In Progress and Poverty, Henry George tells us that to his mind, "Every civilization that has been overwhelmed by barbarians has really perished from internal decay". Some of us understand that the free market/neoconservatives/neoliberals/conservatives and their political flagship, the Republicans, are the barbarians. Throughout US history, all can also be identified as the quintessential "gold-diggers," bringing near extinction to Native Americans, widespread environmental devastation, serfdom to women and Africans, and a gross addiction to "capital accumulation" and political power. Today, there are four tiers of the right-wing "good old boys" political structure financed directly by the American taxpayer: the military, the intelligence community, the criminal justice system, the military industrial complex, and Republican politics. Many are embedded in the nation's civil service with the goal of eliminating all elements of liberal politics and programs. Each tier shares personnel who migrate from one to the other for employment and maintenance. They have recently taken over government because they needed to control legislation that prevented them from having total access to the nation's wealth. The tragedy is not just that they HAVE used our monies to do this. Their rhetoric regarding Washington is a con used to anaesthesize the American people, but since Ronnie, all they have done is live the highlife on the taxpayer. The only sucker in this are the constituencies that make up their base who continue to believe in faith, while their leaders have been stealing their kids heritage for 30 years now. But the real tragedy is that these political scam artists have received almost unbiased support from many Democrats! John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-born economist, has characterized the late 20th century as one dominated by the notion that the poor had too much wealth and the rich too little. (see Interviews With John Kenneth Galbraith by Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield, et al, 2004). The significant economic and governance crises in the United States caused by internal contradictions, neoconservative politics, and globalization of the late 20th century and the current one has been managed in a debate climate irrationally shaped by economists and other leading neoconservatives who have characterized redistributive policies and social insurance programs as either causes of those crises or as serious obstacles to their solution. Unfortunately, the American electorate was seduced by these phonies. Consequently, the Republican attack on the American social safety network has reached a crisis. While the Republicans and their lobbyists are depleting the national treasury for war and the rich, they are simultaneously dismantling the New Deal. IMO, we are now at a juncture in the American Republic that can certainly be characterized as the "worst of times, and the best of times." The US is being led to hell in a handbasket on the road to martial law by a failed entrepreneur and a war-leadership-dodger, the budget deficit has ballooned to over $8 trillion by smoke and mirrors that we know as cronyism, war and corruption, the federal judiciary is being stacked with ideological jurists (now 85% and counting), labor unions are schisming at a time they should be unifying and railing against the "ownership society" -- an anachronism for "wage slavery" and working poor, and our economy and industrial base has been sold to offshore third parties as unemployment and corporate closings continue to rise. And, that's the good news. Even when the Republicans controlled Congress, they could not have pushed through its neoliberal agenda without support from Democrats. Last week, they did it again. The legislation authorizing the so-called financial recovery act was passed without many lawmakers really understanding if it would do anything to resolve any of the problems the public was told the bill was designed to address. T-Bone Pickens is wrong. The largest transfer of wealth Americans are using to purchase foreign oil. No, the largest transfer of wealth has been that from taxpayers to the political and economic elite in this country to which T-Bone belongs. It began with the RTC in the late 1980's and continues to this day. These robberies were premeditated, an ideological swindle backed by legislation to make it work, beginning with the RTC and followed by the Financial Services Modernization Act in 1992 under Bill Clinton's watch and the Commodities Modernization Act under Bush, all part of a premeditated class war on regular people in this country and around the world. Why the need for legislation which for all its emphasis on "modernization" represented nothing but a return to the status quo before WWII? Because some liberals lawmakers with historical amnesia, like Bill Clinton, needed to be reeled in with pretty language. The Republicans, since Reagan and fully endorsed by the Bush administration, were intent on breaking the system and chose the banks for the same reason that John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber of an earlier age, did, because that's where the money is or was. When no more money existed in the banks for the capitalist class to accumulate more capital, well they turn to your erstwhile National Treasury, or at least to the nation's credit line within the international community, because all that money is being borrowed to detail with the so-called "crisis." However, as we will see, it's a continuation of a ponzi scheme. I hoped that Americans notice that the Republicans overwhelmingly sat on the sidelines during the vote on this recent financial services crisis. Their goal is to paint the Democrats as the problem instead of their own greed and treasonous national behavior. Only Dennis Kucinich appears to have any patriotism at all on Capitol Hill. The US public is clueless as 17% still can't make up their mind about who to support for president and another 60% want to separate the "War on Terrorism" from the issues of the economy. Wake those people up, war and economics are siamese twins of the rightwing agenda. At least the rightwing know what they want. The rest of the country has ongoing dementia, just as debilitating as their parents.When will it end? In the United States, it will end only when the electorate fully understands that real people caused this conspiracy and those people must be incriminated and duly punished. Henry George observed that "civilization has begun to wane when, in proportion to population, we must build more and more prisons, more and more almshouses, more and more insane asylums. It is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top."
The American people are dying on the bottom and there are no solutions on the horizon from the top. In fact, the Bush administration goal in this latest crisis is to put the country deeper into debt so as to ensure that an Obama presidency will be stalled by budgetary issues and thereby be unable to jumpstart the national economy. Over the next 30 days, watch the stock market as Europeans continue to take their money out of the U.S. economy. That's the news we are not hearing from the American media. All they report are the falling numbers, not understanding their meaning. And, this week, the neoliberals in the Bush administration and on Wall Street have started the process of bringing down the entire international monetary system with the $700 billion in hand. Watch and learn. Now a man who helped send Goldman Sachs into bankruptcy is appointed as a savior for the American financial crisis. Will former Goldman Sachs employees be the next bankers getting their Spa on? For the rest of us, the asylums can't be far behind?
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