America Stops Laughing to Correct Apoplectic Republican Comic, Rush Limbaugh

Alternet has a plethora of interesting articles and often more interesting and informative comments. This link is to a comment thread to a short article about the right wing propagandist Rush Limbaugh, who is no repecter of the truth or even of facts. A comment by passnthru2 noted:

1. The richest 1 percent has 43 percent of the nation’s wealth—6 times that of the bottom 80 percent, which has just 7 percent
2. the richest 5 percent has 72 percent of the nation’s wealth—10 times that of the bottom 80 percent
3. the top 20 percent has 93 percent of the nation’s wealth—23 times that of the bottom 80 percent
4. the top 50 percent has 97.5 percent of the nation’s wealth—39 times that of the bottom 50 percent which has 2.5 percent

44 percent of Americans couldn’t get $2000 together if their lives depended on it, while the richest 400 families:

1. have $1.4 trillion, and yet,
2. pay under 14% income tax

These rich people and the big corporations they own are sitting on piles of cash, yet they refuse to pay decent wages, and do everything in their power to lower the workers wages, for example using professional bigots like Rush Limbaugh whose splenetic rants impress a substantial section of the redneck population. It explains why there is a recession, and illustrates the huge fault in capitalism.

The rich always want more, and have to drive up profits to get more. They can do it by charging more and by paying their workers proportionally or absolutely less. They can even move their businesses abroad and pay the domestic worker nothing at all! But when people have less to spend whether it is absolutely less through wage cuts or relatively less by price inflation, they cannot afford to buy as much as they could previously. The retail trade goes into recession, and manufacturing businesses follow.

RustyCannon observed that if they were to pay people better, retail and therefore industry would be stimulated. Poor workers necessarily spend what they receive in earnings. They do not earn enough to save it. So the economy would be stimulated if the rich would just realize that they are starving the economy of liquidity by their greed. If the rich will not do it then the government must. President Carter created jobs, then Reagan came in, cut taxes for the rich, and drove unemployment through the roof.

The theory was “trickle down”. Give the rich more tax breaks and less regulations and they will spend more readily, employing people to expand their businesses. It doesn’t work. Republican President, George W Bush did not create as many jobs in the two terms of his presidency as did Carter in the single term he had. The rich just begin to expect more tax breaks to accumulate more risk free wealth—it is easier than taking the risks of trading. 30 years of this has just lead to manufacturers closing factories and destroying lives at home to move maufacture abroad to low labor cost countries. 50,000 manufacturing companies went in the Bush administration alone.

The large and enterprising middle class that was the economic engine of the USA is being impoverished by the stranglehold the rich have on the nation’s ready money—the top 400 wealthiest own more than the bottom 150 million. The economy is starved of demand. Middle class wages have been flat for 3 decades, yet the cost of living has continued to climb. Two income homes are now needed just to get by. The middle class no longer has as much disposable income, and what it has is falling, leaving its demand for products and services lower, with knock-ons to other small businesses dependent on them.

When people, encouraged by the sleepwalking bankers, began using the equity in their homes, they created a false demand bubble, and a false sense of prosperity. Disastrous greed among bankers who thought our money was theirs, led them to gamble with those unsound derivatives. Trading them backwards and forwards each day yielded immense bionuses for doing nothing in the least bit useful. That bubble burst, leaving us in the mess we are in, yet with no will to regulate the banksters and the rentiers, and sustained “head in the sand” insanity among Republicans determined to tie down Obama, and bring him down, if at all possible.

Further cuts as demanded by the Republicans can only make the situation worse, and that is the fault of the Republicans themselves who ought to have accummulated in the good years to spend in the bleak ones. They spent through the good years and now, when spending is the only way out of depression, they want to cut. Strong financial regulation and a New Deal like FDR’s will be necessary to reinvigorate the economy—measures that Republican bigots like Limbaugh call socialism for the sake of their indoctrinated disciples.

US Outrage at Lying Campaign

Democrats, and even some Republicans, are outraged that the GOP is running a campaign to undermine the Obama White House by alleging intimidation. Republican Steve Landes is reported to have compared the White House to “the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany”. Landes said:

I’m a student of history, and the Soviets and Nazis are the most egregious examples of those who used those tactics. I’m a history buff and I use the most relevant and strongest example of what people do.

He forgot Republican Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” and Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s “Enemies From Within”. Even Republicans have been shocked.

It seems the only basis for the Republican campaign is that Macon Carter, the White House director of new media, posted a blog last month (4 August) on the White House Web site asking people to e-mail the White House to report Republican lies about health-care reform:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there… These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Plainly the aim here is to be able to refute the falsehoods being spread by the Republicans, yet the implication is that the White House is acting like Senator McCarthy did. He was a Republican! In fact, when Bush twice fiddled his way into Office, the White House kept names, and required oaths of loyalty to Bush’s neoconservativism. Landes offers no proof that the current President is doing the same thing. All he offers is an emotionally loaded allegation.

The internet response is that Republicans cannot stand the idea of a black president, and have to invent nazi or communist plots to explain their worst fears, and the GOP is now a laughing stock of lunatics and freaks. Honest and open political discourse is dead, killed off to feed Republican prejudice. Lacking any ideas themselves, they resort to lies and uncivil behavior to try to block the properly and fairly elected Democratic President, and his Administration’s program—the reason he was elected.

They say “No” to it all and call Democrats scary names, hoping to prevent the change Obama was elected to bring on. When the president wants to talk to school kids—as Bush and Reagan did without anyone objecting—about the value of education, for Republicans, he is indoctrinating them with communism. When Obama wants to provide health care to all Americans, for Republicans, it is a socialist coup. If he was born in Hawaii, for Republicans, the birth certificate is fake, his parents anticipated his Presidency to put false announcements of his birth in the Hawaiian newspapers in 1961, and hundreds of people have kept quiet about the conspiracy. Even Republicans are outraged, and so they ought to be:

As a Republican, I am revolted over the lies of people like Landes, and I am doubly revolted over Landes’ remarks having Holocaust survivors among my friends. Republicans arrest people who wear antiwar t-shirts at Bush rallies, then bring guns to Obama rallies. They appeal to racist fears through demagogic propaganda. They continuously lie about nearly everything. They rant against immigrants, start gratuitous wars, subvert the constitution, steal elections. Then they call the Democrats Nazis. It is the Republicans are acting like Nazis. Any faith I had in Republicans is dying. The crazies and their favored demagogues have begun to rule through stupidity, fear, ignorance and subversion.

Others agree Republicans have gone crazy, asking, “How did the party of Lincoln and Ike ever become such a party of reactionary cowards?”. Susan Eisenhower said, President Eisenhower wouldn’t recognize the Republican party. Their leaders whip fearful people up into a frenzy by telling lies and half truths. Fear is the central policy of the new republicans. Out of the fear, they have created a group of people who want to shoot first and ask questions later. They have no men or women of substance to be their statesmen, only demagogues, Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity. Others ask:

• Where were these people when Bush confiscated more than 10,000,000 phone records of American citizens without a warrant?
• Where were these people when Bush’s FBI harvested financial records, medical records and emails of more than one million people, of which only a few hundred were being investigated for anything?
• Where were these people when Bush decided he could detain ANYONE, citizen or not, for any reason or no reason, never file charges, never provide any evidence whatsoever, and never let them go?

What has Obama done that comes anywhere near those assaults on the Constitution? Nothing! They want a dog eat dog society of “every man for himself. Democrats will fare better than those folks because we believe in taking care of our own and we believe in paying for it.”

Obama will need support, if he is to succeed in changing America. It is nice to see he is getting some. The outrage being shown here, if it bears longer term fruit, could help the world get its faith back in an America that sunk lower and lower over the last 25 years, through Republican regimes and even Clinton’s, politically castrated as it was—if the President personally proved otherwise, at least to Monica!—by phony Republican morality and its power in the Senate.