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To: saveslivesbyday who wrote (289885)	11/8/2010 11:05:34 AM
From: Pogeu Mahone	Respond to of 306849

Demagogy wins the day in America. That or dancing with the stars.

To: saveslivesbyday who wrote (289885)	11/8/2010 11:48:29 AM
From: koan	Respond to of 306849

Great read.

To: saveslivesbyday who wrote (289885)	11/8/2010 11:59:26 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

Excellent piece! The crux of the biscuit: "The sequence of events is not debatable: 1) In 2001 Republicans inherited Clinton's hard-earned "balanced budget." 2) They immediately moved to dismantle it by generating a trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich. No more balance in the budget. 3) The GOP then added in a war against the threat of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" that did not exist because the "evidence" concocted by Dick Cheney was fraudulent. Another trillion more or less. 4) En route, they tossed in a prescription drug benefit that added more trillions, conceivably forever -- or until we get the public option, whichever comes first. 5) An additional inheritance from Clinton was the culmination of the relentless conservative-championed campaign for "financial deregulation" sanctioned by Alan Greenspan, the old Fed chairman, and buttressed by the Milton Friedman-inspired balderdash trumpeting the emergence of a "rational market." (For reasons that have always escaped me, the latter piece of puffery found a home in the American economics profession.) 6) As a sendoff for his final days, Bush's Secretary of Treasury and his Federal Reserve Chairman found themselves saddled with the inevitable post-regulation financial crisis that (inconveniently enough) could no longer be postponed until after the 2008 election. The $800 billion or so embedded in the Toxic Assets Relief Program was the result. The entire country is now experiencing the GOP's nationwide cover-up in the form of a suffocating blanket of television commercials that warps recent history along the following trajectory of sequential deceptions: 1) Obama promised jobs but thanks to his stimulus program and all his new taxes, unemployment has hit record levels. 2) Your congressman has voted consistently with Nancy Pelosi to raise the debt ceiling that enables this mammoth debt at the very time we need jobs. 3) We therefore must end wasteful spending and save America. Repeat and repeat and repeat in the rhythms achieved by the most expensive off-year political campaign ever. This is the hopeless politics of Herbert Hoover. It is just as hopeless as economic prescription because simply enough, it is a promise to do nothing. But it is also a new form of internal American political propaganda, anonymous in origin, corporate-financed, and delivered with blanketing determination to every corner of the nation. In size and in substance it is a campaign of deception that is without comparison since the creation of the republic. It is a direct result of the most radical single judicial decision in American history, the Supreme Court's Citizens United offering some 10 months ago in the 5 to 4 vote of the Roberts Court. Long-term, it probably dooms the Republican Party by yoking the GOP to a permanent defense of financial deregulation and the liberation of central banks from a connecting relationship to the surrounding national economy. It says goodbye to the unemployed millions. It says goodbye to "we're in this thing together."