Thinking about the sorry state of the world economy today and the continuing and impending destruction of already created wealth, I recalled the words of Oliver Cromwell to The Rump Parliament in 1653, echoed by Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain in the Norway Debate of 1940.
“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
I’d like to address these words to many voices on the political scene at the moment including:
To: Rush Limbaugh, first among those who have devoted their lives to trying, unsuccessfully, to transform the United States of America into a land of self-centered, money grubbing, holier than thou jerks, who care only for wealth, power, and injecting religious dogma and bile into the political process.
To: Sen. John McCain, who contributes nothing new to any debate, or to any effort to improve the economy, who bleats about “earmarks” without having the slightest notion of how to distinguish an “earmark” from a useful instance of economic stimulus, or from one of his beloved military expenditures, who never met a weapons system or an armed intervention he didn’t like, who has not the slightest understanding or concern about the relationship between economic and military issues, and who is always part of the problem, and never part of the solution.
To: Karl Rove, whose main man is gone, whose economic ideology has visibly damaged not only America, but much of the world, whose views on “noble lying,” and foreign policy, and whose talent for manipulation was responsible in some part for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and whose efforts at brainwashing and re-writing history evoke, alternately, hysterical laughter, and fury against the MSM for continuing to provide a forum for one of the world’s most accomplished liars.
To: The Republican Party whose economic and social ideologies are both bankrupt creatures of the nineteenth century, and who turn only to leaders of such transparent dishonesty, shallowness of character, and disloyalty to the ideals of constitutional democracy and open society, that one can only hope that, like the 19th Century Whigs, they will simply fade away and leave us with better alternatives, before they do any more damage than they have already done to the social order of the United States and to its political system.
To: Those professional politicians (like John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, and Judd Gregg), “News” Organizations (like the Wall Street Journal and News Corp. outlets), and journalistic pundits (like George Stephanopoulos, Wolf Blitzer, and Andrea Mitchell) who cannot escape from the categories and talking points of the past; so that they cannot speak about economic stimuli or recovery budgets, without also talking (hypocritically, it turns out, since they were mighty silent about such matters for 8 years) about the big bad deficit and its effect on our grandchildren, while knowing very well that our grandchildren will need to pay back, provided that we spend enough for the economy to recover, exactly nothing; just as we, ourselves, have had to pay back nothing of the accumulated debt of the Depression and World War II generations.
To: Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and other members of the Obama economic team who are still intending to practice “socialism for the rich” by sinking public capital into the Giant Banks in order to avoid “socialization” on grounds that it is not good for the Government to take over banks because a) it is “socialism,” and/or b) Government bureaucrats can’t run banks, and who are, in attempting to implement these “insights,” maintaining the lack of both lending and feelings of certainty that are among the primary causes of the world-wide downward spiral of confidence we are presently seeing. It is very important, that these fine and brilliant gentlemen give way to an equally brilliant team that will, however, be more devoted to the public and its interests, than to the interests of the stockholders and managers of the Giant Banks.
And, finally, to: The spirit of Herbert Hoover, which lingers on in the hearts of all those who think that, even in the absence of inflation and the presence of a deepening mini-depression, budget deficits matter as much or more than generating new real wealth by rebuilding the nation, and who also think that it is too bad that nothing can be done about the blighted lives of those the world over who will be unemployed except to wait for the unregulated market to work its magic.
And so, I say to all of the above:
“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”