Cheney's economic "pep talk"

From the AR Dem Gazette: "Cheney to Americans: Save for future WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney urged Americans on Thursday to do a better job of saving and challenged policymakers to strengthen pensions and Social Security to help Americans heading toward retirement. “The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work,” Cheney told a conference in Washington exploring how to encourage people to boost savings and be better prepared for retirement. Too often, workers are living paycheck to paycheck and are not saving sufficiently, Cheney said. Last year, Americans’ personal savings rate dropped to its lowest point since the Great Depression. The dismal state of savings comes as a big wave of baby boomers will soon start retiring, straining Social Security as fewer workers are available to help bankroll the retirement program. The vice president also called on Congress to complete action on legislation that would strengthen the nation’s troubled pension system. Separate House and Senate bills are aimed at shoring up traditional, employer-based defined-benefit pension plans, which are underfunded by a collective $450 billion. "


It's great to know that Cheney now has reached an understanding that Americans aren't doing so well in the savings race. Our economy is spiraling into uncharted waters with the ancient conservative governance by the Bush/Cheney hydra controlling the agenda, there will be no end to the loss of high-paying jobs that were so vital to the health of the nation's economy in times past and their pension and insurance benefits. Americans are "living paycheck to paycheck and not saving sufficiently," says the Power Beneath the Waves(Cheney--courtesy Joseph Campbell) of discontent that is boiling over among the general population with the worst administration ever to hold the title of President continuing to extoll the "virtue" of "outsourcing" American jobs to India and Bush's encouragement of the practice. When fewer Americans have a degree of security, as have been enjoyed by millions of Americans after the post-WW II economic boom, fueled to a large degree by defense spending during the ensuing Cold War with the Soviet Union, what future do we Americans have before our ways of life all change for the worst forever? It seems our future is murky at best if the electorate don't wake up and demand accountability from the government, which happens to be infected by a GOP majority, we are all in grave danger, unless you're one of the lucky ones who will always be adequately employed and covered by a health plan(at least until retirement, no certainty that retirement to grave healthcare will be around when you retire) and increasingly more companies are dumping pensions from their offerings for employees.

As the postmortem on the causes of the American Revolution reveals, i.e., the idea that the French and Indian War of the late 1750s and early 1760s precipitated the Revolution because the last serious external threat from the likes of a continental European power had been precluded from further conquest in North America, so the stage was set to throw off the imperial head of their colonies and avoid control by any force and set up a strictly North American government. The loss of our great enemy of the 20th century from 1917 to 1991, the U.S.S.R, has allowed the hawkish members of the military/industrial elite to promote a war which should never have reached this conclusion, at least not based on the downside of removing a dictator, not quite as bad as Saddam was Tito of Yugoslavia who kept a lid on age-old racial, religious, and ethnic tensions by ruling rather harshly(just like Saddam, but maybe not quite as brutal of sadistic). Who is to say after the history of the Balkans post-Cold War that Tito's regime wasn't the best possible arrangement to avoid tragic chaos. The Serbs dominated the military establishment, though the "nation" Yugoslavia was a hodge-podge of various groups. The Austro-Hungarian empire had existed ruling a much larger territory than Tito, so imagine their difficulties and possible reasons for why the old empire was so weak.

It's nice to see Cheney admit that things are not working out so well among the general population of Americans. People are living "paycheck to paycheck," as Cheney observed because income has taken a dive and what income is earned is choked by the rising costs of living in our nation. The voodoo economists of the Bush administration suffer the same insensitivity of the elder Bush, who didn't "get it", as the sloganeers emblazoned on the brain of the voting public, because he didn't relate to the ordinary American (his background precludes that possibility) and really didn't seem to care about the spiraling economy during his adminstration of the U.S. government and its negative effect on ordinary Americans. And to slap us all in the face and tell us all that "outsourcing" formerly high-paying, adequate employment opportunities to India is "GOOD" for Americans; the Bushie hegemons have some nerve.

Again: "Last year, Americans’ personal savings rate dropped to its lowest point since the Great Depression." The GREAT DEPRESSION?! If this Bush cartel doesn't espouse the pre-Depression values of the GOP, I have no idea how to describe them. Hoover was a brilliant man, unlike Bush, but he was old-line GOP and they aspire to the conservatism that pushed the world into the global catastrophe remembered as WW-I. Conservatism was a dirty concept because they largely were monarchial forces pledged to join in alliance militarily to oust any government in Europe which had it's monarchial head overthrown, as the French Revolution had achieved. The crowned heads felt much safer keeping their aristocratic cousins(usually literally) on their respective thrones and drown all talk of another mimic of the American Revolution(though, thankfully, the good ol' American people didn't have many aristocrats to behead, as our French allies from the American revolution). Needless to say, monarchial squabbles turned into nationalistic warfare, which has been largely responsible for some of the worst mass bloodshed in human history. I don't want to repeat such cavalier incompetence, thus I eschew all conservative values because I don't think rank and file Americans who view themselves as conservative Republicans had that kind of conservatism in mind when they voted for the most incompetent president in recent memory.

Time to end the GOP majority over this nation; hopefully 2006 is the year to rid the American polity of their bumbling administration of the government. I believe the American people can survive nicely without any more encouragement from Cheney's soulless void described as a human person. Americans can't possibly believe they are better off than 5 years ago when Dubya ascended to the throne his father promised him. For moderates like me, this nation is getting to be a rather ugly place, which isn't quite so foreign to most Americans with the evils and our nation's history during the 20th century. I fear a repeat of the political climate of the 60s which might tear us all apart irreconcilably this time around. Why do Americans always have to learn their lessons the hard way? Dogma is the blinding force responsible and when dogma enters political discourse, nothing but trouble can possibly ensue. Beware of dogma!(stolen from a paraplegic cartoonist, forgot his name).