Tue, Nov 27, 2012

Editor: This week my comments on the just concluded US election continue, despite the fact that some who think their brief sojourn in the US is of interest to us and deserving of much ink,{{more}} but suggest that nobody “cares” about why I cannot support the US Democrats and Mr Barack Obama. It has been stated that if the “US sneezes we catch a cold” so you ought to be very interested in what takes place in that country. You ought to come to conclusions on facts, not regurgitated ignorance of those who think of themselves as members of some anointed elite because they went to some university and you did not. One of them says something about new demographics and it becomes a mantra, even for the supposed opinion shapers in SVG.

These elites tell us that with the defeat of Mitt Romney that signals the death of the Republican Party, unless it abandons its core belief and panders to all segments of the electorate. We heard from those sitting in both camps – ULP/NNDP – in SVG. Ralph Gonsalves, Hans King, Adrian Fraser and Vynnette Frederick united on Obama. When you listen to them you get the impression that if SVG were the US, we would have a one-party state. In other words, this is about a common ideology – the belief that government ought to be in the business of taking from one group to give to another. In SVG, we have both sides trying to outdo each other doing stuff for the poor. Free laptops, free Internet, free school uniforms, paying examination fees, free transportation to school and even free housing for Grenadines students are just some of the freebies. And what they cannot get from those now alive, they borrow, leaving the bill for the next generation to pay. We get Greece – where those who have been bred by politicians to expect more from governments now think they are entitled to wealth of other countries.

Partial Birth Abortion

In the US the “mean Republicans” will have to agree to free abortions, including the particularly stomach curling partial birth abortion. A baby in the third trimester is forcibly induced to exit the womb, once the head is exposed, an incision is made at the back of the head and its brain sucked out. Obama actually supports a law that says if the babies somehow manage to survive that, it should be killed because that is the wish of the mother. To not support that is to declare “war on women”. It might be an education if some of you were to do a little digging: Find out which race was targeted by the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. What role did a “so-called black man” – Russian educated – W.E.B Dubois play? While you are at it, fin.d out his role in the persecution of Marcus Garvey. Eighty-five per cent of all abortions in the US are performed on unmarried women whose annual income is $30,000 or less. Black women are four times more likely to have abortions than white women and blacks as a percentage of the population remain stable – 12 per cent. Obama received 62 per cent of those votes. And what must be strange, four of six state governors (women) are members of the party that “has declared war on women”.

The “dead party”, killed by demographics, trapped in the “…old conservative position on sex, marriage, contraception and abortion… You cannot talk about rape as something God ordains and about people self-deporting then expect women and Hispanics and Latinos to vote for you. Times have changed.” So vote against an idiot (local) talking nonsense about rape, but vote for a man (national) who endorses an abomination (Biblical). Times have, indeed, changed. Changed from “ask not what your country can do for you…” to one where in 2008 there were 32 (32) million on food stamps to 47 million. Changed to where good government is not judged by how many persons no longer need government’s assistance but by how many more depend on it to survive. In the US today, 120 million are now grateful recipients of other people’s money (Read Carter’s Welfare Reform, Aug 6, 1977).

Handouts

When Ronald Reagan won two terms (some say three – the kinder, gentler man could not win on his own just like SVG) with 51 per cent, 44 states and 489 electoral votes and a blow out second time around 59 per cent, 49 states and 525 electoral votes, nothing was declared dead nor was there any suggestion that the losers abandon their core beliefs. And here is another strange: the “dead party” now holds 29 of the 50 governorships and of the 10 states with the lowest employment, seven of them are run by the “dead party” – one, two, three and four, all “dead party” states. Could you imagine a “dead party” with a record for the largest conversion of seats in the Congress in 60 years a mere two years ago?

This brings us to the email sent to several talking heads on Fox News: Optimistic Republicans who say that widespread unemployment and record numbers of people on food stamps hurt President Obama’s re-election chances are overlooking the fact that people who are dependent on government are more likely to vote for politicians who are giving them handouts.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that, back during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He was re-elected in a landslide after his first term, during which unemployment was in double digits every single month, and in some months was over 20 per cent.

The time is long overdue for optimistic Republicans to understand what FDR understood long ago, and what Barack Obama clearly understands today. Dependency pays off in votes – unless somebody alerts the taxpayers who get stuck with the bill…. The intelligentsia has for decades been promoting the idea that there should be no stigma to accepting government handouts. Living off the taxpayers is portrayed as a “right” or – more ponderously – as part of a “social contract.”

The author of the excerpt is a black man born in Harlem in the 1930’s – Thomas Sowell, a real economist with volumes of publications to his name, unlike the flimflammers in SVG who never published even a letter on anything economic.

It is the message the feckless Romney campaign fails to understand; it is what Ralph Gonsalves understands with the early giving away of building materials and cheap land. Let the NNDP continue to delude themselves that hard times in SVG means they have victory in the bag, as their excessive arrogance implies.

Frank E. da Silva