Taxing the rich can pay for everything

In this post at Working-class Perspectives, the blog of of the Center for Working-class Studies at Youngstown state Universtiy, author Jack Metzgar demonstrates how taxing the rich can pay for everything.

Taxing Only the Rich CAN Pay for Everything

It’s time for everybody who wants to say anything about “Obamacare” and taxes to tell the rest of us their income class. I live in one of the 13.5 million households with a six-figure income between $100,000 and $200,000. I could afford to give back the annual $2,500 tax cut George Bush gave me in 2001 and 2003, but our current president has pledged that he won’t allow my taxes to increase by a single dime.

I thought this was foolish and unfair when candidate Obama promised it, but now I understand why he put himself in this trick box. My income class serves as a sort of buffer zone to protect the working class from being attacked with taxes on their health insurance and soda pop. The only way to ever have a discussion about what to do about our rapidly growing income inequality is to leave us, the vast majority of middle-class professionals, harmless.

Read the whole post here...

Yoo's argument points out systemic arrogance and anti-democratic ideology Bush admin.

by Joel Wendland

In defending himself from a recent federal report that sharply criticized as faulty his legal justification for a massive and secret Bush administration domestic spying and data mining program, ostensibly under the guise of stopping terrorism, John Yoo, a former Bush admin. lawyer wrote this in the Wall Street Journal today: "Our Constitution created a presidency whose function is to protect the nation from attack."

This is the upshot of his argument? Has Yoo read the Constitution? The oath the president is required to take before entering office, which is written into the Constitution, says this:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

This oath says nothing about protecting the nation from attack.

It states quite clearly that the president must uphold the Constitution, even those messy amendments and articles that create protections against unreasonable search and seizure and equal protection under the law and the co-equal branches of government the Bush administration, under the patently amateurish legal advice of Yoo, found so dispensable.

I fell out of my chair when I read this one – laughing

From Raw Story:

The divisions taking hold among Republicans are becoming more severe as the party prepares to accuse its outgoing president of embracing "socialism."

The slur that conservatives were so fond of lobbing at Barack Obama during the presidential campaign is now being directed toward President Bush and GOP lawmakers who supported federal bailouts of the banking and auto industries.

At its meeting next month, the Republican National Committee is set to vote on a resolution formally opposing the bailouts, accusing Bush of helping nationalize the banks and taking "another dangerous step closer toward socialism," the Washington Times reports Tuesday.

Read the whole story here...

John McCain's "straight talk": I am going to kill more jobs than Bush

Stop the Yucca Mountain Radioactive Waste Dump

by Joel Wendland

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is in a hurry. This month that department filed a license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to build and use the proposed nuclear dump site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The DOE dumped something like 30 million documents on the NRC and insisted on an expedited process, in order to limit public scrutiny of the $70 billion project and to get it done before George W. Bush leaves office.

The problem is the DOE has not adequately explained a number of key safety problems and political issues. According to Beyond Nuclear, an organization that advocates alternatives to nuclear weapons and unsafe nuclear energy, the DOE has yet to present the NRC with proposals on "a final repository design; final national transport plan; final design for the 'Transport, Aging, and Disposal' canister in which the waste would be 'permanently' sealed; final EPA regulations on radiation releases; and meaningful treatment of Western Shoshone Indian land rights at Yucca under the 'peace and friendship' Treaty of Ruby Valley signed by the U.S. government in 1863."

In short, they haven't explained how they are going to safely move dangerous nuclear waste through your town and prevent accidents or leaks and how the waste will be stored safely (permanently) at Yucca Mountain and avoid the hazards caused by earthquakes or other geological events at the mountain.

Most importantly, the DOE plan will dump radioactive waste on or near land belong to the Western Shoshone nation. This act would be another in a long, sad history of the relations between the U.S. government and Indian nations.

To speak up on this, go to Senator Harry Reid's "Petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to Reject the License Application for a Nuclear Waste Dump at Yucca Mountain." Sign and circulate.

Bush's "Energy Policy": Bring Big Texas Oil to the Arctic

by Norman Markowitz

There are a few truisms, the first spanning all history, the second history in the capitalist mode of production. The first is that reactionaries learn nothing and forget nothing and continue to do the same thing over and over again, blaming each failure on internal or external scapegoats or specific mistakes in implementation. The second is that capitalists will seize upon any crisis or disaster of their making to profit from that disaster, even if it means making the situation worse for the people and in the long run, even for them (since their long-run is inevitably short-run profit).

George Bush reflected both truisms today when he called for an end to a congressional ban on off shore oil drilling and an opening of part of the Arctic National Wild Life Preserve for oil drilling. Bush said that this was lower gas prices and protect "national security." He, the great scientist, proclaimed that" scientists have developed innovative techniques to reach arctic preserve oil with virtually no impact on the land or local wildlife." He blamed the Democrats for opposing the policy in the past and helping to create the present gas crisis. The Democrats responded quite rightly that Bush was offering no solution to the energy crisis and pandering to Big Oil, which has been first and foremost in his political machinations throughout his career.

But more is really needed. First, one should remind Bush and the Democrats for that matter that battles over off shore drilling were fought and lost in the past even before the modern environmental movement pushed back some of the worst predators. Seizing control of public lands to exploit them, both by legal and illegal means, has been a consistent theme since the rise of U.S. industrial capitalism, whether it was franchises to loot Indian reservations, phony land claims by a syndicate headed by Meyer Guggenheim and J.P. Morgan to control coal lands in Alaska (which led to the famous Ballinger-Pinchot scandal in the Taft Administration) to bribes to lease oil lands to oil companies in the Harding administration(the Teapot Dome scandal) to many others. The oil depletion allowance, giving oil companies a huge tax windfall for digging up and using more and more oil, a non renewable resource, has been a scandal for generations and a source, analysts abroad contend, of a "national energy policy" that provides a big disincentive for energy conservation and efficiency (progressives even before the contemporary environmental movement condemned it as a massive subsidy to oil companies that gave them super profits and heightened inequality).

But Bush doesn't know and doesn't care. He doesn't know the meaning of the word conservation. His attitude toward the environment isn't any different than Ronald Reagan's, who as governor of California allegedly said "when you've seen one Redwood you've seen them all," and as president of the U.S. junked the Carter administration conservation and alternative energy policies and went all out for deregulation and subsidies for Big Oil (and of course a foreign policy of disrupting the OPEC oil cartel by backing Saddam Hussein's Iraqi dictatorship in its war against Iran). Reagan also with strong support from the auto companies encouraged minivans which later became SUVs as he pushed "free market" aka subisidize and bail out capitalism as the way to create a limitless supply for a limitless demand.

Once the oil is gone, it will be gone. It has been and will continue to be infinitely more expensive to repair the damage done to the environment by corporate predators than any "trickle down" gains that have been made in jobs and prices by those predators policies. Even if one supports developing oil resources in the Arctic Wildlife preserve, no one who is not a propagandist for the administration and/or the oil companies would say that such developing could seriously produce major new sources of oil to deal with the present crisis, given the existing system, for a long time. As for Bush's comment that scientists have developed technologies that can develop oil with no ecological damage, from my understanding (and I am no scientist but neither is Bush) this is not only very wrong but a little bit like tobacco companies in the pre-1960s period citing "studies" for medical researchers they bought that smoking represented no serious health risks.

McCain announced his support for Bush and Senator Obama announced his clear opposition. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama has come forward with serious suggestions for a national energy policy. Now would be a good time to bring them forward.

Keith Olbermann Slams Bush for Golf Comments

The $3 Trillion War (and that's a conservative estimate)

By Joel Wendland

Wonder why they just canceled music and art classes at your child's public school? Or why the state is trying to balance its budget by raising fees or cutting Medicaid benefits? Do you question why the potholes on your street haven't been fixed for a couple years, or the city transportation system is cutting bus lines? Have you questioned why there seems be no federal money for environmental clean-up, bridge repair, levee repair, or investment in green energy alternatives?

If you haven't asked these questions or others like them you are among a dwindling number of Americans.

The plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face answer to each of them is Bush's $3 trillion dollar war.

And according to a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Harvard economist Linda J. Bilmes and former World Bank economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz, "The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending."

Bilmes and Stiglitz remind us that the Bush administration overcame some concerns about the war in 2002 and 2003 by pretending it would cost as little as $50 or $60 billion, going so far as to fire one adviser who let it slip that it might cost the astronomical sum of $100-$200 billion. The administration even claimed that Iraqi oil would pay the bill, winning votes from even a minority of congressional Democrats along the way.

Bilmes and Stiglitz prove, however, that the cost of war far exceeds the up-front costs allocated by spending resolutions and supplementals, which alone total close to $600 billion.

The total cost of war includes the massive amounts added to the federal debt under the Bush administration, which adds up to an additional $1 trillion. The Bush people refused to ask that the war be paid for and promoted tax cuts instead. Therefore, the war, in true American fashion, has simply been put on the credit card, to be paid for by the next generation.

Write Bilmes and Stiglitz:

Our vast and growing indebtedness inevitably makes it harder to afford new health-care plans, make large-scale repairs to crumbling roads and bridges, or build better-equipped schools. Already, the escalating cost of the wars has crowded out spending on virtually all other discretionary federal programs, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal aid to states and cities, all of which have been scaled back significantly since the invasion of Iraq.

In addition to this the necessary costs for caring for returning veterans from their health care, job retraining and education, and disability benefits will add to the price tag in direct costs and additional debt financing.

In the process, mired in recession and a desperate credit crunch, Wall Street is rapidly selling itself to the highest, even sometimes any bidder overseas.

Bilmes and Stiglitz further state:

While Washington has been spending well beyond its means, others have been saving -- including the oil-rich countries that, like the oil companies, have been among the few winners of this war. No wonder, then, that China, Singapore and many Persian Gulf emirates have become lenders of last resort for troubled Wall Street banks, plowing in billions of dollars to shore up Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other firms that burned their fingers on subprime mortgages. How long will it be before the huge sovereign wealth funds controlled by these countries begin buying up large shares of other U.S. assets?

The economic downturn and the costs to recover from it will add another $1 trillion to US debt.

Bush recklessly entered the Iraq war in an imperialist drive for geopolitical gain and resource control. While the harm this policy has inflicted on the people of Iraq is visible in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and a destroyed country racked by a civil war provoked by a foreign military presence, the damage to our own is just becoming clearer.

Bilmes and Stiglitz, in their closing, make a crucial point:

As we head toward November, opinion polls say that voters' main worry is now the economy, not the war. But there's no way to disentangle the two. The United States will be paying the price of Iraq for decades to come. The price tag will be all the greater because we tried to ignore the laws of economics – and the cost will grow the longer we remain.

Bush has bequeathed is policy of endless war funded by a credit card to John McCain who has promised to carry on without changing course.

Other presidential candidates have promised to begin to think about the process of ending the war on day one. But in a time of economic crisis and with big plans for universal health care and boosting public education there can be no waffling on ending Bush's $3 trillion war.

Having solid national security credentials isn't just about how many earmarks you gave arms maker Northrop Grumman or how many threats you can make toward Iran, Cuba, or any other members of Bush's "axis of evil."

One hopes that the economic security and social health of our communities would be first on the list of national security concerns. We know that Bush doesn't prioritize our communities. The Democratic candidates need to clarify that they will not follow his game plan but will demand real change.

Republican FISA Logic: It is OK to Risk Lives for Corporations

By Joel Wendland

George W. Bush is lashing out again. This time at congressional Democrats who refused to pass his domestic spying expansion under FISA along with telecom immunity. But Republican arguments on passing this bill stretch both the bounds of rational thought and the Republican pretense at sincerity.

And big money may be behind their drive to protect the telecoms.

The Republican Party and its front groups have launched a series of TV attack ads aimed at certain Democratic members of the House. Republicans feel if they can distort the issue enough they might be able to convince some voters that Democrats are trying to weaken national security.

The message is like the old Dick Cheney line: if you don't do what we say, the terrorists will get us.

This time it's if the Democrats don't roll over and give major telecom corporations immunity for breaking the law and providing your private information to George W. Bush, then the terrorists will get us.

But here is really what happened. In Congress, Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell and John McCain threatened to filibuster and George W. Bush threatened to veto a FISA extension that did not have an immunity clause for corporations who broke the law.

In other words, by Bush-McCain-Republican logic it is wrong for the Democrats to risk national security, but it is OK for them to risk American lives in order to ensure that a few corporations get immunity for breaking the law and passing your private information on to the federal government.

And staunch Bush/McCain/Republican efforts to put corporate interests before what they claim are national security interests isn't just about politics. It's about the cash.

According to Washington-based Roll Call (via Huffington Post), Republican congressional aides and even some members are putting out the word that they want more donations from the telecommunication corporations for their efforts on this matter.

Where's Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay when you need them? Oh, right. On their way to jail.

More than 5 Years, 2 Wars, tens of thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars too late

Upon being asked why the U.S. would not send troops to Darfur, Feb. 19, Bush said:

A clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive. In other words, people came from other countries — I guess you’d call them colonialists — and they pitted one group of people against another.

Hello, is this thing on?

Bush Orders Limits on Medicaid as Country Slips in Recession

Media reports this morning say Bush is casting about for ideas on how to stop the looming recession. That he has no ideas of his own is suggestive. Likely we'll here more of the same: tax cuts for the wealthy and for rich corporations, etc. etc. etc.

But he then did something that makes no sense whatsoever.

While recession looms, Bush is ordering states to curtail plans to expand Medicaid coverage to working families.

White House spokesperson Tony Fratto: “This policy demonstrates the president’s compassion.” What? Fratto used this phony claim to cover for the Bush administration's ideological commitment to helping private insurance companies get richer.

Now is the time for expanding health care coverage for working families. The unemployment rate has risen about one-half point over the last six months to 5% last month. The foreclosure crisis has sparked even more serious financial problems and will likely reverberate through the economy with more layoffs in related industries.

Now is the time to help working families who, if they don't already have a hard time paying for inadequate private insurance, soon will see a big financial crunch in their pocketbooks and savings accounts.

What is Bush thinking? This is compassionate? It is similar to his veto of two S-CHIP bills that would have helped cover an additional 4 million uninsured children.

Bush's actions aren't motivated by compassion. In fact, the perverse ideological obsession with big profits for big insurance companies is the very thing more than 236,000 people voted against in Iowa last night.

Bush's Medicaid crunch is the sort of typical Bush-ism that will send a wave of people to polls on Nov. 4th to end 8 long years of ultra-right, anti-people policies that serve as the planks of the Republican Party's platform and the hot air of its ideology.

Ideology: Why Bush Won't Deal with Climate Change

By Joel Wendland

So the Bush administration has admitted that global warming is real and that something must be done to scale back human contributions to our certain destruction – to the chagrin of his supporters who for years have joined him to either block serious discussion of global warming or who vigorously denied its reality.

But now that the US has a chance to do something about the problem at the Bali conference, Bush blocked every measure being offered.

Media reports indicate that countries like China and India and others are prepared to agree to international standards on greenhouse emissions, so Bush can't use them as an excuse anymore.

Still he has refused to accept standards.

Up to this point Bush attempted to scuttle serious discussion on climate change and controlling carbon emissions by holding his own conference and attempting to create side agreements that allow countries to voluntarily control emissions. This of course was no serious plan.

Everyone has to do it or doesn't work.

So once again we're treated to a dismal Bush administration policy failure: no action for a serious global problem that threatens humanity (reminds one of Bush's response to Katrina, the health care crisis, economic problems, budget deficits, the sub-prime mortgage problem).

But the fact is that, in addition to the corporate interests that back Bush and that view international standards on carbon emissions as cap on their profit margins, a straight line can be drawn from Bush's right-wing ideology of free markets, anti-government sophistry, obsession with war, and refusal to cooperate with the international community – hallmarks of Republican Party politics (see also McCain, Huckabee, Tancredo, Thompson, Romney, Paul, etc.) – to his refusal to make a serious effort to address real problems.

He and his right-wing cronies in the FOX media echo chamber would rather invent crises with Iran and immigrants, or even with the "war on Christmas."

This serious inability to live in and deal with reality is probably a key reason why US voters have begun the process of dumping Republican one-party rule, and will finish the job in November 2008.

Mr. Bush Wants to Talk about Vietnam, Let's Talk

By Joel Wendland

In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last Wednesday, President Bush offered a simplistic comparison of the war in Iraq with the war in Vietnam. Basically, his argument boiled down to the claim that the US rush to leave Vietnam led to tremendous human rights atrocities in in Southeast Asia.

Elsewhere writers have dealt with the fact that a comparison of a stable and peaceful Vietnam to Iraq seems ludicrous on its face. Indeed, Bush's specific points about how the US leaving Vietnam led to atrocities against South Vietnamese collaborators with the US war, the forced emigration of refugees known as "boat people," and the "killing fields" in Cambodia are contradicted by the historical record.

It should be noted for the record that the newly reunified country of Vietnam deserves enormous credit for stopping the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (the creators of the "killing fields"). The US government, on the other hand, insisted in the UN that Vietnam's actions in doing so were illegal because the US regarded the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate authority in Cambodia. (Bush also appears to not have known or to have forgotten that a US backed coup against Cambodia's pre-Khmer government along with an illegal US invasion of Cambodia led to a political vacuum in which the previously insignificant Khmer Rouge gained power.)

Vietnam also deserves credit for it systematic efforts at reconciliation with former enemies: collaborators, US veterans, the US people, and our government. This fact cannot be denied.

Further still, one issue that President Bush notably failed to raise in his speech was that of prisoners and MIAs. On this issue, Vietnam has a much better record than any other country in which the US fought a major war in helping to locate and identify MIAs and prisoners. Journalist Stanley Karnow, in his massive work Vietnam, which became the basis of the widely-acclaimed PBS series, pointed out that even the remains of the soldier who served as Arlington National Cemetery's "unknown soldier" for the war in Vietnam were located and identified. (Of course, in no small part, developments on this issue also have a great deal to do with the political pressure by veterans on the US government, which, like Bush in his speech, mostly preferred to ignore the issue.) Karnow also pointed out that in comparison to other wars, the percentage of MIAs still to be located is microscopic.

But, in my view, these aren't the main problems at the heart of Bush's comparison. It is his claim that there was some sort of "rush to leave" Vietnam that deserves more careful scrutiny. For this, I rely on a book published in 2001 called No Peace, No Honor by noted historian of the war in Vietnam, Larry Berman. (Berman teaches at the University of California, Davis and has written at least four books on different aspects of the war.)

I should note at the outset, that Berman's appears to agree with those participants in the war and the political events surrounding it that South Vietnam was betrayed by the US and, after our departure, the southern region of the country was forced into dire circumstances. Without having asked him directly, my judgment is that in some ways he might agree with Bush's assessment that bad things happened in Vietnam after we left – as a result of us leaving.

Using declassified documents only made available to the public in 2001, Berman shows, however, that not only was there no rush to leave Vietnam on the part of the Nixon administration but that the delay Nixon and Kissinger sought only strengthened the position of the North Vietnamese both in battle and at the bargaining table. Peace negotiations were launched in 1968, an agreement was reached 5 years later, and the last US personnel didn't finally leave until 1975 (and the US puppet along with 16 tons of South Vietnamese gold for his personal use.)

Lyndon Johnson, who had escalated the war under false circumstances in 1965, by 1968 recognized the futility of continuing the massive US military occupation. The so-called Tet offensive was a major military blow to North Vietnamese forces, but it showed that despite losing battles militarily, the North Vietnamese could win in the long run. Johnson launched negotiations with the North in 1968 and refused to participate in the next set of US elections.

It should be noted that just prior to Tet, public opinion was pretty evenly split on the war. After Tet it took a turn toward disapproval. But the peace movement itself was fairly isolated and small. It was under Nixon's watch that public opinion nose-dived, and the peace movement gained momentum and influence. Someone out there may correct me on this, but it is my impression from reviewing some public opinion poll statistics from the Vietnam era that public support for the war in Vietnam never got as low as public support for the Iraq war has gotten.

Through back channels, the Nixon campaign helped scuttle the talks Johnson had planned, promising the South Vietnamese President Thieu that under a Nixon administration it would get a better deal. Thieu, in consultation with the Nixon campaign publicly refused to support Johnson's decision to halt bombings of North Vietnam as a precondition for opening the negotiations and conceivably handed an election victory to Nixon by a 0.7 percent margin.

Publicly, Nixon ran as an antiwar candidate. He told voters that he had a secret plan to end the war, promising to do so within six months after entering office. His plan, as it turns out, was to open secret negotiations with the North that excluded the South combined with massive military force. But, again, despite winning every battle with overwhelming US technical and tactical superiority, it had already been made clear that the war could not be won militarily. The situation demanded a political resolution. But with every passing month that Nixon tried to win the war militarily, US and world public opinion turned against him. US troop casualties grew. The bargaining position of the North was strengthened. South Vietnamese military forces proved as equally incapable of turning military prowess in political movement.

The North quickly saw that the situation in 1968, when it sought a political settlement with Johnson, had changed. It saw its best diplomatic advantage in dividing the extremely unpopular and brutal Thieu from Washington and stalling the talks. For his part, Nixon continued to believe in military victory and force, persisting in supporting the undemocratic Thieu regime in South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese strategy ultimately worked, but only because of Nixon's refusal to concede certain realities and bring the war to an end as quickly as possible.

Public pressure forced Nixon to change tactics. Congress ordered an end to troop deployments in Cambodia (which Nixon continued anyway), and increasingly threatened to reduce budget supplementals to pay for the war. "Vietnamization" became the code word for withdrawal. As massive amounts of military aid and cash were handed over to back Thieu's one million person army, US troops were brought out. By the time Watergate (and Nixon's subversion of the US democratic and electoral process) was exposed and impeachment loomed as a real possibility, Nixon had no political muscle to keep his war going even through Thieu's proxy army.

In secret negotiations over a two year-period as the war continued, Kissinger moved from offering basic troop withdrawal promises to offering economic aid to the North, a timetable for withdrawal, allowing the National Liberation Front and the Revolutionary Provision Government (pro-liberation political movements in South Vietnam) to participate in future elections, and eventually promised to dump Thieu altogether. From the perspective of the empire, this diplomatic effort over time gradually weakened. One might even suggest that Kissinger moved from a position of strength to practically begging the North Vietnamese to let us leave "with honor," some shred of dignity.

I have long opposed comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. But one similarity is clear: the longer we stay, the worse our options get. It is time to leave. Above all, it is time for the president to take responsibility for his failures, to refrain from abusing history and insulting us with childish comparisons, and set aside his arrogance.

Perhaps Bush thinks the 7 years it took to get out of Vietnam after peace talks opened and the 19 years the US intervened in that country was a rush. What does this say about how long he wants US troops to be in Iraq?