"As I've traveled around my state over the last year and a half, men and women of all ages and all racial and ethnic groups have expressed to me profound anxiety about their economic futures," Shannon O'Brien, the state treasurer, said in the Democrats' weekly radio address.
But Republicans have ignored Democratic proposals such as boosting the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits, she said. Instead, they granted tax breaks benefiting corporations and have sqandered the nation's budget surplus, O'Brien added.
In September, Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., accused the Bush administration of transforming a budget surplus of $5.6 trillion into a deficit of $400 million.
Although the president has labored for bipartisan backing for a possible attack on Iraq, "when it comes to economic policy, he has no apparent interest in working with Democrats to put the nation back on the road to prosperity," O'Brien said.
"More than ever before, national security cannot be separated from our economic security."
You see? This is what I mean by voting for the party or candidate that supports your best interests. Why people continue to vote Republican when it is clearer than ever that Republicans never have and never will support any of the interests of the majority of their constituancy is beyond me. Why they vote for people who actually go and HURT them is stupidity beyond comprehension! Stupid Americans! Stupid, stupid Americans!
Oh sure - their excuse last time was that they felt that Clinton was so immoral that Bush was better in comparison and that anybody could run the country's economy like it was going! When everyone else tried to point out the Republican history of DESTROYING the national economy, they put their fingers in their ears singing, "la la la -- I'm not listening to you!"
posted on October 20, 2002 07:30:50 AM new
Since George Bush has become president millions of jobs have been lost, a surplus left by Clinton has turned to a deficit, the largest number of corporate bankruptcies and fraud in US history has occurred, people have lost retirement savings, the stock market has lost over a trillion dollars and now we are preparing to spend billions to wage an unprovoked attack on Iraq.
The best description of this is criminal...not stupid.
posted on October 20, 2002 12:06:51 PM new
I agree, Helen. But the last time that I went around on here calling Bush a criminal, some people came onboard here demanding to know why, if he is a criminal, that Congress just doesn't come and arrest him!
Criminal - yes. Stupid, a term most people can identify with.
posted on October 20, 2002 04:26:32 PM new
I just sent Bush an email about the deplorable economic conditions in Mississippi that recently led to the death of six children living in a trailer without basic utilities. They were burned alive when candles being used for light set the trailer on fire. How can we spend billions of dollars on a war for oil while children are living in this country without safe and decent housing.
posted on October 20, 2002 06:39:28 PM new
Detractors of your last post will tell you that the parent(s) were not home when the fire started and charges are not likely to be brought against the parent(s).
That still doesn't change the fact that this urban area is so poor and poverty-stricken that it is a shame that Bush spends so many billions of dollars on his Best Buddies and F*CKS the ordinary American with a "let them eat cake" attitude!
I'm damned sick and tired of hearing about how we all need to go pound Saddam and bully the rest of the world when we have so many probelms and unfinished business here at home. That this adminstration has totally demolished our economy that is downright criminal in its attitudes and behavior should shut the mouths of so many War supporters. But, no - SCREW AMERICA so long as you can support the gangsters running the White House!
posted on October 20, 2002 06:46:28 PM new
Helen, thanks for that article. I've always thought of Mississippi as our Third World country, and I was glad to see it referred to as such. Maybe those stats will open a few eyes and hearts. How awful for those children.
Why has Mississippi been so ignored for all these years by every administration? It's not like it's a new problem. How can we let our own children suffer yet find the money to rebuild other countries after our wars. Really, hard to comprehend.
I agree your email probably won't help, but it can't hurt. I'm going to write one too. It's about the only thing we can do.
posted on October 20, 2002 08:10:01 PM new
Molly Ivins
October 17, 2002
AUSTIN, Texas -- There's something happening here What it is ain't exactly clear...
It's time we stop, children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's goin' down.
Buffalo Springfield
In New York City last year, about 3,000 people died in the attack on the World Trade Center. In New York City last year, 30,000 people came to the new federal limits on welfare. Another 19,000 will lose assistance this year. New York has lost 95,000 jobs since Sept. 11. It lost 75,000 jobs in the year before that. There are now 30,000 people in the city shelters.
Now find the numbers for your town. In Austin, the only organization that provides help to women with breast cancer and no health insurance has just cut its staff from 30 to six, with an equal impact on the help that can be offered. Homelessness is up, food distribution centers are overwhelmed.
And all this is happening in a cruel synergy of inattention, indifference and the final fraying of the social safety net. Charities are overwhelmed and suddenly vastly underfunded in large part as a consequence of the complete focus on the victims of Sept. 11. The federal government, largely under Republican control, is dealing with war, terrorism and recession. State governments, with far less attention, are out of money, running into deficits and cutting services across the board. Texas, with another year to go before the biannual budget battle, is declaring it can no longer afford its small share of the federal Children's Health Insurance Program.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the states raised their taxes, and toward the end of the '90s, they cut their taxes. But, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, they didn't cut the same taxes they had raised. "Increases in regressive taxes--that is, taxes like the sales tax, which bear most heavily on lower- and moderate-income families--by and large were never reversed. Instead, states cut taxes that bear most heavily on upper-income families," reported Paul Krugman. "The end result was a redistribution of the tax burden away from the haves toward the have-nots. A family earning, say, $30,000 per year pays considerably more in states taxes than a family the same constant-dollar income did in 1990, while a family earning $600,000 per year pays considerably less."
But attention is not being paid. The media, with their One Big Story obsession, just got off the war in Afghanistan long enough to start reporting Enron.
And there is something else happening as well. Thirty-eight percent of the tax cut of last April went to benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers. We are at a curious point in our political debate where anyone who points that out is accused of "fomenting class warfare." Actually, reporting that the wealthiest 1 percent got 38 percent of the benefits is not fomenting class warfare--passing a tax cut that gives 38 percent to the wealthiest 1 percent is fomenting class warfare. Likewise, proposing an "economic stimulus package" of which 92 percent of the benefits are tax cuts for huge corporations is fomenting class warfare.
And this is a country that needs to be a little nervous about class warfare as economic pain bites in.
Medicaid, the health-insurance program for the poor, is in fiscal crisis. According to The New York Times, overall Medicaid spending went up by 11 percent last year, just as the states face huge deficits.
We live in a society in which the bad stuff flows downhill, and the people on the bottom are drowning in it. This is not a story to which the corporate media pay attention. Bad demographics doesn't attract advertisers--not upbeat, no patriotism, too busy with Russell Crowe's love life.
As anyone who is involved in raising money for a non-profit organization these days knows, the flying bombs that hit on Sept. 11 also landed on every helping organization in America with a huge impact. Budgets, staff, services, facilities--all slashed. And at the top, those with the power, those who make the decisions, are too far away to even see what is happening in the streets, insulated by multiplying multiples of their incomes.
After six years as governor of Texas, George W. Bush was infuriated by a federal report ranking Texas No. 1 in hunger. "You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas," he said. Well, Texas had been No. 1 in hunger since the Feds started keeping count in the 1960s--it's a permanent condition here, but the governor had never seen it.
posted on October 20, 2002 09:43:28 PM new
Like I've said: for the first time in decades under Bill Clinton, the middle-class and lower-class finally had enough money to not only meet their bills, but enough left over to fuel a steady chain reaction in the economy. Like a nuclear furnace where after the nuclear reaction gets a healthy start it actually becomes self-sustaining and goes on to produce and produce and produce. We finally could buy a nice car, go on a vacation, purchase a computer and hey, if you wanted to get a little bit richer, go bet on a sure thing by investing your money in the stock market. Those were the good old days!
About two years before Clinton finally left office, George Bush and Dick Cheney are quoted in industry magazines as talking about the "necessity" of getting OPEC to raise it's oil prices world-wide. Further they talked about their efforts to being this reality about. And wouldn't you know it - with careful timing, the oil prices skyrocketed on command at the beginning of the new presidential election year.
A nuclear chain reaction can get out of hand and they use large lead rods to drop into the reaction to absorb the nuclear energy and rob it of its momentum. Bush and Cheney did the same thing to our robust and ever-expanding-and-amazing economy by bringing about the oil prices shooting skyward by OPEC. Within a short period of time with the oil prices raising so high that gasoline was well over $2.00 a gallon in the mid-west, the economic reaction began to dim a bit. But that was just the beginning.
First with the Tax Cut that the GOP endorsed and then with Enron, the Republicans had given the highly driven economy a hearty one-two punch in the stomach. The effect was to take all of the wealth that We the Little People had accumulated and then, with what amounts to a giant vacuum cleaner, sucked away all of our surplus of wealth that we had been enjoying and transferred it to their offshore bank accounts and to their corporate coffers. It amounts to the biggest theft in the world's history. So staggering in size and scope that there may be no law to adequately describe such an injustice done to our people. That every last extra penny has been taken away from us, our good jobs taken away from us, our Federal Surplus that we were using to pay down our national debt with, and even our little eBay mom & pop businesses that sprang up by the millions have vanished due to their sinister administration of our economy. It is a crime so bold, so big, so enormous that we don't even want to call it a crime and many of us want to bury our heads in the sand and call it "the good of this nation", which is baloney! A crime is a crime!
Speaking of crime, the economy of the State of California was so enormous that it was the third-largest economy in the world with the income that put the nine-largest nations on earth excluding the USA together to match it. And then, with sheer audacity, executives at Enron and with the blessing of the new administration, violently raped the people of the State of California for staggering sums of money! That it was a crime is not in doubt, but due to the close connections to the Bush Family, this investigation by the Justice department is sure to fail in everyone's eyes. This too, is a crime for which Bush should be tried.
The Question is: can we all afford to wait until he is out of office before he goes on trial?
