January 20, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


OBAMA SHOULD LOOK AT THE REAL REAGAN


If he wins the Democratic nomination, I will support Barack Obama for president. But I found it disturbing that he made remarks about Ronald Reagan that could be interpreted as praising Reagan. It was Reagan's administration that set us on the path we are now. We've had a murderous and bloody foreign policy that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. In Reagan's time it was a supposed fight against Communism. We've had domestic policies that have smothered the middle class and enriched the already wealthy and corporations. We've ignored problems like global warming and AIDS because Reagan, Bush, and others think they're somehow favored by God and they don't have to take action because the "end times" are here. We haven't taken the obvious necessary and prudent step of creating a health system that protects all our citizens. We have despicable trade policies that have sent countless jobs to other countries in the name of "free trade" and the "free market." This article by Katherine Harris at dandelionsalad.wordpress.com:


Senator Obama, are you tragically uninformed, trying to contrive “unity” by pandering to right-wingers or legitimizing their idol from conviction? Surely we can rule out option one, because you’re entirely too smart to speak and write about matters you haven’t studied seriously. Yes, when Reagan started spouting his political vitriol, you were a child. So was I, a somewhat bigger kid, but his words and deeds are well-documented from the mid-1960s onward. Thus, everything I know about him, you must also know.


For instance, while governor of California, he dehumanized welfare recipients, calling the needy “bums”, “cheats” and “a faceless mass waiting for a handout.” He’d campaigned on cutting funds for the poor, saying, “The time has come to stop being our brother’s keeper”. (Some “Christian” sentiment from one who soon styled himself a righteous Bible-thumper, huh?)


Condemning help for working people who lost their jobs, he sneered, “Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders,” and he dismissed upholding minority rights with this argument: “It doesn’t do good to open doors for someone who doesn’t have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.”


DESTRUCTIVE RIGHT-WING ECONOMICS

The dire warnings about the economy are everywhere, so much so that even George W. Bush is pushing for a "stimulus package" to rev up the moribund economy. Why should any of this be a surprise? The Republican administrations of Reagan, Bush, and Bush II have deliberately pursued policies meant to crush working people. Bill Clinton, who some call the best Republican president ever, also pursued policies that hurt working people. We have trade policies that are guaranteed to send jobs to other countries and leave poor-paying service sector jobs in their wake. We have tax policies that were guaranteed to cause massive deficits and consequent cuts to programs that work for working class people. We've seen a deliberate assault on unions and the ability of workers to organize for better wages and benefits. We've seen massive concentration of wealth in a few hands, leaving the rest of us struggling to even survive, even though workers in the United States are the world's most productive. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.nytimes.com:


From 1980 to 2005 the national economy, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. (Because of population growth, the actual increase per capita was about 66 percent.) But the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined during that period. The standard of living for the average family has improved not because incomes have grown, but because women have gone into the workplace in droves.


The peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973 — when the average income per taxpayer (adjusted for inflation) was $33,001. That is nearly $4,000 higher than the average in 2005.


It’s incredible but true: 90 percent of the population missed out on the income gains during that long period.