Feb

17

Check These Items That Fit Your Belief System, and the type of America you wish to be a part of

[ ] A nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership

[ ] Authoritarian nationalism with a corporatist economic system

[ ] Ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong

[ ] Identifies violence and war as actions that create national regeneration

[ ] Resists autonomy of cultural or ethnic groups

[ ] Blames capitalism and liberal democracies

[ ] Advocates a single-party state

I will bet none of you checked any of these. If you did, maybe one or two.  Yet if this does not spell the former Bush Administration, The Tea Party Movement, The incessant filibusters of the current minority party even on legislation they would normally support, and even many of you well educated Americans that for whatever reason cannot see the plain truth that is before you. 

This list is Glen Beck

This list is Bill O’Reilly

This list is Sean Hannity

This list is Fox News (sic)

This list is the Patriot Act

This list is two wars we still wage

This list is why you do not see a single Black, Asian, or Hispanic face in a Tea party crowd

This list is Sarah Palin

This list is Rush Linbaugh

This list is the Federal Reserve

This list is Wall Street

This list is the Health Insurance mobsters

This list is Wal-Mart

This list is what many in the Christian right have become

…This list is the very definition of FASCISM

…Joe McCarthy here we go again

Feb

16

I really do not know but I would suspect many do. So much of the Tea Party movement is sponsored by fallen Republicans and big business.

There are actually many things these people are for that I actually agree with.

- I agree that both Parties have been bought and sold by special interest and big business

- I agree we need to pay down the Federal Deficit

- I agree that many of our civil liberties have been compromised by scary legislation like the Patriot act.

- I believe the Federal Reserve needs to be abolished or radically reformed

- I believe we never ratified the 16th ammendment that is the basis for Federal income tax

What I do not agree with is their hypocrisy. If you are for fiscal responsibility in Government then you are for fiscal responsibility in Government. You are not just for it when the Democrats are in office.

You do not get to forget that the last fiscally responsible President was a Democrat (and this is coming from someone whose mother sent him a “Countdown to Clinton Calendar” when he was elected as I was a Bush guy).

You do not get to forget that Reagan ran up the Federal deficit by 1.34 trillion dollars in his eight years. If you adjust this number for inflation using the CPI the figure is 2.63 trillion.

You do not get to forget that Bush 1 racked up .93 trillion in four years (or 1.44 trillion adjusted for inflation). Or, Bush the younger racked up 1.78 trillion in his first seven years along. This did not include his 800 billion dollar medicaid drug prescription bill, or quite a bit of debt financed outside of the Federal Budget for the Iraq war.

You do not forget these things. For those of you folks on the fringe that have been consistent in your position that you do not like any government I can respect your position even if I do not agree with it.

For the rest of you, take a look in the mirror so you can see what hypocrisy looks like.

Next time you pull into that Walmart parking lot congratulate yourself on all those U.S. Factories your purchases are responsible for closing.

“Always low prices, Always”

But be proud in the knowledge that those Jeans you just bought made someone in Indonesia, paid enough to buy a 1/2 cup of rice.

Jan

22

Their bonus pool is only 16.2 billion dollars. Yes, only a paltry $16,200,000,000 dollars for the year. We need you to sing Fergie, Bono, Ms. Crow. We need to raise some cash for these poor souls.

We have become numb to numbers to the point that they have no meaning to us any more, so let me put this in perspective for you. According to yahoo (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=GS) they have 35,500 employees. That bonus pool works out to $456,338 dollars per employee. Given old Lloyd and his top cronies will be getting a few hundred million of that it is safe to say that the mailroom and the admin pool will be getting stiffed.

To further put this in perspective, with the median household income around $55,000 this bonus pool represents 294,545 families in America. The 10 billion we gave these ziff-bags in TARP money could have been used to put 285,000 Americans to work at a decent wage for a year.

What exactly does Goldman Sachs do to contribute to America?

Well, they do make a contribution to our economy. For one they took risky, reckless real estate loans, packaged them up and sold them as securities, and then had balls so big they also bought hedges against the manure they sold.

Not only did they make money selling this crap to institutional investors dumb enough to buy them, they also make billions (with a B) when our economy almost went over the cliff. In fact, some of the TARP money we gave to AIG went to payoff these vile scumbags.

This is capitalism? This is so far beyond Antionette telling the poor “to eat cake” it is not even funny. Each day I dig a little deeper into the cess-pool that corporations have become the more I realize that socialism is alive and well. Socialism for the the rich that is.

Where art thou Robin Hood? 

 

Jan

18

Martin Luther King is still on my list of the top ten people I would love to break bread with. He is one of the most eloquent speakers I have heard in my lifetime. He was also the best example I can think of, of a man who applied his convictions and principles in the face of a problem so large and threatening on a personal level that it would have been easy to let someone else take up the battle. He gave his life for his cause.

What he did for African-Americans (just Americans in my book) is something we cannot ever measure. He is truly among one of the great Americans in our nations history.

But, from this white guys perspective it took us from the end of the civil war in 1865, until 1964, 100 years to get civil rights legislation. In 2010 we are still far from a country that to quote Dr. King, “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

We are a long way from this ideal.

I do not want to minimize the issue of race. I do not want to minimize the fact that Barack Obama is our first African-American President. I do want to say that white, black, green, male, female… in his first year he has done a remarkable job. REMARKABLE.

When you examine the bag of shit he inherited, it is just unprecedented, even going back to what FDR walked into. He has assembled a great team, and has kept us from a second great depression. If you examine his record in the first year alone he has already accomplished what most Presidents take a full term to do.

I am glad he is my President. I have every confidence he is going to lead us out of this mess. He will do so despite the obstructionist attitude of the other party. He will do so irrespective of whether the makeup of his Congress changes. He will lead us out of this mess because he is a natural born leader. He is a man like Dr. King of great character. Great character may not be able to transcend bigotry and ignorance, but great character will always transcend race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.

ALWAYS!

 

 

 

Dec

28

The recent terrorist attempt on flight 253 was a sobering reminder that extremists are alive and well and still want to kill us.

What I found even more interesting was that a few days later the same flight reported a similar incident. A man, also a Nigerian, created the false alert by spending too much time in the restroom. Turns out he was not feeling well.

At 30,000 feet, given the recent circumstances it is hard to fault peoples caution. But, this is not the point. In a post I wrote September 14th of 2009

http://everydollarmatters.com/blog/2009/09/14/frightening-and-intolerant/

I commented…

“All it really will take during this time is one plane into a building, one more meltdown of the economy and the behavior of rational people can change in a very bad way.”

You just saw a very small taste of this. During WWII we rounded up and interned Germany and Japenese citizens. The vast majority of these people were nothing more than hard working Americans that happened to be from nations we were at war with.

If you think America is too civilized for this to happen again you are incredibly naive. We are one attack or economic meltdown from becoming a nation of Glen Becks in the majority.

If you think that our behavior is motivated by race or religion you should think again. If a bunch of neo-nazis or skinheads or other white hate groups started attacking us on our soil we would be rounding up anyone with facial tatoos faster than you can say your name, and free speech would stop being free for these groups.

The fact is that as a nation we will tolerate hatred and other offensive perspectives to the extent that we do not feel threatened as a nation. We once again feel threatened by these extremest bastards. These twisted souls are filled with hatred. It is buried deep within their soul. 

These nut cases are not going away anytime soon.  Trying to maintain our ideals and democratic values is not easy when shit like this happens. But we must. If we do not then these evil dirtbags will have won. This is a very tight rope we are walking.

If these people are truly the minority in the Muslim world then Muslims need to stand up and unite against the extremists. Expecting Americans to do so will only result in a world that become divided by race and nationalism.

We need to remain diligent in our intelligence while still maintaining our civil liberties and freedoms. This is not and has never been a war about tanks and bombs.

One final note. I appluad the father of the captured terroist who five weeks ago reported to us that his son was a threat. We dropped the ball bigtime on this.

 

 

Dec

23

Because we collectively punish our elected officials by voting those into office that feed us the biggest line of bullshit.

In looking at our history of government deficits I still contend that unlike companies and individuals some debt seems to be okay. But, I am not sure, neither are our leaders and economists exactly how much is too much. But, I think most of us agree that we are likely past the limit.

I am with the tea party people on this issue.

If your personal debt were to be transferred to your children would you continue to rack up debt? Most of you would not.

Yet, we seem to have no qualms about letting our national deficit continue to rise. Our current deficit is estImated at around 11.4 trillion dollars. I do not want to get off on a tangent here trying to explain everything. I think we can all agree the amount we owe is pretty gross, and pretty outrageous.

We are also in some pretty tough economic times. Unemployment is high. And, to make matters worse we have an aging populations that are going to take social security and medicare, both ponzi schemes, and literally bankrupt our federal government. Oh, and let us not forget that our national infrastructure (roads, utilities) are an aging mess, as is our education system.  

All is not total doom and gloom. Since the economic meltdown in October 2008 the general American public seems to have wised up (hopefully long term) and consumer debt is falling and personal savings are rising.

I think it is high time for our leaders to get a similar haircut.

But, they ARE NOT going to do this as long as you do not understand what is at stake and what will be required to dig out.

The principles are really quite simple. Getting everyone in our country to swallow the medicine is the hard part.

If we look at the governments deficit (which is our collective deficit) there are essentially three things that can be done to dig ourselves out of debt.

1) The government can increase revenues by increasing interest rates, and through the increase of taxes.

2) The government can balance its budget and not spend more than it takes in. Our 2008 budget was 2.9 trillion, the government took in 2.5 trillion, a deficit of 400 billion. But, 400 billion is not the real number. We spent 600 billion in social security surplus to fund the debt. Yes, that is correct, the money left over that you and I have been paying into social security is actually spent on other aspects of the Federal Budget.  This is a different issue we need to take up at a later time.

3) We export at least as many goods to other countries (in dollars) that we import. Did you know that our 3rd biggest export is scrap metal to foreign countries. They recycle these metals and sell them back to us as finished products.

Now, for the bitter medicine we all need to swallow.

To increase revenues
- The Fed needs to raise the Federal Funds rate. It is currently 1/2 percent. To put this in perspective for every trillion the government lends at this rate they receive 5 billion in revenue. Raising this rate to 3% would raise an additional 25 billion in revenue and lending rates would still be affordable.
- Raising taxes seems to be to much a lightening rod. Ok, our GDP is around 13 trillion dollars. If we were to enact a national sales tax of 3% of our GDP for 5 years on 10 trillion of our 13 trillion GDP amount this would along raise 1.5 trillion dollars which would be enough to pay off most of our deficit owed to foreign countries.
- Make an investment to put people back to work. It is estimated that over the past three years 7.5 million jobs were lost. Every million people we can put back to work convervatively represents another 4 billion dollars in collected taxes just at the federal level.
- Let the 3 Bush tax cuts expire. Before you get all bent out of shape. If your adjusted gross income is 50,000 and you are filing married jointly this meant you paid $48 less in 2008 that you did in 2007, and $32 less in 2009 that in 2008. I chose 50,000 as this is close to the reported median family income in 2007. The savings of repealing these tax cuts add an additional 12 billion in government revenues. You and I would be missing $1.53 a week. That is $1.53 on $50,000 in annual income. Not a big deal to you and I. However, an additional 12 billion can go a long way.

To Manage the Federal Budget
Simple
- The government only gets to spend what they bring in.
- We spend this money wiser. Easily, we could find 25% of the money our government spends as wasteful. That is a pile of cash. It is time for a fiscal haircut. By the same token, after we pay down or pay off the foreign debt we owe we takes the years of surplus and we save them for the rainy days. If you analyze most periods of severe economic downturns since the turn of the century you will find they are preceeded by years of government surpluses. Is this a coincidence?

Balance Imports and Exports as a zero sum game
- We begin to do this by investing in green energy and reducing our dependency on foreign oil. By doing this we also create jobs for the future and start taking better care of our environment.

If you think we can get out of the mess we are in by not raising taxes and decreasing spending you are a moron, plain and simple. There are many on the left and many on the right that want fiscal responsibility. But, there are still not enough.

Why?

Because so many of you do not seem to really understand what is going on. It is time to get educated and time to demand our leaders to be fiscally responsible.

Because we elect the person that tells us the best line of BS. I can lower your taxes and increase the services I provide you. We need to quit being fools on this. If our employer said they were going to cut our pay and by doing this we could increase our standard of living we would not buy it.

Wake up America.
 

 

Dec

6

I just watched this documentary. I do not use this word very often. It was provacative. I was also scary. It was supported by fact and parallels in history that are hard to deny.

What is scary to me is that the work of the last Administration is still in place. We have become a nation so scared and divided that I think all it may take is one more substantial attack, or economic melt down to push us over the edge.

My question for the Obama administration is why are we still employing Blackwater, a para-military organization?

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