EDITORIAL: Reclaiming our country

[IndianaGreen]

EDITORIAL: Reclaiming our country

Author: PWW Editorial Board
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 10/31/08 11:25

The United States now stands at one of the most significant crossroads in our history. The choice before voters on Nov. 4 is crystal clear: Continue the catastrophic slide of the last eight years into the abyss of economic disintegration, growing human misery at home and costly, deadly adventurism abroad. Or, continue instead to build the broad labor-led coalition which can help a new administration and Congress chart a path to peaceful, cooperative international relations and an economy where people earn decent wages for producing needed goods and services and are assured quality affordable health care and other human needs, while protecting our environment.

Such a new administration and Congress will have much to overcome. On the heels of two decades of Reaganomics and provocative military skirmishing, the eight Bush years have seen the burgeoning of the military-industrial complex and the further hollowing-out of the economy under the impact of parasitic and rapacious finance capital.

In the Bush years, Americans have lost jobs, pensions, health care and homes, and have become ensnared in the lenders’ web as they struggled to meet their families’ needs. Infrastructure has decayed, education has deteriorated, human services and safety nets have been shredded, and racism and chauvinism have been cultivated under the banner of national security. The Supreme Court has been pushed farther to the right, the foreign incursions of the late 20th century have morphed into disastrous and devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the environment has been strip-mined, and the gap between the incomes of the top 1 percent and the majority of people has become a yawning gulf.

Finally, even the powerful financial industry has overreached itself, and cries out for help at the expense of the very taxpayers who have borne the brunt of its excesses.

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/13934/