Steps Toward Taking Back America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The U.S. is bankrupt, literally owned by China who tops the CIA's World Fact Book with the world's largest positive Current Account Balance. The U.S. is on the very bottom as a result of the policies of four incompetent, corrupt and/or crooked U.S. GOP Presidents: Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr and, more recently, Bush Jr.

The U.S. position on the very bottom may be traced to Richard Nixon's visit to China in the 1970's, a trip which George H.W. Bush laid the groundwork. Prior to this trip, the United States was competitive in world markets, known for its steel production in Pittsburgh, its automotive industry in Detroit, its oil production in West Texas.

I spoke with Bush Sr personally about the deals he cut in China. Admittedly, the interview was hasty, an opportunity seized. Had I been better prepared, I might have tried to pin the Senior Bush down. What --precisely --had he agreed to? What precisely were the concessions made that resulted in the U.S. conceding its leadership to China, reduced to thanking heaven above for merely pulling up the rear?

The U.S. economy might have already collapsed but for the brief resurgence in 'positive' job creation and the increases in GDP during the Carter years. Check the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You will find confirmation that Jimmy Carter is among the best U.S. Presidents in both job creation and GDP growth. Carter, in fact, beats any GOP President since World War II. Carter is reviled by the GOP --not because he failed but because he succeeded! He will never be forgiven that!

My challenge to the incompetent but unrepentant GOP is this: if you truly believe the economic claptrap that 'you' have sold the American people, then repeat these failures in yet another GOP administration to follow Obama. Undo the good that he will have done, just as Bush Jr wiped off the Clinton gains with more GOP nonsense and failed policy. The problem with challenging the GOP is this: they will eagerly take me up on it and outdo previous debacles. Why should they care? In fact, they don't care! The typical GOP politician is owned by the ultra-rich upon whom he/she is dependent. The typical GOP politician/office holder takes his orders and, like a good li'l Nazi clicks his heels and says Heil, Mein Fuhrer! Then he supports a bill that will exclude his rich, elite sponsors from life in the real world!

The GOP and the elite base that supports them have long ago exported their wealth to offshore tax havens. Neither the GOP nor the increasingly tiny elite that supports them have anything 'riding on' American success! This betrayal of a nation by a political party, in fact, a crime syndicate of kooks, liars, crooks and cultists, is simply unprecedented in world history. I can think of nothing comparable to the GOP betrayal of the United States and millions of hard working U.S. citizens.

Since the Bush/Nixon overtures to China, the U.S. has consistently declined and, most recently, achieved 'dead last' on the above referenced CIA list. But what does the U.S. position on bottom mean? It means that instead of earning more money on your job, you may not have a job at all. It means that the U.S. is no longer a producing nation. It means that the U.S. is better compared to a cow that is milked by China. It means that even if you have a job the dollars you earn are worth less (if not worthless) when you buy products at any other outlet but Wal-Mart. Check the shelves at Wal-Mart. Make a list of U.S. made products! Make a list of those products manufactured in China, to whom Bush/Nixon sold our economic souls by selling out U.S. labor.

Reagan/Nixon/Bush policies are incompetent, to be sure, but they are far worse. The policies were known to be incompetent among 'brighter' members of the GOP but were pursued and/or effected anyway.

But why? Simply --the GOP pursued those policies knowing that it would enrich their base, a payoff for their support! These are, in fact, Faustian bargains struck by ambitious politicians! Owned by the elites who finance them, they do what they are hired to do, that is, support, promote and vote for economic policies that benefit only the increasingly tiny ruling elite --now just one percent of the total population.

We are in debt because we don't produce enough to balance the trade. See the CIA's World Fact Book. We are owned by China who will drop us like yesterday's news when it is no longer beneficial to them. We are already broke and on the bottom of the CIAs list. The dollar is worth what it is only for as long as it is beneficial to China to maintain it; secondly, oil is traded in dollars, thus creating an artificial floor. When China drops the dollar every nation selling oil for dollars will insist upon almost any other major currency BUT dollars. At that point, the U.S. will be finished.

In the meantime, turn off FOX and boycott Wal-Mart. Trouble is, even locally owned merchants sell imported goods. I keep wondering --does anyone work for a living anymore? The U.S. used to make cars, steel, appliances and electronics products amounting to millions of jobs. Where did they go? Asia, primarily China! Thank you George H.W. Bush!

During the Reagan years, it was 'economist' Milton Friedman who succeeded in providing the GOP with some 'intellectual cover', a plausible sounding rationalization for 'free market' claptrap that has never worked. The abysmal records of every GOP President since WWII compared to any Democratic President over the same post-war period utterly refutes the many absurd right wing claims about "Friedman" economics. I met Friedman when he was riding the crest of celebrity --his book and TV series 'Free to Choose' was out; he was doing a TV thing on PBS (as I recall). Friedman's assertion --""What kind of society isn't structured on greed? " --was most surely the inspiration for Gordan Gecko's: "Greed is good", a line that defined the motion picture "Wall Street". Friedman was eagerly embraced by goppers desperately in need of an intellectual; 'Greed is good' justified rapacious practices by Wall Street predators and wannabes.

In the wake of the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, there’s no silver-screen villain scarier than a banker. Far from the halcyon days when a loan officer like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life’’ could be a town’s hedge against financial ruin, the current crop of financiers — both fictional and, even more terrifying, nonfictional — are the least palatable of the new vampires, sucking the lifeblood from 401(k)s, mutual funds, houses, and livelihoods. Victims wake up, pale, depleted, and broke while, engorged with cash, the incubi race to Tourneau for yet another Vacheron Constantin watch.While the latest “Wall Street’’ movie packages its contempt for the whole venal crowd in entertaining trappings, Charles Ferguson’s just-released documentary, “Inside Job,’’ is an altogether different matter. This film, a feature-length investigation of what really happened to bring our entire financial system to the brink, is harder to stomach simply because it’s true. Around the globe, people are living with the consequences of that manic perversion of the system every day.

--'Greed is Good' cinema

Even so, Arthur Laffer would upstage them all with a curve drawn on a napkin. It was all bullshit too! Wealth, in fact, did not trickle down, as promised, but upward, eventually enriching just one percent of the total population. GOPs might have known this if Laffer himself did not. Otherwise, why was the party so eager to embrace this convenient, easily marketable means by which the party could enrich, i.e, pay off its base for their continued support. Laffer was either a naive dupe. and didn't know better, or he was in on the scheme from the 'git go'. Frankly, I don't know and don't care!

American's might have gotten another version, a better, more accurate play-by-play as this all unfolded. But --alas --the Fairness Doctrine had been trashed by Reagan et al and media, increasingly concentrated in fewer corporate hands, seized upon the opportunity, the green light to be irresponsible robber barons. The very first remedies are about the media because nothing else can follow until truth and real debate is restored.

Therefore:

1. Restore the main points of the Communications Act of 1934, primarily the principle that the people own the airwaves. Updated to include cable easements;
2. Restore strict ownership limitations that will end the concentration of all media into very, very few monopolistic hands;
3. Restore the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time. That means that Beck, Billo, Lard Ass and other liars can be refuted and exposed on their time and 'airwaves';
4. Require 'licensees' to devote a percentage of cable and/or air time to public service and information.

Concurrent with the media reforms I mentioned and support, campaign and election processes MUST be reformed:

1. the primary system militates against against any system other than the two - party system, i.e, dumb and dumber;
2. strict limits on campaign contributions will be possible IF the media reforms outlined above are effected;
3. Direct election of the President via 'instant runoffs' which will a) cut costs of holding elections; b) cutting out those 'middle men' will more nearly put people back in charge of the government while minimizing, as much as possible, the influence of the huge lobbies in various campaigns.

These are merely first steps. Redressing the wealth an income inequalities that have literally destroyed America will require widespread popular resolve, a courageous and competent government free of interference from the paid, entrenched lobbies on K-Street! It will require politicians of courage and integrity. Bluntly: we have very few of those and when one is elected, Obama, for example, he is unfairly attacked, stymied and reviled by crooks, idiots, liars and the big corporate media.

A miracle is required! Alas --the age of miracles is over. I daresay, that short of a miracle, America, as we knew it, is finished!

---

---

Right Wing Scams: 'Why Don't You Start Calling Me Gordon?'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

All but forgotten now, Enron --it's rise and calamitous fall --dominated front pages and sucked up airtime until knocked out of contention by 911. As I was reminded, it was the ghost of Gordon Gekko, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Douglas in 'Wall Street', who both presaged and haunted the fail of Enron and all those who served it or were temporarily enriched by its corporate shams and schemes.

As was the case in the 'Roaring Twenties', fortunes were lost in a heart beat, economic empires collapsed in the blink of an eye. Enron was one of them. Conveniently for the new Bush administration, indeed, the GOP itself a crime syndicate, corporate 'person-hood' benefited from a timely stay of execution -- 911.

Wall Street was one of Hollywood's more pertinent parables even if the name "Gekko" was a bit obvious. Real Gekkos (spelled Gecko) make fairly good pets --or so I am told! They eat roaches. And of late there are no shortage of roaches. The largest roach colonies are found in Washington D.C., Austin, TX, K-street or Wall Street --all sites of irradicable infestations. As we have seen, the GOP eats it own.

Opportunities for metaphor and analogy are endless and every comic needs a foil. Had there been no crooks or idiots, the careers of Voltaire and Mark Twain would have been much less brilliant. We owe a great debt to totalitarians, snobs, goppers, corporate crooks, Bush's surrogate torturers and would-be dictators. Where would Stephen Colbert be without them? Alas, the blog-o-sphere would be scrambling for material.

Enron was run by a gang that most certainly thought that, being "captains" of "industry", they could just pull out and disappear. I suppose every crook thinks that they will get away with it.

Enron will prove to be one of the most important episodes in the history of American business, and its story, from beginning to end, is inseparable from Ken Lay, its founder and long-time chairman. Thus, what people make of Enron—and what lessons they draw from it—will depend to a considerable degree on how they understand Lay.

As I’m sure you know, Enron has to date been blamed largely on free-market politicians, heartless corporate managers, and an egoistic chairman. In fact, as my book will show, Enron relied heavily on government favors, was run by postmodernist managers, and had as its chairman the kind of person Ayn Rand would have called “a second-hander.”
--On the Fall of Enron and Ken Lay: 'Philosophical Fraud' at an Errant Energy Company (and cap-and-trade, renewables forerunner), Robert Bradley Jr.

The US is, likewise, a financial shell. When GM, at last, is swallowed up by a foreign auto maker, what incentive will the new entity have to employ American workers when they can do just as well in Japan or Malaysia or China?

We have become a nation of consumers lent money by China so that we can buy goods manufactured in China. We are cattle, cows to be milked. When the teat runs dry we will be abandoned to third world status if we are not already.

In the meantime, the Bushies and other GOP Geckos will have run off with the last scraps of US wealth if they have not done so already. See the CIA's World Fact Book which lists the U.S. at the very bottom of the list with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance, formerly called the 'balance of trade deficit'. China tops the list with the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance. Every banker can equate that with his own balance sheet and conclude that China, because of the policies of the GOP, now owns America if not the entire world.

The house of cards appears to have fallen --but not just yet! Like Ken Lay, Bush and his gang are most surely clinging to the belief that, unlike Lay, they will get away with it. Chances are good that Bush will live out the rest of his wasted life too stupid to regret a damn thing! It is this luxury, available only to the stupid, that I resent most!

Iraq was a big screw up. The invasion and theft of Iraqi oil was supposed to bail them out. Things have not quite worked out as planned. Then again, perhaps they have exceeded Bushco expectations. They are not yet jailed nor executed for capital war crimes (see: U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441).

Just as Hitler thought he had learned from Napoleon's mistakes, Bush most certainly thought he had learned from Hitler's.

---

---

Wall Street Pulls Off the Biggest Heist in World History

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

US Taxpayers have underwritten and/or are committed to a transfer of some 8.6 trillion dollars to Wall Street [see: 8.6 Trillion was a Drop in the Bucket]. As no 'bailout' has yet done anything but enrich Wall Street 'robber barons' who have invested their windfalls offshore, I propose that Wall Street get no more bailout monies whatsoever. I propose that the government divide up that 8.6 trillion up among all the citizens of the United States. Your share is over twenty-eight thousand dollars. I will take my share now, thank you! Gold --not Monopoly money, please! If this kind of bailout were put into the hands of the folk who really drive the economy with their purchases of homes, cars, meals and clothing, the economy would literally turn around overnight.

During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes proposed that the government would do much, much worse than simply putting 'pound notes' in Mason jars, burying them in a landfill and letting people dig them up. Keynes was not kidding. Clearly, his proposals would have worked while every cockamamie GOP plan since Ronald Reagan's depression of some two years following his tax cut of 1982 has failed.

Instead of cutting taxes for Wall Street traders and speculators, taxes should be raised, in fact, taxes should be raised for every member of the elite of just one percent of the population. This elite owns more than about 90 percent of the rest of us combined. Ending their free ride would go a long way toward mending this broken economy.

Wall Street has not appreciated nor done any good with monies it has already received. In fact, the crooks on Wall Street have complained loudly and arrogantly about the monies they've gotten already. Fine! You don't like it? Then give it back to folk who might use it to save their homes!

The axis of China and Wal-Mart puts Americans out of work and sells them cheap shit that is overpriced at any price and more so when wages and jobs are declining because of the bargain.

Not only have the bailouts failed to effect the economy, the huge brokerage firms, banking houses, and insiders are complaining that they haven't gotten enough money. My position is that they should never have gotten the money in the first place. The result has been that the US is mired, perhaps bankrupted, ever deeper in a pit, an economic black hole from which there may be no escape. At least, not soon!

The bailouts failed because the wrong people got the money. What is called the 'real' economy never got a bailout. It was the 'phony economy' that got YOUR money.

While Wall Street demands more of your money, I demand to know how much of that 8.6 trillion dollars has wound up in hidden accounts in the Caymen Islands.

Tent cities are associated with the Great Depression and many have forgotten that there were tent cities in boomtown Houston, TX. The cause was Ronald Reagan's depression of at least two years following his ruinous tax cut of 1982. Convenient amnesia and denial is found throughout the GOP whenever the facts about Reagan come up. Republicans are not merely wrong, they are nuts! Clue: Obama had no more to do with this crash than FDR with Hoover's crash of 1929.

Depressions are not the result of a 'business cycle'; they are the result of a 'capitalist cycle' or, better, a 'Wall Street cycle'. The cycle is one of 'buying' and then 'selling' and it is a characteristic of the 'phony economy' --not the real one. Declines in the 'phony economy' occur whenever there are more sellers than buyers. Prices rise whenever the opposite is true. Buy and sell, boom and bust. By contrast, 'real' economies in which 'just folk' buy real products of utilitarian value from manufacturers and service vendors who deal in real products might be unaffected but for their reliance upon investment capital.

I define 'capitalists' as those peripheral 'investors' in more complicated economies characterized by a division of labor. There is evidence that the 'division of labor' is ancient but it may be anyone's guess when someone got the bright idea of offering up a piece of papyrus, parchment or paper as representing a 'share' of his enterprise. Whoever that was, he/she was the world's first capitalist.

Economists like to talk about the 'business cycle' as if it were holy script! I don't believe that 'business cycles' are necessary. It's just a term that economists have chosen to use to describe an observed phenomenon but that does not mean that there is anything 'necessary' about them that competent policy could not or would not address and cure. 'Capitalists' would --of course --prefer that you continue to use the term and believe in them. It's not science; it's religion. The term 'business cycle' is, rather, the convenient cover while 'insiders' take their profits. It is what St. Thomas More during the reign of Henry VIII described as a 'conspiracy of rich men'.

This distinction between real business --often called 'main street' --as opposed to Wall Street capitalism is blurred because there exists a symbiotic relationship between them. Mass consumption represented 'mass need' to be met with 'mass production'. Obviously, a burgeoning Ford Motors would require 'capital' in order to meet the 'demand' for cars nationwide.

The key is demand. A small enterprise might meet a local demand without any help from Wall Street. The small enterprise might finance expansion out of profits or with a loan from the local 'building an loan'. Unless the small enterprise requires enormous sums in order to meet regional or national markets, it may never require the kinds of cash that are available only in the nation's financial centers, primarily Wall Street.

With the exception of bad weather and bad crops, local economies might very well have been immune to the so-called 'business cycles' that define Wall Street. Had not global firms --financed by money changers on Wall Street and other financial centers like London or Hong Kong --insinuated themselves like Kudzu in the smaller communities of America, the effects of a 'recession' might have been confined to the money-changers who cause them. Simply, recessions/depressions occurred when stocks plunge; stocks plunge when traders --leeches who have never produced a thing in their lives --compete with one another to take their profits --Thomas More's 'conspiracy of rich men'. Last man out loses. Wall Street is a game of economic 'chicken'.

If the consequences could be confined to those who cause the problems, I might say: to hell with it! But like China who must bail out America or be sucked into the black hole itself, the government is compelled to 'bail out' the crooks and liars who caused it all. In literature that is called a Faustian bargain. Everyone, it seems, will, at some point in time, sell his soul to Wall Street.

Given the crooked nature of this scheme, it seems redundant to point out Wall Street's obvious hypocrisy, that of 'blaming' government for its excesses, blaming Democratic regimes for daring to criticize the Wall Street robber barons who caused it all. These folk are divided into two groups 1) the crooked, and 2) the stupid! Being a Wall Street trader, broker or insider is not indicative of intelligence. A truly intelligent person will have figured out a way to be independent of Wall Street. Someone once said that the best revenge is living well. Wall Street, by contrast, will ALWAYS collapse periodically and just as predictably will seek a bailout as it blames the government for its failure. Many so-called 'conservatives' denounce what they call 'government interference' in the 'free market' but that is true ONLY when they are not seeking a handout or a bailout.

To be sure, the economic contraction is causing pain just about everywhere. In October, less than a month after the financial markets began to melt down, Moody’s Economy.com* published an assessment of recent economic activity within 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Three hundred and two were already in deep recession, and 64 more were at risk. Only 15 areas were still expanding. Notable among them were the oil- and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas and Oklahoma, buoyed by energy prices that have since fallen; and the Greater Washington, D.C., region, where government bailouts, the nationalization of financial companies, and fiscal expansion are creating work for lawyers, lobbyists, political scientists, and government contractors.

--The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America

The US economy has entered into a contraction not seen since 1929. Private and public payrolls combined have shrunk for 14 straight months. Some 650,000 jobs have been lost each month for the last four months. That's like losing a city the size of Austin, TX every month.

Some people have given up finding work. The Labor Department’s alternative unemployment rate measure is designed to measure this effect. This figure is at its highest since 1994. In February that figure was 14.8 percent, up 6.1 percentage points since the recession began. Over 23 percent of an estimated 12.5 million unemployed may have simply given up finding a job.

US may have fallen off the cliff already, and, like Wiley Coyote, is now just hanging on to a branch. Why haven't the bailouts worked? As was the case with Reagan's 'voodoo economics', the wrong people got the money. Did Reagan's tax cuts bring about more growth than would have normally occurred? Of course not! The opposite occurred. The record shows that the growth rate was 3% between 1979 and 1989 --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"!

Punch out the next gopper who tries to tell you that there was. There was no Reagan recovery. Wealth did not trickle down! Rather, wealth has continued to be transferred upward to about one percent of the total population. I am inclined to believe that this transfer was deliberate, planned and executed. It abated only briefly in Clinton's second term. That is but one reason Clinton is officially and systematically demonized and reviled. I have my own problems with Clinton, that is, he did not go far enough. But everything said about Clinton by Republicans are lies! Likewise, I have problems with Obama --but everything said about him by Republicans can be dismissed summarily.

There are many parallels with the American economy of the 1920s. The economy was booming but by 1927 the nation had overproduced goods for which there was no market. Overproduction led to a slowdown in both manufacturing and agriculture. This is evidence --if not proof --that 'trickle down/supply side' economics is a right wing fraud. Transferring monies to manufacturers that are over-produced is economic disaster. Wealth does not 'trickle down', rather, it is transferred to tax heavens offshore. Clearly --a bailout for big banks is a mistake that will continue to have the effect of reducing the supply of money in circulation --a 'contraction'. The so-called 'Great Depression' was, in fact, a great contraction in which those who would have spent monies were deprived of it.

During the Great Depression and, later, Ronald Reagan's depression of about two years, millions lost their jobs. In 1929, bankers and financers continued to speculate on stocks, borrowing the money and buying stocks 'on margin'. More recently, 'short sellers' have made fortunes that you can rest assured have already been transferred into offshore tax havens.

By late October, 1929 investors competed not to buy but to sell. Obviously -prices crashed in what was accurately called a 'panic'. On October 29, 1929 some 16 million shares were dumped. Wall Street had officially collapsed

People lost jobs and fortunes. Companies failed. Millions were thrown out of work and, eventually, gave up looking. Banks failed as people withdrew savings. Other banks had squandered depositors monies in the failing stock market. People lost homes and farms because the couldn't pay their mortgages. Shantytowns sprang up all over America.

There are yet other clues to what Americans who survive this GOP debacle may expect in the future.

It is possible that the United States will enter a period of accelerating relative decline in the coming years, though that’s hardly a foregone conclusion—a subject I’ll return to later. What’s more certain is that the recession, particularly if it turns out to be as long and deep as many now fear, will accelerate the rise and fall of specific places within the U.S.—and reverse the fortunes of other cities and regions.

By what they destroy, what they leave standing, what responses they catalyze, and what space they clear for new growth, most big economic shocks ultimately leave the economic landscape transformed. Some of these transformations occur faster and more violently than others. The period after the Great Depression saw the slow but inexorable rise of the suburbs. The economic malaise of the 1970s, on the other hand, found its embodiment in the vertiginous fall of older industrial cities of the Rust Belt, followed by an explosion of growth in the Sun Belt.

The historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has noted that in some respects, today’s crisis most closely resembles the “Long Depression,” which stretched, by one definition, from 1873 to 1896. It began as a banking crisis brought on by insolvent mortgages and complex financial instruments, and quickly spread to the real economy, leading to mass unemployment that reached 25 percent in New York.

During that crisis, rising industries like railroads, petroleum, and steel were consolidated, old ones failed, and the way was paved for a period of remarkable innovation and industrial growth. In 1870, New England mill towns like Lowell, Lawrence, Manchester, and Springfield were among the country’s most productive industrial cities, and America’s population overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. By 1900, the economic geography had been transformed from a patchwork of farm plots and small mercantile towns to a landscape increasingly dominated by giant factory cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo.

--The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America

---

---

A New Fat Cat-Government Conspiracy to Loot Social Security

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Under the cover of 'Economic Crisis', the Axis of Wall Street, K-street, and the GOP schemes to loot the Social Security Trust fund. This axis of evil wants to use the Social Security trust fund to 'bailout' the crooked banks who created the financial crisis to begin with. When times were good under Clinton, we were told that Social Security had to be scrapped. The trust fund was running out of money, we were told. Now, when times are bad, they are telling us that Social Security needs to be scrapped because it is a success.

The 'trust fund' that we had been told was going broke is coveted because it was NOT going broke. It is now seen as a means by which greedy, incompetent and failing banks can be bailed out! Would the greedy bastards go after a bankrupt program? I don't think so! To the greedy, incompetent bankers who have already squirreled away billions of bailout bucks offshore, I say: you give me the money you secretly transferred out of the country and let me do something constructive with it!

If I were Barack Obama, I would investigate and charge thousands of Wall Street Insiders with insider trading, fraud, theft, and Enron-style accounting. It may be fitting to hold these trials in the Superdome. New Orleans could be rebuilt with admission prices, season tickets, and ancillary rights.

Proponents of this outright theft of YOUR money, argue that this is the way the government should 'recover' billions that have been wasted so far 'bailing out' the very banks who created the crisis to begin with. These venal fat cats have targeted your Social Security Trust fund, Medicare, and Medicaid. They have targeted it for theft! Those wanting to loot Social Security now had supported Bush's plans to 'save Social Security' by destroying it.

Bush had wanted to replace government-guaranteed retirement benefits with private accounts that would have been subject to the whims of Wall Street. What if Bush's attack on Social Security had succeeded? Social Security would most certainly have been kaput by now --a victim of Bush's incompetent handling of the American economy.

In the meantime, Bush's 'bailouts' have done no good whatsoever. Why? Like GOP taxation and fiscal policies, the Bush 'bailouts' were 'trickle down' bailouts that benefited all the wrong people. None of the 'Bush bailout' money found its way into the economy in ways that would stimulate growth, create jobs or encourage consumer spending. Rather, billions wound up in offshore in tax havens maintained by the increasingly tiny elite what has gotten exponentially richer --at your expense. This trend began with Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982. Now --the same crooks, liars and idiots who alone benefited from Ronald Reagan's incompetent economic policies have targeted your money for outright theft.

These players are promoting a tricky way to whack Social Security benefits, but to do it behind closed doors so the public cannot see what's happening or figure out which politicians to blame. The essential transaction would amount to misappropriating the trillions in Social Security taxes that workers have paid to finance their retirement benefits. This swindle is portrayed as "fiscal reform." In fact, it's the political equivalent of bait-and-switch fraud.

Defending Social Security sounds like yesterday's issue--the fight people won when they defeated George W. Bush's attempt to privatize the system in 2005. But the financial establishment has pushed it back on the table, claiming that the current crisis requires "responsible" leaders to take action. Will Obama take the bait? Surely not. The new president has been clear and consistent about Social Security, as a candidate and since his election. The program's financing is basically sound, he has explained, and can be assured far into the future by making only modest adjustments.

But Obama is also playing footsie with the conservative advocates of "entitlement reform" (their euphemism for cutting benefits). The president wants the corporate establishment's support on many other important matters, and he recently promised to hold a "fiscal responsibility summit" to examine the long-term costs of entitlements. That forum could set the trap for a "bipartisan compromise" that may become difficult for Obama to resist, given the burgeoning deficit. If he resists, he will be denounced as an old-fashioned free-spending liberal. The advocates are urging both parties to hold hands and take the leap together, authorizing big benefits cuts in a circuitous way that allows them to dodge the public's blame. In my new book, Come Home, America, I make the point: "When official America talks of 'bipartisan compromise,' it usually means the people are about to get screwed."

--The Nation, Looting Social Security

Fat cats are exploiting this crisis in order to loot Social Security. They resent the fact that Social Security is the government's greatest success story. They covet $billions$ in the Social Security trust fund. They wish to steal your money and re-distribute it among nation's richest one percent who are sure to squirrel your money away offshore in a bank beyond the scrutiny of the government.This is fascism, socialism for the rich elites.

Thanks to Ronald Reagan and the father-son crime syndicate of Bush Sr and Jr, only a rich, evil elite of just one percent of the nation owns more than some 90 percent or more of the rest of us combined. Will the looting of your money for the purposes of welfare for the rich stimulate the economy? NO! As was the case with Bush's bailouts, it will find its way into tax havens offshore, in fact reducing the amount of money in the US. It will hasten the depression by further contracting the amount of money available for spending.

Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to "reform" Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security, not to save it. Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund, with nothing except a name in common with the system FDR created.

In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. The falsehoods ranged from his claim that Social Security is unfair to African-Americans to his claim that "waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security."

...

But the campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war.

And there are two reasons to study that lesson. One is to be prepared for whatever comes next on Mr. Bush's agenda. Despite the tough talk about Iran, I don't think he can propose another war - there aren't enough troops to fight the wars we already have. But there's still room for another big domestic initiative, probably tax reform.

--Paul Krugman, Social Security Lessons

The best thing the government could do with the Social Security trust fund is to leave it the fuck alone. Social Security is probably the Federal Government's ONLY success story, hence the envy with which those monies are viewed by venal, greedy, lying fat cats, Republicans and their paid conspirators on K-street and the Heritage Foundation.

The first thing to know is that Social Security is a bad deal for workers today, offering a much lower return than other investments.

Social Security payments are, in theory, made out of that fund. A depression is often called a 'contraction' because the supply of money literally contracts. As a result sales plummet, jobs decline, industries and businesses go belly up. These venal fat cats are just trying to line their pockets before making their final getaway.

And looking to the future, things only get worse. Younger workers are right to question whether Social Security will be able to provide them with promised benefits when they retire. The huge tax hikes required would exact a great cost on our economy, on employment opportunities, and on future generations.

For over 70 years, Social Security has helped to keep millions of elderly Americans from poverty. But the program rests today on unsound footing.

--Heritage Foundation Lies About Social Security

Given the current economic collapse, aren't you glad the Heritage Foundation gang of fat cats failed to get their greedy mitts on your money?

What it really is a government program with a dedicated tax. We take the payroll tax and it’s used to pay benefits to retirees. And 20-plus years ago, the commission led by Alan Greenspan said, you know, we are going to have this problem as the baby boomers reach retirement age. We will have a higher ratio of retirees to workers, and we better get ready for it. Social Security, the payroll tax was increased. There were some other things, a small rise in the retirement age set in motion. So that Social Security would run a surplus, which would be used to accumulate a trust fund, and this would tithe us over, some ways into the aging of the population. And that on its own accounting is working just fine.

I mean, one of the things that we need to know is that the estimates of the day at which the trust fund runs out, just keep on receding further into the future, because the program is doing so well at running surpluses. So, ten years ago, people said it was going to run out in 2029. Now the official estimate is 2042. Realistically, it’s probably going to go well into the second half of the century. Now how does this become a crisis? Well it becomes a crisis by changing the rules. By saying, oh, well, actually, that surplus that we’re running because of the tax increase that was designed to prolong the life of Social Security, that’s not real. Because it’s invested in government bonds which are a perfectly good asset, for anybody else, but not for the Social Security administration. And so, there was a real crisis that people saw in the 1980’s. They dealt with it. The solution worked very well, but because this administration, because the Republican party doesn’t want Social Security to remain, because they have always wanted to get rid of it since Franklin Roosevelt, they have decided to redefine the rules so as to call it a crisis when realistically, we have a huge budget problem, but that has nothing to do with Social Security.

--Paul Krugman on Social Security, the Decline of the Dollar and Healthcare

Why don't we loot the Heritage Foundation's bank account and distribute all that monies among working folk who lost their jobs and careers during the Reagan years?

Why don't we LOOT the billions that have been quickly squirreled away offshore and re-distribute that money among the millions whose lives have been ruined by the export of US industry that was begun under Ronald Reagan?

Why don't we TAKE BACK this government? Why don't we tell Obama to get on board or get the fuck out of the way? Why don't we seize the bank accounts of the GOP leadership that is conspiring to loot your monies even as we write and post?

We don't we wage a real revolution and take this nation back?

As millions of ordinary working people are anxious about their economic security and worried about their retirement years, an impressive armada is lined up to push the idea--Washington's leading think tanks, the prestige media, tax-exempt foundations, skillful propagandists posing as economic experts and a self-righteous billionaire spending his fortune to save the nation from the elderly.

"We have magneto trouble," said John Maynard Keynes at the start of the Great Depression: most of the economic engine was in good shape, but a crucial component, the financial system, wasn't working. He also said this: "We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand." Both statements are as true now as they were then.

How did this second great colossal muddle arise? In the aftermath of the Great Depression, we redesigned the machine so that we did understand it, well enough at any rate to avoid big disasters. Banks, the piece of the system that malfunctioned so badly in the 1930s, were placed under tight regulation and supported by a strong safety net. Meanwhile, international movements of capital, which played a disruptive role in the 1930s, were also limited. The financial system became a little boring but much safer.

Then things got interesting and dangerous again. Growing international capital flows set the stage for devastating currency crises in the 1990s and for a globalized financial crisis in 2008. The growth of the shadow banking system, without any corresponding extension of regulation, set the stage for latter-day bank runs on a massive scale. These runs involved frantic mouse clicks rather than frantic mobs outside locked bank doors, but they were no less devastating.

What we're going to have to do, clearly, is relearn the lessons our grandfathers were taught by the Great Depression. I won't try to lay out the details of a new regulatory regime, but the basic principle should be clear: anything that has to be rescued during a financial crisis, because it plays an essential role in the financial mechanism, should be regulated when there isn't a crisis so that it doesn't take excessive risks. Since the 1930s commercial banks have been required to have adequate capital, hold reserves of liquid assets that can be quickly converted into cash, and limit the types of investments they make, all in return for federal guarantees when things go wrong. Now that we've seen a wide range of non-bank institutions create what amounts to a banking crisis, comparable regulation has to be extended to a much larger part of the system.

--Paul Krugman, What to Do

Staring into an abyss, we stand on the brink of a new 'Great Depression'. Those who must bear with greed and incompetence, responsibility brining us to this point, now scheme to subvert our only economic success story. As the late Steve Kangas reminded us, retirement before 1935 condemned huge numbers of seniors to starvation in the streets. It was Social security alone that addressed this problem and eliminated it.

Social Security not only provided the American elderly with a pension, some of that spendable income found its way back into the economy and created jobs. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson expanded Social Security and, by doing so, reduced senior poverty from 30 percent to 12 percent. Now --for all the wrong and wrong-headed reasons, an increasingly uninformed and unintelligent right wing covets the monies that have a proven record of success in difficult times. There are two words for these people: crooks and fools!

---

---