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Bush, with criminal intent, planned the economic crisis for partisan GOP gain.

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Yes, I'm saying with malice aforethought which--in US criminal law means knowledge that through an action or omission, the result will be some one's death, big bro 43 caused our economic crisis which has caused many deaths in the US.

This isn't hyperbole, just recent history and it is a moderate interpretation of GOP policies. Rove studied recent GOP politicians to see just how he could create a permanent GOP majority. Reagan, by increasing the military budget and reducing taxes, reduced funding for US social service network. Ronnie spouted off about tough love and Bush 41 warbled about "thousand points of light", but they wanted our social service network to diminish. Big bro 43's Faith based Initiative was a transparent attempt to eliminate working federal social service programs with unfunded private services which would fail, but the victims would be primarily Democrats. Big bro 43's mumbling about an ownership society and allowing people to partially privatize social security were also just plots to ruin our social service network. Why did these GOP ghouls want this? Who are the beneficiaries of these services? To a great extent they are Democrats and the GOP never has wanted to contribute into a system that would benefit their Democratic allies. Herr Karl realized that if the social service network was eroded enough only the strong would survive--and vote for them. Recently tent camps of the impoverished are now forming in the US, and these people serve as a helpful example to our vast portion of lower waged workers. Yes, the GOP sees people living out in the elements as being crucial to their plans as they underscore that if you whine and attempt to get better benefits, then you lose your job and your family is out on the streets.

Big bro 43 stole the American Dream from us so his top 1% cronies could get every last cent and economists have been describing this for years!

Years ago the January 5, 2004 article "The Death of Horatio Alger" at
click here
has Paul Krugman, commenting on how thoroughly W has dashed the hopes of our bottom 99% as the article states "Business Week, which published an article titled "Waking Up From the American Dream." The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains--or even points out what is happening--as a practitioner of "class warfare."

That is what all of the GOP ghouls are moaning about Obama's change right now. They want a US of A in which there are few jobs and therefore chances to excel and those who have the dead-end jobs are ecstatic to have them and because their lives reek of failure are happy that there are people in even worse economic status than they are.

The article deals with how the US' gross inequalities of income distribution had been narrowing, with more of us have a reasonable expectation of improving our lot in life, but as the article continues "Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that of a 2001 Heritage Foundation piece, "Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments." America, they say, isn't a caste society--people with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa, and the route to wealth is open to all. That's where those commies at Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have lately become a lot more rigid."

It wasn't always this bad. Before the Gingrich led GOP Congress choked off all of Clinton's hopes a person could hope their standing could improve as the article continues "Business Week attributes this to the "Wal-Martization" of the economy, the proliferation of dead-end, low-wage jobs and the disappearance of jobs that provide entry to the middle class. That's surely part of the explanation. But public policy plays a role--and will, if present trends continue, play an even bigger role in the future."

How completely has W succeeded in creating a quasi-caste system in the US? The article concludes "Where is this taking us? Thomas Piketty, whose work with Saez has transformed our understanding of income distribution, warns that current policies will eventually create "a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can't compete." If he's right--and I fear that he is--we will end up suffering not only from injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential. Goodbye, Horatio Alger. And goodbye, American Dream."

And what of Krugman? Krugman won the 2008 Nobel prize for economics and argues that President George W. Bush's zeal for deregulation and loose fiscal policies helped spark the current banking meltdown.

Krugman's Nov 30, 2006 article "The Great Wealth Transfer"
at
click here
states "Why doesn't Bush get credit for the strong economy?" That question has been asked over and over again in recent months by political pundits. After all, they point out, the gross domestic product is up; unemployment, at least according to official figures, is low by historical standards; and stocks have recovered much of the ground they lost in the early years of the decade, with the Dow surpassing 12,000 for the first time. Yet the public remains deeply unhappy with the state of the economy. In a recent poll, only a minority of Americans rated the economy as "excellent" or "good," while most consider it no better than "fair" or "poor."...

The reason most Americans think the economy is fair to poor is simple: For most Americans, it really is fair to poor. Wages have failed to keep up with rising prices. Even in 2005, a year in which the economy grew quite fast, the income of most non-elderly families lagged behind inflation. The number of Americans in poverty has risen even in the face of an official economic recovery, as has the number of Americans without health insurance. Most Americans are little, if any, better off than they were last year and definitely worse off than they were in 2000. But how is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger - how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average.

In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year - the richest five percent of the population - will pocket almost half of the money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year - eighty percent of America - will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, economic inequality is on
the rise."

You wonder how these greedy ghouls have the nerve to rip-off the 99% of us. The article continues "According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hourly wage of the average American non-supervisory worker is actually lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 1970. Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared - from less than thirty times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker's pay."

How completely has big bro 43 dashed all of our hopes? The article continues "Not only can few Americans hope to join the ranks of the rich, no matter how well educated or hardworking they may be - their opportunities to do so are
actually shrinking. As best we can tell, pretax incomes are now as unequally distributed as they were in the 1920s - wiping out virtually all of the gains made by the middle class during the Great Compression."

This ripping-off the 99% of us was carefully as the article continues "It's no coincidence that ringing endorsements of greed began to be heard at the same time that the actual incomes of America's rich began to soar. In part, the
new pro-greed ideology was a way of rationalizing what was already happening. But it was also, to an important extent, a cause of the phenomenon. In the past thirty years, right-wing foundations have devoted enormous resources to promoting this agenda, building a far-reaching network of think tanks, media outlets and conservative scholars to legitimize higher levels of inequality.

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Winston Smith is an ex-Social Worker. I worked in child welfare, and in medical settings and in homeless settings. In the later our facility was geared as a permanent address for people to apply for welfare. Once they received that we could send (more...)
 
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