For years I've been trying to understand the leaders of the Republican Party and their staunch supporters.
I've known for years that their policies are wrong but I tried to understand the people themselves and how they think and win support.
After watching and hearing them during the Republican convention, I can now characterize them in two simple ways.
They are sneaks. The sneaks (or the leaders) of the Party fool many of us with promises to cut taxes while really intending to cut taxes mainly for the rich.
Also, the sneak leaders use gimmicks, like the race card, homophobia, zealous patriotism and religious fanaticism to attract support. They win over the boneheads among us who are emotionally attracted to these primitive ways of thinking.
This is an easy way of understanding Republicans and their supporters.
For the enlightened of us, it is our job to educate Republican supporters to the errors of their thinking and understanding.
Which leads us directly into our current state of economics.
This past week the stock market has been falling like a boulder off of a cliff.
Major financial institutions are going bankrupt. Unemployment is going up. What is going wrong?
What's going wrong is that the plutocrats who are leading this country are running out of economic gimmicks – economic gimmicks that have stimulated capitalism over the last 30 years.
First they used deregulation to make goods and services cheaper to sell. Then they expanded the credit industry so that people could borrow and buy more. Then they expanded the home mortgage industry so that people could borrow against the equity in their homes. Then they shipped our industries and jobs overseas to make goods and services cheaper to sell. Then they created a war so that the government could spend trillions of dollars to help stimulate the American economy. Then they thought they could bail out the big financial institutions that were going under because of their bad policies.
But now the gig is up.
They have no more financial tricks to pull out of their hats. The plutocrats are at the end of their line. The American economy and probably the world economy are headed for a total financial collapse or in other words a depression. We have to recognize this and come up with solutions to permanently get us out of this financial crisis.
This financial situation that we're in doesn't have to exist. Many of us believe we can permanently straighten out our economy and have permanent prosperity. We should be looking back at the lessons learned from the last Depression in the 1930s, and taking from the policies implemented under the Roosevelt Administration known as the New Deal.
