Populist Daily

Politics, Culture and American Life

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Here Comes the Election Year Propaganda

January 27th, 2012 · Economics, Health Care, jobs, Labor, Politics, Populism, taxes

If you think you have been lied to before…you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. It’s an election year and therefore the amount and the degree of inaccuracy of Republican statements will increase, and already have increased, exponentially. Here are just a few examples.

Both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have blamed Barack Obama for the lack of response to the Bush Recession. Even though a number of jobs have been created, slowly and steadily, as the months have worn on, it is too slow, according to Gingrich and Romney. And they are right. It is far too slow.

But the idea that it is President Obama’s fault is a lie. Here is the dramatic job loss at the end of the Bush Administration and the total devastation that was dumped onto our 44th President the day he entered office.

In the fall of 2008, the Stock Market, which had already dropped from over 14,000 in late 2007, fell to its lowest point ever, 6,599, in March of 2009, 2 months after President Obama had been sworn in to office.

A recession had begun in December of 2007 and continued growing worse in 2008. The economy lost an average of 137,000 jobs from January through August—over a million jobs and the unemployment rate had climbed to 6.5%. But the worst was yet to come.

In the last four months of 2008, another 1.9 million jobs were lost. Then, in January of 2009, another 779,000 people lost their jobs. The first quarter of 2009 saw an average job loss of 753,000 jobs per month, the largest percentage of jobs lost in any quarter since 1945. [Read more →]

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The Parable of the Thieves

January 22nd, 2012 · Health Care, Lobbying, Media, Politics, Populism, taxes, Wall Street

When reason fails, people fall back on superstition. The American society has long operated under the basic principle that hard work creates abundance and abundance may solve all our earthly ills. When that logic, which has always been one of our foundations, along with “fair play” and “brotherhood” among citizens…although a creaky stair-climb with many slips and falls on our way to the current level…no longer rings true and evidence overwhelms the ideals…we panic.

When we panic, often in our ignorance or our short sightedness at the facts of what is really happening, some of us…a sizeable number…fall back on old ways. Just as the pagans fell back on false idols and their original powerful symbols when learning the new symbols of the new myth, Christianity, so do we fall back on the idea of strong leaders and big corporations providing sustenance. That, of course, will never happen. It is the greatest myth of all—that the Corporation “cares.”

The Corporation does not care. The corporation…despite the decision of the Supreme Court or all the decisions of all the Supreme Courts…is not an animate being. The corporation is merely printed words on a printed page or small electronic dots or absence thereof in an electronic counting machine, which, when printed out, give the semblance of meaning. But there is no compassion anywhere in sight.

Our simplest minds do not ask where the larger currents of power are being directed. They do not ask where those large swaths of the collective power of determination and will are headed. They do not ask because they have been taught that big government is bad and that big corporations are good. [Read more →]

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Nationalize Natural Gas Production and Save America.

December 21st, 2011 · Capitalism, Economics, energy, jobs, Politics, Populism, The Budget

There is one simple and secure way to jump start the economy and sustain it over a decade. That one simple idea is to nationalize the natural gas industry. In fact, not only is it good in a positive way, but the nationalization of the production and distribution of natural gas will prevent a negative…the takeover of our last national resource by Right Wing billionaires.

Before you cry “Socialism” remember that we have a long history of government providing safe and secure utilities for the People. We have regulated utilities since the early 1800s in one way or another. And local utilities were owned by the public for generations until the disastrous Reagan-era mistake that said “private is better.”

Public ownership and regulation are standard in many utilities. We often hear people say that water is essential for life and so water must be made available for everyone. And so water is by and large a public utility. Government jumps in when the air we breathe begins to hurt us. So we have the EPA. Government gets involved in providing shelter by making mortgages available to people so that they can take root in a community and are not left to the whims of a landlord. And when we try to “privatize” it, it fails dramatically, as it did in 2008, resulting in the Great Bush Depression.

Natural gas itself has a long history of regulation. The industry began locally in a number of areas, but then it was piped or shipped across state lines. As a result, states lost control and the Supreme Court said that the states did not have the authority. In 1935, the Federal Trade Commision changed all that and in 1938, the government regulated prices on natural gas and gave the business of natural gas some structure.

And natural gas stayed very heavily regulated for 40 years. In 1978, the Natural Gas Policy Act, responding to natural gas shortages, put into place greater incentives for national gas production. A number of rules were issued by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) during the 1980s and in 1992 virtually all regulations on natural gas pipeline and natural gas sales organizations were removed. [Read more →]

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Grover Norquist: Lobbyist for the Rich

December 7th, 2011 · Lobbying, Politics, Populism, taxes, The Budget, wars and militarism

Grover Norquist is without question the kind of nerd that most working-class Democrats and Liberals like to attack. He comes from an affluent Republican family, grew up in the household of a corporate executive for Polaroid corporation, and has Harvard and Harvard Business School certifications indicating that he completed both required courses of study.

He began early to find his way in the Republican Party—even before college was interested in politics–and particularly in the world of the magical tax-cutters that made Reaganites so popular. He was president of the College Republicans. After college and business school, he worked for the Chamber of Commerce.

No one says that to be evil you must be stupid. On the contrary most successful criminals or despots, although we would like to think of them as evil and often mock them and proclaim their actions to be stupid…are quite bright. Such is Grover Norquist. He is not a true believer in tax cutting. He is an opportunist.

Grover isn’t really interested in fairness or lower taxes as a personal philosophy. It is merely a way for him to make a lot of money. Let me prove that to you logically. During the Bush administration, we had a tax cut that lowered the top rate from 39.6 to 35%, which resulted in a lot of money coming out of a balanced budget…thereby unbalancing it.

Simultaneously, Bush started two wars. First it was Afghanistan and then soon thereafter, Iraq. Then he cut the tax rates again, this time on capital gains and dividends from 20% to 15%. This threw the budget into huge imbalance, causing deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Yet the same Grover Norquist who wanted to cut taxes before, wanted to cut taxes again, even though it was the first time we failed to raise taxes, let alone cut taxes during a war. [Read more →]

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A Tariff Policy to Create Jobs

November 14th, 2011 · Capitalism, Corporations and Industry, Human Rights, jobs, Politics, Populism, taxes, The Budget

We need exports and imports. We need jobs. And we need more jobs than can be provided by exports. In other words,at a very minimum we need net exports. But we don’t have them. We have net imports.

Here’s the problem. In 1993, we signed into law the North Amreican Free Trade Agreement. It broke down tariff barriers between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.What has been the result? Pretty simple. Low wage countries sell their stuff here and American companies make low cost stuff there…and also sell it here!

Net exports to Mexico during the period since NAFTA began have dropped by more than $2 trillion. This means a loss to Mexico of more than 1.1 million American jobs since 1993. China is even worse. Since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, our import-export ratio with China has cost the United States about 3 million jobs.

So China and Mexico alone are responsible for the loss of over 4.1 million jobs. If those jobs were being done here in the United States, our current unemployment rate would be less than 7% even with all the job losses and the layoffs and the deliberate non-hiring by corporations to try to politicize unemployment for the 2012 election. [Read more →]

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Wake Up, Republicans, Before It Is Too Late!

November 10th, 2011 · Economics, Health Care, Politics, Populism, taxes

The recent elections have brought some emotional and some real political relief to a beleaguered Middle Class, but we need to point out a few things that MUST happen or our society will literally disintegrate. For so many years now, Republicans have been listening to a siren song of false promises and false accusations that they must stop now and reconsider.

If you are a Republican, you must ask yourself whether, without realizing it, you may have gone off the deep end. Republicans tend to see themselves as religious, traditional (whatever that means to each individual) and rational. But the people who have been pandering to Republican voters have been feeding them lies in such subtle ways, that many, if not most, Republican voters are persuaded that they have the facts, not the Democrats.

Here are just two of the many lies Republicans have been told. And here are some of the real facts that anyone can look up to get at the truth.

1. Republicans say that cutting taxes will increase tax revenues. The facts are that we have cut taxes at least four times under the Republicans and the government went from less than a trillion dollars in debt to more than $14 trillion in debt. About $8 trillion came under the eight years of the Bush Administration.

This whole idea is not only wrong, it is actually a fraud. You have a Republican government that spent $8 trillion more than it earned in tax revenues during the Bush-Cheney administration alone. It was a totally Republican government for most of that time, and certainly a Republican government when the huge tax cuts were approved and when the wars were started.

Cutting taxes on the rich does not create jobs, does not stimulate the economy and does not facilitate the growth of small business. The facts are so clear that you don’t really need any studies. Clinton balanced the budget the last four years of his Presidency. He created 22 million jobs when he actually raised taxes over the negative votes of every single Republican in the House or the Senate.

If you look it up on the Bureau of Labor Standards web site, (probably www.bls.gov) you will see that Bush, for all his spending and tax cutting, only added 1 million jobs to the economy. [Read more →]

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How Fred Upton and Whirlpool Devastated Arkansas and Michigan.

November 7th, 2011 · Capitalism, jobs, Labor, Lobbying, Politics, Populism

Large corporations are often so huge that it is difficult to get one’s head around their size and their influence. General Electric, for example, has 304, 000 employees world wide. Many of their divisions manufacture things overseas for sale to other countries.

Only about 133,000 employees are still employed here in the United States. Most of the employees here in the U.S. make pretty good money and many belong to unions. CEO Jeffrey Immelt has said that he will now bring jobs back to the United States but at the same time he said that he created several thousand jobs in Brazil.

In Fort Smith, Arkansas, Whirlpool corporation laid off about 1800 workers in mid-201 after other layoffs of up to about 5,000 workers over the last several years. Whirlpool is the largest appliance maker in the world. They encompass brand names like Kenmore, sold at Sears, Roebuck, Amana, Maytag, Jenn-Aire and many other brand names. They have approximately 71,000 employees of which only about 23,000 are located in the United States.

Headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan, just east of Chicago and north of Indianapolis, since 1911, their recent layoffs in Arkansas should not come as a surprise. Those jobs in Arkansas were once in Michigan. They were moved to Arkansas because people in Arkansas worked for less money than people did in Michigan. Why? Because an entire generation of lobbyists for industry had persuaded the average citizens that unions were bad for society. Labor unions stood up for their workers. So Whirlpool went where there are no labor unions but a lot of cheap labor.

So no one should be surprised about what Whirlpool did in Arkansas. But perhaps the numbers might be interesting. The average Whirlpool worker in Fort Smith, Arkansas was not getting rich or wealthy or even climbing into the middle class. They were making, as we understand it, $17 per hour, or $680 per week or $34,000 per year. That is about $14,000 less than the approximate average annual wage here in the U.S. [Read more →]

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Lies My Republican Candidates Told Me.

October 28th, 2011 · Culture, Politics, Populism, The Budget, Wall Street

The Republican candidates are out on the Old Washington Trail. It leads from Iowa to New Hampshire to the Carolinas, with stops in Nevada and other similarly insignificant places along the way.

The costumes are atrocious, the tricks are many and the treats are, well, few and far between. But the missatements of fact…well…they are better than on any April Fool’s Day in recent memory. The exaggerations are monumental and the lies are deliberate and enormous.

Take Michele Bachmann’s comment that “President Obama has the lowest job approval ratings of any President in modern times.” Well, perhaps if you are a Republican, a big lie is a good lie. The fact is that President Obama’s lowest ratings are higher than almost all prior Presidents’ lowest ratings and higher even than some of their medium ratings.

On Memorial Weekend, Michele Bachmann said that President Obama had caused grocery prices to go up by 29% since taking office. The fact is that grocery prices have not gone up 29%, although they have gone up by 3.6%, which, according to the BLS, was caused not by the President but by a variety of weather conditions affecting crops.

“Forty per cent of American Tax payers pay no taxes at all,” says Bachmann. Wrong. That lower income 40% that Bachmann seems to hate, pays payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes and very often state taxes. The reason that the lowest income earners pay no federal income taxes is two fold. First their incomes have actually gone down, so the lowest two quartiles in the country actually have less income than ever. And second, the Bush Tax Cuts lowered the rates on everyone, so to make taxes as low as they became for the top categories, the commensurate tax rates for lower categories had to be cut to practically nothing–or nothing at all. [Read more →]

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OCCUPY AMERICA!

October 26th, 2011 · Capitalism, Culture, jobs, Labor, Politics, Populism, taxes, Wall Street

The last big show of Populist sentiment in this country was when the people of Wisconsin stood up against an oppressive Governor and a neo-Fascist Republican legislature who wanted to dismantle the state government, give away tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks to wealthy business owners, and pit one average middle class family against another.

The Koch Brothers and their billionaire associates spent tens of millions of dollars on a campaign to take advantage of the fears of the Wisconsin people and the uncertainty of the depressed economy, caused by the neo-fascist Bush-Cheney-Rumfeld, GOP war party.

In order to replace the money borrowed from the people and the money stolen by Wall Street from the pension funds, Governor Walker of Wisconsin and his advisors on Wall Street decided to dismantle Wisconsin. They decided to reduce the firefighters and the teachers and police and the nurses of Wisconsin to the minimum wage slaves who work in Texas and Mississippi and the other confederate states.

The hicks of the Southern states let the racists among them control their politics. Now they have only low incomes and poor education to show for their support of the Republicans. Oh yes, they got to slap their neighbors on the back after the local NASCAR race and boast of how many Iraqis were killed today, not counting the 5,000 American soldiers who died for nothing. What did the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era prove? That hicks can be lied to and looted and that all the good-paying defense jobs are in California and Connecticut. [Read more →]

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Returning the Great American Middle Class

October 21st, 2011 · Politics, Populism

This is about returning government to the People. This is about returning the Middle Class to America.

If you read this and you are not a Republican, you will understand it immediately. When you do, you should send it to everyone you know and tell them to send it to everyone they know. Now they are probably not Republicans either. But they may be Independents. And they know some Republicans. Sooner or later it will reach an Independent or a Republican who is concerned about the way the county is going.

And which way is the country going? It’s pretty clear to most of us. It is going backwards. It is regressing–not back to the 50s, 60s and 70s–but all the way back to 1932. In fact, in many ways the country has already returned to the early 20th Century, the Gilded Age, the age of the Robber Barons. Most Americans, Democrats or Republicans, do not want a return to the 1930s and a return to an era before we had a thriving Middle Class.

Among the huge and powerful corporate forces there are unfortunately many with a sinister side. Oil corporations tell us that they want alternative energy but they work constantly against it. The careless and greedy among the pharmaceutical companies tell us how hard they work to create safe drugs, yet it takes years and millions of dollars and countless people’s lives when they sell products that are not ready or safe for the marketplace. Health insurance firms tell us that they are doing their best to provide insurance at reasonable costs. Yet we discover that fully 40% of their profits, and their CEO salaries that average $14 million a year tell us that this is not true.

And yet gas prices reach $4.00 a gallon. Fifty million Americans cannot even get health care. Miners die in accidents because safety costs too much in the coal business. All these outrages and still corporations come back to government for fewer regulations, to pollute the air and water, to create new financial speculations, and to allow the indiscriminate to neglect the safety of our foods or the integrity of our banks. [Read more →]

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The Economics of Robert Reich.

October 19th, 2011 · Capitalism, Economics, Education, jobs, Politics, Populism, taxes, The Budget

Many short men are taller than Robert Reich. But as they said about Ari Onassis (who wasn’t that short, Ms. Onassis was just a little taller) he was not so short when he stood on his wallet. When Dr. Reich stands on his intellect, he is about the same height as Bill Russell.

Do you really want to solve our economic problems? Do you want a job? Do you want it to last for 30 years, or your continued employment in some related field to last for 30 years? Do you want health care and the ability to retire on at least a modest income?

Then listen to Robert Reich. Because, if you want a society where you may get rich but if you don’t you will still be OK as long as you work hard, then he is the one person whose ideas will definitely make that happen. He is a brilliant economist but also a concerned fellow citizen.

1. On tax cuts. Dr. Reich says that tax cuts do not create jobs nor do they in themselves create an expansive economy. The benefits of tax cuts do not “trickle down” to the general population. The fact is that the rich get richer and the government’s tax revenues get smaller, and we end up with greater and greater government deficits. That eventually results in cuts to services used primarily by those who did not get big tax cuts. [Read more →]

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Jobs and the Current American Economic Disaster

October 13th, 2011 · Capitalism, jobs, Politics, Populism, Wall Street

Since the Fall of 2008, the U.S. economy a dynamic enterprise of about $15 trillion dollars, as measured in employment, has fallen by about 8 million people. There were already about 7 million people unemployed, or 7% by the end of 2007, a roller coaster ride up and down after the Clinton Administration when unemployment was only at about 4%.

The Bush policies of hands-off government, privatizing services, sending jobs to companies like Blackwater and Halliburton to help fight unnecessary and totally wasteful wars had created a society in which Neoconservatives, basically the military-industrial complex feeding on two wars, were creating nothing here in the U.S. but armaments.

And that part of the economy has remained the same. In 2010, the U.S. spent over $246 billion on military contracts and already in 2011 through July has spent over $170 billion.

But in 2007, with no manufacturing being done in the U.S. and very little else that could be done with investment funds (only 12% of GDP was manufacturing, the same percentage as government) down from 32% in the 1960s and 1970s. So the financial community, moving money around and collection commissions on it, became a larger and larger part of our economy.

The old reliable home equity for average homeowners suddenly began to look like one of the really solid parts of the economy. In the early days of the Reagan Administration, when he was trying to stop inflation, home values had dropped by 20%. But now they had long since returned. [Read more →]

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Unless You Are a Millionaire–or a Bigot–You Should Not Vote Republican.

October 10th, 2011 · Capitalism, Politics, Populism

It is time that we all faced facts, looked at ourselves in the mirror and asked ourselves who we are.

If you are part of a group that makes racial slurs and condones the bigoted signs of demonstrators or laughs at the racist jokes of radio commentators, or applauds the disrespect for the Presidency of members of the House of Representatives merely because the President is African-American…you are a racist Republican. It is as simple as that.

If you think that between 15 million and 25 million Americans should be facing life with no jobs and only food pantries and homeless shelters, and yet you vote for more tax cuts and cuts in government but no jobs bills, then you are a Republican.

If that is who you are, then you should pay attention. Because that is who you are today, but you may not be that tomorrow. If you think that the new Neocon-Republican Party, like the Nazis of old, will take care of you, see to it that you move into the upper brackets of income…pay attention. You are 500 times more likely to become one of the unemployed.

Are you a man making over $350,000 per year? If so, we can categorize you generally as part of “senior management.? Whoa! Hold on there, you say. I am making $280,000 per year and I am part of senior management, definitely part of senior management. Well, let’s take a look at that concept.

Lets start with a base of facts from which to make some determinations. The last really good year for all Americans, not just Wall Street, was in 2007. So let’s use those numbers, keeping in mind that the winters of our discontent are colder and the long, hot summers are shorter. In other words, the rich may not be richer, but they are getting richer at a faster rate than you are. They are because the rest of us are getting poorer.

There are not only 14.9 million Americans out of work, but those who are working–a.) take less in bonuses, health insurance and 401K contributions than they did before the Bush Depression, and b.) everyone lost 40% of equity automatically when the market crashed in October 2008. So those who made enough were able to reinvest in $6,000 in GE stock and see it climb at some point back up to $24,000.

If you were trying to barely hold onto a house worth less than you paid for it, you were not climbing back up the ladder. So winters (low incomes) got colder and darker and the summers (high incomes and bonuses) got longer and hotter. But I’m in the top 1%, you say. You have made it to the top tier in business. Really? Not so fast. [Read more →]

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Are the Republicans Really Fascists? A Comparison.

October 6th, 2011 · Corporations and Industry, Economics, Labor, Politics, Populism, Science & Technology, Wall Street, wars and militarism

Anyone can call someone else a name. People call others Fascists or Nazis all the time on the Internet. People who have these little backwoods militia are often called Nazi-wannabees or actually in some cases call themselves Nazis. But the fact is that the term “Fascist” has a specific meaning. While Nazis were Fascists, many Fascists exist and existed who were not Nazis.

A good idea is to take the term “Fascist” and examine it and see if what most people generally characterize as “Fascist” can be linked to the behavior, not the rhetoric (because talk is cheap, especially political talk) of the Republican Party. Many of the characteristics of a group or an individual are not by themselves an indication of the whole. But taken all together, they become something that is recognizable as the definition of the word. So let’s see what fits.

Nationalism. Fascism is characterized by a feeling of overarching nationalism. People who take a point of view that does not coincide with mindless…incessant…patriotism are considered disloyal. People who, for example, called French fries “Freedom fries” when the French accurately stated that there was no serious cause to go to war with Iraq are considered sensible. People screaming for war, when there is no need for war…that kind of false patriotism…that is what characterizes Fascism.

Ignoring Human Rights. Subordinating of all our rights to some false need to protect society from an unidentified or fantasized enemy is a typical Fascist trick. Creating a strawman and then setting the removal of our civil rights against the need for protection from an enemy that really does not exist. Hitler claimed the rest of the world was out to get Germans, when in reality people simply wanted to be left alone. [Read more →]

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Who Is Stealing Your Retirement and Why?

October 4th, 2011 · Capitalism, Health Care, Labor, Politics, Populism, Wall Street

It’s about time you faced some increasingly obvious facts. Your own corporation is stealing your retirement income. Corporations are freezing defined benefit plans, shutting down others, converting some to defined contribution plans and drastically capping the amount retirees receive in health care benefits.

It is happening now under the guise of increased costs, but it is, more often than not, a lie. With 79 million Americans, 10,000 every day turning 65, the heart of the Baby Boom generation will feel the impact of this corporate theft very soon and very dramatically.

The very uncomfortable fact is that, at the same time that workers’ retirement pay is being cut, senior executive pay is being increased using these same funds that are being cut from retirees. In one instance, Lucent, the former Western Electric arm of AT&T, reduced retiree benefits by $400 million because, they said, the company was in dire straights. The same year, however, they gave out executive bonuses of $400 million, almost the exact amount of the retirement pay reductions.

For many years pensions were run with various states of efficiency and ethics. But in 1974, the government decided to take action. Pension funds finally came under federal regulation. No more taking employee retirement funds to use for other purposes. Something called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, (ERISA) came into being. ERISA stipulates certain matters concerning employee pensions and how they must be handled. The question is….how is that legislation being manipulated to allow corporations to spend retirement funds for other purposes.

By the early 1990s, ERISA was doing pretty well. Employee retirement funds had surpluses for a variety of reasons of over $250 billion dollars. This was too much of a temptation for a lot of the CEOs to resist. The people on Wall Street began to make suggestions to corporations on ways that these large amounts of money could be turned to their advantage. And that is exactly what has happened. [Read more →]

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