When someone attacks your arguments or comments on your lifestyle, that may be a source of irritation or possibly even anxiety. But when people try to take away your home, or your food or your health…that is no longer argumentation on principles. That is physical aggression. That is an attack on your very well being.
The Republican Party has put itself in a position where they are able to control much of society, not much differently from the way that they did under George W. Bush. Only now, because they are not in power, they cannot loot public lands, give unrestricted corrupt contracts to huge international corporations or go to war with impunity.
Now they use the rules of the Senate to prevent your obtaining reasonably priced healthcare. They try to maintain the reckless and greedy procedures of Wall Street that brought down the economy. They are protecting the large, polluting corporations. And they are denying the ability to buy food and pay for shelter among the great number of Americans that they…they…put out of work with their lazy, stupid policies from 2001-2008.
Not only did they let Wall Street run amuck so long as they got their cut…and they did…but they deliberately put someone in charge of the SEC who deliberately reduced and stalled and threw out regulatory actions that could have saved this country the disaster we are still facing.
Here’s what you must know and you must believe. It is vital now to your survival if you are a member of the great middle class…that is, if you are a working family of either one or two, with children, with a skilled job. You used to be safe. You are no longer economically safe.
There are and will not be pensions. Whatever pensions exist will be converted to basically investment accounts, non-taxable, on which you will be responsible to manage yourself. You can trust a company’s investment advisors but some of them are crooks and others are incompetent. Mutual funds are a watered down investment and many make no money at all. So you need to think about that.
Unless we get legislation…and how will we do that with the filibuster probably in effect again in the next Congress…to keep jobs here in the U.S. you will not be protected unless you are a fireman, a teacher, a local contractor, or a retailer. Only jobs that cannot be intrinsically shipped abroad are safe.
The government is right now surveying all the ways that it can cut entitlements for its citizens. We have been left a $13 trillion debt that came basically from a structural problem created by Ronald Reagan and never corrected. It was simple. He cut tax revenues in half and increased the size of government by a quarter.
Here’s a simple example of exactly what happened. You have an income of $100,000 and expenses of $100,000..that is, you spend all you earn. But you cut your income to $50,000 and then you increase your spending habits to $125,000. So now you owe $50,000 a year and the only way to get back to even is to either increase income or cut spending. Reagan and Bush I talked about cutting spending but never did.
Along came Clinton and he raised taxes, increased income a little, and cut spending a little, and introduced something that said, if you want a new bike, you have to get a paper route or you have to cut back on your allowance. He trimmed spending. So he got it close to breaking even.
But he still ended up with an accumulated debt from his first few years and Reagan and Bush I of over $5.6 trillion. Then came Bush the Moron, Dick Cheney’s hand puppet. He created more debt in 8 years by almost $2 trillion than was accumulated from 1789 until the day he took office.
So now we have $13 trillion debt. That is huge and it is a problem. But Neoconservatives are already setting up the propaganda. They are attacking people on unemployment and people on Social Security. We spend too much on these things, they say, while collecting multi-million-dollar bonuses and amassing huge wealth.
Between 2002 and 2005, 75% of all income increases in this country accrued to only those in the top 1% of income earners. As recently as 2007..and it would be even more now…the top 20% possessed 93% of all wealth, the bottom 205 merely 7%. The top 1% own 64% of all business equity and 60.6% of all financial securities.
So are you being screwed by the corporations, like EXXON, that made $40 billion and paid not one dime in taxes, or by Neonservative politicians who gave them those tax breaks? The answer is yes and it is not going to change. CEOs now may over 250 times what the average worker makes. In 1970 it was about 30 times what an average worker made.
In other words, you are being scammed. How are they making huge profits for their corporations? Very simple. They find areas where they can manufacture abroad and they go there. They either open up plants or they simply contract the work for from half to ten percent of what American workers make. And then they kill American jobs and get big bonuses.
In recent years, the financial services industry had taken your deposits and built huge banks and combined them with investment houses. They are so large that they are able to take existing businesses and other kinds of assets and trade them among themselves, taking huge commissions. This is basically trading the hard work of everyone else back and forth making millions. Or billions. Last year three hedge fund mangers made over $4.4 billion, each.
The Neocon propagandists will tell you that government investment in the economy actually loses money. There are so many examples to the contrary that we should simply point to 1. the GI Bill, which created the largest single educated population in the history of the world and built our longest period of prosperity, and 2. Jimmy Carter’s “bailout” of Chrysler Corporation, which not only allowed the car maker to come up with the minivan concept that revolutionized the way families travel but actually earned huge amounts of money for the government on its investment.
Neonconservatives…that is, any current politicians called “Republican” are liars. They lie because that is the policy of that political party, because they cannot support the policies that try to give more tax breaks to the rich, run deficit spending or cut spending by shutting down Social Security and Medicare…both of which the People pay for.
Once you understand that you cannot have tax cuts and big spending without sacrificing something, then you are on your way to understanding what is happening to the Middle Class in this country. It is Republican (Neocon) government by propaganda. The only difference is that Rush Limbaugh is more entertaining than Herr Goebbels. But the message is the same.
