Stupid is as stupid does…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 12:07 PM Permalink

Our economy has totally tanked because of the out-of-control spending of Republicans who have brought us to a $9 trillion deficit, the highest rate of borrowing ever, and who deregulated the subprime loan and the credit industries so that they could prey upon those poor, but mostly honest, people who could never possibly pay off their debt, but by having two or three people in the family working two or three jobs apiece, they could at least make the minimum payments, enriching the banks on credit card loans that it would take 40-50 years to pay off at that minimum rate. The subprime market is rapidly collapsing of its own weight from their reckless practices.

Then the Republicans, with Democratic support, rewrote the bankruptcy laws so these poor people cannot escape the unjust debts they were suckered into by unscrupulous lenders who repackaged all these bad loans and sold them to the banks now forced to borrow hugh sums of money or sell off hugh portions of their companies to stay solvent.

Overseas countries and companies are buying up America at fire sale prices. When do our national parks and monuments go up for sale?

The anemic rate of job creation is insufficient to employ even just the new entries into the job market; more people than ever abandoning hope of finding a decent job. America has gone from being a first class industrial nation to being a service nation, serving as distributors and buyers to all the industries that have gone overseas to produce cheaper goods and not pay taxes on their overseas operations. Tax rates for millionaires cut so low that income to the treasury has plummeted, with millionaires paying lower taxes as a percentage of their income than their secretaries, as Warren Buffet recently pointed out.

Republicans can bitch all they want about "tax and spend Democrats," but that sure beats the hell out of "borrow endlessly and still spending even more than you can borrow Republicans."

We're borrowing $15 billion a month to throw into the Iraqi Black Hole. And Republicans still want to nuke Iran at an absolutely incalculable cost in money and lives. The "party of life" sure does like to kill as many people as possible.

Stock markets worldwide are following America down the rabbit hole to insolvency, and it can't be much longer before countries holding our dollars and starting to lose billions as the dollar steadily loses its value begin a sell-off of dollars that will cause runaway inflation and, perhaps another Great Depression and Stock Market Crash as in 1929.

The Dow Jones has fallen below 12,000 and the sell-off continues despite the Fed's "surprise" move of again reducing the prime lending rate, now at 3.5%. How much longer before a run on the dollar starts?

And every single Republican candidate can only offer their usual panacea of, "…lower taxes, cut corporate tax rates, keep bush's tax cuts permanently, and spend less than before," while being perfectly aware that it was these Republican monetary policies got us into this sh*t to begin with. Their lack of honesty (and outright lying) on this subject is breathtaking in its scope. Republicans are apparently genetically incapable of seeing financial truths and doing the right things.

Seems to me that the only way out of this debacle is to tighten our belts, raise taxes and eliminate the bush tax cuts for millionaires, get out of Iraq, spend our money employing Americans to rebuild our terrible infrastructure, and employ thousands in appropriate industries to come up with a viable, reliable alternative to oil, our nation's heroin and what is causing our slide into one of those circles of hell.

We must stop war-mongering, cut the defense budget by more than two-thirds, pull our troops back home and stop paying trillions every year in leases for bases, and instead use the umpteen billions, or possibly trillions, of dollars we would save by becoming a peaceful nation working in behalf of our own people and country.

Call me an isolationist if you want, it's always easier to negate someone's influence or standing or ideas by applying a denigrating "label" to them so you can close your ears and minds when you hear the label and therefore not have to apply any serious thought or considerations to their position. Even when their ideas may be the very ones that could save a nation.

As long as we make war, start wars, provoke other countries into war, and continue to lay waste to our treasury and borrow billions and trillions of dollars to maintain our war machines this country will never prosper. We will, instead, spend ourselves into oblivion and right out of existence, yet our leaders, who must know this at least subliminally, continue the folly of war, the folly of spending almost every dime earned or borrowed on making war, and continue to ignore the genuine needs of their fellow countrymen. If this continues, well, we're all dead meat, and the stench of the rotting society in which we live will soon become overpowering.

Labels: Bush, bush as chimp, bush war doctrine, disinformation, Economy, fear mongering, hypocrisy, neocons, rant, US hegemony