Colbert Re-Enacts Palin’s Hilarious Version of Paul Revere’s Ride
Dont’cha love how — when Palin is confronted with the nonsensical nature of her own words — she doubles down! (That’s why she’ll never be president … except in Idiot America).
Check out her reply to Chris Wallace in this hilarious Colbert video:
Yastrow: “We Are on the Verge of a Great, Great Depression”
Reprinted from Washington Blog
The news that frequent CNBC guest Peter Yastrow of Yastrow Origer (and formerly with DT Trading) told CNBC that “We’re on the verge of a great, great depression. The [Federal Reserve] knows it” is going viral today.
But this is not news to anyone who has been paying attention.
As I pointed out Tuesday, billion dollar fund managers agree: the government never fixed the underlying economic problems, so we’ll have another crash.
I provided details last month:
As I noted in January, the housing slump is worse than during the Great Depression. [Confirmed here]
As CNN Money points out today:Wal-Mart’s core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and the retail giant is worried, CEO Mike Duke said Wednesday.
“We’re seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure,” Duke said at an event in New York. “There’s no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact.”
Wal-Mart shoppers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, typically shop in bulk at the beginning of the month when their paychecks come in.
Lately, they’re “running out of money” at a faster clip, he said.
“Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year,” Duke said. “This end-of-month [purchases] cycle is growing to be a concern.
And – in case you still think that the 29% of Americans who think we’re in a depression are unduly pessimistic – take a look at what I wrote last December:
The following experts have – at some point during the last 2 years – said that the economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression:
- Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
- Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (and see this andthis)
- Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker
- Economics scholar and former Federal Reserve GovernorFrederic Mishkin
- The head of the Bank of England Mervyn King
- Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
- Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman
- Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead
- Economics professors Barry Eichengreen and and Kevin H. O’Rourke (updated here)
- Investment advisor, risk expert and “Black Swan” authorNassim Nicholas Taleb
- Well-known PhD economist Marc Faber
- Morgan Stanley’s UK equity strategist Graham Secker
- Former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae Edward J. Pinto
- Billionaire investor George Soros
- Senior British minister Ed Balls
***
States and Cities In Worst Shape Since the Great Depression
States and cities are in dire financial straits, and many may default in 2011.
California is issuing IOUs for only the second time since the Great Depression.
Things haven’t been this bad for state and local governments since the 30s.
Loan Loss Rate Higher than During the Great Depression
In October 2009, I reported:
In May, analyst Mike Mayo predicted that the bank loan loss rate would be higher than during the Great Depression.
In a new report, Moody’s has just confirmed (as summarized by Zero Hedge):
The most recent rate of bank charge offs, which hit $45 billion in the past quarter, and have now reached a total of $116 billion, is at 3.4%, which is substantially higher than the 2.25% hit in 1932, before peaking at at 3.4% rate by 1934.
And see this.
Here’s a chart summarizing the findings:
(click here for full chart).
Indeed, top economists such as Anna Schwartz, James Galbraith, Nouriel Roubini and others have pointed out that while banks faced aliquidity crisis during the Great Depression, today they are wholly insolvent. See this, this, this and this. Insolvency is much more severethan a shortage of liquidity.
Unemployment at or Near Depression LevelsUSA Today reports today:
So many Americans have been jobless for so long that the government is changing how it records long-term unemployment.
Citing what it calls “an unprecedented rise” in long-term unemployment, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), beginning Saturday, will raise from two years to five years the upper limit on how long someone can be listed as having been jobless.
***
The change is a sign that bureau officials “are afraid that a cap of two years may be ‘understating the true average duration’ — but they won’t know by how much until they raise the upper limit,” says Linda Barrington, an economist who directs the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
***
“The BLS doesn’t make such changes lightly,” Barrington says. Stacey Standish, a bureau assistant press officer, says the two-year limit has been used for 33 years.
***
Although ”this feels like something we’ve not experienced” since the Great Depression, she says, economists need more information to be sure.
The following chart from Calculated Risk shows that this is not a normal spike in unemployment:
As does this chart from Clusterstock:
As I noted in October:It is difficult to compare current unemployment with that during the Great Depression. In the Depression, unemployment numbers weren’t tracked very consistently, and the U-3 and U-6 statistics we use today weren’t used back then. And statistical “adjustments” such as the “birth-death model” are being used today that weren’t used in the 1930s.
But let’s discuss the facts we do know.
The Wall Street Journal noted in July 2009:
The average length of unemployment is higher than it’s been since government began tracking the data in 1948.
***
The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.
The Christian Science Monitor wrote an article in June entitled, “Length of unemployment reaches Great Depression levels“.
60 Minutes – in a must-watch segment – notes that our current situation tops the Great Depression in one respect: never have we had a recession this deep with a recovery this flat. 60 Minutes points out that unemployment has been at 9.5% or above for 14 months:
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy notes inFreedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford, 1999) that – during Herbert Hoover’s presidency, more than 13 million Americans lost their jobs. Of those, 62% found themselves out of work for longer than a year;44% longer than two years; 24% longer than three years; and11% longer than four years.
Blytic calculates that the current average duration of unemployment is some 32 weeks, the median duration is around 20 weeks, and there are approximately 6 million people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer.
Moreover, employers are discriminating against job applicants who are currently unemployed, which will almost certainly prolong the duration of joblessness.
As I noted in January 2009:
In 1930, there were 123 million Americans.
At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the total work force or 11,385,000 people, were unemployed.
Will unemployment reach 25% during this current crisis?
I don’t know. But the number of people unemployed will be higher than during the Depression.
Specifically, there are currently some 300 millionAmericans, 154.4 million of whom are in the work force.
Unemployment is expected to exceed 10% by many economists, and Obama “has warned that theunemployment rate will explode to at least 10% in 2009″.
10 percent of 154 million is 15 million people out of work – more than during the Great Depression.
Given that the broader U-6 measure of unemployment is currently around 17% (ShadowStats.com puts the figure at 22%, and some put it even higher), the current numbers are that much worse.
But it is important to look at some details.
For example, official Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers put U-6above 20% in several states:
- California: 21.9
- Nevada: 21.5
- Michigan 21.6
- Oregon 20.1
In the past year, unemployment has grown the fastest in themountain West.
And certain races and age groups have gotten hit hard.
According to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee:
By February 2010, the U-6 rate for African Americans rose to 24.9 percent.
34.5% of young African American men were unemployed in October 2009.As the Center for Immigration Studies noted last December:
Unemployment rates for less-educated and younger workers:
- As of the third quarter of 2009, the overall unemployment rate for native-born Americans is 9.5 percent; the U-6 measure shows it as 15.9 percent.
- The unemployment rate for natives with a high school degree or less is 13.1 percent. Their U-6 measure is 21.9 percent.
- The unemployment rate for natives with less than a high school education is 20.5 percent. Their U-6 measure is 32.4 percent.
- The unemployment rate for young native-born Americans (18-29) who have only a high school education is 19 percent. Their U-6 measure is 31.2 percent.
- The unemployment rate for native-born blacks with less than a high school education is 28.8 percent. Their U-6 measure is 42.2 percent.
- The unemployment rate for young native-born blacks (18-29) with only a high school education is 27.1 percent. Their U-6 measure is 39.8 percent.
- The unemployment rate for native-born Hispanics with less than a high school education is 23.2 percent. Their U-6 measure is 35.6 percent.
- The unemployment rate for young native-born Hispanics (18-29) with only a high school degree is 20.9 percent. Their U-6 measure is 33.9 percent.
No wonder Chris Tilly – director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA - says that African-Americans and high school dropouts are experiencing depression-level unemployment.
And as I have previously noted, unemployment for those who earn $150,000 or more is only 3%, while unemployment for the poor is 31%.
The bottom line is that it is difficult to compare current unemployment with what occurred during the Great Depression. In some ways things seem better now. In other ways, they don’t.
Factors like where you live, race, income and age greatly effect one’s experience of the severity of unemployment in America.
In addition, wages have plummeted for those who are employed. As Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston notes:
Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined ….
Food Stamps Replace Soup Kitchens
1 out of every 7 Americans now rely on food stamps.
While we don’t see soup kitchens, it may only be because so many Americans are receiving food stamps.
Indeed, despite the dramatic photographs we’ve all seen of the 1930s, the 43 million Americans relying on food stamps to get by may actually be much greater than the number who relied on soup kitchens during the Great Depression.
In addition, according to Chaz Valenza (a small business owner in New Jersey who earned his MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business) millions of Americans are heading to foodbanks for the first time in their lives.
***
The War Isn’t WorkingGiven the above facts, it would seem that the government hasn’t beendoing much. But the scary thing is that the government has done more than during the Great Depression, but the economy is still stuck a pit.
***
The amount spent in emergency bailouts, loans and subsidies during this financial crisis arguably dwarfs the amount which the government spent during the New Deal.
For example, Casey Research wrote in 2008:
Paulson and Bernanke have embarked on the largest bailout program ever conceived …. a program which so far will cost taxpayers $8.5 trillion.
[The updated, exact number can be disputed. But as shown below, the exact number of trillions of dollars is not that important.]
So how does $8.5 trillion dollars compare with the cost of some of the major conflicts and programs initiated by the US government since its inception? To try and grasp the enormity of this figure, let’s look at some other financial commitments undertaken by our government in the past:
As illustrated above, one can see that in today’s dollar, we have already committed to spending levels that surpass thecumulative cost of all of the major wars and government initiatives since the American Revolution.
Recently, the Congressional Research Service estimated the cost of all of the major wars our country has fought in 2008 dollars. The chart above shows that the entire cost of WWII over four to five years was less than half the current pledges made by Paulson and Bernanke in the last three months!
In spite of years of conflict, the Vietnam and the Iraq wars have each cost less than the bailout package that was approved by Congress in two weeks. The Civil War that devastated our country had a total price tag (for both the Union and Confederacy) of $60.4 billion, while the Revolutionary War was fought for a mere $1.8 billion.
In its fifty or so years of existence, NASA has only managed to spend $885 billion – a figure which got us to the moon and beyond.
The New Deal had a price tag of only $500 billion. The Marshall Plan that enabled the reconstruction of Europe following WWII for $13 billion, comes out to approximately $125 billion in 2008 dollars. The cost of fixing the S&L crisis was $235 billion.
CNBC confirms that the New Deal cost about $500 billion (and the S&L crisis cost around $256 billion) in inflation adjusted dollars.
So even though the government’s spending on the “war” on the economic crisis dwarfs the amount spent on the New Deal, our economy is still stuck in the mud.
Why Haven’t Things Gotten Better for the Little Guy?
Government leaders make happy talk about how things are improving, buthappy talk cannot fix the economy.
Two fundamental causes of the Great Depression, and of our current economic problems, are fraud and inequality:
- Fraud was one of the main causes of the Depression, but nothing has been done to rein in fraud today
- Inequality was another major cause of downturns – including the Depression – but inequality is currently worse than during the Depression
There are, of course, other reasons the economy is still stuck in a ditch for most Americans, such as encouraging too much leverage, bailing out the big speculators, failing to break up the mammoth banks, and failing to spend wisely, where it will do some good. See this and this. But fraud and inequality were core causes of the Depression, and our failure to address them will only prolong our misery.
In Praise of Warriors, Not War
By Don Pelton
On this Memorial Day, I’d like to speak a few words in support of warriors, and in opposition to war.
Despite reaching my formative young adulthood during the anti-war 1960s, and despite my minor experience with something remotely similar to combat – in the National Guard at the Watts riots in August of 1965, and at Berkeley’s People’s Park in May of 1969 – it occurred to me sometime in the early 1990s that I knew almost nothing about the “Good War” that our father’s fought, that left us with a world mostly free.
I studied American history in college, and read good histories such as William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but aside from reading Shirer’s reporting from Berlin in the early years of the war, I had never listened to the voices of those who experienced the frontlines of World War II (and Korea soon after) first-hand.
So I began to read many personal accounts of those wars, and the harrowing reports which haunt me still are – particularly – E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang, and a report I’ll never forget, by U.S. Army historian S.L.A. Marshall in a collection I can no longer locate, about the hand-to-hand combat of an American squad against some Chinese infantry during the Korean War.
This effort to study war by reading first-hand accounts and by viewing documentaries and films on the subject serves as my poor but only possible substitute for the actual experience of combat. Every citizen who understands that some wars are unavoidable and necessary owes this same effort – to understand what combat really is – to those whom he may ask to risk their lives.
E.B. Sledge described the horror on the island of Peleliu in the Pacific, digging in to fight the Japanese, who were holed-up in caves. By the time he arrived on that island there had already been so much close fighting that he could find no place to sink his spade to dig a foxhole where there weren’t chunks of human flesh mixed up like rotting compost in the loose soil. If that isn’t an image of Hell, I don’t know what is.
Farley Mowat described his upbringing in a patriotic Canadian family, and how the old stories of war filled him with a keen desire to find glory in combat, but not necessarily in the infantry (where he ended up). He finally found combat in the campaign to force the Nazis out of Italy. His vivid description of the savagery of war includes the awful poetic detail of his title, “… and no birds sang.”
S.L.A. Marshall told the story of an American squad that attacked a hill held by the Chinese in Korea, and despite heavy losses – with only three surviving the fight – they prevailed, killing all of the enemy. But the hand-to-hand combat with bayonets had so unleashed the blood-lust of the Americans that – with no more enemies to kill – they went on and slaughtered a small herd of horses that the Chinese had corralled there.
The power of this account – and the sadness of it – is in the awful realization that each of us is capable of such blood lust, given the same circumstance.
I take it as axiomatic that in war, all sides always lose some portion of their humanity in the prosecution of the struggle, at least for a time.
It also seems to be axiomatic that those who are least experienced in war are often the most gung-ho to start it, and those who are most experienced – like Eisenhower and Colin Powell – are most reluctant to undertake it lightly.
Then there’s the lethal shallowness of a man who experienced combat, but whose motives for taking us to war – when he became president – may have included personal insecurity. There have been plausible suggestions that George Herbert Walker Bush undertook the invasion of Panama in part to solve the problem of his “wimp image.”
We honor the sacrifice of our soldiers and remember them on days like this not because war is always glorious and just, but precisely because – whether just or unjust, whether noble or ignoble — it is always Hell, and they have gone into Hell for our sake.
Statue of soldier (at Vietnam Memorial, Capitol Mall, Sacramento)
Washington’s Whiskey Woes
Cross-posted from the New Deal 2.0 Blog.
by William Hogeland
Despite claims to the contrary, the Whiskey Rebellion was no anti-government crusade — it was a battle for progressive taxation and regulation.
The seething social, political, and economic struggles over public and private finance that marked our founding period came to a head in the late fall of 1794, when President George Washington, back in the saddle for the first time since the Revolution, personally led nearly 13,000 troops into western Pennsylvania to subject its populace to a military occupation. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton served as Washington’s major domo for the operation — and he took over full command when Washington turned back to Philadelphia. Under Hamilton’s command, troops rousted citizens from beds in the snow and ran them to holding pens. They detained on no charge hundreds of people against whom the executive branch knew it had no evidence, administering searches and seizures of property and subjecting detainees to harsh conditions and terrorizing interrogations. After spending indefinite periods in privation and fear, most of the detainees were released — inevitably, as there hadn’t been evidence for their detention. The whole operation was conducted in the absence of warrants, any resolution of Congress, or legal suspension of habeas corpus.
Prosecutions were never the purpose of the arrests. Troops soon arrived at every home in the region and required every male over the age of eighteen to sign an oath of loyalty to the federal government. Not surprisingly, most complied. Such was the context in which the U.S. government established its sovereignty in what was then the restless, defiant, trans-Appalachian West.
The real issues sparking the 1794 suppression of western Pennsylvania have been trivialized, at first by Hamilton himself, as “the Whiskey Rebellion.” Just as Hamilton hoped, historians and biographers have contentedly gone on marginalizing the democratic-finance movement that Hamilton dedicated his career to obstructing and tried to give the coup de grace in the suppression of western Pennsylvania.
But the resistance wasn’t about whiskey, and Hamilton knew it. It was about public finance and national economics.
The resistance did begin in objections to the first federal tax on a domestic product, an excise on distilled spirits. That tax had been authored by Hamilton himself as linchpin to his comprehensive funding-and-assumption plan for supporting investment in the federal domestic debt and making that debt a national engine. But whereas Hamilton’s famous political enemies in government — the opposition party coming to be associated with Jefferson and Madison — objected on general principles to Hamilton’s activist approach to federal government, the ordinary people on whom his tax operated most painfully were objecting on other, more pragmatic grounds.
They’d hoped for a government that would protect them against what they saw as the avaricious merchant-class lending industry, and they saw the whiskey tax as a betrayal of those hopes, a continuation, even an amplification, of finance policies deliberately favoring elites and obstructing ordinary people’s efforts to get their hands on political and economic power. The rebels began by making disguised attacks on tax collectors — in the classic “regulation” style that the unenfranchised had long employed to promote more democratic public finance. Then they began raising what had been known in 1776 as “liberty poles” (the Washington administration now deemed raising the poles seditious). By 1794, when the western counties of Pennsylvania, along with some in western Virginia, in correspondence with sympathizers in Kentucky, were marching under a new flag and threatening secession from the United States, their goals went well beyond regulation.
They sought to form a new, western country, with direct access to trade on the Mississippi, cultivating a new kind of democratic republic in which ordinary people would thrive. The rebels were well armed and well organized, some of the toughest people America has ever known. Hunters, trackers, dirt-farmers, laborers, craftsmen and marksmen, they were rank-and-file veterans of the worst theaters of the Revolutionary war; their fathers and grandfathers had been harassing eastern government, both British and American, for many years. The prospect of their seceding and forming a government of their own, hostile to the U.S., was a terrifying one.
And of course it wasn’t realistic. In the end the rebels’ ruthless illegality was overcome by Hamilton, using his own ruthless illegality, on behalf of President Washington, in the occupation of western Pennsylvania.
I’ve written in detail elsewhere, as have others, about how Hamilton’s tax, which he sold to a financially naive Congress as an innocuous duty on consumption of a luxury item, was in fact carefully calibrated to cartelize the distilling business, favoring big merchants, eastern financiers, and federally-connected western cronies and putting small farmers out of business, all while using the tax revenues to pay interest (untaxed) to well-heeled investors in U.S. debt. Also widely discussed in Whiskey Rebellion literature (though not by Hamilton’s biographers!) are Hamilton’s eager anticipation of leading a military effort against U.S. citizens somewhere in America to enforce finance policy, and his manipulating, along with Attorney General William Bradford, the prosecution of tax resisters to create a pretext for bringing that plan to fruition in western Pennsylvania.
But in the context of today’s debates over taxation and public debt, it might be more important to look at some specific things the so-called whiskey rebels objected to in Hamilton’s polices. Hamilton biographers haven’t done so, and taking at face value Hamilton’s own tactical dismissals of his populist critics’ objections, they have confused many of the most important issues in founding finance.
Although the rebels protested and ultimately mobilized militarily against a tax, they were neither inheritors of the Boston Tea Party nor forerunners of today’s Tea Party movement. Unlike the Boston Sons of Liberty — upper-middle-class men who objected to Parliament’s taxing American’s without representation, as well as to a bailout of a company deemed to big to fail — the whiskey rebels wanted government not merely to observe the classic liberties of propertied Englishmen but to promote the equality of the less- and un-propertied. And unlike many in today’s Tea Party, the rebels of the 1790’s did not object to federal taxes per se. Their slogan wasn’t “no taxation” or even “less taxation” but “equal taxation.” They rightly identified the whiskey tax as what today we would call regressive. In their first of many unsuccessful petitions for repeal, they complained that the tax was unjust because it didn’t operate in proportion to property. They saw clearly, in a way Hamilton’s enemy Madison never would have, that the tax was designed to hit the poorest hardest, favor the east over the west, and end local efforts at popular finance.
Nor did they object to an activist federal government. They just wanted it to be activist on behalf of labor, not wealth. Anti-federalists did try pandering to the economic populists epitomized by the whiskey rebels, but one of the most important rebel leaders was the preacher and activist Herman Husband, the first to be arrested by Washington’s troops and sent to prison in Philadelphia. Husband’s sermons were anything but antifederalist. Like Paine, another radical democrat with high regard for the progressive power of government, Husband called for a national government that would use its might to ensure equality. Unlike some of their fellow populists (then and now) both Paine and Husband saw power invested largely in “states’ rights” as likely to be socially and economically regressive.
The “madman of the Alleghenies,” as Husband was called, envisioned a strong national government with social security; taxes on investment income; and slow, centrally managed inflation. Referring to the process by which democratic populists overturned the Pennsylvania government in 1776, he suggested that the rank-and-file militias might succeed in taking over western Pennsylvania. He was in his seventies when federal troops marched him over the Alleghenies and all the way to Philadelphia, where he lay in jail in awful conditions. Unlike many of those arrested, Husband was actually charged — with sedition. But the jury found him not guilty.
No matter. Detention was punishment enough — and for Americans, the occupation of western Pennsylvania was example enough. Husband had been terribly weakened by his ordeal, and he died on his way back to western Pennsylvania. His grave is unknown. The obscurity in history of one our most original and prescient thinkers on finance, government, and democracy is emblematic of the obscurity of the real causes of the Whiskey Rebellion, the cogent thinking of the men who became rebels, and the open conflict between Hamiltonian finance and American democracy.
William Hogeland is the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History. He has spoken on unexpected connections between history and politics at the National Archives, the Kansas City Public Library, and various corporate and organization events. He blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com.
Was Bin Laden a Casualty of the Arab Revolt?
Interesting perspective on Osama Bin Laden’s death from the Asia Times:
“More surprising than the death of Osama bin Laden on Monday was the fact that he lived unmolested in a mansion in Abbottabad, about 65 kilometers north of the Pakistani capital Islamabad. How many Pakistani officials and others must have known about this? “America can do whatever we set out mind to,” President Barack Obama intoned in his May 1 announcement of Bin Laden’s death at the hands during a strike by Pakistani and American special forces.
“Not, apparently, without a little help from its friends, and remarkably belated help at that.
” … while al-Qaeda had drawn funding from both Saudi and Iranian sources, in present circumstances its activity tended to serve Iranian rather than Saudi interests. Support for terrorism, moreover, is a two-way street: precisely because Saudi Arabia was “a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda”, Saudi intelligence knows something about the recipients of their money.
“The Saudis, moreover, have an interest in cleaning up the terrorist associations of the Pakistani military. As the Saudi cold war with Iran grows increasingly hot, Riyadh may look towards Islamabad for military support. Asia Times Online has reported that the Bahrain National Guard already is recruiting Pakistani mercenaries.”
” … American special forces may have been the proximate cause of Bin Laden’s violent death, but the efficient cause is a great strategic upheaval that America does not yet understand, and is not prepared to respond to.”
Read full fascinating article here.
Did Osama Bin Laden Die Yesterday, or in 2001?
Conspiracy theories are usually the tiresome productions of the paranoid psyche.
And this is probably just as true of the old theory of the cover-up of Bin Laden’s 2001 death, which is now given new vigor by the Obama Administration’s announcement yesterday that it has finally succeeded in killing him.
What gives that old theory even a grain of plausibility?
The grain comes from the recognition that any war-based economy and society gets a benefit from the perpetuation of its enemies, and would therefore be tempted to hide the death of its greatest enemy of all time.
And of course, it goes without saying that Bin Laden’s followers would benefit from perpetuating the myth the he could not be killed.
But what gives anyone in this country the motive to claim that Bin Laden really died in 2001, and that the President is lying about it now?
Certainly our president’s political enemies will clamor to deny him the glory of this current accomplishment.
Personally I love the idea that Obama accomplished what George Bush failed to accomplish. It wouldn’t be the first such accomplishment, and probably not the last (think: health care reform).
And this particular achievement — the elimination of Bin Laden — will likely help Obama get re-elected (a fact which in itself serves as more fodder for the conspiracy theorists).
What sort of evidence do purveyors of Bin Laden’s 2001 death offer in support of their theory?
You can examine most such evidence on the following website, which — by the way — the operators claim was the victim of a massive denial-of-service attack ”just moments before President Obama announced that the U.S. had killed Osama Bin Laden.” Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t really out to get you.
Of course, to take seriously the theory of Bin Laden’s 2001 death, you’d have to believe the improbable idea that your government and your president would lie to you.
And I suppose the hurried burial of Bin Laden “at sea” after being shot in the head deep inside Pakistan will only serve to stoke the fires of skepticism even more.
Remember, you read it here last.
Check out http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/osama_dead.php :
CLICK ON IMAGE TO VISIT THE "WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?" WEBSITE.
Happy Tax Day, Alexander Hamilton!
Cross-posted from the New Deal 2.0 blog.
by William Hogeland
Hamilton is revered for putting America on sound financial footing, but he couldn’t have done it without federal taxation.
The annual drop-dead moment when Americans must file tax returns or face unpleasant consequences has become an opportunity for the Tea Party, protesting what it sees as crippling taxation and overactive federal government, to rally its supporters. Extending this year’s filing deadline from April 15 to today, April 18, the IRS gave Tea Partiers a big weekend, and all over the country, tax-day events hymned unregulated markets, excoriated federal programs like the health-insurance reform bill, and defended anti-labor governors. Anti-Obama leaders from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump urged the faithful to oppose evils summed up for them in the annual requirement to file federal tax returns. For the Tea Party, “Tax Day” represents all that’s gone wrong with America since the founding.
So as we stand on long lines at the post office hoping to avoid the midnight axe, we might spare a moment to consider the father of federal taxes, Alexander Hamilton. Our first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton is celebrated by both establishment liberals and establishment conservatives: The Hamilton Project is an economic effort of the liberal Brookings Institution, and former Obama budget director Peter Orszag hung a Hamilton portrait in his office; on the right, the writer David Brooks and former Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are two of Hamilton’s biggest fans. It’s not surprising. Hamilton is rightly said to have put the new nation on sound financial footing and secured its creditworthiness. He gave us our first comprehensive national finance policy.
That policy depended on exercising certain economic powers that finance nationalists like Hamilton and his mentor the rich financier Robert Morris, as well as planter nationalists like James Madison, had been striving to achieve for the federal government throughout the 1780’s, and which came to fruition at the Constitutional convention in 1787. While Hamilton and Madison would arrive at dire odds over whether the Constitution gives the federal government the right to form a central bank (Hamilton yes, Madison no), all nationalists had long agreed that a national government, unlike a confederation of states, would have a right to tax its citizens directly, throughout the states. And unlike what they saw as state governments’ susceptibility to the American popular-finance movement’s riot and noncompliance, a national government, nationalists hoped, would have both the will and the police resources to enforce and collect taxes.
So whereas Tea Partiers sometimes associate their objections to federal taxes with a desire to “get back to the Constitution,” federal taxation is one of the Constitution’s central purposes. And we can thank the wunderkind Alexander Hamilton for proposing the legislation by which the first U.S. Congress imposed the first federal tax ever on an American product.
Hamilton wasn’t messing around. Empowered by the new government to do what he and Morris had long been frustrated in trying to do, the young, charismatic, brilliant, diligent Secretary worked up a full-blown plan for connecting national wealth, and even more importantly national credit, to ambitious national aims. Like Morris, though to a far more sophisticated degree, Hamilton wanted the United States to become an economic powerhouse and financial empire to compete with England. And he’d been tireless in figuring out how to do it.
The key, as Morris had always suggested, was to combine a big public debt with vigorously enforced taxes earmarked for funding that debt. That is: sell U.S. bonds to the small, rich merchant lending class and, as Morris had put it, “open the purses of the people,” collecting taxes from the American people, in metal, not paper, and earmarking revenues for paying the bondholders their 6% interest in hard, cold cash — 6% untaxed interest, that is. Federal power would thus shift national wealth upward and consolidate it. Yoking national credit to national interest, government would serve as an economic pivot between the creditors and the people and thus be in a position to finance roads, canals, wars, and other national projects.
Morris had fought hard during the confederation period for a simple federal tariff on imports, known as an “impost,” and opposition even to that measure had always been stiff: states wanted to retain their sovereign power to tax. But he’d also schooled his supporters in what a real federal tax slate would look like. Once people had become inured to paying a federal tariff, Morris had predicted, the federal government would be able to impose taxes on domestic products too, taxes known as “excises.” Continuing to expand tariffs alone would hit too hard the very people Morris and Hamilton wanted to encourage: the merchant financiers, who also engaged in international trade (that’s where they got the gold). Fully consolidating wealth, and fully connecting it to high national aims, meant collecting revenue for finding bonds from people who would never own a bond. Hence the importance, to Hamilton, of imposing domestic taxes.
And Hamilton pulled his whole plan off, pretty much on his own. He is often portrayed as having faced down and tamed a huge public debt that had been run up, somehow, to unfortunate proportions during the war and now needed to be paid off. Nothing could be farther from how Hamilton himself saw the situation. Swelling the public debt had been a project of his and Morris’s for many years — for all the cogent reasons of national credit described above — and now as Secretary, his plan was hardly to pay the debt down (many of his biographers to the contrary) but to fund it. Which as those of us with credit cards know, is another thing altogether.
In that context, Hamilton further persuaded Congress to assume all the states’ debts in the national one, swelling the public debt to the nth degree at last and placing it all in federal hands. That took a tough political fight. Hamilton won it in part because his Madisonian opponents were nowhere near as finance-savvy as he, and partly because empowering the federal government to enact a top-down national finance plan had all along been a chief purpose of the Constitution under which Hamilton acted.
So state debts were nationalized, and a law for funding the domestic public debt was passed. Hamilton couldn’t get his bondholders their full 6%, but they were happy enough. Investing in the U.S. looked safe and lucrative.
Funding and assumption: those were Hamilton’s great twin achievements, and they did secure the credit of the nation in just the way he and Morris had always wanted. But they depended on a third leg of the finance program, rarely discussed but utterly essential: federal taxation of the American people, with a full-fledged collection service, inexorably spreading federal power to collect, audit, and prosecute throughout the country, from state to state, town to town, and village to village. To Hamilton, taxes weren’t an unfortunate necessity. They created a nation, pulling the country together through a network of federal officers opening offices and banging on doors. Running every last detail of that widespread, growing, and powerful federal agency, Hamilton came into his own.
Next week: How Hamilton constructed and calibrated his first federal tax — the excise on American distilled spirits — to achieve his and Morris’s longstanding goal of quelling the popular finance movement. Also: How the finance populists fought back. In the meantime: Happy Tax Day!
William Hogeland is the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History. He has spoken on unexpected connections between history and politics at the National Archives, the Kansas City Public Library, and various corporate and organization events. He blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com.
Rick Santorum Shows Republicans How to Commit Political Suicide
Those Republicans (like Paul Ryan) clamoring to destroy Medicare either forget or don’t care why Medicare was supported by most medical insurance companies when it was first enacted: because it eliminated the largest pool of poor health risks from their own market.
And considering the current polling showing support of the extremely successful and efficient Medicare system by huge majorities of Americans, including — significantly — Republicans, they are also apparently unconcerned about how their “death-to-Medicare” campaign will affect their own political fortunes.
So much the better.
Rick Santorum, for example.
Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), an ultra-conservative who believes Social Security is dying because of legal abortion, said recently that he feels the Republican budget does not go far enough in restricting medical care for senior citizens.
Unlike Rep. Paul Ryan and the GOP leadership, which has excluded today’s seniors from their plan to destroy Medicare, Santorum wants “most” kicked off the program, and he said so in a recent interview with Fox News conservative opinion host Sean Hannity.
Read full article in Rawstory here.
GOP Taxcuts = Booms and Busts (1929, 2008, … ) Get It?
Editor’s Note: Republican tax cuts in the early 1920s led to the greatest boom and bust (1929) up until that time, and to the Republican Great Depression. The Republican tax cuts of the Reagan and Bush eras led to the bust of 2008 and the current Republican Great Recession. Now Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is a recipe for more boom and bust cycles. How many times do we have to study this lesson before we learn it? Here it is again:
A Ghost From A Ghastly Public Policy Past
Reprinted from Too Much.
House budget-cutters are taking their inspiration from the greatest giveaway artist — to the rich — the nation’s capital has ever known.
You won’t find many photos with smiles on the face of Andrew Mellon, the U.S. treasury secretary back in the 1920s. The exceedingly dour — and fabulously wealthy — Mellon may be smiling someplace now. His spirit lives.
Mellon, a Pittsburgh financier, began his dozen years atop Treasury in 1921. He rated, at the time, as one of the world’s richest men. One of the most determined, too.
Mellon came to Washington as a man on a mission. That mission: to slash federal income tax rates on his fellow rich — and himself, of course, too. He succeeded.
In 1921, America’s richest faced a 73 percent tax rate on income over $1 million. By 1925, Mellon had maneuvered that top rate all the way down to 25 percent.
Last week Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin, the go-to guy on taxes for the GOP House majority, channeled his own personal Andrew Mellon. He introduced, with great fanfare, the official Republican budget for America’s next fiscal year — and decade. His budget’s maximum tax rate on top-bracket income: 25 percent.
Andrew Mellon’s 1920s handiwork would eventually pour $72 billion, in today’s dollars, into wealthy pockets and set the table for the wildest speculative bubble Wall Street had ever seen. That bubble would burst into the Great Depression — and impoverish, in the process, tens of millions of Americans.
Mellon opposed, right up until his 1932 exit from Treasury, any efforts to get the federal government to come to the aid of those millions. Hard times, he told President Hoover, didn’t have to be “altogether a bad thing.”
“People will work harder,” Mellon pronounced. “Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
The “Path To Prosperity” budget plan Rep. Ryan unveiled last week updates Mellon’s Uncle Scrooge approach to public policy for the 21st century.
Andrew Mellon prevented the federal government from creating programs to aid those most in need. Ryan’s budget, if ever enacted, would gut the federal aid programs that have appeared over the 80 years since Mellon left office.
Two-thirds of the $4 trillion in budget cuts the “Path for Prosperity” proposes for the next decade would come out of “programs that serve people of limited means,”reports the Center on Budsget and Policy Priorities.
That would be no accident. The “Pathway to Prosperity” budget, as the text explaining the Ryan plan proudly proclaims, will “ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”
Andrew Mellon never made his insensitivity to the poor any clearer than that. But hand this to Andy Mellon. He had an excuse for his philosophy. History, in Mellon’s time, had not yet fully exposed the folly of cutting taxes on the rich as a route to economic prosperity.
Ryan and his rich people-friendly colleagues in Congress today have no such excuse. The comfort-the-comfortable, afflict-the-afflicted policies Mellon pushed, we now know, did not usher in prosperity. They ushered in the greatest depression in American history.
Our two most powerful national untax-the-rich surges since then — the first in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, the second 20 years later under George W. Bush — also failed miserably to create prosperity for average Americans. For Rep. Ryan and his GOP congressional leadership friends, no matter.
Ryan’s new budget simply ignores the history Andrew Mellon never lived long enough to experience. Ryan’s budget predicts unprecedented prosperity, with numbers so statistically groundless that even the conservative Economistmagazine was describing Ryan’s claims last week as “laughably overoptimistic.”
But we can’t afford to laugh. No proposal that carries a stamp of approval from congressional majority leaders can ever be dismissed as a laughing matter.
Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online weekly on excess and inequality published by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies. Read the current issue or sign up to receive Too Much in your email inbox.
Shocking Inequality: CEO Pay Compared to Worker Pay
Reprinted from Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality
