We went to the Moon.

[bemildred]

Many times.
NASA did it, the government did it, Democratic Presidents and Congresses did it.
Now, we cannot feed, clothe, school, or find jobs for our own children.
We are in retreat globally on all fronts.
THIS is the fruit of 4 decades of "conservative" economic policies and politics.

Edit: FWIW this is what got me thinking about this, I started thinking back and I realized how much we have lost already:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/114210332#post18

[we can do it]

1. Nasty greedy republicans.

[woo me with science]

24. Nasty greedy corporatists, both Democratic and Republican.

These obligatory posts trying to pretend that only Republicans are culpable are as predictable as they are absurd.

Republicans have long tried to do these things. The difference now is that Democrats have gone corporate, too, and no longer choose to stand in their way.

[ForgoTheConsequence]

2. We landed on the moon?

[bemildred]

3. You think maybe it was a conspiracy theory? nt

[Cleita]

4. We seem to have a Democrat in the White House who is fiscally conservative

not to mention the filibuster rule in the Senate and the control of the House by the wacky Tea Party cuckoo caucus. So it's no wonder we are spiraling into a country that rivals many third world countries with 10% of our economy. Our elected leaders should be ashamed.

[Arugula Latte]

5. We allowed our resources to be redirected to the very, very top.

We are all paying the price ... except the 1 percent. We have a gigantic, bloated military complex, and what is it good for? Pretty much nothing -- except slaughtering brown people and jacking up corporate profits. And for those who point to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, well, could we not have done that with a tiny fraction of the wealth we've squandered over the decades?

[WillyT]

6. An Empire In Decline...

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers

[bemildred]

7. That's a good one.

But it's a long and much-ignored list by now.

Tuchman's "March of Folly"
Todd's "After the Empire"

Just off the top of my head.

[johnd83]

8. It has nothing to do with our ability to produce the necessities of the country

we have just decided that people don't deserve food. It is insane but it is a choice, not because we are in "decline" or any of that nonsense. Our country is still extremely economically powerful and capable of doing much more if we can get our collective heads out of our asses.

[pintobean]

9. Then, we bombed it.

[longship]

18. What? When? nt

[pintobean]

19. The moon

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=6712126

[longship]

29. Are you kidding me? The LCROSS thing again?

Tons of stuff crashes into the Moon every single day. Over a hundred tons of stuff crashes into the Earth every single day.

There were precisely zero bombs on LCROSS. The collision of an empty booster stage into the edge of a crater was in no way "bombing" the moon. It was a research experiment to determine the content of water on areas of craters which are forever in darkness, where ice might not sublimate as in the rest of the moon's extremely low atmosphere environment.

And the crater itself was made by a big fucking rock colliding into the moon. If one looks at the moon through a telescope that's what one sees. There's craters everywhere. That's what nature does to things in a planetary system. It crashes things into it. In the Moon's very thin atmosphere, they all crash into the moon.

NASA did not "bomb" the moon. They did an experiment by crashing something into a crater edge which itself was made by a completely natural process to learn something about a place which we might want to go back to some day. If there's water there, it may be a nice thing to know.

Don't you think?

Did I say that there was no bomb? (Just making sure people got that part.)

[pintobean]

30. Wow

no shit


ETA

[longship]

31. Well, you said we bombed it.

Didn't want people to think that was real.
There's enough rubbish around here as it is.

If you intended sarcasm, you might have indicated such. Otherwise it might be taken for something else entirely.

Regards.

[pintobean]

32. It's been a joke on DU for years.

I don't remember who's responsibility it was to inform you. Maybe they were tombstoned before they had the chance.

[longship]

33. I remember that. Just didn't want to see a zombie of it.

Without a how is one to know the difference?

Poe's Law operates here, too.

Thanks for the clarification.

[Posteritatis]

21. That meme is a gift which will never, ever stop giving. (nt)

[jsr]

10. The powers that be have decided that food is not a necessity for 47M Americans

unlike weapon programs and corporate subsidies.

[jtuck004]

11. "Now, we cannot ..." Oh, we could, if we wanted to. n/t

[bemildred]

12. I will accept "we don't" as a edit.

However, it is still quite true that we are not in a position to go to the Moon at the moment, or other things. Our infrastructure is not in good shape. Ours schools suck. In fact it's not clear if we can pay our bills any more.

[jtuck004]

14. We manage to pay banksters hundreds of billions of dollars to keep them

in very, very, very good shape, and continue to do so at $85 billion a month or over a trillion a year, with the idea that they would loan that money out - they don't. It piles up in the Fed and we pay them better interest on it, as profit, than any of us can get at a bank. We write laws that allow very, very wealthy people to hold their cash overseas to avoid paying taxes on it, and both of those things help finance the destruction of jobs that pay a living wage while they are replaced with checks that don't in order to funnel more profit to the owners. We tell people it is necessary to prop their markets up, but that just means we keep making payments to the financiers, while the working people lose more assets every day. We underwrite the majority of hospital income with Medicare, getting less results for our money than nearly any advanced nation. And we write a mandatory insurance bill to guarantee 15% profit to insurance companies while offering less care and more out of pocket expense than many policies currently have, and then the president and others sneak around here, like thieves in the night, trying to pass a bill (TPP) which, among other things, guarantees record profits for pharmaceutical companies and less availability for the majority of people for drugs and an almost certain increase in the number of better paying jobs replaced with those that pay less.

We are owned by too many people making money off of us, and we are either too incompetent to figure out how, or too afraid, perhaps, to leave the plantation just in case it might be scary on the other side.

We could if we wanted to.

[KoKo]

13. Yes.."We Went to the Moon!" but, it's been downhill since those Altruistic Days.....

Now we do ULTRA SOPHISTICATED SPYING!

It's what we are known for. "MASTER SPYERS OF THE UNIVERSE!" We are the Greatest Spying Techware Supporters...and "It's Our FUTURE!"

Forget that "Astronauts on the Moon Walk Stuff!" It's soooooooo OLD NEWS!...

[riverbendviewgal]

15. Mr. B, my US history teacher in High school said empires implode between 200 - 250 years

because of the corruption and greed of the elite. He was right.. 13 years coming up and your country reaches 250 years.

THis song was popular in the 70s....

I am sorry to say that many Canadians are now feeling this, AGAIN.....what happened to you all?

Please don't try to do what is happening to your country to ours.

[bemildred]

35. Yes.

On the one hand, I feel privileged to watch. It's like being a Russian and watching the collapse of the USSR when the conquered peoples lost their fear. And that happened when the Russian people lost their fear. And boy did they underestimate Putin. History in the making.

People will be writing books for centuries about this.

But yeah, I can see why you all would be nervous.

[azurnoir]

16. Yes indeed we have lost much

I think we hit our zenith in the 1960's , by the end of the 1970's the down hill slide had begun

[bemildred]

36. 1968 or 1969, to pick a year. nt

[VPStoltz]

17. We went to the moon and...

had to wait decades for fuel efficient cars
can't create a factory that emits clean air
can run a corporation without resorting to a modern version of indentured servitude
have a gov't. for the people...
how did we ever let it get this far off track?

[HuckleB]

20. Going to the moon is not the problem.

The problem is the choice to become a war mongering nation that wants to control the politics of the entire world.

[reACTIONary]

22. I read the post you were ruminating upon...

.... The poster seems to think that vaccines, or the mercury or formaldehyde preservatives therein cause autism. That's bunk. I give no credence at all to those who hold such non scientific opinions.

[bemildred]

37. No, that's not what he thinks. nt

[allan01]

23. re: We went to the Moon.

yes we can and we did it. unlike some ppl who assert that it was all a hoax which was started by a stupid movie called capricorn 1 which used nasa footage btw. had a friend who would bristle at the idear that the landings were fake as this gentleman desinged the lunar module . i see a lot of rubbish presented on you tube .

[krispos42]

25. Don't worry, tax cuts will fix this.

And the TPP. And NAFTA. And more oligarchs.

[legcramp]

26. If you grew up in that era you remember we went to the moon because of the "missile gap"

and to beat the commies in the "space race". It was all for national pride and honor, and the government financed it but private industry implemented and profited from it.

We proved that our captured Nazi rocket scientists were better than their captured Nazi rocket scientists.

How different would the world be if communism in the Soviet Union, and elsewhere for that matter, had succeeded in providing it's citizens with a better and more prosperous life and we had competed with that?

[bemildred]

38. I did. The topic of the OP is the obvious decay in our society since then.

I have nothing against national pride and honor, I object to selfish incompetence.

[JEFF9K]

27. We should send Rush Limbaugh and friends to the moon, on a one way ticket! Problem solved!

[totodeinhere]

28. I don't think we have a rocket powerful enough to lift Limbaugh off the ground. n/t

[msongs]

34. the moon project was funding for the MIC that made all the tech equipment. sorry, poor people nt