September 10, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THE RIGHT WING ECONOMICS FRAUD

To hear right-wingers tell it, The Market is everything. The Market leaps tall buildings in a single bound, flies faster than a speeding bullet, and encompasses truth, justice, and the American way. Part of that devotion to The Market is what we call trickle down economics. It's the idea that you cut taxes on the very rich, and those august beings, gods almost, will take that extra money and invest it wisely and there will be jobs aplenty and prosperity for all. We've had the major episodes of trickle down economics in both the Reagan and Bush administrations and what we've gotten both times is whopping deficits, massive inequality, and lousy wages and benefits for the majority of us. Paul Krugman talks about it in this column linked at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:

It’s true, as the Bushies never tire of reminding us, that the U.S. economy has added eight million jobs since that 2003 tax cut. That sounds impressive, unless you happen to know that a good part of that gain was simply a recovery from large job losses earlier in the administration’s tenure — and that the United States added no fewer than 21 million jobs after Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, a move that had conservative pundits predicting economic disaster.

What’s really remarkable, however, is that four years of economic growth have produced essentially no gains for ordinary American workers.

Wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated: the real hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, the most widely used measure of how typical workers are faring, were no higher in July 2007 than they were in July 2003.

Meanwhile, benefits have deteriorated: the percentage of Americans receiving health insurance through employers, which plunged along with employment during the early years of the Bush administration, continued to decline even as the economy finally began creating some jobs.

9/11: MISSTEPS ALL THE WAY

When the Clinton administration was leaving office the incoming Bush administration was warned that terrorism should be a high national security priority. But they ignored those warnings, just as Bush himself ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing stating that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States. After the tragic events of six years ago, the Bush administration declared a "war on terror" instead of treating the attacks as the criminal attacks they were. In Afghanistan Osama bin Laden was allowed to slip away and despite Bush's cowboy rhetoric of getting bin Laden "dead or alive" bin Laden remains at large. Then the Bush administration attacked Iraq, a country not involved in terrorism or the attacks on 9/11. Now Iraq has become a major recruitment incentive for Osama bin Laden and has bogged down our military. This commentary by Gary Hart is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

The Bush administration was warned months before 9/11 that terrorists were going to attack America. They did nothing. They have yet to be held accountable for the preventable loss of American lives. Yet the administration blames its critics for not understanding the terrorist threat.

The perpetrator of those American deaths is still at large and the war to eliminate those who harbored him threatens to drag on inconclusively for many years. Instead, administration operatives, with the approval of their masters, find it convenient to use him to create fear, and therefore justify their positions of power.

The United States has suffered more than 30,000 casualties in another war that had nothing to do with those attacks. This folly is producing more haters of America than it can ever possibly eliminate.