Usually when we’re this close to a major election I use this space to praise a candidate I favor or (more often) to slam one that I think is especially deserving of my wrath. But not this year. I hate to admit it, but I feel so disconnected from the political process and the direction our country is heading at this point that I can’t generate much interest in this election or in any of the people who are running for office.
I think the massive failure of our financial system and the government’s “let the taxpayers bail us out, again” response to it has proven to be the last straw for me. I believe we are traveling down a path from which there will likely be no turning back, and at the end of this trip I fear that we will not recognize the country we are living in.
If you’ve read any of my previous columns, you already know that the federal government’s out-of-control spending and our crushing national debt has long been a major issue for me. So you can probably imagine my dismay in the wake of this recently announced plan to dedicate nearly a trillion more dollars that we don’t have to bail out a bunch of big corporations that have been run into the ground.
Frankly, I can’t even wrap my mind around the kind of thinking that leads a supposedly intelligent, well-educated group of adults to conclude that this is a wise course of action, but really this is a fitting final chapter for an administration whose mantra has always been “spend, spend, spend…and by the way here’s a tax cut.” And it wouldn’t be Bush program unless it included a little nose-thumbing directed at the US Constitution. Consider this quote from the treasury secretary’s draft proposal for the bailout plan:
“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
Go back and read that again. What that is saying, very plainly, is that the secretary of the treasury would have absolute authority to spend $700 billion of your money as he sees fit and would be answerable to absolutely no one. Period.
What country are we living in here? It can’t be the United States of America, can it? To be sure, it is not the country that our founders envisioned. They came up with an excellent plan, and so long as we followed it we were, I believe, as close to an ideal place to live as the world has ever seen.
But that nation no longer exists, and the Constitution does not seem to be any sort of obstacle to those who wish to manipulate our finances and personal lives as it pleases or benefits them. Neither of the two major parties has shown any inclination to arrest that trend, and thus neither of them deserves my vote.
Is this the end of American Dream? Are we truly witnessing the final phase of the “Great Experiment”? Perhaps, but I hope not. I believe there is some possibility that the storm that has begun raging on Wall Street and in Washington DC (one that I believe is going to get much worse in the coming years) could, at long last, convince a majority of Americans that our government is truly broken and in need of an overhaul.
I don’t think that such an overhaul is going to occur while our government is in the hands of those individuals pleading for your vote during commercial breaks from “Dancing with the Stars.” We need change all right, but all we are getting from Republicans and Democrats is more “nanny state” nonsense wrapped in different packages. And I just can’t distinguish the lesser of evils anymore.
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