Well, This Is What I Think

I get so irritated with the smug, self-satisfied, careless commentary I see on this so-called News channel. And for Fox News, you could read the entire current field of Republican Party Presidential candidates, and a whole heap of commentators who should know better, too, who have all replaced incisive analysis and creative ideas with thoughtless dog-whistle popularism.

Former Republican heroes like Dwight D Eisenhower, who left Roosevelt’s New Deal pretty much intact, remember, must be turning in their graves at the current state of the American right.

For the record, and we should say it long and loud, poverty is not the fault of the Government, or of the poor. It is the fault of a system which is fundamentally unwieldy, that lurches from over-spending to under-spending, driven by fear and not rationalism, and also veers between mindless, greed-fuelled private credit expansion to a capital strike. (Oh yes, business and investors strike too, not just unions and workers.)

One thing and one thing alone will rescue America’s economic standing in the world, and that is innovation – like the innovation that led to the mass production of motor vehicles, or flight, or telecommunications, or advanced mining techniques, or the micro-chip, or intuitive computing – leading to enhanced trade in terms favourable to the US.

America needs to stop echoing past glories and knuckle down. And blaming the weakest in their society for the laziness and ineptitude of the strongest is not only cruel and unfair, it is pointless.

Innovation. Everything else – everything – is moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.