These days, there is a disease that is rampant in Washington. This illness causes seemingly normal people to lose functionality in the part of their brain that affects their historical memory.
The symptoms are as follows:
- A selective and convenient loss of any historical knowledge gained over a person's lifetime pertaining to the socioeconomic conditions that occurred during periods of economic hard times.
- A selective and convenient loss of any historical knowledge pertaining to the methods used by one of the greatest leaders of our time to rescue America and Americans from the worst depression in American history.
- A self-delusional, revisionist rewriting of history to give the outward impression of no mental loss.
The above symptoms can and do give the afflicted many socially undesirable side-effects:
- A need to lionize corporations and the rich, many of whom just happed to be campaign contributors, by calling them “job creators,” even if they offshore jobs.
- Pretending that those so called "job creators" will create jobs, not just profits.
- An almost sociopathic indifference to the health and well-being of the average American and a willingness to sacrifice it to enhance the corporate profits of campaign contributors.
- A tendency to regard organizations such as unions that fight for the betterment of working people, the retired and the poor as enemies to be destroyed.
- Making constant references to lowering taxes for all, when they really mean lowering taxes for the rich.
- Attempting to finance those tax breaks for the rich on the backs of those who can least afford it by cutting social safety nets.
- Constantly whining about budget deficits, but always managing to come up with money for “defense” and Wall Street bailouts.
- Calling government programs that bail out working people and the poor a giveaways, when they actually jump-start our economy.
- Cutting back on government jobs and lowering the salaries of government employees, creating more unemployment and less purchasing power.
- Refusing to acknowledge that in times of high unemployment, government should jump in and become the employer of last resort with FDR WPA style programs.
- Complaining about “big government” and needless regulations when they affect corporations, supporting them when they affect us.
The cause of this disease appears to be the intoxicating effect of a massive influx of corporate money that “clouds” the afflicted politician's thinking process. Since fairly recent Supreme Court decisions define corporations as “people” and money as “speech,” there is currently no way to stop the flow of the corporate supplied campaign funds that buy most of our electeds and give them historical amnesia. Because there is no cure for this disease, we must fire as many of the afflicted as possible when we vote in November.
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