It's not every day that a superpower makes a bid to transform itself into a Third World nation, and we here at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund want to be among the first to welcome you to the community of states in desperate need of international economic assistance. As you spiral into a catastrophic financial meltdown, we are delighted to respond to your Treasury Department's request that we undertake a joint stability assessment of your financial sector. In these turbulent times, we can provide services ranging from subsidized loans to expert advisors willing to perform an emergency overhaul of your entire government.
We thus want to acknowledge the progress you have made in your evolution from economic superpower to economic basket case. Normally, such a process might take 100 years or more. With your oscillation between free-market extremism and nationalization of private companies, however, you have successfully achieved, in a few short years, many of the key hallmarks of Third World economies.
Your policies of irresponsible government deregulation in critical sectors allowed you to rapidly develop an energy crisis, a housing crisis, a credit crisis and a financial market crisis, all at once, and accompanied (and partly caused) by impressive levels of corruption and speculation. Meanwhile, those of your political leaders charged with oversight were either napping or in bed with corporate lobbyists.
At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, what good was Lehman Brothers, anyway? And if Merrill Lynch was so bullish on America, why is it that, despite the torrent of foreign investment that flowed in to Lehman, Merrill and their Wall Street peers over the past half-decade, so few jobs were created in America during that period of "recovery"?
During the late, lamented Wall Street boom, America's leading investment institutions were plenty bullish on China's economy, on exotic financial devices built atop millions of bad loans, and, above all — judging by the unprecedented amount of wealth they showered on the Street -- on themselves. The last thing our financial community was bullish on was America — that is, the America where the vast majority of Americans live and work.
When Sarah Palin joked about herself and her fellow hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick, she may have revealed more than she intended. She made it sound a compliment — portraying herself and her peers as ordinary mothers who look good but are tough, tenacious, and defend their family at any cost. But do we really want a potential president whose prime trait is an eagerness to bite your throat at any pretext? We already have that: Dick Cheney.
The corruption scandals, Troopergate, her musings on how to ban library books, the moose slaughter, the drill-baby-drill, the creationist stupidity, the pregnant underage daughter and the acceptance of statutory rape as a marriage-brokering tool, the bridge to nowhere and all the rest of it - including the story on the front page of The New York Times on Sunday about how she hired most of her junior high school yearbook to run her government - well, yes, Sarah Palin reeks.
Meanwhile, the real danger of her candidacy has been ignored. It took Frank Rich, on the Times' op-ed page on Sunday, to point out that McCain, in his desperation to be president, has so compromised himself that he allowed the party to pick a running mate who is younger, stronger, more vital and more forceful. With McCain so weak, Palin and the men who pull her strings will take over the office of the Imperial Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney's operation, which is already up and running the country. The Republicans are proposing another weak, lame presidential figurehead, with the real power concentrated behind closed doors.
"If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, then you don't belong in politics."
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Jesse Unruh or Brian Redman, depending on who you ask.
Editor's Notes & Rants:
For decades, Republicans cried that Democrats were the problem. If only the voters would give the GOP control over the White House and Congress, they would fix everything. End pork-barrel spending, balance the budget, get the gov't out of our private lives. In 2002, the voters took them up on it, and today the country is on the verge of collapse. And the Republicans have the nerve to try and blame the Democrats for it. Are Americans really that stupid? I guess we'll find out in November.
NBC News exposes Palin's lies. I guess they probably shouldn't have demonized the "liberal" media at the convention, huh?
AP refuses to comply with SS demand that they turn over all copies of emails hacked from Palin's hacked email account. The last I heard, this was still the USA, where Bush's thugs don't get to censor news they don't like.
America is no longer the home of the free and the brave. It's now the home of cowards who have surrendered their freedom to fascists offering vague promises of "homeland security."
by Rosa Brooks
