ThinkProgress
In an interview earlier this week, John McCain would not answer whether he would be willing to meet with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero. While some speculated that McCain either did not know who Zapatero was or thought he was some “Latin American bad guy,” McCain’s top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said McCain was not confused — he was simply articulating his policy of refusing to commit to a White House meeting with Zapatero.
The logic behind this particular policy is baffling, considering that Spain has long been a U.S. NATO ally and currently has troops in Afghanistan. So why would McCain shun Zapatero? If President Bush’s actions towards the Spanish Prime Minster give some indication, the answer is Iraq.
Zapatero withdrew Spain’s troops from Iraq soon after his Socialist Party swept to power in March, 2004 in a wave of Spanish anti-war sentiment, a move that reportedly angered Bush:
Zapatero’s first action was to make good on a long-standing campaign promise to remove Spanish troops from Iraq, to the overwhelming approval of Spaniards but the great irritation of Bush.
Eighteen months later, there has still been no one-on-one meeting between the two leaders, and rhetoric has been harsh. It got so bad at one point that Bush refused to take Zapatero’s phone call of congratulations last year after the president won reelection.
Since then, the White House has said Bush has “no plans” to meet with Zapataro. In 2006, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley could not answer why the two leaders have not visited one another:
QUESTION: Is that the reason why there seems to be like a veto against our Prime Minister, Mr. Zapatero, who is an ally and has been Prime Minister for two years but hasn’t come to Washington yet?
MR. HADLEY: He has not come to Washington, that’s true. Whether that is a result of bad public opinion polls in Spain about the United States, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. But there’s — at this point, I don’t think there’s any plans for a visit.
Just last March, when Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked if Bush would congratulate Zapataro on his re-election, she would not fully commit: “I expect he’ll be sending a message to him, sure.”
McCain’s incoherent answer to whether he would meet with Zapatero may indicate that he is interested in making Bush’s grudge against Spain permanent U.S. policy. As Max Bergmann notes, it is “beyond reckless” that McCain would refuse to meet with a democratic U.S. ally that has had soldiers killed in Afghanistan, was brutally attacked by Al-Qaeda and wields considerable influence in Europe and Latin America.
Perhaps Spain won’t be expecting an invitation to McCain’s League of Democracies?
by Robert C. Koehler - Common Wonders / Common Dreams
Say you've got a global agenda that's far too important to leave to chance -- wars to fight, quagmires to feed, interests to protect, secrets to hide.
Staying in power is crucial.
This presents a big problem in an election year -- heart-stopping, even -- for the Republican Party. Consider the basic numbers, as compiled recently by the Associated Press: In the 28 states that register voters according to party affiliation, more than 2 million Democrats have been registered, in highly energized get-out-the-vote drives, over the last two years, while, simultaneously, Republicans have lost nearly 344,000 voters in those same states. Nationwide, AP informs us, there are about 42 million registered Democrats right now and about 31 million Republicans.
However, in applied, as opposed to merely theoretical, democracy, there are things you can do about a numbers problem like this - legal, quasi-legal and blatantly, wildly, desperately (but undetectably) illegal. And the GOP, in its virulent neocon incarnation, is going to do all of them. In impolite, non-mainstream-media circles, it's called cheating.
Indeed, "this is an all out Republican war on democracy in which we will be witnessing an unprecedented 'troop surge' between here and November," Brad Friedman, whose blog sounded one of the earliest and most clarion voices of warning about election fraud, wrote recently in the U.K. Guardian. Friedman quoted conservative guru Paul Weyrich, who back in 1980 mocked the idea of democracy and good government as "goo-goo syndrome," and bluntly stated: "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Keeping the voting populace down -- among target groups, of course (African-Americans, students, Native Americans, Hispanics, the poor, the young) -- has been core Republican strategy throughout the Rove-Bush era, from the bogus ex-felon purges of voting rolls in 2000 that disenfranchised thousands of mostly African-Americans in the South and gave Florida to George W. Bush, to a dizzying array of dirty tricks in 2004 (check out "Fooled Again" by Mark Crispin Miller or the documentaries "Uncounted" and the just-completed "Stealing America Vote by Vote"), to . . .
Well, they're at it again, of course, targeting the most vulnerable and the most Democratic-leaning populations, such as, in a stunning display of cynicism, people whose homes were recently foreclosed on, but this time they don't have a free hand. The most crucial news of the 2008 election season is that "Goo-Goo America," if you will -- good-government, democracy-committed America -- is up and out of its complacency in growing numbers.
"In 2004, we were blindsided," long-time voting-rights activist Harvey Wasserman told me. But this year, no way. People are starting to feel a deeper cry of citizenship, to get involved in the process in a new way, whether it be by signing up as election judges or poll watchers, or by becoming indie media types and videotaping what they see going on.
"We think it is actually within reach to get a fair election in 2008," said Wasserman, who is one of the organizers of the Ohio Election Protection conference, in Columbus Sept. 26-28 (see http://www.freepress.org/doit.php?strFunc=display&strID=377&strYear=2008 for details).
This is a rallying cry, not a reassuring bedtime story. We can't go back to sleep about the mechanics of our elections any more than we can give up on the issues of war and peace, the national direction and America's relationship with the rest of the world. The stakes are far too high.
"There are many problems in American democracy," writes Kevin Zeese in Op-Ed News, in a comprehensive roundup of disenfranchisement attempts around the country. "But, if we are unable to get these two basic things right -- registering voters and counting the vote accurately -- then not much else matters because the democracy is a farce and a fraud on the most basic fundamentals."
The problems and potential problems with hackable electronic voting machines, sloppy ballot chain-of-custody procedures and other matters related to the voting process itself are enormous and troubling, and I will address them as the election nears. For now, I focus on the basic fact of power. Its tendency to corrupt is known, documented and filed away under "history."
But history is occurring right now, as the election season progresses, mostly under the mainstream media radar, and it often looks like latter-day, de facto racism. For instance, in Macomb County, outside Detroit in the swing state of Michigan, Republicans have gotten ahold of foreclosure lists to challenge the addresses of (mostly African-American) registered voters, even as the GOP sits on an anti-predatory lending bill in the state legislature. Lose your home, lose your vote.
Goo-Goo America has to rouse itself and rise to the challenges of this election season, because power doesn't bow to principle unless it has to -- unless principle itself has a power base.
by Amy Goodman - TruthDig / Common Dreams
The financial crisis gripping the U.S. has the largest banks and insurance companies begging for massive government bailouts. The banking, investment, finance and insurance industries, long the foes of taxation, now need money from working-class taxpayers to stay alive. Taxpayers should be in the driver's seat now. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.
Tuesday, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department agreed to a massive, $85-billion bailout of AIG, the insurance giant. This follows the abrupt bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank; the distressed sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America; the bailout of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the collapse of retail bank IndyMac; and the federally guaranteed buyout of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase. AIG was deemed "too big to fail," with 103,000 employees and more than $1 trillion in assets. According to regulators, an unruly collapse could cause global financial turmoil. U.S. taxpayers now own close to 80 percent of AIG, so the orderly sale of AIG will allow the taxpayers to recoup their money, the theory goes.
It's not so easy.
The financial crisis will most likely deepen. More banks and giant financial institutions could collapse. Millions of people bought houses with shady subprime mortgages and have already lost or will soon lose their homes. The financiers packaged these mortgages into complex "mortgage-backed securities" and other derivative investment schemes. Investors went hog-wild, buying these derivatives with more and more borrowed money.
Nomi Prins used to run the European analytics group at Bear Stearns and also worked at Lehman Brothers. "AIG was acting not simply as an insurance company," she told me. "It was acting as a speculative investment bank/hedge fund, as was Bear Stearns, as was Lehman Brothers, as is what will become Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. So you have a situation where it's [the U.S. government] ... taking on the risk of items it cannot even begin to understand."
She went on: "It's about taking on too much leverage and borrowing to take on the risk and borrowing again and borrowing again, 25 to 30 times the amount of capital. ... They had to basically back the borrowing that they were doing. ... There was no transparency to the Fed, to the SEC, to the Treasury, to anyone who would have even bothered to look as to how much of a catastrophe was being created, so that when anything fell, whether it was the subprime mortgage or whether it was a credit complex security, it was all below a pile of immense interlocked, incestuous borrowing, and that's what is bringing down the entire banking system."
As these high-rolling gamblers are losing all their banks' money, it comes to the taxpayer to bail them out. A better use of the money, says Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an economic adviser to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, would be to "save these 4 million homeowners from defaulting and being kicked out of their houses. Now they're going to be kicked out of the houses. The houses will be vacant. The cities are going to [lose] property taxes, they're going to have to cut back local expenditures, local infrastructure. The economy is being sacrificed to pay the gamblers."
Prins elaborated: "You're nationalizing the worst portion of the banking system. ... You're taking on risk you won't be able to understand. So it's even more dangerous." I asked Prins, in light of all this nationalization, to comment on the prospect of nationalizing health care into a single-payer system. She responded, "You could actually put some money into something that pre-empts a problem happening and helps people get health care."
The meltdown is a bipartisan affair. Presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama each have received millions of dollars from these very companies that are collapsing and are receiving the corporate welfare. President Clinton and his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin (now an Obama economic adviser), presided over the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, passed after the 1929 start of the Great Depression to curb speculation that caused that calamity. The repeal was pushed through by former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm, one of McCain's former top advisers. Politicians are too dependent on Wall Street to do anything. The people who vote for them, and whose taxes are being handed over to these failed financiers, need to show their outrage and demand that their leaders truly put "country first" and bring about "change."
By Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect / Alternet
Free-market extremists brought us this needless economic collapse. Here's a rundown of the mistakes we've made and the reforms we need now.
The current carnage on Wall Street, with dire spillover effects on Main Street, is the result of a failed ideology -- the idea that financial markets could regulate themselves. Serial deregulation fed on itself. Deliberate repeal of regulations became entangled with failure to carry out laws still on the books. Corruption mingled with simple incompetence. And though the ideology was largely Republican, it was abetted by Wall Street Democrats.
Why regulate?
As we have seen ever since the sub-prime market blew up in the summer of 2007, government cannot stand by when a financial crash threatens to turn into a general depression -- even a government like the Bush administration that fervently believes in free markets. But if government must act to contain wider damage when large banks fail, then it is obliged to act to prevent damage from occurring in the first place. Otherwise, the result is what economists term "moral hazard"-- an invitation to take excessive risks.
Government, under Franklin Roosevelt, got serious about regulating financial markets after the first cycle of financial bubble and economic ruin in the 1920s. Then, as now, the abuses were complex in their detail but very simple in their essence. They included the sale of complex securities packaged in deceptive and misleading ways; far too much borrowing to finance speculative investments; and gross conflicts of interest on the part of insiders who stood to profit from flim-flams. When the speculative bubble burst in 1929, sellers overwhelmed buyers, many investors were wiped out, and the system of credit contracted, choking the rest of the economy.
In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration acted to prevent a repetition of the ruinous 1920s. Commercial banks were separated from investment banks, so that bankers could not prosper by underwriting bogus securities and foisting them on retail customers. Leverage was limited in order to rein in speculation with borrowed money. Investment banks, stock exchanges, and companies that publicly traded stocks were required to disclose more information to investors. Pyramid schemes and conflicts of interest were limited. The system worked very nicely until the 1970s -- when financial innovators devised end-runs around the regulated system, and regulators stopped keeping up with them.
Seven Deadly Sins
Sin One: Allowing Mortgage Lending to Become a Casino. Until 1969, Fannie Mae was part of the government. Mortgage lenders were tightly regulated. Homeownership rates soared throughout the postwar era, from about 44 percent on the eve of World War II to 64 percent by the mid-1960s. Nobody in the mortgage business got filthy rich, and hardly anyone lost money. Fannie's job was to buy mortgages from banks and thrift institutions, to replenish their money to make mortgages, and along the way to set standards. Fannie financed its operations by selling bonds. In the late 1970s, private Wall Street firms started emulating Fannie. They packaged mortgages, and converted them into bonds. Over time, their standards deteriorated, because they could make more money creating riskier products. In order to avoid losing market share, Fannie emulated some of the same abuses. Government did not step in to regulate the affair -- which was a time bomb waiting for the creation of the sub-prime mortgage business.
Sin Two: Allowing Unregulated Bond Rating Agencies to Decide What was Safe. Sub-prime is only the best known of a widespread fad known as "securitization." The idea is to turn loans into bonds. Bonds are given ratings by private companies that have official government recognition, such as Moody's and Standard and Poors, but no government regulation. These rating agencies have become thoroughly corrupted by conflicts of interest. If you want to package and sell bonds backed by risky loans, you go to a bond-rating agency and pay it a hefty fee. In return, the agency helps you manipulate the bond so that it qualifies for a triple-A rating, even if the underlying loans include many that are high-risk. Without the collusion of the bond-rating agencies, sub-prime lending never would have gotten off the ground, because it would not have found a mass market. Had regulators looked inside this black box, they would have shut it down. They might have needed new legislation, but they never asked for it. And public-minded regulators might have done a lot under existing law, since banks (which are regulated) were heavily implicated in the financing of sub-prime.
Sin Three: Failing to Police Sub-prime. The core idea of bank regulation is that government inspectors periodically examine the quality of bank assets. If too large a portion of a bank's loan portfolio is behind in its interest payments, the bank is made to raise more capital as a cushion against losses. Problems are nipped in the bud. But complex securities require more sophisticated regulation than simple loans. Regulators basically waived the rule on adequate capital for the new wave of mortgage lenders who created sub-prime. Many mortgage companies were not banks. They made loans only to sell them off to the Wall Street sinners of Deadly Sin No. 1 (see above). So there was no loan portfolio to examine, and no real capital. The Democratic Congress anticipated this problem in 1994, when it passed the Homeownership Opportunity and Equity Protection Act. This prescient law required the Federal Reserve to regulate the loan-origination standards of mortgage companies that were not otherwise government-regulated. But Alan Greenspan, a free-market zealot, never implemented the law. And when Republicans took over Congress in 1995, they never called him on the carpet.
Sin Four: Failure to Stop Excess Leverage. The financial economy is crashing today because so much speculation was done with borrowed money. A typical leverage ratio of a hedge fund or private equity company is 30 to one. That means $30 of debt for $1 of actual capital. If you make one serious miscalculation, you are out of business. And in the case of sub-prime mortgage companies, the leverage ratio was infinite, because they had no capital. The game was entirely based on creating debt. As long as times were good, financial firms could keep borrowing to finance their deals. But once investors looked down, they panicked. Some parts of the system are unregulated, such as hedge funds and private-equity companies. But they all ultimately get a lot of their funding from banks. And regulators do retain the power to look closely at banks' books (see Sin No.3 above). Had they used that power to police the kind of highly risky stuff banks were underwriting, they could have shut it down.
Sin Five: Failure to Police Conflicts of Interest. Remember the accounting scandals of the 1990s? In those scandals, accounting firms were paid once to audit corporate books and then again to help clients cook the books and still pass muster with the audit. That was a sheer conflict of interest. Though accountants were (loosely) regulated, Congress did not crack down until cooked books caused the stock market to crash. A second conflict of interest was the corruption of stock analysts, who were telling customers to buy dubious stocks because their bosses were profiting from underwriting the same stocks. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Congress narrowly cracked down on these two abuses with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act but simply ignored others -- such as the role of bond-rating agencies and the habit of basing executive bonuses on stock prices that could easily be manipulated by the same executives.
Sin Six: Failing to Regulate Hedge Funds and Private Equity. When Roosevelt's New Deal acted to rein in the abuses in financial markets, it regulated the major players -- commercial banks, investment banks, stock brokers, holding companies, and stock exchanges. But two of the biggest purveyors of risk today -- hedge funds and private-equity firms -- simply did not exist. Today, private-equity firms and hedge funds do most of the things banks and investment banks do. They basically create credit by making markets in exotic securities. They buy and sell firms. They speculate in financial markets with borrowed money, taking much bigger risks than regulated banks. According to House Banking Committee Chair Barney Frank, more than half the credit created in recent years has been created by essentially unregulated institutions. The people in charge of the government -- conservative Republicans -- took the view that these new-wave financial players offered transactions between consenting adults who needed no special consumer protection. But they were oblivious to the risks to the larger system.
Sin Seven: Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This action, in 1999, was one of two major cases when a cornerstone of New Deal regulation was explicitly repealed. (The other was the repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and if your utility rates are sky-high, you can thank Congress for that, too.) Glass-Steagall provided that if you wanted to speculate as an investment bank, good luck to you. But commercial banks were part of the banking system. They created credit. They were regulated, supervised, usually enjoyed FDIC insurance, and had access to advances from the Fed in emergencies. So commercial banks and investment banks were two different creatures that should stay out of each other's knitting.
But beginning in the 1980s, regulators who didn't believe in regulation either allowed explicit waivers of some aspects of Glass-Steagall or looked the other way as commercial banks and investment banks became more alike. By 1999, when Citigroup had jumped the gun and assembled a supermarket that included a commercial bank, investment bank, stock brokerage, and insurance company, Glass Steagall was so hollowed out that it was effectively dead. The coup de grace was its official repeal, in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. That's Gramm as in former Sen. Phil Gramm, a deregulation zealot and top adviser to John McCain.
Three Basic Reforms
What all of these sins had in common was that they led financial markets to misprice assets. In plain English, that means buyers were purchasing securities based on bad information, often with borrowed money. When firms started losing money on sub-prime in mid-2007 and other owners decided it was time to get their money out, the whole miracle of leverage went into reverse. And it spilled over into other securities that had been mispriced thanks to all the conflicts of interest tolerated by regulators.
That's why, no matter how much taxpayer money the Federal Reserve and the Treasury keep pumping in, they can't turn dross back into gold. The next administration and the Congress need to return the financial economy to its historic task of supplying capital to the real economy -- of connecting investors to entrepreneurs -- and shut down the purely casino aspects of the system that have only enriched middlemen and passed along huge risks to everyone else.
Reform One: If it Quacks Like a Bank, Regulate it Like a Bank. Barack Obama said it well in his historic speech on the financial emergency last March 27 in New York. "We need to regulate financial institutions for what they do, not what they are." Increasingly, different kinds of financial firms do the same kinds of things, and they are all capable of infusing toxic products into the nation's financial bloodstream. That's why Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has had to extend the government's financial safety net to all kinds of large financial firms like A.I.G. that have no technical right to the aid and no regulation to keep them from taking outlandish risks. Going forward, all financial firms that buy and sell products in money markets need the same regulation and examination. That will be the essence of the 2009 version of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Reform Two: Limit Leverage. At the very heart of the financial meltdown was extreme speculation with esoteric financial securities, using astronomical rates of leverage. Commercial banks are limited to something like 10 to one, or less, depending on their conditions. These leverage limits need to be extended to all financial players, as part of the same 2009 banking reform.
Reform Three: Police Conflicts of Interest. The conflicts of interest at the core of bond-raising agencies are only one of the conflicts that have been permitted to pervade financial markets. Bond-rating agencies should probably become public institutions. Other conflicts of interest should be made explicitly illegal. Yes, financial markets keep "innovating." But some innovations are good, and some are abusive subterfuges. And if regulators who actually believe in regulation are empowered to examine all financial institutions, they can issue cease-and-desist orders when they encounter dangerous conflicts.
We're talking about a Roosevelt-scale counterrevolution here. But nothing less will prevent the financial collapse from cascading into Great Depression II. And the public should never again forget that this needless collapse was brought to us by free-market extremists.
by Alicia Morgan - Smirking Chimp
John McCain is right.
Everything’s going along just fine!
After all, how couldn’t it? The conservative paradise that has been worked toward by the Republicans for forty years has finally come to fruition.
Like Tom DeLay’s ‘perfect petri dish of capitalism’ in the Marianas, bit by bit, conservative economic policies have replaced the hated New Deal, and all the crummy old prosperity that came along with it. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s go-to guy on the economy, drove the last nail into the coffin by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented commercial banks and private investment banks from getting involved with each other.
And then Gramm has the gall to call us a “nation of whiners.”
Yeah, Phil, I guess we better just shut up and take it. If Phil Gramm had his way , we would not even be allowed to complain about being mugged, rolled and left in the alley for dead.
Every item on the conservative economic wish list is in place at last! No taxation, deregulation, and speculation. Wages have been lowered, while prices rise higher and higher. Privatization, the magic cure-all for everything that government used to do, has permeated every nook and cranny of our system. After all, anything government can do, private enterprise can do better! So instead of giving tax money to wasteful government agencies to use ofn the people’s behalf, why not give it to business instead - to use on their own behalf!
The central tenet of the corporations in this country has been:
Externalize costs; internalize profit.
Translated: We, Big Business, take a risk. If it fails, the taxpayer pays for it. If it succeeds, we keep all the profit.
Heads we win, tails you lose.
Simple and beautiful.
Although the sub-prime mortgage bubble and the wild, arcane speculation are in the spotlight right now, the plain truth is that we, the American public, have been stolen from until there is nothing left to steal - even our children’s financial future has been stolen after they squeezed us dry.
Our labor is stolen from us for less than its real value, and then we pay twice as much tax on what we get for our labor - wages - as the investor class pays on dividends - money that makes itself.
But consumer spending is the engine that drives the economy, and when working people are too poor to spend, the car comes to screeching halt. This is what created the housing bubble and the speculation frenzy - the desperate attempts on the part of the corporate class to keep the public in the dark about the fact that there was no real money to spend - that we were flat broke. Thanks to low wages, high prices, and predatory credit card interests that bought a license to steal from Congress in 2005 with the Bankruptcy Bill, and the evisceration of unions, along with a justice system that always sides with the corporations against the individual, we have now come to the end of the ride.
We were broke a while back, so the housing industry artificially pumped up house prices, knowing that most Americans had no choice but to borrow against the ‘value’ of the home. When the alternative is bankruptcy, and even that alternative has been made onerous enough to deter all but the most determined - when the alternative is being foreclosed upon and turned out of your house with nowhere to go, is that really a ‘choice’? I don’t think so.
After 9/11, we were urged by the President to “go out and spend!” It is no coincidence that we have no savings. It’s not possible to save when you're just hanging on by your fingernails, like so many of us are these days.
There is no such thing as 'job security'. My parents' generation could make long-term financial plans, including saving, because if you had a job and did it well, the odds were that you would stay in that job until you retired. The luxury of knowing how much money you would have coming in for years ahead is one that is all but gone today. Now, if you're lucky enough to have a job that you've stayed in for a long time, you're more likely to be fired right before retirement, so your company doesn't have to pay your pension, and you can be replaced by someone younger who they can pay half your salary to.
This is an excerpt from my new book THE PRICE OF RIGHT: How the Conservative Agenda Has Failed America, which will be in bookstores this week:
Free trade is more than a way of doing business. It’s a philosophy; it’s an ideology. A philosophy with no empirical validation whatsoever. Though it’s supposed to work well for everyone because it works so well for multinational corporations and the investor class, it’s actually managed to be disastrous to most nations. It’s a belief system, like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Like any ideology, the theory matters more than the actual outcome. And being that the benefits are so huge for those whose hands are on the wheel of the ship of state, the corporations and investor class will continue to shoehorn this dangerous, destructive ideology into the national dialogue, and do whatever is necessary to silence any other voices that may threaten their place at the trough, regardless of the ultimate threat to America’s economy.
This race to the bottom will eventually take the corporatists down with the rest of us. Our economy cannot stand the strain of continually borrowing as if we’re playing with Monopoly money. When the consumers are too poor, who will buy consumer goods? When we reach our debt limit, what will happen when China and Saudi Arabia call in their chits? The more we borrow from other countries, the worse our national credit rating, which means –you guessed it! – higher interest rates on our debt. And on whose backs will this rising debt fall? Not the wealthiest, and not the corporations – George W. Bush and friends have seen fit to slash the tax rates for these folks. Combine our rising deficits, disappearing jobs, a grotesquely expensive invasion of another nation that has turned into endless war-profiteering black hole with no fiscal oversight, and tax cuts for those who already receive the bulk of the bounty of this nation, mix with greed and power, and shake well.
Then stand back, and get ready for the explosion.
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