The Repetition of History:

I used to belong to a Dickens's reading group and still get their enjoyable emails. I received the following email from them:

Dickens and America's Defaulting, Nation and State "According to media reports (which has now become the accepted and conventional belief), this will be the first time the USA has ever defaulted on its debt obligations. But as highly respected financial reporter Nicholas Kristof reported in 1998, that is not the case"

´They were the world's richest and shrewdest investors, and they rode a wave of globalization to buy bonds in a promising developing country. When that country defaulted, they were livid. The year was 1842 and the
country was the United States.'

- Nicholas Kristof, in the September 20, 1998 issue of New York
Times International

And, coincidentally, for five days that same year, planted directly
across the street from the symbol of the nation's failed financial strength (The Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia) was Charles Dickens.”

to which I replied:

It is sad because we in this country keep repeating history over and over and over again as witnessed by the content of the email above. Someday which I surely hope and pray not THIS day our nation, our empire will fall in one nasty lumbering heap because, in my opinion, many if not most people in this country see this nation as an "I" and NOT a "We" nation. They do not understand it is not big government that creates recessions but big government which pulls the nation stuck in the grimy ideological muck back from recession/depression.

The Knownothing Tea Baggers say big government is the enemy. I say it is the solution and when the private sector fails which it unceasingly does -- even in Dicken's day, government needs to be there to provide the life preserver against economic catastrophe. That is what FDR's New Deal was all about -- government coming to the rescue of an economy gone wild by the omnipresent human characteristic of greed gone mad.

One article I read recently said it well describing American political thought (I forget the author): "Joe the Plumber THINKS he is one clogged toilet away from living in the Hamptons like a CEO from Goldman Sachs." He is wrong. The CEO of Goldman Sachs lives in an exclusive club and it is NOT about Joe the Plumber. The corporate stranglehold on this nation committing it to an oligarchy is sowing the seeds of its own demise. It has happened many times in this nation's history but now may be the worst. As the late George Carlin said in one of his Utubes entitled "The American Dream" -- "It's the American Dream alright because you have to be asleep to believe it!" I wonder what Dickens would think.