No Mr. Boehner, America is Not ‘Broke’

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

Feb 15, 2011 – Once again on the Sunday news shows, Republican Leader John Boehner declared that "America is broke" — his premise for why we "can’t afford" important investments that are critical to America’s future.

In fact, of course, America is far from "broke". It is the largest economy in the world. After collapsing as a result of the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks — and Republican economic policies in late 2008 — the economy has, in fact, grown for six consecutive quarters. The stock market has almost doubled since the crash — regaining most of its value. Corporate profits are soaring. And American corporations are now sitting on close to two trillion dollars in cash.

What’s more, we still have the same highly-skilled, productive labor force and the same stock of plants and equipment that we did before the financial meltdown — the same ability to create the goods and services that are the real measures of economic wealth.

The problem isn’t that America is "broke." The problem is that economic growth is not being shared with most Americans. The problem is that the very rich are wealthier than ever and everyone else is falling behind. Not only does that mean that the massive store of wealth that we create today is not widely shared. It also means that — taken together — we have less wealth as a nation because so many Americans who could be creating goods and services are unemployed, creating nothing.

Continue reading If the Banksters Are Worried About Deficits, Let Them Close up the Gap →

[Note from Editor: With the caveat that people vote BOTH on facts and emotions, this is a fairly good analysis on the topic]

5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda

Screws Tea Party Supporters

By Adele M. Stan

AlterNet,September 4, 2010

If people could be counted on to vote in their own best interests, there would be no Tea Party movement, for if the economic agenda embraced by Tea Partiers — a vastly pro-corporation, government-killing plan — Tea Partiers would find themselves among the people most hurt by it.

To hear Tea Party activists tell it, they seek to save future generations from the crushing demands of big government. Yet the agenda they advocate, dictated by the big-money players behind the muscular interest groups that keep the movement growing, will likely render the Tea Partiers themselves the economically squeezed subjects of a corporate state, one in which the elderly will be left to scrounge for crumbs, small businesses will be crushed by lack of capital, and their own ground-level online organizing supplanted by the networks built by giant, corporate-funded astroturf groups.

As George Lakoff and Drew Westen remind us, people don’t vote on the facts: they vote on emotion, according to Westen, and their notion of morality, according to Lakoff. The resentment of Tea Partiers toward liberals, East Coast elites, the poor and people who don’t look like them has been effectively marshaled in service of a “free market” ideology cleverly packaged as “freedom.” Never mind that free markets are anything but free for ordinary people. The packaging strikes the necessary emotional and moral chords: Free markets = freedom = liberty = endowed by the Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence by the founders. It’s the perfect exploitation of the worldview of conservative middle-class white people — all in the service of enriching the super-rich at the expense of their unwitting, patriotic ground troops.

Continue reading Tea Party: Pawns in the Bankster Game →