January 28, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY




ROMNEY THE JOB SLASHER



In the recent primary campaign in Michigan you would have thought Mitt Romney was a guardian of working class people and working class jobs. Romney has touted himself as experienced in business and said he would bring that expertise to the White House. But the record is that Romney, in his role as businessman, slashed jobs. It's the Republican way to talk about job creation while doing everything possible to eliminate jobs and decent wages. This article by Robert Gavin is at www.boston.com:



In early 1995, as the Ampad paper plant in Marion, Ind., neared its shutdown following a bitter strike, Randy Johnson, a worker and union official, scrawled a personal letter to Mitt Romney, pouring out his disappointment that Romney, then chief executive of the investment firm that controlled Ampad, had not done enough to settle the strike and save some 200 jobs.


"We really thought you might help," Johnson said in the handwritten note, "but instead we heard excuses that were unacceptable from a man of your prominent position."


Romney, who had recently lost a Senate race in which the strike became a flashpoint, responded that he had "privately" urged a settlement, but was advised by lawyers not to intervene directly. His political interests, he explained, conflicted with his business responsibilities.


Now, Romney's decision to stay on the sidelines as his firm, Bain Capital, slashed jobs at the office supply manufacturer stands in marked contrast to his recent pledges to beleaguered auto workers in Michigan and textile workers in South Carolina to "fight to save every job."


IRAQ: TEMPLATE FOR A BAD WAR



John McCain is running as the most militaristic of the very militaristic Republican slate of candidates. McCain has his experience in Vietnam and as a prisoner of war to give him some veneer of credibility on military matters. But being a POW doesn't make you an expert on military strategy. This commentary by P. M. Carpenter talks about past military thinkers like Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Marshall and how they would have viewed this disaster in Iraq. The commentary is at pmcarpenter.blogs.com:



It so happened that when I read that I had just put down a marvelous new work on military history: Mark Perry's Partners in Command, an investigation into the working relationship between Generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the meticulously driven subtext of Perry's work is that both of these incisive military minds and, later, shapers of America's foreign policy, would have been appalled -- absolutely aghast -- at the United States' entry into Iraq.


Both would have left aside the question of apologies, because both, quite simply, would have found the intervention utterly inexcusable -- a betrayal of America's political culture, societal way of thinking, and even common sense.


Marshall and Eisenhower thought alike because in the 1920s they had both studied at the feet of a certain General Fox Conner, a military genius of unusual sociopolitical insight as well. And what Conner taught them -- what he hammered away at with singular emphasis -- was that, as Perry succinctly worded it, we were "Never [to] fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and never fight for long." (It was these lessons that Eisenhower had in mind, as president, when he pulled our sorry butts out of Korea's human meat-grinder.)

January 27, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



DANGER AND OPPORTUNITY



Troubled economies can produce opportunities, but also present dangers. Adolf Hitler was able to galvanize Germany because the Weimar Republic was suffering hyperinflation. Money was almost worthless. The awful policies of the Bush administration have made our own dollar decline against other currencies like the Euro. We're seeing huge spikes in costs for energy, food, and health care. Many of our good jobs have been sent offshore in the name of globalization and free trade. Like the time of the Great Depression, we have an opportunity to restructure the United States economy. We can get single payer health care, we can rebuild our infrastructure, we can do something meaningful with our education system, and we can make sure working people earn decent wages and benefits. Or we can allow the vultures to privatize everything and reduce most of us to a state of peonage. This column by Naomi Klein is at www.latimes.com:



More than a decade ago, economist Dani Rodrik, then at Columbia University, studied the circumstances in which governments adopted free-trade policies. His findings were striking: "No significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis." The 1990s proved him right in dramatic fashion. In Russia, an economic meltdown set the stage for fire-sale privatizations. Next, the Asian crisis in 1997-98 cracked open the "Asian tigers" to a frenzy of foreign takeovers, a process the New York Times dubbed "the world's biggest going-out-of-business sale."



To be sure, desperate countries will generally do what it takes to get a bailout. An atmosphere of panic also frees the hands of politicians to quickly push through radical changes that would otherwise be too unpopular, such as privatization of essential services, weakening of worker protections and free-trade deals. In a crisis, debate and democratic process can be handily dismissed as unaffordable luxuries.



Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," who articulated the strategy most succinctly. "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."



DEBAUCHING ADAM SMITH


Adam Smith is the Enlightenment economist whose ideas created a framework for modern day capitalism. Right-wingers like to invoke Adam Smith, ideas about the free market, and the "invisible hand" of the market to suggest that business should be unfettered. But Adam Smith did not believe in the godliness of businessmen. This article by Scott Horton is at www.harpers.org:


One of the idiocies I see trotted out every day in the financial industry’s press is the suggestion that Adam Smith and other great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment–who furnished the basic framework for our current understanding of industrial and post-industrial economics–had limitless faith in entrepreneurs. It is true that they had confidence in the entrepreneurial spirit as a creative engine. But their Calvinist inclinations were anything but unstinting in praise of entrepreneurs as individuals or as a class. Smith notes that the individual businessman will always seek the expansion of his own wealth and power at the cost of others and of society as a whole. So Smith would have fully anticipated, and deplored, the consequences of seven years of Bush’s government of by and for the plutocrats. Socialistic experimentation is not the answer for this. But a sound concept of social fairness in the allocation of the burdens of society certainly is. Government should not unduly burden the entrepreneurial class. But neither should it become a vehicle for transfer of wealth to those who already have the most, while leaving a heavy debt to be borne by those who follow in their wake.

January 25, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



GOP AND RECESSION TAG TEAM


I have argued for some time that GOP administrations and bad economies go together. It's no coincidence that every time the GOP is in power the economy takes a major hit. From the time of Herbert Hoover the pattern is clear. You can count on inequality rising, on more poverty, on declining wages, and recessions when Republican policies are in place This article by John Dean is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


As the stock market gyrated wildly this week, given the precarious state of the American economy, the New York Times published a table relating to anti-recession efforts in times past . In scanning it, I could not help but notice that among the last eight recessions, all but the first, in 1948, occurred during Republican presidencies. (The first occurred when Republicans controlled Congress.)


Here are the recessions and their Republican presidents: August 1957 to April 1958 (Eisenhower), April 1960 to February 1961 (Eisenhower), December 1969 to November 1970 (Nixon), November 1973 to March 1975 (Nixon and Ford), July 1981 to November 1982 (Reagan), July 1990 to March 1991 (Reagan), and March 2001 to November 2001 (Bush II).


As we all have watched the stock market this week, thoughts of past major crashes have no doubt popped into the minds of many. Republican presidents oversaw them. Herbert Hoover, of course, was president when the great crash of 1929 occurred, and Ronald Reagan was president with the most recent serious crash - Black Monday in 1987.


The Republican Party has long been the favorite of the business world. But when one steps back to look at the facts objectively - as business leaders who want to remain in business must do, and now seem to be doing - the question must be asked: Is a Republican bias actually good business?


SHORT TERM STIMULUS VS. PERMANENT CURE



The news is abuzz about a forthcoming stimulus package to spark the sagging U. S. economy. But we need more than a brief injection of money into the system. The current system is seriously flawed and there are some basic things we can do to fix it. One of the first is to have a universal health care system. Our current system is a disgrace. Millions of Americans have no insurance at all. Millions more of us have inadequate insurance. A health care crisis means financial ruin. We need a minimum wage that adjusts with inflation. It's astonishing that the federal minimum wage remained at a miserly $5.15 an hour for years while CEO salaries went into the millions of dollars. If education is an answer, as we've been told, it should be easier and more affordable to get an education. College is becoming the province of the rich. We need to end predatory lending practices. Credit card companies and banks are getting away with financial murder. This article by Nomi Prins is at www.alternet.org:


The rhetoric surrounding George W. Bush's economic stimulus package, as boastfully "bi-partisan" as it is (we are, after all, in an election year), indicates a complete lack of comprehension of the difference between this 'national' economy and the 'people's' economy, and the extent of the gap between the two.

The unveiling of his plan was classic Bush: state something ambiguous about a $140 billion adrenaline shot, then have your cronies act as wingmen. Hence, at last Friday's press conference, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO, Hank Paulson was left fending off uncomfortable questions like: would the plan help "elderly people on fixed incomes?" His answer: "The Christmas season has come and gone."

The national economy, as measured by large scale figures simply does not represent individual citizens' economic circumstances. That's why debate over whether we are in a recession or not misses the point of everyday financial realities for most of the population. According to the standard definition of recession (two quarters or more of a decline in GDP), we're not there. In which case, Bush and Paulson are technically right in saying the economy is simply 'slow'.

January 24, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



BUSH ADMINISTRATION: OVER 900 LIES TO WAR



It's no real surprise to most of us. We have known for some time that the Bush administration constructed a mountain of lies to justify a war with Iraq. But for the sake of history it's important that a new study has documented over 900 lies told by the administration. Bush himself has been documented with over 200 lies. This is no small matter when you consider the carnage rained on Iraq, the deaths and wounding of our own military, the raid on our treasury, and the destruction of our credibility. This article by Frank J. Ranelli is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


A nonprofit collaboration of two independent, non-governmental organizations has concluded that President Bush used at least 532 misleading and deceptively false statements to justify military action against Iraq. In all, the Bush administration as a whole used a mind-numbing 935 false statements to goad America into war with Iraq. Calling their findings “an orchestrated deception on the path to war,” the partnership report may very well be the first fully comprehensive investigation that incontrovertibly proves the Bush administration lied this nation into an unfounded war.


The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism determined, through a collective study and breakdown of Bush administration speeches, press briefings and interviews, that Bush and other top officials “led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information.”


According to the report, Bush alone lied more than 259 times, including 232 false statements “about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” and “28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida.” Quoting Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, “It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida.” Furthermore, the shared study noted, “the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”


ABOUT A YEAR TO GO


The countdown is on in this country and around the world for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to go. I only hope the country isn't suckered into electing another Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney. The damage the current administration has done will take decades to repair. Some of it can never be undone. Let's hope that we've learned some things. For starters, the man who wins the most votes should win the election. Abolish the Electoral College. Second, we need campaign finance reform. Big donors and corporations shouldn't get to be kingmakers. Third, we need major reform in the media. The media acted as cheerleaders for this atrocity in Iraq. There are countless other reforms we need, but those would be a good start. This column by Patt Morrison is at www.latimes.com:



One year from this very moment, someone other than George Bush will be sliding behind that antique desk in the Oval Office. In embassies and outposts that fly the Stars and Stripes, photographs of a face other than Bush's will be going up on the walls.


At long, long last. It is seven years since Bush plopped down behind that desk, seven years when hope and honor and good faith and goodwill died a little for me, for many other heartsick Americans who love this country, and for millions around the world who looked up to this country.


I say "died," and I mean that. The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross laid out the basic stages of grief and coming to terms with loss. And Kubler-Ross' five stages track almost perfectly the arc of how we've grappled and grieved over the sickening power crusade of the Bush administration against the nation for these last seven years.

January 22, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



THE RESULTS OF DEREGULATION



Right-wingers tell us that the path to the promised land lies in the "free market." You leave the "market" alone and everything works itself out. The biggest gripes right-wingers have voiced about "big government" deal with taxes paid by the rich and with regulation. The Big Bad Government just stifles business, we're told, with too much regulation. As we see the havoc being created by subprime mortgages, we can see the results of too little regulation. The effects are being felt throughout the United States economy and around the world. This article by Robert Weissman is at www.commondreams.org:



The current crisis is the predictable (and predicted) result of a massive U.S. housing bubble, which itself can be traced in part to global economic imbalances that could have been prevented.


At least five distinct regulatory failures led to the current crisis.
Regulatory Failure Number One: Failure to Manage the U.S. Trade Deficit. The housing bubble (as well as the surge in leveraged buyouts of publicly traded companies (”private equity”)) was fueled by cheap credit — low interest rates. One reason for the cheap credit was an influx of capital into the United States from China. China’s capital surplus was the mirror image of the U.S. trade deficit — U.S. corporations were sending lots of dollars to China in exchange for the cheap stuff sold to U.S. consumers.


Regulatory Failure Number Two: Failure to Intervene to Pop the Housing Bubble. Along with an influx of capital, Federal Reserve policy kept interest rates very low. There were good reasons for the Fed Policy, but that did not mean the Fed was helpless to prevent the housing bubble. As economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research insisted at the time, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan simply by identifying the bubble — and adjusting public perception of the future of the housing market — could have prevented or at least contained the bubble. He declined, and even denied the existence of a bubble.

January 21, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


MOURNING IN AMERICA


Since Ronald Reagan left the White House right-wingers have been busily engaged in revisionist history. Supposedly, Reagan's policies created a dynamic economy that created millions of jobs. Reagan, we're told, ended the Cold War because he stood toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union. Reagan supposedly brought back optimism to the country after the depressing 1970's. But facts remain facts. Reagan created massive deficits, enriched the already wealthy, widened the gap between rich and poor, had one of the most corrupt administrations in our history, and presided over massive human rights violations in Central America with his support of the Contras. The real Reagan record isn't pretty. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:


The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.


When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.



Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

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.

January 19, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORKING CLASS


You can categorize the population of the United States in lots of ways. You can divide us by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by sexual orientation, by martial status, by religious affiliation and so on. But one thing the most of us share is that we are working class. Economics matter. I hope that Democratic candidates will not focus so much on "identity politics" that they lose sight of the working class. This article by E. J. Dionne is at www.washingtonpost.com:

Still, there will be inexorable pressure on both candidates to use identity politics for their own purposes. Gender solidarity was important to Clinton's campaign-saving victory in New Hampshire, and it could help her again. African American support will be valuable to Obama, especially in the Democrats' South Carolina primary on Jan. 26.


But the long term is another matter. To build a majority this fall and make history, both candidates would need a lot of help from a group with its own reasons to be discontented: the white working class.


"Working class" seems an antique term, but the people it describes still exist, more now in the service industries than in manufacturing. Demographers often use education levels as a surrogate for class position, and the past three decades have not been kind to Americans who are not college graduates.


BAD ECONOMICS 101

The Bush administration and Republican administrations in general demonstrate how not to run an economy. We've seen trickle down economics in various forms in all Republican administrations. In the Reagan and two Bush administrations we've seen trickle down economics on steroids. The country has been transformed from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation. We've seen our manufacturing sector mostly disassembled and sent abroad. We've seen a growing middle class under attack and starting to disappear. We've seen stability in our financial sector undermined. This article by Larry Beinhart is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


The idea under which Bushenomics was sold is this:
The rich are the investor class.
If the rich have more money, they will invest more.
Their investments will create more business.
Those businesses will create more wealth, thus improving everyone's lives and making the nation stronger. They will also create new and better jobs.
Whether or not the people who say such things truly believe them, I cannot say. But that's their pitch, and the media certainly seems to buy it, as do most of the establishment economists.

A more realistic -- and less idealistic -- view of Bushenomics is that the Bush administration and its cronies came at the economy with the attitude of oilmen.
They inherited a vastly wealth country.

They looked at it like the oil under the Alaskan wilderness. They craved to pump it out, turn it into cash and grab as much of that cash as possible.

Wherever possible, they literally sold off the assets. This was called privatization. Our biggest asset -- in terms of size -- is, of course, our defense establishment. With privatization, one dollar out of every three for direct military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan goes to private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. So when someone says, "Support the troops!" with budget appropriations, they should really yell, "Two-thirds support to the troops! One third support to Halliburton, et al.!"

January 18, 2008



IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



TIME FOR TRICKLE UP ECONOMICS



Republican style economics have been tried several times in the past 100 years or so. Every time they've been a disaster. We got the Great Depression with Hoover. We got recessions under Eisenhower. We had stagflation under Nixon and Ford. We've had huge deficits and inequality under Reagan, Bush, and under the second Bush. Instead of constantly cutting taxes for the rich, and claiming the benefits will trickle down to us, which they haven't, let's cut taxes for the majority of us. This article by Stephen Pizzo is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


1) Revoke the Bush tax cuts for the top 1%
2) Shift those cuts to reduce the payroll tax by the same amount.

That's it. A two-point economic stimulus package that will pump $1 trillion into the pockets of American consumers. And, rather than that money flowing into family trusts and other paper investments, it will get spent, piece by orderly piece, each week, every week, forever. So, if congress is itching to make a tax cut permanent, that's the one -- a payroll tax cut.

The beneficiaries of the Bush tax cut had their chance to prove the trickle-down theory, and failed -- just as they failed the last time it was tried by Ronald Reagan. Both attempts left America saddled by back-breaking deficits and debt. Both attempts enriched the already enriched at the expense of middle class working Americans.

They had their chance. Now give trickle up economics a chance. Revoke the Bush tax cuts for the top 1% and give them to working Americans.
Then, just so they feel like they're getting a piece of this new action, send each of America's top 1% earners a government check for $300 as their share of our economic stimulus package -- with our compliments.

January 15, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


KEEP IMPEACHMENT ON THE TABLE


Because of the reticence of Democrats in Congress, and the obstructions presented by Republicans, it doesn't appear that Bush and Cheney will be impeached before next year. However, there is precedent for impeaching federal officials after they have left office. I believe for the sake of the Constitution, for precedent, and for history that Bush and Cheney should be impeached and brought to trial. This article by Jon Ponder is at www.pensitorereview.com:


The purpose of a post-term impeachment of Bush and Cheney would be to send a message to future rightwing cabals who intend to highjack the American republic that they do so at their own peril — that they will be brought to justice.

A strong case can be made that if Pres. Nixon had been impeached, followed by a trial and conviction in court on the obstruction of justice and other charges and sentenced to prison, even briefly, Bush and particularly Cheney would have felt less emboldened to behave like despots. (In fact, it’s doubtful Cheney would have been interested in the vice presidency if he’d felt constrained from looting the government for his corporate cronies.)

Just as hindsight shows that Americans 30 years ago could have prevented the abuses of Bush and Cheney by prosecuting and imprisoning Nixon in 1974, we owe it to future generations of Americans to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for their crimes and incompetence today.

If the move for post-term impeachments took hold, Republicans would doubtless object — but just seven years ago it was GOP legal types who floated the idea of a post-presidential, second impeachment Pres. Clinton because they didn’t like the pardons he granted as he left office.

January 13, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THEIR ATTACKS GET MORE INANE


Their own ideology is so toxic conservatives twist themselves into knots to criticize the left. Ann Coulter has made lots of money writing trashy books attacking liberals. There has been a history of conservative "intellectuals" defending the indefensible, such as William F. Buckley praising Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Now we have Jonah Goldberg saying that we on the left are "fascists." He needs to make up his mind. The right usually calls us Communists and, as I recall, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. This article by Brad Reed looks at Goldberg's tome Liberal Fascism. The article is at www.alternet.org:

While a lot of this stuff is easy to laugh off, some of Goldberg's historical revisionism is downright sickening. In one particularly grotesque passage, he tries to obfuscate the Nazis' treatment of homosexuals by calling their attitudes toward homosexuality "a source of confusion." Oh sure, he writes, "some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps," but it's also true that the early Nazi party was "rife with homosexuals." I'm sure the 100,000 men who were arrested for being homosexuals in Nazi Germany, as well as the thousands more who died in concentration camps, were proud to see their brethren so well-represented in the SS.

Most stunningly, Goldberg completely glosses over the American Right's support for any fascist governments, stating that "no leading conservative intellectual or scholar celebrated fascist themes or ideas" and that "to the contrary, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr. and the conservatives around the National Review dedicated themselves to restoring the classically liberal vision of the Founders." He must not have read Buckley's "Letter from Spain" dated Oct. 26, 1957, where he praised Gen. Francisco Franco as "an authentic national hero" who was "not an oppressive dictator" but rather "only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power, and that, it happens, is not very oppressive, for the people, by and large, are content."

January 11, 2008



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IMPEACH CHENEY



BIG GOVERNMENT IS OKAY FOR SOME


Conservatives snarl about "big government." They moan about the taxes they pay and just how unfair it is. But they have no problem with big government snooping on us, trampling on civil liberties, or doling out big cash to corporations. If you run a small business and get into financial trouble, you're on your own, pal. But if you run a big corporation you just run to the government and get a bailout. It's happened time and time again. This article by Jon Faulkner is a good dissection of the hypocrisy and greed of conservatives. The article is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Republicans, with their corporate sponsors, constantly rail against big government. Grover Norquist is a conservative activist and a lobbyist who famously said of government, “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Grover is another one of those conservative republicans who offer such gems of wisdom in spite of government’s traditional role of bailing out one American corporation after the next.

The airline industry, the auto makers, defense contractors, railroads, the oil industry, the utilities industry, the telecommunications industry, the savings and loan industry, and now perhaps the biggest bailout of them all - even edging out the S&L catastrophe - the housing industry. Without the generous contributions that American taxpayers make every year, a great many American corporations would be floating belly up, wherever it was that their management made their last, stupid decision.

Public subsidies, tax abatements, low interest loan guarantees, political favors, price supports and free trade agreements. Corporations would have folded up and blown away long ago if not for massive, government infusions of taxpayer cash. Republicans worship the market place and tout its wondrous abilities to solve all financial problems if only government would get out of the way and let the magic work. Of course, when it falls on its ass, the corporate model of perfection comes, cup in hand, to the nasty ol’ gubmint for its salvation.

January 11, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


ANY DEM OVER ANY REPUBLICAN


Republicans at all levels of government represent big business and the status quo. Progress in so many areas--economic, civil rights, the environment, women's rights--have been advanced by Democrats with Republicans obstructing every step of the way. My first choice is John Edwards, but I will vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama if they get the nomination. Jon Carroll has some thoughts at www.sfgate.com:


Who am I kidding? I'm gonna vote for the Democratic nominee for president whoever it is. I am delighted that Mitt Romney will soon be taking a well-earned vacation, and I admit to rooting for Anybody But Mitt for a while, but that was visceral distaste rather than considered political judgment. Indeed, I suspect that a lot of Republicans shared my visceral distaste, and if I were one of Romney's children I'd be saying, "Daddy, where's my patrimony?"

But Clinton or Obama or Edwards - all fine with me. Bill Richardson would have been fine too. There are areas in which we disagree, but the heck with it - this isn't Match.com. Stopping the bleeding on the Supreme Court is numero uno, and they'll all do that. Sign the damn Kyoto Accords and stop the United States from being the spoiled, whiny child of international diplomacy - they'll all do that.

But Clinton or Obama or Edwards - all fine with me. Bill Richardson would have been fine too. There are areas in which we disagree, but the heck with it - this isn't Match.com. Stopping the bleeding on the Supreme Court is numero uno, and they'll all do that. Sign the damn Kyoto Accords and stop the United States from being the spoiled, whiny child of international diplomacy - they'll all do that.

January 10, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE CULT OF GROWTH

If the stock market is on the upswing, everything is great, right? If the GDP is growing, the economy is sound, right? Not quite. We've heard the Bush administration and the pundits tell us about low unemployment and a growing economy for years, but things aren't wonderful for most of us. The true unemployment rate is far higher than the official statistics. Wages and benefits are stagnating or declining for most of us. This article by Barbara Ehrenreich is at www.commondreams.org:

The soothsayers have slaughtered the ox and are examining the gloppy entrails for signs: rising unemployment, a falling dollar, weak consumer spending, the credit crisis, a swooning stock market. Could there be something wrong here? Could we actually be approaching a, God forbid, recession?


To which the only sane response is: Who cares? According to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical–or at least the newspapers’ standard–definition of a recession, which specifies that there must be at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the GDP. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. If hard times have already fallen on a majority of Americans, then “recession” doesn’t seem to be a very useful term any more.


The economists’ odd fixation on growth as a measure of economic well-being puts them in a parallel universe of their own. WorldMoneyWatch ’s website tells us that, for example, that “The GDP growth rate is the most important indicator of economic health. If GDP is growing, so will business, jobs and personal income.” And the latest issue of US News and World Report advises, “The key… for America is to keep its economy growing as fast as possible without triggering inflation.”


But hellooo, we’ve had brisk growth for the last few years, as the President always likes to remind us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the middle class. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been “de-coupled” from mass prosperity.

January 07, 2008


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BEWARE "THE SUITS"


One of the cliches from the silent movie days was the evil banker tying the innocent widow to the railroad tracks. But maybe they knew something about bankers. These days they wear the expensive suits and run countless commercials on TV and send out tons of credit card offers, but they're just as corrupt and despicable as a leg-breaking loan shark. "Respectable" bankers will jack up your interest rates on the slightest pretext, hit you for usurious fees for being one day late with a payment, or ding you with countless fees on a checking account. This article by Susan J. Douglas is linked at www.alternet.org:


The barely regulated banks are getting away with one usurious practice after the next: In addition to the subprime fiasco now threatening the entire economy, there are the extortionate service fees on your bank accounts and the escalating interest fees, late fees and truncated payment cycles on your credit cards. Millions of us now get credit card bills that give us 10 days -- and those aren't 10 business days -- to pay up or get hit with a late fee. No wonder the credit card industry has been one of the most profitable in the country, earning on the order of $30 billion annually. The rates credit card companies charge retailers have gone up 85 percent since 2001, and those are passed onto us.

In 2005, Congress passed the infamous bankruptcy "reform" act after major lobbying by the financial-industrial complex, adding to the enormous pressure many people are feeling from the mortgage-housing-credit crisis. Designed to protect creditors, the law makes it harder and more expensive to declare bankruptcy.

It used to be that people in financial trouble could file under Chapter 7, which typically allowed them to keep their homes while other property was sold off to help cover credit card and medical debts. What pissed off the banks was that, after flooding everyone with offers to acquire even more credit cards, some of this debt would get massively reduced or written off under the old law.

January 06, 2008


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IT'S THE ECONOMY AGAINThe old saying is that people who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. How many times do we have to see Republican economic policies at work and the destruction they cause to finally realize that Republican economics are a disaster? The most obvious example is the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover. But under Nixon we got "stagflation," a combination of high inflation and a stagnant economy. That continued under Ford. When Reagan came into office we had record high interest rates, designed to "squeeze" inflation out of the economy. Never mind all the jobs lost in the process. Then we had record deficits under Reagan and George H. W. Bush and only modest job growth. Under the current Bush we again have horrifying deficits, inflation of necessities like energy and food, and stagnant wages. Unemployment figures are also starting to tick up. Democrats in the presidential race need to emphasize economic issues more. Katrina Vanden Heuvel looks at the message from John Edwards in this article at www.thenation.com:

It was left to Edwards to speak personally and passionately about the desperate need for a new tax and trade policy. His was a more hopeful message Saturday night-with empathy for a struggling middle class, with talk about uniting and galvanizing the American people to take on entrenched interests and end "the stranglehold on our democracy." He modulated his full-throated attacks on corporations--tonight targeting "irresponsible" corporations and applauding those like Costco which do better by their workers. But he remained true to his fighting for change spirit. When challenged by the others about the limits of "fighting" as a way to get things done, Edwards shot back," you cannot nice these people to death; I am not in a fight *with* the American people but *for* the people." If Edwards does exit the field,and it's hard to see how there's room for two "change agents" coming out of NH, the economic facts on the ground -- housing crisis, job losses-- should move Obama and Clinton to adopt key elements, if not the style, of Edwards' populist message and program. They'd be smart to do so. There was one revealing moment which helps explain why fair, simple and sane progressive economic proposals get such a raw deal in our corporate- owned media. It also explains why pundits label Edwards' agenda "angry." When the majority-supported reform of rolling back tax cuts for the rich drew support from the Democrats, ABC moderator & Nightly News anchor Charles Gibson seemed clueless about middle class reality. Wouldn't such a reform, he demanded, hurt a couple made up of two professors at St. Anselm's who make $200,000 a year. $200,000!? The titter in St Anselm's hall spread quickly. Maybe Gibson could use a crash Econ 101 course: "The Strapped American Middle Class."

January 02, 2008


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LOOKING LIKE A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY

The jingoists among us like to wave the flag and chant, "We're number one!" But the United States isn't number one in the categories we'd like to be. We're number one in things like military expenditures, but we bear a disturbing resemblance to third world nations in inequality, poverty, and the size of our prison population. This article by Arthur Donner and Doug Peters is at www.commondreams.org:


What is usually meant by a Third World economy? A half-century ago, the term was associated with the economically underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania. The common characteristics of these Third World countries were high levels of poverty, income inequality, high birth rates and an economic dependence upon the advanced countries. Third World countries were simply not as industrialized or technologically advanced as Western countries.

But what are some of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary Third World countries? They go beyond these nations’ fiscal position or undue concentration on natural resource exports.

The glaring features today include poverty, lack of democratic institutions, controlling oligarchies and the unequal distribution of income and wealth. In other words, the few enjoy a rich lifestyle while the many share subpar incomes and poverty.

Another characteristic of Third World countries is that a major portion of their fiscal expenditures is allocated to the military. In many Third World countries, the military is controlled by an elite or a small collection of the wealthy.
Finally, in many Third World countries one finds that leadership is passed from one generation to the next, often via a close relative.

Guess what country we are talking about now?

January 1, 2008

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DISASTERS EVERYWHERE

The Hippocratic Oath that physicians take advises, "First, do no harm." Politicians should have a similar standard. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will leave the world much worse off than when they assumed power. In all the vital areas that can be influenced by a presidential administration things are worse. The economy is worse, the gap between rich and poor is worse, the state of health care is worse, education is worse, housing is worse, deficits are worse, the environment is worse, and foreign policy is far, far worse. This article takes a look at Bush's "twilight year" and the dismal legacy being left behind. The article by Jim Lobe is at www.commondreams.org:

Bhutto’s assassination, for example, offered yet another example that Bush’s war has been at best incompetently pursued, if not misconceived from the very beginning.

Not only did Bush’s diversion of both money and troops from Afghanistan to Iraq immediately after the defeat of the Taliban permit both Taliban and al Qaeda to regroup and eventually extend their influence in the rugged tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border, but his virtually unconditional backing — including more than 10 billion dollars in mostly military aid — for the regime of General Pervez Musharraf served mainly to strengthen the Islamist parties at the expense of the secular, “moderate” forces to which his administration has given mainly rhetorical support.

When it became clear last summer that Pakistan’s Taliban was making major advances and that Musharraf’s popular base had dried up, the administration sought to forge an agreement between the military commander and the exiled Bhutto, whom it had long ignored.

THE PUNDITS ARE IRRELEVANT

The world view advanced by the Washington elites, particularly the pundit class, doesn't reflect the reality faced by most of us. The elites tell us that “free trade” as exemplified by treaties like NAFTA is just great. The rest of us see jobs being outsourced and our standard of living declining. We're told that Bush's “surge” in Iraq is working, but 2007 actually had the worst level of violence since the country was invaded. We're told that John Edwards is divisive, but John Edwards is speaking to the issues that affect most of us. The kind of world the Washington elites want is a miserable experience for most of us. This article by David Sirota is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Most Washington pundits have reached their positions by defending the system they cover as fundamentally good. Doing that, in their minds, validates their own value and worth - because if they acknowledge that the system is corrupt, it means they are admitting that their work bolstering that system is corrupt, too (which, of course, it is).

And so elite reaction to the populist uprising is swift. As respected pollsters tell us that "if Americans have ever been angrier with the state of the country, we have not witnessed it," Washington pundits tell us candidates representing that anger are doomed. These pundits desperately claim that candidates' support for majority positions will somehow "rip the nation apart," and that such candidates who take up the populist mantle are "wildly irresponsible" for doing so.

Sadly, the caucuses and primaries look like only the opening act of a more full-scale Establishment backlash against America's populist tide. A group of has-been politicians are pushing Wall Street billionaire Mike Bloomberg to run as an independent if these has-been politicians do not approve of the nominees of both parties. We are told that Bloomberg is the one who can restore "unity" and "bipartisanship" in the face of the uprising. That the populism represented in both parties' primaries right now is supported by both Republican and Democratic voters has somehow escaped these supposed crusaders for "bipartisanship."

December 31, 2007
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SORROW AND ANGER

In right-wing land you're an "America hater" if you don't cheerlead everything about the United States and its history. You aren't supposed to talk about the blemishes on American history--things like slavery, Native American genocide, and wars of conquest. You aren't supposed to talk about the war big capital has waged on labor throughout our history. But, try as they may, right-wingers can't get around the crimes committed by the Bush administration They launched an illegal and immoral war against Iraq, a war that has claimed as many as one million civilians. They have bled the treasury dry to pay for this war, while giving tax breaks to their fat cat friends and benefactors. They have looked at short term profits for corporations while ignoring the possible planet-killing effects of global climate change. They have violated the Constitution time and time again and sunk us into the gutter by kidnapping and torturing people in the name of the "global war on terror." The New York Times takes a look in this editorial at www.nytimes.com:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

December 27, 2007

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PULLING FOR EDWARDS

Ralph Nader justified running a presidential campaign that he knew would hurt Democrats because he said Democrats and Republicans were just different versions of the same party. I don't think that's true. But some candidates, such as Clinton and Obama, are certainly more in the pockets of big corporations than I would like. John Edwards has a message that resonates with me. As a working class person, I believe John Edwards is speaking to the traditional Democratic Party values. This article is at www.thenation.com:

To a far greater extent than Obama or Clinton, Edwards has struck at the heart of issues that should matter most in the race to replace not just George W. Bush, but the Bush agenda of corporate giveaways, job-crushing free trade deals, war profiteering in Iraq, and subprime mortgage profiteering in Indiana, Idaho, Illinois and, yes, Iowa.
Edwards summed up his increasingly aggressive and powerful anti-corporate themes with a declaration: "What makes America is at stake: jobs, the middle class, health care, preserving the environment in the world for future generations.
"But all those things are at risk. And why are they at risk? Because of corporate power and corporate greed in Washington, D.C. And we have to take them on. You can't make a deal with them. You can't hope that they're going to go away. You have to actually be willing to fight. And I want every caucus-goer to know I've been fighting these people and winning my entire life. And if we do this together, rise up together, we can actually make absolutely certain, starting here in Iowa, that we make this country better than we left it."
IT'S NOT "BUSH HATING"
I see the phrase "Bush haters" in letters to The Fresno Bee all the time. Right-wingers want to trivialize all the justified anger we feel about this administration and the damage it has done to the country by reducing our anger to a personality contest. I wouldn't like George W. Bush under any foreseeable circumstances, but it is the absolute disregard for ethics, morality, and the Constitution that outrages me the most. It is all the innocent blood that has been shed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the destruction of our credibility around the world and the failure to do anything about the threat of global warming. My anger extends far beyond George W. Bush. It's all the people who enable this administration, who even shout approvingly of its despicable policies. This commentary by David Michael Green is at www.regressiveantidote.net:
Regressives like to call people like me Bush-haters, and so it is important to address that claim before proceeding, because the entire intent of hurling that label at the president’s critics is to undermine their credibility. If you simply hate the man, they imply, you’re not rational, and your critiques can be dismissed. But it isn’t that simple - not by a long shot. First, it should be noted that the regressive right is far wider a phenomenon than just one person. It currently includes an entire executive branch administration, almost (and, just a year ago, more than) half of Congress, a majority of the Supreme Court and probably a majority of the lower federal courts, a biased-to-the-point-of-being-a-joke mainstream media, and tons of lobbyists, think tanks and profitable industries.

December 24, 2007

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HUCKABEE THE FLAT TAXER

Mike Huckabee's fundamentalist Christian beliefs are disturbing and his ideas for a "fair tax," another name for a flat tax, are just as disturbing. The progressive income tax, when it's been allowed to work, has served us well. But Republicans just don't believe rich people should pay taxes. In economic terms Americans are far from equal, but for some reason I'm supposed to pay the same tax rate as billionaires. This article by Tim Watkin is at www.commondreams.org:

There are any number of practical reasons why a flat tax is a bad idea in practice. For one, switching to the Fair Tax - that is, an effective 30% tax rate on every purchase, with rebates paid in advance on purchases up to the poverty level - would mean repealing the 16th amendment of the US constitution , which empowers Congress to "collect taxes on incomes", but not consumption. Huckabee’s as likely to get the constitution amended for tax reform as he is to walk on water. (Some commentators, such as Dean Baker in Comment is Free earlier this week an>.html>, point out that in reality the rate could climb as high as 40%.) For another, government services would depend on people continually increasing their spending at a time in history when we need to learn to live sustainably and save more.

Flat taxes also mean an end to tax deductions, which in the US means an end to deductions on household mortgages and the whole array of deductions businesses claim each year. If you’ve every wondered if the current mortgage crisis could get worse, or asked what it could take to tip America over the edge and into, not just a recession, but a full-on stock market crash, there’s your answer.

Without doubt it would increase inequality in a country that is already as dangerously skewed as it was in the Gilded Age of the 1920s. Averaged across the 1920s, the richest 10% of Americans grabbed 43.6% of total income (excluding capital gains), and the richest 1% a whopping 17.3%. In 2005 the comparable figures were 44.3% and 17.4%. The richest Americans already have a much greater slice of the pie than they have had for several generations and are doing very nicely indeed under a graduated tax rate (complete with Bush’s tax cuts). A flat tax would destroy the system that seeks to redistribute some of the country’s finite wealth amongst its people in the form of schools, roads and other public goods. And before the whining begins, this isn’t a cry of class warfare, it’s economic common sense. Even if you reject arguments around fairness and moral obligations to those less fortunate, by and large economies with more equality are more prosperous and the countries more stable.

THE RIGHT WING INEQUALITY DODGE

Right-wingers go into contortions to downplay the issue of inequality in the United States. They'll claim that the very rich are there because they're more deserving. The poor are there, they claim, because they're lazy or into drugs or alcohol or other dysfunctional behaviors. They never acknowledge that the system is designed to create inequality. When conservative policies are pursued inequality invariably worsens even for people who are not particularly dysfunctional. This article by Paul Krugman examines some of the great dodges right-wingers will use to justify their vile economic and social policies. The article is at www.nytimes.com:

First is a narrow technical issue — the misuse of the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which is used to claim that there hasn’t been much rise in spending inequality. First of all, that’s not true even if you believe the survey; plus, there’s good reason to believe that the Survey has been systematically underreporting the growth in higher-income-group consumption. See CBPP on all this.

Second is the use of very long-run comparisons — what I think of as the "but even Louis the XIV didn’t have electricity!" defense. Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities — modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn’t whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It’s whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.

Third is the downplaying of poverty. Seventy percent of the poor have cars! They must be doing fine! Except that they often can’t afford medical care, sometimes can’t afford enough food, and usually can’t find a way to get their children a decent education.
Finally, there’s the failure to appreciate just how rich today’s rich are. They’re not people who drive cars just like the rest of us, only fancier. In his book Richistan, Robert Frank (the other one) of the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report — yes, the Wall Street Journal — reports what he found when he began looking at how the rich live:

December 23, 2007

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EDWARDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS

We members of the working class have been hammered by Republican administrations and by Democrats who have been complicit in voting for Republican policies. We've heard about the advantages of "free trade," but agreements like NAFTA and GATT have exported good jobs from this country and left disaster in their wake. We've seen politicians make tax cut after tax cut for the very rich and for corporations, but basic infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Millions of us don't have health insurance. Millions of Americans live in desperate poverty. FDR was called a "traitor to his class" and John Edwards has been attacked by right-wingers for being rich, but talking about helping the poor, the working class, and the middle class. I support John Edwards for president. This article is by Stephen Crockett from www.democratictalkradio.com:

The wages of Americans have been suppressed. The ability to unionize in order to achieve higher standards of living has been attacked by federal legislation, right wing court rulings and harassment by oppressive federal government regulation by the Bush Administration. Edwards is the most labor-friendly Presidential candidate of the top-tier candidates. With Edwards, we have a candidate who both walks the walk and talks the talk. Edwards is strongly opposed to outsourcing American jobs and is committed to ending unfair international trade deals or tax policies that encourage corporations to move jobs out of the nation.


Poverty in America has largely been ignored by our political leadership since the 1980’s. We waste trillions of dollars fighting unnecessary wars but seem unwilling to seriously commit to eliminating institutionalize poverty. Edwards is the only candidate really talking about poverty in America. Poverty is a serious issue in many rural American communities and inner cities. Most candidates ignore the poor because they do not write big campaign donation checks. Edwards can give the poor hope and get them voting.

We remain the only nation out of the 75 most economically advanced nations not to have government guaranteed universal health insurance. We cripple our corporations in international competition by forcing them to provide for healthcare. As a nation we spend 17% of our economy on healthcare while our competitors spend 8%. Our competitors cover all citizens while we have 47 million uninsured citizens and even more underinsured. If we had not abandoned our FDR political traditions, this situation would have been corrected long ago. Edwards is committed to universal healthcare.

AMERICAN DREAM IS DISAPPEARING

We get told in the United States that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be a success. Now if you work hard and play by the rules you lose ground. The productivity of workers in the United States is the highest in the world. But the gains from our productivity are going to fat cats and not being shared with us. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.truthout.org:

Record bonuses on Wall Street at a time when ordinary working Americans are filled with anxiety about their economic future are signs that the trickle-down phenomenon that was supposed to have benefited everyone never happened.
The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

A study released last month by the Pew Charitable Trusts noted that "for most Americans, seeing that one's children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American dream." But for the past 40 years, men in their 30s, prime family-raising age, have found it difficult to outdistance their dads economically.

As the Pew study put it: "Earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades." Family incomes have improved during that time largely because of the wholesale entrance of women into the work force.

For the very wealthy, of course, it's been a different story. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005.

What seems to be happening now is that working Americans, and that includes the middle class, have exhausted much of their capacity to tread water. Wives and mothers are already working. Mortgages have been refinanced and tremendous amounts of home equity drained. And families have taken on debt loads - for cars, for college tuition, for medical treatment - that would buckle the knees of the strongest pack animals.

December 22, 2007

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THE CLASS WARFARE ADMINISTRATION

The eyes of right-wingers bulge out and their faces turn puffy in fury if you talk about making the very rich pay their fair share of taxes. Class warfare! they howl. But they have absolutely no problem with top down class warfare the way we've seen in the Bush administration. Whether it's the failure to pass real minimum wage reform, or gutting environmental regulations, or eviscerating consumer safety laws, Bush has done everything he can to enrich the already rich and shaft the rest of us. This article by Peter Dreier is at www.commondreams.org:

Virtually every week since he took office, the Bush administration has made or proposed changes in our laws designed to help the rich and powerful while harming the most vulnerable people in society and putting the middle class at greater economic risk. The list of horrors can be so numbing that one can lose sight of the cumulative impact of these actions. Taken together, they add up to the most direct assault on working people, the environment and the poor that the country has seen since the presidency of William McKinley over a century ago.

Bush has been a persistent practitioner of top-down class warfare , but the media rarely characterize his actions that way. In contrast, when progressive activists, unions, environmental groups, community organizations and politicians support legislation and rules to redress the balance of power and wealth, they are inevitably described as engaging in class warfare . Top-down class warfare seems to be OK, but bottom-up class warfare is apparently a no-no.

The class warfare rap is now being used against John Edwards, when he talks about challenging the power of the insurance and drug corporations. In a recent speech, Edwards said that his campaign was about challenging "the powerful, the well-connected and the very wealthy." But wary of being criticized for fueling class resentments, even Edwards felt it necessary to say "This is not class warfare. This is the truth."

LAND OF THE POOR

While we read about huge bonuses going to Wall Street moguls we learn that millions of Americans are having a hard time getting even necessities like food and shelter. Many of those Americans are children. Let's hear about "family values" and the other drivel we get from right-wingers. We're a country that spends and wastes billions of dollars on military expenditures. We're a country that cuts taxes for the already obscenely wealthy, but we can't even provide adequate food and shelter for our citizens. This article is at www.cbpp.org/12-20-07pov.htm:

During the holidays, many Americans make a special effort to help the less fortunate. Sadly, there is no shortage of families in need.[i] According to the latest government figures:

36.5 million Americans — roughly one in eight — live in poverty.[ii] Despite relatively strong economic growth since 2001, poverty has remained stubbornly high, and today’s poverty rate is higher than it was during the last recession. That the poverty rate is still above its recession level is especially distressing given that poverty usually declines during recoveries and rises during recessions. If the economy goes into a slowdown or recession in 2008, poverty likely will only increase further.

15.4 million Americans live in extreme poverty. In other words, their family’s cash income is less than half of the poverty line, or less than about $10,000 a year for a family of four.

December 17, 2007

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT PREVAILED IN SPITE OF RELIGION

One of the major right wing canards is that the United States is a "Christian" nation and founded on Judeo-Christian beliefs. Right-wingers claim that the Founding Fathers were Christian and that there is nothing in the Constitution establishing a wall of separation between church and state. In fact, the Founders were Deists, who were concerned about the intersection of religion and politics. This article by James Carroll is at www.commondreams.org:

Romney’s "Faith in America" speech, riddled with mistaken assertions about religion, was itself a warning. But other presidential candidates, debate moderators, pundits, and religious leaders all share a dangerous confusion about questions of faith and citizenship. Here are only a few: Is America’s goodness grounded in God? When Romney and others assert that American virtues, generally summed up in the idea of "freedom," are based on faith, a cruel fact of history is being ignored. The politics of human rights, like the idea of individual freedom, were born not in religion but in the Enlightenment struggle against it.

When Thomas Jefferson located "inalienable rights" in an endowment from the Creator, he was decidedly speaking from outside the mainstream of any denominational faith. Jefferson’s point was not to affirm God, but to deny King George.

It is not an accident that "God" does not appear in the Constitution. Following the American lead, religions, too, learned from the nonreligious improvements of modernity, but it is dishonest to claim after the fact that religions somehow sponsored them.

Were "the Founders" religious? It is a convention of political speechmaking to ascribe faith to the Founders, but what kind of faith, and what Founders? The Pilgrims, for whom "freedom" and "rights" meant nothing, wanted a theocracy. One hundred fifty years later, the Deist revolutionaries assumed a distant God whose interest in creation, much less the young nation, was minimal.

By Lincoln’s time, traumas of war drove piety, and it was only then that present notions of public devotedness were born. (It was Lincoln who established the motto "In God We Trust.") In truth, the power of faith in American politics has waxed and waned. There is no consistent tradition to be upheld or to be betrayed. Is "secularism" dehumanizing? When Mitt Romney praised vital American religion in contrast to Europe where churches are "so grand, so inspired, so empty," one could wonder what the collapse of institutional faith in Europe actually means. Romney condemned the "religion of secularism."

December 16, 2007

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"CHRISTIAN" CONTROL FREAKS

After the miserable experience of George W. Bush, you hope that people will be properly skeptical of anyone claiming to be a Christian and using that as a basis for their presidential campaign. So it is with GOP candidate Mike Huckabee. These so-called "Christians" are really control freaks. They want to dictate what we watch, what we read, that we celebrate their version of Christmas, that their morality can intrude into our personal lives, and that religion and government can mix. This article by Nick Paccione is at www.smirking.com:
It's clear that Christian religious fanatics want their way in regards to religion and public life. They are determined to impose their views on all Americans. They constantly cry that they are the victims of discrimination when in fact they are the relentless discriminators.

Fundamentalist Christians including Huckabee want American tax dollars used to fund private religious schools. Is there any similar request coming from Jews, Muslims, atheists, wickens, gays, lesbians, liberals or soothsayers?
They want laws passed to keep Gays from marrying. Are Gays trying to pass any laws that infringe on a Christian's personal life or rights?

They want abortion made illegal and don't believe that it's a private matter to be discussed by a pregnant woman and her doctor.

They want to be a part of people's life and death decisions in matters like the Terri Schiavo case.

December 11, 2007

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THE RULING CLASS ISN'T BETTER

The French Enlightenment philosopher Diderot once observed that people will not be truly free until the last king is strangled by the entrails of the last priest. Through the ages the human race has been held prisoner to superstition and to an unwarranted awe of the rich and powerful. To maintain their hold, the ruling class have propagated a variety of myths. They're powerful because God wants them to "lead" and other blather. Working people are "supposed to know our place" and be grateful for whatever crumbs come down from the ruling class. Enough of that nonsense. This article by Bob Higgins is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The forces which have so cynically manipulated public opinion to bring about the death of democracy have always been with us and have, at various times, risen and ebbed as evil tides, of "red scares," "commie menaces," of "outside agitators," and the currently in vogue "Islamofascism," <> a term popularized by some Goebbelian marketing wonk in the bowels of Dick Cheney's office and pressed forward by money driven waves of irrational fear, and the malignant energy of powerful and pathologically dishonest men.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, caused in large measure by the abdication of reason by rank and file Democrats, the racist and anti-democratic march to plutocracy, halted and long delayed since the thirties by the common blessings of FDR's "New Deal," was born again, hidden behind thinly disguised code words like "silent majority," "hard hats," or "family values."

The incubation of this poisonous philosophical monstrosity did not begin to reach it's full virulence until large measures of neo-conservative and rabid theocratic ingredients stirred into the mix at the millennium, at which point those who most despised the Constitution and the rule of law were then able, due to a perfect storm of world events, a combination of public dread and apathy, congressional and judicial meekness, and the complete corporate takeover of the fourth estate, to seize control of the very government they long held in such contempt and begin it's thorough looting, dismantlement and replacement with corporate rule.

Now we have a Department of Agriculture run by agribusiness, the Mine Safety and Health Administration run by corporate mining interests, a Department of Energy thoroughly in the control of multinational oil and gas and coal conglomerates, a health care system run by the insurance and drug industries and on and disgustingly on through every federal department and agency.

December 10, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE RIGHT'S PROPAGANDA ON HUNGER

According to right-wing think tanks, there is no poverty in the United States. If you have an old car that's falling apart, a VCR, an old TV, whatever, you can't possibly be poor. They're expanding their argument into the issue of hunger. People don't go hungry, they say; the poor eat too much. If you believe people like the Heritage Foundation, slaves had it good. They had food and a roof and a place to labor every day. This article by James Ridgeway is at www.motherjones.com:

There's another side of the story, of course, that addresses realities Heritage and its followers choose to ignore. Adam Drewnowski, professor of epidemiology and director of the University of Washington's Center for Obesity Research, believes diet is determined by economic and social factors far more than by personal choice. "Healthier diets are more expensive," he says flatly. It's easy to point to specific exceptions like doughnuts vs. beans or Coke vs. milk (well, not always; my local Safeway charges 40 cents more for a half-gallon of milk than for a two-liter bottle of Coke). But research generally has shown that "energy-dense foods," which often are high in refined grains and added sugar and fat, "provide dietary energy at a far lower cost than do lean meats, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit," as Drewnowski wrote in a 2004 article for Nutrition Today. Processed foods also dominate store shelves in poor neighborhoods, are quick to prepare, and simply taste better to some people than some nutritious foods available on the cheap—think cabbage, condensed milk, and canned fish.

Drewnowski calls Rector's arguments "rubbish, written from a position of class privilege—let them eat broccoli, indeed." He cites the suggestion that the poor should purchase cheap, nutritious foods rather than processed stuff. "When you suggest that people buy rice, pasta, and beans," he says, "you presuppose that they have resources for capital investment for future meals"—since these healthy staples come in large bags—"a kitchen, pots, pans, utensils, gas, electricity, a refrigerator, a home with rent paid, the time to cook. Those healthy rice and beans can take hours; another class bias is that poor people's time is worthless. So this is all about resources that middle-class people take so much for granted that they do not give them another thought. Not everybody has them."

On the other hand, he says, "buying a doughnut for dinner does not involve any of those middle-class resources. You pay 55 cents for this meal only and there you are. Yes, rice would be cheaper if only people had the time and were not working two jobs on minimum wage."

December 06, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

MONEY FOR NOTHING

In their never-ending quest to give everything to the rich, right-wingers even reshape the language. The inheritance tax suddenly became the "death tax." You're taxing the money twice! they wail. It was taxed once when Rich Person #1 made it and then taxed again when it was passed on to the Heirs. It's a stupid argument. We're all paying taxes on money that has already been taxed. When you get your undoubtedly modest paycheck you're paying taxes. Your employer has paid taxes on the income that trickled down to you in your paycheck. What right-wingers want is a rich aristocracy that doesn't pay taxes like you and I do. This article by R. J. Eskow talks about Whoopi Goldberg buying into the "death tax" nonsense. The article is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Why, you may ask, do wealthy children get a tax break that others don't? Because our country's lawmakers have traditionally favored the idle rich over working people. Whoopi, I think you understand that. And while everybody understands the desire to leave our wealth to the children we love, hardworking Americans aren't really happy about the 'tax-free' part.

This "death tax" phrase was designed and marketed by conservatives to confuse people into supporting the idea that rich kids shouldn't pay any tax at all on their unearned multi-million dollar income. And it won't go away. I saw a headline the other day that read "Dexter: Let's drop death tax." I thought it was referring to the serial killer on TV named Dexter. If he paid taxes for every victim he murders, that would be a "death tax."

(Actually, "Dexter" is a Canadian politician who's using the phrase for its intended purpose, which is to confuse voters.)

"If I have to give something to my kid I (when) already paid the tax," says, Whoopi, "why do I have to pay it again because I died?" Er, Whoopi ... you don't. They do. Just the same way your gardener and maids have to pay taxes on the money you give them, even though you paid taxes when you earned it. (Except for the fact that they don't get the first two million tax-free.)

THE BUSH ECONOMY IN ACTION

Worker confidence in November hit a record low. We're seeing exploding costs in health care, food, and energy, but our wages remain flat. Jobs are being shipped to other countries, but no one tells us what is supposed to replace those jobs. George W. Bush and right-wingers are creating an economic perfect storm. This article from Reuters is at news.yahoo.com:

Worker confidence stumbled to a record low in November, reflecting growing pessimism over jobs and personal finances stemming from housing and credit troubles, a survey released on Wednesday shows.

The Hudson Employment Index dropped to 91.9 points, the lowest ever for this gauge. The November reading was lower than the 100.8 in October and 105.3 a year ago.

"Simply put, U.S. workers are worried that job growth is going to slow significantly in the coming months," Robert Morgan, co-president of recruitment and talent management at job placement firm Hudson Highland Group (HHGP.O), said in a statement.

December 04, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH'S LETHAL LIES

Politicians lie. Presidents and their administrations lie. But the magnitude of George W. Bush's lies surpasses ordinary lies. He deliberately and with aforethought committed mass murder in Iraq. He wants to do the same thing in Iran. The administration has blustered about a nuclear threat in Iran. A new National Intelligence Estimate shows that, once again, Bush and his henchmen couldn't care less about the truth, about decency, or about preserving the lives of innocent people. This commentary by Tony Hendra is at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/:

Here are the salient points from the NIE:

We judge with high confidence that the halt (in trying to develop nuclear weapons, not producing them) has lasted at least several years. (Four to be exact, a lifetime in war and politics).

We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon. (Or has ever had one).

We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015. (Which Bush - and for that matter Gates - flatly lied about this morning implying that the NIE said they could re-up anytime).

Let's be quite clear how far the men in the White House were willing to go. In the lethal linguistic fog these warmongers and the rightwing quislings who enable them, have plunged us, reasonable people seem to have lost sight of what we're talking about. Nuclear weapons aren't a bigger better version of Daisy Cutters. Nuclear weapons aren't just more bang for the buck. Nuclear weapons are the most cowardly killing devices ever devised by our benighted species. Nuclear weapons are instant genocide. Nuclear weapons are designed to murder as many unarmed noncombatants as possible, by the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Using nuclear weapons - even throwing around the threat to use them - was is and always should be unthinkable. Yet the monsters, yes monsters in the White House were willing to lie through their teeth - again - to get the chance to use them. On innocent people who posed no threat to us.

December 02, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

GOP FIELD IGNORES ECONOMIC REALITY

When you listen to the GOP presidential candidates you hear the same old formula that has created massive deficits and put the U. S. economy into a perilous condition. It's mostly about tax cuts for the rich, slashing domestic spending, a huge military, an unending presence in Iraq, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure, ignoring our health care crisis, ignoring global climate change, ignoring the disintegration of the middle class, and pretending that everything is fine and dandy. This article by Robert Borosage is at www.tompaine.com:

The Republican CNN/YouTube debate lasted over two hours Wednesday night. But once more, we learned nothing about what the candidates would do about the economic straits we are in.

Not a word about the housing crisis—the rising tide of foreclosures, plummeting housing prices and sales—and the credit crunch that now roils banks across the globe.

Not a word about the recession that Wall Street is now betting on.
Not a word about the stagnant wages and rising costs of food and gas and college that had two-thirds of Americans thinking we were in a recession or near it when the Bush economy was at its best.
We learned nothing about what Republican candidates would do about our broken health care system. Nothing about what they’d do about gas prices, energy dependence, global warming or trade deficits that have made our economy dependent on the kindness of strangers—primarily Chinese and Japanese central bankers and Arab princes.

We learned only that these candidates can repeat the conservative gospel. All (except Duncan Hunter in an "emergency") vow not to raise any single tax while in office, not even the shameless tax break that has billionaire private equity barracudas taxed at half the rate of their secretaries.

With the economy slowing, all would slash domestic spending. Mitt Romney calls for capping and cutting by 1 percent a year, and promises to "go at something like our entitlements." Fred Thompson mumbles about his plan to "save Social Security," which does so by slashing benefits nearly in half over 60 years. Rudy Giuliani calls for "5 to 10 percent" across-the-board cuts, and cutting the federal workforce—already near record lows—by 25 percent through retirements. If the one guy named Bob who is tasked with testing toys for the Consumer Product Safety Commission retires, Giuliani will just leave it up to the Chinese to keep the lead out. John McCain fulminates about vetoing any pork-barrel spending, a Titan boasting of squashing a gnat. Ron Paul at least knows where the money is, pledging to bring the boys home and save billions out of the military budget.

No one—not one—gave any indication that cutting spending—and jobs—as the economy slows might not be such a good idea. These guys have been in campaign bubbles for so long they don’t have a clue about what is happening around them.

December 01, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

A MEAN-SPIRITED BUNCH

When he ran for president George W. Bush advertised himself as a "compassionate conservative." That alone should have set off alarm bells because "compassion" and "conservative" are contradictory. Bush has run one of the most heartless and corrupt administrations in our history and the current crop of GOP candidates would like to continue the tradition. This editorial is from The Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com:

Even without a question from a talking snowman, Wednesday's CNN/YouTube Republican debate made for lively viewing. It also left an unsettling aftertaste. Eight years ago, George W. Bush began his first presidential campaign by proudly identifying himself as a "compassionate conservative." But on Wednesday, many of the Republicans who aspire to succeed Bush seemed to be competing for the title of "meanest candidate."

In pursuit of that goal, the candidates' hearts were especially hardened toward illegal immigrants, including children. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) boasted that "I built that border fence in San Diego" and promised that, as president, he would fence off the entire border in six months. Mitt Romney professed dismay at the fact that Mike Huckabee, his fellow former GOP governor, had "fought for giving scholarships to illegal aliens." Rudy Giuliani, on the defensive over charges that New York City was a "sanctuary city" during his administration as mayor, conceded he allowed undocumented children to attend public schools -- but insisted he wasn't interested in giving them an education as much as trying to keep them off the streets "at a time in which New York City was going through a massive crime wave."