just a heads up to Sheri–one of our local banks seems to be doing fine here, but a look into the bank that owns the bank reveals a holding company full of toxic assets, leaving the local bank with less than a two-star rating over at BankRate.
Lots of research is called for here, which is not a bad thing.
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