Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 08:42 pm
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After destroying the economy during Bush’s administration, and then strangling all attempts at recovery in the cradle, the Republicans, predictably, are pointing to the economy as a reason to give them a chance. However, as President Obama famously quipped in 2010,
After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. “No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.
With the midterms looming near, nothing has change since 2010 with regard to how the Republicans want to run America’s economy. They want the keys, but they steadfastly refuse to drive the car.
To the contrary, they have done all in their power to back the car back into the ditch in order to discredit Obama, first to make him a one-term president, then to derail his second term and ruin any chances for a Democratic successor.
And they have been quite open about these goals. It is part of the public record.
Yet House Speaker John Boehner, presiding over a do-nothing House whose popularity is just south of syphilis, is now complaining in a statement released May 2, “we need more robust economic growth if we’re going to help the millions who remain unemployed get back on their feet.”
Earlier this week, we learned that economic growth largely stalled at the start of the year. And while it’s welcome news that more of our friends and neighbors found work in the past month, this report also indicates more than 800,000 Americans left the workforce last month, which is troubling. We need more robust economic growth if we’re going to help the millions who remain unemployed get back on their feet. House Republicans have made the people’s priorities our priorities, passing jobs bill after jobs bill to expand opportunity and economic security for middle-class families. President Obama ought to call on his Democratic-led Senate to take up the stacks of House-passed jobs measures so we can get this economy moving again.
House-passed jobs measures? Boehner’s approach to the problem of unemployment has been four-fold,
a) Create 0 jobs;
b) Cut unemployment benefits;
c) promote the Keystone XL pipeline, which will create,count them, 50 permanent jobs; and,
d) Spend $14 million investigating Benghazi.
Of course, where do you find time to create jobs in between 54 votes to repeal all or part of the law, or to create religious exemptions or prohibit payment, etc, for Obamacare over a four year period? Fox News says there were only six repeal attempts, but The Washington Post gives us the dates of those 54 votes to change or repeal the law.
The cost of those repeal attempts, as of attempt 33, was already $72.5 million.
That’s a lot of starving kids fed, or actual jobs created and parents able to feed their kids.
As Nancy Pelosi has said, “The Republican approach shows nothing but contempt and disregard for working families.
From the GOP we have contempt for working families, contempt for the president, and contempt for the American people, particularly those hit hardest by the Republican-engineered economic collapse of 2008 – and no, I am not talking about the 1 percent.
Contrary to Republican ideology, our economy does not revolve around the wealthy. They not only create no jobs, they send what jobs we do have overseas. Not only do they not pay taxes, they receive welfare from the federal government while likening welfare recipients who actually need the money to wild animals.
In fact, what economic growth we have experienced is due to the relentless efforts of a Democratic administration in the face of nothing short of treason from Republican ranks. Both Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have threatened to destroy the economy unless their profiteering adventure known as the Keystone XL pipeline is approved by the president.
What makes their actions more egregious (if that is possible) is that the economy has been steadily improving:
We’ve had 48 straight months of job growth – +288,000 jobs last month alone (none of which Boehner had a hand in creating) – and the stock market hit an all-time record high, all of which only prompts renewed efforts to sabotage it.
But because the economy is not back to where it was before they destroyed it, Republicans are focusing on the few negatives, like the GDP increasing just 1 percent in the first quarter of 2014.
Never mind that the unemployment rate is just 6.3 percent as of April, according to the Department of Labor, down from the 9 percent unemployment rate Obama was handed when he stepped into the Oval office after G.W. Bush’s ruinous terms. Along the way, we shed two un-funded wars and saw the demise of our greatest enemy, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, the guy Bush couldn’t or wouldn’t catch, Osama bin Laden.
And unlike Bush, and despite all the Republican efforts you can imagine, President Obama has not gotten us into any new wars. That’s certainly a relief and a vast change of pace from the buccaneering expeditions mounted by Bush & Co.
It is time to take stock of where we are as a Nation midway through Barack H. Obama’s second term as president. A well-informed public, which we most certainly do NOT have, would see that things aren’t all that bad compared to where they were at the end of 2008. They would see that despite the GOP’s best attempts, Democrats have moved the economy forward and that this country is on the road to recovery.
And they would kick every last Republican out of both houses of Congress and bar them from the executive branch for at least a generation.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
