It's the Hypocrisy, the Financial Collapse, the War Crimes

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Where were the 'tea baggers' when Nixon was selling us out to China to whom we are now but a vassal state?

Where were the 'tea baggers' when Ronald Reagan's incompetent policies would plunge the nation into the greatest depression since Hoover's 'Great Depression' of '29.

Where were the 'tea baggers' when it has since become clear that the US has not really ever recovered from the Reagan 'recession' in which were lost several major US industries to Japan and, most recently, China!

Where were the 'tea baggers' when Ronald Reagan sold us out to both Iran and the Contras?

Where were the 'tea baggers' when Bush Sr lied about raising taxes?

Where were the 'tea baggers' when Ronald Reagan called 'crazy' those made jobless by his idiotic, right wing policies?

Where were the 'tea baggers' when Bush Jr was bankrupting the nation with wars of naked aggression, lying about 911, covering it up, and money-laundering booty to his 'base' via 'tax cuts' and whopping defense contracts?

Where were the 'tea baggers' when Bush Jr waged war on what he called a 'goddamned piece of paper' known to the rest of us as 'The Constitution'.

Where were the 'tea baggers'? The Carvellian quick response: 'they were bent over with their heads squarely up their asses!

The Tea Party Express has hit Washington and while there are many sincere people involved in the Tea Party protests and they have valid points to make about government spending, the entire movement is stained by the fact that its organized by conservatives who are the ones responsible for the mess in the first place and who haven't to this day, taken responsibility for their own mistakes and the economic mess they created by letting George W Bush get away with his disastrous policies.

--The hypocrisy of tea party conservatives

I grew up listening to windbag conservatives denounce 'big spending librul's' and DC bureaucrats. So --what do these windbags do? They support Ronald Reagan who DOUBLED the Federal Bureaucracy and TRIPLED the national deficit. But this idiot ilk will still talk about 'big spending libruls'. Give it a frickin' rest or get a new comedy writer!

Enough already!

My suggestion to the GOP: unless you can come up with more creative lies, more entertaining bullshit, just do us all a favor and just shut the fuck up!

The same policies, under a Democrat, might have been redeemed by the 'Keynesian' increase in jobs which even Nixon would have embraced. But during the Reagan regime, NONE of the moneys spent so profligately 'trickled down'. Following Reagan's tax cut, called a 'red herring' by his own Budget Director David Stockman, the nation plunged into a depression of two years, the deepest and longest since the Great Depression during the Hoover years.

Now --after another INCOMPETENT GOP President bankrupts the nation, plunges it into yet another financial crisis, a war of naked aggression, commits war crimes for which he is culpable and prosecutable, so-called 'tea baggers' are protesting GOVERNMENT WASTE.

Where were these scumbaggers four years ago?

It was the conservatives who, after 8 years of the greatest economic expansion in history during the Clinton years, came to power and intentionally undid everything Clinton did, reversing all of Clinton's policies. And anyone with half a brain knows that if you do the opposite of anything you will get the opposite results. And that's what the Republicans did. And that's what the country got. Now the conservatives are shaking their baby rattles and complaining.

It was a conservative Republican administration and a conservative Republican congress who blew a $5 1/2 trillion budget surplus. They destroyed the balanced budget they inherited, and after Clinton had eliminated the deficit, they exploded the deficit to record levels with their war and tax policies.

It was a conservative Republican government that took the country from the greatest economic expansion in history, lowest unemployment in 40 years, a balanced budget and record surpluses to deficits, unemployment and the greatest economic crisis since the 1930's.

So during these Tea Party protests conservatives are showing why the word "hypocrite" should be part of the dictionary definition of conservative.

The hypocrisy of tea party conservatives

I know where these lying hypocrites were eight years ago. They were in Florida busily violating Federal Laws, attacking vote re-counters, stealing an election! They were trying mightily to effect Antonin Scalia's prescription for a GOP win: stop the recount while Bush was still ahead! Or as Robert Novak put it: 'the Democrats are trying to steal the election by counting votes!'

Eight years ago, this ilk was trying mightily to sandbag a continuation of Clinton's policies which --in fact --had reversed previous declines in jobs and GDP, another legacy of two failed GOP regimes: Reagan and Bush Sr.

Here are some facts I wish the GOP would choke on:

Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents⁸

Johnson   3.8%
Carter    3.1
Clinton   2.4
Kennedy   2.3
Nixon     2.3
Reagan    2.1
Bush      0.6

-- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics Survey

The GOP prezzes are at the bottom because that's where their policies have taken the US vis a vis the rest of the world. Those official figures shatter the carefully cultivated GOP myth, in fact, an Orwellian re-write of history, a bald-face lie! Fortunately, enough patriotic liberals have survived the wave of murders and assassination to set the record straight after so many GOP-types have worked so mightily, so assiduously to set it crooked.

Reagan inherited many of those economic problems, but once he cut taxes, America's entrepreneurial spirit was unshackled. We experienced the greatest peacetime expansion in postwar history - the so-called 'Seven Fat Years' from 1983 to 1989. Then George Bush broke his 'Read my lips: no new taxes' pledge, and sent the economy back into recession."

There are several problems with this story. First, Carter actually began many of the policies that Reagan would later become known for; Carter gave the rich a capital gains tax cut, massively deregulated key industries like trucking and airlines, and even increased defense spending. This was also the period that corporate PACs began compelling Congress to pass pro-business legislation.

According to supply-side theory, these actions should have nudged the economy in the right direction, not plunged it into the worst recession in 40 years. Other problems involve timing: Reagan's first tax cuts went into effect in 1982, but this was also the summer that the Federal Reserve Board slashed interest rates and expanded the money supply. Most economists believe the Fed, not Reagan, was responsible for the following recovery. Finally, the recession of 1990 began four months before Bush broke his "no new taxes" pledge. The recession began in July 1990; Bush signed his tax increases into law in November 1990.

And supply-siders are careful to note that Reagan's was the longest peacetime expansion since World War II. In truth, the Kennedy-Johnson expansion was longer: 106 months compared to Reagan's 92.1 Of course, there was a war in Vietnam, which gives supply-siders an excuse to dismiss it because wars are beneficial to the economy. But they are beneficial because governments engage in Keynesian borrowing and spending during them (which could be directed to social services as well as war). Unfortunately for supply-siders, it was really Keynesianism that produced the longest economic boom since World War II.

--Steve Kangas, Economic Performance, The Reagan Years

Such GOP success as was enjoyed by the 'White Rioters' in Florida is a failure, a tragedy in fact, for the nation as a whole. I no longer expect the GOP to see past the end of its crooked nose, to perceive the fact that what is good for the GOP's increasingly tiny elite gang of oligopolists is not good for those of us who have refused to sell out to the special interests.

I am frankly not interested in defending Obama. If Obama did little more than just show up and punch a clock, he beats any GOP regime since WWII.

Anything but Joe, the idiot beats another disastrous GOP regime of lies, incompetence, cronyism, and rampant felony crimes at the highest levels of government. An unemployed paper hanger could have done a better job than Bush Jr ...a dumb ass if there ever was one!

DOWN WITH THE GOP!

There is a growing body of scientific research to the effect that 'Republicanism' is a mental illness! Earlier, Stanford Univ psychologists published the results of their studies concluding that Republicans have more nightmares and night terrors than do normal folk!

Earlier, Dr. Gustav Gilbert ascribed to Nazi 'war criminals' at Nuremberg a 'lack of empathy' and implied that it was the source of evil itself. Hanah Arendt, a founder of the distinguished New School for Sociological Studies in New York wrote of the 'banality of evil'. Anyone who has acquired and read the 'minutes' of the Nazi meeting at Wannsee conducted by Reinhard Heydrich will discover such 'banality', i.e, Nazi bureaucrats discussing disspasionately the the mass murder of an entire race over a gourmet lunch amid witty conversation and 'banal' quips.

Certainly --anyone who can look at Reagan's abysmal record after some four years in office and blame CARTER for it is either 1) nuts, or 2) stupid, or 3) both!

Hey, GOP! Live with this: Carter beats any GOP President since WWII.

Also see:

• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  
• A Spiritual Mind Movie

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Why the US 'Investor Class' are Blood Sucking Parasites!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The bailout of big banks and 'financial houses' is a deliberate fraud! So too, 'trickle down/supply side' economics. Even if 'tax windfalls', like those found in 'supply-side' economics, persuade manufacturers to produce more, where is the market for the overproduction? Lately, however, Fat Cats have figured out how to game the system: transfer the booty offshore! As a result, declines in GDP have become a defining characteristic of every GOP regime since those of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes.

The current economic crisis has much in common with the US economy in the 1920s. The economy had been booming but by 1927 the nation had overproduced goods for which there was no market. No one should have been surprised that the overproduction led to a slowdown in both manufacturing and agriculture.

Overproduction results when there is no market for increased production. Among several reasons for 'declining markets' the most obvious is this: more and more have less and less to spend on new products or increased production. Failed economic ideology inevitably favors what is called 'economic stimuli', a more 'intellectualized' version of 'voodoo economics', otherwise called 'supply side economics' or, just as precisely 'trickle down' theory! It's all more accurately called 'bunkum', 'claptrap' or 'bullshit'! GOP/right wing economics fails to recognize the basic fact: increased production means absolutely nothing to those who have grown poorer. The fancy car in the showroom means nothing if I don't have a job or if my dollar has declined vis a vis the 'yuan' or the 'yen'.

Some recent history may illustrate the point: the Wall Street crash of 1929 was followed by a severe world wide depression acutely felt in the US, Germany, France, and to a lesser degree --Great Britain and Sweden. Nevertheless, unemployment was high in Sweden when that nation returned a Labor government committed to a program of public investment to address the high unemployment problem. It worked. By 1935 real output in Sweden was 7 percent above its 1929 level. Unemployment was reduced and the finance minister was said to have been happy to suffer another budget deficit to stimulate the economy.

Ronald Reagan's budget deficit did not have as happy a result. So --why did Keynesian economics work for Sweden in 1929-30 but not for Ronald Reagan more recently? The answer is simple: Sweden was then --as it is now --among the world's most egalitarian economies and because of that, a prosperous 'consumer' class proved to be the growing market that supports increased investment, increased production. By contrast, the US --among the very least egalitarian nations --inevitably slides into recession/depression whenever a GOP regime favors the increasingly few but richer elites!

Reagan's tax cut of 1982 benefited only the investor class! As a result markets and spending declined. It was a 'depression' of some two years. the worst since the 'Great Depression. It was characterized by decreases in consumer purchasing, declines in jobs, and the shrinking of the US GDP. Sound familiar?

The wrong people, an utterly worthless investor class, got the money!

While a true 'Keynesian' deficit might have stimulated growth, the GOP/Reagan deficit had the opposite effect.

The proof of my assertion is the public record. Reagan's tax cut of 1982 was quickly followed by the nation's worst recession since the Great Depression. The economy contracted, people had less money to spend, many lost their jobs and homes and slept under bridges. Where had all that money gone? It would eventually find its way to China! It was Bush Sr, in cahoots with Nixon who set it all up. It was Bush Sr who cut the deals while feasting on 'dog lip' in the Forbidden City. Since then, most (if not all) US wealth has found its way to China.

Reagan's best critics were found inside his regime, primarily, budget director David Stockman who blamed a "noisy faction of Republicans" for Reagan's infamous tax cut and the debacle that followed. Reagan might have achieved the prosperity that Keynes had predicted. That might have happened had his policies rewarded the working and middle classes instead of the rich and idle elites. Fact is --Ronnie was owned! The government is owned! The MIC is owned! We are owned! We are slaves to a system that may be beyond our ability to reform short of revolution.

The Reagan-heads forgot that the wealth of a nation is the result of the 'work' that is done by its people --not the 'offshore investments' of an utterly worthless, idle leisure class.

Trickle-down (supply-side) transfers of monies to manufacturers that are over-produced is economic disaster. Similarly, transferring wealth to elites for whom additional consumer purchases are characterized by decreasing utility is foolhardy! Put another way --of what use is more 'spending money' to one who has 'everything'? And for that reason, why should a capitalist get a tax cut for producing product that cannot and will never be sold? The US investor class has solved that much of the problem by exporting manufacturing --our jobs --to China. If you don't believe me, just check out the CIA's own "World Fact Book" which lists the US at the very bottom with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance still often called the 'balance of trade' deficit. China sits atop the list with the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance.

Because the very, very wealthy i.e, those benefiting from GOP tax cuts, most certainly do not increase purchases with tax cut windfalls, wealth does not 'trickle down'! It does not support increased domestic sales nor does it stimulate increased production and, thus, GDP. In fact, the record shows that instead of stimulating the economy by stimulating production, growth and sales, the very opposite invariably occurs.

This consistently results in a reduction of the money supply, most prominently:

1. lower wages ala Wal-Mart et al for those still fortunate enough to be employed;
2. declining purchases followed by declining GDP.

Why the US 'investor class' is an economic blood-sucking parasite!

The so-called 'Great Depression' was, in fact, a great contraction in which those who would have spent monies were deprived of the money to spend. A 'depression' is a self-reinforcing race to the bottom, a black-hole which feeds on itself.

During the Great Depression and, later, Ronald Reagan's 1980s depression of about two years, millions lost their jobs. In 1929, bankers and financiers continued to speculate on stocks, borrowing the money and buying stocks 'on margin'. More recently, 'short sellers' made fortunes on 911! What guilty 'insider knowledge' had they possessed? You can rest assured billions have already been transferred into offshore tax havens --wealth that is perhaps forever lost to the US economy.

Transfers of wealth to everywhere but America not only fail to stimulate the domestic economy, they bleed it! The wealth of a nation is not the money it prints, borrows or coins. The wealth of a nation is the productivity of its people and their industries. Both declined under Reagan and declined again under Bush and declined yet again under the other Bush! When another GOP 'Prez' assumes or steals the office, there will be yet another decline. That assumes, of course, that we survive the current crisis.

One wonders why Reagan didn't just cut out the middle man. A more equitable tax cut or better a more progressive tax might have put more spendable income directly into the hands of consumers. Spent money circulates and drives an economy. That consumers spend money seems to be a fact lost on the likes of Reagan, Bush, and the nation's rich and callous elites.

Surely, there were knowledgeable advisers in Reagan's regime who knew better. The tax cut, therefore, was entirely political, a pay off to the rich for their support, or more precisely, their investment! Nothing has changed in the GOP. The Bush administration made several such "payoffs" during his catastrophic and criminal regime.

The current collapse of the US is the end result of a trend begun with the passage of Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut for his rich, elite base. The year was 1982. Historians will write of that date that it was the beginning of the end of the American empire.

The Dangers of American Fascism

Following is a description of the American fascists who have looted the US and exploited the labors of those whose efforts alone create wealth.

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

...

--Henry A. Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism, The New York Times, From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

In this case, the "gods" of American fascism are greed and lies. While Democrats are flawed and often impotent, the GOP has ceased to be a political party! It is, rather, a crime syndicate, a dangerous, kooky cult of psychopaths and liars!

We're in the Money?

It was Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) who 'stole the show' when she sang "We're in the Money" in Gold Diggers of 1933. Goldiggers was a Warner Bros. musical choreographed by Busby Berkeley, starring Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell and, famously, Ginger Rogers.

An original stage production ran for 282 performances on Broadway in 1919 and 1920 featuring songs by Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (lyrics). In 2003, Gold Diggers of 1933 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

"We're in the Money" is memorable not only for its energy but for a charming performance by Ginger Rogers, singing a verse in Pig Latin accompanied by scantily-clad showgirls dancing with giant coins.

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