America’s political discussions are irrational

Spartan Daily

News
Opinion
Sports
A&E


Categorized | Opinion, Spartan Daily





America’s political discussions are irrational

By Salman Haqqi
Spartan Daily
November 9, 2010

 Print This Story




Salman Haqqi's On the Contrary





American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational.

On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector or the deadly assault on the ecosystem.

On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas.

More than half of those who identified as “mainstream Americans,” in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports,  now view the tea party favorably, while the other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic......


One Response to “America’s political discussions are irrational”


Ted Rudow III,MA says:
November 13, 2010
Well, I think it’s important to look at who the tea party is, what the tea party is. I mean, let’s remember, it’s many different organizations. They wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t been for an enormous amount of money from a few … well, Simon Johnson calls them the “13 bankers.” 13 bankers is the rise of concentrated financial power and the threat it poses to our economic well-being. Over the past three decades, a handful of banks became spectacularly large and profitable and used their power and prestige to reshape the political landscape.
More remarkable the responses of both the Bush and Obama administrations to the crisis, namely bailing out the megabanks on generous terms, without securing any meaningful reform, demonstrate the lasting political power of Wall Street. The largest banks have become more powerful and more emphatically too big to fail with no incentive to change their behavior in the future. This only sets the stage for another financial crisis, another government bailout, and another increase in our national debt economic well-being. The Wall Street world to which Barack Obama said, “I’m the only thing that stands between you and the pitchforks,” turned around, and for all the compromising that Obama did to Wall Street and to the banisters who had brought us the crisis that he inherited when he was elected president, they turned around and poured money into the organizations that we think of as the tea party.

Ted Rudow III, MA
class of 1996