OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: I Called it Right! I Called it Wrong

My sister was a teacher. How could she ever pay that debt back in any reasonable amount of time? My brother-in-law eventually had to enter military service to keep up with the Joneses and to pay off debt.

This same couple later bought a house, and luckily they were subsequently able to sell that same house just before the housing crashed two years back—but imagine how much more of a mess my siblings would have been had they not been so lucky as to have sold that house?

Hundreds of thousands of American military families are similarly adversely affected by DEBT.
This is one reason that many young and middle aged citizens still sign up to join the U.S. military or national guard these days—even though the executive-in-chief has not run the military industrial economy and policies any better than I had presumed back in 2000. WE BLEW IT!

In short, Professor John Robertson had correctly warned young Americans against allowing the W. Bush Administration from taking office under the peculiar election conditions that December 2000, i.e. as the Supreme Court Justice votes counted more than the uncounted ballots in Florida.

NOTE: Recall the strategy in 2000 mis-election was the same by the news media as it is today in 2008. In both November and December 2000, news media claimed that a decision had to be made NOW—the markets couldn’t wait.

The Cheney-Bush Administration spent beyond my wildest dreams between 2000-2008, without even offering Americans high yielding war bonds to fight wars on multiple fronts simultaneously as had occurred in WWII.

I admit, too, I had failed America, too. I should have quit university in January 2001 and joined the protests and underground to stop the inauguration of the unelected Bush Presidency that same month. Instead, I just washed my hands of the fiasco and naively prayed that the better day would come soon.

Later in 2001, I also failed to go to Washington personally and lobby Congress to have Dick Cheney investigated for bullying the General Accounting Office. Recall that the GAO in 2001 was fully ready to investigate what the Vice-President of the United States had promised on the White House grounds to oil and energy producers starting in February and March 2001. (Not enough Americans stood up for the GAO investigators who could have uncovered Evidence of malfeasance and ridded the nation of Bush-Cheney before they had time to double-team America into unnecessary war and debt.)

I also failed to go personally to put my life on the line protesting the Invasion of Iraq in 2003. Recall that several witness for peace types died in Iraq in march 2003 standing in support of the victims of Bush’s war!--nor did I go to Washington to help make a million (or two million) man march on the capital in opposition to that unwise and ill-informed war.

EPILOGUE: A PROGRESSIVE FUTURE?

Naturally, I have not been the only American to have failed to stand up more aggressively against bad governance and bad political economic theory.

Americans, like me, must take into account our failure to wipe out the status quo in Washington and Wall Street before now.

Many progressives, like me, know we have not been able to stop the flighty notions of neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and conservatism wiping out much of what was positive development in America after WWII to see that Americans could afford good housing, good and inexpensive higher education, and good infrastructure from our government.

These are things that we can do better on in the future by providing better banking services and government support—rather than an endless series of bailouts for badly run mega-firms, previously supported blindly by growth-at-all-cost capitalism over recent decades (even though we had already begun to see limits-to-growth without energy development and properly homegrown production facilities across the nation).

We have tried. We have spoken out, but so far, we have blown it, Progressives!

Let’s make sure that in elections 2008 we set a progressive tone for the next 3 or 4 decades.

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