August 06, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

LIKE QUIVERING JELLYFISH

Chicken Little might have been a good member of the Bush administration, although Chicken Little wasn't scuttling around screaming, "The sky is falling!" to cynically manipulate people and ram through an onerous political agenda. The Bush administration has managed to make lots of Americans afraid of the dark, metaphorically speaking. The threat of being killed by terrorism is almost nothing compared to various other threats we face. But we've allowed the Bush administration to spy on us, shred civil liberties, torture, start preemptive wars, and funnel billions of dollars to defense contractors because that boogeyman terrorist might be hiding under the bed. This article by Allan Uthman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

More Americans have been killed in the war in Iraq than have ever been killed by terrorism in the history of the country. A San Francisco Chronicle piece puts the odds of being killed by terrorism as slightly lower than dying in an avalanche. How much are we spending on avalanche prevention? Why is there no counter-avalanche czar? How many news stories have you seen about the threat of avalanches? Think about it: “Avalanches: Are we safer than we were?” Or “Democrats: Soft on avalanches?” Why does the liberal media ignore the avalanche threat?

You get the idea. From a purely rational perspective, we are spending a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time, money and attention on what amounts to a tiny threat. Not only that, but we have failed miserably in even reducing that threat, despite the astounding scope of our backwards approach to it.

It's truly amazing: we spend more on defense and security than the entire rest of the world, and the enemy is a shabby assemblage of repressed losers. Yet somehow the media manages to effectively convey the feeling that the country is some soft, white, utterly vulnerable blob of flesh, a giant, defenseless belly with no arms or legs, practically begging to be punctured and devoured by a teeming mass of impossibly disciplined super-criminals.

INFRASTRUCTURE, POVERTY, AND TAX CUTS

When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency it was a seismic shift in our politics. We went from an era where government policies helped to bolster the growth of a middle class. The Reagan tax cuts for the very rich and his assault on unions gave power and wealth to the plutocrats. It has only gotten worse since George W. Bush waltzed into office. Even achieving the middle class is getting more and more difficult. A college education is almost a necessity in getting a middle class job, and college is getting almost impossibly expensive for working class people. Even a person with a college degree may have a difficult time attaining middle class status because so many jobs get outsourced to places like India. This article by Thom Hartmann is at www.commondreams.org:

Reagan promptly cut income taxes on the very rich from 70% down to 27%. Corporate tax rates were also cut so severely that they went from representing over 33% of total federal tax receipts in 1951 to less than 9% in 1983 (they’re still in that neighborhood, the lowest in the industrialized world).

The result was devastating. Our government was suddenly so badly awash in red ink that Reagan doubled the tax paid only by people earning less than $40,000/year (FICA), and then began borrowing from the huge surplus this new tax was accumulating in the Social Security Trust Fund. Even with that, Reagan had to borrow more money in his 8 years than the sum total of all presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined.

In addition to badly throwing the nation into debt, Reagan’s tax cut blew out the ceiling on the accumulation of wealth, leading to a new Gilded Age and the rise of a generation of super-wealthy that hadn’t been seen since the Robber Baron era of the 1890s or the Roaring 20s.