a starting diatribe

It's new years eve and I thought one of the changes I'd make would be to start a blog, so this is my start.

I'm really looking forward to the new year, a new President, and hopefully lots of changes on the political front. The USA has gone backwards almost continually since President Kennedy was assassinated, and that's been most of my life. Johnson certyainly deserves credit for getting much of Kennedy's platform enacted, but he let Vietnam spoil its implementation. Too much money going to defense and not enough to what really mattered to Kennedy, and me. Carter stemmed the rightward tide for a while, but he wasn't really a liberal, and he was never able to really manage our government. (But he certainly has shown the world how to be a great an ex-president.)

Clinton probably did more damage to progressive causes than a republican would have, because he and his centrist accomplices legitimised the free market, privatization and deregulation crapola spouted by the right wing.

Regulation was imposed because the free market needs it. It wasn't imposed because some bureacrat wanted to build an empire. Elected officials imposed it to address real weaknesses that had become apparent from the operation of the marketplace. We've let the conservatives and the conservative owned media ignore this history and dictate the dialog.

Even growing up in conservative and Idaho, my teachers in the 1950s did not teach unbridled capitalism as the answer to all that ails us. Yet today, (or at least up until the latest market collapse), any Idaho teacher that implied a government based solution might be better than a market based one was jeopardizing their career, or at least risking a backlash.

Hopefully this will turn around in this new year.

Well, enough for now.