I love the way you say, "Don't believe the propaganda concerning the end of c*******m." Are we supposed to believe yours instead? Y'know like, "The EVIL that is known as C*******m is taking over the entire world." Really? Where? Most former c*******t countries have abandoned the principle, not that many truly applied it accurately. They uniformly used it as a tool for the subjugation of the masses.
So, is Obama a Hitler or a C*******t? It's not like the two ever really got along, y'know. Is it because so many FRWNJs CALL him a Hitler? What has he accomplished, or even attempted to deserve the comparison? I prefer facts and sources. Oh, and the sources must be legitimate; no FRWNJ websites. I will call b.s. in such an event.
Lots of FRWNJs call him a dictator, so I guess that's where the "Hitler" analogy comes from, although he's accomplished nothing particularly dictatorial. If he had, we'd have universal healthcare (not the hyper-conservative authored "Obamacare"), we'd be out of Afghanistan, he'd've ended the drug war, cut the DOD budget in half and handed Dick Cheney over to The Hague. None of this has happened, has it? I usually catch at least SOME news daily, but I haven't heard of any of these events occurring.
So far as being a c*******t goes, he hasn't broken up the "too-big-to-fail" banks; they've only gotten bigger and more likely to fail. That's not what liberals wanted, that's what conservatives wanted. It's certainly antithetical to what c*******ts want. In fact, the Dow was at 7949 when he took office. Now it's over 14,000. Corporate profits are at an all-time high. If he's a C*******t, he REALLY sucks at it.
Now calling him a F*****T? That I can go with, although his level of f*****m is VASTLY overshadowed by the Retghuglicons and their owners: ALEC, USCOC, the Kochs, etc.
Is that true, or did you hear it on GOPTV/FOX?
The Greedy Oligarchic Patricians have gone to great lengths to show that they are clearly NOT "pro economy" as you claim and haven't been for quite a while. History shows this to be the case.
The economy was getting better until the Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January of 2011 and spooked the markets with their budget games. This resulted in America's first credit rating downgrade. Thanks, chumps.
Stock market performance for Obama's first two years versus this Republican-controlled Congress.
---------------DJIA-----NASDAQ------S&P500
01/20/09----7,949-----1,441---------805
01/20/11---11,823-----2,764-------1,280
01/20/12---12,514-----2,737-------1,298
First two years of Obama.
DJIA +49%, NASDAQ +91%, S&P500 +60%.
Then take a look at the poor performance of the stock market under this Republican-controlled Congress.
DJIA +5%, NASDAQ -1%, S&P500 +1%.
Now, let's take a look at the historical record of Bill Clinton versus the shrub:
1) Under Clinton the DJIA tripled. Under the smirking chimp, the DJIA LOST 20% over his eight-year 'Reign of Error.'
2) Alan Greenspan said in his book 'Age of Turbulence' that in 2001 there were "surpluses as far as the eye could see." Now, we have deficits as far as the eye can see.
3) In January 2001 it took 78 cents to obtain one Euro. After the i***t's 'Reign of Error' it took 140 cents.
4) When the two oil men stumbled into the White House in January, 2001 oil was $22/barrel. In the summer of 2008 it was a disgraceful $140 a barrel.
The Republican Party did a better job at bringing America to its knees than Al Qaeda.
Congratulations, assholes.
In fact, a January analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly. The top 1 percent of earners' real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.
In other words, we're back to the widening ine******y we had before the debt bubble burst in 2008 and the economy crashed.
Obama was right. Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity. That's because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they're less able to spend. Without their spending, the economy can't get out of first gear. That's a big reason why the recovery continues to be anemic, and why the International Monetary Fund just lowered its estimate for U.S. growth in 2013 to just 2 percent.
Almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage -- like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains. At this rate, who's going to buy all the goods and services America is capable of producing? We can't return to the kind of debt-financed consumption that caused the bubble in the first place.
Get it? It's not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that's barely moving.
If they were rational, the wealthy and their Republicon toadies would support public investments in education and job-training, a world-class infrastructure (t***sportation, water and sewage, energy, internet), and basic research -- all of which would make the American workforce more productive. Instead, they fight all of these ideas tooth-and-nail.
If they were rational they'd even support labor unions -- which have proven the best means of giving working people a fair share in the nation's prosperity. But labor unions are almost extinct.
The decline of labor unions in America tracks exactly the decline in the bottom 90 percent's share of total earnings, and shrinkage of the middle class.
Imagine if the current mode of GOP economic "reasoning" had been at the fore after WWII. There would have been no investment in the economy; only the same austerity pogroms that reignited the Depression in 1937 and have slowed the current recovery as well. No new roads, bridges, hospitals, water systems, and certainly no freeway system.
In the 1950s, when the U.S. economy was growing faster than 3 percent a year, more than a third of all working people belonged to a union. That gave them enough bargaining clout to get wages that allowed them to buy what the economy was capable of producing.
Since the late 1970s, unions have eroded -- as has the purchasing power of most Americans, and not coincidentally, the average annual growth of the economy. Since around 1980, the average wage has failed to keep pace with the increase in GDP and productivity for the first time in American history. It has actually lost ground in real spending power while the wealthy have grown increasingly more so, clearly at America's expense.
Last January the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that as of 2012 only 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector were unionized. (That's down from 6.9 percent in 2011.) That's the lowest rate of unionization in almost a century.
What's to blame? Partly globalization and technological change. Globalization sent many unionized manufacturing plants abroad. Many more were sent abroad at taxpayer expense, and when Democrats tried to get similar tax incentives passed to encourage the return of those jobs Rethuglicons said, "No".
Whom does THAT benefit?
Manufacturing is starting to return to America but it's returning without many jobs. The old assembly line has been replaced by robotics and numerically-controlled machine tools as was inevitable. Technologies have also replaced many formerly unionized workers in telecommunications (remember telephone operators?) and clerical jobs.
But wait. Other nations subject to the same forces have far higher levels of unionization than America. 28 percent of Canada's workforce is unionized, as is more than 25 percent of Britain's, and almost 20 percent of Germany's.
Unlike other rich nations, our labor laws allow employers to replace striking workers. We've also made it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and we barely penalized companies that violate labor laws. (A worker who's illegally fired for trying to organize a union may, if lucky, get the job back along with back pay -- after years of legal haggling, if he can survive that long.)
Rethuglicons, in particular, have set out to k**l off unions. Union membership dropped 13 percent last year in Wisconsin, largely due to unionized public employees being either laid off or terminated. This, in 2011, curbed the collective bargaining rights of many public employees. As well it fell 18 percent last year in Indiana, which last February enacted a right-to-work-for-less law (allowing employees at unionized workplaces to get all the benefits of unionization without paying for them). Last month Michigan enacted a similar law.
Don't blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart , America's largest employer, still don't have a union. They're not in global competition and their jobs aren't directly threatened by technology. The average pay of a Walmart worker is $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart's employees work less than 28 hours per week and don't qualify for benefits. Walmart is a microcosm of the American economy. It has brazenly fought off unions. But it could easily afford to pay its workers more. It earned $16 billion last year. Much of that sum went to Walmart's shareholders, including the family of its founder, Sam Walton.
The wealth of the Walton family now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
But how can Walmart expect to continue to show fat profits when most of its customers are on a downward economic escalator?
Wal-mart, in fact, is a drain on local and state economies as well as the federal economy. They actually give their employees instructions on how to receive public assistance. This, after obtaining favorable tax breaks to place a store in their town/county. All the while driving other profitable stores out of business and reducing the amount of taxable income to everyone involved.
Walmart should be unionized. So should McDonalds. So should every major big-box retailer and fast-food outlet in the nation. So should every hospital in America. That way, more Americans would have enough money in their pockets to get the economy moving. And everyone -- even the very rich -- would benefit.
As Obama said, America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.
Reaganomics (convincing poor people they can become rich by giving rich people more money) has done nothing good for the economy. Occasional short periods of growth, yes. Long-term benefits, not so much. And while deriding the efficacy of Keynesian economics he turned around and employed them three time to fight off the effects of his three recessions. His GOP successors did the same and all were successful.
Republicons love to point to Chile as a model of the "beneficial" effects of the trickle-down theory. They call it "the Chilean Miracle". Hmm. Let's take a look at that...
On September 11, 1973, in an U.S.-encouraged military c**p, Chilean Air Force warplanes began bombing and strafing the National Palace, President Salvador Allende's governmental headquarters. During a firefight, as c**p forces moved in, president Allende committed suicide to avoid capture.
A military junta, led by General Augusto Pinochet - who considered himself to be guided by the hand of God (so did the shrub as well as most of the recent GOP moron-a-thon participants), commenced; over the course of his regime thousands of Chileans suspected of socialist or l*****t leanings were rounded up and executed.
Meanwhile, American-trained economists, dominated by the privatization-obsessed "Chicago School" moved in. In Chile after the 1973 c**p, the nation would become a forced libertarian experiment, imposed at gunpoint, in neo-liberal, free-market privatization. Leading the charge was José Piñera, now Co-chairman of the Project on Social Security Choice at the Libertarian Cato Institute.
The "Chilean model" has been showcased so aggressively by libertarian economists and think tanks such as the Cato Institute, as a shining example of privatization, that it's difficult to find analysis even mildly critical of the torture regime-backed experiment amidst the copious pro-privatization propaganda that populates Internet searches on the subject.
And José Piñera - who has built an international career advising governments, such as South Korea, on how to privatize their pension systems - vigorously denies the documented extent of the the shocking human rights abuses that went on in Chile while he treated the nation as a personal privatization laboratory.
The anti-democratic ethos of today's GOP, displayed in Republican p**********l candidate Mitt Romney's apparent contempt for 47% of U.S. citizens, is reflected in the origins of Mitt Romney's private equity firm Bain Capital, which was founded with money from Central American financiers linked to government-backed death squads in El Salvador. His running-mate Paul Ryan's budgetary ideas have a similarly dark origin, in the paradigmatic case of what has dubbed "The Shock Doctrine".
In August 2012, Republican political consultant Roger Stone made the accusation that the billionaire libertarian Koch Brothers had bought Mitt Romney's se******n of Paul Ryan as a running mate, by offering to kick in $100 million more for "independent expenditures" in the 2012 p**********l e******n. Paul Ryan is one of the few elected officials allowed into the inner sanctum of the Koch brothers and their fellow libertarian big money donor circle.
It is also the case that Ryan's Social Security privatization ideas closely track Koch Brother schemes promoted from the Koch-funded libertarian Cato Institute since 1980, over three decades ago - before Ryan had even hit puberty. Cato's website currently features the ringing endorsement of Paul Ryan:
"Ryan is an articulate defender of free enterprise, and he consistently argues not just for the practical advantages of smaller government but also about the moral imperative to cut... if the next administration is Republican, and if it decides it wants to push major reforms, Paul Ryan is uniquely qualified to lead the charge."
In 2005 Congressman Paul Ryan led a failed Republican legislative push for a Social Security privatization plan that also later popped up in Ryan's 2010 "Roadmap For America's Future". This centerpiece of Ryan's budgetary vision traces back to a vicious war on the poor and middle class that was waged over three decades ago by a South American police state.
The conceptual basis of Ryan's Social Security privatization approach was hatched as the Piñera plan that was implemented under the radical right-wing Chilean torture regime of 1973 military c**p leader Pinochet.
While the Piñera plan sought to eliminate wealth redistribution under the old pre-Pinochet Chilean pension system - by jump-starting a new pension system under which Chileans began investing in private sector pension accounts - by 2006, the original Piñera Plan was proven to be a failure and in 2008 it was essentially scrapped and replaced by new legislation.
A report on the Chilean pension reform from the U.S. Social Security Administration explained, "The cornerstone of the new law sets up a basic universal pension as a supplement to the individual accounts system." As the the New York Times described in an April 2008 story, Chile's new law was a dramatic move away from radical libertarian privatization:
"Chile is undertaking its biggest overhaul ever of its pioneering private pension system, adding sweeping public payouts for the low-income elderly. The new $2 billion-a-year program will expand public pensions to groups left out by private pensions - the poor and self-employed, homewives, street vendors and farmers who saved little for retirement - granting about a quarter of the nation's work force public pensions by 2012."
Even as political pressure to overhaul the Chilean pension system was building, in 2005 under the George W. Bush Administration Paul Ryan spearheaded an attempt to pass legislation that would have imposed a modified version of the Piñera Plan on Americans.
Then there's this warm, smelly little nugget:
On February 2, 2005, at a Washington, D.C. celebration of the 100th anniversary of libertarian guru Ayn Rand's birthday,held by the Rand-dev**ed Atlas Society, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan declared his fealty to the guiding principles of Rand, founder of a cultic school of thought known as Objectivism, which holds up selfishness as the highest moral virtue.
Ryan was introduced by Atlas Society Director of Advocacy Ed Hudgins, who told the audience of Ayn Rand admirers, "He is best known for his efforts in the fight to reform Social Security by allowing the expanded use of individual retirement accounts. Now, I don't know whether you [Ryan] use the 'privatization' word. We here have no problem with that [Ryan overheard laughing] but sometimes you have to do a little bit of a soft sell up there, because many members of Congress are not quite as as far-thinking as Congressman Ryan."
In his speech to the Atlas Society Ryan confessed to the assembled true believers, "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." Then he addressed his 2005 attempt to pass legislation privatizing Social Security.
In Ayn Rand's view, the paramount good is individualism, the paramount evil collectivism. Ryan told his audience, "The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism... when you look at the fight that we're in here in Capital Hill, it's a tough fight... there is no more fight that is more obvious between the differences of these two conflicts than Social Security. Social Security right now is a collectivist system, it's a welfare t***sfer system."
Moments later, as he declared, "what's important is if we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing social security", Ryan could be heard laughing while the Atlas Society's Ed Hudgins, also laughing, interjected, "personalizing".
After the mirthful outburst, Ryan continued, "personalizing social security," (to laughter and applause, this time from the audience,) "think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist."
"Personalizing", it was clear, was a thinly veiled code word for "privatizing" and later, during a question-and-answer period, the specific model for that project became clear: it was privatization under the vicious, bloody Latin American military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Brilliant.
As the Atlas Society's Ed Hudgins told the audience, with Paul Ryan enthusiastically interjecting, "By the way, I just want to add real quickly, and I know the Congressman has I'm sure said this. José Piñera, who helped privatize Social Security in Chile, who also was by the way an Ayn Rand fan--José points out the moral revolution that occurs with privatization, that is, people in Chile, you know, who thought of themselves as Marxist suddenly feel that they are owners of property [Ryan "Yeah"] and, you know, they literally get up and they start reading the Chilean equivalent of the Wall Street Journal [Ryan interjects, "That's right"]."
After his drivel, er, talk, during a question-and-answer period Ryan coached the libertarian audience on how they could best lobby Congress in favor of the 2005 legislative effort, which failed after meeting stiff Democratic Party opposition, to begin privatizing social security along the lines of José Piñera's Chilean Model.
Then there's the report that came out last year from the Congressional Research Service which concluded that cutting taxes on the rich (a Republicon hallmark) had no correlation with higher economic growth rates. Surprise! Outside the right-wing think-tank bubble, that's been the conclusion of practically every economist who's looked seriously at the evidence.
Nonetheless, congressional Republicans were SHOCKED, and made their displeasure known. Shortly thereafter the report was withdrawn making nonpartisan analysis more and more impossible. Say something that contradicts a Republican talking point, and you'd better retract it.
However, Steve Benen reminds us that this is hardly new:
"This was consistently one of the more offensive hallmarks of the Bush/Cheney era. In 2005, for example, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration announced it would stop publishing its annual report on international terrorism. Reality proved problematic, so rather than addressing the problem, the Republican administration decided to hide the reality.
"Soon after, the Bush administration was discouraged by data about factory closings in the U.S., the administration announced it would stop publishing information about factory closings.
"When Bush's Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming, the administration said it would sharply cut back on the information it collects about charter schools."
I'm sensing a pattern, here.
In an e-mail Bruce Bartlett pointed out that this attitude goes back even farther than that. Earlier that year, Newt Gingrich called the CBO "a reactionary socialist institution," a statement that came as no surprise to anyone who knows his history. After the Republican landslide of 1994, Gingrich did more than most to destroy congressional access to analytical information:
"When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.
"....In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations."
Reality. Bah!
And Bartlett points out that the current GOP routinely attacks not just the CBO and CRS, but also the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office. They just don't like having anyone around that might mess with their preferred version of reality.
It seems that you don't either. "...the GOP is pro economy"? Seriously?
I'm referring to the way the GOP clearly far more helpful to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce than it is in helping actual citizens (i.e. using my taxes to pay my former employer to ship my job to another, cheaper country and then saying "No" to the idea of using tax dollars to provide similar incentives to entice corporations to bring (at least some of) those back as proposed by Democrats) as well as all of the laws drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council that have been passed by GOP dominated legislatures (i.e. that have outlawed against bringing unhealthy and abuses in industrial farms to light).
The USCOC and ALEC are effectively an unelected government to whom the GOP has paid obeisance to the detriment of the American people. This has been severely exacerbated with the so-called "Citizen's United" decision which further pretty much changed money from being property into being speech. Another example could be that GOP shutting off the fiscal spigot once the big banks and big industries were bailed out; refusing to help the adversely affected citizen. Again.
Witness the stimulus. A $1.6.trillion hole blown into the economy and the Republicons whittled the proposed stimulus down to less than half; 40% of the $787 billion that was left was squandered in tax breaks which largely benefited corporations and the wealthy. It's more than a minor miracle that the stimulus has worked as well as it has.
The GOP has shown that they're wedded to the idea of fiscal policies that have been shown to fail. All of the economy-stabilizing laws enacted after the Depression in order to prevent another one have been rescinded under GOP administrations. Pres. Ronnie the Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from collaborating with full-service brokerage firms or participating in investment banking activities. This had the effect of keeping that banks from gambling with your money.
He also gutted enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act whose purpose was to prevent monopolies, therefore promoting effective competition. Notice the industrial consolidation that has occurred since then.
His tenure also saw the flattening of wages even while the GDP and productivity rose. This is the first time in American history that wages failed to keep pace. They have, in fact, lost ground.
His administration also changed the law that kept medical insurance a non-profit industry. In allowing medical insurance companies to begin to turn a profit, his justification was that the mythical "freedom of the marketplace" would actually bring prices DOWN through competition. Economists said that this was antithetical to economic realities and that costs would actually rise. We now know who was correct.
There's lots more, but I think you get the idea. All these changes in economic policies have done little, if anything, for the average citizen but the wealthy and corporations have profited immensely. All at our expense.
Wow. That got kinda wordy, didn't it? Must've struck a nerve.
Mind you, the Democrats also kowtow to the wealthy and corporations, but that do try to help the average citizen as well.