As an aside, this is what happened in 2010. The people were lied to by Tea Party members who said that they were Populists but who were actually liars, working for the Koch Brothers and other Right Wing billionaires.

They said that they would create jobs, but when they entered office, they did exactly the opposite, rejecting all proposals for job creation (billionaires don’t want or need jobs…they want lower labor costs) and instead focusing on social issues like overturning Roe V Wade, and decertifying unions, and stalling out government by investigating every little paperclip that went missing in the last 3 years.

The people seem to be catching on, if the Republican calls to C-Span are any indication. They call in wondering how Republican Congressmen on the television call-in programs can ignore the fact of $7 trillion in debt under Bush and now want to start cutting social programs rather than either raising taxes or creating jobs to bring in more government revenue.

But Mitt Romney really expressed the true face of the Republican Party in his victory speech after the Republican primary in Florida.

He said that, after 35 months of unemployment above 8.5% of the population, he would use his skills to fix it. Well, assuming that this is not simply campaign rhetoric, there is nothing in his background that would indicate that he could create jobs. His career was as a so-called “turnaround” specialist.

A turnaround specialist is simply a group of MBAs and CPAs who go into a failing company, borrow money against any good assets that can be used as collateral, then use the money to dissolve the company. They modernize some parts, which they then sell off. They close other parts and lay off workers. They pay off the loans with the parts that had value that they sold. Then they take the company into bankruptcy, paying themselves for their work, always in the tens of millions of dollars. Losers are the workers and stockholders.

So Mitt Romney didn’t create any jobs here. In those parts or factories within companies…those parts that they did occasionally resurrect, the jobs went to China. This isn’t conjecture. This is what happened.

Romney said that more people have lost their jobs and more people have had their homes foreclosed than under any President in history. While this may be true, it is also true that Mitt Romney lives in a country that was stolen from Native Americans. It is not his fault, although he is living here now under those continuing conditions.

President Obama did not create the conditions that created a $1.4 trillion dollar budget deficit handed him in January of 2009 by President Bush, or the conditions…job losses every month for 9 months in the hundreds of thousands…that were handed to him starting in January 2009. He didn’t create the $7 trillion losses in American wealth from a stock market that eventually crashed from 14,000 in 2006 to 6,500 in January of 2009, the day he walked through the door.

President Obama didn’t create the 14.9 million unemployed that was the highest since Ronald Reagan deliberately created a 10.8% unemployment rate in the early 1980s, and the second highest of all time. He didn’t create, nor was he in any way responsible for the 4 million foreclosed homes since the Bush Recession began in 2008. All those 14 million plus jobs and all those homes were foreclosed when the Bush Recession began, and the economic downturn, the $7 trillion loss in the wealth of the people—that caused the unemployment and the unemployment caused the drop in value of homes and the foreclosures.

Romney talks about President Obama’s shrinking the military. That is laughable. First, President Obama expanded our role in Afghanistan, set drones on every Taliban enclave in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. He authorized the killing of the number two leader of Al Queda and Osama Bin Laden as well as two successful rescues of hostages from the Somali pirates. He has strengthened our naval position in the Mediterranean and welcomed and worked with allies to free Libyans from the yoke of the Kaddahfi tyranny.

We have a military budget that even the Chief of Staff, the former Secretary of Defense, and former Defense Department officials have recommended be reduced by as much as 30%. Why? Because our current military budget is larger than the total of all the other countries of the world, including China, Russia, Great Britain, France, all the Middle Eastern Countries, and North and South Korea put together.

Romney may want to back up on his promise to make the American military the most powerful in the world. Our military leaders may have to inform him that it is, in fact, without question or doubt, already the most powerful in the world. If he is suggesting that he will maintain spending at current levels then he is talking through his hairspray because any President will be forced to reduce the military budget. We have 11 Aircraft Carriers, most of which are nuclear powered super carrier size. The next largest military power has one.

The idea that President Obama’s foreign policy is one of appeasement and apology is patently false. President Obama’s foreign policy and that of his Secretary of State have been quite strong. In fact there is no question that our position in the world is quite clearly much better than the disastrous Bush foreign policy.

Romney says that he is not going to be the “cradle to grave” government support President. Well, what does that mean? It is pretty simple and is reinforced by his comment that he doesn’t care about the poor.

The fact is that more people will be poor unless we changer our trade policy, our tax policy our manufacturing policy and our policy towards the exploitation of natural resources by those who then not only contribute nothing to society but in fact want to reduce Americans to poverty and wage-slavery.

This is what Romney stands for. Eliminate…repeal…health care reform, the first step to controlling the health insurance industry. If Romney is elected, and if he can get support from enough Republicans in Congress, he will reduce us all to dependence on the same health insurance industry that now charges outrageous rates and leaves 49 million Americans without any healthcare at all.

And where do those inflated rates go? They go to the CEOs of the health insurance companies, who make an average of $14 million annually, and have for years and years. And how do they spend their money? That’s pretty easy. They spent $400 million trying to defeat Obamacare and they are spending hundreds of millions to try to put their man…Mitt Romney into office to protect their multi-millionaire lifestyles.

You have a choice. You can select the man who is so favored by Wall Street, by big oil, by the health insurance companies and by every lobbyist on K-Street or you can vote for yourself. That’s right. The Presidency is about you. The President is your advocate. Which one do you think is your advocate….centa-millioniare Mitt Romney or community organizer, state senator, U.S. Senator and President Barack Obama.

Ask yourself which one cares about your family, your needs and your future. Ask yourself which one will work with the Republicans in the Senate to destroy Medicare (lying to you and telling you it is unsustainable…it is not), to replace Social Security with a worthless 401K (ask people who lost all the value in their 401K from Romney’s pals on Wall Street) and which one will raise taxes on those who are virtually looting this country, making billions of dollars and often paying not one red cent in income taxes.

Ask yourself which one will try to enact the Paris Hilton Retirement Tax, so that Paris Hilton, rather than paying about a net 20% on money she never worked for from a business she never helped to create….will pay…are you ready…nothing.

Romney and the Republicans want to create a society where some wannabe Internet porn star can be handed $100,000,000 in an inheritance and not pay one single dime in taxes…taxes that would build roads, improve schools, educate the poor and help to raise the standard of living for all Americans.

Romney is the one and this is the election. What happened to public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey is what would have happened in the 1930s if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not been elected. But he came to office and put 4 million Americans to work in less than 6 months and dropped the unemployment rate from 25% to less than 15% almost immediately.

Romney and his friends in the statehouses where Republicans have control intend to destroy this country by impoverishing every single man, woman and child. They work for the hugely wealthy. Romney has done it for decades…closing plants, firing workers, sending jobs overseas…wiping out whole villages from loss of consumer spending after massive layoffs.

Most of us don’t believe in ridiculous superstitions any longer, like the idea of the “Anti-Christ.” But Mitt Romney, if not the Anti-Christ is certainly the Anti-American Presidential candidate.

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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.

Before the cascade of job losses, month after month, could be slowed, 4.7 million jobs would be lost in 2009, even with a massive job stimulus program. By January 2010, the efforts of the Federal government and the President’s stimulus plan had stopped the massive job losses. In January 2010 the unemployment rate actually fell from 10.0% to 9.7%. The massive job losses were conclusively over and the economy was slowly, very, very slowly…on the mend.

In March of 2009, while jobs were still falling like leaves in autumn, President Obama brought out his successful $787 billion stimulus bill. It reined in the falling unemployment numbers over a period of months and eventually created positive job numbers. In October of 2011, the President again tried to stimulate more jobs with a $447 billion jobs bill that was dead on arrival in the Republican controlled Senate. The Congress had passed a small, roughly $15 billion jobs bill in February 2010, but the benefits came primarily in the form of tax credits to companies and small, direct payments to Social Security recipients and other basic transfer payments to small business for job creation.

In 2009, President Obama had already fought two major battles with the Republicans, and those battles made it clear which group each Party represented.

In the battle over the stimulus bill, the Republicans won a major victory by forcing the President to include about one third of the stimulus as tax incentives to corporations. The balance of the funds went to states for infrastructure development and directly to states in block grants to hold on to teachers, firemen, nurses and police who would otherwise have been laid off.

In the battle for health care reform…and remember by 2009, there were at least 44 million people, and perhaps as many as 50 million who had no health care insurance. The average cost for a family in 2009 was about $13,000, so it is no surprise that many people simply could not afford health insurance. By the beginning of 2009, health insurance prices had gone up a whopping 131% over the past ten years and in some places and for some people as much as 15% per year. The country was clamoring for some relief.

President Obama fought for an entire year for the cooperation of Republicans on health care reform. But, with $400 million in campaign bribes being put into their bank accounts from the health care industry, the Republicans were having a health-care-obstruction payoff bonanza.

Once the Affordable Care Act was passed, they could no longer so easily move dates for its inception back to 2013 or 2014 for any new provision. Furthermore, nearly 130 million Americans are now safe from being denied health care insurance based on “pre-existing conditions.” If the Affordable Care Act were repealed, then they would lose their insurance and only those with perfect health records could be accepted by the insurers.

The 50-percent tax breaks for small businesses on employee health insurance and the health insurance exchanges that will require that all persons be included and that as many qualified insurers as possible join the exchange…these provisions will not kick in until 2014. While premiums will go down under ACA and the exchanges and likely by a large amount, should the Republicans somehow win a repeal, health insurance costs will go up bay an estimated 166% over the next ten years.

There is no way that the Republicans can reform the ACA and gain any victories for their constituents, the Health Insurance companies, hospitals, physicians, the rich and big corporations. Even with reforms, unless the bill can be repealed, most of the major provisions….non-denial of service…unlimited premium increases…denial of claims and caps on coverage…cannot be removed. As soon as exchanges are put in place, the health insurance company premium profits will disappear. The $14 million average health insurance CEO salary will evaporate.

The Republicans talk about mandates. It is a phony argument, designed to divert attention away from the main issues…high costs and restricted health care services. The mandate simply means that everyone has to have health insurance, just as everyone has to have auto insurance and just as everyone has to file a tax return. But if you do not make enough money, you do not pay taxes. Similarly if you cannot afford to buy health insurance, you will be given a subsidy in an amount that will guarantee you can afford health insurance. Certain SCHIPS and MEDICAID programs will be extended to include more people at the low income level.

So these are two major points on which the Republican candidates would like you to believe their lies. They don’t like President Obama. Do you know why? It is not because he is Black, African American.

It is because he is so popular with the people he represents. He stands for, and stands up for, you. He is the representative for 54% of the People of the United States…over half of each and every American. He is also the representative of the other 46%, whether they voted for him or not.

So it is the Republicans blocking you. You voted for a man who said he would begin to fix the health care problem and he has. You voted for a man who said he would end the war in Iraq and he did. It is over and our fighting troops, our combat forces, are home. He said that he would try to fix the economy and he at least has created some jobs, and increases in employment on average every single month since he stopped the bleeding of jobs in the beginning of 2010.

He promised to relieve us of this awkward, overhanging legal prejudice against gays, which we all wanted to eliminate. A majority of Americans may not understand the gay lifestyle, but they now accept it as natural, if rare, and want to be fair. He did it. He followed up on President Clinton’s idea of don’t-ask-don’t-tell with a real, meaningful determination…let gays serve in the military. They’ve been there forever so now make it legal. No big deal.

So this President has done his best in a bad situation, in the worst economy…as you have seen…since 1945 in terms of unemployment. We, as President, are fighting a well organized, well-funded Right Wing cadre of billionaires and huge international corporations. He, as us, can beat them. We, he, have greater numbers and a stronger feeling of comradeship with our fellow Americans.

He will win, and therefore we will win, because he is not our local representative. He is our personal representative…when he speaks he represents us. So let him know who we are and what we want. That’s all he needs to beat the forces of oppression who would oppress us.

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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.

They have been taught by a corrupted media called “Liberal” but owned and programmed by rich white men who are anything but Liberal. They want you to believe that the media constantly attacks the Right Wing…but ask yourself when was the last time that Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity attacked the Right Wing. Limbaugh is the radio broadcaster with the largest audience and Hannity’s Fox News is still the largest cable opinion network. And there are literally hundreds of others, from Laura Ingraham and Bill O’Reilly to Michael Savage and Hugh Hewitt.

The People have been lied to repeatedly by the Conservatives on radio and the propagandists on much of television. So…having been told that the government is composed of thieves, they vote in thieves who are represented by these propagandists as reformers. Those thieves create more corruption.

Corruption in Congress is not…as we have been told by these propagandists…a problem “on both sides of the aisle.” It is the Republicans. It is the Republicans who have filibustered 200 times including every jobs bill that the President sent them…costing Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs and costing taxpayers billions in unemployment. It is the Republicans who tried to shut down government. It is the Republicans who refuse to extend unemployment after the laxity in the Bush Republican administration caused an economic collapse.

Is there any one person more responsible than others for the collapse? Yes. The anti-regulation, free-trade, pro-lobbyist, pro-Wall Street House of Representatives member Chris Cox, whom Bush made head of the SEC. He was chosen for his anti-regulatory stance and it was that hands-off approach and the firing of large numbers of investigators and the refusal to indict Wall Street firms guilty of all kinds of infractions that led to the collapse of Wall Street.

In the hearings on Bernie Madoff it became clear that the SEC under Chris Cox had been decimated. Investigators were told to keep hands off many “favored” firms. Investigations were closed by Cox arbitrarily. So, if you want to resolve the issue, you should find Chris Cox, kidnap him, take him to the steps of the Federal Reserve and hang him by the neck until dead in front of the entire executive memberships of every Wall Street firm. Then you should let them know that if they do not stop their unethical practices, they will be next.

Now we have the parable of the new Theives. We have the parable of the thieves…Romney, Gingrich, Paul, Santorum.

And what do they propose? Let’s take Romney first because he’s the leader. Romney wants a flat tax. He only pays about 15% on his income now. So it stands to reason that his idea of a 20% flat tax is a fraud. The reason the Republicans want a flat tax is so that they can reduce the top marginal rate from 35% down to 20% at a time when they know that the mood in the country is to raise the top marginal rate to at least 40%.

The rich have never been richer, and Romney’s tax rate of 15% or so, according to him, shows us why. If you earn even 4% on wealth like his, somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 million, you’re income is going to be around $6 million a year. Right now he pays a capital gains tax of around 15% he says. But if we had a flat tax of 20%, one of two things would happen. Everyone would pay 20% at the top income level, or there would need to be a capital gains rate. The capital gains rate would be lower or there would be no point to having one. That means that Romney’s income, and those of his friends on Wall Street would stay at somewhere around 15%.

But the main reason for the flat tax at 20% rather than an income tax with all kinds of deductions at 35%, even though some of the very rich pay no taxes at all, is that they all know that things can be changed. First you get a deduction for your house or for some other investment that helps the middle class…so the rich get it too. So they know that deductions will come back, and that, even though they will be paying less with a flat tax, then will eventually pay even less because a Republican administration will bring back deductions.

After tax cuts, the biggest boogyman that the five remaining candidates can unearth is the amorphous term…”regulations.” The thing stifling our economy, they say, is regulations. Regulations are vast and confusing to businessmen and are keeping them unsettled, undecided on what to do. Of course that is nonsense. The real reason why businessmen are not creating more businesses and more jobs is two simple things. There is no demand and there is no investment capital available.

Since 5 banks basically control all investment in this country and since those banks are now being regulated more heavily as a result of the financial collapse, and because they do not want to be regulated, they are holding up investment until after the 2012 general election, hoping that a damaged economy will cost the President the election.

And because they will not invest in small or medium sized businesses, there is no advance in employment and since there is no advance in employment, there is no consumer demand. So, the economy has nothing to do with regulations. It is merely that the banks do not want regulation. They want to continue to gamble with your money. And they feel that you are out of luck.

If they can get the Congress and the Presidency for their friends, the Republicans, they will do to you in another several years what they did to you in 2008. Have you noticed that the stock market is up above 12,000? Should you be happy or should you be afraid? If you are not an “insider” and have an interest in whether the market goes up or down, you should be very, very afraid. This market is manipulated by a handful of very rich men. They will sell out and drop the market faster than you can run a comb through your hair.

All these candidates have their guilty pasts.

Romney has killed more jobs and sent more jobs abroad than George W. Bush, whose policies he would like to restore. His idea of an economy that works is to create more retail clerk jobs like those at Staples, a company that created nothing new, but merely took jobs away from workers at Office Max and Office Depot. The pot stayed the same size, but more ladles were dipped into it. Romney has no new solutions except those that will make the rich not only richer, but totally dominant. He does not want democracy; he wants plutocracy, if not totalitarianism. He’s an elitist who wants to run everything without Congress. He wants to run the government like a business or a military operation.

Gingrich worked tirelessly to kill health care reform under Clinton. Then he returned in 2009, founding an anti-reform organization, sponsored by huge corporations in the health insurance and hospital businesses, to try to kill it again. Now, when it is already helping millions of Americans and will reduce health care costs, according to the CBO, by a trillion dollars…going into the pockets of average American families…he wants to repeal it and return to health savings accounts….health care for the rich and upper classes.

Santorum is a religious fanatic. We founded this country on the idea that no state, like the government of Great Britain at the time, could tell us that we could not be Catholics, or Lutherans, or Presbyterians or Puritans. Now Santorum has specifically said that his religion would be the religion he would espouse for everyone…he would put certain aspects of it into federal legislation. He would not allow abortion. He would not allow contraception. He would forbid marriage between two gay men or two lesbian women. He would, in short, take us back to the old British loyalist days, against which we fought a Revolutionary War. We do not need religious fanatics running the country.

Ron Paul will never be elected. The Republicans do not like him any more than Democrats do. Why not? He wants to do away with the military. Half of the Republicans are either rabid war mongers, people who think that problems should be solved with guns, or somehow involved with the military as contractors or officers in the military. Ron Paul wants to do away with criminalizing minor drug offenses. That won’t work for the Republicans who have become entrepreneurs in the judicial punishment system. How can you vote for a man who wants to treat drug addicts instead of putting them in prison? How is this going to help your friends and partners in the business of building and running prisons?

So…there are no rational Republican presidential candidates. And that does not include of course those who were already weeded out as too crazy or to phony or too stupid to possibly be elected even by the knuckle-dragging hicks who listen daily to Rush Limbaugh.

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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.

Now we have a pretty much unregulated industry. So, as happens with all public and profitable ventures, the vultures are descending. T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil man and corporate raider, who takes over corporations in trouble, strips them and sells them for a profit after firing everyone, wants a huge tax credit for the production and use of natural gas.

Pickens and his group want to convert government vehicles and over-the-road trucks to natural gas and get a tax break in the process. The Natural Gas Act, in the absence of any other intelligent proposals to lessen our reliance on gasoline, he has earned the support of over 200 companies and a number of gas industry Senators. They are pushing hard to take your natural resources and give them to Boone Pickens, who is portraying himself as some kind of Patriot for trying to further enrich himself!

So let us see just how patriotic all these gents are. Let’s see if they will agree that a much better idea is to nationalize the natural gas industry. It makes unparalleled common sense.

According to Pickens, the U.S. has more natural gas than the Arabs have oil. It is clean and easily obtainable. The thing is…Pickens and his pals want to keep all your revenues. A better idea is this. In one piece of legislation, declare eminent domain over all lands in the U.S. under which there is natural gas. Then both drill for that natural gas, using a government agency, the Department of Energy, and buy up all existing leases from people who want to get out before the unlimited government production makes their leases worthless.

That’s right. They will become worthless because the United States would then go all-out to do exactly what Boone Pickens says should be done. We believe him. We should create vehicles and use cheap natural gas to heat our government buildings, make it available to power government and over-the-road vehicles. We should allow everyone to participate in this natural resource that belongs to all of us.

There is about 2.5 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas under the U.S. At a current price of roughly $5 per cubic foot, the total potential is about $11 trillion dollars, enough to make this country solvent while reducing the national debt by at least $300 billion a year.

It would create something like 500,000 skilled and unskilled permanent government jobs. It would cut the trade imbalance with the Middle East to zero. It would reduce unemployment and change at least $50 billion of the deficit to a $50 billion in positive personal income tax revenues. It would reduce the interest on the debt by $9 billion a year.

If we bought up all the leases from people who realized that the prices that they would get from natural gas would not be worth the investment, then we could begin to lower natural gas prices by simply producing as much as we want and need for homes, factories, utilities and vehicles. Gasoline prices would drop through the floor. Oil companies would make only realistic profits….and gasoline would drop to less than two dollars a gallon.

All revenues would go to the federal government. The resulting improvement in government, in health care funding, in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (the government could afford to pay back some of the money that it has borrowed) and in social services.

Even at current usage, natural gas is roughly an annual $120 billion enterprise here in the U.S. When expanded through lower prices to more industries and more applications, that number will most certainly double. That means an inflow to the government of revenues, even at adjusted natural gas prices, of approximately $200 billion a year in added revenues. As opposed to letting Pickens and his friends at BP, Chevron, Exxon and others profit billions from it, pay no taxes and use their funds to support Right Wing Fascist organizations. We really have no choice.

At first it may seem far fetched, even preposterous. It is not. It requires only one thing…the unanimous support of Congress plus one Congressman or Senator to initiate the legislation. If the Occupy Wall Street members, if the Democrats in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan and other states, like Illinois, where there are rational Middle Class citizens, it can be done. Once the federal government has determined that all new natural gas finds will belong to the people and will be drilled and shipped by the Department of Energy, then it will be done.

We can offer a fair price to all those who currently have natural gas leases, including the large corporations who, if they do not sell soon, will find that the value of their investments will drop so low that it will take two lifetimes to recover their value. Remember, the goal of private industry is high price…for profit. The goal of government is low price…to keep cost of living lower for the citizen.

Now is the time to act. If you are part of an organization, group together with another of similar objective. Once we have enough voters working for an entire new society, starting but by no means ending, with nationalized natural gas, we will restore the Middle Class.

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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.

Grover Norquist is a liar. His goal is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and to eliminate the Middle Class altogether. It is not clear, never will be clear from what he says but it is overwhelmingly clear from what he does. He continues to lobby for more tax cuts for the rich while cutting services for the poor, the elderly, the veterans and the elderly. And he wants to cut taxes during our $15 trillion national debt. `

Here’s how it works. A rich man makes a million dollars. And at the end of a year, he ends up paying about $230,000 in taxes. While the rich man still has disposable income of $770,000 per year, he doesn’t like laying out that kind of money. Grover Norquist’s job is to find those really rich people who hate paying taxes and gather them into an organization, Americans for Tax Reform.

Now, wealthy Americans are used to paying taxes, especially those families like the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts who have sent wealth down to one generation after another. In fact, in the early part of World War I, the very wealthy paid a top income tax of 7% but as the government asked them to do more to safeguard a land of which the top 1% owned about 50%, they eventually paid a top rate of 97%.

This happened again in the Second World War and for a couple of decades after while we paid down the wartime debt, which grew to about 120% of GDP. But in 2001, George W. Bush came up with a new formula, of which Grover Norquist approved.

Bush and Dick Cheney decided that they could create not one, but two, wars and pay for neither. At the same time, they decided to defy the laws of finance, economics and good sense, they decided not only not to raise taxes but actually to cut taxes…once in 2001 and again in 2003.

Of course Americans for Tax Reform were quite happy. They got huge tax cuts which enabled the top 1.1 million Americans to not only earn about half of all income earned in a country of 300 million people, but to keep enough so that they could eventually own about two-thirds of all equities, i.e., two thirds of all the corporations and banks in the country.

And what kind of money is that? What kinds of things do the rich have that you do not? Well, just take Cindy McCain, Senator John McCain’s second wife. She is the heir to a Budweiser distributorship. Not a huge deal, but still multi-millions. As we learned, you may remember, in the 2008 campaign, the McCains have 9 domiciles, nine places that they call home. This is at a time when 3 million Americans are being turned out onto the street because of policies that John McCain supports.

So you can see why Grover Norquist is so popular among the rich. And because the particular rich who do not want to pay taxes (Republicans) spend a lot of money buying up Republican politicians who will gladly take ten or twenty thousand dollars to vote against any tax measures, Grover Norquist became the pre-eminent lobbyist for the rich and a very powerful man in Washington.

Of course it is not only the rich who do not like paying taxes. None of us like paying taxes. But the fact is that we have 300 million people in this country, of whom about half have jobs and pay taxes to support the other half, who, at any given time, are non-employed spouses, children, elderly, the unemployed, disabled or retired. Today the unemployed make up at least one of every ten of those non-tax paying individuals.

It has never been otherwise. The difference today is that an organized segment of the very wealthy, namely Norquist’s self-serving group, no longer want to pay even slightly more in taxes in order to sustain the country in a time of need. They would not do so when Bush began the War in Afghanistan, or when he began the war in Iraq. On the contrary, they sought and were given tax cuts while the country spent billions.

If you spend half a billion dollars on a war and you cut taxes by half a billion dollars, that is clearly and obviously $1 billion less than you have as revenues coming in. So that is how the Bush Administration built up an additional $7 trillion in debt over a little less than 8 years. (On top of $5 trillion in debt already rung up by Reagan and the first Bush.)

Right now we have less revenue coming in per capita than at any time since 1950 when we had less than half the people we have today. We have annual deficits of $1 trillion. Here’s why. George W. Bush unbalanced the budget after Clinton balanced it. He cut taxes without cutting government. Then he started two wars.

Bush left town every year for an average of about 50 days. Hardly what you would expect from a hands-on manager, CEO of a country of 300 million, supposedly trying to win two wars. He relaxed banking and securities regulations, put the Fox (Chris Cox, a man who hates regulation and regulators) in charge of the hen house at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cox fired regulators by the hundreds, refused to charge securities companies with fraud, closed cases and in general allowed the Great Bush Crash of 2008, if in fact he did not deliberately start it.

In all of this resulted in an increase of the deficit of $700 billion a year ($350 billion in lost tax revenues from tens of thousands of closed businesses and 14 million people unemployed and $350 billion in additional unemployment benefits, welfare benefits and other costs associated with a large percentage of the economy that shut down.

Add this $700 billion a year onto the already high, roughly $350 to $400 per year Bush deficits and you now have a trillion dollars a year. With two wars, and giveaways to banks and the Prescription Drug bill that cost $600 billion over a number of years and the tax cuts and the two wars, each one about a trillion dollars over the life of the conflicts….we’re in real debt.

And what does Grover Norquist want to do? He wants to shut down most basic services for the average American, including those that the citizens have already paid for but have been stolen by the Republicans….like Social Security.

Grover Norquist works for the rich. He will always try to reduce the taxes that the rich pay. He wants taxes to zero out. He will be paid by the rich and the rich feel that they do not need most of what government provides. They need protection of their businesses, but they don’t need Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

So that is Grover Norquist, a little weasel ready to do the bidding of anyone who will pay him enough money. It is time that Americans woke up and realized that the Tea Party and all the other Republicans who signed Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge actually made a pledge to a lobbyist for the rich, and therefore a pledge to help the rich themselves.

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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.

So, what about tariffs? We hear that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was a disaster for the American economy in 1930. Crap. Here are the facts. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was introduced in 1930, and the tariffs were quite high. But so many other factors were involved with the expansion of the unemployment in the Great Depression, that Smoot-Hawley, while harmful, was not definitive.

First of all, exports as a percentage of GDP were a much smaller percentage in those days. Second, the imposition of tariffs did have a favorable effect on employment before the entire monetary system of the world collapsed. But if you take imports minus exports, it was a net loss. And while domestic jobs did pick up, as the world economies began to really fall off, so did that brief period of domestic job increase.

While Smoot-Hawley was considered by some to have had as much as an 8% effect on the growth of unemployment in the years 1930-1933, the fact is that the world-wide tariffs plus the other monetary factors were much greater. In other words, the world was going down and Smoot-Hawley was merely one of the things dragging it down. Worldwide exports declined by 67% in the early years of the Depression. Everyone was hiking tariffs, so it was not merely the U.S. Not good, but not merely Smoot-Hawley.

Today we are in a hugely different situation. We are not in danger of losing manufacturing. We have already lost it. Actually, very wealthy men, owners of gigantic corporations, gave much of it away to other cheaper countries in order to add to their profits…not make profits but add to their already abundant profits. We were told otherwise, but now we know the truth. They sacrificed American workers for their higher profits.

Tariffs today should not be placed exclusively or even predominantly on foreign companies. Here’s what should be done. We need to place tariffs on American companies manufacturing abroad but bringing products back into the U.S. for sale to American customers.

Let’s say that you are a manufacturer. You get raw materials and some plans. You send those plans abroad, let’s say to China. You make a product using Chinese labor and those raw materials. It is a product that can be made for $6.00 here with $2.00 profit. But in China, you can make it for $5.00 sale price of which $2.00 is labor and $3.00 is profit. You are an American company so you bring the product back here with no duties.

You were selling a million of these for sales of $6,000,000. Now at $5.00 you sell 1.5 million for gross sales of $7,500,000. But instead of the $2 million you made before, you now have more profits on more sales. So you make $4.5 million on sales of $7.5 million. For the Conservative it is a “no-brainer.” Except for one thing. If you had 20 people working for you here in the U.S., you now have only 4 jobs here and 16 jobs, let’s say, in China. In the U.S. only need to package and ship and bill. That’s all everything else is done in China. So you just cost this country $400,000 to put an extra $2.5 million in your pocket.

So here’s what the United States needs to do. If you sell products that you make in China, and you are a U.S. corporation, you should pay an extra 5% on your revenues. So, if it is worth it to make an extra $2.5 million, then you should not mind a “sales privilege” tax for using the U.S. market, the largest in the world. You still make more sales and keep more profits. You keep a little over $2 million (for a total of $4 million rather than $4.5 million profits) but your country gets $450,000 to create new industries to employ the people you replaced with Chinese workers.

But let us suppose that there are a thousand of such companies (there are, at minimum, tens of thousands.) That would mean at least 16,000 more people employed, which means another 16,000 in our service economy. That would also mean $450,000,000 more in the government coffers to loan to small business. This would be an enormous help in creating training programs in community colleges for specific skills, and help in paying for government-shared health insurance costs for the working poor.

Ten thousand such companies would mean $4.5 billion. And all the money that had previously been lent and all the tax revenues from the jobs that were created would begin to compound. Yes, it would take years but every year would see another huge decrease in the unemployed, and a better economy, reductions in home foreclosures and a stronger fabric in society.

All of this could happen…would happen…if we could persuade the very rich to take a slightly smaller share of the economic pie, rather than skewing the marketplace against the working man and against our beleaguered Middle Class. We are not asking for personal tax increases. We are only asking that they help pay to retrain and rehire American workers by taking slightly less of the added profit they get from manufacturing abroad but selling to the lucrative U.S. market.

There was a commercial for automotive maintenance products that used to say: “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.” In other words, the very rich do have some obligations to the society that allows them to become rich or the society that allows them to securely pass along a large percentage of wealth from one generation to another. Those obligations can be done agreeably, or, if resisted, can be voted in with severity. That is not necessary. We only need a small share of created wealth to jump-start our economy.

History tells us that when the greedy go beyond caring what is necessary to sustain life for the rest of society, then society make a change. In all of history there is no sympathy written into the records for those greedy few who oppressed the masses, or who deliberately withheld their concern and help in times of need. In those cases, drastic economic changes came about with drastic social changes.

Let’s hope that we have come far enough to let the very wealthiest among us see that it is so much more rational to share the kind of affluence that one can never hope to spend or invest or even give away within a normal lifetime. History tells us that those who become so removed from the people that they cannot bring themselves to help the masses who need help will, in the end, receive no help from the masses when despair turns to violence and good will turns to bloodshed.

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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.

In 2003, in the Bush Administration, an economist by the name of Douglass Holtz-Eakin took a chance on proving that cutting taxes increases government revenues. He was the Republican head of the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, the organization relied upon by both parties for impartial budget data on which to base legislation. The study results showed that tax cuts do not pay for themselves in revenues derived from increased growth.

In fact, the CBO study showed that only between 1% and a maximum of 20% of the cost of tax cuts can be recovered. In other words, the Bush tax cuts cost about $1.8 trillion. That means that only between $18 billion and $360 billion could ever be recovered. Remember, this was the CBO under Holtz-Eakin in the Bush-Cheney regime.

So why didn’t we say…wait a minute….this isn’t working? Well, the question is….why didn’t you? Why didn’t the Republicans say…hey…this is going to add at least $1.764 trillion (or more) to the debt each time we do it? If you are a Republican, why didn’t you object?

The reason no one objected is that you didn’t hear about it. There are four major television outlets for this kind of news. Three of them are controlled by Republicans and the fourth tries to be objective…”he said, she said” journalism. There are several thousand radio stations in the country and no one denies at any time, anywhere, including Republicans (they’re proud of it) that 90% of all political and news commentary is delivered by paid, Right-Wing commentators. (Actually, they are propagandists, paid by the corporations and the very wealthy who do not want to pay higher taxes.)

Do you think that Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer? He is not. Rush Limbaugh is paid $40 million a year by corporations who advertise on the radio networks on which he appears. In return, his job is to spread misinformation about items that will propel their agenda, like the destruction of investment regulations, or defeating anti-pollution legislation. He attacks the unions relentlessly because the unions are the only organized groups that have enough people to counter the toxic effects of this devastating corporate agenda.

Rush Limbaugh’s lies on legislation like health care for poor children and the negotiation of drug prices that would have helped keep some elderly alive have hurt so many people that he broadcasts from a hidden studio, appears only with bodyguards, and would not stay alive, literally, if he were surrounded in some neighborhoods of some American cities. He has done so much damage and has spewed so much hatred that he is literally a “wanted man,” dead or alive, justifiably, in some areas of the country.

Some of the people who are sponsored by the rich, like Ann Coulter, appeal only to Right Wing racist, pro-life zealots who listen to her monotone rants to bolster their own attitudes. The problem is that she lies a very large percentage of the time.

Simply go to the Internet, to www.mediamatters.org and type in “Coulter.” You will then see innumerable instances of her lies balanced against the real facts and the references to the legislation or the actual words that a legislator used, not her distorted interpretation of it. The same is true for dozens of other propagandists, from Glenn Beck to Sean Hannity to Michael Savage that you can find on that site.

2. We need to repeal Obamacare. Not only is this wrong, but the single most important thing we could do to help our economy and our personal lives is to pass a public option to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Here’s why.

When the President began to create the “health reform” legislation, over a million people were being bankrupted a year by health costs that their health insurance didn’t cover. About 100 million were receiving health insurance increases of about 15% per year. Let’s go back and visualize what that meant. (And it hasn’t gotten any better yet, because Obamacare cost-reduction doesn’t go into effect until 2013. That was the negotiation from the health care industry just to get talks started.)

So that means that in 2001, if it cost you $1,000, then the next year, it cost you $1,150, then something like $1, 265, then something like $1,400 and in five years your costs would virtually have doubled. But it didn’t start at $1,000 did it? And it wasn’t limited to only 15% per year, was it? Of course not. Many people are paying $1,500 a month, even more than $20,000 a year. The median cost for a family of health care is $15,000 in 2011.

But here is why the President felt it necessary to take on these huge, greedy health care corporations. Since President Clinton left office, inflation has gone up about 25%. In other words an additional approximately one-fourth of what it was in 2,000. But health care costs have doubled and then gone up an additional one-fourth or more. Health care costs have gone up five times faster than inflation.

Why? Because health care is not a business but we here in the United States now, since Ronald Reagan was President, treat it as a business. Until the Reagan Administration, hospitals were non-profit organizations. They were run by the Catholic Church or the Lutheran Church, Adventists, or dedicated, private, non-profit organizations like the Shriners.

The rest of the world…all of the rest of the world without any exceptions…does not allow their health care institutions to make a profit. It is clearly a conflict of interest, so logical that there is simply no debate outside this country at all. The weakness in our governmental structure is frankly on display when health care is discussed. For example, it is not defensible to say that one citizen should make money on the misfortune of another. It is further indefensible to say that a business will make more money if it is doing less of what it is designed to do and will make less money if it does more of what it is designed to do, i.e. does what it does best.

If you insure someone and that person gets sick and you take care of them, it may cost you a great deal of money. The better you take care of them, the better you are succeeding at what you do. But the more you do, the more money it will cost you and therefore the less money you will make. So, you succeed at your business but you lose money at your business. The point: it is not a good business. It should be run by non-profits and by charitable and religious organizations.

There is a further problem that makes the situation even worse. Not only does the health insurance industry pay for more costs to insure that care is done appropriately, but a for-profit organization must add on whatever profit it needs to reward stockholders. Today, because corporate managers have run amuck with their business procedures, as much as an additional 40% of costs is added on to health care to cover executive salaries. The average health insurance industry CEO makes $14,000,000 per year. And other top executives make similarly high amounts.

The reason is that it is not a free market. You cannot simply go out and buy health care on the open market the way you can vegetables or soap flakes. The health care industry lobbyists have tied up all the financial aspects of health care and health insurance into a system where there are only a couple of companies per state that you can buy from and those companies can deny anyone who may cost them money.

The reason that the health insurance industry spent $400 million in one year in lobbying and advertising efforts to obtain the votes of legislators and demeaning and ridiculing a very soundly competitive piece of legislation is that they see their fat paychecks dwindling and anticipating that when Americans catch on, a public option will destroy their fat-cat paydays. The fact is that the industry has become corrupt, with many good people leaving it and many bad people staying to collect high salaries literally over the dead bodies of some American citizens.

So why repeal? Why the term “repeal” of health care and not “reform?” It is really quite simple. Repeal means that you cannot add on to the bill, which is pretty minimal at this point. The current bill only asks for some cost reductions, a few add-ons to existing services and requires an intra-state pooling of insurance companies to create larger pools of people and to compete with one another to bring down health insurance premiums.

Repeal would mean that you cannot introduce a public option into the price negotiations of the health insurance pools because…with repeal….there would be no intrastate competition for better rates…no regional health insurance pools. Without the health reform act, there would be no pools, no negotiation and no reductions in premiums with the threat of government stepping in to say…not good enough so here’s the government’s health plan option…compete with this.

So what are we saying? We are saying that the health care situation is as simple as this. President Obama knew what a gigantic fight the Clintons had carried on with the health insurance industry in the prior attempt at reform. He also knew that today not only the insurance industry but the 1,600 radio stations carrying Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel would start virtually every hour with a new lie (like the “death panels” lie) about health care reform. They are paid by the health insurance industry to keep Americans from voting in health care reform.

So what did the Republicans do? They trashed the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act at every chance they got. It was good business. They are being paid by the health insurance industry to do it. The constant drumbeat has created a public reaction that now in many polls says that the American people no longer want health care reform. Which of course is stupid and here’s why.

There are several Republican proposals. And because they have succeeded in brainwashing a large number of very stupid Americans to ignore facts and listen to their Right Wing commentators, they have put up proposals that basically keep things as they are only make them worse or…offer solutions that basically disassemble the meager health care plans we do have now that work, like Medicare!

It is astonishing how foolish many of these average American Republicans are. They are often so bigoted and so racist or so religiously fanatic that they are willing to listen to people who are paid to screw them. Rather than saying that they hate abortion but at the same time don’t want to be screwed by health insurance companies, they join things like the Tea Party which pretends to care about the people but is almost 100% funded not only by the rich but by a mere handful of the super-rich who don’t want people to have any health care subsidies at all. No insurance. No nothing. Just two million bankruptcies apparently, instead of one.

So that is why “repeal” is so important. They don’t want to make health care more affordable. And they don’t want the remotest possibility that the government can intrude with regulations forcing them to take care of people. This is only a good business if you can deny coverage when you know it will cost you a fortune to take care of someone.

Making health care expensive is how the CEOs earn fourteen million dollars a year. Keeping 50 million Americans from health insurance coverage may sound to you like a challenge for society and a tragic blow to many Americans who become injured, get sick or are attacked by a disease. “Repeal” rather than modification means that they can continue to disallow these tens of millions of Americans from having health insurance and thereby add to their coffers by simply taking everyone’s personal assets and savings in return for health care services.

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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.

So Whirlpool could not afford to pay workers even a salary roughly halfway between poverty level and the middle-income of American workers. Even though the company made $177 million in the third quarter of 2011 alone. Is that good? Well, if 124% improvement in profit is good, (in other words more than doubling your income in one year) then they are doing pretty damned well in a bad economy. Of course, the layoffs of the 1800 people in Fort Smith will add another $60 million to that number.

So, Whirlpool and its stockholders will share in about $700 billion additional profits this year as the workers in Benton Harbor, Michigan and Fort Smith, Arkansas look for jobs.

Corporations are beholden to their stockholders. And who are the Whirlpool stockholders? One is Representative Fred Upton, heir to a great deal of Whirlpool stock from the company his grandfather built. Fred Upton is the House of Representatives member from the district that encompasses the Whirlpool headquarters in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Fred Upton does pretty well. But Fred Upton wants more, and he wants you to have less. Here’s how well Fred Upton is doing. He receives a salary from the government of $174,000 plus expenses as a Congressman. He has another roughly $100,000 in income from stock he inherited in Whirlpool. He and his wife have another $300,000 or so in other stocks, like Exxon.

Upton’s total income is something like $600,000 annually. He further has undisclosed amounts of stock in a Whirlpool family trust, which he does not control and which equity is worth between $5,000,000 and $25,000,000. The Uptons have cash in the bank of somewhere between $500,000 and $1,000,000. As a Congressman, Fred Upton has to make all this public, and it is.

We can say one thing for sure. Fred Upton is doing better than the 5,000 people that the Whirlpool company laid off in the last year in order to provide those additional profits for his and his wife’s stock.

So Fred Upton should have some conflicting interests. He’s a major stockholder in Whirlpool…and a congressman. The congressman should care more for the people than he does for his wealth or why would he be pretending to work for the people, rather than Whirlpool’s best interests?

In Benton Harbor, Michigan, which is almost completely African-American, except for the Whirlpool headquarters, there is a park. It is called Jean Klock park and it is on the shores of Lake Michigan. Not many average workers still have jobs at Whirlpool in Benton Harbor. It closed its manufacturing jobs there long ago, and moved some of them to….Fort Smith, Arkansas because the wages were cheaper there.

Along the Lake Michigan shoreline, Jean Klock Park is one of the few highlights of a town where very little has ever been done for the people. And now Jean Klock Park has been diminished. More importantly, Benton Harbor may be the first case of the coming Fascist takeover of America.

You see, in 2010, a new governor was elected in Michigan. The hick farmers and the rich Republicans got together to put Ric Snyder into office. Snyder is a Right Wing investment banker, a Neocon-Fascist who was elected with the wealth of the Koch Family, the aid of a massive television ad campaign of lies, the help of the Tea Party Fascists, and the votes of the stupid hick farmers who are to narrow and greedy to understand that their parks will be next after Jean Klock Park.

The middle class Right Wingers and the hick farmers and the fundamentalist, racist nuts who don’t understand that their white skin or their prayers to a white God won’t save them from the ruin of a totalitarian state. This isn’t about white on black. This is about rich on poor, economic power…white rich men who want money. It’s about the color green the color of money, of real dough, of greenback dollars.

Whirlpool owned some old brownfields adjacent to Jean Klock Park. It was basically useless land to Whirlpool, especially since they did no manufacturing in Benton Harbor any longer. Someone in a group called the Cornerstone Alliance came up with the idea of building luxury homes and condominiums and a country club on that land. But they soon discovered that they needed some land from the Benton Harbor’s Jean Klock Park. But strangely, the people of Benton Harbor did not want to give up their beautiful park for a private luxury home development and private country club.

So a man named Al Pscholka, a former aide to Representative Upton, who had been elected in this Republican landslide of 2010, acting on behalf of the Cornerstone Alliance, a group of apparently concerned citizens for the welfare of golf courses and—here we go again—the Whirlpool Foundation, decided that the good citizens of Benton Harbor, median per capita in come $10,000…not the stuff of which most country clubbers are made…needed less lakeside park and more golf course and luxury home development.

Pscholka did not try to persuade anyone in Benton Harbor of anything. Why should he? It didn’t make sense with all the huge needs of Benton Harbor that have never been met. The very last thing on the minds of struggling Benton Harbor citizens was a golf course. But it was on Fred Upton’s mind, obviously. Not only was Al Pscholka, his old aide sent up to Lansing to file a new law, but Upton’s previous aide, John Proos went up to Lansing as well, moving up to State Senator from Pscholka’s seat so that Whirlpool Freddie could have two people in the state legislature.

And what was that law? It was a new law based on an old principle. It could be called mercantilist or monarchist or Fascist. It was a law that says the state of Michigan can take your land, and if your elected officials object, the state will fire your elected representatives and install new ones. Because of the stupidity of the Tea Party and the venality of the Right Wing Republicans in Michigan, people like Pscholka were elected with a big majority in the Michigan legislature. After election, with a Republican majority Pscholka rammed through a piece of legislation that says that an elected official in a local community can actually be removed by order of the Governor.

Because of the need to enact this bit of greedy, selfish, improper takeover of Benton Harbor lakefront, this is exactly what happened. The governor of Michigan, threw out the local mayor and installed his own man, a Republican operative named Joe Harris. The land was confiscated, the park changed, the golf course and home development established and the people of Benton Harbor relieved of their civil rights.

It isn’t just three holes of a golf course designed for Fred Upton and his wife and their friends. It isn’t about a park that could have been kept in pristine condition, a wonderful, free, wild place along the Michigan lakeshore. It is about political power, and the kind of cruel, evil power that we have not seen since the days of the American Robber Barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In a free society, when the central government uses its power to overrule the vote of the majority, that is Fascism. Fascism is defined as an alliance of government with industrial forces to overpower, to control government at all levels.

So do you see the connections? Fred Upton and Whirlpool Corporation. Upton votes against jobs bill after jobs bill as a Right Wing Republican. Whirlpool creates a foundation to help support a local organization whose job it is to take care of the wealthy members of a poor community. It then creates more money to go into its foundation by sending jobs first to Arkansas, devastating the local Benton Harbor community, further separating the rich in Benton Harbor from the average citizens. Finally, it devastates Fort Smith, Arkansas by sending those jobs to Mexico, as far down the pay ladder as a corporation can go.

Isn’t it clear? It is all about the rich, like Fred Upton and his wife, and their needs, their golf courses, luxury housing for their friends. Harbor Shores will undoubtedly be a fine place to play golf. There will even be professional golf tournaments there, to create revenues and some temporary jobs. But the goal is to create something else for the wealthy. It is to further create space between the middle classes and the lower middle classes and the management classes and owners of corporations, like Whirlpool.

Fred Upton and Al Pscholka won. They stole the land along lake Michigan from the residents of Benton Harbor. They built Harbor Shores golf course and the luxury home community. But they did something much worse. They took a piece out of the American system. Ric Snyder, Fred Upton, Joe Pscholka and another Upton ally, State Senator John Proos, all dedicated themselves to the initiation of Fascism in Michigan.

Where will it stop? How many pieces of land will be stolen, how many elected mayors dismissed, how many golf courses for the wealthy will be built before the people stand up and either vote these people out of office, or do away with them in some other appropriate way? Trying to overturn a government is not a good thing….unless it is an illegal, totalitarian government that will take your property, your job or your civil rights for the personal benefit of a few scoundrels. Then our own Declaration of Independence tells us that this kind of tyranny cannot and must not be tolerated.

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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.

She said that under President Obama only one oil drilling permit had been issued. The facts are slightly different. First, prior to the Gulf oil spill, hundreds of drilling permits of all kinds had been issued. Second, after the oil spill in the Gulf 35 shallow water permits have been issued and 6 deep water drilling permits have been green-lighted. So, once again, more lies from Michele Bachmann.

And then there is Mit Romney who said, that President Obama went “around the world apologizing for America.” Not only is this false, but President Obama’s efforts to reach out to the Muslim world have resulted not only in more trust in the U.S. according to surveys, but may have been responsible for some aspects of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya, Iran, Yemen and Syria.

Mit Romney says that President Obama has never worked in the “private sector” and Michele Bachmann says that she has never had a government job. President Obama was an attorney working for a private lawfirm, and he was a published author before becoming a State Senator, U.S. Senator and President. Michele Bachmann simply makes no sense whatsoever. She worked for a federal agency, the IRS, as a tax lawyer and works today as an elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Lies, lies, lies lies…..

Governor Perry of Texas—running for President—says, and these are whoppers—that the American Recovery act—the Stimulus—created no jobs, zero jobs. (It created a documented 2,000,000 jobs)

Governor Perry, in an attempt to deflect his part in not closing down the borders to the satisfaction of his fellow Presidential challengers claims that President Obama has done nothing, zero to increase activity on the border. The facts are exactly the opposite. The border patrol has doubled in the last five years, including over 20,000 border patrol agents since 2010 alone, 17,000 of whom went into…you guessed it…Texas.

In arguing against health care reform for his health insurance lobbyist friends, Governor Perry has said that the number of uninsured in Massachusetts is about the same as it was when Romneycare was introduced. That is wrong. Over 300,000 people have been insured and it is 3-to-1 popular in that state.

Governor Perry also said that the President influenced the Ex-Im Bank to loan $2 billion to Brazil for offshore oil drilling. That isn’t true. The Ex-Im Bank Board of Governors, first of all, in early 2009 consisted of all-Bush appointed Republicans. Second, Politifact not only called this a lie by Perry but a “Pants-on-Fire” or indisputable lie—that there was no evidence of involvement by the President but much evidence to the contrary.

How about Herman Cain’s tax plan, the infamous 9-9-9 plan? He says that everyone would get a tax cut. Is that true? No. It is not. The poor and people up to $200,000 per year would get a tax increase. Those over $200,000 would get a tax cut, starting at $19,000, and culminating in a $455,000 tax cut for those making over a million.

How about good old Newt. Newt Gingrich is one of the political world’s best all-time liars. He is able to stretch a point until it breaks. He can find the most obscure point and make it the principal point in a discussion, even though it changes the facts to make the statement itself totally false.

For example, Newt says that the United States Defense Budget is less today “as a percentage of GDP than at any time since Pearl Harbor.” Not only is that not true, according to defense budget experts, but it is also misleading.

No one, according to these economists, would peg 4.8% or any amount to the GDP. The GDP does and should go up every year. But defense costs do not automatically go up because circumstances change over time. For example, even when adjusted for current dollars, our budget is $300 billion more than it was during an average of the peak years of the Cold War era.

Moreover, at the beginning of World War II we had one of the lower military budgets in the world and we had to build it up to take on the chief responsibility among our allies for armaments. Today, our $700 billion (and more unreported) budget is already not only the largest, but larger than the military budgets of all other countries combined.

So Newt not only dissembled on the truth and the facts….he simply told a big, fat lie.

Then of course there are the broad, sweeping allegations by the Republican Party as issued by a number of anonymous sources but spread far and wide via the Internet. One of the most popular is the Email sent out to all Republicans and then spread by them into the general populace that the Obama Administration would raise Medicare Premiums to $104 in 2012, and $247 by 2014.

Well, first of all, these numbers are calculated every year, so there are no numbers at this point for 2014. So that is clearly and unquestioinably a lie. Second, the current 2011 Medicare part B premium is already $115.40, not $99. But that $115.40, it was announced not long ago, will actually go down in 2012 to $99.90 because of some factors having to do with a larger pool of eligible retirees.

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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.

Starting from the top of the list of being hottest states to be poor, it is Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Montana, South Carolina, and New Mexico. (Now, Montana and New Mexico seems like they have only about one cowboy and one cow per county, so their numbers are a little skewed.)

Having raced through the South spreading hysteria about gays, gun control and abortion, the Koch Brothers’ henchmen landed back in Washington with thousands of neo-Fascist GOP and decided that it was time to work on the poor rural members of the upper Midwest states. Wisconsin seemed like a good state to bring down to the level of the Confederate states. The average household income of Wisconsin was up near the top end, at 20th in the nation. So here was a good state to attack.

But it didn’t work. Wisconsinites, gathered up their old Progressive and Populist traditions, polished them off and kicked out two of the Republican state senators who had voted to decertify the state unions. Then they set about to organize a recall of Governor Walker himself, set to kick off in early November.

It is not certain if the actions of the citizens of Wisconsin and their continuing actions were the catalysts for Occupy Wall Street, but it is a fact that Occupy Wall Street followed on the heels of those activities and the ones in Ohio to change some of Governor “Wall Street John” Kasich’s legislation against unions and the middle class, and the retired and the poor.

Occupy Wall Street was like many of those small efforts that somehow catch fire and turn out thousands and then tens and then hundreds of thousands. It is not new of course. In the days before radio, tens of thousands would turn out to hear a speech by William Jennings Bryant or march to the Haymarket in Chicago for a Labor Demonstration.

On or about September 17, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street group began to inhabit Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since that time, the movement has spread to Times Square, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rome, London and towns and hamlets not only around the U.S. but around the world.

What does it mean? It means that a very small percentage of America, the very rich, meaning people who make $300,000 or more per year have taken over control of society, and, because of their greed in wishing to hold on to all the wealth, have earned, as a group the enmity of a very large percentage of the population. Around 70% of the American people, when surveyed in the last several weeks, say that they support the “Occupy” movement.

Now, we know a few things about the current make up of society. Small businesses create about 70% of the jobs. Yet small businessmen claim incomes largely of less than $100,000, and even if this is somewhat skewed because of taxes, they are still far and away, not the primary members of the 1% club. This does not mean that there are not small businesses that can grow to more than $25,000,000 at which point owner incomes can reach well into the $300K category. But most…probably 90% of small businesses are in a far lower revenue bracket.

So, here are the people we can exclude from the top 1%: Local bankers, heads of small community banks and credit unions, real estate agents, insurance salesmen, cops, firemen, nurses, teachers, college professors, waiters, chefs, retail clerks, truck drivers, cab drivers, sanitation workers, city and county road workers, arborists and building maintenance workers, postal workers, UPS and FEDEX drivers, bakers, shoemakers, dental hygienists, butchers, pilots, stewardesses, soldiers including most officers, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, x-ray technicians, barbers, hair dressers and lifeguards. And too many others to mention.

I am not sure that anyone wants to envy the incomes of doctors, given the level of skill and the years of education and the dedication (even among those who are totally disinterested) and the overwhelming number of totally focused hours per week necessary to simply do the job, let alone excel among other physicians or surgeons. And the same goes for dentists. Some dedication, intelligence and learned skill should be rewarded at the market price, even if that price is far beyond average income rates. So we can exclude this class, even though they do clearly fall into the top 1%.

So who is left to be among the top 1%. Corporate executives. The average income among CEOs of health insurance companies is $14,000,000 per year. Why should that not be? The question becomes, first of all, are they in fact worth 400 times more than the average worker? Does the CEO of a health insurance company contribute 400 times the profitability of the company than the average worker?

If the average worker makes, let’s say $45,000 per year, then a standard amount that he or she should generate for the company would be about $225,000. If the average CEO makes the same percentage contribution, then he or she should personally be generating sales of $5.6 billion. That isn’t happening. Not even remotely close. So the CEO of the health insurance company should be making $1,125,000, not $14 million.

You may say that $1.1 million is a lot of money, but that is what is fair compared to the income of the average worker, assuming they both contribute to profitability. So what would happen to the other $13 million if the CEO were correctly compensated? That money would go to stockholders, would help grow the business, could pay taxes so that local communities and national government would be more solvent, and could go to the pensions or 401Ks of employees to make their retirements less perilous.

Right now it goes into the pockets of the CEOs of health care companies who not only make up one of the largest categories of the “1%” but do absolutely nothing to find ways to insure the 50 million who have no health care. They become richer, give more to the Republican Party legislators who will work to keep them in that top one percent, spend more on personal luxury items and can afford to send their children to the best schools so that it further expands the generational continuance of the country’s income imbalance.

The last time we had such an imbalance in the income of the people was in 1928-1929 just before the Stock Market Crash of October 1929. Very soon after, unemployment rates went to 25% and many of those on Wall Street and most investors who had been speculating, were broke. Hoover tried traditional methods but, after nothing improved in 1930, 1931 and 1932…about the same time as we have been waiting…they elected Franklin Roosevelt who took over in March of 1933.

By 1937 he had dropped the unemployment rolls to 14% from 25% and was on his way to an acceptable, for those days, 8-9%. But in 1937 the conservatives in both political parties encouraged him to make large cuts in government spending, which he did. The result was a dramatic and sudden increase in unemployment from around 14% to 19% and climbing. As a result of that, in 1938 Congress once again expanded the jobs programs and unemployment dropped back to pre-austerity 1937 levels and continued to go down right up until World War II.

After the war, as a result of a world economic condition favorable to the United States and tax and labor policies which encrouaged production, domestic spending and job growth, unemployment fell to less than 5% for long periods of time, only jumping over 5% in the 1960s. In the Eisenhower era, in the era of “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” the tax rate on incomes over $400,000 was 92%, then 91%.

So in 1954, let’s say, if you made $400,000, anything over that amount would be taxed at 91%. During that time, however, whatever you made in the U.S. was sure to sell to someone, because the unemployment rate was under 5%, so almost everyone had a job and 32% of those jobs were union jobs. That meant that people had inexpensive health care, a retirement program and very often low-cost union loans for their brighter children to go to college. So they could go out and buy things with their after-tax incomes.

It was not until 1964, the first year of the Johnson administration that the income tax rates on these same people dropped to 70%. But it is interesting that, even with a war that was heating up and lower tax rates, unemployment had begun to climb a little…not by today’s standards…to over 5%. It should also be noted that there has been a corresponding increase in unemployment periods as union jobs have gone away.

It is also no coincidence that incomes have stayed flat or gone down, while the incomes of the top 1% have gone through the roof…over 280% since 1980! The top 1%, or roughly 11 million households out of 300 million take home one quarter of the country’s income. This same group owns two-thirds of all corporate equities and that figure is climbing even during this second great Depression.

The President offered a simple plan. His idea was to tax not the top one percent, but those earning over $1,000,000 per year ($83,333 per month) a mere .2% of their incomes. Not 2% but .2%. The idea was to save 400,000 jobs of cops, firemen, nurses, teachers all over the country that will otherwise be laid off. The Republicans refused.

In our country’s greatest time of need since the 1930s, the Republicans, the Neocon-Fascist Republicans, voted down a simple plan to keep 400,000 jobs that will now be lost. That is what Occupy America is all about. It is a group question to the top one percent about their greed. The question is simply: why?

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