We pride ourselves on being straight with you, our readers, every day - and today is no exception.
We're not going to say that we're completely unconcerned about the massive drop in the stock market yesterday. Like millions of people, we also have investments, and we also lost some value on those instruments yesterday - so we understand the economic pessimism that seems to be rampant.
That being said, the idea that the American economy is mortally wounded, and that the vultures are sweeping in to clean up the kill is ridiculous. As Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman points out, while stocks dropped like a rock, U.S. Treasury bond prices rose.
That is far from a sign that U.S. debt isn't a safe investment.
It's a sign that the U.S. continues to have a weak economy, and is being held back by two things: a lack of jobs, and a barely functional political system - which we've discussed before. Yesterday, in fact.
The jobs problem in America may not be able to be fixed today - but the political problem may get a jump start towards repair today, with the latest round of the Wisconsin recall elections.
Today Wisconsinites are heading to the polls to vote in six recall races across the state. A mass recall of this nature has never been held anywhere in the U.S. Some officials are expecting turnout rates of seventy-to-eighty percent, which is a level of participation most legislative districts in the U.S. never see, even in Presidential election years.
Then again, we've never seen the kind of corruption and disregard for the law exhibited by the Wisconsin Republican Party and their extremist, far-right wing, corporatist boosters over the last year. Recently, the right-wing lobbyist group "Americans For Prosperity" (as if there were Americans who wished for decay and failure, other than themselves) purposely sent out blatantly misleading absentee ballots to the six districts having recall elections today -- mail-in ballots which had the date of the recall elections wrong. If voters were to have followed the advice of this group of cheats and liars, their votes would have come in long after the races had already been decided.
Of course, the right-wing group feigned incompetence (which we don't think was completely an act) for the misleading ballots, and blamed the printer for their mistake. For an organization that often crows about individual responsibility, we find their hypocrisy both sadly ironic and par for the course.
These GOP state legislators are the same people who have been aiming to kill union rules in the state that gave birth to the union movement in America, who want to roll back child labor laws, wipe out protections for both tenants and landlords (both private and commercial), and enact a far-right wing ideological agenda on a generally moderate Midwestern state.
We agree with the Wausau Daily Herald that the recall elections Wisconsinites are engaged in today are indeed a direct check by the populace over elected legislators.
We also agree with many who have said there far more important things going on in the world today than whether the stock market goes up or down a bit.
In Wisconsin, there's an election today to put the power back in the hands of the people. Let's hope the best candidates win.
