As Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) said in the movie "Thelma and Louise": "You get what you settle for." In settling for Reagan, Bush, and other assorted avaricious incompetents, we have gotten exactly what too many of us have settled for. For instance, the trend toward excessive deregulation led to a $500 billion + Savings and Loan scandal, which we are all paying for one in one way or another. Similarly, there is a recession and a great deal of unemployment, largely due to so-called Junk Bonds, hostile corporate raiders, the party that the rich had at the expense of the poor and the future during the eighties and nineties, etc. Graft and power-hunger led to the Iran-Contra scandal, and perhaps the so-called October Surprise. An inherently unfair stacking of the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative justices is eroding your individual and civil rights and liberties, even as you read this. In short, we are in the mess we are currently are in because we arguably haven't had a halfway-decent President since November 23, 1963. (to be cont'd)
[Originally published in Feb. 1992 in Eastern Connecticut State University's Campus Lantern student newspaper and part of my unpublished manuscript "In Mediocrity We Trust... In Debt We Die" and Other Essays]
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