Why GOP Administrations Do Not Create Jobs

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

What tycoons of old understood was that if wage earners earn more, they spend more. Jobs are created. Even more spending follows the additional jobs. That's the left/dem/progressive model. But the GOP method is just the opposite and so --too --the miserable results.

The effects of the GOP model are confirmed with official stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Commerce Dept and various other studies.

A GOP tax cut --from which only elites benefit --is invariably followed by a recession/depression, increased joblessness, higher prices and the export of jobs, most often, to China. [See: CIA'S World Fact Book, online] For example, Reagan's "infamous" tax cut was followed quickly by a depression of some two years (or longer). It was the LONGEST, DEEPEST depression since H. Hoover's GREAT DEPRESSION.

The Axis of Reagan/GOP are wrong. Wealth does not and has never trickled down. "Suppy Side Economics" was and remains a scam, a con job sketched out, it is said, on a napkin by Arthur Laffer. Laffer is remembered for his "Laffer curve" illustrating the theory that reducing taxes for the very wealthy would result in increased production. That has never happened. It's either a lie, a fraud, a fairy tale or all of the above. The Axis of Reagan/GOP are wrong. "Suppy Side Economics" was and remains a scam, a con job sketched out, it is said, on a napkin by Arthur Laffer. Laffer's curve, it was said, would result in increased production. That has never happened. It's either a lie, a fraud, a fairy tale or all of the above.

GOP tax cut for its elite base was quicklly followed by a recession of some two years. It was the deepest, longest depression since H. Hoover's big one! Not addressed with Laffers curve is the fact that elites have the purchasing power to bid prices UP! They also have offshore bank accounts. The results are not inflation! At least since Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, the GOP has tried to peddle tax cuts that have benefited only the elite classes with various forms of trickle down theory. No GOP plan has ever worked!

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Why GOP Regimes Create Recessions/Depressions

by Len Hart, The Existentialist cowboy

Every major economist has espoused the 'LABOR THEORY of VALUE'. That includes the conservative Adam Smith and the left-leaning Karl Marx. ERGO: a declining "real' wage that should be going to labor TRICKLES (in fact, FLOWS) upward to the ruling elites.

The Axis of Reagan/GOP are wrong. Wealth does not and has never "trickled down"."Suppy Side Economics" was and remains a scam, a con sketched out, it is said, on a napkin by Arthur Laffer. Laffer is remembered for his "Laffer curve" said to illustrate the theory that by reducing taxes for the very wealthy would result in increased production.

The GOP embraced it immediately! They claimed that by cutting taxes for their 'base' of wealthy folk, wealth would trickle down and create jobs. The very opposite occurred. Reagan's tax cuts were followed by a depression of some two years, the deepest, longest depression since Hoover's big one!

Not addressed with Laffers' curve is the fact that elites have the purchasing power to bid prices UP! That's not inflation! It's THEFT! At least since Ronald Reagan occuped the White House, the GOP has tried to peddle tax cuts benefiting only the eilte classes with various forms of trickle down theory. It has never worked! By now, the wealthy (if not everyone else) knows that 'trickle down" or "supply side theory" is bunkum. The elite classes, however, will always resurrect it if it is believed that they can milk it for another tax cut or "stimulus" as they often like to call it.

The elites know what the general public does not: wealth does not 'trickle down'. Rather --it is labor which creates value and 'value' is the very soruce of a nation'swealth. Windfalls and tax cuts are not re-invested in ways that create jobs. They are squirreled away offshore or, in other ways, removed from circulation. The results are obvious: a recession/depression or --at best --a slow down follows every GOP tax cut. Every GOP administration since 1900 has presided over a recession/depression. Just a fluke? Not a chance!

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The "Malibu Effect" and Why Greed is Not Good for You

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Inflation is crudely defined as too many dollars chasing too few products. A good example of inflation: in 1960 $30,000 would buy you a mansion. 30,000 today will buy you an outhouse. That's most probably inflation. Not inflation, however, is the effect that income disparities have on markets. When a smaller percentage of the population takes in a greater percentage of the nation's wealth, people who may seem to be earning the same amount of money are actually LOSING ground because of what I call the Malibu effect. As the rich get even richer, they bid up the prices of desirable items. Malibu, for example, is just another stretch of beach. But neither you nor I can afford to live there. This is not inflation; this is money controlling the market for the benefit of the very rich. As was said in the motion picture Wall Street: "Greed is Good"!

More accurately: greed is good but only for the privileged elite, the GOP base. This is seen to have happened during the Reagan Administration as Reagan took credit for bringing inflation under control. It was high unemployment over a period of some 16 months that brought inflation under control --not Reagan! But --that's beside the point. The point is that even as inflation was "brought under control", the GINI Index began a trend of exponential increases --the direct result of Reagan's tax cut of 1982.

Economists use the GINI index to measure inequality, disparities in income. Therefore, the loss of ground that middle and lower income families and workers experienced during the Reagan regime had nothing to do with inflation and everything to do with the fact that they had been "bid" out of a lifestyle that they might very well have afforded just five, ten, twenty years prior.

Someone posting on the now-defunct NPR "How's Bush Doing? Board" wrote:

I've been working for nigh onto 36 years; maybe I've finally made it.

How much credit did Clinton's prosperity get for that? The GOP was more interested in his sex life. When the nation finally began to emerge from the effects of Reagan's tax cut for the rich [namely, the 16 month long recession, the longest since the Great Depression, it was the result of "liberal" economics policies --not "conservative" ones.

That there was a recovery at all in Reagan's regime is a triumph of Keynesian economics --not the policies of that GOP "darling" --Milton Friedman. Keynes --not surprisingly --is reviled by "conservatives". Despite GOP lies to the contrary, Keynes defended the capitalist system. What the GOP really despises about Keynes is that he did not pretend to defend the "mythical" market economy model. Keynes proposed that prudent and well-planned government spending could prevent recessions. Just as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was "proven" by putting it to the test, Keynes theories have been --by and large --proven in England, at least by those governments having the good sense to implement them.

In the U.S., unfortunately, the right wing associates Keynes with FDR --whom they still revile however  irrationally. In fact, FDR "stumbled" upon Keynesian economics by accident. In the first 100 days of his administration, he tried everything hoping SOMETHING would work. Those programs that worked turned out to have been KEYNESIAN! "Conservatives" still have not forgiven either FDR or Keynes. It has been said: a conservative is never so miserable as when times are good.

Sadly, however, FDR was not yet spending enough to stimulate an economy that had all but died. WWII changed all that. Expenditures jumped from some 15 billion to some 105 billion almost instantly. I have not taken the time to check those figures but I am sure that my recall is within the range and can be checked out. To the extent that the increased government spending made its way into wealth creation i.e. manufacturing etc, WWII ended the depression. But the effect tended to confirm Keynes.

What is worrisome is this: the United States became addicted to war. If we are not waging a Cold War, a War on Terrorism, a Korean War, a Viet Nam War, would we slip back into depression? Most certainly --if "conservatives" get their way. Conservatives will oppose government spending on what they consider to be "social programs", but, hypocritically, have no objection to even larger amounts of spending on the military or on corporate welfare.

Reagan ranks near the bottom of the list of American Presidents since WWII in terms of job creation. But Reagan is near the top if not the top in the manner in which he helped create the "ruling elite", in other words, the top one percent of the population.

Sir/St Thomas More describes modern day Republicans:

...so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be.

--Of the Religions in Utopia, St. Thomas More

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Why the GOP Cannot be Believed

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

GOP dogma goes like this: government regulation is excessive, a drag on the economy, an impediment to growth. For the GOP that's a 'given', an article of faith! Reagan's solution was a 30% tax cut which primarily benefited ONLY the nation's 'elite'. It is without doubt the origin of the so-called 'ruling 1 percent'.

Occassionally one runs across one or two paragraphs that simply 'hit the nail on the head'. Following are two that do precisely that. The topics are Ronald Reagan and 'trickle down theory':

"Tax relief for the rich would enable them to spend and invest more. This new spending would stimulate the economy and create new jobs. Reagan believed that a tax cut of this nature would ultimately generate even more revenue for the federal government. The Congress was not as sure as Reagan, but they did approve a 25% cut during Reagan's first term.

The results of this plan were mixed. Initially, the FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD believed the tax cut would re-ignite inflation and raise interest rates. This sparked a deep recession in 1981 and 1982. The high interest rates caused the value of the dollar to rise on the international exchange market, making American goods more expensive abroad. As a result, exports decreased while imports increased. Eventually, the economy stabilized in 1983, and the remaining years of Reagan's administration showed national growth."

--The Reagan Years, Reaganomics

In a phrase: wealth did not 'trickle-down'. Instead --wealth literally flowed upward as only the upper quintile benefited from Reagan's tax cuts. Investment in the U.S. economy did not increase as we had been told it would! It is safe to say that 'investments' in offshore bank accounts enjoyed a boom! That the Regan tax-cut was followed by recession/depression of some two years --the deepest/longest since Hoover --is proof enough that none of the 'tax cut' benefited working Americans in any way whatsoever.

The right wing is heavily 'invested' in 'trickle-down' economics. Some may truly believe that unfair tax cuts will stimulate the economy. I have given this group the benefit of doubt. But one is tempted to put one's hard-earned tax cut on the truth of this assertion: GOP tax cuts have, in fact, been the root cause of every GOP depression/recession since 1900!

When the GOP eschews its creation of the 'ruling 1 percent', I will begin to take them seriously.

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How the Ruling Elite of ONE Percent Enslaved Americans

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Despite right wing lies and distortions, it was Adam Smith --a 'conservative' --who espoused a LABOR THEORY of VALUE not unlike that of KARL MARX who is a favorite target of wingnuts and morons. We should not be surprised that a 'class' that supported Ronald Reagan et al would revere Smith while demonizing Marx. Not surprisingly, the GOP have completely misunderstood Smith. Smith and Marx both subscribed to a 'Labor Theory of Value'.

Here's what the conserative's 'darling' (Smith) had to say asbout the Labor Theory of Value:

"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.

--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Book 1, chapter V

In other words, what would it cost a person who wished to have a ditch if he were required to dig it himself? What would it cost a person who wished to furnish his home with chairs, a sofa, et al if he were required to make them himself? What is the value of any commodity but the cost that would be incurred should it be necessary to hire the labor to do it?

Being Forced to Work for Someone for Free is Called 'Slavery'

But having to work for a 'ruling elite' which conspires to suppress the value of labor is, at the very least, a form of slavery itself. When an elite controls the means of production and distribution and --at the same time and in various ways --depresses wages and worker rights, the effect is indistinguishable from slavery.

Adam Smith clearly states that the value of a 'thing' produced is equal to the 'toil and trouble' that, say, a capitalist might have expended himself had he not hired someone to do it for him. Or --had he not enslaved someone to do it! Or --had he not depressed wages to do it! Ergo: those who enrich themselves, claiming for themselves all profits as well as special and/or unfair taxation or --worse--NO taxation whatsoever for themselves are, in effect, demanding that others work for them for free.

Plantation owners were expert at this scam. Cotton was, what we would call today, 'labor intensive'. It most certainly would never have been profitable had plantation owners been required to pay laborers their true worth. Were it not for slavery, the antebellum south could not have made a living. Cotton was a source of great riches but only if it could be picked, ginned, and sent to market. It was slave labor that made possible a class called: Southern Aristocracy.

In a modern, industrial society the only way to address the PRIVILEGES that 'capital' now claims for itself is by TAXING them fairly. After all, there is NO production without labor of any sort. A society in which just 1 percent alone has benefited form the labors of millions is a one-legged man and will fall! We are witnessing that fall right now.

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Election Postmortem: A Picture of Dorian Gray

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It is said that insanity is repeating a failed strategy in the expectation of one day getting a different result. Because that never happens, the nation is nuts! Just enough people always vote against their own interests to guarantee that wealth will continue to 'trickle up', that wars benefiting ONLY the very wealthy will continue to be waged, that everyone else will suffer declines in education, the environment, living standards, and the plague of fascist law enforcement taser fetishists and/or authoritarian perverts.

Like a vain Dorian Gray, a huge chunk of the U.S. electorate has sold its soul for a temporary feel good. Keep it up! There will be a reckoning. If I were living in a posh suburb and voting GOP, I would be well advised to check on that oil portrait collecting dust, out of sight, down in the basement.

The mid-term election pleases no one and disappoints everyone. Surely, the screwed-up process and endemic flaws at every level could be overcome were there a will to do so or if 'politicians' had anything meaningful to offer. To be honest, I have not checked the 'turn out' numbers. What for? What's the point? I doubt that there are any surprises except, perhaps, that anyone bothered to show up at all. That is not cynicism on my part but a lingering optimism that should any politician ever tell the truth, eschew spin and BS, outline a real program with real solutions about real issues, the people would --indeed --show up and vote! Ummm maybe not! Maybe we're just screwed up! Maybe we should expect or deserve to be robbed by just one percent of the total population. I will say this: if you voted GOP or tea bagger, you are a big part of the problem.

The chart at right is just a small part of the economic debacle, the black hole left Obama by Bush. That anyone not a member of the plutocratic one percent votes GOP is simply insane.

The people themselves are part of the problem and until they stop blaming everyone but themselves, the nation, Democracy itself, is finished as the economy is sucked into an increasingly tiny black hole: the nation's wealthiest one percent.

If the wealthy are so wealthy, where is the money? The quick response: OFFSHORE!

If the economy needs a stimulus, who should get the money? If you said rich investors, corporations and/or banks, you FLUNK this course. That is precisely what is done with every stimulus and, in every case, it fails. The wrong people get the money which they quickly invest offshore, perhaps Switzerland or Panama or wherever the financial cognoscenti squirrel away their 'winnings' these days! The point is this: they are cashing in their chips and leaving the casino with their booty, your ass! Ocean's 11 have nothing on these guys. This heist has been going on at least since the ascension of Ronald Reagan. The official stats at the Bureau of Labor Stats, the Census Bureau and the U.S. Commerce Department - B.E.A. confirm me.

Democrats, meanwhile, have a classic positioning problem. That they perform better economically is not enough. Most people don't understand economics and are often suckered with slogans. Sadly for the nation, being right is no longer good enough to get you elected. And being wrong is --unfortunately --not enough to get you thrown out of office; ergo we are stuck with the increasingly stupid but powerful, evil right wing noise machine.

So --how does one begin a revolution? The late Howard Zinn left us a clue and it is that great Texan, Bill Moyer, who draws our attention to it in one of his recent speeches.

One month before his death he finished his last book, The Bomb. Once again he was wrestling with his experience as a B-17 bombardier during World War II, especially his last mission in 1945 on a raid to take out German garrisons in the French town of Royan. For the first time the Eighth Air Force used napalm, which burst into liquid fire on the ground, killing hundreds of civilians. He wrote, “I remember distinctly seeing the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in the fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.” Twenty years later he returned to Royan to study the effects of the raid and concluded there had been no military necessity for the bombing; everyone knew the war was almost over (it ended three weeks later) and this attack did nothing to affect the outcome. His grief over having been a cog in a deadly machine no doubt confirmed his belief in small acts of rebellion, which mean, as Howard writes in the final words of the book, “acting on what we feel and think, here, now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience.”

--Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!", 2010

Another friend of Dorian, the artist Basil Hallward, awakens Dorian’s vanity. After admiring a portrait of himself painted by Basil, Dorian declares that he would give his own soul if he could remain eternally young while the portrait grows old. He gets his wish, and the picture shows the gradual disfigurement of his soul as he sinks into a life of degradation and crime.

--Excerpt: Synopsis of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'

Don't believe the pundits: It's not over 'til it's over!

by Guest Columnist, Doug Drenkow

News flash! Despite what a lot of the pundits might lead you to believe, the election of 2010 has not yet been decided. Until Tuesday morning, it has not yet even begun! (Except, of course, for mail-in ballots, which -- again despite what some pundits had led us to expect -- are running decidedly in favor of Democrats)

Do we want less regulation of the very companies that crashed our economy?

Do we want greater inequality of wealth in our country?

Do we want to increase our national debt by lowering taxes on the rich?

Or do we want to invest in infrastructure and green energy and other pressing needs in the short run, to increase demand and bring down unemployment -- by the way, the only way to pay off our debts -- in the long run?

Are we going to be bullied by the history-twisting, race-baiting, immigrant-fearing, health reform-hating, climate science-denying, fascism-flirting phenomenon of the Tea Party?

Are we going to give in to the Right-wing political, media, and corporate powers that foment and finance the Tea Party, the very same powers that the Tea Party dupes publicly rail against?

In short, are we going to give our country back to the very same party that drove us into the ditch we're now trying our damnedest to get out of?

Or are we going to say No! to The Party of No, and vote -- and get out the vote -- for Democrats?!

And while we're at it, let's keep up the growing pressure to reform the filibuster rules -- possible only on the first day of the new Congress -- that have killed off more good legislation in the Senate and given the GOP more power than anything else.

Well, as I wish progressive candidates and their supporters across the nation all the best, here are some excellent candidates and strong positions on propositions for our election in California, along with some very good reasons for voting and for getting out the vote:

C A N D I D A T E S

GOVERNOR: JERRY BROWN. He has devoted his life to public service, and done so effectively and with honor. Jerry Brown has consistently worked for fiscal responsibility, environmental protection, diversity, workers rights, new technology, and infrastructure development -- keys to growing new jobs in California -- while being tough on crime, including the "white collar" variety. Even those who have on occasion disagreed with him know that Jerry tells you exactly what he believes; and he's usually been ahead of the curve, out in the lead -- as with his big emphasis on education years before it became fashionable to recognize it as the key to our economic competitiveness in the 21st century. Compare that to his opponent, who has flip-flopped (to say the least) on everything from immigration to abortion. And do we really want to make governor of our great state someone who not only has no experience in government but who also got into big trouble making big backroom deals with Wall Street?

SENATOR: BARBARA BOXER. Sen. Boxer has always stood up for Californians and what's best about California. She has proudly supported economic stimulus money and other legislation protecting and creating clean energy and millions of other U.S. jobs, after-school and education programs for kids, health care reform for all, environmental protections, women's rights, programs for veterans and seniors, and -- overall, as I see it -- standing up for "the little guy and gal" up against formidable powers-that-be. By contrast, her opponent, again someone with no experience in government, paid herself handsomely while shipping American jobs overseas. Are those really the values we want representing California in the U.S. Senate?

LT. GOVERNOR: GAVIN NEWSOM. Yes, he's been an outspoken proponent of civil rights for gay people, and all people. So how is that a bad thing? As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom championed biotech and other new technology jobs, nearly universal health care, solutions for homelessness, and urban renewal. He's a natural leader and will make a great Lt. Governor.

ATTORNEY GENERAL: KAMALA HARRIS. As the first African American woman and South Asian American woman in California to be elected as a district attorney, Kamala Harris has been extremely effective as D.A. in San Francisco, cracking down on crime -- particularly violent crime, as against children -- and working to improve the quality of life, as by increasing prosecutions for vandalism, graffiti, and auto burglary. Harris has brought free legal clinics to immigrant neighborhoods, expanded services for crime victims and their families, and developed programs to prevent re-offending. Like her predecessor, our current Attorney General and candidate for Governor, Kamala Harris will be tough on crime and good for California.

TREASURER: BILL LOCKYER. As State Treasurer, Lockyer has held the unenviable position of having to confront the national recession, the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime. But his smart, hard work with the state's finances has created and maintained more than 100,000 good-paying construction and related jobs and saved thousands of projects for highways, schools, parks, natural resources, and affordable housing. As other investment funds lost trillions when the financial system crashed, Lockyer's prudent investments protected the state's $80 billion investment fund, which actually earned dividends and never lost a penny! He led the national fight against the Wall Street rating agencies that contributed to the crash; and even as credit has dried up nationwide, California has been able to sell bonds at historic low interest rates. Having proved himself "under fire," Bill Lockyer definitely deserves to be re-elected Treasurer of California.

CONTROLLER: JOHN CHIANG. Not only has he already proven himself well qualified for the job, as the state's "independent fiscal watchdog" -- weeding out waste, fraud, and abuse and making the state's finances more transparent and accountable to the public -- John Chiang has courageously stood up to both the governor and the legislature in the state's budget crisis -- denying them accounting tricks and holding their feet to the fire. What's more, John has shown himself to me, personally, to be intelligent and sincerely concerned with the issues affecting everyday Californians. He, too, deserves re-election!

INSURANCE COMMISSIONER: DAVE JONES. As Assemblymember from Sacramento, Dave Jones has earned a reputation standing up for consumer rights, children and families, affordable housing, early childhood and other education, environmental protection, healthcare, privacy rights, civil rights, equal access to the courts, and economic development. In short, Dave Jones has what it takes to make a great Insurance Commissioner, looking out for us.

SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION: TOM TORLAKSON. A science teacher -- a second-generation teacher -- and high school coach, Assemblymember Tom Torlakson has fought for school funding, textbooks, computers, campus safety, student health and fitness, after-school programs, student nutrition, and physical education, and against hazing, crimes against children, junk foods on campus, and our alarming dropout rates. As State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson wants to work for safe schools, career and technical education, college prep, arts and music programs, and excellence in school management. A vote for Torlakson is a vote for our kids.

SECRETARY OF STATE: DEBORAH BOWEN. As Secretary of State, Bowen has earned a national reputation for exposing flaws and ensuring security in our electronic voting systems. She has also streamlined her agency and cut its budget, increased the public's access to agency information online, improved voter education, and held private contractors more accountable. Sec. of State Bowen has earned our votes for re-election.

P R O P O S I T I O N S

PROP. 19: MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION. YES. Regulate and tax the sale of this already widely available substance, like we do alcohol; the existing prohibition, like that we had against alcohol, costs society dearly -- in terms of policing, incarceration, enriching and empowering gangs and drug cartels, and making criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Supported by L.A. Co. Dem. Party.

PROP. 20: CONGRESSIONAL REDISTRICTING. NO. Empowers the 14-member state redistricting commission -- appointed by three state auditors, in a very untransparent and unaccountable procedure -- created by Prop. 11 (2008) and prevents redistricting by the Legislature -- accountable to us voters -- and does not guarantee the right of voters to reject boundary maps by referendum. If both this and Prop. 27 (below) pass, then the one with the most votes prevails. Opposed by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties and the CA Sierra Club.

PROP. 21: SURCHARGE FOR PARKS AND WILDLIFE. YES. Pay an extra $18 a year on your vehicle licensing to not only preserve and protect our wonderful state parks (in need of a lot of maintenance) and irreplaceable wildlife, but also to get for yourself a free day-use admission to all the state parks. Supported by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties and the CA Sierra Club.

PROP. 22: PROHIBITION ON STATE'S BORROWING OR TAKING FUNDS FOR TRANSPORTATION, REDEVELOPMENT, OR LOCAL GOVERNMENT PROJECTS. NO. A close call -- a power struggle between state and local governments -- but the facts that it will further hamstring the state budgeting process -- already nearly impossible -- and open the door for "sweetheart" deals with local developers argue against this proposition. Opposed by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties.

PROP. 23: SUSPENDS "GREENHOUSE GAS" AIR POLLUTION CONTROL LAW. NO. Don't let the Texas oil companies behind this initiative tear down our state's leading environmental law and destroy clean energy jobs! Opposed by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties and the CA Sierra Club.

PROP. 24: REPEALS CORPORATE TAX BREAKS. YES. Close a big tax loophole that recently passed but benefits almost entirely a few huge corporations, not small businesses, and restore funding to schools and other vital public services. Supported by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties.

PROP. 25: SIMPLE MAJORITY VOTE FOR BUDGET. YES. Make state budgeting fairer and more effective. Restore majority-rule -- and get rid of minority-rule, by The Party of No -- by dropping the requirement for a 2/3 supermajority and requiring only a simple majority (51% or greater) to pass a state budget (although there still will be a 2/3 supermajority required to raise taxes). What's more, if legislators fail to agree on a budget by the deadline, they forfeit their state pay! See also Prop. 26 (just below). Supported by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties and the CA Sierra Club.

PROP. 26. SUPERMAJORITY VOTE FOR FEES AND CHARGES: NO. Changes the vote to approve certain fees and charges -- as on big oil and tobacco, to clean up their pollution and other health hazards -- from a simple majority (51% or greater) to a 2/3 supermajority; in other words, allows minority-rule, by the Party of No. See also Prop. 25 (just above). Opposed by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties and the CA Sierra Club.

PROP. 27. ELIMINATES REDISTRICTING COMMISSION. YES. Eliminates the 14-member state redistricting commission -- appointed by three state auditors, in a very untransparent and unaccountable procedure -- created by Proposition 11 (2008) and returns redistricting to the Legislature -- accountable to us voters -- and guarantees by constitutional amendment the right of voters to reject boundary maps by referendum. If both this and Prop. 20 (above) pass, then the one with the most votes prevails. Supported by CA and L.A. Co. Dem. parties.

Voting is power to the people! Use it or lose it. Vote and get out the vote!

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How the Right Wing Destroyed America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The U.S. Supreme Court has decreed: corporations are now people. They have been given rights that only real people had before. Worse --corporations remain 'privileged' in ways that real people could only dream about! Corporations enjoy 'limited liability', a privilege which, in fact, defines them. Corporations are above the law.

Real people meanwhile may be prosecuted for murders and, if found guilty, sentenced and possibly executed. A mere legal abstraction need never fear the hand of justice. They have been made 'people' but very, very privileged people to whom the criminal laws may never be applied. Examples are Exxon with respect to the Exxon Valdez disaster and Dow Chemical, Union Carbide et al with respect to mass deaths at Bhopal.

Real people, meanwhile, have been robbed of any real power by which they may influence the direction of government. The power resides primarily among the corporations and an increasingly tiny elite which control them from the board room. This is symptomatic of dictatorial plutocracies that result when the rich are enriched! We witnessed recently the most absurd SCOTUS decision in U.S. history in which it is decreed that these mere legal abstractions --corporations --are real people to which all the Bill of Rights apply, to which the protections of Due Process of Law apply! This unconscionable outcome is the reductio ad absurdum of right wing thinking in general and fascist policies specifically. Unless this decision is reversed or may irrelevant by law immediately and a Constitutional Amendment in the longer term, you can kiss the last vestiges of American Democracy goodbye.

Today --just one percent of the U.S. population owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined and the trend is toward even greater concentration of wealth into yet fewer hands. The trend began in earnest with the Reagan years --heady boom times for the idle rich, offshore banks and the Military-Industrial complex. But in real America, the growth industries were poverty and crime.

Even in the second half of the 19th Century, when big 'combines' were industrializing the world, it was not believed that these mere agreements on paper were 'people'. Even so, organized labor was in a fight for its life, a fight that it did not lose decisively until Ronald Reagan busted up a strike of air traffic controllers in the 1980s. Concurrently, the conduct of American politics morphed. Politics, over the years, ceased to address the needs of 'people'. Politics became the process by which 'money' bought influence in DC and the various state houses throughout the nation.

We'll never raise as much money as Bush is going to raise and his corporate lobbyists, I can promise you, because he has paid them back in spades.

--James Carville

Carville refers to the very purchase of the government, a purchase analogous to the sale of Rome by the Praetorian Guard which literally auctioned and sold the Empire to nobleman Didius Julianus. The sale was transacted in Greek Drachmas --not worthless Roman sesterces.

Rome was then as the U.S. is now a plutocracy.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think we have one now and we didn't, 12 years ago when I wrote THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR is when money has ceased just entertaining itself with leveraged buyouts and all the stuff they did in the '80s, and really takes over politics, and takes it over on both sides when money not only talks, money screams. When you start developing philosophies in which giving a check is a First Amendment right. That's incredible. But what you've got is that this is what money has done. It's produced the fusion of money and government. And that is plutocracy. ... a plutocracy in a way that we haven't had before, since the gilded age.

BILL MOYERS But the signers of the Declaration were representatives of America's first and wealthiest families.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, they were, but, you know, a funny thing about that, because they were simultaneously people who were furious with the British. Furious with the British for taxing them, for not letting them make their pig iron into hammer and spades, for not paying the right amount of money for tobacco.

And if you read what they had to say, it sounds like the American version 100 years earlier of what the people out in the plains said about the bankers in New York and the railroad owners in Minneapolis. So they were fighters in a way. And Thomas Jefferson pretty much stuck with that. You had a divergence within the founding fathers of those who became, in the American context, pretty conservative, and those who like Jefferson maintained their anger they had against the British economic elites in the United States.

BILL MOYERS: But where is that anger today? Because the ... the two men who spoke most consistently with what you're saying in WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY in 2000, John McCain and Willi... Bill Bradley, Senator Bradley, both got defeated in their primaries. And they were the ones who were registering the discontent of which you are ... are writing about. What happened? The peop... that the majority of people don't share your convictions and mine?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, I'm not certain whether they do or they don't. But the ... the key thing in the year 2000 was that if you look at all the psychological profiles of the United States, of the electorate during that period, even though the Nasdaq had started to crash they still thought things were pretty good. The real dive didn't come until after the election when you had the miserable elections stalemate and the sagging economy.

So that basically, you never get one of these reactions against big money until you've had this speculative implosion. And normally I think if we were seeing any kind of debate in Washington, and the Democrats have all kinds of things they could say about the Bush dynasty and Enron, for example, it's mind blowing, but they don't.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think partly because they're so interested in raising money that they can't see their soul in the mirror.

BILL MOYERS: What has happened to the word equality? When you and I were young men in politics it was a common reference in our political discourse. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, a lot of others too, but you don't hear it in the political lexicon anymore.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: You hear it in twisted ways. There is a view in some conservative circles that it doesn't matter much what concentrations of wealth you have or disparities of income. It's equality of consumption. It's the right to have Nike shoes, to listen to a boom box, to take a plane ride. And ...

BILL MOYERS: Nothing wrong with that.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, no, but on the other hand, that didn't solve problems in a depression when you had the right to watch a plane fly over Kansas. Or turn on the radio. So you've got these different ledgers that are kept. And people that try to say "consumption is the yardstick" usually have it in mind that democracy is not ... that income differentials are not, they stand for a different philosophy.

BILL MOYERS: Didn't the word "equality" disappear because the people who believe in inequality won the elections?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, there's a certain truth to that. And going back to the time when we were both in politics on different sides of the aisle, the ... one of the great weaknesses, in my opinion, in liberal politics, was to start talking about social equality in a way that had never really occurred in the United States. People came to this country as immigrants and they ... they suffered all kinds of hardships and "no Irish need apply" and everything you could name. Nobody ever tried to draw blueprints for bussing the Irish around Boston ...

BILL MOYERS: Mm-hm.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: ... or things like that. And there was a sense that equality in the social sense could be obtained through government, that became powerful in the '60s. And in my opinion, that was the beginning of the tending of the idea of equality in the sense of ... of economics. Now, conservatives will still say all that matters is equality of opportunity.

BILL MOYERS: The market will produce the equality.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Yes, exactly.

BILL MOYERS: You ... you know that I was quite taken with your book "The Politics of Rich and Poor," what, a decade ago?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: 1990.

BILL MOYERS: 1990. In it you told of how the wealthy had made great gains in their power. They had ... are you writing the same thing now? Has it changed quantitatively and qualitatively?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think there are two stages, the 18- ... the 1980s were the first stage in the sense that Ronald Reagan wanted people to have a chance to get rich. He liked entrepreneurs, he liked people who owned 14 department stores or two movie studios. It wasn't for the big old steel companies or anything, but he liked money. And he and Don Regan, the Treasury secretary, created a political culture in which fashion became in, making money became in, paper entrepreneurialism was the key, all the leveraged buyouts. And that was a whole culture of... people got a lot of money at the top.

But what you got then in the 1990s was, in my opinion, stage two. And this was the technology mania, and the rise of the securities markets, taking technology and making this incredible bubble out of it. And a new crowd of people got rich. Plenty of the old people, but a whole lot of new people. New people who tended to have a more liberal politics in many cases, to name Internet companies, things like Yahoo! and AskJeeves, and what have you.

If you look at the list of new money in the Forbes 400 say in 199... 1998 or 1999, when the Internet crowd was coming in big time, we've got an awful lot of Democrats. And the Democratic Party has in its own way started to be a party of a different type of wealth. The Republicans have the smoke stacks and the polluters and the ranchers and the oil companies, and the Democrats have a lot of the communications media, a lot of biotechnology, a lot of the coming stuff ...

So what we've got are two sets of people in Washington who basically because of the whole demand of financing campaigns go to people with money. They go to different sets of money and you've sort of got what you had in politics before the Civil War: the Democratic Party, that basically was in with a southern plantation aristocracy, and Republicans who are in with the merging industry. Nobody was for the little guy.

BILL MOYERS: What's the ordinary Joe and Jane to do? I mean, the guys running these cameras working here, whom you've met, they can't write big checks to either political party or political candidates, and yet it's a struggle not to leave people despairing today when they read an analysis such as "Wealth and Democracy." What are the average folks to do?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, one thing I think they have to do is they really have to say on certain issues, which are not strictly party issues, we've just got to mobilize on the issues, whether it's campaign finance or other things like that. But secondarily they've got to work to make the party system make a difference. You can't have two parties that represent different flavors of great wealth and expect not to see all these weaknesses continue to grow.

BILL MOYERS: But you've already said that both parties spend all their time raising money. And they don't listen to the people running the cameras. They listen to the people writing the checks.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Yeah, well, some of the time they do, because you keep reading about votes in Congress periodically, where these outrageous proposals, be they tax or trade or other things, they only make it through by one, two, three votes. People are standing there twisting arms of Presidents, giving them six post offices and three favors.

Now, if there wasn't some responsiveness to public opinion and a sense that things have gone too far, that wouldn't happen. So the trick is to mobilize somehow or other institutions in this political culture that will take those issues on which Congress ... some of them would like to be made to vote against their contributors. And, you know, I'm ... I'm not sure how to do it. I think ...

BILL MOYERS: It took a rich man, Ross Perot, to make it happen in any significant manifestation ... eight years ago, ten years ago.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: But see, part of the thing in ... in the United States, is that the minority of rich people are usually on the side of trying to make America work like America. You had in the last election, in the three people who were running sort of as populist, John McCain, millionaire, son and grandson of four-star admirals, Bill Bradley, multi-millionaire, former basketball player, even Ralph Nader's got three or four million dollars worth of investments. So all kinds of people go against what should be their interest financially because of what they think is the right thing to do. That's really something to build on.

BILL MOYERS: What's been the biggest change? You ... I was in Washington in the '60s, you came right after, helped elect Richard Nixon, we were both in our 30's then, very young 30's, what's been the biggest change in Washington since we were young men there?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think the entrenchment of money in ways you can't even begin to count. It used to be that when a new wave politically came to Washington they swept it out. And that was certainly true with Lincoln, it was certainly true with FDR. It couldn't happen even in the '60s, in my opinion. There's no way to sweep now. The whole structure was just a pyramid of ... of economic influence mongering.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think the new McCain Feingold ban on soft money will have any positive impact on this?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Oh, it'll have some positive impact, but in many ways, it's gonna be another version of the lawyers and accountants full employment act.

BILL MOYERS: So what do we do?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Keep fighting. I think there are signs that it's turning now. To me one of the most important milestones will be if people, and I include the media here, have the courage to document and put on the front page what they won't really touch now, which is ...

BILL MOYERS: Which is?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: All the examples of the Bush family's role in the rise of Enron. Here, we're running around, we're blaming these accountants, these tricksters that were in Enron, but George W. and George H.W., his father, were very much involved in the whole rise of Enron's influence and power in this country. But you ... you don't see that. People in the press have a lot of trouble touching these issues right where the rubber hits the road.

BILL MOYERS: Well, when you've got anchors making eight, nine, ten million dollars a year, when you've got a handful of huge media corporations owning over half of the outlets in this country, do you expect much populism from those people?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: No. And that's the fundamental problem. How do you get dynasties to talk about other dynasties? I think it's a real difficulty. Unfortunately, that means that some of us have to start talking about stuff we'd rather not do all the time because if you don't make a lot of friends by doing it ... it's tough, but a dynasty is a dynasty is a dynasty and these problems are there, and this incredible amount of money is ... is just staring this country's historical role in the face

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain that the pro-wealth policies of the right, the conservatives, have endured so much support among working Americans and low income Americans?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, all I can say is if I were a Democratic senator, I would go on and make a speech that might remind Democrats of stuff they haven't heard in a long time. You get professors who are dedicated liberals and they go on and they make these speeches and nobody pays any attention. You have to basically go in there and do a number. You have to go in there and just stand there and describe who supports somebody, who is paid for and who has done this, that and the other.

If the Democrats wanted to take all these issues out and run 'em up the flagpole, there is still plenty of people ready to salute. That's why we have some of these close votes. But you've got to be willing to do it. And I understand why a lot of them don't want to do it. But, you know, who's gonna do it? Ralph Nader couldn't do it. His friends dropped him when he talked about all of this.

--Kevin Phillips, Author of 'Wealth and Democracy', Now with Bill Moyers

Why does the GOP insist upon repeating failed strategies? Reaganites promised that the stimulated economy would outgrow the deficit and the budget would be balanced "...within three years, maybe even two." It didn't! Reagan tripled the deficit and, on the way, doubled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Reagan's tax cuts were followed promptly by the longest and worst recession since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. As Robert Freeman correctly points out: "...Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year."

How will Bush the lesser compare to Reagan? By the year 2002, Citizens for Tax Justice were already writing:

Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated to receive tax cuts totalling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.

By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.

1968 was the year in which measured postwar income was at its most equal for families. The Gini index for households indicates that there has been growing income inequality over the past quarter-century. Inequality grew slowly in the 1970's and rapidly during the early 1980's. ...Generally, the long-term trend has been toward increasing income inequality. Since 1969, the share of aggregate household income controlled by the lowest income quintile has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 1997, while the share to the highest quintile increased from 43.0 percent to 49.4 percent. Most noticeably, the share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Over the same time period, the Gini index rose 17.4 percent to its 1997 level of .459.

—Income Inequality, Census Bureau

The trend began then has continued: October 2003 figures from the US Census Bureau make stark reading:

Median household incomes are falling The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million individuals.

The number of people living below the poverty line ($18,392 for a family of four) climbed to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million people.

Wages make up the majority of income for most American families. As "Downward Mobility," NOW's report on workers and wages illustrates, many American workers are facing corporate efforts to cut pay and benefits, which could lead to more American families struggling to stay out of poverty.

The results in black and white:

• Twenty percent of the population own 84% of our private assets, leaving the other 80 percent of the population with 15.6 percent of the assets.
• In 1960, the wealth gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of Americans was thirty fold. Four decades later it’s more than seventy-five-fold.
• Either way -- wealth or income – America is more unequal, economists generally agree, than at any time since the start of the Great Depression…
• And more unequal than any other developed nation today.

—Inequality.org

The most pernicious effect of GOP economic policy is the effect of declining opportunity, a corollary of declining in wealth among all but the very rich.

It is merely rhetorical to ask: why does the GOP seem to repeat ad nauseum utterly failed strategies that have never been shown to work? The answer is simple: the GOP sales pitch is what Reagan Budget Director David Stockman called a 'Trojan Horse'. The purpose of the tax cut is not to trickle down. The tax cuts always do precisely what the GOP insiders know they will do: they enrich the GOP base! Here is how someone who lived through the Reagan nightmare remembers it:

I was in the automotive field at the time, and dozens and dozens of established tool manufacturers, unionized shops, producing high quality tools, small companies with deep roots and real a commitment to the towns they were in all across the Midwest and the local communities, went out of business.

Why? Because with deregulation any hustler could get virtually unlimited financing and set up manufacturing plants overseas producing exact copies of American made tools and flood the US market with them with no fear of the Reagan administration enforcing any laws against them.

It also became easier, and far less risky, to get financing to set up a thousand junky identical chain outlets than it did for small local businesses to get credit or tax relief - restaurants, auto parts stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, florists - thousands and thousands of small businesses chewed up and destroyed.

We have a younger generation of people who have no personal experience with so many things - local businesses and tight knit communities, affordable, convenient and efficient public transportation, wages that allowed one person in a household enough income to support the family, homes that were homes, not investments, easy access to public recreation, confidence in the safety of food and other consumer items, all regulated and inspected for the public welfare, freedom from the relentless intrusion of corporations into our lives, and on and on and on.

Reagan destroyed the country, and if we try to gloss over that (which at the very least Obama's remarks have done) or if we buy into the dishonest rationales and excuses and obfuscations that the Reagan administration used to disguise their agenda and to sell it to the public, we surrender any chance at real change, we bury the coffin forever into which the right wingers have put the left - and by extension, the majority of the American people, and we condemn ourselves to living in this ongoing nightmare of destruction and human suffering.

It is not time to make nice with the Reagan legacy propagandists, even by implication or omission. It is time to relentlessly and fearlessly point out that the crisis the country is in is best described and analyzed as the chickens coming home to roost from the Reagan era.

It is time to fight. It is not time to heal or move on—no matter how attractive and appealing this may be—it is not time to paper over the profound divide in the country, it is not time to accommodate or apologize for

--Found on the Democratic Underground

Paul Krugman can always be depended upon to put this kind of thing in perspective.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan’s political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.) But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.

Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

--Paul Krugman, Debunking the Reagan Myth

Reagan/Bush tax cuts are payoffs to the very rich for their support. For everyone else, the GOP prescription is simple: just take another dose of what's making you sick.

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Why this Crisis May be Worse than the Great Depression

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

About one percent of the nation owning more than about 90 percent of the rest of us combined not only foresaw the impending crash but planned to benefit from it. GOP types have traditionally gotten rich by playing 'last man out loses'! A race to be first to 'get out' has triggered many a panic creating bargains to be picked up, fortunes to be made on the inevitable upside. The big difference now is that --this time --there may not be an upside.

The sheer size of this crisis is worrisome. During the Great Depression, the US still had viable industries that had not yet been exported to China by way of the Bushes and Wal-Mart. The US manufactured automobiles, refrigerators, radios and, later, televisions sets. The steel industry created Pittsburgh. Autos made Detroit. America's work and labor were the sources of its wealth. The right wing exploitation and export of that wealth is the source of our current poverty, the financial collapse and our impending slide into third world status. An increasingly tiny elite is the cancer upon the body politic and economic.

The US oligarchy demonstrates why it so foolhardy to transfer so much wealth to so few so quickly. These 'few' foresaw the crisis and triggered it by bailing out early. It is left to the rest of us to pick up the tab.

Something like 50 trillion dollars in derivative debt is far bigger than even the stock market. Derivatives are collateralized debt obligations, leading to the erroneous conclusion that 'debt is money'. The current crisis is proof that it is not. Moreover, anyone who has ever taken a course in accounting knows the accounting equation: net worth = assets - liabilities. That the money changers swapped these instruments did not change the accounting equation. Money owed you is not money in the bank --a lesson that is, of late, very expensive.
Many have said that 'we are doomed'! Our borrowing will be financed by our own savings. Already, Beijing is poised to become the financial capital of the world.

We can thank Wal-Mart and GOP policies for that outcome. In previous articles, I have traced the rise of the Axis of Wal-Mart/China to the faustian bargain Bush Sr cut with Chinese poohbahs as he paved the way for Nixon's infamous visit to the Forbidden city back in 1973. The quick rule of thumb: whenever the US is betrayed, you can be sure to find a GOPPER in hiding whenever the shit hits the fan.

Lately, it has become fashionable to 'spread the guilt' around! What's up with that? I suspect another scheme, another right wing tactic. Fact is GOP 'trickle down' policies have had the measurable effect of enriching just one percent of the nation's population. When the GOP has been caught holding the blood-dripping dagger over the corpse I am in no mood to listen to crap like: 'but Democrats are 'bad' too!' Not this time! Democrats were in office but eight years out of thirty! But in those measly eight years the trend in which wealth flows upward was reversed only to be undone by Bush Jr.

So --if you wish to dilute the open/shut case against Reagan/Bush/Bush Jr cite me some facts and spare me the bullshit!

It was not so long ago that a Democratic president had left to his incompetent GOP successor a whopping budget surplus, a growing economy, the lowest unemployment in decades, and --for Republicans --the most worrisome trend of all: the rich were no longer getting richer as they had done during the Reagan/Bush years. I can think of only one group of people who are most miserable when times are good! REPUBLICANS!

Historically, Republicans have always benefited from recessions.

1. Recessions are not caused by declining stock markets but seem always to be accompanied by them and are often predicted by them. Republicans play the game of 'last man out wind', taking their profits in numbers that often cause the panic. Only insiders benefit. Others are forced to take their losses.
2. A depressed market becomes an opportunity for the elite oligarchs to get back in. This elite, in fact, controls the market. Everyone else is exploited by the oligarchs.
3. It is easy to make money 'selling short' if you have an insider's knowledge of the market. That fortunes were made short-selling subsequent to the 911 attacks seems to me persuasive, perhaps conclusive evidence that 911 was an inside job. What was known by whom and when? No wonder Bush covered up 911. The answer to those questions would have exposed a murderous conspiracy, perhaps 'insiders' inside Bush's criminal and treasonous administration.
4. Unemployment always rises during times of recession. Should they survive, companies will hire from a larger labor pool at lower wages, lower salaries, reduced benefits, and less vacation or sick time. The GOP despises the Clinton years --not because they were bad but because they were good years and fondly remembered. Europe after the Black Death has that much in common with the Clinton years. The labor supply had been depleted by plague. A would-be employer often had to accede to a worker's demands--better working conditions, more money, a place to live! The serfs had been freed and it was the beginning of the end for Feudalism. I had hoped that a less traumatic cataclysm would have already freed modern day "corporate serfs." Alas! My hopes are dashed. If the US survives at all, you can rest assured that the ruling elite will hire from an impoverished and growing labor pool. Wages and salaries are sure to be inadequate and, as a result, the 'recovery' (should there be one) will be slower for it.
5. Only the oligarchs benefit when many businesses go out of business during depressions which have the effect of 'weeding out' the competition, consolidating oligarchical gains. A conservative, therefore, is someone who supports a free market when it benefits him and the oligarchy at every other time.
6. Recessions are not always accompanied by a decline in prices. As many businesses fail, competition is decreased and higher prices result. Given the demand for a particular product, a company may actually earn more money selling fewer units. The difference comes out of your ass. Such demand is called: inelastic, i.e. revenues increase as prices increase --even if total sales should fall.

Unless someone blows the whistle or exercises some clout, the increasingly tiny elite of just one percent of the US population will be even richer at the end of this ruinous and tragic financial collapse. You can be sure the oligarchs foresaw the collapse and hastened it. You can be sure that they alone will benefit from it as they have benefited from every other such crisis in US history.

Depressions are defined by a 'contraction' of the supply of money. It has been asked: 'where did all the money go?'. Much of it was exported to offshore bank accounts in anticipation of a domestic collapse. But much of that money didn't really exist. It was just paper. It became fashionable to consider DEBT as money. But debt is not money and never was. Anyone who has ever considered the significance of the accounting equation --capital equals assets MINUS liabilities knows the truth of it. Nor is 'debt' money for those holding the paper. Loans are good only when backed up by collateral or, in some cases, one's earnings and ability to re-pay. As in all crashes, a 'bill' has come due but cannot be paid.

If debt is not money, what is? A question that was debated just prior and during the Great Depression and, again, in the 1980s. At that time, there were attempts to create a stable ERM --an Exchange Rate Mechanism for European currencies. A gold standard was also discussed. In both cases, it was 'labor' that sucked up the costs of implementation which consisted of efforts to force manufacturers to keep costs down. Again --it is not wealth that trickles down. It is 'costs' that always trickle down and labor is always expected to suck up the costs and consequences of such schemes.

More recently, a 'gold standard' was discussed. Who would have borne the costs of such a scheme when it became clear that the US cannot back up but a fraction of its 'currency' with gold? Ron Paul, I believe, advocated a tax rebate for precious metals purchases. That would have hastened the collapse by encouraging a run on the dollar! But, in fact, the ordinary working person does not invest in precious metals and, if he had done, the decline in consumer spending would have brought about the collapse of our economy even sooner and, arguably, the effects would have been even worse.

Following is a PBS NEWS HOUR Interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb of October, 21, 2008. A Famous economist, Taleb authored "The Black Swan". Also appearing on the video is Dr. Mandelbrot, professor of Mathematics. Both point out several reasons that make the current crisis worse, more serious than the Great Depression.

Worse Than the Great Depression

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The Origins of Collapse in Nixon/Reagan/Bush Sellouts, Criminality and Incompetence

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Bailouts for Wall Street insiders are a complete waste of $trillions$. It was Ronald Reagan whose policies began the process by which American jobs --the very source of American wealth --were exported 'offshore' to China, Japan, India, Viet Nam, et al. US robber baron elites are lying and/or wrong about the source of this nation's wealth. Every economist of significance --right or left --has said that 'labor' is the source of 'value'.

Not content to merely export American jobs, these 'robber barons' have demanded and received whopping bailouts which they've likewise exported to offshore tax havens. The 'robber baron elites' --a mere one percent of the total population and decreasing still --had set this nation on a 'race to the bottom' where we have, in fact, arrived.

It was the Reagan's tax cut of 1982 that began the dissolution of the US economy. Since that time an increasingly tiny elite has gotten exponentially richer. I am no coincidence theorist. This was by design.

It must be pointed out that following the tax cut, the nation plunged into recession, the worst since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression of 1929. 'Tax cuts' benefiting only the upper classes remove monies from circulation, monies that might be spent, monies that might have prevented a recession or cut short those already begun. Unfair, inequitable tax cuts create what economists call a 'contraction' of the money supply. A more familiar word is 'depression'.

It must also be pointed out that there was 'no Reagan recovery'! The record shows that between 1979 and 1989 the growth rate was 3% --the same as the growth rate between 1973 and 1979! There was, then, no improvement with "voodoo economics" than without it. There was no "Reagan recovery"! Wealth did not trickle down; it flowed upward at alarming rates.

The nation had been plunged unnecessarily into recession upon a pack of lies. The only beneficiaries were those who were rich already. At the end of his disastrous misrule, the economy had barely gotten back to where it had been before Reagan screwed it up. That's not 'recovery'; it's theft!

Wages have been stagnant since 1982. Prices, however, have inevitably risen and only the 'elites' have benefited. Result: you are much, much poorer in terms of what your money will buy. I would direct you to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Commerce - BEA, the Census Bureau. It's all there in black and white.

The unkindest cut of all is the Faustian deal Nixon cut with China. China --thanks to Reagan/Bush axis of treason and betrayal --has the world's largest POSITIVE account balance --the result of deals cut by the GOP, deals which have resulted in China dumping its crap on the US via Wal-Mart. As a result of those deals, the US sustains, by far, the world's largest NEGATIVE current account balance of $ -568,800,000,000. [See: CIA: The World Factbook] The famous trip and the deal had been set up earlier by Bush Sr with what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men seeking to procure their commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth'.

Every economist of significance --right or left --has said that 'labor' is the source of 'value' and thus a nation's 'wealth'. This outcome was inevitable. The GOP regimes of Reagan, Bush, and Bush Jr presided over the export of US jobs to China, Japan, India, Viet Nam. Who benefited? Quick response: only one percent of the total population, the GOP base of elitist robber barons.

Not content to export American jobs, these 'robber barons' have demanded and received whopping bailouts which they've likewise exported to offshore tax havens. The end result of this 'contraction' of the money supply may very well make the 'Great Depression' look like a Sunday outing. In the thirties, the US still had a steel industry, an automotive industry, appliances, et al. What can the US fall back on today that China has not already pre-empted? Not even the oil industry will save us. The fact that the US attacked and invaded Iraq for its oil is proof of that.

Wages have been stagnant since 1982. I cited the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Commerce - BEA, the Census Bureau. It's all there in black and white. Following the Reagan tax cuts of 1982, every one not in the upper quintile lost ground.

Reagan did not perform nearly so well as Jimmy Carter, who is, in fact, among the nation's best 'performing' Presidents in terms of the growth of GDP and jobs. Everything said by the right wing about Carter is a bald face lie! Carter ranks number two on the list of best Presidents since World War II.

From that same list, the top five are Democrats. The bottom three are goppers [politely, Republicans!!].

Very early, the upper twenty percent outstripped every other segment. Now even the poorest of the rich are in danger of falling off the ladder: only one percent of the population owns more than the rest of us combined. This has been a deliberate transfer of wealth, a deliberate assault upon the economic foundation of 'value', a subversion of the US by the very richest of right wingers. A crime of this magnitude is not merely the biggest heist in history, as I have called it, it borders on high treason. Certainly --this crisis undermines national security, exposes weaknesses to enemies.

The 'bailouts' are premised on 'trickle down theory', a crazy right wing idea that only the investor class creates wealth and that's why they need money. This is just crazy. The source of a nation's wealth is the work that is done. Elites do not work and do not create wealth! Most of these 'elites' should be rounded up and thrown in jail for various and numerous frauds. They should never, ever be bailed out!

At the height of the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes said that the government might get better results if, instead of 'bailing out' the big wigs and fat cats, it just put "pound notes' in mason jars, bury them in a landfill and let people dig them up. Clearly --money in the hands of those who will SPEND their money will stimulate the economy. Fat cats squirrelling away bailouts in offshore tax havens will not!.

Lately, it has become fashionable to say that debt is money! That's stupid on its face. Debt may represent 'leverage' but not 'value' and most certainly not 'money'. Debt is nothing more than a promise to pay with something of 'real' value at some point in time.

Paper money was --at one time --backed up by gold. Gold had intrinsic value as a metal of not inconsiderable practical applications. A 'practical application' is, ultimately the product of work or 'labor'. Almost every major economist from Adam Smith (the godfather of capitalism) to Karl Marx (the godfather of socialism) are in agreement: the source of value in an economy is 'labor'.

A simple illustration may make the point. If I own land, I may wish to dig a ditch in order to irrigate my crops. I can either dig the ditch myself or, if I should have 'capital', I may wish to hire the ditch dug for me while I manage the enterprise. In any case, the work that is done is of 'value' to me and, presumably, my enterprise is more valuable for my having done it.

Young, arrogant hotshots came to believe --like Gordan Gecko --that all one needed to do to get rich was just move money around. This 'class' leeches off the labors of others who had, in simpler times, made the factories run.

A balance sheet disproves the bogus theory that 'debt' is 'money'. A 'balance sheet' is composed of three parts: assets, liabilities, net worth. It's a simple equation: net worth is equal to total assets minus liabilities. If 'debt' were 'wealth', you would have to add 'liabilities' --not subtract them! Adding liabilities would give one a grossly inflated value of the enterprise. Making money would be easy: just take out another loan! Perhaps an absurd perversion of this most elementary accounting principle accounts for the sorry state of US business and GOP dominated government.

One is reminded of Enron and lesser known crooks cooking the books, scamming customers, putting the screws to California. An investigation to discover the cause of the imbalance is imperative. The entire point of the 'accounting equation' is to arrive at a figure for 'net worth'. If 'debt' were money, the 'net worth' of individuals, corporations, sole proprietorships would be figured differently. A mentality that equates the ability to take on more debt with REAL money is what got us into this mess to begin with.

Addendum:

No! Democrats are NOT just as bad!

The following stats are just a sample of the numerous, seemingly endless instances in which the GOP has been dead wrong and the Democratic party has been absolutely correct. Let's take a look at the history before it gets re-written:

• Any Democratic President has presided over greater economic growth and job creation than any Republican President since World War II.
• When Bush Jr took office, job creation was worst under a Republican, Bush Sr, at 0.6% per year and best under a Democrat, Johnson, at 3.8% per year.
• Economic growth under President Carter was far greater than under Reagan or Bush Sr. In fact, economic growth in general was greater under Johnson, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton than under Reagan or Bush. Democrats always outperform a failed party: the GOP!
• The job creation rate under Clinton was 2.4% significantly higher than Ronald Reagan's 2.1% per year.
• The "top performing Presidents" by this standard, in order from best down, were Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Kennedy. The "worst" (in descending order) were Nixon, Reagan, Bush.
• Half of jobs created under Reagan were in the public sector --some 2 million jobs added to the Federal Bureaucracy. Hadn't he promised to reduce that bureaucracy?
• Reagan, though promising to reduce government and spending, tripled the national debt and left huge deficits to his successor. Bush Jr's record will be even worse.
• By contrast, most of the jobs created on Clinton's watch were in the private sector.
• Put another way: any Democratic President beats any Republican President since World War II.

These are just a few that I had knocked out quickly in preparation for a previous article. With any real work, any one with a nodding acquaintance of economics can demolish the GOP. The GOP is a crime syndicate, specifically a FRAUD foisted upon the American populace in order to enrich the increasingly tiny elite. That they have been highly successful is convincing evidence, perhaps absolute proof of the cult-like nature of this phony 'party'.

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The Obama Budget: A Return to Equality

by Doug Drenkow

Stoked by the changes going on in DC, I just had to share with you, below, a few excerpts from today's most-e-mailed article in the New York Times online. And remember: This isn't about "class warfare" -- even though that is what you'll continue to hear from those on the Right who, as the article reports, for some 30 years have been effectively looting the national treasury and all the other wealth created by the hard-working, anything-but-rich people of this great nation.

No, this is simply about restoring fairness and wisdom to our economic policies. Why, even the rich will ultimately be enriched if the poor and middle class have more money, since it is the "anything but ordinary" Americans (as Obama so wonderfully put it) who buy most of the goods and services sold by the companies the rich are invested in. There's a word for that phenomenon: It's called "progress."

Our nation, plundered by greed, will be restored by hard work and common sense. And I don't know anything more American than that.

A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas

By David Leonhardt

The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters. ...

More than anything else, the proposals seek to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. They do so first by rewriting the tax code and, over the longer term, by trying to solve some big causes of the middle-class income slowdown, like high medical costs and slowing educational
gains. ...

[T]he average post-tax income of the top 1 percent of households has jumped by roughly $1 million since 1979, adjusted for inflation, to $1.4 million. Pay for most families has risen only slightly faster than inflation.

Before becoming Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers liked
to tell a hypothetical story to distill the trend. The increase in inequality, Mr. Summers would say, meant that each family in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution was effectively sending a $10,000 check, every year, to the top 1 percent of earners. [emphasis mine]

Mr. Obama’s budget reflects that sensibility. Budget experts were still sorting through the details on Thursday, but it appeared that various tax cuts and credits aimed at the middle class and the poor would increase the take-home pay of the median household by roughly $800.

The tax increases on the top 1 percent, meanwhile, will most likely cost them $100,000 a year. ...

And if the economy remains weak into next year, as many forecasters expect, Congressional Republicans will try to pin the blame on the looming tax increases on the affluent.

It was Chris Matthews (or perhaps his likewise great MSNBC colleagues Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow) pointed out, can you even imagine a U.S. politician on the national scene, let alone in an address to a joint session of Congress, unabashedly calling for higher taxes on the wealthy even just a couple years ago?

It's horrific that it took a financial crisis that has us not just "on the brink" but actually going over -- The GDP shrunk by 6% last quarter! -- but finally it seems like some common sense has finally been pounded into the American psyche. 69% of the public thinks Obama's doing the right things on the economy; and after watching the Obama speech, over 80% think the economy will get better.

But like any wounded animal, the Right is now more dangerous than ever. And you and I know they are capable of anything to keep their power. However, what they don't seem to realize is that the people at large -- the everyday households whose consumption accounts for two-thirds of the GDP and whose votes put the hands on the levers of constitutional power -- are the real "powers that be" ... as long as we are properly informed and not misled.

And that is precisely why I am surely stoked by the events ongoing. We have an extraordinary leader in Mr. Obama -- Damn my slowness in finishing my Web site / portolio; I need to apply for a job with his administration! -- and in this economic crisis unlike any we've ever seen -- comparisons to the Great Depression may even be inadequate if things continue unabated -- eyes and minds are being opened, unlike I've ever witnessed before. As Obama says, we have great challenges but also a great opportunity to do a lot of good.

But just remember, it was 30 years of lower taxes on the rich -- and fewer regulations on their financial shenanigans -- that got us into this mess in the first place. The only thing that will get us out of it will be tax breaks targeted to and investments in the things that help the other 95% of the population. As the song says, This Land Is Your Land!

---

Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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