Here they come, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: McConnell, Vitter, DeMint and Boehner.
The voters say: start with a plague on all your houses. Yet they visit the plague itself, the obstructive, propagandistic, elitist Republican Party on all of us.
War, famine and death…well, we already have the first (a double-header) and part of the second–food bank visits are up 30% and the ultimate goal of the Republicans seems to be the final one, death–of the Middle Class.
The Tea Party Republicans, abetted by people like those appointed to…of all things…President Obama’s Commission on the National Debt, have a plan to literally destroy a large part of the government. They use the fancy term “austerity” to mean that they will never levy appropriate taxes on the rich and on huge corporations. They are left to farm out our jobs to China and India. But the Commission wants to cut your Social Security.
The Tea Party Republicans are leading the way. In recent interviews, they have said that they will cut Social Security in half, privatize Medicare and Medicaid (and thereby greatly increase the personal costs to individual seniors.) They want to shut down the Department of Education, the Department of Energy (goodbye alternative energy, hello Arab terrorism and $4 a gallon gasoline) and cut taxes for the rich by as much as 50%! And that last one is from what is supposed to be the sensible part of their Party, the barnyard economist, Representative Paul Ryan.
In the guise of cutting the annual budget of the United States, which at present and beginning with the Bush Administration now has less income than at any time since 1950, they have fooled even as brilliant a man as the British economic historian Niall Ferguson. Apparently he is persuaded that his own place in history will be secured by adopting a high-school economics plan by unschooled pop-economist Paul Ryan. Ferguson will, indeed, have a place in history if he continues to promote that piece of ridiculous, incomprehensible, unbalanced arithmetic.
The candidates for Congress and Senate proposed by the Tea Party Republicans are as radical and regressive as we suspected that they would be when we first saw their signs. They almost universally reject gay rights on religious grounds, ignoring the medical facts that have become incontrovertible. They want to bypass the efforts to control global warming, rejecting all that universal scientific agreement in favor of oil-company-sponsored scientists. They want to eliminate social services in favor of charity and personal benevolence.
In short, they really haven’t thought any of this through. They think that they can substitute kind thoughts for rational behavior. The national secretary of the Tea Party Organization, a grim, Salem-witch-trials looking woman could not give one department or piece of legislation that she could eliminate, yet she wants to cut government spending dramatically. Apparently the need has been “revealed” to her by a higher power.
The Republicans and the Tea Partiers, newly Republican with their new lobbyist money jingling in their pockets, will try to repeal health care reform. This shows just how Neoconservative they are. They are, for the most part, people who would be hit hard with private insurance rate increases, their children denied care, the infirm with dropped coverages…all the things that health care reform was designed and passed to prevent. Someone told them it was expensive. Probably the same health care lobbyists who gave them campaign funds.
But these bumpkins, never ones to read anything, do not know the facts about the health care legislation, do not understand how it will bring down costs by $1 trillion over the next ten years, do not understand how the Senate works and how it can be improved now and made more cost effective without the intense battles of having it pass initially. They do not really believe in the cost efficiency of free markets, where insurance pools across several states will reduce premiums and cost CEOs those huge salaries.
At United Health Care, where the CEO has made literally hundreds of millions of dollars, there are a whole pile of executives who make upwards of $500,000. Each regional CEO of Blue Cross/Blue Shield makes at least a million a year and the recently fired CEO of the Illinois Blue Cross walked away with $12 million. Take that times fifty states and you can see where some money at least could be saved.
Not only do the Tea Party members dislike health care reform which will finally bring some relief to the workers of small businesses so that small businesses can attract better quality employees, but they love the crooks that swindle health care recipients.
Ric Scott whose company was fined $1.7 billion dollars by the government for health care billing fraud took the fifth amendment fifty times so that he would not incriminate himself. He escaped without going to prison and also escaped with $100 million dollars for being a health care cheat.
Apparently a further benefit is that you can get the Tea Party Republican nomination to be governor of Florida, and probably cheat Florida out of its Medicare funds. Why would anyone think that? Because the scum bag is currently under investigation for cheating the government through his current chain of health care clinics! But the stupid Tea Party members love him.
This only goes to prove that this whole Tea Party movement is a harbinger of the near-death of our society. When we have billionaires funding huge media networks of radio commentators spreading lies every single day and churning up unrest on issues like abortion, homosexuality, race, and immigration….all of which should be bi-partisan, rational issues but are being used to distract…then we are headed for disaster.
Why would billionaires do this? From what do they want to distract the American people? From the fact that since Bush and Cheney came to office, the government has been looted by $8 trillion dollars and then deliberately bankrupted by the Republicans on Wall Street. Now we have very little money in the bank and a lot of debt. The very rich, those making over a million dollars a year got income increases of over $120,000 per million per year, every year for the last 10 years. In addition, they saw to it that the average Americans lost at least 20% of the equity in their homes, and a substantial portion of their retirement income. The average American income went down by $2,000 during the same period that the rich were increasing their incomes.
Some have already spent down a very large percentage of their retirement savings and 401K value. Why? Because, despite laws against firing older workers, the Bush Administration collapsed those laws, put judges into place who will rule against those law suits, and fired regulators, so that fewer cases can be brought.
What do they want to distract from? From 2.5 million jobs sent to India and China and elsewhere by top U.S. corporations, whose stock is 65% owned by those top 1% who received the Bush tax cuts. You are being screwed by people who are now pushing Tea Party members who foolishly now campaign on cutting the miserable minimum wage and revoking unemployment benefits. The rich have these kooks actually believing these things…and they reinforce their points with tens of millions of dollars in campaign funds, like the $14 million in outside, anonymous, funds to Sharron Angle, who wants to cut government for others while she lives on her husband’s government pension.
In other words, Bush worked with big corporations to kill the bills to prevent firing older workers. Consequently, when this round of layoffs came, workers who could not get other jobs, workers who could not get health care on their own, and workers who could not survive on unemployment benefits alone because they could not get out of their mortgages, spent their savings.
This wasn’t done by accident. Do you really think that Saddam Hussein was going to attack the strongest military power in the world, with a vice president who had been Secretary of Defense in the previous devastating war and whose President hated his guts? Of course not.
Cheney wanted contracts for Halliburton. He was still an employee of Halliburton after he became Vice President, an unprecedented act in the history of the country. He never sold his stock. The war allowed him to give Halliburton $12. 5 billion in contracts and made his stock worth many times what it was when he entered the White House.
Cheney is clearly an international war criminal who caused the deaths of 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and he should be indicted as a war criminal, turned over to The Hague and, if convicted, sentenced to death.
The Republicans may take the House of Representatives and they may think, some of them, that they have won a great victory. But others know the reality. The people who pay off the existing Republicans in the House and the Senate to block any legislation for the Middle Class, the Koch Family and Murdoch and others…they will win. The health industry that spends $3.5 billion in lobbying to keep the Tea Party members fooled into thinking that health care reform is a bad idea and will cost millions….they will win.
The polluters, like the oil companies and others who have given millions to Michelle Bachmann after she said we should apologize to BP for somehow, incredibly, causing them to spill oil in the Gulf of Mexico. They will win.
Who will lose? Are you an average American citizen? Sorry…in that case…you…lose.
