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February 2, 2011

They Don't Even Try to Hide it Anymore

By David Cox

On the cover of this weeks Time Magazine is a photoshopped picture of Barack Obama standing next to Ronald Reagan. Reagan has his arm around Obama's shoulder as Obama gushes a smile like he's meeting Frank Sinatra. The lead story in this mainstream magazine is "Why Obama, hearts Reagan and What He's Learned From Him."

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Reagan
Reagan
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Obama
Obama
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On the cover of this weeks Time Magazine is a photoshopped picture of Barack Obama standing next to Ronald Reagan. Reagan has his arm around Obama's shoulder as Obama gushes a smile like he's meeting Frank Sinatra. The lead story in this mainstream magazine is "Why Obama, hearts Reagan and What He's Learned From Him."

It is a disreputable cover and one that the current White House certainly wouldn't tolerate unless of course they agreed. Let's forget that Reagan was a Republican and Obama was elected as a Democrat. Let's forget that the Reagan administration was corrupt up to its eyeballs. Let's forget that the Reagan administration generated wars that killed thousands of innocent civilians in Central America. Let's forget that the Reagan administration sold the chemical weapons to Saddam that were used to gas the Kurds. Let's forget that the Reagan administration traded arms for hostages and sent birthday cakes to the ayatollah.

After we've forgotten all of that, we are left with the administration that shifted the tax burden from America's wealthy to America's working class. An administration which declared ketchup a vegetable to skirt Federal law on providing school lunches. An administration that bought plastic Air Force bombers for three quarters of a billion dollars a copy. Plastic dreadnoughts, too expensive to risk and too expensive to throw away.

Why oh, why, would any politician want their name or image joined with such company? It's Winston Smith's job, to rewrite history. This is historical revisionism. Reagan was a media President, and to please the media, the President sent the Marines into Beirut without ammunition in their guns. After a truck loaded with explosives killed 241 of those Marines and sailors, the media President responded by using a vintage WW2 battleship to open fire on the innocent civilians in Beirut.

It was message discipline.  The US couldn't appear to look weak, so innocent people had to die. Whether shooting down a civilian Iranian airliner or bombing Tripoli Libya, it was all about message.

Bloomberg - " AOL Inc. co-founder Steve Case will lead a White House campaign seeking to increase private-sector investments in startup companies and small businesses as part of President Barack Obama's directive to promote entrepreneurship, the administration announced."

Watch closely as the Obama administration uses the tools of misdirection so popular from the Reagan years. Obama talks one way and then acts the opposite. How is he planning on promoting entrepreneurship?

"Obama's fiscal 2012 budget, set for release Feb. 14, will include a proposal to make the elimination of capital gains taxes on certain investments in small businesses permanent, according to the announcement. The budget will also include an expansion of the New Markets Tax Credit to help encourage investments in startup companies and small businesses based in low-income areas.

The White House also will announce that the Small Business Administration will direct $2 billion in existing guarantee authority over the next 5 years to match private sector investments in lower-income areas."

What does Obama's budget offer for the unemployed and struggling? The same thing that Reagan offered, nothing!

Bloomberg- "In spite of differences between Democrats and Republicans on reforming housing finance, both sides back proposals that would make mortgages more expensive and difficult to obtain.

Government officials and lawmakers want to make the market less vulnerable to another credit crisis, and all the options lead the same general direction: Borrowers will need larger down payments than in the bubble years, have higher credit scores, and pay extra fees to cover risks and premiums for federal guarantees on government-backed mortgage bonds."

The plan first proposed by the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing think tank, is to privatize the mortgage market. To reduce government loan guarantees because two banks, Wells Fargo and Bank of America now control nearly 50 percent of the American mortgage marketplace.

Bloomberg - "We are going to have more collapses of this market if we open home ownership up to anyone who wants a home as opposed to people who can afford a home," said Peter Wallison, an author of the AEI report and former general counsel at the Reagan Treasury Department. "People are coming to that realization now." Wallison was also a key Reagan administration player involved with  deregulating the finance industry. Wallison was Ronald Reagan's lead counsel in the Iran Contra affair and now he's back, just in time to help the Obama administration.

"Joseph Pigg, senior counsel at the American Bankers Association in Washington, said that without a government guarantee, banks would be unlikely to keep offering traditional 30-year mortgages. "

Yes Reagan would be so proud, Republicans and Democrats working arm and arm with Republican think tanks and the American Bankers Association just to limit any government assistance available to the public in a monopolized mortgage market.

The AEI report said the market could operate effectively without Fannie and Freddie or some other kind of government guarantee as long as banks followed strict underwriting standards. Mortgage insurance, paid by borrowers, could also mitigate risk. You see, Mr. Obama, just like Ronald Reagan, is working night and day to get big government off of your back. Just like Reagan Obama says, leave it up to the banks and the free market to decide.

Home ownership rates had risen from 63.8 percent in 1994 to 69.2 percent a decade later, and are expected to fall to levels not seen since Dwight D. Eisenhower was in office. An entire generation of progress wiped out, but in doing so the banks can make more money by lending less but charging more. That's why monopolies are so popular, they are just damn profitable. A nation of renters with 62 percent ownership and what are the rates of home ownership in Socialist Europe? 67.1 percent.

"We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again." Barack Obama

Bank of America just gave its investment banking chief Thomas Montag a $15.2 million bonus this year. The amount is larger than the $9.05 million the bank awarded its CEO Brian Moynihan. It dwarfs the salary earned by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who only earned $12.6 million dollars this year. " I don't begrudge" the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay." Barack Obama

Ronald Reagan was a pirate, he was the reverse Robin Hood, he robbed from the poor to give to the rich. Yet Reagan was a pirate with a press agent. He spoke in noble platitudes about how much he loved America, and he conned a lot of people into believing him. That is also our Mr. Obama--a con artist. He is a con man who talks like a Democrat and acts like the worst of the Republicans. If we were to put a name on his administration's platform, it would be "The Screw Deal."

These bank profits were earned from borrowing money from the Federal Reserve at .25 percent and lending it back out to the public at 29 percent.  Any moron can show a profit like that!  But you, yes you, are being asked to subsidize this lending. While the Federal Reserve is lending to the banks at a quarter percent interest with Obama's smiling approval, the taxpayer pays the difference of the real cost to the tune of over $20,000 per million dollars borrowed.

Steal yourself rich, and Ronny Reagan would be so proud.

Hillary Clinton Secretary of State for the Reagan/ Obama administration recently told Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak to do the right thing, and hold new, fair, elections. You could laugh if it wasn't so serious, but that is the Reagan /Obama way. Never acknowledge reality, never let 'em know whose side your on until you slip the knife in. Ask Honduran President Zaleya about that. Why he dared to raise the minimum wage for the poor in Honduras, so he had to go.

Never acknowledge the truth! Never! Even when you shoot down a civilian airliner or send birthday cake to Iran. Even if the banks in Afghanistan are about to fail and President Karzai is involved, just ignore it, the suckers will soon forget. So what, if the Afghan bank's CEO bought $150 million in luxury villas in Dubai under his wife's name. So what if the Afghan President's brother owns seven percent of the bank and so what, if the total exposure is close to a billion dollars. Isn't that the American way? Aren't the Afghans doing exactly what they've learned from their American counterparts?

We have two years to bring about real change, be it through genuine Democrats, genuine Socialists or even some other third party. The script for 2012 is already written, if President Reagan/Obama faces a weak Republican challenger, the Tea Party will remain silent. If however, President Reagan/Obama faces a strong Republican challenger with a chance to dethrone him, then the Tea Party will enter the race to split the Republican vote. It will all look so honest and on the up and up, just like it did in 2000 and 2004.  In 2008 we choose between a Republican and a Democrat, and even though the public chose a Democrat, we got a Republican.

Why would Republican leadership want some other Republican? This one is just like Ronny Reagan!



Authors Bio:

I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really.

Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am.

We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.


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