Are we reliving 1929 to 1941?

The Obama camp should be comparing Senator Obama to FDR instead of JFK. The powers that be (the Establishment, the billionaire families, in other words, the Republican Party) won't budge on anything either foreign or domestic unless there is a Great Depression and a Nuclear War with Iran and China to force them to allow change. Let's take inventory:

• Great Depression means scarcity, food prices high, gas prices high, unemployment high, foreclosures, middle class families homeless, working poor, Hoovervilles (Bushvilles), undernutrition, malnutrition, and hunger. There are cuts in food stamps, school lunch, WIC, and food banks. Shelters do not take families but there are entire families (sometimes three generations) homeless. No affordable health care and no health insurance.

• Natural disasters during the "Dirty Thirties" were mostly dust storms. What we now have is more tornadoes than usual, rising sea level, heat waves each summer, strange winters with super-hurricanes, air too nasty to breathe, water with pharma (drug) pollutants, and food with bis-phenols, phthalates, and God knows what else. By the way, the chemical industry knew how toxic chemicals were back in the 1930's, according to their own records.

• Addiction during the 1930's was mostly to bathtub gin. Now it is crystal meth, crack, and a dozen other drugs.

• Bank robbers are now the executives running the banks into the ground. And they are not folk heroes like Bonny and Clyde.

• Gangland violence, gangsters glamorized in the movies and in music, drive by shootings, nothing has changed from the Thirties.

• Flood of immigrants continues but now most seem to be illegal.

• Corporations are hell-bent on breaking labor unions. American workers are too scared of losing their jobs to realize that they're going to lose them anyway as the USA races to the bottom trying to compete with nations that pay workers pennies a week in parts of Africa.

• Eduation - The Money party keeps Americans stupid with the worst schools and Christian academies (teaching intelligent design) as India and China crank out PhD's by the millions. Back then it was the Scopes Monkey Trial and schools closed because of the Great Depression.

• World War Two either never stopped or it morphed into the Cold War which in turn morphed into Bush's War on Terrorism which the terrorists perceive as a War on Islam.

• The G-men are busy chasing terrorists instead of Nazi spies. If 9/11 had been turned over to the FBI as a purely police matter, Osama would be in jail or in a grave right now because every nation on Earth including Iraq, Iran, and North Korea would gladly have helped us, such was the international sympathy at the time.

• Atmosphere of Paranoia - The OSS, SS, Gestapo and death camps then. The CIA's secret prisons, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, School of the Americas, and torture now. Also, privacy is all but a memory. Privacy is, of course, the Zeroeth Amendment. The right that comes before all other rights. The right without which all other rights are meaningless. No privacy, no freedom. No privacy, no thought. Without privacy, sanity is not possible. No wonder mental illness rates are skyrocketing. No wonder the entire country is going insane just like Nazi Germany did. Without privacy, there is no decency and no good because there is not the free will to do good. Without privacy, there is no truth because whistle blowers have no protection. This is why the media conglomerates do not accept anonymous letters to the editor and why investigative news is disappearing.

• We'll always have Casablanca. We can't seem to get out of the Middle East. For the last half century, not a day has passed that the major newspapers and television networks have not filed a bad news report from that region. The Muslim Arabs, for their part, admire the Nazis. Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are perennial bestsellers in their bookstores and regarded as truth despite Hitler's own admission that if you repeat a lie often enough, some fool will believe it.
  
  
  Here's looking at you, kid.