A thread to honor all the good bush has done

[BillCosby]

Originally Posted by timeforchange

Canada taxes the hell out of their people, that is why it seems nice up there. Want to give up 1/2 your income be my guest.

I am not going to wander to far off topic here. We have gone over this here already. I would be happy to reply in more detail if you like to explore it further-Start a thread on it........

IMO the reason we can not have it here is the money that is spent on war............ BILLIONS upon BILLIONS........

If you have coverage it aint free...... Instead of paying you more they hand you that...... You are going to pay for it one way or the other....

Oh & the poor fools w/ no coverage.........???? LOL they will use the emergency room & cost us three times more for the problem.......

[Jonesy]

Republicans aren't bad people. They're just fucked, in the head. They pursue happiness even at the cost of the Constitution (because they do not understand the ramifications), and reality itself. If they want something, and you tell them getting it would result in something unConstitutional, they will almost literally say, 'Fuck the Constitution'.

This is not a small problem.

[BillCosby]

Originally Posted by timeforchange

I atually work for a french owned company that pays 75% of my health cost so I am very grateful. So even if I pay either way I am better off the way it is as the alternative means the quality of care goes down.

lol......... You maybe be.. I certainly am as well......... I pay nothing... Nor for dental.............

You & I in a crowded elevator full of ppl w/out coverage coughing, sneezing & blowing their noses helps us how???

[Kanadesaga]

Bush Military Spending Recalls Stalin and Hitler
by Sherwood Ross | April 6, 2008 - 10:54am


The relentless increases in Pentagon spending President Bush has pushed through since taking office recall the actions of Hitler and Stalin prior to the outbreak of World War Two.

Both European dictators escalated their war machines and both dictators showed little concern when their domestic economies and workers' incomes suffered as a result. In 1933, his first year in power, Hitler pushed up German arms spending from less than a billion to four billion Reichsmarks. He jumped that figure to 10 billion in 1936; 17 billion in 1938 and 38 billion in 1939, the year he invaded Poland. Similarly, Stalin steadily boosted military spending in the Thirties from two billion rubles to 41 billion rubles.

As historian Richard Overy put it in "The Dictators" (W.W. Norton & Co.): "The share of defence spending in the state budget in Germany reached 54% in 1938/39; in the Soviet Union it reached one-third of the budget by 1940." The commitment to military spending, he says, "was historically exceptional" and created by the late 1930s "something approaching a war economy in peacetime."

Today, President Bush is right up there with the European dictators. His military spending has soared from $291 billion to a lavish $515 billion and he's proposed a stunning $651 billion next year. The Friends Committee on National Legislation, of Washington, D.C. says that 44 cents out of every dollar in his proposed record 2009 budget will go for war, compared with 2.2 cents for social programs. Typically, he calls for cutting 47 education programs while handing the generals 8% more.

Under Bush, U.S. military spending is now roughly equal to the combined total of all other nations. What's more, Uncle Sam is the world's Number One arms peddler, selling about half of all weapons bought by the developing nations, and showing few scruples about sales to dictators. The Center for Defense Information reported last year that U.S. arms sales to 25 countries it studied increased 400 percent over 9/11.

Of course, the two criminal 20th Century dictators didn't build their war machines for sport, and neither has Mr. Bush. By mutual agreement in 1939, the "CommuNazis," as they were known, carved up Poland, Hitler invading from the West and Stalin from the East. In the summer of 1941, Overy writes, Hitler remarked "what one needs and does not have, one must conquer." That's not much different from Bush's view of Middle East oil. Having made war on Iraq based on lies and having subjugated that small country by force, Bush is pushing its cabinet to put through a giveaway law to profit the oil companies. And he's threatening oil-rich Iran with an attack.

As for the quality of life on their home fronts, Stalin and Hitler didn't mind sacrificing their people one bit to a war economy. Neither of them tolerated labor unions. In the Kremlin-controlled economy, real hourly wage rates in 1937 were 40% lower than in 1928 and by 1940 they were down another five to ten percent, Overy writes. There was food on the table for Hitler's workers but few consumer goods to buy. In 1932, consumer industries accounted for 40 percent of Germany's investment. By 1938, this had shrunk to only 17 percent, a trend similar to that in Russia under Stalin. Under Bush, the real wages of Americans have stagnated as well. Despite their fantastic productivity, U.S. workers are earning less today in real dollars than five years ago. And restrictive laws make union organizing tougher than ever.

As ever more Americans lose their jobs and homes, favored Pentagon contractors reap record profits, not necessarily from operating on free market principles. As the Center for Public Integrity noted, only one of the top 10 defense contractors "won a majority of its contracts through full and open competition. All the rest collected most of their contract dollars through sole source contracts or other no-bid procedures." CPI identified Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, General Electric, Carlyle Group, and Newport News.

One might think in these hard times -- when the price of a gallon of gas has doubled in good part because of the Iraq war -- the White House might ask this supine Congress for a windfall profits tax on the oil majors. With two former oil executives holding the two top jobs, though, that's not likely to happen, any more than the Iraqi people will ever see the profits from their oil resource as long as George Bush is president.

The bottom line is that the people both of Iraq and America are suffering from a needless war to profit USA's military-industrial complex. Recall that Thomas Jefferson opposed a standing navy because he had observed the way the Royal Navy pushed Great Britain to wage wars. If you don't remember that bit of history, it's safe to say President Bush doesn't, either.
_______
Bush Military Spending Recalls Stalin and Hitler | The Smirking Chimp

[BillCosby]

The Friends Committee on National Legislation, of Washington, D.C. says that 44 cents out of every dollar in his proposed record 2009 budget will go for war, compared with 2.2 cents for social programs.

Will we soon hear: MY GAWD!!!!!! he is wasting 2.2 cents of every dollar.............

[babylonDon]

Turning over regulatory agencies, to the people who they are supposed to be regulating, continues to be a GREAT idea!

Way to go, F.A.A.!

[BillCosby]

lol....... THe mouse guarding the cheese factory........

[babylonDon]

Originally Posted by BillCosby

lol....... THe mouse guarding the cheese factory........

The pigs guarding the gravy.

[babylonDon]

THE CAVALRY ISN'T COMING
Tue Apr 15, 7:57 PM ET

Ted Rall

High Unemployment and High Inflation Make This Recession Different

KANSAS CITY--"Why is this recession different from almost all other recessions?" asked Herbert Barchoff. The economist, a former president of the Council of Economic Advisers, answered his own question: "This is not only the usual cyclical recession, but also a structural recession."

Barchoff's dark assessment appeared in a letter to the editor of The New York Times---in June 1992. Then, like now, Americans were suffering through a long, grinding recession following a boom (under Reagan) that had primarily benefited the wealthy. There were mass layoffs. The real estate market had collapsed. Foreclosures were rampant.

George H.W. Bush, who had expected to coast to reelection on the strength of his near 90 percent post-Gulf War approval ratings, projected a Herbert Hoover-like resolve to not lift a finger to alleviate the misery. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates, but it didn't help. Six months later, angry voters fired an out-of-touch president who seemed unwilling to fix an economy he didn't think was broken in favor of a guy who claimed to feel our pain.

Barchoff, it would turn out, was too pessimistic. "To reverse the excesses of the 1980's," he wrote, "restructuring has been going on in massive proportions at every level. It is a rare day that newspapers do not report layoffs, often in the thousands in the industrial sector." What Barchoff didn't know--few people did--was that the U.S. was about to begin the longest, broadest and biggest period of economic expansion experienced by any civilization in human history.

Downsizing continued in traditional sectors like manufacturing and newspapers. Even during the Clinton boom, millions of people were ruined, forced to declare bankruptcy. Midwestern cities were reduced to rusted-out shells. But none of that mattered to Wall Street. The Internet revolution prompted so much capital investment, and generated so many new jobs--freshly minted college grads thought it perfectly normal to earn $85,000 moving around lines of HTML--that otherwise sane people began talking about a "new paradigm" in which "the old rules no longer apply."

In other respects, however, Barchoff was prescient. "[The then-new European Community] will substantially hurt our ability to be competitive," he correctly predicted. "The drop in interest rates is no solution. During the Great Depression the prime rate went to one percent, with no cure. When you are out of work or afraid of losing your job, you do not take on debt. Nor will entrepreneurs borrow even very cheap money unless there is a market."

The Bush Sr. recession was a grim affair. When I graduated from Columbia in 1991, the university canceled its annual jobs fair due to employers' lack of interest. But it was a picnic compared to what we're facing now. Bush Jr. could finally realize Barchoff's nightmare of a structural recession--the kind of no-way-out shock experienced by Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Normal" cyclical recessions feature increased unemployment, which puts downward pressure on prices. You rarely see high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. Conservative economists point to rising inflation during the late 1970s as an exception, but that wasn't even a downturn, much less a recession. Inflation was high but unemployment was low. Anyway, the inflation didn't hurt workers; during the Carter years mean wages rose faster than inflation. The opposite is true now. Real income is falling.

The economy has bled 3.1 million jobs since George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, the worst record since the Depression. The official unemployment rate, constantly re-jiggered to make the economy appear more robust, has risen to 5.1 percent. The long-term unemployment rate, which includes people who have had such bad luck looking for work that they've given up entirely, has doubled, to over 13 percent.

Meanwhile, inflation is approaching seven percent. Again, that's the official inflation rate. Your mileage as an average American--who spends a third of your pay on housing and more and more on gas--will vary. But let's not dwell on the irony of $4-a-gallon gas resulting from a war fought to steal oil.

But wait. There's even more bad news.

Two-thirds of economic activity is generated by consumer spending. Most people are broke. So much for that two-thirds. "In 2000," reports David Leonhardt in The Times, "at the end of the last economic expansion, the median family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau's inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less--about $60,500."

This, says, Leonhardt, is a big deal. "This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records." RBC Capital Markets reports that consumer confidence has fallen below 30 percent, an all-time record low. T.J. Marta, a fixed-income strategist at RBC, said: "What confidence? There is no confidence. It's like 1929."

If Barchoff had picked up a copy of the San Jose Mercury-News in 1992, he would have read about the birth of the Web revolution, then touted as the "information superhighway." But there's nothing like that coming down the pike today. To paraphrase the ever-quotable Donald Rumsfeld, we're going to have to make do with the economy we have, not the one we wish we had.

Liberal economists like Paul Krugman suggest a rerun of the 1930s, when FDR's New Deal employed millions to build new infrastructure like dams and bridges. But none of the three remaining presidential contenders is likely to undertake such a thing. "The worst-case scenario" about the 1991 war against Iraq, Barchoff said in 1992, would have been if it had lasted two years and cost an extra $200 billion. Iraq War II, now in its sixth year, is currently pegged at an estimated $3 trillion. Republican John McCain is committed to pouring more trillions into Iraq War II until victory is achieved, i.e., forever. As Democrats wary of being tarnished with the label of "big spender," both Obama and Clinton will likely place fiscal discipline ahead of expansive new government programs.

There is no short-term fix. In the long term, we must put more money into more people's pockets. That means higher wages and lower taxes for the poor and middle class. Some of what is needed is easy to see: a more progressive tax code, repealing laws that allow employers to harass and fire those who try to organize unions, nationalizing industries run by vampire capitalists--health insurers, private hospitals, colleges and universities. Banks encourage predatory lending while stifling saving. They ought to be re-regulated. What madness permits them to charge 30 percent on credit cards while paying one percent on passbook savings accounts?

More--much more--is necessary to prevent the wholesale collapse of the U.S. economic system. A maximum wage should be imposed--the highest paid American should earn no more than ten times the lowest paid. I know, I know--none of this will happen. There will be nothing but Band-Aids and lazy rhetoric as we plummet into the abyss. It cannot be otherwise, for our politics are ossified, the media is corporatized, and we the people are dull and apathetic.


Comment-When will we admit that, bush and friends have looted our economy, and shipped it to offshore banks.

13% of the workforce. 3.1 million jobs. For the first time in American history, not only real wages, but actual median income is dropping.

Do you feel safer?

[Kanadesaga]

4050


35 this month so far.


$500,000,000 + ($2000 a second)