The 22 countries of the European Union do not function as united states. Germany is the fourth largest economy in the world. When her neighbors asked for economic aid, she refused.
When Katrina hit Louisiana, did the other 49 states tell her to repair the damage by herself?
Perhaps, it is over-simplistic and unfair to point out European weaknesses in so cursory a fashion. What we see from them is mainly confusion. They are rookies in the current Depression. They are a patchwork of hastily contrived laws mostly legal paperwork without the bedrock of litigation, precedence and experience.
What Worked in the Great Depression?
Although the bank and stock market failures triggered the Depression, it essentially became a huge problem on the demand side. Unemployment soared as wages went into a black hole. The disaster overwhelmed the traditional charities and community resources. The people were jobless, homeless and penniless. Americans were glad they had tent cities to live in.
Does this sound familiar? The Democrats fought back.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation provided loans to small, medium and large concerns.
Social Security came into being, so to obviate a life of destitution that ended in a pauper's grave.
John Kenneth Galbraith urges us to recreate an organization like the depression-era Home Owners Loan Corporation "for triage and renegotiation on a case-by-case basis."
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/129169/?page=1
Essential to any recovery is the Employee Free Choice Act. Although I have written about this before, the country will collapse without it.
Bernie Horn has described what Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans are doing to ruin the country.
Expect the right-wingers to rely on phony arguments. Remember some of their whoppers during debate on the President’s economic recovery package?
- They said the New Deal didn't substantially lower unemployment. (It did.)
- They said the bill would give more than $4 billion to ACORN. (It didn't.)
- They said that funding food stamps and similar safety-net programs doesn't stimulate the economy. (According to economists, it's the most effective kind of stimulus.)
- They said that corporate tax cuts would be the best kind of stimulus. (According to economists, it's the least effective kind.)
- They said that it raised taxes for most Americans, especially small-business owners. (It contained the biggest middle-class tax cut in U.S. history and cuts taxes for at least 98 percent of small-business owners.)
- They said Obama's legislation was full of earmarks. (There were no earmarks at all.)
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009030901/political-armageddon
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