Peter A. Diamond

Peter A. Diamond was given the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economics. To most of us he is not a renowned figure. He was the professor of the head of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernacke.
Mr. Diamond was nominated to fill one of the vacant seats in the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately some of the members of the minority party in the U.S. Senate that has hold hostage this country for the past 4 years have decided that they will not allow President Obama’s nominee to be confirmed. The main one leading this fight is Senator R. Shelby from Alabama, saying that Mr. Diamond is not qualified for the job. I guess Mr. Shelby thinks that he is qualified to decide who is best suited to be one of the board members of the Federal Reserve.
This is the same party and its new spin off the Tea Party that is giving us some unqualified, unprepared candidates that may very well win their races, during a time where people want to take revenge with their government officials for the downturn that they are living. I will not say that they are right or wrong in their anger. What I can say is that we should look closely at this candidates and what they propose: privatizing Social Security, in my book that sounds like doing away with the most successful program in American History, privatizing Medicare and Medicaid, same goes for this program, privatizing the V.A., dido, and we can go on.
This party is also proposing rolling back what they call “Obamacare”. That means re-instituting the clause that allows insurance companies to reject kids with preconditions. That sounds like a humane position. But we should never forget that the insurance companies’ bottom lines come before the health of its insured.
They are running on the pledge to America which is cut taxes for the wealthy, deregulation to banking and increase of military spending. That sounds like the Bush-Cheney dogma that sets us back 10 years.
A friend of mine has told me more than once that I try to figure out people, although I try not I guess it is my nature, and I fall victim to my own temptation probably because after 25 years it worries me seeing this great nation falling behind the rest of the world in every single aspect from education to infrastructure to technology. Having grown up in Argentina and being a neighbor to Brazil the thing we always found amusing about Brazilians was that whatever you would talk about with them they would always answer the same “O mais grande du mundo”, which translated is the greatest in the world, which was a fantasy because they had zillions of problem including 60% of population living in poverty. Now living in the United States American people remind of those Brazilians as I was growing up.