How Keynes Got it Right and the 'Right' Got it Wrong!

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Many have proposed a 'flat' tax. It sounds good but isn't! Flat taxes are not really 'flat'. Ten percent of the income of a poor or middle person is a much, much greater burden than is the same percentage against the income of a millionaire. The difference is that merely keeping a roof over the family's head and food on the table is a MUCH bigger percentage of income/wealth for a poor or middle class family.

The very, very wealthy, in fact, find it difficult to spend all their wealth. What is left over after the cost of maintaining a villa in Spain or a swanky lodge in the Alps is invested in enterprises that earn even more wealth. Moreover, even Libertarians --if pressed --may admit that 10%, 20%, 30% percent, indeed, any percentage of a poor person's income is a much greater burden than almost any rate on the income of a millionaire! Among the many reasons this is so is that mere necessities --food, water and to varying degrees, shelter --are not only fixed, they will always amount to a much higher PERCENTAGE of a poor or middle class budget than that of the budget of a multi-millionaire or richer.

Libertarians, however, will maintain that income tax is immoral because tax policy may have the effect of re-distributing wealth and income. My reply is that when just one percent of a nation's population owns more than the rest of the population combined, it is time to raise taxes on the very rich.

The whole system is pure criminal as from the installation of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 by Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Not only the American people suffers, the whole world has been sandwiched by the private banks behind the central banking system.

--G. Edward Griffin, Legalized Plunder of the American People

The best argument against a flat tax, ironically, has come from a so-called 'libertarian' who wrote:

That 10 percent is a greater burden on the poor than is 10 percent on the very rich is the very reason that income tax is immoral --as it is currently imposed upon us.

Alas! The Libertarian does not go far enough. A flat tax of any sort will penalize the poor while enriching the rich.

During the 'Great Depression', the American comedian Bob Hope was asked to comment on it. He quipped (and I paraphrase)

"..I looked up the word depression. A 'depression' is a hole. I looked up 'hole'. A hole is 'nothing'. So --if you think I am going to waste my time talking about nothing, you have another think coming!"

There is nothing mysterious about depressions. They are defined by 'negative GDP growth' from which follows negative job creation rates --not to be confused with mere slowdowns or periods of slow growth. Thus depressions are disastrous for the poor. The very, very rich can actually benefit from them by buying bargains that are beyond the reach of the poorer or middle classes. The 'ruling elites' are capable of rigging markets with cleverly timed 'sell-offs'. They have the luxury of buying back in at bargain prices.

A 'depression' is a period of 'contraction'. In the U.S. every recession/depression at least since World War II has occurred during a Republican administration. That is but one reason I am not now nor have I ever been a Republican.

If FDR had been either a Republican or what is commonly called a 'libertarian' (in the Ron Paul sense of the word) the U.S. would have eventually collapsed. Even so, it may have required the U.S. entry into WWII following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to get the U.S. into the war. As a stimulus, 'war' created millions of new jobs and put women to work where --earlier --their presence had been unknown. The image of 'Rosie the Riveter' is still symbolic of the period. The good effect is that women would never again consent willingly to 'second class' citizen status.

As for Keynes, he would not have been surprised by the American experience. He was, after all, famous for his proposal that in times of increased joblessness, the government may do well to bury 'pound notes' in a landfill and let 'private enterprise' dig them up.

If it's all about jobs, why wait for a war to create jobs? A 'liberal' administration has a responsibility to society overall --not just to the 'ruling elites' who finance his campaigns. Rather, a liberal and/or progressive regime will support a more egalitarian society, in fact, a more efficient society as a result.

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Where the GOP Went Wrong and Why It Still Is

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The GOP seems always to grow more militant after its failures. The failures have been many. As a result the GOP has turned both wrong and radical, more kooky than cult-like, both radical and rabid! This trend is traced to the Reagan years –an era that the GOP longs to resurrect but failing that might be happy if their recollections of that era were not undermined by the truth about it. Republicans would love to recall a time in which the lovable old Ronald 'there you go again' Reagan would earn a place in the American pantheon among the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR! Reality has not been on the GOP side for quite some time now. 

Look at the Reagan years. What went wrong? Did nothing go right? Reagan is most often associated with 'supply-side' economics –the GOP's favorite psuedo-ideology cited to justify whopping tax cuts for what was euphemistically called the 'investor class'. We live with the legacy of that kind of thinking: it is the emergence of a ruling elite of just 1 percent of the total population, the tiny, near microscopic minority which, in fact, owns more than the rest of us combined.

Arguably –this elite rules us because they own us. In effect, 'we' –the 90 plus percent –have assumed the burden that might have fallen to those more wealthy than us, those more able to sustain the financial burden. The result is slavery: we work and thus create the wealth of which we, as a class, are denied! I refer you to the works of any major economist since Adam Smith. All of them --from Ricardo to Marx, from Friedman to Keynes –have espoused the 'labor theory' of value.

The right wing predictably maintains that growth under Reagan proves supply-side theory. The opposite is true. Reagan's failures disprove 'supply-side' or 'trickle-down' theory for all time. Supply-side theorists believe that if top marginal tax rates are reduced then the potential loss of tax revenue will be offset by growth in the economy. That has never happened. The 'theory' is but a theoretical curve drawn on a napkin. Reagan, meanwhile, is remembered for having doubled the national debt and tripling the national deficit.

The test is whether the tax cuts produce more growth than occurs during normal business cycle recoveries. 'Supply-side economics' fails the test. Between 1979 and 1989, the growth rate was 3% --nothing to write home about, certainly not confirmation of 'supply-side' economics.

'Trickle-down theory' is not even the product of academic research. It's origins are found in political magazines, not scholarly journals. In fact, many right-leaning professional economists prefer a smaller government but have not advocated extreme tax cuts. None believe that with extreme tax cuts the economy will grow and most certainly not to the extent that revenues will actually increase –as supply-siders had said they would.

N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist, the senior Bush's own economic advisor, called Reagan's supply-side advisers “incompetent and unscrupulous”. In 1995, Irving Kristol, confessed that he supported supply-side theory but only because of its "political possibilities".

Now we come to the very reasons Bill Clinton is reviled by those who have lots of money –more money that normal people are allowed to even dream about. In 1989 the top 1% were taxed at a rate of 28.9%. By 1995, that rate had risen to 36.1%. Like Chicken Little, the 'supply-side' crowd warned that the sky was falling. It didn't! The result was unprecedented growth (not seen in decades), lower unemployment, and a whopping budget surplus. For having done such a great job, Bill Clinton was very nearly impeached and removed from office.

In general, tax cuts may stimulate demand but that is most surely the case only if those whose spending supports the economy get the tax break. That segment is, obviously, the middle class! The ruling elites do not spend in ways that drive the economy. Rather, they squirrel away their riches in offshore banks and other tax dodges. It's good money down a bottomless pit, wealth that is forever lost to the nation.

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The 'Cowboy' on Facebook
Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

A Party of Panic and Depression

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The administration of Ronald Reagan ushered in a depression of some two years, the longest and deepest since Hoover's Great Depression of the 1930s. Millions were put out of work. Many businesses, entire industries never recovered. The Reagan depression followed a GOP tax cut benefiting only the upper quintile. As a stimulus, it was an obvious failure, yet that's how it had been sold. It's how they are always sold.

The real world results: a depression of some two years, a contraction of the economy, a transfer of wealth upward to the upper quintile, the nation's richest 20 percent. A windfall of this nature is not stimulus to invest but, rather, to transfer the gains offshore. There were no net gains in jobs. There was no Reagan-recovery. There were, rather, net losses, declines in employment. The government's own stats prove it. They are available the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and the U.S. Commerce Department --B.E.A.

Our Major Exports: Death and Destruction

Check the CIA's 'World Fact Book' where you will find listed on the very bottom the United States with the world's largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance. China is on top with the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance. The downside for China is this: it must prop up the worthless U.S. dollar if it wishes to survive by dumping its product on our shores. The downside for us is this: we are now a vassal state of China. Anyone reduced to shopping at Wal-Mart should know this. If not, I suggest you search the shelves and aisles for goods manufactured in the United States and exported abroad. I doubt you will find any.

If the U.S. citizenry believed that there was booty to be gained with oil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was fooled again! Clearly, then, the war racket has done absolutely nothing for the US bottom line and less for the working people who are always faced with the prospect of living in a tent city during a downturn. The US, the right wing in particular, for all its bullshit and bluster has less than nothing to show for the many lives sacrificed at the alter of greed and capitalist/imperialistic ambition.

The US follows the Roman model of empire though it is difficult to say which comes first --the collapse of the real economy or the commencement of empire? In the case of Rome, it is clear that the local economy was already in trouble when Rome began its conquest of Dacia for its gold! Had Rome been producing more than it had been consuming it might have survived and prospered. As the dollar is all but worthless today, the currency of Rome --sesterces --was worthless except as a means by which a head count could be made of those attending the gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum. Something needed to be done and quickly. The Praetorian Guard saw an opportunity in Rome's increasingly difficult problems. The Guard took action, selling, at auction, the Roman empire. The highest bidder  was Didius Julianus who purchased the empire with Greek Drachmas, not worthless sesterces.

The U.S. dollar is similarly debauched but conveniently propped up by China. That is not the case because China wants to help us out. Rather, China must support the dollar if it wishes to continue selling to U.S. consumers. Some have said that China "dumped its crap" on the U.S. consumer via Wal-Mart. If it did not, it was said, its own burgeoning population would face utter poverty, millions might starve. Chinese poohbahs will, of course, blame the U.S. Facing starvation, China it was feared would threaten the world, if it had not already.

The New National Capital/Capitol: K-street

K-street is the best little whorehouse in Washington; it's the nation's 'read light district' in which the apparatus of government is pimped! K-street --not Congress --is where the bills, the laws, the policies are written, decided upon for a price! K-street is where the 'Johns' buy the bureaucracy and decide foreign and domestic policies. K-street is where money talks, souls are sold, bullshit peddled.

K-street is where the so-called 'Jewish Lobby' (read: Israeli Lobby) dictates American foreign policy. Some have called it a marriage made in hell, in fact, a Faustian bargain, in which the soul of America is bartered or whored-out outright! What's in it for the U.S. to continue to support the increasingly fanatic, aggressive and extremist governments in Israel? The most obvious answer is this: Israel provides the convincing 'pre-text' for US oil wars in the Middle East. Big oil has said to Israel or perhaps Israel to big oil: 'you scratch my back and I will scratch yours!'.

The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit, until it was hijacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like bogus overseas threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women at home. Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted from their sinking economic status - through the diversion of a sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior status - was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant.
In any case, the takeover of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its second stage. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it is. Seriously, what is the next step after this one fails to provide any long-term solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the case? For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing that they are capable of anything. Which more or less answers that question, doesn't it?

If you're willing to savage military icons like John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry in order to win elections - and especially after you get away with it every time - you're willing to do anything. If you're willing to mock the 9/11 widows as scheming opportunists, you're willing to do anything. If you're willing to don a tuxedo and joke about missing WMD at a press banquet in Washington, just as you're telling the American military's adversaries in Iraq to "bring it on", you're willing to do anything; Our Long National Neight Isn't Over; It's Just Beginning, --David Michael Green

War is a Racket

It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

--War Is a Racket, General Smedly Butler, Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient, Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired

Conspiracies are how things get done. Some are legal; some are not. A 'corporation', for example, is a conspiracy made legal by 'charter'. Corporations were described by St. Thomas More in his 'Utopia':

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. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

--Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia

If you are still drinking the Kool-aid, go to Findlaw, where the search term 'conspiracy' of itself will get you 690 cases. Go to the Cornell University Law Library. Type in the single search term 'conspiracy'! Among the hundreds (possibly thousands of cases) you will find No. 03-3156,UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,APPELLEE v.ANTONIO N. TABRON, A/K/A FAT CAT,APPELLANT.

The transfer of wealth upward is deliberate. It's how the 'pay-offs' are laundered. Initially, it was only the top 20 percent who benefited as charts dating to the beginning of the Clinton administration indicate and prove. Clinton briefly reversed the trend. It might have been Clinton's lasting legacy, his finest hour, had not the regime of George W. Bush resumed the payoff as evinced in the resumption of the inexorable flow of U.S wealth upward and outward.

I don't know who it was who said that Satan's biggest 'trick' was convincing the world that he did not exist. The traitors of the 'American' right wing have, in fact, sold out America while wrapping themselves in the flag, convincing you that 'conspiracies' do not exist. But, in fact, St. Thomas More's description of the 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth' was never more accurate or more precisely descriptive than it is today. It is this 'conspiracy of rich men;', this ruling one percent who alone have benefited from GOP 'tax cuts', tax cuts which are inexorably followed by job losses if not recessions/depressions. And it is only the GOP which has benefited from them as working people are denied not only jobs but careers.

This is how the right wing thinks. While sane and/or scientifically inclined people will observe first and conclude later, the right wing acts upon prejudices and/or whatever rationalization makes them feel good about themselves. Supply-side economics is most certainly a rationalization whose origins lay in the troubled and often psychopathic minds of tortured Republicans. Thus 'trickle down' theory helps them feel better about themselves, relieves them of guilt, helps them sleep at night.

The GOP needs to believe. Studies by Stanford University prove that Republicans have more nightmares and night terrors than do normal people. To this end, they shoe-horn reality into a GOP mold; they work backward from foregone conclusions. They cannot suspend a prejudice long enough to reach a conclusion based upon evidence or verifiable fact. They reverse 'cause and effect' and often mistake one for the other. They will shoot first and ask questions later! They will not tolerate facts that proves them wrong.

Here are the basic facts on the major financial panics of the 19th century.

Panic of 1819

The first major American depression, the Panic of 1819 was rooted to some extent in economic problems reaching back to the war of 1812.

• It was triggered by a collapse in cotton prices. A contraction in credit coincided with the problems in the cotton market, and the young American economy was severely affected.
• Banks were forced to call in loans, and foreclosures of farms and bank failures resulted.
• The Panic of 1819 lasted until 1821.
• The effects were felt most in the west and south. Bitterness about the economic hardships resonated for years and led to the resentment that helped Andrew Jackson solidify his political base throughout the 1820s.
• Besides exacerbating sectional animosity, the Panic of 1819 also made many Americans realize the importance of politics and government policy in their lives.

Panic of 1837

• The Panic of 1837 was triggered by a combination of factors including the failure of a wheat crop, a collapse in cotton prices, economic problems in Britain, rapid speculation in land, and problems resulting from the variety of currency in circulation.
  
• It was the second-longest American depression, with effects lasting roughly six years, until 1843.
  
• The panic had a devastating impact. A number of brokerage firms in New York failed, and at least one New York City bank president committed suicide. As the effect rippled across the nation, a number of state-chartered banks also failed. The nascent labor union movement was effectively stopped, as the price of labor plummeted.
  
• The depression caused the collapse of real estate prices. The price of food also collapsed, which was ruinous to farmers and planters who couldn’t get a decent price for their crops. People who lived through the depression following 1837 told stories that would be echoed a century later during The Great Depression.
  
• The aftermath of the panic of 1837 led to Martin Van Buren’s failure to secure a second term in the election of 1840. Many blamed the economic hardships on the policies of Andrew Jackson, and Van Buren, who had been Jackson’s vice president, paid the political price.

Panic of 1857

• The Panic of 1857 was triggered by the failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which actually did much of its business as a bank headquartered in New York City. Reckless speculation in railroads led the company into trouble, and the company’s collapse led to a literal panic in the financial district, as crowds of frantic investors clogged the streets around Wall Street.
  
• Stock prices plummeted, and more than 900 mercantile firms in New York had to cease operation. By the end of the year the American economy was a shambles.
  
• One victim of the Panic of 1857 was a future Civil War hero and US president, Ulysses S. Grant, who was bankrupted and had to pawn his gold watch to buy Christmas presents.
  
• Recovery from the depression began in early 1859.

Panic of 1873

• The investment firm of Jay Cooke and Company went bankrupt in September 1873 as a result of rampant speculation in railroads. The stock market dropped sharply and caused numerous businesses to fail.
• The depression caused approximately three million Americans to lose their jobs.
• The collapse in food prices impacted America's farm economy, causing great poverty in rural America.
• The depression lasted for five years, until 1878.
• The Panic of 1873 led to a populist movement that saw the creation of the Greenback Party.

Panic of 1893

• The depression set off by the Panic of 1893 was the greatest depression America had known, and was only surpassed by the Great Depression of the 1930s.
• In early May 1893 the New York stock market dropped sharply, and in late June panic selling caused the stock market to crash.
• A severe credit crisis resulted, and more than 16,000 businesses had failed by the end of 1893. Included in the failed businesses were 156 railroads and nearly 500 banks.
• Unemployment spread until one in six American men lost their jobs.
• The depression inspired "Coxey's Army," a march on Washington of unemployed men. The protesters demanded that the government provide public works jobs. Their leader, Jacob Coxey, was imprisoned for 20 days.
• The depression caused by the Panic of 1893 lasted for about four years, ending in 1897.

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Bombs and Bailouts: How the US 'Pissed Away' 14 Trillion Dollars

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

After four years sifting through a morass of US government records, the Brookings Institution reports that the US government has spent $5.1 trillion on the development and manufacture of nuclear weapons, adding that if 'clean up, stockpiling and dismantlement' is included, the cost rises to $5.5 trillion.

US officials have called it: "money well-spent". Having spent trillions threatening the world, the US has recently bailed out the crooked banksters and other robber barons to the tune of $8.5 trillion for the total cost of the bailouts. See the spreadsheet graphic below. Click on it for the complete story.

Since 1945, the United States has manufactured and deployed more than 70,000 nuclear weapons to deter and if necessary fight a nuclear war. Some observers believe the absence of a third world war confirms that these weapons were a prudent and cost-effective response to the uncertainty and fear surrounding the Soviet Union's military and political ambitions during the cold war. As early as 1950, nuclear weapons were considered relatively inexpensive- providing "a bigger bang for a buck"-and were thoroughly integrated into U.S. forces on that basis. Yet this assumption was never validated. Indeed, for more than fifty years scant attention has been paid to the enormous costs of this effort-more than $5 trillion thus far-and its short and long-term consequences for the nation.

--Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, Brookings Institution

Elsewhere, Brookings reports that even as the Cold War ended, the US continued spending some $35 billion a year [$96 million a day], 14 percent of the defense budget on nuclear weapons and maintenance. Even Brookings concedes '..with the benefit of hindsight and objectivity, the waste, the duplication and occasional foolishness.'

Much is made of an 'atmosphere of tension, ambiguity and fear'! But the fact of the matter is this: much of that 'atmosphere' is traceable directly to the presence of a US nuclear arsenal that threatens the world. Brookings concedes that the moneys were not always well spent but does not go far enough. How many of the starving millions might have been fed with just one percent of some 14 trillion squandered by the US on weaponry and bailouts? How much more goodwill might have been achieved with the investment of just half that amount in peaceful projects that would have benefited all mankind? The US may have blown a golden opportunity forever!

``Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.''

-- Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Baghavad Gita

That might describe as well the ruinous effects of a wastral US fiscal policy, a bloated bailout for banksters, an impending implosion that will directly result from the US enrichment of just one percent of its population as some 95 percent descend into poverty, illiteracy and hopelessness and all of it a result of the right wing export of US industries, jobs, and hope!

Adendum:

The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: “U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since ’45.”

The headline next to it said: “Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses.”

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

And we still don’t seem to have learned the proper lessons. We’ve allowed so many people to fall into the terrible abyss of unemployment that no one — not the Obama administration, not the labor unions and most certainly no one in the Republican Party — has a clue about how to put them back to work.

--Bob Herbert, Safety Nets for the Rich

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• 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
  

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Billionaires For Bush Reveal How Bush Paid Off His Base and Stuck You with the Tab

If you think the astounding rise of income inequities and the rise of the GOP are just coincidental, please email me. I would like to speak with you about the many advantages and pleasures you might derive as the new, proud owner of the Brooklyn Bridge. The GOP sold Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982 like George W. Bush sold his war on Iraq. The benefits of both have accrued only to this nation's power elite and, in both cases, everyone else is stuck with the tab. It will be left to sons, daughters, grand-children and great grand children to retire the debt Bush has run up murdering civilians in Iraq. Yet, odds are, many of those same sons, daughters and their offspring will start life pulling up the rear having been denied pole position at the outset.

Bush stuck you in yet another way. His "elite" base got the tax cut that you didn't. Those who did not get a tax cut are considered "poor" but are getting poorer as we live and breath. His "base" was rich at the time Bush cut their taxes. They've gotten richer as a result. Where will Bush's base hide, I wonder, when the bill he has run up in Iraq comes due? They are not worried. Bush has been bought and paid for.

We have grown up with "official myths", Horatio Alger stories of rags-to-riches, stories about how down-and-out boys might achieve an American dream of wealth and success through mere hard work and fair dealing. The US, myths say, is not an aristocracy; it is a "meritocracy". On the other side of the coin is an implicit message that if the deserving poor eventually get rich, those that are not rich deserve to be poor.

The GOP are well-advised not to waste my time and their time denying it. Their progenitur is Scrooge.

"Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons...then let them die and decrease the surplus population."

—Scrooge, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Still, the GOP is indicted best in their own words. Pat Buchanan is the class example.

One by one, the prophets of doom appeared at the podium. The Reagan decade, they moaned, was a terrible time in America; and the only way to prevent even worse times, they said, is to entrust our nation's fate and future to the party that gave us McGovern, Mondale, Carter and Michael Dukakis.

--Patrick J. Buchanan, 1992 Republican National Convention Speech, Houston, Texas

Buchanan targeted Democrats already tarred with the label "liberal", a GOP code word for anyone opposing GOP robber-baron economics. Any Democrat would have made a better President than any Republican chosen at random. At least one on Buchanan's hit list did. Jimmy Carter, now demonized with a GOP made-up, code word --stagflation. There is, in fact, no real word for an economic condition that only Republicans seemed to have complained about. Certainly, when another Democrat interrupts the GOP diet of government gravy and Pentagon pork, he/she will be accused of stagflation --or whatever word GOP consultants and focus groups can make-up or otherwise "pass".

The critics Buchanan so vociferously publicized were right about Reagan's disastrous presidency. Much of the rest of Buchanan's speech credits Reagan with any number of things which Reagan had nothing whatsoever to do with or things which occurred despite Reagan's worst efforts.

It was under our party that the Berlin Wall came down...

Thus it is implied that Ronald Reagan, who paid tribute to Nazi SS dead at Bitburg, had something to do with bringing down the Berlin Wall. Reagan is more accurately remembered for having "blinked" when Gorbachev put total nuclear disarmament on the table for negotiation at Rekjavik.

Buchanan's next absurdity must be read while remembering Bush v Gore:

We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against Supreme Court justices who think they have a mandate to rewrite our Constitution.

To be fair, Buchanan could not have known in 1992 that in a mere eight years a "conservative" majority on the high court would prove him wrong yet again. For all the right wing bluster about "strict constructionist" interpretations of the US Constitution, it will be forever recalled that it was the Republican majority on the Supreme Court that rewrote the Constitution in order to put into office an imperial "President" who would finish off the venerable document for good!

Wealth "trickling up" is a world wide phenomenon but the effects are stunning. In the year 2000, almost twenty years after the infamous Ronald Reagan tax cut benefiting only the richest Americans, a tiny elite, the richest 1% of adults, owned 40% of the world’s total assets. In 2000, the richest 10% of adults owned 85% of total assets. The bottom half of the world adult population owned a mere 1% of global wealth.

[See: World Institute for Development Economics Research, The World Distribution of Household Wealth, 2006]. It's gotten much worse since then.

It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. "People on the whole have normally distributed attributes, talents and motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that are much more unequal than that," says Robin Marris, emeritus professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London.

In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that the distribution of wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law pattern, which essentially meant that the extremely rich hogged most of a nation's wealth (New Scientist, 19 August 2000, p22). Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very rich, and not necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the rest.

Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the vast majority of people are governed by a completely different law. Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland in College Park and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001. They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy- about 3 per cent of the population- does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97 per cent fitted a different curve- one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas.

In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas. The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko.

--New Scientist, There's one rule for the rich

Some essential background:

• In 1979, the top 1 per cent of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20 per cent. In 2000, the multiplier had grown to 88.5. Certainly, since Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982, US "inequality" grew steadily but for a brief respite in Clinton's second term. Bush's final record will be even worse.
  
• Surveys have also identified a small, but fast-growing global group of 70,000 super rich individuals with more than $30 million in financial assets. This group is growing even faster than "paupers" in the $1 million-plus bracket." [See: World's richest worth $29 trillion in 2003; Survey: Wealthy now back at level before dot-com bust. MSNBC.com, June 15, 2004 ]
• The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent.
  
• The top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined
  
• Table 2: Share of Total Available Household Net Worth, 2001*
  
  

  Wealth Group	Share of Net Worth
  99-100th percentile	32.7%
  95-99th percentile	25.0%
  90-95th percentile	12.1%
  50th-90th percentile	27.1%
  0-50th percentile	2.8%
  Total	100.0%

  [See: Kennickell, 2003. See data from the Federal Reserve Board for details.

The "center" itself would not be so bad were not the centers so far to the "right", in other words, skewed. Imagine a line with a tiny, ruling oligarchy on the right end and a perfectly egalitarian democracy i.e, a group sharing both power and wealth in perfect equity on the left end. The bulging bell curve in the middle of this line is not --in America --the middle at all, but far to the right. In America, the center is not in the center and may never have been.

While a tiny few, like Bill Gates, may indulge acts of philanthropy from time to time, the over all trends have not changed. A more egalitarian society is the preferred remedy to injustice --not isolated acts of charity, however kind. Moreover, with very, very few exceptions, those growing rich at the expense of others are unlikely to become more liberal as they gain riches. With few notable and statistically insignificant exceptions, the nouveau riche will continue to "...dance with the party that brung 'em." Reagan-heads called it the "Reagan Revolution" for good reason. Conditioned to think of "revolution" in terms of the French or Russian revolutions, Americans might not have grasped the significant harm "Reaganomics" have done America. It was for real.

How many people actually rule America by virtue of their great wealth, their ability to finance political campaigns, their ability to open doors with a phone call? The size of this group is variously estimated, but the fact is no one really knows. Surveys don't ask that question and political consultants like Karl Rove or Paul Caprio will most certainly not tell you. It is possible, however, to estimate the size of a group that literally owns some 99 percent of all "wealth" in the US. As this group grows both smaller and richer, the GOP declines in terms of total votes that can be counted on. This is why the GOP must, of necessity, communicate to its core base via "code words". The GOP, in other words, cannot afford to be honest even with its rank and file. It has cut a Faustian bargain with a tiny elite, Bush's base.

This tiny elite, Bush's base, must work behind the scenes. Robber barons have the money and the power to interfere with the electoral process in numerous ways. The most glaring development is the rise of super-conservative "networks" like Fox and talk shows like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These programs are the Right Wing's propaganda machine, "faux news" programs that make no effort to tell the truth. Gullible people who have nothing in common with Rupert Murdoch will nevertheless fall for the Fox line. In more egalitarian days, opposing voices could demand and get "equal time". The Fairness Doctrine was deliberately targeted by un-American, "monied" interests for whom the open exchange of ideas is a threat.

Even Roman Emperors gave the vox populi lip service with a healthy soupcon of bread and circuses. The most successful oligarchs --real and faux --are those who succeed in tricking the "folk" into thinking them "...of the people". A regular contributor to this blog wrote recently:

Howard Dean, along with the other main stream Dem orgs. and the progressive Dem.orgs had better figure out a way to co-exist and share resources, they are going to need, if they are to over come this corrupt bunch they are about to take the field with.

Certainly, as more voters grow dis-enchanted with George W. Bush and the GOP in general, Democratic prospects will improve. But there is a downside to the political reality that even as they grow smaller in number, the GOP's natural base grows very, very rich.

Sadly, our electoral system seems designed to weed out dissent deviating past a certain "norm", a norm acceded to by a tiny, exceedingly rich, ruling cabal, a "norm" established by the Democratic and Republican wings of a single party.

An update.

Americans Now Resemble Pre-War Nazi Germans

You see them at the supermarket aggressively pushing their shopping carts around, and you get this feeling that if you do not move fast enough they might just run into you. You detect an undercurrent of suppressed rage, hostility, and detachment as if they are on some other planet.

You feel the same thing when you are driving down the road, and you see them driving with one hand on the wheel, the other hand holding up a cell phone to their ear, wheeling their SUVs around just as aggressively and at the same time detached, like those people in the supermarket pushing their shopping carts around.

No-one smiles any more. No-one wants to talk about things that matter. If you want to discuss anything other than sports, sex, or Dancing with the Stars, no-one seems interested.

What is happening? Is it something in the water, or is Invasion of the Body Snatchers actually happening for real?

I do not remember people being like this. They are hostile, impatient, full of suppressed anger, abrupt, suspicious, and some even threatening.

Not so many years ago, you couldn't walk down the street without running into your friends and neighbors wanting to talk about anything and everything, and have a good laugh. People, I remember, used to communicate -- now they just glare at you, or completely ignore you.

No-one wants to complain about anything. No-one seems to be bothered by high taxes or inflation. They just look at you and roll their eyes like you are crazy if you dare to express your dissatisfaction with the status quo. And God forbid, do not mention the wars, that topic really gets people uncomfortable. It is as if you are asking some personal question. ...

Just how much debt will Bush leave to your children to pay back --unless, your children somehow become billionaires?

As percentage of GDP, "deficit is twice as large as it's ever been"

Billionaires for Bush

Bush Restricting Travel Rights Of More Than 100,000 Americans

Monday, September 3rd, 2007 by RLR
From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

Citizens who have done no more than criticize the president are being banned from airline flights, harassed at airports’, strip searched, roughed up and even imprisoned, feminist author and political activist Naomi Wolf reports in her new book, “The End of America.”(Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the fascist playbook,” Wolf says. She noticed starting in 2002 that “almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration(TSA) and given a more thorough search.”During one preboarding search, a TSA agent told her “You’re on the list” and Wolf learned it is not a list of suspected terrorists but of journalists, academics, activists, and politicians “who have criticized the White House.”Some of this hassling has made headlines, such as when Senator Edward Kennedy was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004, suggesting no person, however prominent, is safe from Bush nastiness. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia has also been mistreated. And it can be nasty. Robert Johnson, an American citizen, described the “humiliation factor” he endured:“I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal,” Wolf quotes him as saying. And it gets worse than that. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, said he was detained at Kennedy airport by officers who “threatened and shoved” him. And that was mild. Maher Arar, a Canadian software consultant was detained at Kennedy and “rendered” to Syria where he was imprisoned for more than a year by goons that beat him with a heavy metal cable. Read the rest of this entry »

From an Amazon reader review of John Perkins' "The Secret History of the American Empire.

In his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins lifted the veil on a world rarely seen by most people. He took us on a tour of the costs and consequences of American corporate hegemony, dispelling myths of the `free market', and forcing us to peer deep into our own souls. As Perkins states in his earlier works, "The world is as you dream it," so the question is, what will you dream?

Picking up where he left off, Perkins continues down the path of redemption. Once serving the masters of modern slavery, Perkins now works tirelessly to free those who have been oppressed by the corpratocracy. His thesis? Our planet cannot survive ruthless consumerism at the expense of the world and its people. When all the trees are gone, and all the oil is tapped, what will be left? Does your shirt still feel nice when you understand the suffering involved in its production?

The world John Perkins envisions is one in which personal participation is crucial, and power does not rest in the hands of the few. We have everything we need to create a sustainable global society. We have the resources, the technology, and viable social models. What we need now is a vision, and the inspiration to create such a world. In 329 pages, Perkins provides us with the inspiration to fearlessly question ourselves, and the power structures that exist around us.

Traveling through countries like Indonesia, Brazil, Bolivia, Iraq, and Iran, Perkins paints a picture so vivid its life-altering. This is an amazing follow-up to Confessions, and I strongly recommend this book to anyone who still believes the `free market' benefits all, or anyone who is still waving a flag. This story is brutal, harsh, and real. But the good news is: life can change. We can change. Deep down we all share common values. We all want to live peacefully, we all want to prosper, and we all want to feel love.

If you wish to understand the world for how it really exists, and you seek the tools to help create positive changes, then you have to read this book.

As John says, "Today is the day for us to begin to truly change the world."

Additional resources

• The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, Jr. University of North Carolina at Wilmington
• We're Right, They're Wrong
• Wealth Inequality ChartsPublish Post
• War Profiteering and the Concentration of Income and Wealth in America
  

Discoveries

• Carl Jung - Matter of Heart

The Cowboy's Shared News Items

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

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Appearing Now in a Neighborhood Near You: The Budget Deficit that Ate America or How Walmart Robbed 200,000 Americans of their Jobs

Wal-Mart makes a killing putting people out of work, depressing local economies, and lowering wages but it is globalization --an unholy alliance with GOP "trickle down" policies --that spawned Wal-Mart and sounded a death knell for the futures of American workers. Most recently, Wal-Mart's Chinese imports have displaced nearly 200,000 US jobs

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was supposed to improve the US trade deficit with China and create good jobs in the United States. But those promises have gone unfulfilled: the total US trade deficit with China reached $235 billion in 2006. Between 2001 and 2006, this growing deficit eliminated 1.8 million US jobs (Scott 2007). The world’s biggest retailer, US-based Wal-Mart was responsible for $27 billion in US imports from China in 2006 and 11% of the growth of the total US trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2006. Wal-Mart’s trade deficit with China alone eliminated nearly 200,000 US jobs in this period.

Robert E. Scott, The Wal-Mart effect

The Wal-Mart effect on US workers and manufacturing is typified by the effects seen in clothing --low-cost goods with a hidden higher price: lower wages, lost jobs. Underlying every sector, however, are unsupportable US trade deficits which benefit American consumers but only so long as they have jobs themselves.

As has been the trend at least since the regime of Ronald Reagan, manufacturing suffers most as Wal-Mart grows more intrusive, exploiting the trade deficit with its own undervalued currency. In effect, American consumers have financed China's economic boom.

Of some 133,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the US, sixty-eight percent were the direct result of Wal-Mart's "partnership" with China. The effect is devastating to US workers and the US economy overall. Manufacturing jobs, after all, have generally paid higher wages and provided better benefits.

The US-China trade deficits amount to more than $1 trillion in US Treasury bills and growing. It is fair to say that China has done this deliberately to rehabilitate its own economy on US backs. It has had the effect of lowering the cost of its exports to the United States and other countries.

The relationship between the dollar and the yen has been affected primarily by the adverse trade balance that we have with Japan. At the last summit meeting in London, for instance, we discussed the very high positive trade balance that Japan enjoyed then. The goal established by your own leaders was that this trade balance would be reduced. Instead, it's continued to go up.

I think, as the economic market leaders have recognized, the high export of Japanese goods and the relatively low imports into Japan of other goods, the yen has strengthened in comparison to other currencies, including, of course, the American dollar.

- President Jimmy Carter, Interview with Western European and Japanese Reporters, July 11th, 1978

My good friend, Matthew Stevenson, contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, wrote both an explanation and a history of our "indebted prosperity" in his review of a new book [The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar] for the Texas Observer. As few have, Stevenson makes the connection between Alexander Hamilton's vision for America and our current Asian debt.

At almost every level, what is sustaining the US economic miracle is Hamilton’s beloved debt. The federal government balances its books with paper laid off to Asian bondholders under the Faustian bargain that they buy our securities and
we buy their exports. Domestically, the lender of last resort is not the Fed, but the US consumer, sadly as innocent about speculators as Abraham Lincoln.

-- Matthew Stevenson, The Best Government Money Can Buy, The Texas Observer

As I have often pointed out, the origins of current economic woes --exploding budget deficits amid the declining dollar --may be traced to what is called the "parlous economic stewardship of Ronald Reagan". Reagan cut the marginal tax rate for the very wealthy from 70% to 38% amid raised expectations that wealth would "trickle down". It didn't. The many presentations by Dr. Daniel Weinberger at the Census Bureau make the convincing case that the reverse occurred. Wealth did not trickle down. It flowed up!

Reagan's own Budget Director, David Stockman, later recanted. [See: Atlantic Monthly, The Education of David Stockman] Certainly, “supply side economics” produced the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression. Stockman saved his most ascerbic comments for a "noisy faction" of Republicans who had promised an "orgy of investments" that would propel the US economy to new heights. I have no idea what Reagan, the GOP and Stockman had been smoking. Only prices and unemployment got high. Wages and living standards remained firmly tethered to terra firma if not the hole that had been dug for them. Many joined the growing ranks of the newly poor. A pernicious trend continues to this day. That is, the rich get exceedingly rich and the poor get even poorer. That has been the case since 1982 but for a brief interlude in Bill Clinton's second term.

Bush, hoping to bask in Reagan's fading stardom and Hollywood mystique, pushed through Congress a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts. Like Ronald Reagan, Bush has waged a "war on terrorism" during which acts of terrorism increased. The final numbers have not yet been tallied for Bush --but, again, like Reagan, the results are pedestrian but tragic, a war of mass distraction in Afghanistan, a quagmire in Iraq, and the budget deficit that ate America.

The phrase "debtors death spiral" is used to denote what happens when consumers borrow to cover only the interest on previous loans. New debt compounds old ones and bankruptcy may be around the corner. Many writers speculate that the US --under Bush --has already entered such a spiral. What keeps us afloat? A "Carvellian" quick response is simply: the rest of the world which cannot afford an American black hole. The US is kept afloat not because our economy is strong but because it is not. The US may be thought of as an empire but only because the rest of the world cannot afford not to keep us afloat.

Between 1989 and 2003, the ever-increasing US trade deficit with China has led to about 1.5 million jobs that either moved overseas or never were created in this country as production shifted to China, according to a report released Jan. 11, 2005, by the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a congressionally appointed panel. The pace of job losses has picked up since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, with about one-third of the total, or 500,000, occurring in the past three years.

Lower Wages for US Workers

By supporting foreign-made goods on such a massive scale, the company that trumpets its All-American image is creating incentives for corporations to destroy good jobs in the United States.

• As the world’s largest company with sales of $288 billion in 2004, Wal-Mart exerts a strong downward pressure on wages, and not only for its own workers. Its sheer size and buying power gives it the ability to influence wage rates of its competitors and suppliers, including manufacturing and construction companies.
• Wal-Mart pressures its suppliers through a policy that says the price Wal-Mart will pay and will charge shoppers must drop each year for basic products that don't change. To survive in the face of the retail giant’s pricing demands, suppliers have had to lay off employees and close US plants in favor of out sourcing products from overseas.

By purchasing such a large amount of goods produced in China, Wal-Mart indirectly supports continued workers’ rights abuses by Chinese authorities.

--Wal-Mart's Imports Lead to US Jobs Exports

Meanwhile, don't miss a Washington Post report that shows how Wal-Mart pits suppliers against one another and squeezes them for the lowest price. The result is that factories respond with longer hours and/or lower pay. Wealth, as we have learned the hard way, trickles UP --not down. The robber baron will always make up his losses out of your ass. In China, the workers have no choice: China forbids independent trade unions. That is a policy not unlike that of the US GOP and Ronald Reagan, specifically, who is not fondly remembered for his effective War on Labor and his ineffective war on terrorism and drugs. [See also: The Peace Tree]

Frontline: Is Wal-Mart Good For America

Do you get that? Through the Port of Long Beach alone, China exports some 36 billion dollars worth of manufactured goods for the American consumer market. But surely, the US now sells exports to the world's biggest market of some 1.3 billion folk, a promise held out when Bill Clinton signed the China trade agreement of 2000. Sadly, it just didn't happen. US exports through the port of Long Beach about 3 billion dollars worth of raw materials --not US "high tech". Largely because of China's undervalued Yuan, the "consuming world", the US primarily, is reduced to Third World status and losing ground. The US has no leverage on foreign money markets.

Under Bush, we could not fight back if we wanted to. The dollar is vulnerable as long as Bush runs up the highest American budget deficits in history. The Iraq war alone might have bankrupted the US if China and Japan had not propped us up for the sole purpose of dumping cheap crap on our shores. Wal-Mart is the primary gateway into an economic black hole from which there may be no escape --lower prices, chasing lower wages, chasing still lower prices. Everyone but the GOP's ever shrinking elite are impoverished. There must be a word for this skullduggery, this betrayal of the working men and women of the US who want merely to have a good job and educate the rug rats.

Until Michael Moore decides to take on Wal-Mart, we have Robert Greenwald who does a great job exposing Wal-Mart on this video.

And Jon Stewart has his take.

Additional Resources

• Wal-Mart's Deal with the Devil
• New Poll: Globalization Backlash in Rich Nations
• The Daily Scare | Exposing Media and Government Propaganda
• Walmart Sells Defective and Dangerous Products
• “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know,” by Charles Fishman.
• Long Term Interest Rates Rising
• Unrestrained Globalization Ends Camillus Cutlery
• The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
• US Consumption of Foreign Products
• PBS Frontline: Episode #1
• PBS Frontline: Episode #2
  
• PBS Frontline: Episode #3
  
• The Four Biggest Myths About the US War Against the People of Iraq
  
• Pentagon Wages Deadly, Silent, Toxic War on US
• The War on Terrorism, Noam Chomsky
• “Wal-Mart’s Impact Far-Reaching,” by Jeffrey Rubin.
• “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” by PBS “Frontline.”
• Read the USCC report, US–China Trade, 1989–2003: Impact on Jobs and Industries, Nationally and State-by-State.
• Read AFL-CIO Chief International Economist Thea Lee’s statement on US–China ties before the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations.

Discoveries

• OGM Foods-Genetically Modified Food
• L'imposture de la lune et des americains
• When It Happens
• Ah Pook

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Globalization
Why Conservatives Hate America
Wal-Mart
Bush

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