Paul Krugman takes stock of the last six years, in inimitable Krugman fashion.
Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you?
It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball bat.
And now you understand the basics of what has been happening to several major economies, including the United States, over the past few years. In fact, you understand these basics better than many politicians and commentators.
The best part is we handed over the economy to the GOP so we can start bashing ourselves in the head some more, because two-thirds of us stayed home in November.
And yes, I'm going to keep harping on "two-thirds of us stayed home in November" until things change. At some point, we've got to learn that if we don't vote, we get screwed.
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2 comments:
Keep pounding that point - if we don't vote, we get screwed - and on some heads you will need to swing away with a baseball bat to get through that Greenwaldian Green Party sabotage propaganda and drive the point home: when our Democrats win, they move left and life gets better for everyone. When our Democrats lose, the Republicans are in control and they screw things up for the 99.9% while the Democrats move right in search of reliable votes from people who are not petulant whiners who will maliciously stab you in the back from sheer spite.
It's a tough thing to convince people of - if they are already getting screwed (student loans, lack of jobs, unwarranted police attention, etc.), they may believe that it is easier to get more people into the "screwed" club than it is to get themselves OUT of it. Especially when so many people trumpeting the "2/3 stayed home" are the ones on the cusp of getting screwed, who would really like things to get better so they don't fall down into the club.
Improvements don't usually happen to the ones on the very bottom - improvements help the ones barely hanging on, and then in goes down the line, MAYBE / POSSIBLY getting to the ones on the bottom. Where is the incentive to vote? Maybe if the "screwed" club gets big enough, big changes can happen fast and actually help the ones on the bottom. Of course it might mean terror and famine and blood, but those things aren't strangers to the ones on the bottom. Why wouldn't they just say the hell with it, and welcome us all into the garbage dump when the Republicans break it all and steal everything for their corporate overlords? How does that change things at the bottom? Why should the bottom care about YOU and your struggles to remain afloat when they have already sunk? Maybe if YOU sink, you will bring some harpoons and torpedoes to the bottom with you, and we can do something about the powerboats and hydroplanes zooming by above on a steady diet of $100 bills.
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