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2/3/2001

Original text and editing by:
A G Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
"A good slave works for food alone."

Week two:

Economy:
1/31/01 George announces a tax cut for charitable donations. How much will this affect you? But it will assuage the national conscience. The White House press release this morning hailed it as a demonstration of George's compassion. George is very generous to his wealthy friends, with our money... before or after he steals it from us.

If everyone gets the same percentage of tax cut the bottom 40% get nothing at all. Guess who gets 80% of the 1.3+ trillion dollars over ten years? If we spread it out equally to 120 million adult consumers (whether or not they can get enough work to pay taxes) it is $10,833.33 each. Over ten years that is about 50 cents per hour for forty hour weeks. But they don't plan to give most of us even that much. Is this how they propose to build up demand and forstall a recesssion?

1/31/01 But Alan has lowered the prime to 5.5%. Where does the FED get the money they loan to the banks? Do we go in debt for it... so it can loaned to us at a profit? Is this method of bolstering demand for the sake of corporate profit better than raising wages and creating good jobs.

LBJ cut taxes, raised wages, eliminated unemployment, reduced debt and created an economy so strong it took Nixon's policies and the war in Vietnam a full eight years to destroy it. Nixon was long gone before his swindle came to fruition. Let's not let George's fuzzy peach of a plan ripen.

An ongoing problem for the working poor is prisoners and illegal alien labor employed below minimum wage. I don't mind the competition from immigrants as long as they adhere to the standards instead of being exploited to get employers around them. But it galls me to listen to Bushshit about our great economic system when its anybody's guess how many homeless have dropped off the charts (and probably died within 3-5 years), while cheap prison and illegal laborers are made to compete unfairly for the miserable jobs available. (Remember, Reagan changed the way we count the unemployed. 4% under LBJ was a lot smaller percentage of real people without jobs than is 4% today. Sound like an oxymoron? Check it out. It's newspeak statistics!).

Employers always want to minimize wages. This is good for profits and therefore Wall Street does well. But low wages ultimately decrease demand causing cut backs in production which cause lay offs which decrease demand. For at least twenty years the response has been to cut taxes (which puts little additional money at the disposal of 40 to 60% of employees) or lower interest rates thus increasing non-government debt. The only real beneficiaries are Wall Street financiers and other parasites born of the abstraction of wealth. Even economists can't be so blind as to believe the ability of the economy to support debt is infinite. Look at the changes in the distribution of wealth over the past twenty years.
charts
http://www.unrisd.org/engindex/publ/list/dp/dp37/dp37-06.htm">list

The money needs to come back down from the top. But the only way they are willing do that is to loan it to us; at a profit. An idiot could see this can't work. It will just exascerbate the problem. Are conservatives in denial of reality?

When JFK/LBJ strengthened unions by holding down prices as wages on the bottom end and in the middle increased, we spent money that we didn't have to borrow. The increased demand for consumer goods caused production to grow and industry profits (and even the Wall Street parasites) benefited. So tell the fools to get their heads back in view and get with the program before their shortsighted greed and rationalization providing principles get us into a hole from which we can't dig out.


Law and order:
If it hadn't been Ashcroft it would have been some other conservative. Flawed philosophies produce flawed government. At least we know who to watch in one department. Come to think of it we know who to watch in every department of the Bush administration. Whoever he chooses deserves scrutiny.

John is a law and order man. Apparently two million, 1/4 for non-violent drug crimes, are not enough slave laborers to statisfy conservative economists. Prisoners cost $30,000/year to house, cloth, feed, guard and doctor. If we gave a fourth of them $10,000/year plus $5,000 worth of [wholesale] drugs, we could save $15 billion per year and put the dealers out of business. This last would work better if we spent the 15G on 500,000 additional addicts who are now on the streets.


Energy:
"It's a Western States issue" 1/31/01. George refuses to be accountable for the conservative deregulatory feeding frenzy that has created the "California" power crisis. The refusal to take responsibility for the real problems brought about by the policies of Nixon, Reagan and Bush I is typical of the right wing. They have words for everything but competent action is reserved for fortifiing their own positions of interest.

Bush's response to California's energy crisis is: "it's their own fault". George is great at fixing the blame. Can he fix real problems? Cheney said on Meet the Press 1/28 the problem is: "deregulation was not" thorough enough. Presumably that means the problem should be fixed by multiplying the price six-fold to the consumers. 1.3 trillion dollars would buy enough independent solar power installations to provide free power for 120 million families. The $10,000 dollars required up front for good solar electric system for a single family dwelling is probably less than you would pay for twenty years of electric bills at the OLD prices. We could put it to a vote but votes don't count with Bush.


Foreign Policy:
Seems to have dropped below radar this week. But when it reappears it will be as a means to funnel money into the hands of defense contractors large and small. I've worked for defense contractors at $50,000+ per annum. Even "salaried" employees are paid by the hour because the contractor gets three times as much as the employee for each hour worked.

It's a turnkey operation for the owners of these money machines. The government supplies, building, furniture even pencils. We supply the money. The contractor supplies only resumes, references and an empty bank account to be filled at taxpayer expense. And the products do not increase real wealth.


Religion:
Bush II issued an executive order to allow public funds for community and religious social programs that off load the problem from government. Is our man of principle ducking responsibility by handing it to churches. Or is this his way of making sure only deserving people get help. In the application process for these funds, that his Executive Branch creates, will white supremacists in the guise of religion be eligible. What about Muslims?

Some Muslim nations are labeled terrorist. Do we weed out some American Islamic churches? Where do draw the line. Lines drift and usually (sorry Euclid but Albert won't mind) bend around to form a circle. Who will be placed outside the boundary of acceptable religious behavior? Will the remaining inner circle constitute the "establishment of religion".

We know how the suborned majority in the Supreme Court will react. This is the worst case scenario for justice.

The best case scenario is Just Us: public money will be funneled to George's friends and supporters for the administration of the "private" charitable programs. Regardless of conservative propaganda to the contrary, private administration of public money always costs more than government bureaucracy. There are limits to the size of government paychecks.

Let's not let George circumvent those limits in his distribution of the spoils of his victory [in the Supreme Court].


Social Security:
Are the scam plans quietly going forward while Bush declaims no desire to make an issue of Clinton's white house exit. Come to think of it the news has been full of backward looking, ironic Bushshit all week. What is their smoke screen trying to hide?


Editorial Column:

The Truth is powerful.
The one true God is the One who tells the Truth.
The one true religion hasn't been invented yet.
The real truth is, I doubt we'll ever cultivate
the lower forty. Though, all it really needs is leveling.

The American pie is divided such that 59% of the people have 4.7% (the lower 2/3 of them have 0.2%) of the goods and money, while 5% of the people control 59.4% of our wealth.
charts
list

Why won't the FED's rate reduction work to keep demand up? (Market expansion is required for a pyramidical economy to continue to function.) It's been working for thirty years. That's exactly the problem. The middle class is saturated with debt. The loans [presumably from the 5% at the top] must go to the 36% of people in the middle. That group controls 35.9% of goods and money. The 59% don't have enough credit to borrow us out of the feared recession and they don't make enough to pay income tax. A tax cut won't put the money where it needs to go.

The almost religious zealousness that conservatives bring to the discussion of the wages paid to employees eschews the obvious solution to the demand problem. We must get the money from the top to the bottom. Sharp increases in wages are required. Only greed and selfishness prevents us from accepting this truth.

Middle class pretentiousness and wanna-be-ism are the impediment to overcoming our denial. The 5% are supported by the 36% because they are the managers and overseers created by the elite to do so.

But fear not, greed is secure. The 40% who own 0.2% won't be seeing this email. If they could afford computers or even decent educations, the high tech boom might more easily continue. I won't hold my breath until they get a reasonable wage.

-For the American Just Us system, Ashcroft is the ideal, the standard choice. But he might dull the patina of civility on the surface of a chaos of selfishness and greed, the real principles of conservatism.

2/2/2001 Senator Hatch said to the detractors of John Ashcroft, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Does that mean that unless one is perfect one may not judge that the acts of another are harmful, ie. sins, even if they affect the imperfect one.

Ashcrofts act's may affect me but it is unlikely that mine will affect John. The scale of the potential harm is also a factor. We have more right to judge John, even though we're imperfect, than he has to judge us. And that goes for George and all the Dick's in the White House too. I do hesitate to judge anyone as immoral. But I know what I like. And I'll be the judge of the value of anything or anyone to me.

-George, I know you have delegated the Pardons and White House looting to staff, but presumably you are in charge. Let's put Clinton behind us. We want a clear view of your preparations to sack the treasury for your masters. Don't worry, our expectations are no more or less... for a political demimonde.



Remember, no amount of opprobrium heaped on Clinton will legitimize the Bush presidency. We will hold George II accountable for looting the treasury and starving the productive sector of the economy, to make his friends richer.

Bush is here and now. What he does has a more immediate and profound effect on our lives than any irrelevant issue or past deeds of scoundrels he can dream up or exaggerate to distract us. We can't afford to be diverted from the truth by allowing our emotions to be played.

Maybe you've known the truth all along but you don't believe there's much hope. HOPE! The Truth is powerful. Spread the Truth!

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Greg Kaiser