Workers! Demand that you be paid in Gold Bullion!

By Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Put 'supply side' nonsense to the test! Demand that you be paid in gold bullion. If right wing ideology and theories were correct, your bosses shouldn't have a problem with it. They will not accede to your demands because they know that right wing economics is pure bullshit!

The right wing erred big time when it tried to tar Obama with a canard, accusing him of advocating Marxism by 'spreading the wealth around'. But it has been the GOP since Ronald Reagan's improvident tax cut which 'spread the wealth around' upward to the top one percent of the population. That increasingly tiny elite has since 'spread the wealth around' among their various investments, none of which create wealth.

Right wing 'theories' are best summed up with the term -- supply side economics! Supply side economics, derisively called 'trickle down theory', is utter nonsense but sounded credible enough to justify Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut of 1982 and similar instruments by which 'wealth is spread around' upward to about one percent of the nation's total population.

'Supply side theory' was and remains a GOP fairy tale designed to provide a credible sounding rationalization for the big whopping tax cuts which benefit only the very, very wealthy, the 'pay off' for their support. The nation was told a bald faced lie that the 'tax cuts' were necessary to 'stimulate investment' and that the results would 'trickle down' to working folk. Utter nonsense! There is absolutely no evidence in support of it. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, called the policy a 'trojan horse' supported by a 'noisy faction of Republicans'.

In reality, supply side tax cuts routinely precede recessions that are characterized by decreases in investment --effects opposite to the stated purpose. Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982, for example, was followed by an economic depression of some two years, the deepest depression since the crash of 1929.

The culprit is 'supply side' economics from which is derived the nonsense that the right wing tries to pin on Barack Obama, specifically, the charge that he is in favor of 'spreading the wealth around'. But what is 'supply side economics' if not an attempt by the right wing to justify the spreading of wealth UPWARD to those already rich, those who don't need it? The right wing is absolutely dead wrong in several ways:

1. Supply side 'tax cuts' have never, ever trickled down. In every instance, the rich get richer and everyone else poorer.
2. It is predicted that revenues increase with supply side tax cuts but that has never, ever happened.
3. Tax cuts were expected to end recessions and stimulate the economy. In every instance, the opposite has been true.

Specifically, if 'supply side' bunkum were true, the economy would have expanded as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Not only did that NOT happen, the economy contracted. This happened during the Ronald Reagan/Bush Sr years. It's happened again.

This election is about one thing, and one thing only — it’s all about the economy. In a Presidential race that was hyped to be a rebuke on the War in Iraq, instead it has turned out to be a rebuke on the economy. More bad news for George W. Bush, John McCain, and the Republican Party today, the US economy has contracted at .3 percent in the third quarter, a rather large decline.

--The Final Nail in the McCain/Palin Coffin

Now --can we, please, consign 'supply-side' economics to the dustbin of history, a stupid idea gone bad?

I've been been debunking supply-side idiocy for years. The time has come to take off the gloves. Let's put this elitist, right wing nonsense to the test.

If GOP economics were anything but elitist rationalizations designed by focus groups to sound plausible, then your employer (most likely a big corporation dominated by right wingers, fascists, and, of course, Republicans) should not object to your DEMAND that you be paid in gold bullion. You've done the work. You deserve to be paid in something that is actually worth something, something equal in value to the work that you have done. By 'creating wealth' with the act of 'work', you deserve to be paid with something other than a worthless piece of paper that has declined in value during every GOP administration.

In the meantime, a dwindling and increasingly hysterical right wing is screaming about how Barack Obama is advocating the 'spreading around of wealth' which, they claim, is a Marxist idea. That's nonsense. Many indigenous peoples, including some Native American tribes, beat Marx to the idea and, until their various paradises were mucked up by Europeans with capitalistic idea everything worked out very well. Before he screwed it all up, Columbus himself described a society that was very nearly paradise. No one was thinking 'inside the box' of capitalism, supply-side nonsense, and all the idiocy and claptrap that goes with it. The world was new and fresh and worked.

The Arawaks, for example, were doing fine in a 'Utopia' of their creation until they were utterly wiped out by Christopher Columbus. Their society was credibly described by Howard Zinn in his "People's History of the United States". It was literally an 'ideal society'.

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.

...

"As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts." The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?

The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."

Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

--Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Like idiots and fools throughout history, Bush is cursed with the unintended consequences of his idiocy. Bush certainly did not intend to prove Marx correct, nor did Bush intend to call attention to Zinn's great history. Bush did not intend that the 700 billion dollar bailout of his cronies would prove Karl Marx to be absolutely correct. Marx said: "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his need!" Typically, Bush screwed even that up. What Bush has done is to expose the GOP modus operandi best summed up this way:

"From those who can least afford it TO those who did absolutely nothing to create it, did not earn it, and do NOT deserve it"!

The right wing, thus, pathetically and ineffectively reduces its anti-Obama campaign to a phrase --'spread the wealth around' --a practice which they had hoped could be confined to their elite base of greedy fat cats.

The GOP have always justified this 'transfer of wealth' upward with an article of GOP faith: 'supply side economics'. I propose that we put the GOP's only faith to the test. I propose that if 'supply side economics' were in any way true or valid, then your employer should not object to your demand that you be paid in gold bullion.

Your employer will probably refuse to do so. That's because the currency that he had duped you into accepting is absolutely without any intrinsic value and, lately, it's probably worthless. As the bailout has proven --money was literally created out of thin air by the central banks. The bubble popped. Your employer will not pay you in gold for several reasons:

• He doesn't have any in reserve.
• If he tried to pay you in gold, he could not purchase, with cash on hand, enough gold to pay all his employees.
• Eventually, all workers would demand gold and when only a few could be paid, the economy would collapse to its pre-bubble state.

But --if 'supply side economics' had been in any way valid, employers would be creating wealth, enough to pay you in currency that is actually worth something. Alas, however, the 'white man' has run out of indigenous people to enslave or slaughter in hopes of finding enough gold to pay its workers who --alone --create wealth!

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