October 08, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

WORKERS HAMMERED SINCE 1980

The Gipper stepped into the White House in 1981 and things have been bad for working class Americans ever since. I remember reading about some rich Texas oilmen who were celebrating Reagan's victory. They had a big cake with the shape of the Capitol dome. On the dome was the word "Ours." Since 1980 we had twelve years of Reagan-Bush, eight years of Clinton, and now six plus years of the current Bush. Even Bill Clinton was more a moderate Republican than a traditional Democrat. In this article Seth Sandronsky takes a look at Dean Baker's book The United States Since 1980. The article is at www.counterpunch.org:

What makes the U.S. so unlike other rich nations? There is no single answer. At the top of a list is the power of the business class to shape policy-making and the lives of the nation's populace. In The United States Since 1980, economist Dean Baker focuses on the policies that have set the country on a business-friendly path. There have been far-reaching effects.

"For most of the population of the United States, the quarter century from 1980 to 2005 was an era in which they became far less secure economically, and the decrease in security affected their lives and political attitudes," he writes. "It is important to note that this decrease was the result of conscious policy, not the accidental workings of the market."

Baker steers clear of ambiguous terms. This is a great help to the layperson searching for clear-headed policy analysis of this critical 25-year period. Ruling interests' efforts to roll back the popular gains of the vast mass of workers has marked this time.

"The change in the ground rules affecting the market distribution of income has had a much greater impact on the country than the change in tax and transfer policy," Baker writes. Accordingly, a changed rule of critical impact driving the wage gap between Americans on the bottom and in the middle and those at the top has been in employee-employer relations. What does (not) happen at the point of production, the workplace, matters.

WAR SUPPORTERS SHOULD PUT THEIR MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTH IS

If the war in Iraq, or the war on "terror," is the titanic clash of good against evil, the effort to save western civilization we've been told, then supporters of the war should be happy to pay higher taxes to support it. So maybe Democrats in Congress should push the idea of a "war surtax" to make Republicans and their supporters put up or shut up. This article by E. J. Dionne is at www.truthdig.com:

Would conservatives and Republicans support the war in Iraq if they had to pay for it?

This is the immensely useful question that Rep. David Obey, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, put on the table this week by calling for a temporary war tax to cover President Bush’s request for $145 billion in supplemental spending for Iraq.

The proposal is a magnificent way to test the seriousness of those who claim that the Iraq war is an essential part of the “global war on terror.” If the war’s backers believe in it so much, it should be easy for them to ask taxpayers to put up the money for such an important endeavor.

Obey makes the case pointedly. “Some people are being asked to pay with their lives or their faces or their hands or their arms or their legs,” he said in an interview this week. “If you’re going to ask for that, it doesn’t seem too much to ask an average taxpayer to pay thirty bucks for the cost of the war so we don’t have to shove it off on our kids.”

Or as Obey said in a statement, “I’m tired of seeing that only military families are asked to sacrifice in this war.”