Flat Wages or Increased Spending

On Wednesday November 24 the government released the finding which said Americans earned more and spent more in the month of October.

Of course Americans spent more, the price of everything constantly goes up.The price of gas has risen and according to the oil companies it is due to increased demand. A local news station reported the price of a Thanksgiving dinner is up from last year and a local grocery store owned by a company in the Netherlands reported increased profits due to more people shopping. Ha, profits are up because the price of food goes up weekly. Is that due to increased demand as well?

Electricity and heating is on the rise not to mention the impending health insurance hikes in January. Added all together, we continually make less as prices rise.

So who’s making more? From an article by Robert Reich -”The top one percent of Americans, by income, is now taking home almost a quarter of all income and accounting for forty percent of all wealth”. And in early 2010 JP Morgan paid out $27 billion in bonuses to executives, traders and “valued” employees.

People at the top are making more but for the rest of us, corporations have been slashing benefits and wages since the 1980’s. Robert Reich states: “With hefty campaign contributions, and platoons of lobbyists and public relations flacks, the rich helped push through legal changes that enabled them to accumulate even more income and wealth-including tacit permission to bust unions, slash corporate payrolls, and reduce benefits…”

In his book ‘Aftershock” Robert Reich sums it up: “The fundamental problem is that Americans no longer have the purchasing power to buy what the US economy is capable of producing. The reason is that a larger and larger portion of total income has been going to the top.”

Spending has increased at the top while requests from food pantries has increased at the bottom; with one out of four children living in a household which runs out of food.

Poverty has increased and wages remain flat, so who are they kidding saying Americans earned more and spent more?

Certainty for the Few

Representative John Boehner wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent to reduce uncertainty in America saying, “ you can't invest when you don't know what the rules are, when you don't know what the tax rates are going to be next year. And that's why making these permanent would be the most important thing we could do to create jobs in the country.”

While it is admirable that Representative Boehner wants to reduce uncertainty, how many millions of Americans are facing uncertainty when it comes to keeping their homes, their pensions, or are facing the uncertainty of staying alive in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Is Representative Boehner concerned about relieving their uncertainty? Let’s face it, how many Americans make over $200,000 per year? It certainly isn’t the majority, it’s the minority.

A retired member of Congress leaves his job in government and then goes to work as a lobbyist for a bank or corporation with the starting salary of $500,000, and that’s on the low end. How is cutting this person’s taxes going to create jobs?

Since the taxes were enacted in 2001 and over eight million jobs have been lost, how is keeping the tax cuts permanent going to create more jobs? If those tax cuts worked, we’d have those jobs now.

The founders understood a good credit system is necessary to promote prosperity. Our credit system is broken, tilting towards growth for banks only, who have trillions parked at the federal reserve earning interest while refusing to lend. Tax cuts aren’t going to make them lend this money to create jobs.

Reducing uncertainty is a luxury many of us won’t be afforded, but one thing is for certain, those who are able to donate large sums of money end up with the rules in their favor; like tax cuts for lobbyists, politicians and the banking billionaires who pay them.　

Reaping Obamacare Rewards

Republican leader John Boehner said they have to repeal the health care bill or else it’ll bankrupt the country. Meanwhile, on November 3^rd, the Federal Reserve announced they’re going to print 600 billion dollars to buy US Treasury Bonds. They’re doing this to entice banks to lend money by making interest on US Treasuries come down, so investors won’t buy them so much. They call this “quantitative easing”.

The fed stated they are doing this to spur the economy and create jobs. In reality, it helps the banks (the same ones who brought us this depression), more than it helps the economy.

Understand, we owe interest on every dollar the federal reserve, a bank, prints. Therefore, we now owe the interest on 600 billion more dollars. How much debt will these interest payments leave to future generations?

The fed announced this back door bailout the day after the elections; which Republicans won by saying “no more bailouts”. Yeah, right.

The AP reports “stocks indexes reached new highs a day after the Federal Reserve announced a $600 billion plan to boost the economy“, “investors like gridlock”, and a “stalemate between the White House and the new Congress will mean less regulation of business.”

With no one watching, self inflicted gridlock means banks will continue to reap unfettered profits at our expense by printing money, and insurance companies will continue to monopolize health care while raising premiums.

By focusing on repealing Obamacare along with Mitch McConnell’s pledge to insure Obama is a one term president, they’re only focusing on the easy targets, they’re not focusing on tough targets like banks who are ”too big to fail“, or insurance monopolies.

Besides, it’s not like the president’s health bill or the financial bills did anything to address real issues, they only took out some of the most reprehensible business practices, like denying sick kids insurance or reaching a benefit maximum. New credit card laws prevent only a few banking abuses while leaving mechanisms in place to guarantee another recession/depression.

Catchy campaign slogans ring hollow when compared to the reality that in one year banks contributed 88 million to Democrats and 67 million to Republicans. Obamacare isn’t the only monster in the closet.

Undue Influence

Political contenders, tea partiers and free market enthusiasts are echoing what a banker said in the 1939 movie “Stagecoach”. The banker complained that the government wanted to examine his books and said rather than examine his books the government should reduce the deficit and cut taxes.

Back then, at least the government had the guts to examine the books of the banks; now, we have stress tests administered by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a loyal friend to the banks. The results were predictable, they all passed with flying colors and are on sound footing.

What they should be examining is how the banks hijacked our economy by creating this new financial industry engineered by Wall Street and founded on sub prime loans. Mathematical wizards devised complex equations to over value our homes, then transferred the trillions in these over valuations into the hands of the few mega banks. (Which we have due to the banking deregulation of the seventies, which led to the public bail out of the Savings and Loans in the ‘80’s which then led to banks too big to fail, and another tax payer bailout).

The government has been cutting taxes on the wealthy for decades, and we see where it’s gotten us; trillion dollar deficits. According to Robert Reich, the government “halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70 to 90 percent to 25 to 39 percent; allowed many of the nation‘s rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax; and shrank inheritance taxes that affected only the topmost 1.5 percent.” Imagine, paying only 15 percent on profits made in the government sanctioned and bank hidden derivatives market, while the pay of common workers is reported to the government and taxed at over 30 percent.

Anyone who is against keeping the Bush tax cuts is called a socialist. Yet while the sub prime loan market was exploding, bankers were denying reality by insisting prices of houses would never come down, or if they did, they wouldn’t come down across the country all at once. Contrary to their idealistic free market beliefs, housing prices did fall and when they did it brought us this ongoing Recession.

We need a return to the realism of Marriner Eccles, former federal reserve Chairman from 1934 to 1948, who said in the 1920’s, that people with the concentrated wealth had “great economic power” and “ had an undue influence in the making of the rules of the economic game.”

This concentrated wealth and the “undue influence” it buys, caused the Great Depression. Concentrated wealth and its “undue influence” has once again caused financial catastrophe for many Americans. And just like the first time, it will be years before we get out of it.

Reforming the Entitlement Mentality

Tea Party candidates say we need entitlement reform. We need reform alright, but sadly, there isn’t much agreement on which ones should be addressed.

For instance, banks are now entitled to be bailed out. In March 2009 Paul Volcker said, “What all this amounts to is an unintended and unanticipated extension of the official “safety net”…the obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted. Ultimately, the possibility of further crises-even greater crises-will increase.”

There’s not much Tea Party coverage of this entitlement danger, but when it’s a social safety net like Social Security, that’s an entitlement they say we just can’t afford.

In 2009, after the tax payer bailed them out, Goldman Sachs set aside 14 billion in bonuses for their employees, which works out to 750,000 per employee. Not only are they entitled to tax payer bonuses, the banks don’t even think they should pay taxes on any of it.

In his review on the book Casualty Gap, about poorer and less educated citizens being more likely to die in America’s wars, former West Point instructor Andrew Bacevich, said, “…the powerful are determined to preserve arrangements that serve their own interests. Those who enjoy these privileges and the politicians who do their bidding-are determined to retain them.” And “…for the rich and well connected, inequality translates into privilege“. Isn’t privileged synonymous with entitled?

When it comes to this year’s campaigning, the heated rhetoric insists it’s Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid bankrupting the country, not a word about the trillions in entitlements we’re giving to Wall Street bankers and war machines.

Dislike for one another is gaining momentum, and it’s being used as a political platform for the privileged to maintain their entitlements, while the rest of us lose entitlements, like dignity in old age.

Net Control

The age of hypocrisy is alive and well. On the issue of net neutrality, Tea Party idealist Ben Cunningham of the Tennessee Tax Revolt said:
“it’s ideological: individual decisions freely made by consumers and vendors will provide the best regulation of the internet. Letting the FTC set rules will only bring out armies of lobbyists seeking to influence policy.”

This is the same hands off policy the government had towards the banks, which brought us the worldwide recession. Federal oversight and regulation of banks was bad, we were told, the markets could regulate themselves said Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

After the damage was done and the market crashed, the former Fed champion of deregulation admitted he had been mistaken in thinking markets could or would regulate themselves. Only a banker has the luxury of twenty-twenty hindsight without any repercussions.

And, as if on cue, here’s a supposed grass roots enthusiast telling us we should repeat the same mistake with giant Telecommunication companies.

Without rules, a few corporations will gain too much power, and in turn will control information on the web. If one wanted to look up the impact of the BP oil disaster, would it lead to a corporate propaganda site, or would it lead to a local site showing the devastation up close and personal?

If we don’t protect net neutrality, we’ll end up with covert corporate control as opposed to the overt type of control like we see in communist China.

At this very moment “armies of lobbyists” are working against net neutrality and “seeking to influence policy”. We are a nation of laws for a reason, under the right circumstances and combined with governmental hands off policies, human nature cannot and will not regulate itself. This is a truism even a former banker now admits.

We've been Warned

There is much uproar currently in the news over the president’s religion. Believe it or not, there was actually a time in this country when it was considered rude and socially unacceptable to ask which religion someone belonged to. That information is your personal business and nobody else’s.

Thomas Jefferson said “Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our God alone. I inquire after no man's, and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend’s or our foe's, are exactly the right“.

Not so today where too many bombard us with their brand of religion, like Glenn Beck, who said during his speech on the Washington Mall “it’s not about politics, it’s about God.” Glenn Beck started out as a radio stunt man. Now he’s continuing his antics by using religion as a prop to convince the easily swayed citizen that Glenn’s a ‘shepherd of the people‘, all in his zealous pursuit to merge his brand of religion with politics.

James Madison reminded us what happens when religious and civil power were entwined “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution”. Madison knew that one day the country would confront “the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government.”

That day is now here. The corporations are the leaders, the journalists and politicians are their minions, and the rest of us are the sheep being fleeced by false gods in the name of salvation. It's so ironic that the Founding Fathers predicted this and warned us all, long ago, of the extreme danger of mixing politics with religion.