At a time when we have a President who has called for bi-particianship it seems to me that there is even more particianship. My perception is likely clouded by a) the lack of attention I paid to politics when Bush was President due to my semi-perminent state of cringe, and b) the enormous amount of attention Obama gets in the media- as the grandpa I was sitting in the spa with last night pointed out, there has not been a day since he took office that he has not been mentioned on the news. I have no problem with particianship and the fact that our two parties have differing opinions, but the benefit of having differing opinions is that each can challenge the other which can lead to better ideas and decisions. Unfortunately differing opinions seem to be leading to stupidity. Republicans seem to be morally opposed to agreeing with Democrats, not on the principal of the idea but instead on the principal of agreeing. Further it seems to me that Republicans are getting dumber. Last night I was watching CNN and a Republican legislator from Bakersfield, CA (complete with a background with changing images of Bakersfield) was complaining about how stimulus funds are being spent. The governor of Ohio, I believe, he said is going to spend a load of money $23 million or so on a study rather than projects that apply the shovel to the ground and provide jobs for hardworking people... or something like that. Hello! Wake up! Get your head out of your butt!!! Obviously this guy doesn't know what a study is and for this I think the voters of Bakersfield should send him to school. Someone has to do a study. Actually a bunch of someones are often involved with a study. And these people get paid. If there are not studies to be done, these people may not have jobs. So doing a study provides jobs for people. Educated people, people like me, thank you very much. And this is what I am concerned about. In case you have not been paying attention the past 10 or 20 years we have this little problem with immigration and we Americans are snobs and don't want to do menial labor. So why are we so intent on providing menial labor jobs? In the US our educational institutions are factories of knowledge. We need to provide jobs for these people who we have already subsidized through funding to institutions of higher learning, and financial aid and subsidized loans to students. Where is this in the economic recovery plan? I am not hearing about it. I am hearing about cleaning up trash, and re-paving highways. How many Republican lawmakers want those jobs for their children. I am not knocking these jobs, they are vitally important to the infastructure of the US. Increasing the number of them, will, duh employ more people. I just see an imbalance of focus on these jobs to the exclusion of other jobs.
On Thursday I had an "ah-ha" moment when I was at a lecture given my Saskia Sassen, a world famous sociologist who is most known for her research on globalization. I had been having a funny feeling about the bailouts being given to the financial sector and the fact that it seemed that as the US economy tanked so did the world economy. Dr. Sassan was talking about the tension between the national and the global, which people seem to want to see as exclusive of one another but they really can co-exist. She pointed out that the bailouts given by the US government were not bailing out a national system but instead are bailing out a global system. Ah-ha. That is totally the case and why should the US carry the responsibilty in this area? Which goes to the G-12 (that's the right number, right?) and all that happened at that meeting...
Okay. All for now. Off to the wedding festivities! Another friend willingly surrenders her last name.
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