Sunday, March 08, 2009
Food banks can't fix the economy
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Mona Moore
Moore is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Western Community College.
I respectfully disagree with my colleague Linda Whitlock about the economy, fear and President Obama, ("Letting go of fear," Feb. 12 column). The suggestion that church food banks can help fix the economy is a lovely, sweet idea that should certainly be pursued, but it is not a realistic plan. We should be afraid, be very afraid. (By the way, the former administration was effectively re-elected in 2004 on a platform of fear.) But even though I am just an English teacher, I can see that even those of us fortunate enough to have jobs are watching our savings, investments and retirement funds melting before our eyes. And nothing seems to be getting better.
For eight dismal, painful years, Congress rolled over and played dead and passed almost every big-bucks piece of legislation that the Bush administration demanded it pass, and Bush's "base" prospered handsomely, right down to the contracts and monies involved in the war in Iraq. And the perceived lack of character of the credit-loving consumer might just have been fostered by the examples that the CEOs of big business set with their flagrant conspicuous consumption. Moreover, the widening and deepening gulf between the haves and have-nots never went unnoticed.
Now the Republicans are deciding to flex their muscles and "declare war" on President Obama? And that is exactly what they are doing. Americans, along with the rest of the world, dared to see and feel hope and renewal on the horizon after those miserable, shameful eight years, but the Republicans are already determined to wrest those hopes from the majority of Americans.
If these partisans believe that the voters will forget this before the next election, they are badly mistaken. Those who allude to the Obama administration's use of fear and to the president's fondness for high-dollar bailouts seem to suffer from very selective amnesia. I'm still waiting for an explanation of where all that bailout money for the nation's big banks went. That was Bush's bailout, not Obama's.
And what about that $8 billion that simply "disappeared" after being sent to Iraq in the early years of the war? It is still missing in action.
At the end of the day, Rush Limbaugh's blatant hope and prayer that the Obama administration will fail seems to be highly contagious among the right.
Yes, I am glad that Obama is doing something. I just don't believe that grass-roots outreach programs are going to save the economy. Anyone who cares to take the time to wade through the bill to see where the money is going may do so--the bill is transparent. The other bailout -- the Bush bailout -- has simply disappeared.
