Where Do We Go When All Hope is Gone?

Where Do We Go When All Hope is Gone?
By David Glenn Cox


Where do we go when all hope is gone? Where are the answers to be found when our leaders refuse to seek them? I do not see in Washington either hope nor change. I do not see the answers; I don’t even see any questioning for the answers. The Democrats in Congress whined for two years about all that they would do if only they were in the majority. So, now there they are, and what do we get?

We get lame excuses, futile half measures, and right-wing rhetoric balled up as centrist humanitarianism. Under the Republicans, banks and big business got all their needs promptly attended to. What is different now? What has changed? The wars go on and are expanded as the President calls for government agencies to tighten their belts during the worst economic times in a century. The Pentagon is, of course, exempted. But even worse is the total abdication of care for the American people.

George W. Bush was publicly pilloried over his failure to provide humanitarian relief after Hurricane Katrina. One million people were displaced by the storm and were in need of immediate government assistance. Today, in the worst economic times in over a century, two million more families are expected to lose their homes; three million families lost their homes last year, and the total is rapidly approaching ten million families! Forty million people out in the street and we don’t even get a flyover from Air Force One. We’d paint “help” on our rooftops but we no longer have rooftops. We no longer have jobs; the President's stimulus package was expected to, and this was revised, “to create 'or save' three million jobs in next two years.”

Hello! Earth to Obama, we are losing six hundred thousand jobs a month; your stimulus program was out of date in January. Instead it is marked completed and put in the done basket. The administration forced the chairman of GM to resign and questioned their plans to return to profitability, but just this week GM announced plans to begin importing Chinese-made automobiles and the administration nodded their heads in approval! States with automotive suppliers have been hit especially hard by the movement of more jobs to China and Mexico. This is beneath contempt; this is rubbing salt in our wounds, borrowing money from us so you can buy a gun to kill us.

What was the point of bailing out GM if there is no benefit to we, the people, but only to we, the stockholders? If we are just going to continue to hemorrhage jobs why should we, as a nation, subsidize it? There is a major global disconnect out there. I have heard all the arguments about free trade and the global economy. But the economy is not global. It is the US being screwed globally so that the capitalists can profit from cheap labor. In Germany the docks are full of BMW’s, Mercedes, Volkswagons and Porsches ready for export; Germany is not importing cheap cars from Korea or China. Of course they could be made less expensively in Asia, but the German government is looking out for the German people. Germany exports $1.53 trillion and imports $1.2 trillion in products, but of all that trade her eight largest trading partners all have like economies and wage scales.

Only 6% of Germany’s imports come from China. Japan and Korea didn’t even make the list. In the United States 17% of all imports come from China, followed by Canada 15.7%, Mexico 10.6%, Japan 7.4%, leaving two of our biggest trading partners with third-world wage scales. It’s a good, old-fashioned barnyard screwing for the American worker. With millions unemployed and millions losing their homes the government cares not a whit for their survival or their livelihood. It is as if we don’t exist to them. The elections are over, back to the business of maintaining the rich at the expense of the poor.

The President is expected to make his first Supreme Court nominee, and after eight years of Republican choices it should be refreshing. It should be, but instead the President has hinted that it will be a moderate woman with the emphasis on woman. Gee, how about a good, old-fashioned, liberal woman? The Republicans placed Scalia and Roberts, and Obama is looking for a moderate? What is this, an episode of Hannity and Combs?

The President announced plans to close Guantanamo, well, mainly close it, kind of close it. Yesterday the Democratic majority refused to give the administration the funding needed to close it out of political fear. Spineless jellyfish, afraid of how it might appear in Peoria, they are more concerned with the appearance of good works than in doing good works.

My son bought a car from a woman yesterday; she was twenty-four and a college graduate. She was selling the car because she was going into the military. It was the only job she could find. She had lost her job and moved back in with her parents. So, sadly, her last recourse was to join America's last growth industry, its war machine.

Where do we go when all hope is gone? Do we keep sending in proof of purchase box tops to the government? Hoping against hope that they will look up and take notice of the millions of stray dogs and cats that used to be the American middle class? What is the true purpose of a government? What constitutes a failed state? Would the largest trade deficit in the world qualify? How about a nation with the world’s largest trade deficit that advocates for even more free trade? Would the abdication of concern for its people apply? It would seem to me a government with no concern for its citizens would qualify only as a tyranny.

I had a long talk with my brother-in-law about free trade and he explained that it could not be stopped because it was the way the world operates now. He wasn’t interested that the rest of the world isn’t operating that way, that Germany doesn’t operate that way. Japan doesn’t operate that way; Korea doesn’t operate that way. Only America opens her borders to goods manufactured in the third world in factories owned by American companies to exploit cheap labor and subvert American wage scales.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know what you can do to stop it. It’s the law.”

I answered, “It's only the law that keeps you safe in your bed at night. You can call the cops if you hear a prowler, but who you gonna call when you hear a million prowlers?”

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

the grave.

A person cannot live without hope. The body can be kept alive, but without the tiniest spark of hope, the only thing left is death.

been there myself, and it's frustrating to hear people say that they've given up all hope. If that were really true, you wouldn't have bothered to write this peice, or have had the desire to post it.

Discouragement is one thing- dispair is too- but true hopelessness is a place few get to, fewer still, survive to tell about.


Blow hard on that spark that still exists within you- and don't stop till you've kindled a flame, or run out of breath.


peace~
blu

Regardless of which party occupies the seat of power it's the same. Our government is owned and guided by big business. Through their lobbyists they control what is acted on. Their donations are the largest portion of the re-election campaigns of most politicians at the federal level. Till that's changed there will be no change.

You go to hell, thats where.

have one big business party. But still we have brave souls out there like Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich and independents like Bernie Sanders so it's up to some of us to keep on speaking our conscience and having a definite influence ir at least set some people straight on the issues. Change in this case must come in increments. Anyway the system as it is can't last due to the environment and diminishing resources.

I'd advise going to get a dose of reality.

Life isn't perfect, and neither are governments. Change, both personal and political, is of necessity incremental, not instantaneous (except in coups or dictatorships). Unrealistic hope is not the same as hope. Also, thinking that your hopes are the same as everybody else's hopes is naive (and one might add, egotistical).

to do right by it's citizens here is the link to the CIA Fact book look for yourself at the fraud of global trade. Its not what you trade but who you trade with! If you trade with like economies you get like results. If you trade with 3rd world wage scales you get economic deforestation. The European Union aren't selling their workers down the drain. The Germans and Italians aren't selling they're buying! GM's Opel is in a bidding war and it won't be sold like Saturn as an excuse to re-badge Chinese autos. Germans work at Opel and will continue to work at Opel.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

not our government. It really hasn't been doing right for its citizens in a very long time. It's been for the elites, the corporations, the lobbyists, the banksters. It's maintaining their status quo while the rest of us become poorer and poorer.

We are sliding into a worldwide depression which it appears you have already begun to see and feel. Sooner or later, the rest of us will be with you there too. And that is why we must all try and figure out how we are going to get thru this together, as small communities, because I don't see our goverment being there for us.

Move in with family or friends? Form a small community with neighbors where everyone pitches in and barters for the things they need?

This is going to become a more dire situation as thousands (millions?) are to be laid off when Chrysler and GM shutdown their factories. Dealers are being closed down too, and then more will be unemployed. And it will all trickle down to affect everyone as more businesses fail forcing more unemployed people and homeless families.

It seems Obama and his team should be helping people to plan for this different way of living frugally, but all we get is fake feel-good propaganda and recovery is just around the corner.

:shrug:

It ranks only in the middle 500 of such editorials posted at DU in May.