Can We Say Republicans Are Craven Budget Hypocrites? YES - We Can!

The Republicans are so full of it, one could almost roll on the floor laughing at their blatant budget hypocrisy. You know their song and dance! Always yapping about "deficits" and "debt" but when crunch time comes - or they win mid-term elections in both houses, or the Presidency - all of that goes by the backboards.

A case in point, revealed in a recent front page Financial Times article ('U.S. Congress Considers Host of Tax Breaks', Nov. 26) is congress' plans to "blow the budget open" with a whole swatch of tax breaks, some of which could be made permanent. Let us bear in mind these nitwits, mainly Repukes, are doing this in an environment which, as the FT notes- has seen a dramatic fall in in the federal deficit, from more than 10 percent of GDP 6 years ago to 2.8 percent of GDP now.

So why the hell go nuts and break the bank when things are just now turning rosy and the fiscal future appears much better? Well, because as is their usual shtick - the Reepos and their lackeys and useful idiots (like Peter G. Peterson and his Foundation, Fix the Debt etc.) want to generate enormous added debt via tax breaks and giveaways in order to justify cuts to social insurance programs like Social Security later. (Indeed, I just received an advanced alert yesterday from the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare that this is precisely what these callous assholes would do.)

One of the most egregious parts of the "mooted deal" - to use the FT's parlance - is the plan to expand and make permanent the R&D tax credit for corporations, which lets companies write off R&D expenses against their tax bills. While it sounds harmless enough, in the past grievous misuse has included writing off 2-3 time more R&D expenses than companies actually used. The FT estimates this could cost $160 billion over ten years, but I suspect that's a gross underestimate. Look instead for it to top $200 b, especially when Big PhRma starts exploiting it.


The FT notes this also "changes the starting point for future tax reform". Indeed! If R&D write-off is made permanent the business sector will have much less reason to back broader reform. Why should they when the pukes are handing them so much on a silver platter? The FT piece adds that it "also lowers the tax base for a revenue neutral package".

All of this is insane given that currently the nation's spending and remaining debt is some 15 times larger than its income via taxes. Our infrastructure alone is literally falling apart with each year it goes untended for maintenance or replacement. If any tax credit ought to be given, it is for company investment in repair of our crumbling infrastructure- water mains (some of which, like here in COS are over 100 years old), sewer lines, and bridges.

And don't for a minute believe the Dems are innocent little angels in all of this! No, they just aren't as bad as the repukes (that dysentery vs. Ebola comparison again). The FT notes, for example, it would include "mass transit and college tuition tax breaks" - likely made permanent - for Charles Schumer of NY.

But the worst omission? The presumptive deal would not make permanent the Earned Income Tax Credit so important to the working poor (i.e. those at Walmart where that store has requested more well off employees to help those in need, with food, care packages etc.)

The FT reports that the White House has "threatened a veto" and in my opinion, they ought to make good on that threat. Indeed, they need to veto this whole absurd  proposed tax package which would send us back to higher deficits we can't afford and allow the debt mongers to after the programs people need.

Leave it to the Reeps to f*ck the country up just when it's beginning to get on the right financial track including lower deficits. Another reminder that elections have consequences and Dem voters need to get their butts out and vote in mid-terms as much as they do in general elections!

The U.S. A Banana Republic? Believe it!

A section of the Minneapolis Bridge which collapsed several years ago.

Author Barbara Ehrenreich in her must-read book, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America  has warned of how a cult of positivity permeating the country has blinded citizens to its severe problems in the interest of cultivating delusions. She pulls no punches by also showing how what was once the province of two bit hucksters has now become an accomplice of the American Business model - found in every niche cubicle and team-building exercise. And by god, if you ain't a happy camper, the HR folks will help show you the door. No negative shit wanted here!

But unless the rose-colored glasses come off we can't see how the nation has degenerated to become basically a third world backwater in disguise. A banana republic. How or why, well it probably began from the time Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, and more and more resources got diverted to the military, national security state. Kennedy did his best to prevent this but the bastards couldn't tolerate it and offed him in an Executive action I exposed in multiple blog posts over October and November.

Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford of the National Priorities Project write:

“Robust public investment had been a key to US prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post–World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.”

What would show we aren't a banana republic? Well, significant non-military investment across the board: from development of alternative energy sources - including solar, geothermal, wind, to massive infrastructure repair. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates at least $2.2 trillion needs to be spent to even get most of our bridges, water mains, sewer systems to a passable grade C+ standard.  That requires a massive increase in TAXES.

The alternative is to be left further and further behind the rest of the world. China, already, is developing its alternative energy - especially solar- at a frenetic pace set to put the USA to shame. China has also just launched a Moon bound space craft in preparation for a manned landing. In the meantime, the U.S. has to rely on Russian craft to hitch rides to the International Space Station. We are now so officially poor we can't even afford a government supported manned space program. (And no, I do not believe pitiful little "private" efforts will amount to much more than near Earth commercial tourist ventures.)

How poor are we? Pretty damned poor for the so-called "richest nation on Earth". Richest nation, yeah, for the top one percent or the top 0.01 percent - who control as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.  You can thank over three decades of Neoliberal  trickledown economics and its attendant  monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry. Add in also the destruction of labor protection that has resulted in 50 million Americans living in abject poverty, while 400 individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth.

This sort of inequality, with faint hope of upward mobility, is the very definition of a banana republic. (Which is also distinguished by its characteristic out of proportion military spending.) Process this: the four Walmart heirs enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent. The 0.01 percent, after all,  can afford jaunts to St. Kitts on weekends for  rose wine wraps for their wives, e.g.

While the men take in 18 holes at one of the well -tended golf courses.


 Meanwhile, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada. In fact, the percentage of Americans who say they could not afford the food needed to feed their families at some point in the last year is three times that of Germany, more than twice than Italy and Canada.

If anyone believes we're on a par with Germany or Austria I invite them to travel to those nations and look around as we did 6 months ago. Homeless people, soup kitchens? Unheard of! Hungry kids starving for food at night, unable to sleep because a rich bastard ass party wants more and more for the rich and military - no fuckin' way! As our friend Reinhardt put it: "We would be ashamed to have such a situation here in Germany!"

Here's another wake up call for the drooling optimists in our midst and positivity cultists: The destruction of labor has become so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their jobs to the U.S. In other words, we’ve become the new India. Foreign companies, such as in Germany,  now see us as the world’s cheap labor force. 

Thank the inroads made by the Neoliberal labor destroyers. Of course, in the bidness-friendly, slavery l-oving, non-unionized South this degradation has reached its apotheosis.  Chuck Thompson, author of Better off Without Em, writes:

 “Like Mexico, the South has spent the past four decades systematically siphoning auto jobs from Michigan and the Midwest by keeping worker’s salaries low and inhibiting their right to organize by rendering their unions toothless.”

 Average wages for autoworkers in the South are up to 30 percent lower than in Michigan. People, alas, can't live on such low wages. Neither can the millions of fast food workers ensnared in a permanent underclass because - due to lack of investment in alternative energy or infrastructure- decent jobs aren't available and the Goops don't want to raise the minimum wage.  In the U.S. the minimum wage is just above $7 per hour and workers can expect no more than 12 days of annual vacation. Fast food workers earning that pittance get  little or no holidays, no sick days so even if they have the flu or a stomach virus they've no choice but to come in - getting the rest of us sick.

By contrast,  in Sweden, the minimum wage is $19 per hour and workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks paid vacation every year. They also are afforded sick days so if they do get a terrible rotavirus they can stay home and not spread it around in all the food they serve.

Poor? Yes we are, for the most part. Thanks to the military-national security state and Wall Street' denizens subverting the country.  Oh, and the bought and paid for political system - which thinks money is "speech" - that has enabled it!

Latest Budget Deal Seeks to Preserve Military Bullshit Spending - Spare it from Sequester

"No one has recently said to me, 'You can only get so angry,' and escaped with their hide intact, probably because I tend to spend my time with people who know better, and the people who know me know better than to try and tell me I'm making too much of things in this diseased day and age, when "things" make plenty of themselves without my help."- William Rivers Pitt, in 'It Only Hurts When I Laugh' - on smirkingchimp.com


Well we now know, after Paul Ryan's conscious (or maybe unconscious) admission this morning on CBS Early Show, that this new budget deal is designed to spare the military -defense enclave about $23 billion in sequester cuts that otherwise would have gone into effect. Hence, any deficit savings are on the backs of the poor, hungry kids, the unemployed. 

Ryan openly admitted his "concern" about military spending cuts in the sequester so was "pleased" that $63 b of defense sequester cuts are "offset" by $85b in gov't "automatic spending". Unmentioned is that unemployment extension was off the table, as were any new tax increases - which would have helped limit the deficits by nearly $150b within two years. But oh no, none of the Reepos want higher taxes - so the Demos obliged them. The above offset - or rather spending cut imbalance between defense and "discretionary budget allocations" amounts to nearly $23b. That amount will now allow the defense industry-Pentagon to go ahead with the building of 2,335 F-35 bombers at a cost of 3/4 billion each. But oh no, can't cut this piece of waste! Too important to line the pockets of defense contractors! See also:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/09/joint-strike-fighter-lockheed-martin

The fact is that in real terms, military spending has exploded the past 11 years, thanks to the American people being scared shitless into believing them there "terrorists" will get them if they don't have massive, sustained and insane  "defense" spending.  Back in 2011 it was noted that Pentagon spending had doubled since 2000, to $790 b a year. This number included both yearly "supplementals" to fund the Afghan conflict and occupation, along with $553b for the base Pentagon budget.

Over the past decade this translates into a pure growth factor of nearly $2 trillion. Thus, Repub Tom Coburn (OK) was correct (for once) when he admitted in a 2011 statement that Pentagon spending :

 "is higher in constant dollars than at any time in the last 60 years, including the Korean War, Vietnam and all the Defense Dept. spending during the Reagan years ($2.2 trillion)".

It is also more than the next 25 nations' military spending combined. The gist of all this? In fact there are no real cuts to military spending in any absolute terms, but only an estimated "trim down" of roughly 23% in the projected INCREASES in Pentagon spending over the next ten years! The point here? Contrary to the bloviators' bollocks of "jeopardizing national security", just the opposite is true: the Pentagon base budget will still be larger than it is today by 2021! This necessarily means, given the zero sum resources we have, everyone else will be much poorer. That means an even more shattered and useless infrastructure with crumbling roads, cracking sewer and water mains and collapsing bridges....and a much more likely intolerable domestic environment over all.

 Anyone who doesn't see this as the distinctive symptom of a nation in decline is a foursquare idiot.

Does the U.S. REALLY need 702 military 'installations' in 63 foreign countries (it has 4,471 bases altogether), according to the Defense Department's  2012 budget statement? ( Figures that don't include bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.) We're talking about our military presence in nations like Germany, South Korea, and Japan. ALL of these represent redundant costs since the wars that incepted the bases are now more than a half century over! While the total cost of these bases is kept secret, the best analysis I've seen estimates their ten-year cost at approximately $1 trillion. Cut that fat and waste, and unemployment insurance could easily be extended and a Farm Bill could be passed that doesn't kill food stamps to the tune of $40 billion over 10 years.

So why the fuck are we blowing so much on this military  bullshit when our own people need help - with 16 million kids going to bed hungry each night - and our infrastructure falling into massive disrepair?  The reason is simple: the defense contractors know if they can squirrel away some amount of jobs into every congressional district they essentially have all the politicos in those districts - now numbering in the thousands - by the brains and balls. They know that being seen to surrender jobs in this low aggregate demand environment would likely see a congress critter getting "primaried"  by some military spending whore, like our own Doug Lamborn here in Colo. Springs, e,g,


Lamborn in his most recent comments to The Denver Post ('Defense Cuts Put Lamborn in Tough Fight'. Nov. 8  p. 5A) on the importance of military spending,  is on record as saying he:

 "intends to find other places to chop, including entitlements like food stamps and Medicare, to shield the military."

The Post piece also went on to note:

"Lamborn receives his heftiest campaign contributions from military contractors. Just in this election cycle, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman- both with offices in Colorado Springs - gave him a combined $10,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He has also received contributions from Honeywell International and Boeing."

Where will it end? Sadly, as the yen to further bloat the military curries more favor from political Jacobins, traitors and numbskulls, the target of  REEP austerity hawks will continue to be "entitlements".  That essentially is what Ryan implied this morning, as he professed so much "concern about our debt". Funny.....,these fuckers when in power don't worry about debt or deficits at all. Wasn't it Dick(-head) Cheney who actually said: "Deficits don't matter!"  No, I guess they don't when Reep-Turds are in power and blow up the budgets with unpaid for "wars" and tax cuts so the next Dem Prez gets the blame and has to clean up the mess - by cutting  domestic spending!  These Rat fuckers won't be satisfied until we're all homeless, sick, dead or maybe ....walking dead.

Am I angry"? Fuck YES! And if you're not then either you're not paying attention or you're already among the Walking Dead!

Skewering Another Pet Canard of the Right: "Governments Don't Create Jobs!"

As I watched 'Morning Joe' today, there were only two redeeming features to merit the time, both reasonable commentators: Jack Lessenberry, and Eugene Robinson. They spoke sense and they produced facts and verifiable data. On the other side was the obnoxious, former (Bush Jr) PR hack Ari Fleischer, who once more proved Hitler's famous line: "When you tell a lie often enough people will start to believe it"

He did this by repeating (at least eight times that I counted) the famous new line on the Right: Governments don't create jobs!

Well, tell that to the Wall St. traders and professional economists, say if suddenly ALL government jobs vanished overnight and the unemployment rate (which includes government jobs!) shot up to 11%! (Including all the ancillary contract jobs that depend on the government jobs!)

But because this bullshit has been so often repeated, usually on the FAUX airwaves, many have begun to take it as gospel or some established fact. "Oh yes, it's true! Only businesses create jobs not government!"

What I'd really really like to see here, to wake these lying assholes up, is all across the board defense cuts amounting to $2 trillion done instantly with no gimmicks! No cutting border patrol, or VA benefits, or Homeland Security or foreign aid and calling them "defense cuts".

You see, because if these REAL defense cuts are made where it hurts, say like the Pentagon's pet program to build 2,443 F-35 fighter jets, I guaran-damn tee you NO defense contractors (like Boeing or Lockheed) will get that money, and hence thousands of workers will be out of jobs! And again, let's cut the crap here: those jobs - since they'd use government money to make the fighters - ARE government jobs! I don't care if the actual workers are making them while at Boeing, or Lockheed. They are paid out of the government's purse, hence to all intents - for that time - are government workers!

Hence, ALL defense contracted jobs are government contract jobs, and gazillions of these are what keep many of the Reep puppet's constituents happy - that they're getting paychecks. THIS is a primo reason why these little rats object to any or all mention of cuts to defense. Not because they're genuine patriots, but because they don't want to lose that government money floating in - which in other circumstances (say applied to private workers and their health care) they'd object to on the basis of the "Nanny State".

Well, hell's bells, they have no problems with the "pappy state"!

This paradigm, obviously, also extends to the thousands of NASA workers (mainly on the Shuttle program), who just received pink slips. Even if not all directly worked for NASA, say 1,000 were based in Missouri and made the Shuttle's heat tiles, they were all government workers for the time they received government money - contract workers or other.

At its height, let's recall, NASA had nearly 67,000 workers working in 33 states on all various parts of the Apollo program. I defy anyone with more than air between the ears to tell them their jobs didn't really exist, because "the government doesn't create jobs"!

As a matter of fact, if millions of government jobs hadn't been retrenched (as initiated with the Dumbya Bush reign, and oddly, continued under Obama) we'd have more like 8% unemployment rate, as opposed to 9.1%. And bear in mind all those workers receive money that is just as much legal tender as any private worker's money. They use it to go to movies, to buy HDTVs, to go out to eat, and to buy homes. Take all that money from all those government jobs away and what do you think you'll get? Well, economic bupkiss.

Yes, I also had a government job, working in the Peace Corps for four years. That didn't pay a lot ($125/ month) but did entail thousands of man-hours of real work- teaching seven classes at two remote country schools, while also doing lots of volunteer work on the side. By the same token, my brothers have held government jobs, serving in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps.

Anyone want to tell any of us that the "government doesn't create jobs"? Then, exactly HOW did those service jobs emerge, whether Peace Corps or in the military? Did they just pop out of existence like Zeus from Mount Olympus? Give me a fucking break! Of course they appeared because the GOVERNMENT provided the money and resources to make them so! No private corporation created them!

Yet why don't we hear more DEMS (as opposed to Socialists like me) defending the government as a bone fide job creator, as opposed to listening to the incessant LIES spread around repeatedly? And by the likes of Ari Fleischer? Do the Dems have such low opinions of the government themselves they must depend on those like me to carry water for them and do their spade work? Is it left now to Socialists to do that too?

If the Dems had more brains, or gumption, they might have made the substantive case that the opportunity for job creation exists right now, in funding several trillion for a massive capital works program on the scale of FDR's WPA. Those 1930s workers built massive projects like the Hoover Dam, and meanwhile, here we are sitting on our asses while our roads, bridges, sewers and water mains collapse all around us!

No vision! No sense even remotely to see a massive government -propelled infrastructure program could put hundreds of thousands to work across this land while saving our decaying support systems. Yes, idiots gaze at the magic numbers with any DOW spike, but those numbers are meaningless if your water mains and sewers cease working and you become little more than a slightly advanced Somalia!

In the meantime, stock watchers who get wet dreams with every DOW spike are little different from a householder who fawns over a windfall and how he'll spend it, even as black mold (Stachybotrys) invades his basement.

Let's hope our people wake the fuck up before it's too late! In the meantime, Ari Fleischer and his crew of lying scum need to put a sock in it.