We're No. 1!

I went over to the Home Improvement Center on Gutierrez Street the other day to look for a shower curtain rod. I didn’t need anything with designer or decorator touches, just your basic 72” curtain rod. I figured I’d find one that was cheap and made in China, but to my surprise the rod I found was made in Delaware – right here in these United States.

A few days later I read excerpts of an interview with Vice President Joe Biden in which the Veep defended the US economy and insisted that America would never lose its position as the world’s leading economic power. Biden had strong words for those who claim that America has seen her best days.

Joe Biden tends to be verbose and hyperbolic -- and of course it’s the duty of a Vice President to defend our nation’s honor even if it means denying reality -- but like the majority of politicians, regardless of party affiliation, Biden is unwilling to look reality in the face and admit that America doesn’t manufacture enough shower curtain rods. Or toaster ovens. Or flat screen televisions. Or computers. Or blenders. Or durable medical equipment. Or -- you name it.

And unless Americans are building tangible products that the rest of the world wants to buy, our economy will never fully recover nor will the yawning gap between the haves and have nots narrow. A “financialized” economy cannot produce widespread prosperity; what it will produce is banana republic-like income disparity.

Of course there are many more things that Joe Biden and the ruling class need to wrap their heads around if this country is to pull back from the brink.

Open-ended wars are one. The government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan talks about being dependent on US military assistance for the next two decades. With the exception of opium production, Afghanistan doesn’t possess an economic infrastructure lively enough to produce the revenues needed to build and sustain a functioning police force and military. The US is that revenue source, and we are therefore trapped in Afghanistan, unable to “win” the war and equally incapable of cutting our losses and exiting; we will waste bodies and coin for years to come.

The ruling class in Washington cleverly keeps the true costs of our foreign adventures off the books, but the bottom line is that the capital we are pissing away in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan should be invested in rebuilding our country.

The sclerotic, paralyzed, and corrupt state of our politics isn’t helping matters, either. Forget for a moment the absurd Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, and instead consider the political strategy of the Republican Party. At every turn the GOP says, “No.” Not “maybe,” not “subject to discussion,” not “we’re willing to negotiate,” but flat out “No.” The only policy the GOP will support is tax cuts and obscene amounts of spending on the military-security complex.

Not that the majority Democrats are any less ridiculous. In the Clinton Era they abandoned their traditional constituencies in favor of bribes from corporate America, and now Democrats more often than not sound, look and smell just like Republicans.

To make the political landscape even more toxic and surreal, the mainstream corporate media takes people like Sarah “No-Brains” Palin seriously. Did you hear her rambling speech at the Tea Party convention? One tired, worn out conservative orthodoxy after another tumbled out of Palin’s mouth and the audience lapped it up like she was the second coming of Dutch Reagan.

I hate to admit this, but Palin is so vapid that she makes Reagan look like an Ivy League intellectual.

Palin is the poster child for what Hunter S. Thompson called America’s “downward spiral of dumbness.”

In the same breath, and with no sense of contradiction, Palin advocates that government level the playing field for average Americans AND get out of their lives; she proposes a “market” economy AND “small” government; tax cuts AND big spending on our war machine. It’s as if Palin and her clan have been living in an isolation chamber for the past decade.

Note to Sarah: Bush/Cheney tried that circus act and we are reaping the dire consequences.

I can’t take Sarah Palin seriously and for the life of me can’t understand why anyone does. On the other hand, I’m sure there were plenty of Germans who thought Adolf Hitler was a harmless crackpot right up until the time his henchmen torched the Reichstag.

The state of collective denial in this nation is stunning, but at least there’s a company in Delaware that manufactures a fine shower curtain rod.