Obama, The Economy, History & Election 2012

Here's the online story from my hometown broadsheet, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Democrats grab momentum on volatile GOP contest which describes the the state of the GOP nominee field and how it stacks up with the incumbent with the inclusion of economic and foreign policy factors.  A lively discussion in the comments section ensued, including the following:

mwrg 9:06 AM on November 28, 2011
[...]
Do you honestly see this President being re-elected with these kinds of unemployment and consumer confidence numbers? Seriously?

Do you think the economy is going to magically get better over the next year under this guy? It may be above your pay scale to pay attention to what's happening in Europe right now, for instance?

He's finished, and even most Democrats know it. The country is ready to cut its losses. If you haven't noticed the Conservative wave of the last 3 years, you're willfully blind. But then we knew that, didn't we?


And...

mwrg 9:02 AM on November 28, 2011

Wow, color me shocked that a Chron "political writer" just wrote another piece slanted against Republicans and for Democrats.

Apparently she doesn't read her history however. The economic and political dynamics of this country are so akin right now to 1979, it's uncanny. Economics works in cycles, and politics follow. Carter 2.0 is in the White House right now. Remember what happened next?

About which, in response, I wrote:

Oh, my freaking gaud, look how gobsmacked I am that yet another perennially malcontent, cafeteria-style pseudorealist conservative grabs at minor circumstances that service his wishful narrative while ignoring the big picture that blows his playbook out of the water.

The early 1930s are more similar to the current crisis than 1979, where it took from October 1929 'til November 1932 to vote out enough of the anti-working class, pro-Wall Street/corporation Republican obstructionists in favor of FDR. That was three years and three weeks, which is just about exactly how long its been, now, since the investment bankers took their failed banks to be saved on the backs of American tax payers. FDR and new Democratic majorities, over time, ushered in real economic stimulus like the Work Projects Administration (very much like Obama's American Jobs Act) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (aka Roosevelt's Forest Army, the New Deal, twenty years of Democratic adminsitrations and forty years of Republican near irrelevance and unprecedented American prosperity. The almost universal Republican overreach in continued policies favoring corporations over the vast majority of working class, lower class voting American has awakened the current electorate's recognition and acknowldegement of the vivid destructiveness of the neo-conservative/religious right movement of the past thirty years.

In the 30s, Europe had been in economic ruin for over ten years similarly to Iceland ,Greece, Spain, Portugal & Ireland's current state, somewhat presaging what world class economists predict is an inevital replay of the financial catastrophe of eighty years ago that gave rise to political envirnonments that brought the world Mussolini, Franco, Nazi, and Bolsheviks fifteen years before that. Now, we have the Arab Spring and possible Arab League prominence in Egypt, The American Autumn.

The current circumstances bear a mere shallow comparison to 1979 which made Reaganomics and neo-con policies possible, & a whole lot greater resemblence to fifty years prior. That time brought us the New Deal, World War II, and paved the way for the rise of the Middle Class, The Great Society and major civil rights legislation which, in turn, enabled the way for bigoted Democrats' defections to the Republican party, the rise of the Religious Right and corporate cooptions of regressive groups and emergence of Reagan, et. al.'s Objectivist policies now utterly exposed for the hoax and fraud they are.