Shades of the Great Depression

As if the Chimperator has not already done enough to earn himself the title "Worse President Ever." he now seems to be mindlessly acting along the same lines as Herbert Hoover as the USA fell into the great depression. The Chimperator has shown himself time and time again to be utterly oblivious to objective reality in addition to being utterly ignorant of history. If he'd studied the history of Iraq for instance, we'd have likely never have invaded back in 2003. Harold Meyerson has a column in today's Washington Post that shows how the Chimperator continues to screw over the country. The dangers of having a cretin in the White House are enormous - not that the Sarah Palin loving Kool-Aid drinkers will ever figure this out. From what I am seeing in the residential and commercial real estate market - i.e., segments of the economy that largely power everything else - things are still continuing to worsen. Here are some column highlights:

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George W. Bush . . . his handling of our plunging economy is Hooverian in both its substance and inadequacy. Herbert Hoover, we should recall, had a program for dealing with the Depression. It consisted of lending to banks but opposing fiscal stimulus or direct aid to individuals. Which is why Hank Paulson's frenzied endeavors to prop up the banking sector and Bush's dogged resistance to assisting anybody else amount to pure neo-Hooverism.

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Having done his bit to bail out the banks, however, Hoover rested. He opposed provisions that would have enabled homeowners to hang on to their homes. As breadlines lengthened, he vetoed a bill appropriating funds for public works on the grounds that it was inflationary and contained pork-barrel spending. Bankers would be saved; everyone else was effectively damned.
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Sound familiar? The Bush administration's approach to today's meltdown is to direct all its energies and largess to lending institutions. There is, as yet, no program to help floundering homeowners renegotiate the terms of their mortgages. The president is opposed to further stimulus programs, even though private-sector investment in the United States has all but ceased.

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It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that while saving the banks may limit further calamities, it doesn't really save anybody else. Even with government-guaranteed lines of credit, financial institutions are refusing to lend money. With the banks effectively on strike, an economic recovery, if there is to be one, must begin with the government injecting funds to those parts of the economy that need it most: infrastructure development, state and local governments, an alternative-energy sector. These are all programs to which Bush is firmly opposed.

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In a sense, Bush's inactivity is even less excusable than Hoover's. Unlike Hoover, Bush could learn from the successes of New Deal and World War II-era programs to revive the economy. . . . Bush, drawing on no known body of economic thought, remains opposed. (So does Republican House leader John Boehner, who seems determined to elevate stupidity to a party principle.) And with each passing day, the economic hole out of which we will have to climb grows deeper.

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So where's the outrage? Why aren't demonstrators besieging the White House? . . . Bush . . . misled us into a nearly endless war of choice to disarm a threat that never really existed. He let a great American city drown. And now he stands by while the economic security of tens of millions of Americans is vanishing.