As I scanned the news tonight, several items caught my eye.
First was this list of the 15 states having the highest percentage of $200,000 plus earners. Interestingly, only one of the states listed, Texas, voted for John McCain last November. The others voted for Obama, even knowing that their taxes would go up should he be elected. Among these states was New York, home of Wall Street and the investment bankers. Those of us who’ve been around the block a few times remember the term “limosine liberal.” It refered to those people who, despite or perhaps because they were wealthy, understood that they had a responsibility to the rest of society. And that sense of responsibility has consistently tended to indicate a set of political values that can be termed liberal. One of the favorite epithets used by conservatives towards liberals is “elite” or “elitist.” I would venture that most people earning more than $200,000 a year probably have a college education. On the other hand, the GOP traditionally was the party of business. Yet its influence is more prevelent in those states and those parts of states that tend to have a lower overall level of education — people whose interests are often polar opposite of the monied portion of the population.
Another thing that caught my attention is that the FDIC is reporting its first loss in 18 years. Hmmmm, what was happening in the banking sector 18 years ago? Ah, yes, the savings and loan mess — the last time we tried deregulating the financial institutions. The president behind that was Ronald Reagan and his treasury secretary Don Regan. I saw the consequences of that up close and personal. I was working for the Resolution Trust Corporation, specifically dealing with cataloging the records of two failed institutions. I saw the records of the bad loans the institutions had made, and they were nothing less than shocking. In many instances there were multi-million dollar loans that were written off as total losses — not one payment had been made on them. And the same relatively small group of individuals were the recipients of many similar loans. At the time, such a practice was known as a bust-out, an operation that amounted to robbing a bank but which was legal in that it involved loans rather than an actual heist.
The last item was a report on the CPAC conference. From the line-up and the issues of concern, it’s clear that the GOP is intellectually completely bankrupt. They were an anti-Bush, anti-McCain crowd to be sure. They seemed convinced that Hawaii was not part of the United States in 1961 when Barack Obama was born there, and that Joe the Plumber was the best qualified person to show them the way out of the wilderness. How pathetic! The economy of the country and the world is swirling around the toilet bowl and this is what they’re fixated upon? If it weren’t so horrifying it would be laughable. We need more than one political party in this country, but if this represents the GOP, it’s not only the party of no but the party of know nothing.
UPDATE: And it continues… this morning I read that John Bolton, that hardest of hardliners, the guy who couldn’t get confirmed as UN Ambassador but who Bush kept in the role as long as possible via other means, “joked” at the CPAC convention about how a nuclear bomb detonating in, say, Chicago, might be instructive to our president’s views on foreign policy. And as if that weren’t only one more sorry episode in his history of ill-chosen remarks, the room erupted in laughter and applause. Sick.
