It is time to stop stealing the pension funds of firemen and teachers and nurses. It is time for real Americans to stand up. It is time to give the 1%, the 3 million people out of 300 million who take home 55%…55%…of all income in this country to start paying back what they and the Neoconservative Republican politicians have stolen from the rest of us.
Never forget that we had only a $5.6 trillion national debt and the annual budgets were in balance as of January 2001. Then came the criminally negligent government of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Neoconservatives in the Republican Party, Rob Portman, John Boehner, Bill Thomas, Billy Tauzin, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, James Sensenbrenner, Orin Hatch, Jeff Sessions, Richard Ensign, John Kyl, John McCain, Chuck Grassley, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum and many, many, many more.
They spent us, looted us, lied us into war and turned the wealth of this country over to Iraqis, Chinese, Saudis and their American corporate pals. They deliberately looked the other way as military contractors stole over $9 billion in money no one can account for. It simply disappeared. That is in addition to the $400 billion in no-bid contracts to Neocon Republican campaign supporters.
They allowed a credit default swap and mortgage securities fraud speculation to run wild causing Wall Street to crash from 12,500 to 6,900. The resulting Bush Recession cost pushed unemployment to 10.8 % (14.9 million unemployed) and the national debt up to $13 trillion by the end of the last Bush Budget. The subsequent consequences of the Recession left annual deficits of $320 billion annually from lost tax revenues and $300 billion increases in unemployment and welfare.
We already had $300 billion deficits, so that gives you plus or minus a trillion dollars a year right there. And with no investment by the six banks who now own more than half of all financial assets in this country, every year the business conditions get worse, no matter what the brain-dead and wholly owned media people tell you. So if you wonder where the $1 trillion per year deficits come from, just do the math. The persons who caused all the problems? George W. Bush and Richard Cheney…financial crooks and war criminals.
And the idiots who supported them in this last election just elected even more of the same people to congress and 29 of them to state Governors! They will take every last penny in your pocket, throw you out of work, cut your unemployment, Medicare and Social Security.
You only need to know two things. One, they borrowed $800 billion from China and gave it directly to the rich in tax cuts, while we soon will have a $14 trillion national debt. They all…all the new Neocon Republican governors got together to get rid of unions. Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin have already done it.
If the unions do go down, if we don’t overturn this and throw out these politicians…it is not too dramatic to say that the Middle Class is finished. And the Middle Class, that group that moved their children upward through good public education, good health care, and a comfortable lifestyle….is the single greatest accomplishment of the American democratic system.
One Hundred Thousand people marched and peacefully demonstrated in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday, March 12, 2011. Politicians, union leaders, teachers, firemen, police, nurses, farmers (with their tractors) and even actors like Susan Sarandon and Tony Shalhoub gathered at the state capitol to protest the mistreatment of American middle class workers.
Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold has been a visitor and a supporter of the protests from the beginning. Current Senator Ron Johnson, a Tea Party candidate, who owns a plastics company with his wife, the daughter of the owner of a huge international corporation. He voted and campaigned against pro-victim’s rights legislation to curb Catholic priest perverts. Johnson is anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-war and anti-union.
Johnson campaigned against the stimulus bill which despite people like him did add a thousands of jobs to Wisconsin. Once he was Senator he refused to participate in the Transportation department’s high speed rail program, costing Wisconsin 5,000 good public-to-private jobs. He wants tax breaks for millionaires like himself (he spent $8 million to defeat Feingold) but he wants to do away with your home mortgage deduction and drill for oil immediately “anywhere we can find it” but will not vote for alternative energy (job creating) provisions because it is against GOP patrons, the big oil corporations who pay no taxes.
One thing is now clear. Republicans like Johnson don’t give a damn about the people, unless they are their people…the rich and the country club set. They are not the best people…certainly some country club slug who sells commercial real estate is less cultured than most Wisconsin teachers, a large percentage have master’s degrees these days.
No, the qualification for Senator Johnson’s “social set,” the one he wants to help at the expense of all others, is not culture…it’s money. The more money you have and the more you support those with even more money than you…at the expense of everyone else…the closer you will be brought into the Neoconservative Republican center.
The thing we hate most about America…that it occasionally promotes certain people who seek wealth at the expense of everyone else…most of whom eventually end up in jail, like Bernie Madoff…the most prominent feature of the new Neocon Republican Party.
Of course, we now know that independent Wall Street analysts and world-wide financial experts say that a very large number of people on Wall Street should be in jail in a cell next to Madoff. That is how deceptive their practices were. So let’s penalize them a different way. Let’s take a big hunk…a very big hunk…of that money back for the government.
Anyone who reads this blog would know that our proposal would be to tax the rich so much that we would put to work 5 million Americans for at least two years. Once we have extracted that penalty from the rich, which would cost $400 billion dollars, those paying taxes would reduce the deficit to the point it could be balanced by cutting the military budget and not touching Medicare or Social Security.
We could then let the impending cost corrections now been implemented in Oregon and Massachusetts be incorporated into the health reform bill and we would start to level off spending. What would happen to those 5 million government workers?
There is by now about $3 trillion in investment money in the hands of Neocon Republican Wall Street investors who want to wait out the President and use it to unload monumental campaign contributions to the Republicans in 2012 under the Citizens United rule. Then they will do as they please, with no regulations. And cause another crash to further impoverish the middle class. This is all about demolishing the American Dream.
In our scenario, there are many, many jobs for people in government-private partnerships that will be hugely profitable. Just a few are, long-term batteries, personal home wind-energy generation, low cost solar panels, electric cars, solar generators, hydrogen vehicles, electrical grid development, home natural gas energy and vehicle natural gas energy, biomass energy…on and on and on…not to mention thousands of pending research projects on genetic medical improvements that are mind boggling.
Those 5 million jobs will translate to 5 million permanent, government co-sponsored, then sold to private industry, jobs that will build this country’s future. Any investor who does not get involved will be left behind with a pile of money and no good investments to put it in. Trust the experts. Oil, by necessity, just like what happened in Wisconsin, will disappear as an energy source. No one will want it in five years.
You see, we are underserved in this country in many, many industries. You won’t hear that from Republicans because they don’t want you to know. You won’t hear it from Democrats because they don’t want to even whisper about government spending. The Neocons have them running scared.
But when push comes to shove…and there is gigantic pushback in Wisconsin that will remove 8 Republican legislators this year and a sitting Republican governor next year…the people will…when forced to…save their lives and those of their children.
Why not recall Senator Johnson? Does he really care about the future of Wisconsin? Why leave a man in office for six years who wants to destroy the middle class of Wisconsin, standing right along side and supporting Governor Walker. Get rid of them both at the same time.
Here’s the rest of a financial plan that will put this government back on top.
Taxes. Here’s the Robert Reich plan, to which we subscribe 100%. There is no reason this will not work. First, tax incomes…remember, we’re talking about annual incomes over $15 million, 60% on incomes between $5 million and $15 million, and 50% on incomes between $500,000 and $5 million.
Can’t happen? Under the Eisenhower regime the top rate, which included most of these, was 91%. Under other Presidents in the 1960s through Jimmy Carter the top rate was 74%. Please understand two things.
One…these people will not be hurt one scintilla by this and it is about time that they paid their fair share. They own two-thirds of all stock in the country, make 55% of all income and many of them will still make out like bandits because their income is on stock which is taxed at only 15% (which should be boosted to 20%.)
Two…the alternative is to tax the poor the elderly, cut Medicare and have it cost more (making it virtually useless) and cut Social Security…which is exactly what the Koch and Scaife billionaire families want to happen to you.
The biggest way we could eventually cut back some of these taxes on the rich would be to cut medical costs in half. Our biggest problem is the greed of the for-profit medical companies. They charge what they want because, just like Wall Street speculators, the laws are rigged so that they can.
The next thing we could do is cut the military budget from $700 billion—a year—to $400 billion…still larger than Europe, Russia, Asia and the Middle East…combined! We could do it without sacrificing any national security. Many people not in the military industrial complex will tell you that this is true, without question.
Rescind trade policies. Stop giving corporations tax breaks for locating abroad. Make them have headquarters and pay taxes here. Tax products ten percent at the port of entry if they are made by U.S. corporations in foreign countries and then imported into the U.S. That money could be used to create jobs…it would be more than enough…plus all retraining for workers in new industries right here at home. It would be something like $100 billion a year.
Pass a bill that says that everyone who wants to join a union can do so by simply holding up his or her hand, or signing a card that says: I want to join the union. Teachers should be exceptions. Teachers should be in a national union. Once you are accepted into the national teachers union, you get two things.
One, you get government sponsored health care, just like the military, or the VA only with a credit card and a monthly bill for an affordable premium. Second, you get whatever the prevailing pay rate is in your area. Third, every year you complete as a teacher, you get one-thirtieth of a thirty year requirement to earn retirement, which you will be eligible to take at age 65. Retirement will be negotiated with the government.
All details of how well you teach and whether you can get a raise are all negotiated based on teacher performance, just like the Army, on a performance rating and a review by a board who will review test scores and talk with parents. Pay raises will be made on an annual basis in bonus payments paid in July following the school year.
The money for raises will come from the federal government apportioned to states based upon highest test scores receiving the largest amount of money, per student, right down to the lowest ranked states receiving the least amounts of money.
We know several things now that we did not know ten years ago. One, we do not need a $700 billion military budget. (We didn’t need one during Reagan either. We now know…some of us knew then…that the Soviets were completely collapsing from within by 1976 at the latest.
We know that if we tax the rich appropriately, make the cuts and the trade changes and the new industry-government connections, our deficits will drop to where they were in the 1960s and 70s…what would today be in the area of $100 billion a year…while paying off the interest, making Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (a new and improved Social Security) solvent.
That’s how you do it. You simply have to keep going after you toss out Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Rick Snyder, and a few other governors. You then impeach Supreme Court justices Roberts and Alito for lying to the Senate. You impeach Scalia for palling around with people only days before ruling in their favor instead of recusing himself. Then you impeach Thomas because he is clearly working for the Tea Party and the Right Wing political activists through his wife.
These Supreme Court justices should be treated the same way as the Nuremburg Trials treated the Nazi judges. If you cheat, if you pander to your friends, if you let your own personal political agenda color your decisions, you should not be on the Supreme Court or any court as a judge in a land where equal justice before the law is written into the Constitution.
