April 29, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSINESS "EFFICIENCY" IS OVERRATED

When you hear the word "bureaucracy" you tend to think of government. Government can be annoying sometimes. But anyone who thinks there is no bureaucracy in the business sector hasn't worked in business or dealt with corporations. I've worked for businesses my entire working life, and I'm frequently amazed at the fog of bureaucracy you encounter every day. This article by Pierre Tristam is at www.commondreams.org:

Every “expansion of government in business,” Herbert Hoover had said, “poisons the very roots of liberalism — that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity.” That is, exactly the values reactionary Republicanism, aided by the courts it’d been packing since President McKinley’s day, clobbered as it turned the 1920s into “the most expensive orgy in history” (as F. Scott Fitzgerald would describe it in 1931, when the party was over), “the whole upper tenth living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of call girls.”


That was before the orgies Reagan, that value-added conservative, unleashed in the 1980s, and that his dry-drunk ideological godson George W. Bush managed to squeeze in between two recessions. That they used government to underwrite their upper-class orgies while calling government names is among those elitist ironies men-of-the-people like Reagan and Bush chose not to consort with. It helps to live in the world of slogans.

But in the real world, is it really true that government is the problem, that business does it better than government? Not in my experience. Getting naturalized a citizen of this country was simpler than getting bogus charges taken off my cell phone account. Getting my passport or driver’s license or tags renewed has always been more pleasant and efficient than dealing with the cable company (long since abandoned). Filing taxes? Give me that over dealing with health insurers any day. At least with tax returns, I usually get money back. Insurers just garnishee my wages and shave years off my life. I envy my parents’ comparatively non-existent Medicare bureaucracy, and their complete freedom to choose what doctor they please — up to and including the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, which I’d have to pay for on top of the $5,000 I pay in private health insurance premiums for me and my family for often mediocre services and artery-clogging bureaucratic grief. Seems to me private-sector insurance is the problem here, and government the demonstrable solution.

BUSH'S PERMANENT RECESSION

According to the propaganda, there was a recession at the start of the Bush administration that started in the final stages of the Clinton presidency. Then there was an alleged "robust" recovery. But during Bush's years job growth has not even kept pace with the need for new jobs. Wages and benefits for most of us have been on a steady decline. Bush's defenders blame 9/11 and his wars for some of our problems, but wars have traditionally been good for the economy. Right-wingers claim it took World War II to bring us out the Great Depression, but they take a different tune with George W. Bush. This article by Larry Beinhart is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The recession of 2001 never ended.

At least not for ordinary Americans.

Ordinary Americans found that their income was declining. From 2001 to 2007, median family income declined -- depending on where you get your figures from -- by somewhere between $500 and $1,000. Median individual income went down by at least $1,000.

The yearly average number of new private sector jobs created from 2001-2008 was just 369,000, not even keeping up with the growth in population. It should be compared to the average number of new private sector jobs created from '92 to 2,000: 1,760,000 per year.

The number of people in manufacturing jobs decreased by over 3 million.

The number who got healthcare at work went down, from 64.2 million to 59.7 million. The number of people without healthcare went up from 38.4 to 46.9 million.

The number of people in poverty increased from 31.6 million to 36.5 million.