The Republicans in Congress have their paddles out and are ready, if we let them, to make us walk the line again, while the Neocon frat boys in the Chamber of Commerce, in Congress and on Wall Street deliver a good spanking like the one they handed the country in 2007-2008.
Yes, these cartoon characters, these fact-challenged, GOP legislators want to go around again. There are no adults in the room.
They want to cut back on government spending. A noble goal? Where were they when corporations, health insurance companies, the military-industrial complex and Wall Street looted the country for 8 years? Do we want to hand over an economy that they ginned up to 9.9 million unemployed back to the same crooks who ruined it?
Do we want to open the vault to the crooks…and they are…basically…fiscal degenerates who know that there are 15 million people suffering and will do nothing…literally nothing for the suffering. The Republican Senators put holds on legislation the result of which is that millions of unemployed lose needed unemployment insurance.
What is happening to this country? It is time to get very angry. We elected the President with 54% of the popular vote and elected 59% of the Congress as Democrats. Where is the legislation? If necessary, we need to offer the same kinds of bribes to people like Lieberman and Lincoln and Ben Nelson that they are getting from the Reich Wing.
Make them an offer that they cannot refuse. Yes, if necessary, that kind of offer. People are starving and dying. This is the U.S.A. People are not supposed to be thrown into the street, lose their jobs, lose unemployment, hardworking people being excluded deliberately from society by the rich.
It is not supposed to happen in the richest country in the world. If we are going to be a third-world country for half of the population, then that segment of the population being victimized has no obligation to act any way other than as victims. That’s what happens when corporations and landowners and the Army get together in a Latin American plutocracy. Revolution and kidnapping and death. But revolution is not a panacea.
In every revolution, there is a reaction that is bloodier and farther reaching and longer lasting than the revolutionaries envisioned. There are no mild revolutions. Things go wrong. Students can be accidentally shot by the military on the college green. Many innocent citizens are caught in the passion and the crossfire.
Yes you can bring down tyrants. But you lose the best and the brightest of your own, because there are always the crazies that the other side uses. And when you are through, what kind of government would you have, what guarantees of conversion to a fair society if we cannot even get out the votes in the relatively free society that we have already.
The Reich Wing media, the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Becks that support them are leading the way. The head of the Republican Party and Republican Senators bow down to them. Why would they not, when someone like Rupert Murdoch will suffer tens of millions of dollars of losses from boycotts against Glenn Beck from sponsors who are otherwise unremarkable for their political activism? The Republicans are actually in disarray if you consider the American people to be rational. Some declare that they are “conservative’ others “fiscally conservative” and yet others simply identify themselves as members of the “tea party.”
The tea party people are an assembly of everything from KKK members to anarchists to simple exhibitionists and publicity seekers. They cheapen the political process and make the Republicans look more and more like a cartoon or caricature of a political party. But the Republicans control 90% of media exposure. They deliver the message the way they want it.
The Senate Minority leader began the returning session of Congress with a tirade against the Democrats for their supposed lack of understanding of this issue…the national debt of the United States. This is like the world’s greatest bank robber telling the police that they are incompetent, and would they please let him take over jurisprudence. Of course McConnell took whatever statistics he needed from the pandering research that Conservative think tanks are all organized to provide.
The reason is of course that the pinnacle of achievement for a Republican Congress is to simply continue to cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations. We recently heard the House Minority leader and the Senate Minority leader say that they were completely at odds with both the TARP, which was a Republican initiative under Bush and the Stimulus under Obama.
They claim that they can stimulate the economy with tax cuts. We have heard that every year since 1980 and every year the economy goes its own way, but the tax cuts create a huge deficit, that has now reached $13 trillion. The very simple way to get out of the economy is a three step process. Create five million government jobs which will create another five million in the service economy. That will bring us temporarily completely out of recession.
Next, increase taxes on both individuals and corporations with a 70% top marginal rate. That would mean one of two things. The government would receive enough revenues simply from this to balance the budget forever. Or the very wealthy could pay only what they pay now and invest half their income to avoid taxes so long as they invested in American manufacturing, done right here with American workers here in the U.S. These same people would eventually be taxed on this money, but only in capital gains of 15%. The result: a restored U.S. economy by far and for a long, long time the richest in the world, with no debt.
Finally, we would change trade policies so that any U.S. manufacturer who makes any product outside the United States would pay duties on it at the same rate as a non-favored foreign country. If a company made a product with a favored nation, they would pay a flat 3% for access to the American market. If they did not want to make and sell things here in the U.S. they could move, and as a foreign company compete with U.S. companies who would not pay any duties.
The greatest question any American can ask today is this: who stole the $100,000 from my Social Security and spent it on wars and tax cuts for the rich? Every single tax cut, every single war, except for when Clinton and General Clark bombed the Serbs into submission in less than 3 months, was proposed and rammed through over the objections of the minority party. This means only one thing: if you voted for a Republican, you are a co-conspirator in stealing $100,000 of your own money, spending it and now your grandchildren will pay for it.
We now know, after a year or so of waiting to see the actual results, that the stimulus created about 1.8 to 2.2 million jobs. Was it worthwhile? Well, the Well, of course, this takes only several brief comments to educate the turteline Senator from Kentucky. The Bush Administration received a positive cash flow and some reductions in the debt from the Clinton Administration…the opportunity to write DOWN the debt by five trillion dollars over the life of the Bush Administration’s two terms.
We would now have a balanced budget and a positive cash flow, no recession, and, even with the illegal, immoral and unnecessary Iraq War and a national debt–remarkably–of no more than $3 trillion. This is the same amount as President Clinton and some of us found as troubling when warned by that true American Patriot, though unelectable as President, Ross Perot.
Junior Bush and Cheney cut taxes by $120,000 per household with annual income over $1,000,000–or $1,200,000 over the ten-year life of the bill. They did not reduce the $5.6 trillion debt. They added another $2 trillion from the tax cuts. Then they added another $5 trillion in overspending.
(We were told in 2005 by that oracle and Bush fellow Neocon, Alan Greenspan, that paying down the debt might be injurious to our Federal health. Dr. Greenspan needed to return to residency in the emergency room. His recommendations have put the country on life support.)
Bush and Cheney and Frist and McConnell…all Neocon hands on deck, voting for every spending bill…while voting down and out the \”Paygo\” rules that Clinton-Gore Democrats had set up…while conducting, and initiating one totally wasteful and criminal war…and a final touch with the Great Bush Recession of 2008, for a grand total of $13 trillion in debt.
For 8 years, the Neocons participated with their friends on Wall Street to have an enrichment spree, reckless in the extreme, in which they insidiously forced everyone who owned a home into the spiral or be financially devastated. The result of that foolish, unregulated speculation was the Great Recession and the financial collapse on the American People and the Obama Administration. The Bush Administration had added $2 trillion dollars of the $13 trillion of the $13 trillion in just 2008-2009, those last two budget years. It was more than the entire debt of all the years of the country’s history from 1789 to 1980 when Reagan took over.
And now, Senator McConnell, wants us to again give him the keys to the car after just crashing it into a tree. No. Don’t let that happen. Call your House of Representative member. Tell them that the American Middle Class says: Senator McConnell, you and your frat boy friends go straight to hell!
