Friday, October 10, 2014

Without a Clue Rant

The Albuquerque Journal profiles on our local congressional candidates shows just how clueless and out of touch most republican candidates are in the current era.  Michelle Lujan Grisham's opponent wants to cut down rules and regs in the federal government and turn over most responsibilities to the state.

Think Texas.  Those folks there let a man from western Africa loose from a hospital with out even checking to see if he had Ebola.  He is dead and the private sector hospital and the Governor's office under Rick Perry seem rather stupid.  (In Perry's case--stupider.)

Is now really the time to be saying that the CDC, who has taken budget hits from republicans, should turn over its responsibilities to states?  Think Susana Martinez.  Would she fund a state agency correctly to do such work, or would she continue to find ways to cut corporate taxes for our corrupt business system in the country.

Sometimes the dumbing down of America seems unstoppable.  The downside of the internet is that it let morons become organized and manipulated by the wealthy right wing.  

4 comments:

New Mexican said...

I watched the debate between the two of them last night and was impressed favorably with congresswoman Lujan-Grisham. Her opponent was no slouch either.

It struck me as odd, as it always does, when Republicans claim that the government does not create jobs, only the public sector creates jobs. Who do they think employees the majority of New Mexicans. It also struck me that it generated no response from the congresswoman.

Anonymous said...

If you read her opponents bio he does or has done contract work for the Air Force, Sandia labs and Los Alamos Labs. I think the government helped create his job!

Vicki said...

New Mexican is right about government-creating jobs but he doesn't tell the whole story. A state like ours with so many government agencies, labs, bases and institutions create private sector jobs at an exponential rate because so many (mostly small) businesses are started or grow because of the flow of capital from government payroll spending and contract/subcontract awards. My husband's small service- disabled veteran business is one example. We were financially damaged last year when the Republican-initiated government shut-down stopped a purchase order dead for his business. It was a very large contract for equipment my husband (a Republican, I might add) provides and his company revenues ended up with a loss in 2013. Everyone driving through Albuquerque can see the many businesses (from furniture to restaurants) close-up, only to be replaced by new Title Loan companies opening up in their place. Thanks, Susana, for encouraging private sector loan shark business development!

Anonymous said...

That's true about the right wing internet. It's a vast area you might not even be aware of unless you stumble upon it.

When I was on Facebook I'd see an occasional posting from my brother Bill, the family Republican (married a Baptist preacher's daughter and, I think, got caught up in the ecstasy). They have their own memes and web sites, tea bagger sites, news sites, and it's all interconnected. The Left might take a look and see how it's done.

But it's pretty dumb, too. Bill never posted a single a thing that I couldn't easily point out the central flaw in. But it never mattered, either. With them, it's not an intellectual endeavor, it's emotional. Their heart is stirred by odes to entrepreneurial spirit or Ronald Reagan's city on a hill and they are made afraid by scary religions and images of brown hoards and a disappearing America that never existed.


The dumbing down of America may well be unstoppable, but there was a previous America that wasn't well educated, either, and it managed to assume quite a bit of political power, which was expressed through unions and various Socialist and Populist parties and by the Democratic Party, eventually.

For all of the benefits of our post WWII public education system, that was remarkable in educating people and making college open to practically all who wanted to attend, that generation, of the well educated, hasn't been able to stop public education's ongoing gutting, nor the dumbing down, nor the evisceration of anything else from the New Deal era like increasingly higher wages and living standards.

The reason: Democrats stopped being a class based party and became Republicans who are socially liberal, and stood by doing nothing while war was waged on the unions.

The only thing that will unite working people, that ever has, is class identity. It will unite people across region, race, gender and ethnicity. The rich have it, but they've managed to make working people believe we live in a classless society. And they have waged Reaganomics, which is nothing but a war of the ruling class against the working class, a scheme for the massive redistribution of wealth upward, and the Democratic Party eventually went along with it.

It all started back in the 70s with Bill Clinton and Al Gore and their Democratic Leadership Council, and Tony Coehlo, the congressman from California, when he was put in charge of fundraising and said we should go after all that Wall Street money, and they did.

Now you have New Mexico Democrats who won't even utter the word "union" in public, who veer far, far away from anything that hints of populism, whose campaigns and votes once in office make mockeries of working peoples' economic interests, as they slash rich peoples' taxes ever further, cut Medicare and Social Security, cut veteran's benefits, cut Head Start, and look away as college becomes a disappearing dream for more and more kids. But they're fighting hard to save the middle class. Just listen to them.