Why GOP Policies Are a Cruel Fraud

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

As U.S. GDP declines during GOP regimes, it does so because 'wealth' is literally transferred upward to a 'ruling elite' class, a laundered pay-off to the 'base'. At present, just one percent of the nation's total population owns, by some estimates, more wealth than is owned by about 95 percent of the rest of the population. ^*

This is the culmination of a trend that began in the era of infamous 'robber barons'. Their banker of choice was J.P. Morgan. The trend reversed during WWII but resumed with Ronald Reagan's tax cut for the very wealthy in 1982.

Wealth inequalities are measured with the GINI index. These indices always rise as GDPs decline during depression years. The effect of GOP tax cuts are best visualized in graphics based upon the data that is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

Few make the connection between declines in GDP and 'transfers of wealth' upward to an increasingly tiny elite. Fewer connect these trends with the periodic recessions/depressions which are historically/mathematically more numerous during GOP regimes. The 'Great Depression' which began during the Hoover administration was clearly the result of the preceding GOP administrations of Warren G. Harding (a George Bush of his day) and Calvin Coolidge.

Historically, the U.S. is most productive when it is egalitarian. The era beginning with the end of World War II is the best example. It was an era of egalitarian growth and prosperity that did begin to end until the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

The automobile industry successfully converted back to producing cars, and new industries such as aviation and electronics grew by leaps and bounds. A housing boom, stimulated in part by easily affordable mortgages for returning members of the military, added to the expansion. The nation's gross national product rose from about $200,000 million in 1940 to $300,000 million in 1950 and to more than $500,000 million in 1960. At the same time, the jump in postwar births, known as the "baby boom," increased the number of consumers. More and more Americans joined the middle class.

--The Post War Economy: 1945-1960

Democracy is the first victim of militarism. Today, Germany, which is said to have lost WWII, is the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods, ahead of China for whom the U.S. is just a place to dump product while it pollutes its own environment. To make the point even more dramatically, German wages and benefits today are higher than those in America even as it maintains a much higher and better 'safety net'. Germany alone disproves just about everything the GOP ever told you about economics.

The GOP is mum on several facts, specifically, that periodic depressions are beneficial to ruling elites. It is during depressions that they get richer and everyone else gets poorer. It is during periods in which prices decline that the 'robber baron' mentality picks up bargains among stocks and properties. But even worse, market panics are triggered when 'traders' decide that the time has come to take their profits or, as was often said in the sixties: 'take the money and run!'.

The timing of rallies is controlled by and for the benefit of concentrated wealth which alone has the power to control the behavior of markets. A small trader is generally just kidding himself. A small trader is probably a stupid trader or, more accurately, stupid because he/she indulges the delusion that he can 'play' with the big boys. In fact, the big boys have the power to change the rules and do so when it is beneficial to them. Big money controls big money movements. The market is by and for the rich; the chances you will get rich by 'trading' are slim and none.

Hoover said of the jobless/homeless 'Let them sell oranges and pushcarts from a cart!' The Great Depression was followed and was the result of the transfer of wealth upward, a trend that had begun with the GOP regimes of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. A careful study of the Great Depression is the best evidence, the proof of everything posited here.

Why a 'flat tax' is a scam

How is wealth re-distributed? It is to the GOPs advantage that a so-called 'flat tax' only sounds equitable but is --in fact --the most unfair, the most inequitable tax of all. A flat ten percent will cut into what you budget for essentials --housing, food, and transportation to and from your job if you are lucky enough to have one. Ten percent of several millions each year has absolutely NO affect on the amount of monies the super-rich spend on food, housing and clothing. A 'flat tax', therefore, is an unfair tax.

Taxes raise revenues from all taxpayers yet redistribute disproportionately among the top 1% of income earners via the tax cut. Simply, money is taken out of my pocket and put into the pocket of a George Bush fat-cat!

A bankrupt nation cannot be either productive or wealthy

GOP policies since the rise of Ronald Reagan have made of the U.S. the world's largest net debtor nation with the world's largest negative current account balance. China, to whom the US has been sold and sold out, boasts the world's largest positive current account balance.

The 'Great Depression' followed a period in which wealth had become increasingly concentrated in very few hands proportionally. It occurred during a period in which an increasingly tiny elite had become increasingly, obscenely wealthy while many more, millions became increasingly, extremely poor. Death by starvation increased. What do you think caused the great depression? It was a top heavy collapse! When those who had 'engineered' the boom had milked it to the max, they took their 'winnings' and dealt themselves out. Margin speculators were caught flat-footed. The House of cards collapsed.

Wealthy, healthy economies are productive economies. Every major economist agrees: labor creates value. It follows, therefore, that the most egalitarian societies are the most productive societies. Conversely --those societies, like the US, in which just one percent owns more than some 90 to 95 percent of the rest of the population combined are --as to be expected --the very least productive. A society which is no longer productive should expect to find itself at the bottom of the CIAs World Fact Book with the world's largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance, sometimes called the balance of trade deficit. Click the link and scroll down. You will find the U.S. on the very bottom of the list, enslaved by China which alone benefits from the U.S. consumer's addiction to Wal-Mart.

As its position at the bottom of the CIA's list proves, the US, as a result of the policies of the Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr and, later, Bush Jr, has become a third world nation, the World's Largest Net Debtor nation. Simply --the US is bankrupt.

The U.S. is Bankrupt!

It may have been John Maynard Keynes who said: "If you want a prosperous economy, you must create wealth." If it was not, it's true in any case. A nation which does not produce does not create value. A nation that does not create value i.e, 'wealth' is either bankrupt or headed there.

A nation that has disparaged labor should expect to slide into Third World Status. Every major economist --from David Ricardo to Paul Krugman, from Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes --has recognized the truth of the Labor Theory of Value. The way to create 'wealth' by putting money to work. Wealth is not created by 'outsourcing' jobs, most recently, to China. Wealth is not created by rewarding an idle elite investor class with whopping tax cut which inevitably wind up in tax havens offshore. Tax windfalls winding up in offshore tax havens is money that is perhaps forever lost to the American economy. The results of GOP tax cuts are 'contractions' of the economy as evidenced by real declines in monies circulated.

Egalitarian nations are not only more productive and prosperous, they are are happier, a fact that is revealed in numerous studies. People in such societies enjoy a much higher standard of living than is found in those nations like the US which has been plundered to bankruptcy by the right wing and the Republican party specifically.

The recession of 1990 began four months before Bush broke his "no new taxes" pledge, in July 1990; Bush signed his tax increases into law in November 1990.

I was asked the following question: "You do realize Keynes's theories were demolished in the 1970's right?"

When I stopped laughing, I responded:

FACT: OVER 24 MILLION JOBS WERE CREATED DURING THE 70s:
While ONLY about 18 million jobs were created in the 80s.

3.4 percent more of the population was put to work during the 70s but only 2.6 percent during the 80s.

Reagan-heads falsely claim that Reagan's was the longest peacetime expansion since World War II. The truth is the Kennedy-Johnson expansion was considerably longer: 106 months compared to Reagan's 92.1

Sadly for right wingers and/or supply-siders and Reagan's adoring, non-thinking multitude, it was Keynesian economics that was responsible for the longest economic boom in the post World War II era. The GOP adoration of Milton Friedman is misplaced. Friedman does not have the track record to disprove anything that resulted as a result of the application of Keynesian principles.

It is sometimes said by those leaning right wing that "...attempts to push up demand at the expense of the "wealthy" have always failed miserably and always will fail. " Bluntly --this is a strawman fallacy but undermines 'conservative' arguments' that cutting taxes for the rich stimulates the economy. The burden of proof is on conservatives to name a single time in the 20th century that productivity increased following a 'tax cut' benefiting only the wealthy. It has not happened once! Not one time! Ever! It is time to consign this bullshit to the dustbin of history. I tire of writing about it.

Keynesian economics --not Milton Friedman -- may and should claim credit for the 80s. Some have tried to rewrite history, saying that Reagan was --in fact --a closet Keynesian. If that were so, why does 'Keynesian' policies work for Democrats but not for the GOP. The facts of the matter are this: 1) Reagan's tax cut of 1982 was quickly followed by a depression of some two years, the deepest and worst since the great depression of 1929. The very definition of 'depression' involves a contraction of the money supply. That raises the question: if the tax cut benefited anyone, then where did the money go? Where, indeed, did it go? Did anyone bother to check the offshore accounts of those benefiting from the tax cut? Did anyone bother to correlate the contraction of the projected U.S. money supply with actual increases in accounts offshore? Is there, in fact, anyway to police these robber barons?

The Reagan/Friedman era is a TOTAL FAILURE

The fact is: the US has the lowest general tax rate in the entire industrialized world and, at the same time, the very worst savings and investment rates! Nothing predicted by Friedman came to pass. Instead of jobs, we got depression. Instead of universal increases in the standard of living, the standard of living declined for every but the upper quintile, Reagan's base.

As a result of Friedman's policies and during the Reagan regime a trend began that was not reversed until Clinton's second term, that is: only the very wealthy benefited and only the very, very wealthy got even richer. Everyone else lost ground. That's right. If you were only middle class, even upper middle class, you lost ground. Concurrent with this trend was Reagan's 'Recession', in fact, a 'depression' of some two years in which the nation's GDP declined and millions were made homeless and forced to live in tents under bridges even in boomtown Houston.

The following chart is from the U.S. Commerce Department - Bureau of Economic Analysis. It just about sums it all up in terms of job growth. That's because a nation that is not working is an economy that is not working.

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



Source: US DEPT OF COMMERCE - BEA

Three well-known Republicans pull up the rear: Nixon, Reagan, Bush. All are failures.

I am asked:

If government is so great at wealth redistribution and running the economy, what about the Great Depression?

That's too easy. The question itself betrays an appalling ignorance of U.S. history. My critic may never have heard of Calvin Coolidge, may never have known about the feverish stock market speculation, margin purchases, the heady almost euphoric belief that unfettered laissez-faire capitalism could turn ordinary schmucks into new J.P. Morgans or Rockefellars. It was all an illusion, smoke and mirrors, a cruel hoax, a fraud!

The Great Depression was the result of the policies of every GOP Prez since Woodrow Wilson and resulted when 'wealth' was re-distributed upward under the regimes of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. All three were Republicans and Hoover was President at the time of the 1929 crash.

It was Hoover who said of the jobless/homeless: "Let them sell oranges from a pushcart"! And, much later, it was Reagan who said that homeless folk living under bridges were crazy and accused a 'welfare grandma' of driving a Cadillac. The fact of the matter is, there was NO such 'gran'ma'. Reagan lied his ass off! Hey! He was a Republican!

^* sources: U.S. Department of Commerce - BEA, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Karl Marx On Capitalism

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

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Of High Treason and Economic Incompetence: The Reagan Years Revisited!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Ronald Reagan was already a 'grandfather' figure when he came to office in 1981. It may be unfair to say that he won the election with a single phrase: 'Well....there ya' go again!' In retrospect, it is all that one remembers of Reagan's empty promises and equally empty platitudes! Those and a head nod won him the White House. It is this surface veneer we remember --not his cowardly refusal to assent to Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of complete nuclear disarmament, not his two year long 'depression' which left millions homeless, not the act of 'high treason' called Iran/Contra.

Reagan was no friend of the poor, the working class, the cities. On numerous occassions, Reagan would offer up his own version of 'let them eat cake'. Reagan implied that the poor were lazy and welfare recipients 'crazy'. He invented --full cloth --a 'welfare Grandma' who drove a cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Many reputable journalists tried to find this 'welfare cheat'! None succeeded! At last, they were forced to admit that this infamous 'welfare cheat' did not exist. She was either one Reagan's bald-faced lies or one of his many psychotic delusions. I will be charitable to Reagan's memory. She did not exist! Reagan was not nuts, he was just a common, goddamned liar! Tragically, the image stuck. Reagan might have known it would. The lasting image of the 'Cadillac driving' cheat was behind the 1996 'welfare reform law' which the GOP stuck on Clinton who, to his shame, signed. It demonstrates the power of the 'big lie' technique which the GOP clearly learned from Hitler.

Of aids victims, he might as well have said what he really believed: 'let them die and decrease the surplus population!'. Reagan is evidence if not proof that evil is what Nuremberg psychologist Dr. Gustav Gilbert said it was: 'the utter lack of empathy!'.

Recessions, like the one following Ronald Reagan's improvident tax cut of 1982, harm workers. American recessions, like periods of prosperity, are inequitable in their effects, harming wage earners at the outset and paying off a tiny elite on tax day. The conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter confirmed as much when he compared recessions to a "cleansing douche", a characterization that lifelong goppers must surely apply to everyone but themselves and their country club cronies.

"When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people," former Sen. John Edwards shot back at an event in Henderson, Nevada.

"He was openly -- openly-- intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country...He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment."Edwards added, "I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

Washington Post, Obama's Reagan Comparison Sparks Debate

When I think about what Ronald Reagan did to this nation, I think of how he struck at and perhaps killed-off a viable labor movement. I think about how middle class families made homeless lived under bridges and overpasses in boomtown Houston. I think about how Reagan, like Bush, waged a phony war on terrorism during which terrorist attacks increased some three fold. I think about how Ed Meese waged a war on porn even as a gay prostitution ring operated right out of the White House. I think about how Ronald Reagan neutered affirmative action, the fairness doctrine, and the industries that had kept the middle class in the middle class. I remember how Ronald Reagan was worshipped by the gullible who remembered Reagan's reign at the Republican National convention of 1992: "Reagan made us feel good about ourselves", they swooned.

Reagan was both a liar and hypocrite. He occupied the White House with a mandate to cut federal spending. It was his raison d'etre. Conservatives bought it. Reagan became the biggest spending 'President' in U.S. history, doubling the size of the Federal Bureaucracy, tripling the deficit! He would escalate the military budget, enriching his crones on K-street and the Military/Industrial Complex.

Reagan can be given no credit for restoring the nation's prosperity. It was not enough that he destroyed the labor movement, he would cut off its raison d'etre by exporting jobs and industries abroad. Whatever economic growth occurred benefited only the upper quintile, a fact easily proven by cold, hard stats available to the public at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His tax cut of 1982 benefited only the upper quintile and, inevitably, the chasm between the rich and everyone else widened. To be expected, wages declined; home ownership declined; infrastructure declined.

The rich remember Reagan fondly. They alone prospered. Everyone else lost ground. In fairness, that trend was reversed briefly in Clinton's second term but --to be expected --resumed with Bush Jr. Today --just one percent of the U.S. population owns more thant 95 percent of the remaining population combined. The Reagan years were heady boom times for the idle rich, offshore banks and the Military-Industrial complex. But in real America, only poverty and crime increased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Income Inequality, Census Bureau

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

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

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

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

The results in black and white:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Found on the Democratic Underground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Paul Krugman, Debunking the Reagan Myth

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

Reagan was clearly aloof, indifferent to anyone's plight but his base of ultra rich robber barons, idle rich boys and the war mongers of the Military/Industrial complex. Reagan cared nothing for 'urban voters' which for him meant: 'black people' or 'brown folk'. There was only one black face in his cabinet, that of (HUD) Secretary Samuel Pierce. At a reception, Reagan asked him: "How are things in your city?" Unfortunately, I don't have the reply. I hope it was: "Fuck you, Mr. President!" Reagan got away with a housing scandal because no one knew anything about it until Reagan had left office. How convenient!

It was during the Savings and Loan Scandal, often described as an 'orgy of commercial real estate speculation', that Reagan managed to rise above it all by closing his eyes to 'widespread corruption, mismanagement and the collapse of hundreds of thrift institutions' across the nation. As we have seen recently, the Savings and Loan scandal preceded a huge bailout which stuck the tax payer for $billions$!

Widespread, endemic, institutionalized racial discrimination by banks, real estate agents and landlords, went unrestrained and un-monitored. Big banks exploited what was called 'red lining', openly violating the Community Re-investment Act, to deprive minority and poor neighborhoods of capital. Only eight of some 40,000 applications from banks seeking to expand their operations were denied by the Reagan administration because they had violated CRA regulations.

Reagan cut federal assistance to local governments by some 60 percent. His administration eliminated general revenue sharing, slashed public service jobs and job training, and all but dismantled federally funded legal services for poor people. Other targets: the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program and any program having to do with public transit. It was primarily the 'inner cities', which Reaganites considered to be 'black', which suffered. Reagan's favorite 'urban' program' provided aid to highways and that was favored only because it benefited 'white suburbs' not 'black' inner cities.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

--Barack Obama, Washington Post

Following is a very brief checklist of a variety of Reagan abuses that defy easy categorization.

• During the Reagan years, federal aid to cities dropped from 22 percent to six. Causalities included urban clinics, hospitals, and police.
• In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice." And to that, I say: bullshit! Prove it!
• Various groups, community organizations et al, fought to limit the damage. Some victories were won including, during the Clinton years, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and stronger enforcement of the CRA. But funding for low-income housing, legal services, job training and other programs are still lost and may never be restored short of a revolution that will undo Reagan's very worst legacy: the fact that the rich have gotten exponentially richer as everyone else, including the middle class, have lost gains. I will repeat this until someone gets it: today, just one percent owns more than some 95 percent combine. That is Reagan's most horrible legacy and the one from which almost every other evil springs.
  
• Reagan was called the 'great communicator' but used his talent to divide the nation, perhaps, irreparably! Obama inherited a nation in which there is extreme wealth among the very, very, very few but obscene poverty and deteriorating conditions among the many. The middle class is no longer smug but threatened as the increase in foreclosures throughout suburbia will attest.

Iran-Contra: A Case of Treason!

In 1986, the Reagan administration was implicated in two illegal and secret U.S. Government operations stemming from the Reagan's support for Nicaraguan 'contra' rebels. At the time, U.S. law prohibited aid and/or the sale of arms as, in fact, transpired in Iran/Contra. The scandal called 'Iran/Contra' came to light and Reagan administration officials announced that government had sold arms to Iran. Iran was, at the time, an avowed enemy of the United States. It was not so long prior that the U.S. embassy personnel, held hostage, had been released by the 'revolutionary' government in Iran. Proceeds from arms sales to Iran were diverted --off the books --to the 'contra' rebels in Nicaragua.

As the 'scandal' came to light, Attorney General Ed Meese sought the appointment of a 'special prosecutor', a position in which Lawrence E. Walsh would assume the role of 'independent counsel' to investigate and prosecute possible crimes arising from what was already called 'Iran/Contra'.

It was alleged that Director Casey's 'unswerving support of President Reagan's contra policies' encouraged CIA officials to exceed legal restrictions in both operations, though it cannot be said that Iran/Contra was the only origin of CIA 'off the book' operations. The Boland Amendment of October 1984 had sought to prohibit and prevent the CIA from aiding the 'contras' either directly or indirectly. As the 'scandal' came to light, it became increasingly clear that Casey had made an end run around Boland and was, in fact, the architect of North's role in a so-called 'contra-support team'.

North's role --described as 'dove-tailing' CIA activities --violated the Boland restrictions even as Casey ordered and/or supported arms sales to Iran. 'Operatives' Alan Fier and Claire E. George lied to Congress to 'keep the spotlight off the White House'. When the arms ales were made public in November, 1986, it was clear that Congress had been lied to; the people, the nation had been misled.

Four CIA officials were charged with crimes. George, the third highest-ranking CIA official, was convicted of two felony counts of false statements and perjury, i.e, 'lying' to Congress. Two CIA 'operatives' were awaiting trial when they were pardoned by Reagan whom Special Prosecutor Walsh clearly implicated in his 'Final Report' on Iran/Contra matters.

The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.

The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths.

Lawrence Walsh, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

The Reagan era was the beginning of the end. If Reagan was the American 'Augustus', Bush Jr is Caligula. Those writing of the Fall of the American Empire often write as if this outcome is Obama's fault. That's just plain stupid! If Obama were an utter incompetent, he could not possibly have duplicated the thousand cuts inflicted by Herrs Reagan, Bush and Bush the Lesser. Likewise, Clinton. No 'miracle worker', Clinton --in fact --reversed several pernicious, ruinous trends that had begun with Reagan. Given another term, the end of America would have occurred on Bush Sr's watch. Reagan's sorry legacy benefits from the fact that Presidents --competent and incompetent alike --are limited to eight years in which to fuck things up!

The fatal trends, however, were all in place and working overtime when Reagan exited the White House. Therefore, it is not Reagan's fault that the evil empire he helped create did not fall immediately! He tried his best!

To be fair, U.S. Presidents are as incompetent if not as impotent as were the Emperors in Augustus' wake. During the Cold War, the MIC, a latter-day Praetorian Guard, became accustomed to getting all the appropriations it wanted. The power accrued to the MIC during the cold war years meant that 'they' would not simply go quietly into that good night with the fall of the Soviet Union. A new enemy would simply have to be found. The MIC is still around and bigger and 'badder' than ever, openly enriching themselves with the spoils of war.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, it became necessary to invent exterior threats with which to terrorize the populace, around which to build up a military infrastructure. The threat of 'terrorism' has filled the role to the satisfaction of Pentagon brass asses and war mongers. It does not matter to them that 99 percent of what is CALLED 'terrorism' is but the resistance to illegal U.S. occupations, invasions, and interventions. It does not matter to them that most U.S. incursions since World War II have been illegal and purely imperial, intended to enrich the vast and complex array of defense contractors and Pentagon suck-ups.

The most obvious example remains Bush's attack and invasion of Iraq --clearly a violation of every international principle and/or treaty to which the U.S. is bound. Almost if not everything the U.S. has done internationally is illegal but to merely oppose it --as every people has the right under international law --is called terrorism by the U.S. govt. Bush called his opposition in Iraq either insurgents or terrorists. But if you were an Iraqi, you most certainly would take up arms to defend your nation against the invasion by the evil empire. When the British took arms to reclaim thirteen rebellious colonies, it was William Pitt in Parliament who summed up the situation precisely:

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms -- never! never! never!

Because Ronald Reagan bequeathed us a legacy of imperial lawlessness and arrogance, US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq ARE terrorist acts. Deaths resulting from orders issuing from either Bush or Cheney are war crimes described precisely in the federal laws which prohibit them under the penalty of death. See: U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441.

To cover their crimes, U.S. administrations since Reagan have lied to us as a matter of policy. The U.S. government has failed utterly to deal with its own citizens in good faith! It pursues its own agenda and those of its co-conspirators on K-Street and the MIC. It has dealt with the sovereign citizens in bad faith!

A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook.

--Bertolt Brecht.

Therefore: our 'leaders' are crooks and the U.S. government has become a crime syndicate if not a rogue nation. The U.S. must withdraw from every middle eastern nation from which it had hoped to steal resources. If I may paraphrase Pitt: if I were an Iraqi or an Afghan, while a foreign troop was in my country, I would never lay down my arms! NEVER!

---

---

One Million Strong Against the GOP

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The GOP has been infiltrated by a kooky kult of korporatists! It is not the party of Eisenhower-like fiscal conservatives or of Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt anymore. It has become the party of the MIC and the big lobbyists on K-street. It has become the official party of the big corporations, the ruling one percent of the population which alone has benfefited from GOP fiscal policy.

Ronald Reagan doubled the national debt and tripled the deficit. While revenues declined as a result, Reagan compounded the problem by ramming through Congresss a TAX CUT from which ONLY the upper quintile benefited. It was a recipe for historic deficits, in fact, national bankruptcy. Concurrently, a trend, in which the rich get richer and everyone else poorer, did not abate until Clinton's second term. Under Bush the Shrub, the trend resumed with a vengence.

Today --as a result --just one percent of the nation owns more than about 95 percent of the rest of us combined. The inevitable result of transferring this wealth to the wealthy is that the net gain to the wealthy is, in fact, exported out of the economy and into offshore bank accounts.

That being the case --why were we surprised that the inevitable collapse occurred under Bush and carried over into the Obama regime. In effect, monies were removed from the economy --a contraction. Economists call this recession.

I have enough material on Reagan's irresponsible profligacy to fill several volumes, more data than I have time to 'twitterize'. Sometimes, you just have to read the long, dull story.

Bottom line: the GOP is just not credible when it claims to be fiscally conservative. The GOP is just not credible when it tries to trick you into believing that there is no difference between the GOP and Obama. The GOP has no legs when it claims to be fiscally conservative. Listening to goppers cry about Democratic 'deficits' is like hearing a million or more crocodiles singing the Hebrew Slave Chorus.

Because the big corporations dominate K-street, Americans inevitably get a ONE SIDED view, the GOP spin. The actual facts available from the Labor Dept, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis and EVEN the conservative Brookings Institution paint a different picture.

It's hard to set the record straight on a TWITTERIZED net. Even so some key facts utterly disprove the GOP/Reagan myth. To wit:

Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents

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 Reagan ERA was a period in which corporate PACs literally compelled Congress to pass pro-business legislation. According to supply-side theory, these actions should have nudged the economy in the right direction, not plunge it into the worst recession in 40 years. But that is PRECISELY WHAT HAPPENED.

The resulting 'depression' of some two years was the longest, deepest since Hoover's GREAT DEPRESSION triggered by the crash of '29, an event not seen again until Shrub's second term.

Given the economic 'crimes' committed by Reagan, Sr, and Shrub, the lame ass charges against Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pale.

How the GOP --which ran up the highest debts and deficits in US history --can lay that rap on Democrats which had control of Congress just eight of almost 20 years is just plain ludicrous.

ANY Dem Prez beats ANY GOP Prez since LBJ. Now --I would say that JOB GROWTH --essential for a healthy economy --is reason enough to fire the GOP until it repents and gets down on its knees to beg forgiveness of the American People, until it pleads, on its knees, for political salvation. Say Hallelujah!!!

Addendum:

This article would not have been possible had not Steve Kangas braved the wrath of a crooked GOP! Given that background, I have a message for Richard Mellon Scaife: FUCK YOU!

The Who: Won't Get Fooled Again!

Additional Resource: One Million Strong Against the Republican Party

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

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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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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How the US Became a Vassal State of China

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

China owns the United States --or, at least, holds a 'mortgage'. China props up the dollar just enough to ensure that its excess production can be dumped here by way of its US retail outlet --Wal-Mart! The value of the US dollar is almost entirely dependent on China. When it ceases to be advantageous for China to prop up the dollar, the dollar will collapse.

The decline and fall of the American empire is a sorry, tragic saga. It is the story of betrayals of this nation by the likes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan , Bush Sr., the Shrub, and many lesser known 'agents' of the increasingly tiny cadre of ruling elites. It is the story of how GOP administrations paid off its elite base with tax cuts which have had, in fact, the effects of impoverishing the poor, enriching the rich, exporting the US manufacturing base, and exporting the jobs that it had supported.

There are many versions of the 'supply side' story, but the most famous one involved a napkin and a Pizza Hut. While Ronald Reagan still occupied the White House, an alleged "economist" is said to have drawn a fictitious curve on a napkin. [More about this 'curve' to come.] As a result, millions lost their jobs, tent cities sprang up across the country, the nation plunged into a great recession --the deepest, most severe, the longest since Herbert Hoover's "Great Depression! I saw some of those 'tent cities' in 'boomtown' Houston. I was inspired to publish an essay in a local magazine. My essay was entitled: "What happened?" In a word, the bulls had gone bear if not 'bare'; the captains of capital cashed out at the top and left many another holding real estate that was declining rapidly in values. The least fortunate were those whose interest in Real Estate was simply that of keeping a roof over the heads of family members. Many of these folk lost their homes and moved into the 'tent city'.

Under the occupancy of George W. Bush, the folly was repeated and the harmful effects left to Barack Obama whom it is hoped will take the rap.

Called "preppies", they consulted Republican political campaigns and were in a position to spread economic dogma like 'supply-side' or 'trickle down theory'. Economists Arthur Laffer and Milton Friedman lent an imprimatur of respectability. Laffer, for example, drew a "curve" on a napkin which some believed proved the preposterous idea that reducing taxes for the elite classes would reduce debt and deficit. In fact, when Reagan put the theory to work with his infamous tax cut of 1982, the opposite occurred. Both debt and deficit increased. Supply side, i.e, 'trickle down' theory was proved wrong. Sadly, the GOP has not gotten the memo.

• Wealth might have 'trickled down' IF the wealthy had invested tax cuts domestically!
  But they don't and probably never have! They squirrel away their windfalls in offshore banks, havens, shady investments or other ways which do not create new jobs, do not raise wages or stimulate capital investments or growth! The opposite has always occurred, i.e, the economy, rather, has always contracted with each GOP tax cut! If the government wishes to stimulate an economy by stimulating spending, it should just cut out the 'middle man' or, as John Maynard Keynes suggested, it should put bucks in mason jars, bury them in a landfill and let 'labor' dig them up! There is no point in letting the very, very, very rich SKIM OFF the top with idiotic schemes like 'trickle down theory'.
• Lower income citizens do not bear smaller tax loads as claimed.
In fact, their taxes are always higher as a percentage of income because the working classes do not have access to most forms of depreciation, offshore tax havens, capital gains, tax credits, etc. Because they have dodges which salaried people don't, elites pay much less tax as a percentage of total gross income.

Unfair tax cuts always make the rich richer. Reagan's tax cut, for example, benefited only the upper quintile. [See the GINI Indices at the Bureau of Labor Stats later published by Brookings ] Bush Jr's cuts benefited an elite of just one percent which, as a result of his policy, owned more than 90 percent of the US population. By the end of his reign of terror, this elite of just one percent had increased its share of total wealth, owning more than 95 percent of the rest of the population combined.

I told ya so!

During the 1920s, the wealthy accumulated such exorbitant stocks of cash, they couldn’t spend it all. Instead, they played the stock market, fueling a rapid run-up in stock prices. Lower and middle income households, on the other hand, lacked wealth enough to meet their daily needs and were forced to borrow heavily. Today --the elites have squirreled their tax cut windfalls offshore, effectively removing wealth from the US economy. That is called a 'contraction' and it is the source of many recessions or, more properly, depressions.

Many historians believe that a combination of growing personal debt and a widening wealth gap destabilized the economy and precipitated the Great Depression, characteristics that define the current collapse. Not so long ago, the media touted rising economic growth and a soaring Dow Jones. Those 'signs' of wealth likewise preceded Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. Certainly, the 20s are remembered for vast inequities of wealth financed by growing consumer debt. Neither 'elephant' has left the room.

Welfare for Wall Street

The lessons of Enron and WorldCom were not learned. The GOP still schemes to PIRATIZE your Social Security and are, perhaps, even more motivated to do so now than during the Bush years. PIRATIZING Social Security i.e, letting Wall Street speculators play with YOUR money is the ultimate 'bailout' of crooks who brought you the current 'financial crisis'. There is simply no rational justification for allowing Wall Street to 'speculate', play the markets with your money.

What are 'private accounts' but a government give away, welfare for Wall Street? You already have the right to open a private account of your own anytime you wish. Giving Wall St speculators carte blanche to play the markets with monies you earned by working is foolhardy, stupid at a time when taxpayers have already underwritten a national debt of several trillion bucks. Privatizing Social Security means that when the next collapse occurs, you will pay for it twice --once with an immediate bailout out of tax revenues and --again --with your hopes for a comfortable retirement, the Social Security which you may never see again!

How right wing policies have robbed the US population with "trickle down theory" and other nonsense utterly unsupported with fact or evidence:

• In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. [Source: Source: Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ].
• The top ten percent of the US population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. [Source: Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5].
• One percent of the US population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. [Source: Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: Harper Business, 1993].
• 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....
• Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.
• Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined...
  Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President's Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We've gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn't seen since the teens and 1920s.’" [Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999; addendum: since 1999, the date the source was published, the situation is much, much worse. Today --just ONE PERCENT own more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. GOP incompetence and criminality moves so fast these days, it's hard to keep up!].
• The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. [Source: Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108].
• Federal Reserve median family net worth by percentile for 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Federal Reserve Bulletin January 2003, pp. 1-36). Note the small gains for the bottom 75% of the population and larger gains for the upper 25% and that the 1998 to 2001 gains were largest.

  --US Wealth Distributions 1989-2001

Republicans bought the scam because it made them feel good about being greedy, shallow bastards. The appeal is obvious: trickle down rationalized greed but only after the fact; it made one feel good about one's worst impulses, motives, and elitist bigotry.

To his credit, the Sr Bush called the Laffer Curve 'voodoo economics'. Two politicians, however, bit big. One of them was Ronald Reagan . The other was the Jr Bush, the Shrub, the idiot left behind!

It is a GOP promoted myth that the GOP does not pay attention to 'polls'. That they promote it, proves it's a myth and that 'trickle down' itself is a deliberate lie by which wealth is transferred upward. It the mechanism by which GOP pays off its base! Not surprisingly, trickle down tested well in focus groups. Everyone likes pie in the sky and greedy bastards will always support any measure that is sure to enrich themselves at the expense of those who must work hard for a living.

Republican campaigns are driven by polls, focus groups, and market research. They're rich; they can afford it. Modern sophistry --the teaching of politicians how to lie, how to con the media, how to couch a phrase or deflect a point --was and most surely remains a growth industry.

The Laffer 'curve' was worse than fiction, it was a fraud. But the 16 month long depression which resulted is a disastrous effect that is still with us.

• New job creation under Reagan was 2.1% per year compared with Bill Clinton's 2.4% job creation rate.
• Reagan's showing, however, may be misleading; almost half of those jobs were in the public sector. In other words, Reagan , though he had promised the opposite, added nearly 2 million jobs to the Federal Bureaucracy. Reagan GREW the government --but NOT the economy.(Incidentally, job growth under Bush Sr, was a mere 0.6% --the worst performance since World War II. ) Reagan tripled the national debt and left huge deficits to his successor --Bush Sr whom Reagan blamed for what can only be called the Bush/Reagan recession.
  
• The disparity between rich and poor grew during the Reagan regime, narrowed somewhat during Clinton but exploded nova-style under Bush Jr.
• Almost one half of all American taxpayers were victimized by Reagan 's so-called tax reform; in other words, over 40 percent of those workers had a bigger chunk taken out of their check at the end of Reagan 's misrule than was taken out at the beginning of his regime.
• And what about "real wages", i.e, income adjusted for inflation? That declined as well.

The Presidency of Jimmy Carter is often tarred with a made-up, focus group word that has a GOP stench about it: 'stagflation'. Diplomatically, 'stagflation' is a myth and will remain one until I find the memo that proves that it was all just made up, validated, perhaps,by a focus group. In any case, it is a GOP fabrication with which the GOP would forever tar the Carter legacy. In fact Carter is among the best US Presidents in economic terms. Here are the FACTS that the paid liars of the GOP will not tell you:

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

Stagflation, my ass!

How the GOP Exported Your Job

But, it is objected, the 80s were a period of great prosperity and, surely, Reagan 's tax cut must be credited! The quick response: the 80s, adjusted for inflation, were, in fact, a period of stagnation, increased poverty, and lost job opportunities defined by the export of US jobs, primarily Japan and China.

This was a point about which Milton Friedman reacted very testily, defensively when pressed about it in the grand ballroom of one of the luxury hotels in Houston's famous Galleria. I know. I was there! Friedman said that US jobs are not exported. He was either wrong or excessively pedantic! It was not --after all --a meeting confined to professional economists. For those who must work for a living, Reaganomics represented in a very real and practical sense the export of his/her job! For the real story about the phony 'prosperity' in the 80s, check out: Playing with the Numbers, How So-called Experts Mislead Us about the Economy, Richard A. Stimson

Reagan 's legacy lives:

• US manufacturing is all but non-existent as the shelves of Wal-Mart remind every shopper!
• Labor never regained a pre-Reagan living standard
• wages never kept pace with inflation
  
• 'good paying' and/or skilled jobs never rebounded.

The US had only begun to recover in Clinton's second term. [Bureau of Labor Statistics, BEA; summarized by Kangas, Economic Performance] It was left to Bush Jr, then, to finish the job that had begun with the administration of Ronald Reagan, that is, the collapse of the US economy.

The US boasts the world's largest NEGATIVE current account balance while China boast the world's largest POSITIVE current account balance. [CIA, World Fact Book, Current Account Balance] China owns us! China props up the buck because it is still in their interests to do so. China will pull the plug on the buck when it is in their interests to do so! As a result of the GOP policies of Ronald Reagan , Bush Sr and Bush Jr, the US has become a vassal state even as it indulges the delusion of empire! Pathetic!

Supply side --though discredited --reared its stupid head again some twelve years after Bush Sr. failed to grasp the simple maxim:

It's the Economy, Stupid!

For measuring the economic welfare of individuals rather than the strength of the nation, it is necessary to convert the national measure to the amount per individual, family or household. Otherwise, a nation could double its GDP and its population without anyone benefiting. Such an individual measure is real per capita GDP, obtained by dividing real GDP by the population, and this can be very useful for comparisons over time, although it contains the same weaknesses as GDP itself.

Another such measure is per capita personal income, which is the share each individual receives, on average, of total personal income. The latter parallels GNP and GDP, differing only moderately because of adjustments explained in first-year college economics courses (for example, corporate retained earnings and some taxes are deducted, while Social Security benefits, private pensions, and welfare are added).

A paradox almost always arises during recessions. Wages are stagnant, unemployment grows, and yet the media broadcast and print government reports of increasing per capita personal income.

This misleading result can be explained by considering the average income of a population of two: namely, billionaire Bill Gates and almost anyone of the rest of us. Take the total, divide by two, and you have an enormous amount. If Gates adds another billion it raises the average but does nothing for the other individual.

Rising per capita personal income during recessions reflects the gains being made by a small fraction of the population, which are enough to offset the losses of all the rest and thus bring up the average.

A per capita figure has the characteristics of a simple average (the arithmetic mean), but people’s economic well-being depends on how evenly or unevenly the fruits of production are shared in the population. For this reason, the median (that is, the value at the middle of the range, with as many lower instances below as there are higher instances above) is a better measure. It is available statistically in the form of median family income and median weekly wages and salaries.

Another complication is that when a household has more wage-earners and/or people work longer hours, often taking more than one job at a time to make ends meet (as has been happening to an increasing degree), a given amount of real income is not as beneficial as when it came from fewer hours.

--Playing with the Numbers, How So-called Experts Mislead Us about the Economy, Richard A. Stimson

Die hard, embittered supply-siders tried to effect a coup by impeaching a popular President who presided over the creation of some 35 times the number of jobs than were created under Bush Sr! The coup didn't work, of course, but the die-hards failed to get the message.

It's the Stupid Economy!

Following the closest election in the history of the nation, an election in which the winner was defined [by Scalia's 'majority opinion'] as the one getting the fewer number of votes, a mediocre, self-described 'retail politician' of few achievements and fewer ideas presumes to lead a nation while declaring:

"This would be a lot easier if this were a dictatorship...and I was the dictator!"

Those are the words of a someone who places loyalty to his ideological party and his corporate constituents above his loyalty to his nation. This is the kind of man who subscribes to "supply side" economics because it justifies his largesse to his corporate sponsors --the Enrons who bought him a public office.

But --it is hard to comprehend the near mass hysteria that accompanies debate on this issue --exploited as it was by Bush Jr's hero, Reagan, who somehow managed to make people feel good about themselves, when, perhaps, they should not have.

Reagan, Bush Sr and Bush Jr, indeed, the GOP, must take the responsibility for the US debt which was, last time I checked, some 7.4 trillion dollars, the highest in US history, perhaps World History. Since Ronald Reagan bankrupted the nation, the US has been a net debtor nation which survives, literally, at China's whim.

You can pay off your old credit cards with new ones for as long as you can find another card willing to extend you credit! Eventually, however, someone will refuse, and you will have to cough up the cash --and, if you can't cover what's due by selling off your assets, you must declare bankruptcy. The US is bankrupt!

Why was the US able to sustain the fraud for so long? Europe was willing to buy our T-Bills because the world's fuel --oil --was traded in dollars. Nations wanting to buy oil, had first to exchange their currency for dollars as oil producer nations demanded payment in US dollars. A crack in the dike was the creation of the Iranian 'oil bourse' where oil would be traded in currencies other than the dollar. That and other less publicized moves explains US antipathy toward Iran and US determination to seize the oil fields of Iraq, specifically, the Bush/Cheney/Carlyle/Halliburton attempted "oil grab" in the Middle East --the raison d'etre for war, the plan behind the convenient pretext called '911'. The history of the US since 1980 is the history of US attempts to seize and/or dominate the world's oil resources and markets.

This was all predictable! It was shortly after the US attack and invasion of Iraq that I posted the following comment on one of NPR's long defunct 'How's Bush Doing Board'.

The most absurd invention in the history of technology --the SUV --will go out of fashion overnight --and so will jobs!

It will make the Great Depression of Herbert Hoover --another GOP charlatan --look like a casual walk in the park.

Nixon Ends US Agreement with Bretton Woods

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