Here’s an imaginative new platform for a Republican Candidate. Tim Pawlenty’s blistering slogan is: “A Better Deal.” Huh? That’s it?
For God’s sake, governor, get your own motto; don’t fall back on Liberal mottoes for policies that actually worked. The New Deal and the Fair Deal and the New Frontier…Democratic slogans for when the United States was powerful, sane, equitable, visionary, hard working and secure. None of that applies to anything done by Neoconservatives over the last quarter century.
Pawlenty’s amusing “A Better Deal” is just a bigger, better scam for Neocons. We’ll show you why, piece by piece.
Let’s take three of his starting points that make up the criticism of the President. Gas prices are $4 dollars. The Democrats have been trying to get alternative energy legislation for at least 3 years but before that, even when they had no chance because Republicans controlled everything, they tried and the Neocons squashed it.
That is why gas is $4 a gallon. The oil barons were President Bush and Vice President Cheney and oil went to $4 during their tenure in the White House. They did nothing to hold down prices. The oil companies have rights to 98 million acres of U.S. land and have for years but they don’t drill. They make more money by importing oil.
Health care is too expensive. Wow, that is news. Who knew that health insurance premiums have been going up at an average of 15% and that they have doubled in the last 10 years? If President Obama is a lousy steward of America’s health care, then what was George W. Bush, when prices went up by double digits every single year of his administration? Prices, Republicans said, went up again 8.5% this year. That’s interesting because some people in California got increases of 39% from Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
So, no, Obamacare is no good. Pawlenty is right for the wrong reason. What we need is Medicare for everyone and do what other nations have done…eliminate private, for-profit health insurance. Costs will drop to half of what they are now. There’s no debate that it is better than what we have. The only reason we don’t do it is that the health care industry, as Anthony Weiner so accurately pointed out on the floor of the House of Representatives, is “a wholly owned subsidiary of the health insurance industry.”
The only reason we can’t get Republicans to vote for it in the Senate is that they are all crooks. They are getting bribes from the health insurance industry. They are called…campaign contributions. And the uncontrolled flow of money into Repubican Senators’ pockets will only grow after the Supreme Court decision that said that corporations can give money basically as if they were individuals.
So let’s not quibble over health care. Pawlenty is a phony, a liar on this issue. Think about it. He will not support the people. He supports the Republican position, to repeal Obamacare for one reason: to pander to the fat-cat health insurance industry. Obama is our best chance and Obama care is our only chance to eventually have decent, guaranteed health insurance that we can all afford.
Unemployment is over 9% first of all because George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deliberately put someone in as head of the SEC, Chris Cox, who wanted to stop regulating the stock market. He did. It collapsed and we had more than 11% unemployment. Then, because Wall Street has been told by Republicans–in return for blocking new legislation to keep them from ruining the economy again, they followed orders and will not invest in creating new jobs. Those are the facts.
Wall Street and the financial community will not invest in the economy as long as Obama is President. They are deliberately trying to ruin the economy because they know that they are at the top of the pyramid. They will continue to trade stocks back and forth among the wealthy and never miss a paycheck or a meal.
These are the people who Tim Pawlenty is speaking to, not the average American. Wall Street thinks that by making President Obama look bad, they will make the Republicans look good. That’s a bad bet. Pawlenty is saying things to which Americans have now “gotten wise.”
If the Democrats are smart, as each of thee foolish proposals come from Pawlenty, and the accusations, they will pull out of the files the more than 240 Senatorial filibusters, the blockage by Republicans. of jobs, of infrastructure improvements, of alternative energy development and of small business loans.If they are smart, they will drop that information off on every doorstep in the nation.
Pawlenty next talks about unemployment and the deficit. It is good that he does, even if he is only the next Republican stooge to try to get money from the billionaires rather than going out and finding himself a job off the public dole, where he has been most of his life. Unemployment was 7% under George W. Bush. Then his policies let the bottom drop out of the economy and he dropped it to 9, 10 and 11%, with 760,000 jobs being lost by the first month that President Obama took office. And the economy continued to lose jobs in the hundreds of thousands for almost a year. It was the worst economic disaster since 1929.
We know why, but we live a lie. The top one percent of Americans like things the way they are. They don’t need many government services so they want to do away with them. If they can get the Republicans to lie about the current situation they can prevent their taxes from going up. And their taxes are nothing as a percentage…they don’t even feel it. But they are a lot in actual dollars. So what is the current situation?
We must always remember…when Republicans talk about austerity…that they lie. if you were going to create a more sound economy, what is the first thing you would do…cut your revenues by giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires? Don’t forget…the Democratic plan, the Obama plan, was to leave the previous taxes on the top income Americans who were by now so fabulously wealthy that some of the really honest ones were saying…we don’t need more tax cuts, we need a country that will not fall apart.
So Pawlenty’s idiotic statement that we need to stop the President’s policies is ridiculous. The Republicans in the Senate…Pawlenty’s cohorts…have stopped any jobs creation that has been attempted. You see what has happened in Republican states, jobs cut in Wisconsin. Wages reduced, benefits reduced…and tax breaks for corporations. You see what happened in Ohio. John Kasich, who is himself a Wall Streeter, cares so little about the people that he has at least done what he can for the billionaires…disbanded the unions, the ability of the people to speak for themselves, to bargain for better wages. He has laid off teachers and other workers so that he can give big time contracts to his Republican donors.
In Michigan Ric Snyder has gone farther. He got his Republican legislature to declare him “Ceasar, Czar and Emperor of all the Wolverines.” He now has the power to remove any local official, mayor, city manager and replace him or her with one of his cronies.
Governor Snyder has done so already in Benton Harbor. He replaced the city manager with one of his political allies, a man who wants to turn a city park into a private golf course community for the wealthy. The man is associated with the heirs of the Whirlpool corporation which moved its jobs out and now tries to manipulate the impoverished, jobless citizens with its remaining ownership of land and assets…one of which is the governor of Michigan.
When you hear people like John Kasich or Ric Snyder or Tim Pawlenty try to make themselves Populists by saying “I was from a poor background.My father was a postman…” (or a miner or a menial laborer) remember this. Hitler was from a lower class background. FDR and Teddy Roosevelt were both from upper class backgrounds. It is normally not the upper classes who become criminals. The lower classes often bring out men who make it to the upper regions of the economy…like Bernie Madoff….or Kasich or Snyder…before they make their move. Pawlenty is too dumb to be a master criminal.
President Obama has no “addiction to spending” as Pawlenty claims. If you subtract the amount that Bush left the need to spend for unemployment, and the loss of revenues that would have been accrued through the taxes those people would have paid….President Obama actually cut spending by 8% over the last Bush budget, adjusted for those circumstances. Pawlenty is just lying.
Pawlenty says the stimulus didn’t work. All economists say it did. You only have to look on the “stimulus.gov” web site to see where the jobs were and which companies did them and how many people they hired to do them. It’s all there.
Good economists say it would have worked much better without the tax cuts the Republicans demanded, which, again, economists say did nothing to help. Pawlenty know these facts, the jobs, the Republican wasted tax cuts. So he’s lying about the stimulus.
Pawlenty says that he is going to level with the American people. Well, so far he has lied at least four times in one speech. He went to Iowa, to New York City, to Florida…he says…to tell the truth. Who cares where he went. Within a minute after he is finished one of his boring speeches, filled with lies, no one remembers that he spoke.
He says he told Wall Street that the era of bailouts had to end. So, what Party is he running on. Wall Street is in lock step with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell who made two special trips to New York City to tell Wall Street…and they made no attempt to hide it…that they could continue to take enormous risks with the economy and there would be no regulations allowed to prevent it. Pawlenty knows this. He is a liar.
Pawlenty says that markets work. He should have said “free markets work.” We don’t have free markets. We have five oil companies, five telecom companies, five huge media companies and a handful of health insurers. There is no competition. There is merely the silent collusion of the oligarchical business community. Where the CEOs of all companies in an industry are barely enough to make a Saturday morning foursome at Shinnecock.
It means higher prices for phone services, health care, and, yes, $4.00 a gallon oil. And who is behind it? The Supreme Court of the United States, the most powerful group of corporate lawyers and shills for corporations in the world. The anti-trust attorneys know that the Court is packed in favor of big corporations controlling the country. Scalia, the adoring son of an alleged Fascist, spends his extra time duck hunting with Dick Cheney. You figure it out. Pawlenty knows this. He lies about “free markets.”
Pawlenty can’t make the unemployment rate go away. His Party is dedicated to higher production efficiency. What is the biggest cost in any industrial enterprise? Labor. Big business has already made the decision to move jobs abroad. Last year many jobs were created. They are created every day by huge corporations. In mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Hong Kong and Indonesia…Mexico and Brazil.
Pawlenty is part, right in the middle, of the cheap labor crowd. He may even be able to create 5% growth in the economy. But he won’t create any jobs here in the U.S. He will have a multiplicity of excuses. The real reason is that the Republicans work for the Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber is owned by big corporations and big corporations have most of their operations off-shore. Pawlenty knows this. He lies.
He gives us the old “big government is weighing us down” line that has been so well prepared by Frank Luntz and all the Neocon propagandists, working for GE and EXXON and others. We’re all supposed to be “discouraged” and “disillusioned” by government red tape. That’s nonsense. Anyone who has run a small business will tell you that this is pure bullshit.
Corporations never did better than the 50s, 60s and 70s, when they were weighed down with red tape, higher taxes, labor unions and lots of competition. The difference today is basically two fold. First, they pay almost no taxes (only 7% of government revenues come from corporations) so those at the top are getting fabulously wealthy. Second, the government is falling apart because of the fiscal policies of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. And the stupidity of the American people.We voted them in over much, much better men.
And let’s face it. If we do grow by 5%, the person that takes us there will never be a wimpish moron like Tim Pawlenty. It is difficult to see how some pablum spewing lightweight even got to the national political stage. He’s like a male Sarah Palin without the squeaky voice. And he’s the most boring politician perhaps of all time.
Pawlenty says we can grow the economy at 4.7% because we did it under Clinton. Pawlenty is no Clinton. Not Bill. Not Hillary. Pawlenty is one step above your local village board supervisor. Even the bridges in Minnesota were not safe while he was governor and he did nothing…nothing at all…to fix them. How could he run a country?
And what is his magic idea? Economic freedom. What does that mean? HEELLOOO, he’s a Republican. What do Republicans think is the magic cure for everything? You guessed it. He wants to reduce taxes even further. He really thinks…he is so stupid that he really thinks….we will fall for that crap again. He is so far out of date that it is embarrassing.
There is no point in going into what he proposes. None of his ideas are original or remotely sound. They just cut government revenues further and give more tax breaks…even more…to big corporations and wealthy individuals. Silly stuff but just what you would expect from Pawlenty. We need about 20% of GDP just to keep a scaled-down government running at a minimal level and still provide services. We now get between 14 and 15% and Pawlenty’s “plan” would take it down to around 10%. Remedial economics class dismissed.
By the way, American corporations pay less in U.S. corporate taxes than they do anywhere else in the world. The reason they do most of their business abroad is that they make up for local taxes, which they can often bribe their way out of because of the slave-labor wages they pay to get basic manufacturing done.
Pawlenty’s tax plans are warmed over versions of the laughable proposals of Dick Armey and Steve Forbes, that giant intellect who has never accomplished anything with the fortune and the brilliant staff left him by his father.
Then, finally, genius Pawlenty, after cutting corporate rates and individual tax rates, now wants to give the rich no taxes at all on the money they earn…their principal incomes…from stock dividends. He wants to do away with capital gains taxes altogether. It is mind-boggling.
He says that revenues increased by 99%. I’d like to see that reference, but, even if it were true, it is because of the baby boomers. If you were born in 1946…and there were a ton of people born in 1946, you got out of college in roughly 1966, when a ton of people were getting college educations, thanks to Lyndon Baines Johnson. By 1980 and every year after that, more and more educated baby boomers were coming into the workplace and paying taxes.
Ever heard of the Baby Boom Generation? That is the kind of economic demographic effect they had on the economy. In the 1990s they were even older and earning more. But even with them, Reagan spent $2.14 trillion more than his government took in. And Bush the First spent even more, leaving Clinton with a $4 trillion deficit.
Clinton balanced the budget, but it wasn’t just the natural growth of live bodies in the economy. It was hard work.
He says he balanced the budget in Minnesota. Big deal. He had no choice. The law says that you will balance he budget. He had great economic times when he was governor. And he had a legislature that was mandated to balance the budget. So that is the only reason he balanced budgets.
Now, of course, he says he wants to curtail spending. But Republicans don’t cut spending. They say they will cut spending and then they do the opposite. He says he’ll have Congress institute a freeze on spending. Not likely. Not if the Republicans are in office. They are the ones who spent us into this mess in the first place.
Pawlenty does want to raise the retirement age on the elderly. He wants to give states the right to use Medicaid funds for birthday parties or helicopters for the governor so that, apparently, people can die and go off the Medicaid rolls. Those are the kinds of things the Republican governors will do with the money if you give it to them in a block grant.
He wants to “slow the growth of defense spending.” In other words, let’s keep all the huge wasteful military expenditures that do us absolutely no good now, and only add more at a slower pace. He’s an idiot.
He wants to freeze government spending, not realizing apparently that President Obama has already done that for two or three years. .
Pawlenty says he knows how to cut spending. He says he did it by union busting in Minnesota. So, at rock bottom, he is still the tired, stale old Republican. Tax breaks for the rich and pay cuts for the middle class and cut anything for the poor or elderly.
He wants to privatize anything you can find on Google. This would include, of course, the military. That would put us almost exactly on the same kind of suicide course that the Roman Empire took, which by 410 A.D. (or C.E. if you prefer) saw their former mercenary allies looting and burning Rome, effectively ending the empire.
All these stupid ideas…getting rid of the Post Office and the Government printing office and AMTRAK, just when we need them most is, of course, every Republican’s wet dream. Total nonsense. Huge parts of government have already been sent out to contract for private firms and they more often increase costs rather than reducing them. And the services are worse or are eventually eliminated. For “privatize” you can often read “get rid of.”
Pawlenty refers to the competitive efficiency of the free enterprise system. So…what…are we going to farm out our government to China in order to cut more taxes for the rich? Because that is how we have created efficiencies in industry. The only way. All else is inefficiency, bad service, throw-away products, bankrupt retail and restaurant chains, fast food in place of real food, cheap crap from China sold in a bazaar of poorly paid clerks happy to have any job….in a place called Walmart.
Pawlenty is a dolt. We need to put people back to work. His plan not only does not do that, he doesn’t even say that he would do that. Give him credit. He’s not lying about that. He wants to enrich the rich and the biggest corporations. His economic plan says nothing about you except that you get Social Security later, that you’ll never get a union job and that if you rely on Medicaid or Medicare….don’t.
He talks about Lean Six Sigma, a management program as if it were some kind of panacea. It’s a management program. That’s all. Our future is not only about more efficiency in running government. It is about who benefits from those efficiencies. Pawlenty wants the benefits to flow upwards. Obama and the Democrats want those benefits to flow horizontally, all across society, so that all citizens can benefit from a better government.
As the brain-dead Pawlenty is excoriating government regulations, remember this: government regulations keep your water clean to drink; they keep women from being paid less than men for the same job; they keep workers from losing arms and fingers in workplace accidents and making those work hours standard for all. They make heavy trucks responsible to be in good working conditions, make hospital standards such that they can simply not throw you out on the lawn from the emergency room until you are stable; that meat and vegetables are fit to eat; keep airplanes from crashing into one another or keep airlines from flying dangerous planes. They keep companies from dumping chemicals onto your property and then expecting you to get them out of your water supply. This is what regulations do, and more.
We won’t go over health care again, except to say that the Affordable Care Act is going to reduce costs and make health care available for everyone. Yes, it will impact the health insurance industry. But unlike Tim Pawlenty and his gang, the Democrats in Congress will be there to step in with better, less expensive Medicare-like health care if the private industry would rather go away than simply make good, not exorbitant, profits.
Pawlenty of course lies about the regulations on Wall Street. He claims that they catastrophic problems on Wall Street, such as the worthless credit default swaps, the practically no-equity leveraging and the simple fraud perpetrated on the public were all caused somehow magically by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The fact is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are simply mortgage guarantee companies, backed by the Federal government. They had nothing to do with promoting the sale of worthless securities. They should not have backed some of the zero-down, low-doc loans, but those were the standards set by the industry in their foolishiness.
Pawlenty comments on Obama’s appointees. What he doesn’t criticize is the fact that the Senate has not allowed most of Obama’s appointees to even be allowed a vote on approval. The Republicans have once again brought the country to its knees by preventing regulators and judges from taking their appointments, thereby crippling government operations.
Pawlenty wants to do away with the National Labor Relations Board. Why does it not surprise me that a toady like Pawlenty is ready to work for the big global corporations to send more jobs overseas? Wow.What a surprise.
Not only does he want to do away with the NLRB, he wants to accelerate sending jobs overseas with more and more free trade treaties that allow countries with 50-cent-an-hour labor to bid on American jobs. Good thinking, Tiny Tim.
He wants a strong dollar. We can be almost certain that he has no idea what that means. If we strengthen our economy, put people back to work, strengthen our domestic consumer purchasing power, the dollar will automatically strengthen. He knows it….it is one more way of making another little lie, an evasion of the trurth.
In his most outlandish statement he says that “…President Obama is a champion practitioner of class warfare.” That is a ridiculous lie, one that he must have been told to say, because no one looking at the domestic scene in the last year could possibly believe it….since the exact opposite is true. It is one of those outlandish lies that the Republican Party has people throw in now and then to shock people and perhaps win over ten new moronic party members. We all know who has been dividing the nation. it is clear. And it is a bald faced lie and an insult to the American people’s intelligence to even say such a foolish thing.
Pawlenty should think more about spreading the wealth around than worrying about how much in taxes the top ten percent are paying. The reason the top ten percent pay so much of the taxes is that someone making money has to pay taxes and taxes on everyone are so low…mostly the billionaires and millionaires…that we need more revenue.
All Pawlenty’s teenie-weenie rambling about the debt and the jobs that Bush lost everyone and the budget that works very well thank you until we can get some kind of minimal agreement by Republicans to stop being Fascist pigs…all of it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. We are in the greatest recession since 1937 and we need more positives than negatives. Saying that you will give $800 billion to billionaires then cut taxes again then saying…”Hey, we can’t afford our government….” Duh! Of course we can’t when you take away all the money.
He’s not a serious candidate. He is worse at math than Paul Ryan. They both can neither add nor subtract. They can add to the deficit but they cannot subtract from it.
Pawlenty is right about only one thing. America is in trouble. His kind have caused it. So long as we let one of them into Congress or a statehouse or the Presidency, we will continue to be in trouble. They work for the rich and the international corporations and against the People. Pawlenty is just a weak sister trying to get into the act with the big boys.
