Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Schlep Gone Bad
Recently I was told about this interesting program called The Great Schlep, which aims to have Jewish grandchildren go down to Florida to inform their grandparents about Barak Obama to help swing the state in his favor.
Since I will basically do anything Sarah Silverman tells me to do, I accepted the challenge with alacrity, and booked my flight.
I sat down with my grandfather, and I was only a few minutes into my spiel about how we need change for the sake of change, and how the McBush cabal is terrible because they are stupid / old and frequently use malapropisms in their speeches, and how Bush is not legitimate anyway because he somehow tricked Gore into litigating his election loss and then tricked 7 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices into upholding the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment thereby “anointing” Bush as a false President.
My grandfather stopped me, and pointed out that having been born in 1917, and having nothing to do all day but read newspapers and watch news broadcasts, he was actually already aware of all the points I was making, and would like to point out a few things that perhaps I had not considered when all my favorite celebrities and I decided that Obama was right for America.
He asked me if I knew why he and Grandma always re-used the tin foil they stored leftover food in. I said I thought it was because they were old and batty. That’s when he told me the story of what happened to our economy when he was a teenager.
Apparently, starting in September 1929 the stock market took a steep dive because of some poor advice given by Joseph Kennedy’s shoe-shine boy. By April of the following year, the market was 30% below its previous peak. I was shocked by this, noting that now our stock market is about 30% below its peak from last year, just like in 1930!
He had me enthralled with this story, so I begged him to tell me what happened next. Apparently, some Congressmen named Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley wrote a crazy law that raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. This caused a collapse in global trade and drove a stake into the heart of the American economy that lasted for years.
I asked Grandpa why they would do that, since over a hundred years prior, David Ricardo wrote Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, and taught the world how comparative advantage causes free trade to be highly beneficial to economic prosperity.
That’s when it dawned on me what grandpa was driving at. Obama and his party want to unilaterally renegotiate the NAFTA treaty, are against a similar pact, CAFTA, with Central America, and are stridently opposed to reducing barriers with our closest ally in South America, Colombia. It also occurred to me that since my beloved Democrats are a virtual subsidiary of the labor unions, they’re not likely to support any free trade.
Grandpa had me scrambling, but luckily I remembered what one of my friends was saying about those trade agreements after the Trotsky themed poetry slam we went to in Brooklyn. So I smugly asked him how he can support free trade without environmental and labor protections for those poor workers.
But again the old man had me outclassed. He patiently explained how environmental protection and workers’ rights rise mostly when a nation can afford it due to increasing prosperity and that by limiting trade with these developing countries we were actually working against the stated goal.
He had me. I finally agreed with Gramps that my man Obama was dead wrong on trade, but heck, at least his tax plan was way more fair, right?
Grandpa’s face turned a little red, his knuckles white, and he took a couple deep breaths, whispering faintly something about “serenity now.” “That discussion will have to wait until your next trip down here,” he said. I agreed, even though I really wanted to discuss it right then, because deep down I was panicked that when I got home and started to really look into the issues one by one, I would have to pull the lever for John Bush II McOldyOld.
Recently I was told about this interesting program called The Great Schlep, which aims to have Jewish grandchildren go down to Florida to inform their grandparents about Barak Obama to help swing the state in his favor.
Since I will basically do anything Sarah Silverman tells me to do, I accepted the challenge with alacrity, and booked my flight.
I sat down with my grandfather, and I was only a few minutes into my spiel about how we need change for the sake of change, and how the McBush cabal is terrible because they are stupid / old and frequently use malapropisms in their speeches, and how Bush is not legitimate anyway because he somehow tricked Gore into litigating his election loss and then tricked 7 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices into upholding the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment thereby “anointing” Bush as a false President.
My grandfather stopped me, and pointed out that having been born in 1917, and having nothing to do all day but read newspapers and watch news broadcasts, he was actually already aware of all the points I was making, and would like to point out a few things that perhaps I had not considered when all my favorite celebrities and I decided that Obama was right for America.
He asked me if I knew why he and Grandma always re-used the tin foil they stored leftover food in. I said I thought it was because they were old and batty. That’s when he told me the story of what happened to our economy when he was a teenager.
Apparently, starting in September 1929 the stock market took a steep dive because of some poor advice given by Joseph Kennedy’s shoe-shine boy. By April of the following year, the market was 30% below its previous peak. I was shocked by this, noting that now our stock market is about 30% below its peak from last year, just like in 1930!
He had me enthralled with this story, so I begged him to tell me what happened next. Apparently, some Congressmen named Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley wrote a crazy law that raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. This caused a collapse in global trade and drove a stake into the heart of the American economy that lasted for years.
I asked Grandpa why they would do that, since over a hundred years prior, David Ricardo wrote Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, and taught the world how comparative advantage causes free trade to be highly beneficial to economic prosperity.
That’s when it dawned on me what grandpa was driving at. Obama and his party want to unilaterally renegotiate the NAFTA treaty, are against a similar pact, CAFTA, with Central America, and are stridently opposed to reducing barriers with our closest ally in South America, Colombia. It also occurred to me that since my beloved Democrats are a virtual subsidiary of the labor unions, they’re not likely to support any free trade.
Grandpa had me scrambling, but luckily I remembered what one of my friends was saying about those trade agreements after the Trotsky themed poetry slam we went to in Brooklyn. So I smugly asked him how he can support free trade without environmental and labor protections for those poor workers.
But again the old man had me outclassed. He patiently explained how environmental protection and workers’ rights rise mostly when a nation can afford it due to increasing prosperity and that by limiting trade with these developing countries we were actually working against the stated goal.
He had me. I finally agreed with Gramps that my man Obama was dead wrong on trade, but heck, at least his tax plan was way more fair, right?
Grandpa’s face turned a little red, his knuckles white, and he took a couple deep breaths, whispering faintly something about “serenity now.” “That discussion will have to wait until your next trip down here,” he said. I agreed, even though I really wanted to discuss it right then, because deep down I was panicked that when I got home and started to really look into the issues one by one, I would have to pull the lever for John Bush II McOldyOld.
