Echoing many sentiments expressed throughout the Kos community, but just to add my feelings of complete frustration and anger at the failure of our political institutions to deal with basic reality in our national discourse.
At no other time in our history at least since the Great Depression would we be debating deficits and debt at a time of 9.2% official unemployment (and a lot more than that if you count people who've just given up). Quite the opposite -- normal, rational, sane government would demand a far more active government in this time of economic turmoil.
With structural surplus labor and everyone who is not a millionaire getting hammered with stagnant wages and rising costs, the debt is the wrong debate to have at the very worst time.
The real debate should be what in the hell do we do with roughly 20 million, 30 million, maybe more Americans who for absolutely no fault of their own have been effectively made obsolete through a vicious combination of a globalized economy, free trade, outsourcing, and much higher productivity made possible by the high tech revolution of the last quarter century.
While there are a thousand things I really admire about Obama, he has been a total failure in reframing our national debate around the biggest challenges facing the country:
-- A crippled economy and jobless recovery,
-- A military (i.e. empire) stretched too thin that costs way too much and is stuck in several hot wars and not a few lesser conflicts around the world,
-- An energy policy that leaves us overly dependent on foreign sources of oil and fossil fuels that are baking the planet,
-- An inability to have adult conversations about controversial social issues like immigration, LGBT issues, abortion, guns, etc,
-- A failure to rebuild our education system for the 21st century,
-- A health care system that is bankrupting America and providing too little care for too few people,
-- Etc.
On each of these issues, we are at best a step, maybe two forward -- and on many of these issues, we are several steps backward.
And now with corporations sitting on record profits and with Wall Street doing very well, thank you very much, the most fortunate among us are raking the dough and have little incentive to reinvest in new innovation to create new jobs.
There is a theory that at some magical point in the future, companies will see a need to rehire and push the unemployment number down, but I'm not sure there's much evidence to support that theory.
With the housing bubble long gone and the housing market confronting a double dip recession... with credit cards still maxed out and Americans struggling to rebuild savings/equity... with labor pressures from China and India and many other parts of the developing world still hitting the American worker hard... and with no real vision for how to unleash the next evolution of economic growth and innovation, I don't see any real path for getting out of this rut.
And with Democrats divided, Obama on the defensive, and Republicans on a road to whack-topia, where is the political leadership going to come from? Who will stand up with a realistic and credible plan for how to deal with the structural problem of surplus labor and production overcapacity?
Whatever brilliant rope-a-dope political strategy Obama is playing, we are all suffering from a the delusion that things will just get better on their own with a little more time and a little more patience. Perhaps that's possible in the very long run, but, as Keynes said, "In the long run, we're all dead."