Trickle Down Economics Perpetuates War

August 9, 2007

The European Central Bank injected emergency funds into the market for the first time since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -----In London the FTSE 100 index closed down 122.7 points, or 1.92 per cent at 6,271.2, while shares across Europe also fell after the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that it was pumping billions of pounds worth of emergency funding into the continent's banking systems.---The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 387.2 points at 13,270.7, The S&P 500 lost 44.4 points to 1,453.09, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 56.49 points to 2,556.49. ---It is no longer unusual to see the hour before closing producing mad gyrations in the market as huge buys by interventionists attempt to move it into positive territory. It no longer works. The cracks get wider.

The only thing GW Bush had to show for his eight years in the White House was the positive numbers of the stock exchange. If the market is going up and up then it follows that Trickle down is working. WRONG. When people can not afford to make their mortgage payments and are taking money out of their children’s education fund to pay their bills, and can no longer afford to buy houses, no intervention by the government can save the market or the empire.

The trickle down theory of economics has been a conservative political anthem for a century. Even though most economists admit that it doesn’t work. Greed still prevails and old trickle down spreads around the world.

The theory is that if you get investors, foreign and local to invest in companies and give the companies large tax breaks, the profits they make will trickle down to the workers. It’s like the old Wobblies song (International Workers of the World) "there will be pie in the sky when you die THAT’S A LIE!"

The folks that put words and ideas into the mouth of Ronald Reagan in the economic insanity of the 1980s cut the top tax bracket from 70% down to 50% and then way down to 28%. How well I remember Reagan’s budget director David Stockman telling American workers that the tax cuts would stimulate the American economy and benefit the workers.

Cold war profits soared, but the number of people below the poverty level
increased from (31.8 million) to (39.3 million) according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The federal budget deficit grew from $74,000 million in 1980 to $221,000 million in 1986 and what was called the greatest collapse of U.S. financial institutions since the 1930s left the working poor devastated and facing foreclosures on their homes.

From 1986 to 1989, 296 savings and loan institutions with total assets of $125 billion were forced to close and many workers realizing the American dream of home ownership for the first time lost their homes. An April 10, 2007, editorial in the New York Times claimed a net loss of homeownership for up to one million families and challenges Congress and state governments to determine whom to hold accountable. It is not whom, but What."

Henry Wallace, vice president under FDR and presidential candidate said back in 1948, "War preparations create record profits for big business, but only false prosperity for the people—their purchasing power shrinks as prices rise, their needs go unfilled, and they are burdened with new debts." He was right then, as Harry Truman prepared for the war In Korea and became the worst trickle down labor president in history, and Wallace would be right today.

Trickle down has never worked; it is not working now. It is a steroid for greed as Russian workers have found out and the Chinese are beginning to understand. It has caused the old cast system in India to be born anew. Countries, that allow foreign investors to buy into their companies and control the workers and the country's resources, quickly discover that trickle down does not trickle. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. That is always a formula for social upheavals.

The major cheerleader for Wall Street, the Associated Press gleefully reported on April 20, 2007 that "the signs of a surging economy are every where in China, but Chinese leaders are trying to apply the breaks." It is not the inflation that they have caused that they fear; it is the workers anger. In my book "The Genes Of Gregoria" I quote a Russian economist who was old, sick and dying. He earned many medals fighting the great war against the Nazis, but after seeing the boorish drunk Yelstin give away the nations resources and insert the trickle down, he shouts at his wife, "Is that what so many of my comrades died for…so a few Russians could get rich?"

At a book show in New York two years ago, a Chinese editor took my book home. "Is that what you fear for China?" she asked by email /"Yes," I replied. "Greed feeds on greed."

Thousands of holocaust survivors living in Israel live in shameful poverty, as Trickle down is a stanchion of Israel’s economy. Some 80,000 of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living under the poverty line, according to the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund.

Trickle down creates and thrives on war. War profits do not trickle down they land on the workers drip by drip, but inflation keeps them at the faucet trying to survive. Those of us who call ourselves "peace people" do what we can issue by issue. We try, but only if we can cut off the serpent’s head will real peace arrive. The serpent is greed and it feeds at the trough of Trickle down Economics.