A Word or Two from Mike Lofgren

Today, as I was looking through what was happening on truth-out.org, I came across this article by MIke Lofgren discussing the climate of both political parties, putting blame and truth on both of them for where our country is and the direction that it is headed in.  If you need a little history about Mike Lofgren, then you would like to know that he was a Congressional Staffer for 28 years.  He retired from his life on Capitol Hill after looking objectively at what is happening to the GOP as well as our government  in general.  I took the time to read the article twice to make sure that I wasn’t missing any extremely subjective views and I feel that he does a great job of just being an observer and placing fault on both sides. I do suggest reading the footnotes first because it will place you in a state of just reading the article opposed to try to negate what he is saying. 

Here are two excerpts that I really enjoyed to help give you an idea of what you will be reading if you are thinking about it.

  • Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class – without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking

 

  • It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors’ looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At “Washington spending” – which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade’s corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

 

To view the entire article, click here.  Please let me know your thoughts after you read it.  The purpose of posting this is to motivate thought on the climate of our national community.  This is necessary especially on a national holiday that celebrates rights that ironically, have been taken away in numerous states this past year.