Blog Archives
Tax-cut game may take on a pre-election playoff…
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For our Tea Bagger friends…
Haven’t we been Taxed Enough Already? A musical number by emma’s revolution:
From their web site:
emma’s revolution is the duo of award-winning, activist musicians, Pat Humphries & Sandy O, who write songs that become traditions. Their song, “If I Give Your Name” won Grand Prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and their music has been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and Pacifica’s “Democracy Now!”. “Peace, Salaam, Shalom” is sung around the world and has been called the “anthem of the anti-war movement.” “Keep On Moving Forward” opened the NGO Forum at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, becoming the unofficial theme of the Conference.
James Kwak wrote a great article, Budget Sense And Nonsense, in the Huffington Post.
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Ben Hoffman put this on the Drudge Retort this evening:
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I agree with the NY Times…
… in the Editorial this morning titled Tax Them Both. Tax the Banks to recover the large fees put into the bailout and “also impose a windfall tax on the huge bonuses that bailed-out bankers plan to pay themselves over the next few weeks.”
This sums it up for me:
Let’s be clear, the crisis spawned by banks’ recklessness has cost the country a lot more than $120 billion. Any calculation must also include the deepest recession since the 1930s and the loss of more than seven million jobs. What profits banks have made since then have not come from lending to credit-strapped businesses. They are trading profits made possible by trillions of dollars in cheap financing from the Federal Reserve.
The crisis occurred because banks that had grown too big to fail came too close to failure — driven by a reckless pursuit of risk and profit. Credit froze, and the government was forced to put enormous public resources at their disposal to keep them afloat.
Congress should not let these jokers make wild profits on the suffering they brought on to average Americans. It should be on the side of the vast majority of citizens who are hurting very badly from actions the Big Banks took and, as it seems, are starting to take again.
After watching Ben Nelson push the Anti-Woman Amendment on his Colleagues…
… this afternoon, I got an even bigger kick out of the piece our friend Tengrain put on Mock Paper Scissors. Take a look HERE:
There’s People Dumber Than Dirt… and the there’s Ben Nelson.
Drop over and read it (and tell Tengrain that btchakir sent you.)
And Speaking of Civil Wars…
Thinking this morning (see prvious post) of our insertion into Afghanistan which is in the midst of what can be seen as a Civil War, I started to ponder the “Intellectual Civil War” we are currently experiencing right here at home. While it is not the bombing, kidnapping, house-to-house shooting kind of Civil War, ours has elements which spell out an equally destabilized future for those of us who grew up in the Post WWII Middle-Class environment.
Starting about thirty years ago, the Conservative Right set out to weaken and then, most recently, to destroy or at the least enslave the Middle-Class to be the exclusive tax-supplying funding source of an Upper-Class dominated economy. The fact that it was stretched out over three decades (a slow, slow war) made it almost invisible to the majority of Americans who were convinced that there was something called a “trickle-down” advantage to stopping the taxation of the top 2% or so of the economic population. Then, when it was too late to really make a change without unattached politicians who were not paid off by the corporate creations of that top 2%, we discovered ourselves in a world where a ratio of one Dennis Kucinich was put up against 50 or so “identified-as-liberals”… or, as I would like to call it, the “false democracy.”
This “Intellectual Civil War” has battles, too, only they have taken on names like “Tea Parties” and have been controlled by outside players acting as puppeteers, and we have done little to cut the strings. Those of us in the American 98% that are being economically destroyed, robbed of affordable health care, impoverished by bankruptcies of government supported financial institutions and forced to see possibilities of our world turning around for the better dashed against the whining wrinkles of Joe Lieberman… we are left not knowing who to turn to, who we can actually believe is acting in our interests.
Look… I want to believe that Nancy Pelosi is going to do something to really get the Insurance Companies disabled when it comes to health care. I want to believe that Obama will see what’s going on in the Middle East and issue the order for everyone to come home… now… and forget the crap about how many years it will take to get our weapons and ships and other facilities dismantled… bring the armies home NOW, have them pull out in the middle of the night on Wednesday (and if Karzai’s government complains, tell them you’ll be back IF they really have a fair election and IF they handle their own military and police actions… frankly, we’ll never have to go back.) I want to believe that Republican leaders like John Boehner will actually call up Pelosi this morning and say “we’re ready to help and compromise for the good of the country… what do you want us to do?” I want to believe that the sun will shine and the sky will be blue and everything will get better (and employment opportunities will turn up so I can be at work instead of sitting here at the computer bitching about everything)… I want to believe it. I’m just not able to given current conditions.
I want to see an end to our Intellectual Civil War. I want to see the opposing generals like Dick Armey and Sarah Palin and Michael Steele decide that they have enough and can ride off into the sunset.
Fat chance.
Quote of the Day
I’m going to avoid anything about the Nobel Prize in this segment today… there’s going to be a lot more talking about it (Obama, as I write this, is getting ready to speak live-on-TV). Instead, I was interested in this:
“The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.”
– Paul Krugman in a column entitled The Uneducated American
Past 20 years… hmmm… I guess he means starting with Reagan where everything else in our great state dissolution started.
It Looks Like People A.) Want a Public Option in Healthcare and B.) Are Willing to Pay More For It.
The NY Times /CBS News Health Care Poll that came out yesterday should make it pretty clear to Congress that the American Public wants Real Health Care Reform, and not the Insurance Industry controlled farce that some of the leading Democrats (and virtually all the Republicans) are in favor of.
Partly because they know what side of the bread is buttered for them by corporate money in their election funds… partly because they are afraid to do something which radically changes the financial basis of health care and adds a real government involvement in it.
Let’s start by taking a look at the poll results:
It is the changes from 2007 to the present which should stand out to those in Congress who are working on the legislation. It is clear that people WANT that public option… even though there are issues that have to be considered, but which certainly can be overcome – we’ve done it with the VA system. It is also clear that the issue of paying for it with taxes has become much more acceptable in the past two years. It’s also interesting how important providing health care to the uninsured is.
The big question here is whether the government will adhere to the will of the people, or just ignore it. The latter option is the one that is most likely to occur. Too bad. I’d certainly like to be surprised by a change.