“I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN’T MY FAULT!” — Jake Blues, “The Blues Brothers”
Compare that classic movie scene from what Americans heard this week from President Obama: “When I came into office, businesses ... were crying ‘Do something!’ because, as a consequence of reckless decisions that had been made, the economy was on the verge of collapse. Those same businesses now are profitable; the financial markets are stabilized.”
IT WASN’T MY FAULT!
And now we have the official word from on high.
The Great Recession is over.
Ta-da!
Alacazam!
“Pay no attention to the man (or the recession) behind the curtain.”
Pay no attention to the continuing inflation.
Pay no attention to unemployment that is officially right at 10 percent and is actually over 15 percent — the figures conveniently leave out those who have fallen off the outside of the unemployment stats because they have been out of work for too long.
Pay no attention to this administration’s efforts to lose hundreds of thousands of full-time, living wage jobs; and then to increase the number of part-time, minimum wage jobs and claim that is an even swap.
If we simply pay no attention to those issues, we can easily see that the Great Recession is, indeed, over and we can expect the sky to be bright ahead — as long as we never have to pay back the gigantic amounts of freebies we’ve paid out over the past year and a half. Funny, how you can’t find any working class — or even “middle class” — Americans who have benefitted from the enormous taxpayer debt we’ve piled up.
But if we just don’t pay attention, if we will just shut up and accept that the recession if over, then all will be well.
Maybe if working-class Americans would promise to not care whose fault all this is, just so long as we could create some living-wage jobs, maybe if we would do that, the current administration could stop spending so much energy on trying to shift the blame and get back to work, trying to get Americans back to work in real, family-supporting jobs.
“IT WASN’T MY FAULT!” isn’t helping anyone, any more.
— Chuck Smith