Human beings with an ounce of intelligence look at their mistakes and
successes, learn from them, and do their best to avoid bad decisions
while repeating what they know is successful to spare themselves
needless misery. In the 1930s, a Great Depression racked the world’s
economy and Americans were fortunate their leaders took steps to protect
the people with the New Deal, implemented a massive public works
project, and passed regulatory laws to ensure economic disaster never
threatened the survival of the nation again, but it took years for the
people and the economy to recover. Despite the devastating effects of
the Great Depression, the richest industrialists emerged with greater
wealth than they could possibly imagine as the rest of the population
struggled to survive and if not for the New Deal, it is doubtful working
Americans would ever recover, much less prosper. Fast forward to 2007
and deregulation, Wall Street malfeasance, and uninhibited greed created
a Great Recession that decimated the economy and destroyed millions of
Americans’ jobs, and like the Great Depression, the richest
industrialists emerged with increased wealth beyond their wildest dreams
as the economy recovered.
For two years after the Great Recession, President Obama and a
Democratically-controlled Congress followed FDR’s path and passed
financial reforms, created a tiny public works project (stimulus), and
the economy slowly recovered. However, that is where the similarities
between the Depression’s recovery and the Recession’s ended because repugicans obstructed every single attempt to jump-start the economy,
implement financial reforms, or create jobs, and have been unrelenting
in their attempts at eliminating New Deal provisions that protect the
people. However, repugicans have fiercely protected the financial
sector and assisted the richest Americans to increase their wealth by
preventing them from contributing to recovery through tax cuts paid for
with remorseless assaults on programs to assist struggling Americans,
and through it all, they had overwhelming support from the wealthy that
crashed the economy, and profited from the recovery.
Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a new all-time high, corporate
profits are soaring, and Americans are still struggling with
declining wages
and a new round of job losses repugicans celebrated with enactment of
indiscriminate sequestration cuts. The wealthiest Americans who have
grabbed 94% of wealth from recovery have been staunch supporters of repugican’s
phony debt reduction
rhetoric and campaigned vigorously to implement steep cuts to New Deal
programs such as Social Security and anti-poverty programs
they claim “
we can’t afford”
any longer. The sequestration cuts wingnuts and Wall Street titans
claim are necessary to grow the economy and create jobs have no effect
on the rich, and yet groups such as “
Fix the Debt”
clamor for deeper cuts in a well-funded fright-inducing campaign to
convince Americans that without massive cuts to Medicare, Social
Security, safety nets, and Medicaid, America is doomed.
First, there is
no crushing debt,
or deficit, and making relentless cuts that kill jobs and take money
out of the economy will not, have not, and can not grow the economy or
hasten recovery. Still, repugicans parrot the “
deficit reduction”
meme with frantic alarm and particularly the blatant lie that cutting
Social Security will affect the debt, or deficit, by one penny. Besides
deliberately killing jobs, repugicans complain President Obama’s “out
of control spending” is crushing the economy when the reality is reduced
spending reduced fourth quarter GDP by .7% and the Koch brothers
sequester threatens to cut up to 1.7% more in seven months of a ten year
slash-and-burn campaign guaranteed to kill millions of jobs, create a
recession, and increase poverty to levels unseen since the Great
Depression.
There are those who ask; what do wealthy industrialists like the Koch
brothers, Wall Street CEOs, and repugicans have to gain by killing
jobs and creating a recession, and it reveals their ignorance of the
after effects of the Great Depression and Recession. Remember, that
after both of America’s flirtations with economic demise that created
massive unemployment and widespread poverty, the richest Americans
increased their wealth
by unimaginable amounts, and they see another opportunity to emerge
from an economic recession with greater wealth and power to control the
direction of the country for years. The Koch brothers, for example,
became
richer by billions
of dollars during President Obama’s recovery, and yet they funded
attempts to defeat his re-election bid so Willard could enact deep
austerity that has driven double and triple-dip recessions across
Europe. A recession to enrich the wealthy explains the repugican cabal’s austerity
drive because they learned from living examples that the quickest way to
create a wealth-producing recession is austerity that kills jobs, cuts
domestic programs, and increases poverty among already embattled
working-poor Americans.
Americans can hardly take much more economic abuse from repugicans,
Wall Street CEOs, or Libertarian teabaggers panting to cut spending
under the guise of debt or deficit reduction just to enrich wealthy
industrialists. Barack Obama has presided over the sharpest cut in
spending in 60 years, and the phony deficit is being reduced at levels
that threaten to undo the meager recovery by starving the government of
much-needed revenue better spent investing in infrastructure, renewable
energy, and education, but that would mean a thriving economy that repugicans will never allow, not when there is wealth for their
supporters in a recession.
New
research has suggested that a person's high intake of sugar - more than
any other factor like obesity and aging - is a big reason for diabetes:
I
have enough trouble making tying knots with my shoelaces, so this is doubly
awesome: researchers at the University of Chicago, Illinois, have created
a 3D knot in a fluid.
