On the recordDecember 30, 2012
The Anasazi were Native Americans whose culture dated back 2,000 years. They were the cliff dwellers who built into the sheer walls of canyons extraordinary places to live. Yet, in 1300 A.D., these cliff dwellers, these great architects of culture and civilization, mysteriously disappeared. The people of this great Nation, the United States of America, are dwelling on real cliffs of fiscal insecurity: the cliffs of joblessness and low wages; the cliffs of mortgage foreclosure, homelessness; the cliffs of retirement insecurity; the cliffs of small business failure and investor uncertainty; the cliffs of violence at home and war abroad. At a time when the government should be demonstrating its capacity to meet the practical aspirations of the American people for jobs, education, health care, and retirement security, the government instead would have America dwell at the edge of a fiscal cliff in a manufactured crisis to manufacture consent for a deal that would otherwise be unacceptable. Leaders of both parties would do well to remember that the original cliff dwellers, as great as they were, disappeared. ____________________
