Democrats: Offense!!

Perhaps they were bullied as children. Perhaps they are afraid of the loud crashes and clangs that are predictably coming out of the corporate media (run now almost entirely by a handful of powerful elite.) Perhaps they still don't comprehend what happened last November; that we handed them a REAL mandate.

A mandate for change.

It is past time that Congressional Democrats grew a little spine and delivered on promises made.

They cowered for two years since we gave them a majority in the House in 2007, and now they still don't seem to comprehend... that our latest electoral shout indicates that we are no longer asking, but are demanding a change from the last eight years.

Stop listening to the GOP! Damn it -- stop cowering!

But don't listen to me... who am I, anyway? Some miscellaneous American citizen. A blogger, no less. (Eww.)

You certainly ignore me when I call your offices, trying to make my opinion heard.

No, don't listen to me -- listen to Krugman. Perhaps his Nobel prize will get your attention.

On the Edge
By PAUL KRUGMAN

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.

It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving — a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now. Developers of commercial real estate, watching rents fall and financing costs soar, are slashing their investment plans. Businesses are canceling plans to expand capacity, since they aren’t selling enough to use the capacity they have. And exports, which were one of the U.S. economy’s few areas of strength over the past couple of years, are now plunging as the financial crisis hits our trading partners.

Meanwhile, our main line of defense against recessions — the Federal Reserve’s usual ability to support the economy by cutting interest rates — has already been overrun. The Fed has cut the rates it controls basically to zero, yet the economy is still in free fall.



Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive.

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