If someone said that it is all a lie, that Republicans do love big government…many people would say that it is not true. By the way, when we say Neocon we mean Republican. Repbulicans are now all Neocons…neoconservatives…fascists…corporatists…all sponsored, paid for, purchased, and controlled by big industries, the health care industry, the oil industry, Wall Street, etc.
The fact is this. The truth is that all these people, including the Tea Party hypocrites, have used government to make themselves rich, or are about to do so. The Republican governors are merely the latest group. And the money doesn’t merely extend to the existing elected officials Take Sarah Palin for example.
Sarah Palin has some sex appeal. She’s not bright…she went to five different colleges before she could find one to graduate her. She was a bad governor, we now know. She left in the middle of her governor’s term because she was offered huge amounts of money by the Neocon Republican establishment to rally their troops for the 2010 election. She did and has thus far made $22 million.
We know that conservative book clubs pre-ordered enough books to put her and her ghost-writer, whoever it was, on the best-seller list. After that, the books sold for something like a quarter. But who’s counting? The Republicans won the elections and she got the Tea Party Republicans out to vote. Lies on lies on top really stupid lies…but who’s counting? It’s only a reality show in which the American people were just kicked off and they handed her the win…and the 20 million. Neocons just want to have fun…at your expense.
But she’s only the dumbest, not the first of the candidates who have made a fortune on the stupidity of the American people and the avarice and duplicity of the Republicans.
Dick Cheney never had a real job. At least, that is the way Neocons would see it if they were being “honest.” Of course when talking about Neocons you need to put certain words in quotes because they are of questionable usage when applied to Neocons. Like “truth” and “justice.” He was always in government until his boss lost his job and Cheney lost his at the same time. Cheney was in government or in Congess from day one until he got a job in the Ford Administration then in the Bush administration and then Bush I lost the election.
It was 1993 and Bill Clinton had just trounced Cheney’s boss, the elder (and we always must point out, the non-moron) Bush. Even Ross Perot, who, if he had used his head rather than his personal knowledge and picked a more popular vice presidential running mate, would have made a good run at Bush and might have come in second.
Anyway, Cheney was out of work. He had never held a job in the “private sector” so he just asked around and a few dozen guys whom he had helped to get some military contracts while he was in his last government job, Secretary of Defense, offered him a nice slot…President of Halliburton.
Halliburton was a nice little company. It has revenues of $18 billion dollars and has 50,000 employees. It is a highly technical company in services to the petroleum and natural gas industry. Cheney was a Congressman, a Chief of Staff to a President, and the Secretary of Defense. He had never had a job in any kind of industry. Yet he became President of Halliburton, all 18 billion dollars worth.
Now why would you hire a former Congressman from a state that is so small that it only has one Congressman to be the head of an 18-billion-dollar oilfield services company? Wyoming does have some oil drilling, not much, but Cheney has lived in Washington D.C. and worked in Washington D.C. for more than 40 years.
Here’s one scenario. While Cheney was president of Halliburton, they were granted hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts for military projects by the same military procurement officers and their military bosses who had worked for Cheney.
The higher-up military brass are all mostly Republican. (Who knows why. Maybe it has to do with choosing a life of killing people, including your own people.) So it was not too surprising that huge contracts went to Halliburton. And it was not too surprising that Cheney ended up, after a few years of feeding government contracts to Halliburton, with a nice nest egg of a reported $44 million dollars.
He never had a job in business. He knew next to nothing about the petroleum industry. But he had that one thing that all Neocons hate, and who could blame them. He had that career where you just suck at the government teat from virtually cradle to grave. At least, that is what they claim. They want you to think that.
By the way, unlike any previous Vice President, Cheney kept his affiliation with Halliburton so that he could increase his earnings, his deferred income after he was Vice President. It’s pretty clear that he did well. After all, when he became Vice President, he created, literally out of nothing, the Iraq War that killed millions of Iraqis, 4,500 American soldiers and provided another $12.5 billion to Halliburton, under no-bid contracts, said to have been at the Vice President’s express orders.
Because his income comes from Halliburton stock, which he never relinquished, he became richer and richer every year of the Bush Presidency. It is unheard of. It is as if someone said that they would go into the grocery business while owning a farm. They would then buy all the produce from the farm through the grocery purchasing agents, then take all that money from the produce and put it in their pockets.
There are laws against it. But why would Cheney care about the law when he discovered he could get away with starting a war and never be indicted as a war criminal. When he could release the name of a secret operative of the CIA.
Why would he worry when he could inadvertently, through avarice and perhaps stupidity give away the connections between the CIA and secret operatives, courageous friends of the United States in Arab countries…for political purposes? He doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about what kind of torture they will endure or have endured if they were caught. They are only people to Cheney and his view is that people don’t matter.
Why would he worry about committing what many people think is treason when he has the support of so many Fascists and just plain ignorant hicks that the real citizens of this country cannot get at him, except by assassination…which is unthinkable.
Donald Rumsfeld entered government about the same time as Cheney. He was from Chicago, from a good family, well educated, went to Princeton. Unlike Cheney, he served his country as a jet jockey. Cheney asked for and got 5 deferrments. Bush went AWOL.
He was a congressman’s assistant, then a congressman himself for many years. He did have just a brief couple of years in the private sector before running for Congress. But essentially, he spent no time in the business world.
He was appointed to many posts after he left congress, including Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford. He was the youngest secretary of defense. And then later, under Bush II, he became the oldest Secretary of Defense.
Between his two stints at the Pentagon, he was chief executive of pharmaceutical giant G D Searle & Company from 1976 to 1985. He knew nothing about the pharmaceutical industry. He was a friend to the pharmaceutical industry as he was to big oil, big steel, big mining, big health care. Rumsfeld is a corporatist. What is good for corporations (and good for his pocketbook) is good for the country.
In other words, Searle knew all they needed to know. He would find areas in government where he could develop business for Searle that would more than pay for him. He sold off several Searle subsidiaries, reduced the payroll by more than half, and made Fortune’s list of the ten toughest bosses in America. Critics charge that he used his Washington connections to rush approval of Searle’s aspartame (NutraSweet), which, by the time Rumsfeld left, accounted for more than half of Searle’s profits.
He was involved in the selection of the head of FDA who rushed through the approval of Aspartame, which became a huge….hundreds millions of dollars in sales and is used in over 9000 products. But it has been connected with brain tumors and other cancers. It’s not Rumsfeld’s problem.
Do you really think a man who sends 4,500 men to their deaths, maims another 30,000 and causes the deaths of at least…at least…250,000 innocent (not the troops, that would be more) Iraqis for no good reason would care about some deaths from Aspartame (Equal, Nutrisweet) if it can make him…as it apparently did from what he told Congress, about $50 million?
Billy Tauzin. This one is a gem. An old Louisiana political hack, in the Huey Long tradition, Wilburt Joseph Tauzin was a good old boy Cajun. He worked for the Louisiana State legislature while he was in law school where he graduated in 1967 and by 1972 was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives as a Democrat.
In 1979, when a Republican seat opened up for the U.S. House of Representatives, Wilburt saw no reason not to go for it. Louisiana was still a Democratic state, so he ran and won the seat and remained in it as a Democrat for 15 years. Then, when he saw the opportunities from a switch to Republican interests and a Republican House, he made the move to the Republican side. There was certainly more money to be made there.
Operating from what would be considered a “safe” district for him in Louisiana, Wilburt could concentrate on the Republican Party and making money. He became a Republican leader in the House. Wilburt Tauzin was responsible for the Private Securities Litigation Act, which, in short, made it difficult to sue Wall Street firms if they are doing something wrong that affects thousands of their customers. Nice guy, Wilburt.
He then shepherded through Congress, holding a floor vote in the Congress open for 3 hours past the deadline, to twist the arms and bribe members of Congress to vote for the Prescription Drug Act. The problem had been that drug prices were so high that seniors could not afford their drugs. Many were buy drugs instead of food or cutting pills in half which made them less effective.
Meanwhile, Democrat after Democrat..as well as some Republican house members…were showing every day where the same drug that sold in the United States for $5.00 was selling in Germany for $.50. The pharmaceutical industry was getting away, literally in some cases, with murder. So what did Wilburt Tauzin and the Republicans do?
The Prescription Drug Act, set up a program which, after a $250 in a deductible, plus $400 per year in premiums, ($35 a month) Seniors on Medicare would get a 75% reduction in prescription drugs up to $2,250. At that point, they would pay for all their own costs up to the point that they have spent a total of $3,600, which would include the deductibles, the monthly premiums and the 25% that they must pay themselves.
The problem with this plan was that it put no pressure on the drug companies to lower prices. In fact, between the time the bill was signed and the date it went into effect, the pharmaceutical companies raised their prices by 26%. The bill was originally estimated to be a windfall for the pharmaceutical companies…it cost them nothing and gained them tens of millions of new customers…about $400 billion.
Wilburt Joseph (Billy) Tauzin left Congress the next year and went to work for the pharmaceutical companies for a reported $2.5 million a year, as their lobbyist.
That’s the way that Republicans believe in government. What has it done for me lately?
And why is that important. Because of John Kasich, who worked in government his whole life, worked to help corporations. Then he left government and was given a job on Wall Street with Lehman Brothers that, it is said, earned him several million dollars a year. After becoming quite wealthy, Wall Street said to him that he had been paid back, and how about doing the Republican Party a favor.
They would give him all the money and all the propaganda support he needed to lie to the people of Ohio that he would make things better (he was also in on the same scams as Tauzin was) and grow jobs and balance the budgets. He became governor and now he is already paying back his Wall Street pals by joining in with 6 other Republican governors to attack unions.
With other governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Ric Snyder of Michigan, Ric Scott of Florida, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and Paul LePage of Maine to attack the unions he is eliminating collective bargaining. How can he do it? Because Americans were stupid enough to believe that these people were honest…even after the Wall Street crash that came as a result of lax regulation and the Prescription drug bill and the huge tax cuts for billionaires while we have a $14 trillion deficit…all but about $1trillion of it caused by Reagan, Bush and Bush II.
There is not even a question about that last part. Less than a trillion in debt when Carter left office, and $2.14 when Reagan left office, and $4 trillion when Bush I left office (and running about $500 billion a year. By the time Clinton could get it balanced after four or five years of hard work, it was $5.6 trillion when he left office….with the budget finally more or less in balance, with a surplus and with debts being paid down.
Within a year after taking office, Bush II had raised the debt by another $1 trillion. By the end of his term, it was $12 trillion. But…that wasn’t all. In his final budget year, which carried over into 2009, he added another trillion because of the Depression. So, in total, he added another $7-$8 trillion to the deficit. In addition, he left President Obama with 14.9 million unemployed and a Senate that filibustered 240 attempts to create jobs and improve the economy.
George W. Bush is a story of using government, his father’s name (I wonder what it’s worth now?) to get rich, to get ahead, to become the most incompetent…certainly by every single measure and by every authority at least one of the top five worst presidents of all time.
There are thousands of men since Reagan who have used the government to make at least a million dollars or more simply because of their connections. Not all are Republicans. But as you read of the disasters that are sure to come in those 7 Republican states mentioned, remember that they are out for one thing only. They use government to enrich others so that in return others will return the favor later on.
This has repeated a thousand times more than the few examples given here. And it is going on now in the collusion of the rich with the Republican governors. The solution…kick them out the way they came in. Only do it with a recall. Don’t wait until the next election. Join in the effort to take our country back from the billionaire-backed Neocon governors.
