What a bunch of losers we saw in the first Republican debate. It was shallow, obfuscating and ignored reality.
We’ll start off by saying that we can’t even add Herman Cain and Ron Paul to a serious discussion.
Cain is a total zero and Paul, as we know from what he has said in the past and hasn’t altered, would bring down the entire country in about 36 hours. He does enough damage even being in the public eye. His one claim to fame, his one rational thought, is that we should bring the boys home from war. But after that, and after a long time in government, he hasn’t a clue how to do anything. He’s a joke. Probably has a pretty good memory. That’s how a lot of guys get through med school without much more to commend them.
Herman Cain was a lulu. He said that the President has caused the economy to stall. Even if that were true, Cain’s solution is the old, tired, worn-out, failed Neocon mantra. He’s got less than zero. Nothing. Cut taxes to the bone. (As if that had worked over the last 30 years or as if it had not been a disaster in the last ten.)
Cain says it will create jobs. The Bush era saw the lowest taxes and the fewest number of jobs created by a President in the last 80 years. Cain wants to drop the capital gains (the money billionaires earn on long-term stock income) to zero. He’s either a loser or in the pockets of the billionaires. Either way he’s not a serious candidate. His idea basically is that if the government has no income at all, none whatsoever, things will get better. What?
So who are the really bad, but serious candidates? They are a familiar cast of characters, warmed over and made up to look like real people.
Santorum is one of those guys whose face you want to smash in, not for his arrogance, but the fact that he has so very, very little…actually nothing…to be arrogant about. He’s stupid. Plain and simple. He says that the global corporations are “shackled by Obama’s oppressive policies, by regulations and taxation.” What is he talking about? All the evidence is to the contrary.
Is he talking about Dodd-Frank, because that is only about a quarter as tough as it should be? Santorum is the bag man for the lobbyists. He was the intermediary between K Street and the Bush departments of government while he was a Senator. Bush and Cheney would send him in to find a good lobbyist to put into the Energy Department or Interior or the FDA and so on. Then when some lobbyist got into a scandal and had to leave, Santorum would find them a job. He’s basically a crook.
His spiel was on gas prices. He says we should be drilling more and that Obama is holding up the parade. It’s a lie. It is not a distortion or a misunderstanding. It is an out and out lie. Santorum doesn’t care that President Obama has given leases in the gulf and encouraged drilling on the 98 million acres the oil companies have leased from the government or the land directly adjacent to ANWAR that the oil companies own.
He says he wants to “speed up the pace of government.” That has absolutely no meaning at all. Do you speed up the pace by filibustering 240 bills in one year, including many that would have put millions of Americans back to work?
Of course, he then switches off to natural gas and says we should be drilling the way Pennsylvania has been drilling natural gas wells. Well, that’s ok. But the Republicans have voted down all the alternative energy bills, including natural gas incentives. And, it was not Santorum that had anything to do with drilling for natural gas in Pennsylvania. It was Ed Rendell, the Democratic governor who saw to it that the drilling was done with as much safety for Pennsylvanians as possible.
Santorum knows that gas prices are not Obama’s fault. They are part of Wall Street speculation that still goes on because John Boehner and Mitch McConnell literally went to New York on two separate visits (reported in the press) and guaranteed that they would not be too closely supervised by the regulators. So Wall Street, according to the people who watch it, has bid up the price of gas you use by about a dollar a gallon. All money going into Wall Street’s pockets.
Pawlenty is simply a damned fool. He says that he can grow the economy by 5% per year by also “speeding up the pace of government.” Well, that is patently stupid. The only time we have had 5% growth or more on a sustained basis was during the Depression.
Pawlenty wants to cut government. You understand, don’t you, that austerity…cutting government back severely…does not make an economy grow. It contracts when you cut back. He will say that the private sector will grow if government cuts back. If that were the case, the private sector would have been growing by leaps and bounds over the last two years. It has not. It has contracted.
We’ll give Pawlenty one more paragraph. It is more than he deserves. He offers the same-old, same-old solution. Cut taxes on his rich friends, and on his campaign contributors, the giant global corporations, and everything will work out. Despite the fact that this is the situation right now. What he is recommending exists right now and we have 15 million people unemployed, the rich getting richer and guys like Scott Walker in Wisconsin attacking unions while giving yet more tax breaks to the rich.
Mit Romney has been very vocal. “This president has done this and failed to do that and this whole mess is his problem. He is the most incompetent President since….since (since George Bush, Mit?)
Here is Mit Romney in a nutshell. He is the corporatist’s corporatist. They love him because he has no conscience whatsoever, yet he looks like your average suburban Westchester accountant who just got off the train at New Rochelle.
Romney says that President Obama did not create the bad economy but that he made a bad economy worse. Well, we will agree that the President could have made the economy better. But not the way Mit Romney would have liked.
The President should not have…as Romney would have recommended and did recommend…let himself be blackmailed into giving the richest Americans another $800 billion when they had just each, on average had tax breaks of about $1.2 million dollars over the last ten years. While they were getting those tax breaks the Republican Congress was spending $7 trillion more than it was taking in. And then left us with 15 million people paying no taxes and needing unemployment, food stamps and temporary assistance of all kinds from a government down by another $350 billion in revenues from an already low point not seen since 1950.
Let’s understand who Romney is. He is a liar. He says he will create jobs but when he was governor of Massachusetts, in a good period for the country, he made Massachusetts the third worst state in the country for jobs.
Romney made millions by buying up companies in trouble, then selling off assets, and selling off subsidiaries, then moving U.S. jobs overseas to cut labor costs, and pocketing the difference. He did it over and over and over again. If you look in the dictionary for “economic traitor” there should be a picture of Mit Romney. He has no solutions. He is a liar. He will do the same thing, because he is the same only smoother, that Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin, John Kasich is doing in Ohio, Ric Snyder is doing in Michigan, Ric Scott is doing in Florida and Chris Christie is doing in New Jersey.
They all have done the same thing and it is something that Romney was doing first and he will do to the country if he gets the chance. He thinks the money from corporations will be enough to get his big lie into every home and fool Americans once more.
All these guys and Romney have cut taxes for the rich and for good sized corporations. They have attacked the labor unions to reduce wages. And they have cut back on the kinds of services that Americans need…health care for the poor, education and so on. This is Mit Romney. Vote for him at your peril.
Senate filibusters against helping people in foreclosure, helping small businesses, helping people with more stimulus are what have caused the continued Recession, the unemployment and the housing market foreclosures. Romney will see to it that policies are adopted that will create millions of jobs…in China.
What can anyone say about Newt Gingrich that his former wives have not said to divorce attorneys. He’s a lying piece of shit. He’s a shit bag who made a name for himself by trying to shut down government during the Clinton Administration. There was no good reason for it. He just thought it would be a good lever to have over Clinton that he could starve a few Americans in government and a few old people, a few poor people to get his way.
Newt’s campaign is to go back to the Reagan era. He ignores the fact that there are no more Reagan people in the Republican Party. Only Neoconservatives, like he is, by the way. He said in the debate that Reagan created 25 million jobs. He didn’t. Reagan created 16 million jobs. That’s not bad but Jimmy Carter created 10 million jobs in only 4 years.
Newt says that Reagan cut taxes and that this raised revenues by $800 billion a year. Really? Then how is it that the national debt at the end of Reagan’s term was $2.85 trillion up from $800 billion?
Reagan quadrupled the military budget, spent an additional $1.5 trillion. So this left Stockman, his budget chief, (and a former divinity student) in the predicament of having to cut services for the poor, and he did. He cut Medicaid, cut subsidies for low-income housing, cut food stamps, and cut Aid to Families with Dependent Children ( the principal form of direct assistance to the poor.) All this, plus the unequal tax cuts meant that poverty rates increased every year while more upper income Americans climbed higher into the stratosphere of very small tax bills.
To stop inflation, Reagan and Paul Volcker created a recession, the worst up until then since the Great Depression. Unemployment climbed over ten percent. So,yes, there were good growth rates, the kinds you always have coming out of a Recession. The main thing to remember is this. Any good years that Reagan had, and unemployment averaged 7.5% during that period, were financed by a debt that was already at an all time high, several times worse than ever before, by the time he left office.
By the way, Clinton created more jobs than were added by Reagan, Bush I and Bush II combined…23 million jobs in 8 years. And his first year in office, he raised taxes. On top of it all, he stopped the deficits and balanced the budget.
Now let’s talk about Big Crazy Momma, Michelle Bachmann. The one who wants to be President but who talks about the Hoot-Smalley (Smoot-Hawley) trade policies, getting not only the names wrong but the dates that were essential to her argument.
She really has only one plank in her platform. She says that she will repeal Obamacare. In other words, when she becomes President, she will see to it that you no longer have protection from insurance companies denying you coverage or dropping you if you get a serious illness.
Under Bachmann, you will go back to paying an extra $2500 for prescription drugs. Your kids will go off your policy at age 19. You will go into her favorite, Ryancare, which means you will lose Medicare (we simply can’t afford it. We need more tax cuts for the Rich. Ryan cuts the top tax rate to 25% from it’s current 35%.)
We will have no insurance pools. She will trust the health insurance industry and free competition. (Do you have a lot of free competition in the health care marketplace right now? If so, why are rates going up by 15% per year, sometimes more?
Why does she trust the health insurance companies? Because she has been raising money from them for months, in come cases years…so to speak…over your dead body. You don’t need to imagine what life would be like under Bachmann. She was an integral part of the Bush administration—huge spending, tax cuts at the top, corporations like Enron and BP running wild, Wall Street unregulated, health insurance industry making billions on billions and top industry execs earning an average of $14 million a year…while 47 million Americans cannot even get insurance today.
Why would a woman who has five children and 25 foster children not want those of limited means to have access to health care? We may as well ask why Hitler loved dogs and Evan Braun but killed 6 million Jews, executed war prisoners and sent V-2 bombs into the heart of London to kill women and children. Hate-filled, maladjusted people can love their immediate families and still hate whole huge segments of society.
If you have children yourself, why would you resent the fact that others are being offered health caer? If Bachmann wants to repeal health care and has been against it from the start, and approves—which she does of Ryan’s health care plan—then she would resist even more a single payer plan or a plan that allowed the reduction of costs with the alternative of a public option. Only one of those two will eventually bring costs down to where they need to be, like every other industrialized country in the world.
If Bachmann were elected you would basically be turning your health over to the Koch Brothers, EXXON, Cigna or the Taliban. Or you could entrust your health to Newt Gingrich, the thrice-wed, opponent of the Clinton health care program who said, “Don’t pass the Clinton plan. Trust me, health care costs will go down.” That was when health care costs were approximately 200% lower than they have turned out to be. Thanks, Newt.
And you may not want an out-and-out liar for President. Bachmann said that the CBO said that Obamacare will cost 800,000 jobs. That was wrong, and she knew it was wrong when she said it.
What the CBO actually said was that Obamacare could affect the workforce, not jobs, allowing as many as 800,000 people to retire early or get out of the workforce in situations where they are only working to hold onto health care insurance.
Many people want to move to part time jobs or move elsewhere in the country but they cannot because health insurance companies will drop them and they will not, under current conditions, be able to buy health insurance.
So why would this supposedly wonderful woman tell such a lie? How wonderful a woman and a mother can you be when you are working to keep 800,000 people from being able to relax a little, cut back their work hours, or leave the workplace so that some other unemployed person can fill that position? And it is all…at least the health care debate…about how much money the health insurance companies can extract from the people.
All in all, this was quite a group. From Santorum to Pawlenty to the heavily-eyelashed Bachmann to the token black man, Cain, to Romney, the real job-killer, the guy who reputedly made hundreds of millions laying off workers or sending their jobs to China.
Now, somehow magically…these guys are talking jobs. But the have always been on the other side of the issue. They take money from the very billionaires who are fighting minimum wages, who give money to governors to kill unions and thereby end any wage and job negotiations.
These candidates are backed by these billionaires who support and are supported by the Party that is trying to cut social services after having given billionaires $800 billion in additional tax cuts that they do not need. Some billionaires have finally said that …for God’s sake, please….we don’t need more tax cuts!
In Wisconsin, there is a clear Fascist as governor. Scott Walker is as close to a dictator as we have in this country right now, except possibly for Rick Snyder, his twin in Michigan. He is being given the same kinds of powers in Wisconsin that Hitler was given in Germany after he became Chancellor. Only here and now we have open and public evidence of his attempts to totally control every aspect of Wisconsin life.
Walker is supported by the Koch Brothers who think that because they inherited billions of dollars and because the oil continues to flow making them worth $40 billion each that they deserve to run everything in this country. Walker stole between $4,000 and $8,000 of previously hard-won income from every employee of the State of Wisconsin, out of their health care benefits and their pensions. That is how much more they will pay out of paychecks that average around $45,000-$50,000!
But even knowing this, in a recent election, where 7,000 votes suddenly appeared from somewhere in Milwaukee where votes have magically appeared before, the citizens of Wisconsin…some of them…stupidly voted against their own best interests, just like the Jew-hating Nazis of the 1930s.
Why would they do such a thing? What stupidity would make a bunch of fools vote for a Supreme Court Justice that they knew would vote for the corrupt governor and against them? Was it bigotry, superstition…the ultimate arrogance of those who know nothing and will never learn? Why would you vote for a man that you know for sure will vote against your ability to ask for a raise for more work or better work?
This is how countries and empires die. This is how people become victims. This is how concentration camps get started, and genocides get started. They don’t always start with a Civil War. They start with some pompous newspaper owner like Mussolini persuading the people that someone or something is out to get them and that they should be afraid. This time the Walkers and Snyders are hawking deficits and debt. That of course is nonsense.
Here’s just one example, just one of the many, many ways we could solve our financial problems were there not racist, bigoted, religiously superstitious nuts running the Republican Party.
First take back the $800 billion in tax cuts to the rich. With $200 billion of that you can take 5 million people off the unemployment rolls and give them enough money to pay their bills and get back on their feet. This will create almost the same, or perhaps even more jobs in the private sector. Remember we are an 80% service economy. That means that 8 out of every 10 dollars will go directly into the private sector for food, rent, clothes, doctors bills, haircuts, plumbing repairs…you name it.
Those steps automatically change the economy. We now have $600 billion left from those tax cuts to put into the Treasury at $300 billion each year for two years. We then must bring the troops home from Iraq and Iran. That will save another $100 billion a year. Then we must cut the military budget by $200 billion dollars. The good news is that comes directly out of the $700 billion that we spend, because the wars are not included in that number.
So now we have $300 billion, plus $200 billion, plus $100 billion, or $600 billion. What’s more, for those 5 million people, at least for one year, we don’t have to pay unemployment, so that money comes back. Plus we get tax revenues, so that money comes back, and we get increased revenues in at least the amount that we used to create the jobs, or in other words, $200 billion. So the net switch in the economy is $800 plus and $300 minus. Which means that in a $1.1 trillion shortfall, we have now balanced the budget!
It is hard. After all is it hard to catch a crook? Is it hard to defeat terrorists? Is it hard to overcome people who want to continue slavery? These things are hard to do. But if people agree that slavery is bad or terrorism is bad, and will stop, then there’s nothing to it. We all agree and no one terrorizes or enslaves.
If Scott Walker would agree that he is ruining the lives of American people in Wisconsin, or Kasich in Ohio or Christie in New Jersey…we could simply institute the right policies and we would literally have no major problems at all. If we returned to the tax rates before Reagan…where Jimmy Carter was creating 10 million jobs in 4 years and no millionaires were jumping off buildings…our problems would be over instantly.
We don’t have a financial problem. We have a Fascist problem. The Republicans who used to count among their number Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant and Dwight David Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt have become greedy tinpot Fascists, pandering to the rich, to corporations and to the top and most militant members of the military.
We have become Argentina, or Franco’s Spain, without yet the mass imprisonments. Is that the next thing to come for people like Walker, Snyder, Kasich and these Republican candidates for President.
If Romney would fire a thousand people and send their jobs to China in good times…just to make money…what would he do in bad times? If Bachmann would lie about health care just to get money from billionaires to run for President…what would she lie about after she became President? We know what Newt would do. He shut down government just to make a name for himself. He ruined our chances for universal health care over 15 years ago. We would all have universal, safe, cutting edge medicine by now were it not for Newt. Newt knows about hospitals. It is said that while his wife was in the hospital recovering from cancer, he divorced her.
If we do not let the Fascist Republicans scare us into backing off the really good cost-cutting measures of the Obamacare plan, we will save another trillion dollars over ten years. This is another way we will help pay down the deficit. This is what Peter Orzag was saying even before President Obama was elected.
In the Reagan era, we went wrong when we went off on the nutty voodoo economics of Arthur Laffer and Milton Friedman, a brilliant man, but a man who never understood that he could not make politicians turn on a dime. Friedman never understood that politicians and certainly the Republican politicians would never commit to serve the best interests of humanity over the interests of 14,000 lobbyists. Nor did they have the courage to withstand the allure of the money from the sinister Koch and Anschutz and Scaife families, people with so much economic power that they can buy the greedy and the foolish.
They have already bought the current Republican Party…like the Boehners and the McConnells who daily ell out their fellow Ohioans and Kentuckians for 30 pieces of silver.
And these Republican candidates are no better. They may be worse because, like Michelle Bachmann, they may parade their kids out onto the front lawn to get your attention while they are sending poor kids to starve in the alley out back.
