franklin roosevelt’s second bill of rights
watched mike moore’s capitalism: a love story last night. this speech from FDR stuck with me. in fact, i cried as i was watching it. what if FDR had been able to enact these propositions? would sarah palin exist? would g-dub? would we be billions of dollars in debt and our entire economy and social structure bowing to big business and goldman-sachs?
Photo
“One Big Ass Mistake, America”
One
Big
Ass
Mistake
America
That’s what I saw gracing the back of an old Ford pickup truck as I took the cat to the vet on Thursday.
it immediately made me think of a Saturday Night Live sketch from last week that we just saw the night before.
my first thought in response to the truck was: “wow, yeah, because health care reform really is a horrible idea. what could we be thinking?”
my second thought in response to the truck was: “gee, conservatives and republicans don’t know anything about spending lots of money on special projects. oh wait, i’m being sarcastic.”
the point that was made in the SNL sketch (well, there were several, this is just one of them) was that we’re in the middle of a global financial crisis, and here we are, spending an assload more money on new stuff with the hope that it might help boost the economy. and that’s all it is, a hope. because the market is volatile, and it’s based entirely on people’s perceptions, because people’s perceptions are what is going to cause the economy to thrive — consumers believe that the economy can and will bounce back, and spend money as normal, thereby boosting small and large businesses and rebuilding the economy — or fall further into recessions — consumers feel that there is no hope for recovery and hole up, pull their money out of the bank and start stashing it under the bed like it’s the 1920s, thereby causing more banks to go under, more companies to close shops, and the global economic crisis to escalate until we live in a Mad Max-ian alternate reality where socoiopathic daredevil types hotrod their cars into killing machines and rampage the highways stealing gasoline, the only remaining currency.
on one level, i can empathize with people who are suspicious of spending more money on things that seem unrelated to the economic crisis. and i read 2 different references in the past week to the great firewall of china; given our financial debt to china, it does seem a little snotty of us to get persnickety about their…well, just about anything they do, really.
but the old business saying that “you’ve got to spend money to make money” is true, and while health care reform seems unrelated, it’s, uh, not. if people are healthier, or feel like they’re covered in the case of an emergency, they’re more likely to dip into that “rainy day/in case my liver explodes” fund they’ve been hanging onto for the last 10 years. and the thing is that taking potshots on spending loads of money…isn’t that a bit unfounded. it’s not like republicans don’t like spending money.
the difference is what the money is being spent on, although i challenge anyone to convince me that creating competition for major insurance companies is a bad thing, or that creating more checks and balances so people who, for example, have horrible pre-existing conditions (like, um, pregnancy) can’t be refused coverage.
so yeah, seeing someone scrawl “One Big Ass Mistake America” on the back of their truck irked me a bit. it also made me wonder what kind of horrible crap this dude is listening to to believe that? probably sean hannity, who — as i’ve mentioned before — is known for his accuracy and truth in reporting. and it made me sad that there are people out there who don’t see the good that a lot of these Obama-driven initiatives will come to, and will probably never see it. it makes me anxious to get this stuff started — to be able to afford insurance for myself and my family, to see electric cars on the street, to get the frak out of the middle east and start rebuilding relationships with countries that we alienated thanks to g-dub.
and it makes me worry for 2012.