Same Song, Fourth Verse

In the throes of yet another Presidential campaign season, I can only shake my head in wonder as the Republicans trot out one variation after another of the shopworn theory born as Reaganomics in the 80's, that has become more radical and irrational with each passing year. It should have been finally discarded after the Bush '43 debacle, in which our economy came within a hair's breadth of locking up completely in a crisis that most economists say would have dwarfed the Great Depression in its depths and scale.  It was avoided by the great bailout, accompanied by successive infusions of $16 trillions of cash from the Fed, unapproved by congress and unreported in the press, known only because of a Bernie Sanders-sponsored partial audit of the Fed, which revealed that it went to "too-big-to-fail" financial houses, not all of which were U. S. companies. 

Reaganomics - the trickle-down theory, despite its repeated and complete crash-and-burn failures over its sorry life span, refuses to go away. In recent years, its proponents have successively doubled down with each demonstration of its logical and inevitable results, in which the rich who can game the system and purchase the lawmakers and . thereby the laws, wind up with all the money, as the middle class becomes an endangered species. 

In the four years since 2008, as the economy has limped along, the Republicans have pursued their top priority by practicing the purest form of obstructionism and partisan solidarity. What they could not stop outright by filibustering, they watered down by counter-productive amendments, which they frequently insisted on, only to vote against them at the end, simply to deny Obama any credit for an accomplishment. 

The Reaganomics banner is being carried into battle once again by the Romney team, leftovers from the last Bush administration, who oversaw the 2008 debacle.  That they can even show their faces in public after their last disgrace is amazing enough. The Mittster has appointed Paul Ryan their latest champion - his vacant blue eyes fronting for an ideology that would relegate our social safety net to the scrap heap, ending medicare, repealing Obamacare, and completing the raiding of social security, while preserving our abject servitude to a voracious military/industrial complex whose ultimate aim of a constant state of war is now a fact. 

Are our memories that short?