Could another " New Deal " be what America needs?

After almost 8 years of incredible mismanagement by the Bush Administration, America is in a state of complete shamble. Last year, I took a photographs of a graffiti sprayed on a crumbling house in the lower 9th ward in New-Orleans; it said " America needs help". This is probably, in a nutshell, the most accurate political statement of today.

The numbers can make one's head spin. Our budget deficit is 9 trillion, the dollar has reached record low against currencies such as the Euro, the Yen, and the Pound.The low dollar is not really helping our manufacturing sector either, it is more or less gone thanks to the strategy of corporation such as Wall Mart of exporting jobs to India and China. The jobs left to maximize corporate profit and they won't come back.In this insane hyper-capitalist logic Americans were supposed to be the eternal consumer with a credit card never maxed out.

Well, guest what, Americans ( except the super wealthy ) are going broke. Since the burst of the real estate bubble, they can not borrow on their houses any longer. In the mean time, the skyrocketing oil prices is triggering inflation. In the last few weeks, the Feds had to take over a Bank and are tracking a few on their " at risk " of going under list.

The so call economical " stimulus" from the Bush administration ( remember the $600.00 you spent already) was insulting, inefficient and pure political pandering. Another symptoms of the drastic economical misconception of this administration. Bush wanted people to spend the money....well they should have saved the money instead.

Americans have been spending money they don't have for too long consuming stuff they quite often don't need. It is time to re-think our behavior or face the consequences. What we have being doing for years with our own financing management reflect at a much smaller scale the " economic model" of the Bush crack team. The best example is the two wars on installment plan ( with money borrowed from China and Japan) at a cost of 1 trillion combined and counting.

What the next president will have to do to prevent America to become a 2nd or even a 3rd world country is to revisit the type of ideas that FDR implemented to take America out of the great depression in the " New Deal". The next president and the next Congress will have to put a real stimulus plan together, not based on consumer spending but one focusing on fixing the infrastructure of the countries ( roads, bridges, levees, sewage systems, ports, public transportation).
Our country is falling apart, and spending on infrastructure generate much more growth than cutting taxes.

We also need to re-think our conception of " free market" in the long run. It is a paradox that the Bush administration, now a day, is practicing a socialized capitalism consisting of private gain and public losses. With just happened with Fannie & Freddie is an illustration of this point.

It is time to spend money in America not on wars that we can't either afford or win.

Politics as Spectacle.

Politic has become a circus, with celebrities of all stripes " endorsing " politicians. Why should we care that Rambo ( Sly Stalone) and Texas Ranger ( Chuck Norris) are for McCain , or that Ophra is for Obama? Today, it is hard to make a distinction between actors and politicians..one become the other in a heart beat. Think about Reagan...the " teflon" president was a B list actor that became a president. The sad thing is that someone as brilliant as FDR would not stand ( no joke intented) a chance today in our context of " rock star" politicians.

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