October 22, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

A GORDON GECKO ECONOMY

In the movie Wall Street Michael Douglas portrayed a high rolling financier named Gordon Gecko. Gordon Gecko was famous for the statement that epitomized the Reagan era, "Greed is good." In one memorable scene Gecko talked how he didn't produce or make anything. He moved money around. He destroyed unions and took their pension funds. He used insider trading techniques to manipulate stock prices. Our version of Gordon Gecko is the billionaire hedge fund traders, the kind of people who benefited from unregulated subprime mortgages. The number of billionaires in the United States has increased and the number of poor has increased. We have millions of people without even basic health care insurance. This is what we get with reactionary administrations like the Bush administration. This article by Holly Sklar is at www.commondreams.org:

The 25th anniversary of the Forbes 400 isn’t party time for America.

We have a record 482 billionaires — and record foreclosures.

We have a record 482 billionaires — and a record 47 million people without any health insurance.

Since 2000, we have added 184 billionaires — and 5 million more people living below the poverty line.

The official poverty threshold for one person was a ridiculously low $10,294 in 2006. That won’t get you two pounds of caviar ($9,800) and 25 cigars ($730) on the Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index. The $20,614 family-of-four poverty threshold is lower than the cost of three months of home flower arrangements ($24,525).

Wealth is being redistributed from poorer to richer.

Between 1983 and 2004, the average wealth of the top 1 percent of households grew by 78 percent, reports Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University. The bottom 40 percent lost 59 percent.

THE REALITY OF PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK

Thanks to Republican economics, whether you want to blame Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or a combination of right-wing politicians,economists, and think tanks, have created a situation for many of us where survival is getting harder and harder. Essentials such as food and energy are getting horrendously expensive. Rents go up, but incomes to do not. This article by ANNE D'INNOCENZIO, is at news.yahoo.com:

Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.

Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.

While economists debate whether the country is headed for a recession, some say the financial stress is already the worst since the last downturn at the start of this decade.

From Family Dollar to Wal-Mart, merchants have adjusted their product mix and pricing accordingly. Sales data show a marked and more prolonged drop in spending in the days before shoppers get their paychecks, when they buy only the barest essentials before splurging around payday.