"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...."
-- United States Constitution; Amendment I
Last night, Rick Warren, an overfed, smiling skinned-hog of a man who's made a fortune from his megachurch in California, and from his book, "The Purpose-Driven Life", held a "Forum on Faith" where he moderated a discussion by Barack Obama, the likely Democratic candidate for President, and his counterpart, John McCain.
He asked "tough questions" regarding each man's beliefs; their 'greatest moral failings', and other suchlike.
Hello? Hello? McFly??
What part of 'Congress shall make no law' do these people not understand?
While McCain and Obama are busy pandering to the evangelicals, they're ignoring the central issues:
1. The U.S. is embroiled in two illegal wars which have all-but-bankrupted America in every way that counts.
2. Our current President has all but demolished the Constitution (that's the document I quoted earlier -- it might help to go read it, here) - by running roughshod over the basic civil rights of all Americans (a good discussion on this topic in some depth may be found right on this very blog, a few posts down).
3. The Neoconservatives currently-in-power have adopted a borrow-and-spend mentality which has debased our currency to the tune of around 25%, give-or-take. (Note: This sort of thing hasn't happened on this scale since Roman times - and we all know what happened to them.)
(If not, here's a place to start.)
I've got a radical suggestion.
It's time for an atheist for President.
That's right. Someone who will tell the evangelicals, the mainstream-types, plus the voting blocs made up of the Jews, Catholics, and the other religions - to go straight to -- well -- 'hell'.
Congress shall make no law....
Sounds like a good campaign slogan to me.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
It's Time For an Atheist....
Friday, August 15, 2008
Ah, I Love Portland....
It's the home of Chuck Palaniuk (of "Fight Club" fame); Tonya Harding made her home here (in a trailer park in Clackamas County - not quite Portland, but in the area); Bob Packwood still lives here (being the only senator in recent memory chased from office for a 30-year history of sexual harassment).
It's also the home of Gus Van Sant (one of the best filmmakers in the world); Mike Rich (a journalist and screenwriter of some note - if you saw "Finding Forrester", you saw some of his best work).
We're home to a thriving arts community - which means that parts of this town can get a little quirky.
The box itself is a public-service-of-sorts; it serves as a repository for All Things Bad And Awful - and all it costs you is a quarter to get rid of it.
Once, an owner's-manual for a nondescript car was found (I guess there's an obvious explanation there somewhere).
Cheaper than a shrink, too.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The Fed and The Economy....
(I wrote this in September, 2007, and it's beginning to read like history now. While I hope there's still time left, the light we see getting closer and closer is moving from side to side - and soon - my own humble prediction is 'sometime-in-the-first-year-of-Obama's-presidency' - we're going to see that the light isn't the end of the tunnel, but the Headlight Of An Oncoming Shit-Train that's going to hit us head on like God's Own Flyswatter.
The fix is in over in 'Ol Beijing - the Chinese were handed the Olympics courtesy of a President who didn't want to piss-off the country which is buying most of his debt to finance his wars [and everything else, besides] - the Chi-nee are due to win most of the medals, too - heralding a New Age of Asia-Rising.
Now, class -- turn your history books to that chapter on National Socialist Germany - and read the pages dealing with the '36 Olympics....
There will be a test.
Let's not all see the same hands....)
______________________________
(From September 12, 2007, on Yahoo/360)
Recently, the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernacke held its annual meeting of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
While they sipped coffee from Indonesia, ate tilapia from the coasts of Vietnam, and made arrangements to fly back to their homes using fuel we purchased on credit from the Middle East, they all got together for a photo-op and told us all that the housing-bubble isn’t a serious problem.
This smacks of the same logic which came from The Bunker in April of 1945 - while Hitler was living in air-conditioned comfort below the Reichschancellery, the Russians were busy writing their reviews of his ‘thousand-year Reich’ with PPSH submachine guns and flamethrowers. A few of his general-officers and intermediate ranks knew what was really going on, but Hitler, Bormann, and the rest of the elite continued to ignore the reality which was coming their way.
Pardon me for the heavy-handed metaphor – but I don’t share the Fed’s enthusiasm.
A little backstory.
In 2000, I went to Hawai’I for a few weeks. I was shocked by the gasoline prices there – they were higher than anything anyone had ever seen – as it turned out, Hawai’I was the first place that the concept of peak oil combined with higher Asian demand raised its ugly head in America.
I got home to find that people were talking about gasoline – and that higher prices were affecting us here at home, as well. Round One of the fuel-price-increases which we now know and don’t love today had begun.
At the same time, we were in the process of ‘enjoying’ the benefits of seeing our 401K’s increase by leaps and bounds, courtesy of a stock-bubble driven by the ‘dot-com’ explosion. New ways of doing business; new frontiers – the world was about to be revolutionized.
I put about half my holdings in cash at the end of 2000, and waited.
Meantime, the American working-class – most of who live paycheck to paycheck, didn’t have a 401K. They also had very little in the way of savings or other assets; America having the lowest savings-rate of any industrialized nation.
More than a few of us saw that the party couldn’t last – and that a stock-crash was all-but-inevitable, once everyone learned what those of us in high-tech already knew: There really WASN’T a ‘new way’ of doing business; the internet was only augmenting the same methods of commerce which we’d used for centuries.
In early 2001, the bubble peaked, and collapsed. By fall, we were in a recession, and it wasn’t pretty.
The Fed, for its part, saw fit to feed the fire with gasoline, and lower interest rates to their lowest point in over forty years, rather than deal with the problem head-on.
It turns out that while it is possible to boost an economy with an ocean of cheap money, there’s no fundamental control over how it gets spent. What happened next will probably be remembered as the greatest single wealth transference in history.
The cash generated by the Fed was made available by the nation’s banks primarily to consumers – and the main vehicle by which this money was loaned was through tapping the equity in the nation’s housing stock.
Home equity loans became as easy to get as credit-cards – in fact, easier. While some people borrowed money to start businesses, most decided on home-improvements, cars, vacations, and education for the kids.
The problem is that only the first of those options generates any real wealth, while the others just transfer or spend it. This became a great time to sell nearly anything – but, as with any credit-fueled party, it could only last so long.
The housing sector is a little better than 5% of the economy. That might not sound like much, but it’s been driving most of the consumer spending on which the economy depends.
Housing has contracted a whopping 20% over the past 18 months, and will probably shrink another 25-30% before it’s done in the next year and a half – and from all appearances, there’s nothing to stop it.
When finished, the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse will have created negative-equity for one-half of America’s homeowners – and the Fed doesn’t seem inclined to do anything at all about it. This is going to have ramifications on an order-of-magnitude greater than the recession of 2001.
First, credit is going to have to dry up – at least, the type used by homeowners to tap their homes like a glorified ATM.
Second, the Fed is going to have to do one of two things – turn on the spigot again, or actually increase rates to dry up the money supply so things can get back to normal.
“Back to normal”, however, is going to create a huge economic problem in the interim.
It’s the kind which changes governments – not just the party-in-the-White-House.
Consider – most of the people who work in construction have a specialized trade. Put another way, they can’t just go out and get another job – not unless they want to flip burgers or work for Wal-Mart. Jobs which paid $15, $20, $25 and more per hour will evaporate; in their place will be jobs paying $8 to $10 per hour.
The dispossessed construction workers alone will account for a shrinking ‘wealth effect’ – not only will these former homeowners (because they’ll lose their houses before this is done) not be able to tap their home-equity any longer, but they’ll also not be making what they did before – and they won’t be spending it, either.
The problem won’t stop there. The companies which employed these people will go under – and there’s a very real likelihood that many of the people who worked in the construction, insurance, title, loan, real-estate, and other related industries could wind up living on the street.
I’ll use the word to describe this, because no one else seems to have the courage:
Depression.
Solutions, anyone?
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Sky Is Falling, After All....
(On occasion, someone writes something so damn well, and making all the points I'd make even better than I can - -when that happens, and it's rarely, then I'll either link or reprint.
Steven Pizzo, the fellow who wrote this article and posted it on his blog, "newsforreal.com", is one of my all-time favorite bloggers - and if you want a real treat to some genuine 'no spin/no B.S.' reporting, then click on the title of this article and add him to your blogroll.
Meantime, sit back and read one damn fine piece of work here.)
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Anyone who has read this blog for very long knows I'm a real Chicken Little when it comes to the economy.
Beginning with George Bush's 2002 reckless and excessive tax cuts I've worried out-loud -- and getting louder by the month -- that this trickle-down Pied Piper was leading us and the world off a fiscal cliff. Well, the cliff is now before us and, frankly, it's too late to do a damn thing about it but sit back and watch the ugly show that's about to play itself out. (Memo to Dick Cheney: Hey, Dick, seems deficits DO matter after all -- you numbskull.)It's been a lonely six year vigil for us naysayers out here. But suddenly our little group of worry-beaders is getting crowded.
Fortis Bank predicts US Financial market meltdown within weeks (Fortis is a large bank and insurer in the Netherlands and Belgium.) 28th of June, 9:10: BRUSSELS/AMSTERDAM - Fortis expects a complete collapse of the US financial markets within a few days to weeks. That explains, according to Fortis, the series of interventions of last Thursday to retrieve € 8 billion. “We have been saved just in time. The situation in the US is much worse than we thought”, says Fortis chairman Maurice Lippens. Fortis expects bankruptcies amongst 6000 American banks which have a small coverage currently. But also Citigroup, General Motors - there is starting a complete meltdown in the US.”
And, The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks. “A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared,” said Bob Janjuah, the bank’s credit strategist. A report by the bank’s research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as “all the chickens come home to roost” from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets. “The Fed is in panic mode. The massive credibility chasms down which the Fed and maybe even the ECB will plummet when they fail to hike rates in the face of higher inflation will combine to give us a big sell-off in risky assets,” he said.
And, Barclays: "US central bank accused of unleashing an inflation shock that will rock financial markets. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Business Editor, Financial Times "Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall “below zero”. “We’re in a nasty environment,” said Tim Bond, the bank’s chief equity strategist. “There is an inflation shock underway. This is going to be very negative for financial assets. We are going into tortoise mood and are retreating into our shell. Investors will do well if they can preserve their wealth.” “This is the first test for central banks in 30 years and they have fluffed it. They have zero credibility, and the Fed is negative if that’s possible. It has lost all credibility,” said Mr Bond. The bank said the full damage from the global banking crisis would take another year to unfold.
Meanwhile those who decided it was a good idea to run everything that runs on oil, continue to believe that the answer to our current problems is to simply drill for more oil. And, as they have been every inch of the ways -- they are wrong about that - dead wrong:
Simmons says market forces driving crude to $600: Press/Journal/ UK. 1 July 2008: The chairman of energy investment-banking firm Simmons and Company International has predicted that oil prices could double or more within a few years. Matt Simmons said that in his view oil was “dirt cheap at $140 a barrel”, and with supplies having peaked and demand growing prices were bound to go higher. He said: “It is not beyond the pale of imagination to see oil at $300, $400, $500 or even $600 a barrel within a relatively short time, much less than 20 years. It is not speculators who are driving oil prices. It’s simply about supply and demand.”
So, what's it all mean to you and I? I have no idea. This is uncharted territory. Over the next five years we may see what happened to Communism in 90's happen to Capitalism. If so it will be the fault of those who allowed the gap between rich and working poor expand into a yawning chasm. On one side live the once upwardly mobile middle class, now mired in debt and crushed by inflation. On the far side live a smaller group -- the super-wealthy -- who benefited from the shift in taxation and other preferential fiscal and policy changes. These folks, in living in their McMansions, don't care about the housing crisis plaguing the millions on the other side. Nor do they give a fig about deteriorating commercial air travel, as they have their, separate and unequal, jet fleets. This rich minority also has the best medical care their money can buy, while those on the other side are left to meager graces of charitable medical organizations -- if they're lucky.
What we are witnessing develop is one of those historic social divides we used to read about in history classes. You know, the kind of "let-em eat cake" thinking that lead to the French Revolution and a couple of centuries later, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. And what about the collapse of Communism nearly 20-years ago? Why would the collapse of a non-capitalist system have any relevance to what we are seeing unraveling here today? Because both systems, begun as egalitarian breakthroughs, devolved into two classes, separated by wealth and privilege.
Right wingers like to give Ronald Reagan credit for destroying Soviet Communism. But that fat was in the fire already. By the time Reagan came to office those living on the Soviet side of that wall increasingly chaffed at their declining conditions as the elite lived well. As hard-working Soviet citizens stood daily in long lines for food, the elite had their own well-stocked grocery stores. As citizens used run-down public transport, the elite whizzed by in limousines. As two generations of families crowded into cramped apartments, the elite spent their holidays at their country dachas.
The worse things got for the Russian people, the better they got for the well-connected party elite and those they did business with. But most of all ordinary Russians were deeply offended and outraged by a clearly bifurcated legal system that allowed the well-connected to skirt -- or entirely avoid -- the law, while the same legal system fell like a sledgehammer on ordinary Russians. By the late 1980s the Russian people, and those occupied by Russia, had had it right up the here with the system. So much had been taken from them and given to the communist elites that they no longer had anything left to lose. So, Reagan or no Reagan, the Soviet Union's days were numbered. The truth is that the Soviet Union's undoing was its own doing. All Reagan did was grease those skids and hasten the inevitable. Ironically historians will record that it was another supply-side Republican who greased the skids under capitalism as we've known it. Like Moscow elites before him, George W. Bush and the neo-con ideologues he installed in high office, pursued policies that enriched themselves and the already rich who supported them. They lavished upon them over-generous tax cuts, government contracts and by gutting the regulatory machinery that had at least tried to keep the destructive appetites of these hyper-capitalists in check. And unchecked those capitalists did what such bears do in the woods -- and they did it all over working Americans. Home ownership has become a nightmare for millions. Easy consumer credit became indentured servitude. Automakers were allowed by Washington to sell cars and trucks with embarrassingly bad gas millage because they were more profitable. Those cars and trucks are now just another lodestone around the necks of struggling ordinary Americans. (Were they dumb to buy them in the first place? Yes. But dumb is why laws regulating self-destructive human behavior are necessary. After all, if everyone obeyed the speed limit there would be no need for highway cops.)
The neo-cons saw regulation by government as an evil. So they let private for-profit health care companies decide which American citizens can get medical insurance and which cannot. Predictably those who need health coverage the most have become the ones who can't get it -- some 50 million, and counting. (Gee, who would-a thunk it?) The neo-cons saw recognition of global warming, not as a threat to the human species, but a threat to corporate bottom lines. So they let companies use the air as a cheap garbage disposal system for gaseous industrial waste. Of course you will never find one of these polluting power plants or factories anywhere near upper-class communities. Instead poor communities get to host them instead.
So far they've gotten away with it. But all that's kept most Americans on board with all this nonsense has been the promise that, if they worked hard and obeyed the rules they too could achieve a significant piece of the action. But that promise became transparently hollow as, over the past decade, middle class jobs moved offshore in search of cheaper people. Today, like the Soviet people two decades ago, Americans are becoming increasingly fed up. With each passing month now average Americans take stock and notice they have less and less to lose. Most have not yet reached the point where they have nothing to lose. But, if what we see developing comes to pass that could change and change fast. As average Americans come to realize they have less to lose and little hope for a reverse of fortune, it will become increasingly perilous for those living comfortably on the far side of the wealth chasm.
After all, they have plenty to lose.
Friday, July 4, 2008
The Fourth -- A Perspective...
“America is a whorehouse where the revolutionary ideals of your forefathers are bartered and sold on the altar of capitalism.”-- Cmdte. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (“Che”); to the United Nations (1961)
I don’t suppose I have to tell you that America is in a mess. I wonder, however, if you know just how bad that mess happens to be.
In 2000, the dollar was worth more – 25% more – than it is today. Put another way, if you’re making $20.00 an hour, and your salary hasn’t changed, you are now making $15.00 in real purchasing power – and the cost of everything has gone up, not down, which has further eroded your buying power.
This erosion of our currency is mainly due to the practice started by the Neocons in the ‘80’s.
Saint Reagan (I use his Neocon reverential here) began the practice of ‘supply-side economics’ – in other words, he made a bet with the nation’s treasury that if he cut real tax rates, the ‘trickle down’ effect of giving all that money back would create a stronger economic base – and hence generate the taxes through economic growth.
Problem is, it didn’t work out that way.
What really happened was this – and it’s an altogether too scary rendition of the final years of the Roman Empire.
(Constantine, and then Diocletian, tried similar measures – what happened was that financial power wound up in the hands of a few – in the outlying provinces, individual landowners were far more powerful than the Imperium; having raised their own armies, levied their own taxes, and rather taken matters-in-hand themselves – hastening the demise of the Imperial economy and leading in turn to feudalism).
The wealthy (to whom most of these tax-breaks went) squirreled it away in places where the government couldn’t touch it. As a result, the ‘trickle down’ effect didn’t work – jobs weren’t created; taxes weren’t created – money was put in places where taxes couldn’t reach it (can’t blame anything but human-nature here) – and the people who had benefited before (people whose services were cut in the name of ‘supply side theory’) just had to make-do.
I learned this one first-hand when I buried my father, a war-veteran, in 1984. Cutbacks in the V.A. made it necessary that I fund a good portion of my father’s funeral out of my own pocket – seems that some of the cutbacks were aimed at that part of the V.A.’s budget which took care of burying veterans.
With the tax-revenues gone, the only thing the Reaganites could do was to quietly go about ‘printing’ money – only what they did, rather than engage in the process directly, was to sell bonds first to the Arab nations; then to the Chinese.
This process continued on Bush the First’s watch; then Clinton’s – and the press has really cranked up to speed under Bush the Second.
Shrubby has done his work well – instead of shoring up our currency against the ravages of inflation, he went and did something else – he bought us a shiny new war.
Now, we’re in a bad way. The shit-train has finally pulled into the station – or, as Hunter Thompson once said, “…the chickens are coming home to roost; only they’re really mutant buzzards bent on eating us alive….”
If we’d only paid attention to things and shored up our currency’s value, gasoline would be somewhere between $2.25-2.90/gallon – because oil is valued in dollars – and that primarily due to the perceived stability of the American currency.
Here’s a wake-up call: The dollar isn’t stable any more, and the clock is ticking. The Euro has proven out to be a far more stable currency, and it’s only a matter of time before the oil-producing nations begin to view America as a liability.
(You can get another lesson here – I like Becky’s approach to the topic; I wish she’d use some different illustrations, which some of you – myself included – find in questionable taste; however, if you can get past that, her logic and facts are sound).
Next, we come to our civil liberties.
I’ve written about all of this recently here. The first time I published this piece, I was told my over 20% of my readership that I was ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’ (which proved, as far as I was concerned, the abysmal state of American education). That alone should cause some fear and loathing, but no matter.
We now have a president who learned a vital lesson from FDR – if you can’t get your way with Congress, start writing Executive Orders.
FDR’s most-infamous was #9066 – the one which ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry interned. This, of course, led the way for largely white landowners to confiscate their property – and while we officially ‘apologized’ some decades later and offered token remuneration, the damage had already been done, in spades.
If Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes make LBJ look like a tightwad-by-comparison, then Bush the Second makes FDR look like a boy-scout – and Lincoln’s revocation of habeus corpus during the Civil War an administrative detail.
You can read my article here – but in recap, we now have:
-- The Patriot Act – allowing broad-reaching wiretapping and other surveillance.
-- The Military Commissions Act – allowing non citizens and citizens alike to be interned in military-run camps outside the reach of American law (Gitmo and the like).
-- Proclamation 7463 (a ‘Proclamation’ is different from an Executive Order, but carries most of the same weight) – this one allows for the President alone – not Congress – to freeze military pay-grades, retirements, and to deploy troops for the duration of a conflict – as defined by the President. (Note to everyone: This is dictatorship. Just sayin’….)
-- Executive Order 13438 – this one allows the President to declare anyone, citizen or not, a ‘threat to the stabilization of Iraq’, and seize their person and property.
Sum it all up - - and we have a dictatorship.
Or, if you prefer, an Imperium much like Rome - -the Senate still has ‘power’, but the Emperor is in charge – and if you have any question, please do step out of line so he can make an example of you to prove it.
The Emperor has taken away your rights as a citizen. He’s debased your currency. He’s spent your birthright. He’s mortgaged your future to the highest bidder.
To date, no one has sufficiently pointed out that he has no clothes. That’s up to us.
I’ll leave you with another quote; this time from a man named Thomas Jefferson:
“A little revolution every now and again is a good thing.”
Happy Fourth of July….
--“Astra”
Saturday, June 21, 2008
For Stephannie and Mike....
Stephannie WhiteOccasionally, we learn things which uplift us – stories of great courage; other times, we learn happy things – a wedding; a birth, or other great news from our online ‘friends’.
Then again, sometimes we learn of tragedy.
Unfortunately, this is one of those. Bear with me.
In early ’07, Stephannie White (‘Steph’ being her online name, and how most of us here on the ‘net know her) asked me to add her to my friends-list. I was happy to do so; she was an ex-pat living in Korea with her then-almost-13-year-old son; she was an instructor at a university in Korea, having moved there some four years earlier.
Reading about her life was genuinely fun. She wrote about the culture; how she taught; the things she and her son did on the weekends. It became obvious to me that she was not only a good Mom, but the kind of best-friend a boy that age needed.
Single motherhood isn’t a cakewalk – but Stephannie was making a go of it, and in a country where the language could be bewildering at best.
Her son, Mike, made friends easily and adapted well to a life which included a lot of travel. He was smart, happy, and had a ready smile. Built like a football-player with the good-nature of a kid from the south, he was without doubt the center of Stephannie’s life.
On May 10th this year, Mike died.
The actual cause is highly suspicious. While the ‘official’ word is that that cause was natural, his age (14), his robust health and complete lack of physical problems points to another cause.
I’d ask you to do three things here.
First, I’d ask that you write a note to the American Embassy in Seoul. Secondly, I’d ask that you write the Korean Ambassador to the U.N., and ask that a complete and impartial investigation be allowed/conducted in Mike’s case.
Lastly, I’d ask you to drop by Steph’s website, and show her a little love.
She needs it right now.
Best,
--“Astra”
Saturday, June 7, 2008
The Swan-Song of the American Century
So, with the help of surgeons’ hand
The cloning’s done, and done quite deep.
“The Cloning of Bush in John McCain” - (WDN; ©2008)
Folks, it’s over.
The American Century ended, for all practical purposes, with the announcement today of the conclusion of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President.
It’s not that I was a Hillary supporter – far from it – but Obama’s all-but-guaranteed nomination means a square-off between the Lesser of Two Evils – a panderer from the senate, or a clone of G.W. Bush, soon to be late of the White House with eight full years of nonsense-passing-for-policy under his belt; said predations on the freedom, pocketbook, and persons of the American People now ready to be duly whitewashed by his likely successor.
Let’s look at the history of Neoconservatism.
In the 1960’s, America ‘suffered’ under the onerous burden of 17-cent-per-gallon gasoline; the fact that fully 60% of the world’s goods were manufactured here in the U.S., and had the benefit of plenty of disposable income. American society underwent an explosion of creativity - both ethnically and socially, American music, art, film, and other creative media saw a creative period like none other in its history.
Liberalism, the movement from the 1920’s which culminated in the three Roosevelt administrations and the sociopolitical movement which followed through the Kennedy administration, espoused the establishment of a ‘safety net’ for the social fabric, an experiment with socialized medicine (Medicare and Medicaid), as well as other acts which formed Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and Johnson’s “War on Poverty”.
The ‘vital center’ (a term coined by Arthur Schlesinger) was the concept that Liberalism was America’s sole intellectual – and hence, educational – tradition. This was echoed by classic Conservatives such as Barry Goldwater, who held with many Liberal traditions such as caring for the less-fortunate and guaranteeing personal liberty.
The leftward drift of the Democratic party in the late ‘60’s and early 70’s, as embodied by the candidacy of George McGovern in 1972 against the right-wing conservative Richard Nixon, who was running then for his second term, created disillusion within the Democratic party and a seemingly-paradoxical shift to the right (political scientists make much of the ‘pendulum swings’ in politics; while it’s beyond the purview of this post to discuss that in any detail, it makes for a helluva discussion).
The swan-song of intellectual Liberalism in America was the candidacy and presidency of Jimmy Carter. He admittedly created a double standard regarding his human-rights policies, which allowed for a ‘bye’ given to some Communist regimes, while enacting sanctions against others with whom America either had little trade or which had little influence over the U.S., economically. The further disillusion created by the Carter administration drove some classic Liberals “over the fence” to the right-wing of American politics, and set the stage for the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The chart, below, is probably the most single-damning evidence of the damage caused by the Neoconservative movement.
While decrying Liberals for a ‘tax and spend’ mentality, the Neoconservatives did something far worse. Let’s look at the facts:
1. In 1980, the tax-rate on an income of $100,000 was approximately 50%. Reagan, in a widely-celebrated move labeled “voodoo economics” by some, he proposed halving the tax rates – which he did, and which hold true today: The average tax-rate for a $100,000/yearly income is around 25-28%, depending upon deductions, which can reduce it to around 15-17% or lower.
2. In 1980 (per the chart, below), the real run-up in the national debt began. We might ask, “How can this be, because trade should balance, or nearly so?” You’d be right at the elementary level – a ‘trade deficit’ is largely artificial, as the difference has to be made up with currency. The only question is where the money originates.
In the case of the Reagan administration – and most administrations afterward, including Clinton and G.W. Bush – the source is borrowed money – which is why the national debt is now so high.
(Oops. Sorry. That sound you just heard? It was the pet- theories of a lot of Republicans, hitting the wall at Mach-1. It was the sound of a paradigm, shifting without a clutch. I’m sorry if I just skewered a fantasy with a few ugly facts, but we should all realize sooner than later that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, and there’s a huge shit-train that’s about to pull into the station, economically-speaking – and the Republicans, along with their Neoconservative cronies, aren’t our friends.)
The miracle of borrowed money enabled America to listen to the pandering of the Neocons while lowering real tax rates and seeing gasoline drop to under a dollar a gallon in 1985. (Demand-pull inflation as well as cost-push inflation had driven the price of fuel from seventeen cents per gallon in 1965 to over a dollar a gallon in 1983.)
You’ve read the chart – and you’ve seen the run-up, and where it started. I also don’t have to tell you who took office in the early ‘80’s – and it wasn’t a Democrat.
With further apologies to my Republican-aligned friends, Mr. Obama isn’t going to ‘effect change by taking it from your pocket’ – that’s a cheap shot, created by Neoconservative P.R.-flacks and policy wonks who’d have you believe that money-laundering (cutting taxes and borrowing the difference from the Chinese) is preferable to cutting our belts, paying our bills, and curing our economic woes by creating wealth.
It’s 2008. Inflation – both kinds – is back. The Neocon’s money-laundering scheme has finally caught up with us. The new president is going to have to do some things to deal with the problem – but we have two choices: A president who’ll tell the Great Unwashed what they want to hear (Obama); or a president who’ll give us Four More Years of the Same Thing (McCain).
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, and we don’t have a lot of time left to fix the friggin’ problem.
(Note: I understand that McCain is actually considering his current 'economic advisor', Carly Fiorina, as his running mate. That's what we need - a clone of Cheney wearing a skirt; someone who dismantled one of the most-venerated high-tech firms, and walked away with millions. Someone please wake me when this is over....)
