Here’s something to consider for all those stimulus opposing Republicans (and a few Blue Dog Democrats, too): a statement by the CEO of Nissan which announced today it is cutting 20,000 jobs from its work force:
“In every planning scenario we built, our worst assumptions on the state of the global economy have been met or exceeded, with the continuing grip on credit and declining consumer confidence being the most damaging factors,” Nissan’s chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, said in a statement.
“[O]ur worst assumptions on the state of the global economy have been met or exceeded . . . “ That isn’t coming from some NY Times crazy liberal white ivory tower columnist like Economics Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, my friends. That’s the assessment of the CEO one of the world’s largest and (until recently) most successful automobile manufacturers, with employees around the world, many of them right in the heart of red state America. He’s saying that the current state of the economy is worse that Nissan’s worst case scenario projected. I expect that’s the situation for a lot of multinational companies. Everywhere you look people are losing their jobs and companies are losing money (Big Oil excepted).
And something tells me that Lindsey Graham or John Boehner going on Fox News or appearing on Sean Hannity and/or Rush Limbaugh’s hate fest radio railing about wasteful government spending, the evils of unions and the need for more tax cuts for rich people isn’t going to change that fundamental fact.
Nor will the falsehoods and distortions about the stimulus bill propagated by our large media conglomerates change the reality that without an immediate infusion of government spending we and the rest of the world will soon be diving straight off a cliff into the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression (if not worse). The National Republicans and “centrists” may have won the media war and effectively castrated the stimulus bill, but at a cost to the welfare and economic security of ordinary Americans.
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?
A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished. […]
All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.
Political grand standing like we’ve witnessed over the last few weeks from Republicans and “moderate” Democrats doesn’t help Nissan (or Toyota or Ford or GM or Volkswagen) sell cars. It doesn’t prevent the “worst assumptions” regarding the global economy from coming true. All it does is increase unemployment and misery for “the little people” at the expense of the egos of a few politicians who followed the lead of the ultraconservative ideologues whose policies led us into this sinkhole in the first place. The time for bargaining with those too blind to see the writing on the wall is over. If our government fails to take the actions needed to begin reversing the “catastrophic successes” of the last eight years we won’t be talking about the relative merits of spending versus tax cuts. We’ll be looking at something far worse headed our way.
We can either emulate FDR’s New Deal, or we can follow the path of indecision and compromise and inaction which the Weimar Republic took in response to a global economy that looks more and more each day like our own (and we all know how the Weimar Republic ended). The time for fruitless discussions and endless negotiations is long past. Bi-partisanship be damned. The time for appeasing those who cannot be appeased is over. If President Obama doesn’t realize that essential truth his administration really will be doomed.
