We have a new Congress coming to office today. John Boehner will weep for the horrific conditions in which our fellow billionaire citizens find themselves. The top 1% of Americans can only muster up 90% of the entire wealth of the country. We recently helped them out of this very humbling position by offering them more tax reductions to help break up the monotony and daily drudgery of counting their money.
With the $700 billion in new tax cuts in 2010 and 2011, the Super-rich and corporate CEOs may now be able to relax somewhat, at least for a couple of years while they plan ahead for the potentially lean years. Oh, yes, these will come after 2013. By then, their efforts and those of their employees, the Republicans in the Senate and the new Republican majority in the House will have completely eliminated the American workforce.
At that point, with only other rich CEOs, corporate attorneys, stockbrokers and physicians and surgeons still the only consumers with funds not allocated to survival, they will be facing a situation in which there will be no potential customers left for their imported products from China.
How, says “Darryl” Issa (no, he does not have two other brothers named “Darryl,” but he does have one brother who has been reported to be a convicted car thief) will our billionaire friends and neighbors be able to afford 9 homes, 6 BMWs, 3 yachts, and 1000 ft of ocean frontage? It is a problem. Issa has called President Obama the “most corrupt President in our history.” But Issa, worth over 100 million dollars, voted for tax cuts for himself and other multi-millionaires and billionaires while voting against unemployment insurance for those 15 million whom his Wall Street Republican friends put out of work, 8 million of them in 2008 alone.
Not to mention the millions whose pensions were ruined and those who lost their health insurance. We now have a total of 50 million people….FIFTY MILLION PEOPLE…without health insurance. And if only one tenth of one percent have assets and get some major illness, like cancer, it means that another half-million people will go bankrupt for lack of a national health care program. Issa and his Neocons, totalitarian political thugs and hacks, want to repeal health care reform. Haven’t we learned our lesson? Why is a man like Issa even in Congress More importantly, how could rational Americans be willing to vote for Neocons like this who want to remove the social safety net for American families?
The Republicans are looking for a new political leader, a new head of the Neocon Campaign Committee. Among the stooges who are being considered is one who proudly says, as some kind of qualification, that he has five guns. Not to be outdone, another, a woman, jumps out in front…in the NRA sweepstakes by saying that for Christmas they got a big box to put all their 16 guns in…Glocks and God knows what else.
And who was asking the qualifying questions to these people? Grover Norquist, the wannabe Heinrich Himmler of the Right. Shut down the government and drown it in a bathtub, or maybe give it a shower in Zyklon-B. Maybe that is what our Himmler look-alike Norquist has in mind. He certainly supported killing off American soldiers in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He supported letting New Orleanians drown in the aftermath of Katrina. He supports tax cuts for the Super-rich while cutting off unemployment to those who are unlucky enough to be one of the four job seekers who do not get the job that is only available to one of five.
That’s right. Today, there are five applicants for every job available–just the way the Neocons like it. Those are the statistics of the Bush-Cheney-Norquist-Wall Street Great Recession. Hundreds of people showing up to seek 5 job openings. And these people, Issa and Norquist and Cheney…who for some reason still live…and have jobs through their political associations…want these “lazy, shiftless” unemployed to be tossed off the unemployment and welfare rolls so that they will go out and get a job. What job?
“Darryl” Issa (sorry but it is a funny name. Who can forget the brothers, Darryl, Darryl and Darryl?) says President Obama is “corrupt” because after he was elected, and while we were losing literally 700,000 jobs per month (which didn’t seem to upset “Darryl” at the time) the President enacted an $787 billion stimulus, fully one-third of which was relatively ineffective.
That ineffective portion of the stimulus was the one-third in tax cuts for the rich demanded by the Neocons in order to get them to vote to help the American people. It is always the same…more tax cuts for the rich and super-rich…more hostage taking…rather than jobs for those who desperately need them. And always less and less government revenue while the rich get more and more. And we wonder why we have deficits.
The rest of the stimulus…still going on…created an identified (see www.recovery.gov) 2 million jobs. You don’t need to listen to Issa’s lies about corruption. It is all…all of it…on the web site if you simply take the time to go there. Issa is counting on the fact that the average citizen will not, and therefore he can continue to spread his lies. You can go to the site right now and see that 678,471 jobs were created between July and September of this year. It’s all right there, where they were created and what for.
It has to be said and repeated and repeated that the mess we are in was created by a recession that began in December of 2007, when the financial house of cards created by Goldman, Sachs and other major investment banks began to collapse when investors began to see the speculation in the housing market begin to level off. Just like an airplane losing power, the markets began to nosedive and as they did, the so-called credit default swaps that were meant to provide some kind of cover for investors but no real security also began to collapse.
AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, through its London office, was involved in speculation and AIG, which protected airlines and shiplines and huge real estate conglomerates and manufacturers…a huge segment of the industrial fabric…was on the verge of collapse. That, in and of itself, would have caused a massive economic calamity. Not a crisis. The crisis was already there. A calamity. One out of five people out of work. A ten to twenty year cycle of perhaps thirty million people out of work. A nation in debt by as much as double what it is now and many states literally going bankrupt.
During this crisis in the last year of Bush’s administration, did he even address it? No. Did he ask Chris Cox, head of SEC, to address it? Cox simply laid off more regulators and more securities attorneys to make it even more difficult to find out what was going on. They wanted the economic collapse. They wanted it or they would have done something to prevent it before it happened. They counted on the Congress bailing them out because the alternative that they had created would have been such a disaster that the country would literally have been thrown into chaos. People would have died on the sidewalks of dirty, dusty streets, like the inhabitants of some barren, bleak third-world country.
With no help from Republicans at all…none…they didn’t care…President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid saved this country. And with unemployment that went from 8 million to 15 million from December of 2007 to March of 2009 before a stimulus was introduced, the task was daunting just to stop unemployment. The month President Obama took over, 700,000 jobs were lost in that month alone!
Even without the stimulus, the country lost an additional $300 billion over the roughly $400 billion it was losing every year under Bush. Then the stimulus of almost $800 billion to stop the unemployment, which it did after six months or so, thew the budget losses up into the $1.5 trillion range.But none of it was caused by President Obama. Had he not initiated a stimulus, the country’s unemployment statistics would be at the least in the 15% range, or in other words, 26, 000,000 people or more out of work.
So, “Darryl” can investigate anything he wants. He will have no more success in it than if it were being done by the fictional “Darryl” brothers. Issa is a sham, a fool and a posturing little twerp. He wants to distract us from his real goals. And here is what they are.
“Darryl” wrote a “how can I help you” letter to over 150 large corporations, trade groups and Neocon think tanks. He advised all of them that the new House of Representatives was going to work with them…and asked how he could work better to reduce the restrictions on them. One of those companies was BP Oil. He might as well have asked, “How can I help you reduce the safety and security precautions that you already neglected, leading to the dumping of hundreds of millions of gallons of black, sticky oil into the Gulf of Mexico?” How can I reduce the requirements we put on your meat and produce to keep it safe,” he might have asked food companies.
How can I earn the money the hundreds of millions of dollars that you, corporate America, have given to the Neocon Party to elect the most radical the most pro-business Congress in the history of the country? How can I thank you, besides, of course, insuring that no tax loopholes for locating in the Bahamas or Cayman Islands were removed merely so that heroic and patriotic New York City firemen and police could afford the medical attention they need to survive, or survive for a few more years? We don’t care about them, says “Darryl” (though it’s not funny this time.) We care about you, our corporate sponsors in the Caymans and in Dubai…calling yourself Americans while paying no taxes and taking most of your jobs abroad.
No it is not President Obama who is corrupt, not the smallest, least amount. It is the obstructionist Neocon Senate and the newly elected House of Representatives who pander to the international corporations and the Super-rich. We need jobs. We don’t need investigations. We need health care. We don’t need reduced regulations on food processing or oil drilling. We need responsible government, not hacks like “Darryl” who can only pander to their constituents, the big oil corporations, food corporations, Chamber of Commerce, billionaires and their trade associations.
If this is the beginning of the new era of Republican control of the House of Representatives and continuing Republican obstruction in the Senate, we may be facing the great crisis in government that people such as Issa and Grover Norquist, and the Neocon financial backers, the Koch Family, have been planning. They want the country to go down, to drown, to expire…so that they will be left, like the hyenas they are, to pick over the bones of a once-great society.