Forum Post: We are warm blooded, we are legion (Truth & Reason from P2News)
Posted 11 years ago on Dec. 3, 2012, 11:17 a.m. EST by WSmith
(2698)
from Cornelius, OR
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
From: http://www.prairie2.com/
Late Sunday, US time
Far East stocks are up on news that China's economy is stabilizing. This positive activity is viewed in those markets as being 'capped' by the US budget impasse.
The so-called 'world' market is dependent on what the US does or doesn't do. The fact is that China is a oligarchy based on the Communist Party. They don't care what the US does other than what damage the US can do to them. China is not a slave to the illusions that the West chooses to live by. This doesn't predict an outcome over the long term, only a sign post to read.
Ha ha ha ha ha, roll on the floor
George Stephanopoulos came very close to making Timothy Geithner burst into laughter on network TV Sunday morning by asking him about the possibility that Obama would replace him with Wall Street banker Jamie Diamon. After Wall Street spent hundreds of millions to put Romney into the Presidency, Obama will put the head pirate into the Treasury Department? Ha ha ha ha ha....
George also asked if Senator McConnell actually laughed out loud when Geithner presented the President's tax plan. Geithner's response suggested that the Republicans are on the ropes and ready to compromise. In fact we should not 'compromise' with the people who have been stealing out wealth. Success will require having enough Americans aware of who the bad guys really are. Keep putting the truth out there. We will win, if we don't give up.
Cleaning up after the Trolls
A new Troll came through today, so I got out the shovel and wheelbarrow and waded in: [Sound familiar?]
"The more the govt. taxes, the more it spends. ... starve the out of control beast." on We are warm blooded, we are legion Except that the Federal Government is the smallest its been since 1952. The Billionaires want it small enough that they can kill it, then they will be the government, and the peasants will learn what the lash can teach them.
"'China graduates twice as many engineering students every year as we do.' So why does China steal our technology if this is true?" on The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them No capitalist re-invents the wheel, or develops technology that he can steal from its rightful owner. You righties would call him a fool to do otherwise.
"Hoping the fiscal cliff starts on Jan. 1 .. have lots of cash to buy as others panic and run for the hills. .. Repeat of 2008-09, ... buy low, sell high." on The fiscal gentle slope Only a rightwinger would wish for catastrophe as a business opportunity. This dovetails with their belief that creating more poor people will benefit them. The only possibility of their being another 'bank panic' as in 2008 (Bush) would be from the collapse of the 'too big fail' banks again. This is a real possibility, but not from the Fiscal Bunny Slope.
"I say get rid of Walmart and all overseas merchandise. Made in America for all Your cheap underwear from Indonesia will now cost 5 times as much when made in USA. ... Sweet." on The Real Takers I guess he's trying to be sarcastic with this. Small problem, the cost of labor is only in the single digits in any manufactured product. If you think about it, it can't be more than that. Who would pay for everything else in the retail price of a product? It was never about making it cheaper, or making more money. They were doing incredibly well making products here. It's about destroying the middle class, capturing all the wealth for a handful of people, and consolidating absolute power for them. And that doesn't mean you, rightwing troll. If we liberals don't prevail, in the end you won't own your underwear, it will belong to your master.
"'The right-wing Elf of the Senate, John McCain, came out of his tree on Fox Sunday' ... I saw that lefty cockroach Harry Reid right behind him." on Don't eat his cookies I don't know how he even thinks this makes any sense.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
We are warm blooded, we are legion
Some people on the left are alarmed that Treasury Sec Timothy Geithner is leading negotiations to deal with the Fiscal Cliff (or the Fiscal Bunny Slope) being held between the Obama Adm and the Congress. Okay, he wouldn't be my pick, but he does have the expertise and the staff to deal with it.
Let's clear up a couple of things, Geithner never worked for a Wall Street bank. He was Governor of the NY Fed, which is largely responsible for riding herd on the the Wall Street banks, but that business was completely out of control before he got the job.
Now this doesn't prove anything one way or another, but Geithner was simultaneously on the board of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). It was this body that pulled the plug on the Wall Street banks transferring money between banks in 2008 over their involvement in the selling of a quadrillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000,000) worth of un-backed derivatives. This effectively froze the US banking system overnight. John McCain was caught completely flat footed by this move. He said when reporters asked him about the imminent end of Western Civilization, "the fundamentals of the economy are sound". Obama was not caught off guard, even though Obama has no experience or training in banking or economics. He seemed completely comfortable talking about it, just like he had been briefed. He did make Geithner Sec of the Treasury, typically a plum appointment given to an ally.
Okay, even if Geithner can't be trusted, Obama's Chief of Staff Jack Lew is himself an economist with experience in banking. He's also worked at the State Department, the Council of Foriegn Relations, Office of Management and Budget, and several other jobs that suggest that he's nobody's fool. He is also expected to replace Geithner in Obama's second term.
Anything that happens over the budget negotiations will be with Obama's full understanding. Even if Obama "gives in" to Republican demands for cuts, it's the timing you need to look at. If the 'cuts' are put in far down the road, they are like no cuts at all. Anything done now can be undone by any future Congress, good or bad. Since the Republicans are just a bunch of dinosaurs waving their tiny arms in the air as the asteroid approaches, we liberal mammals need not panic. If we stick together we will prevail.
at Thursday, November 29, 2012
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them
"The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them", normally attributed to Lenin, maybe he said it, maybe not. However, the founder of the Koch dynasty made his fortune selling American oil technology to Stalin, and that allowed him to win WWII.
Prat & Whitney Inc. has admitted selling software to the People's Republic of China that allowed them to develop the the Z-10 Attack Helicopter. Equal to if not superior to American helicopters it advances China into the 21st century in a big way. Not that it gives China a head to head advantage over America, it's really just an example of American capitalists selling our only edge to China. Can you say 'treason'. Probably not, since you didn't hear it on the corporate news channels.
Let's be clear, this sort of super helicopter is the 'edge' that turns tank battles, or suppresses the rebellion that a repressive regime wants to put down. More disturbing is the fact that China was actually able to build them at all. It's not just propaganda, they've been demonstrating them in public. A helicopter that can do a four point roll at combat speed while carrying more ordinance than an F-18 is nothing to trifle with.
It shouldn't be any surprise, China graduates twice as many engineering students every year as we do. When you say one in a million, with four times our population, China knows how to use that to their advantage. The US doesn't make any real effort to recruit 'the best and the brightest'. China does this to perfection. In the US, math wiz students are recruited to develop algorithms that 'beat' the stock market. In China they are developing the next generation... of well, everything. Thirty years ago they were building steam locomotives, now they put people into space with ease. They are capable of shooting down our spy satellites, they can sink our aircraft carriers from 5000 miles away. They have more and better nukes than we have, and they are concealed them in a vast underground system we know little about.
Why are we in this position? Republicans believed in their arrogance that they would always be superior to the non-whites. They thought they were taking advantage of the little yellow people by selling the egg-head stuff they couldn't possibly understand. In fact they were just kidding themselves. In an effort to consolidate power away from the Middle Class, they gave it all to China. Is this position hopeless? With the defeat of Republicans in this election, it is isn't insurmountable. That doesn't mean the road ahead will be easy, it just means we have a chance. www.prairie2.com
Why Republicans Became Anti-Tax Extremists
How did the GOP become so unreasonable on the issue? Here's a hint: Grover Norquist had nothing to do with it
December 3, 2012 |
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Claire McCaskill pointed outthat she’d met Grover Norquist for the first time backstage, then asked a pretty good question: “Who is he?”
Her point is that Norquist’s visibility and reputation dramatically exceeds his actual political clout. It’s understandable how this has happened. Republicans have evolved over the past three decades into a staunchly anti-tax party, and Norquist is a colorful and endlessly quotable symbol of this absolutism – one who happens to live and work in close proximity to much of the national political press corps. So he gets an awful lot of face time on television and it can sometimes seem as if he and his anti-tax pledge are the reason no Republican member of Congress has voted for a tax hike in over two decades.
But, as Tim Noah wrote last week, Norquist’s actual power in Washington and within the GOP is illusory. In terms of stature and public prominence, he’s been a major beneficiary of the party’s opposition to tax increases – but he hasn’t been the driving force behind it. The real story of the GOP’s modern evolution on taxes played out in several stages, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
The first key moment was the advent in the late ’70s of supply-side economics, the theory that minimizing income, corporate and investment taxes would result in perpetual economic growth that would benefit everyone. It was a fringe idea at first, championed by economist Arthur Laffer and a handful of Republican members of Congress, most notably Jack Kemp. At the time, the GOP was locked in something of a civil war, between the moderate old guard and a rising New Right. In the 1976 primaries, Ronald Reagan had nearly led the conservative wing to victory over President Gerald Ford, and in the run-up to his 1980 campaign, Reagan decided to embrace supply-side as one of his major platform planks, cementing it as a conservative principle. In his first year in office, Reagan signed a set of sweeping tax cuts into law, and supply-side became mainstream.
Reagan, it’s true, went on to approve a number of tax increases over the course of his presidency, but it’s the ’81 tax cuts (along with tax reform in 1986, which brought the top marginal rate – which had been at 70 percent when he took office – all the way down to 28 percent) that conservatives tend to remember. The story of the Reagan years, as they came to tell it, was simple: He inherited a stalled economy, slashed taxes, and unleashed record-shattering economic growth. (Never mind that there wereother reasons for the sudden surge in growth that began halfway through Reagan’s first term.)
The next key moment came in 1988, when Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, sought to succeed him. Bush had been with the old moderate wing a decade earlier, and had ridiculed Reagan’s supply-side prescription as “voodoo economics” during the 1980 primaries. To make peace with the moderates, Reagan had put Bush on his ticket that fall, but Bush recognized that Reagan’s wing had won the war. He spent his eight years as V.P. reinventing himself as a conservative true believer, and sought to extinguish any remaining doubts by including in his 1988 convention acceptance speech this emphatic vow:
The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no. And they’ll push, and I’ll say no. And they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
It was the most memorable line of the 1988 campaign, but the problem was that Bush didn’t actually mean it. He was still at heart an Eisenhower Republican. And so, confronted with the massive deficits Reagan had left over, Bush put together a deal with Democratic congressional leaders in 1990 to raise taxes. Actually, Republicans were in on it too – at least at first. At the time, the top Republican in the Senate (Bob Dole) and the top Republican in the House (Bob Michel) were also Eisenhower-types who’d never been comfortable with supply-side. So they joined with Bush, and the expectation was that most of the party would fall in line too. Which brings us to the third key moment in the GOP’s evolution: the ’90 revolt.
It was led by Newt Gingrich, the second-ranking House Republican. He had designs on Michel’s job, and saw the tax deal as the perfect opportunity to make his move. Declaring it a sellout of conservative principles that would wreck the economy, Gingrich declared his opposition to the plan and urged Republicans to join him. Most of them did – enough to deliver Bush a humiliating defeat when the package first came to the House floor, but not quite enough to sink the revised version that emerged a few weeks later. Still, Gingrich had made his point: Most of the party was with him, not Bush.
Two years later, Gingrich and every other Republican who’d savaged the ’90 deal got to claim vindication, too, when Bush was defeated for reelection. In the story they told, Bush’s tax hike had caused the early ‘90s recession, thereby guaranteeing his loss at the polls. In reality, the recession had already begun when the tax deal was struck, and it actually ended months after it was implemented. But when voters went to the polls in the fall of ’92, most didn’t feel like the economy was recovering. Never mind all of that, though; the takeaway for conservatives from ’92 was this: Not only is raising taxes a violation of our values – it’s also bad politics. This was the fourth key moment.
And it flowed neatly into the fifth, which took place during the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Clinton had campaigned on a pledge to raise taxes on high incomes, arguing that the affluent had disproportionately benefited from the prosperity of the ‘80s and that the middle class had been left behind. As president, he followed through, pushing for the creation of new 36 and 39.6 tax brackets for high-income earners. He got his way, but without a single Republican vote. The 1993 budget passed the House by the barest margin – 218-216 – and made it through the Senate on the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Al Gore. Republicans guaranteed that it would ruin the fragile recovery, plunge the country into a new recession, cost millions of jobs, and fail to reduce the deficit. Because of the experience of 1990, even normally pragmatic members of the party had no wiggle room; anti-tax absolutism had become orthodoxy.
Of course, none of the dire predictions about Clinton’s budget panned out. As it happened, the rest of the decade was marked by declining unemployment and strong growth. And, thanks to the combined effects of Clinton and Bush tax hikes, this translated into a revenue windfall, resulting in budget surpluses in the final years of Clinton’s second term. But Republicans never really grappled with this, preferring to create a revised history that credited the strong economy to the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994 and to Clinton’s willingness to sign a capital gains tax cut in 1997. Nor was there much pressure on them to grapple with reality. Thanks to the surpluses of the late ‘90s, it was easy for George W. Bush to run in 2000 on a call for deep tax cuts.
Clear through the Bush years and Barack Obama’s first term, the GOP’s posture on taxes remained unchanged. But in the wake of his reelection, Obama now has considerable leverage to force Republicans to sign off on rate increase of some sort. It’s still far from clear they will, but some of them have beenmaking noises recently that no one in the party has made for more than two decades. If Republicans do end up voting to increase tax rates, it will obviously be a big deal. But it won’t represent a failure on Grover Norquist’s party any more than the anti-tax absolutism of the last 22 years has represented a success on his p
Does anybody still not get it? What they want is the End Of Democracy! Does anybody not see that their every effort is to bankrupt government, so that they can Take Over America, not just it's wealth but its institutions? These people are traitors. Plain and simple traitors!
"Why are we in this position? Republicans believed in their arrogance that they would always be superior to the non-whites. They thought they were taking advantage of the little yellow people by selling the egg-head stuff they couldn't possibly understand. In fact they were just kidding themselves. In an effort to consolidate power away from the Middle Class, they gave it all to China. Is this position hopeless? With the defeat of Republicans in this election, it is isn't insurmountable. That doesn't mean the road ahead will be easy, it just means we have a chance." www.prairie2.com
We recognize our enemy, despite the persistent smokescreening of a few, NOW LET'S FIGHT!!
Unite and Win!
Watch: Teacher Infiltrates ALEC Education Meeting, Confronts Members
Education activist Sabrina Joy Stevens, a former teacher in the Denver school system, tells right-wing, would-be policymakers how their agenda is destructive to education.
December 3, 2012 |
At the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C., on Friday, December 1, members of the Education Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council got an earful when education activist Sabrina Joy Stevens infiltrated their closed-door meeting to confront the ALEC members on their own turf.
This two-minute video is well worth watching, especially for the part where one of the task force members mansplains to Stevens that she doesn't understand how ALEC really works. Why, the task force doesn't set policy, he says, implying that Stevens had chosen the wrong target.
In reality, ALEC's task forces draft policy recommendations that are taken up by the national body.
Stevens wrote on her YouTube posting:
On November 30, 2012, I had the rare and deeply disturbing experience of witnessing part of the American Legislative Exchange Council's Education Task Force meeting: a closed-door policy-shaping session open only to the state legislators who help to pass them, the corporate lobbyists who pay big money to shape and sponsor them-- and scrappy activists like me, who are no longer willing to cede our policy-making processes to unaccountable, undemocratic organizations who hide from the people their decisions ultimately affect. Here's me speaking from my heart as a teacher driven from the classroom into activism by destructive policies like theirs.
Stevens formerly worked as a teacher in Denver, Colo., and in another capacity with students in Philidelphia, Penn. She took her ALEC mission on as a "rogue operation" she says, wholly on her own. She is currently employed by the American Federation of Teachers.
You can follow her on Twitter: @TeacherSabrina
Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington correspondent. She co-edited, with Don Hazen, the AlterNet book, Dangerous Brew: Exposing the Tea Party's Agenda to Take Over America. Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/addiestan . Send tips to: adele@alternet.org
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/watch-teacher-infiltrates-alec-education-meeting-confronts-members
Alec meeting?
Sounds like a place that could use a MIC check...........................:)
Yuh thinks?
Catch Bill Moyers? Was it this reun or was there a new one:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/27/the_united_states_of_alec_bill
I'll watch this later............:) Got some stuff to do.
Perhaps we need a consolidated ALEC information thread?
We sort of let ALEC off the chain when the election took hold. They, ALEC, went States!!!!! How fucked were are! How dry we are! How ALECed we are!!!
Alec has always done it's dirty work in the States.
It's a truly insidious organization.
Founded by an "evil" human being, one Paul Weyrich.
Between ALEC and Grover Norquist, isn't there a conflict???
As a lobbyist, Norquist is in agreement with ALEC.
http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
We still have a plethora of RepubliCon/1% damage to clean up. Meanwhile they are going after everything they can think of to sabotage us.
Internet: http://act.aflcio.org/c/18/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=5157&tag=em20121203
ALEC will be busy in all of our neighborhoods and all of our lives.
We have to be, too, then.
A conflict of interest that Cons honor their allegiance to G(poopyhead)N and ALEC over the Constitution and Country!!
There are many HELOC loans with first 10 years interest only payments that are going to start coming due this year and next.
Remember these people were sitting on homes worth 500,000 that are now worth half of that and once they have to start paying back interest AND principle, their will be another run of foreclosed homes.
Excellent post. Funny & informative.
We must support him!!!
I do. Wholeheartedly.
You are wise.
Disregard the trolls.
I was havin fun. They appear to have retreated.
Not in my NEWLY CENSORED neck of the woods!!!!! Prog-talk snuffing is big sports!!
Have they been harassing you? Have you been censored?
Progressive Radio has been censored since the election. Harassing, Yes, on other venues.
RW petty vindictive BS and a problem with ownership, Clear Channel, Bain, Fox.
Here, have not... in a while.
YesI remember now. I signed that petition.
Good luck boss.
Thx