No.

Editor,

"25 years of excess" consumption places the blame for the collapse of the consumer economy squarely where it does not deserve to be.

The real cause of this collapse is that the so-called "job creators" that right-wing ideologues insist we coddle with tax breaks, subsidies, and "self-regulation" (meaning no regulation) shipped as many jobs as possible to countries where workers work for 50 cents an hour, laying off as many potential consumers here as possible and scaring those American workers who still had jobs into accepting declining real wages and benefits for the last 30 years, for which they vainly indentured themselves to credit issuers to make up the difference.

Also, "the biggest flaw with the past stimulus was" NOT "that it imagined that the old consumer economy might return." It was that 2/3 went to tax breaks for corporations and the rich, again at the insistence of right-wing ideologues (who somehow manage to dominate the debate in this country and now blame the failure of the stimulus on the concept of stimulation itself) that "job creators" would spend this welfare "creating jobs," which of course they only do in China, India, Mexico, Thailand, etc. if they bother "creating jobs" at all.

No. This economy is being looted, gutted, plundered, and pillaged by the same faction that fought to preserve slavery in the Civil War -- because slavery is what Ayn Rand's master race of "job creators" cleverly employ to keep their labor costs as close to zero as they can.

You have to hand it to the closest thing we have to fascism today for transforming the mass media, by buying it, into a racist propaganda machine that successfully manipulates American workers into fighting with each other when the real enemy to prosperity in this country -- "enemy" because shared prosperity is precisely what they are out to eradicate, deliberately -- is the proto-fascist core of the American right-wing.

Re: "We’re Spent" (7/17/2011)