Stimulating the Economy Redux

How else can you describe a society other than insane that began with the slogan “taxation without representation” where in less than 250 years the representatives of the people have created fica tax, city tax, county tax, state tax, federal tax, cigarette tax, alcohol tax, clothing tax, school tax, sales tax, gas tax, personal income tax, and a projected deficit of a trillion dollars, that’s a lot of zeros and a vice president who says deficits don’t matter – of course he neglected to qualify that with “deficits don’t matter to “him” because he has the power to insure that never happens – budget deficits do matter to most - and yet the public drinks it up and drowns out dissent when Congress continually approves of 2 plus billion American tax payer dollars to wage a war fabricated by all the presidents men while at the same time giving the most wealthy Americans a tax break in essence the people that pay all those taxes are now paying more for the war that was going to pay for itself - are you freakin kiddin me!!! –

How else can you describe a society other than insane where the first president allegedly said “I can not tell a tie” and today’s president cannot tell the truth to a public that prefers the comfortable lie – “they have WMD” “they supported 9/11” – “we have to disarm them” “remember 9/11 like remember the maine” “they’ll welcome us as liberators throwing candy and flowers at us” “the war will pay for itself” - to the uncomfortable truths that there were no WMD, Iraq was no imminent threat to be disarmed and if you remember anything at all remember that Iraq had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. This man is spending 2 billion dollars a week of tax payers money to wage a war in which Haliburton, world oil companies, and Blackwater profit while some people die in the process.

Hardly sounds like the land of the free and the home of the brave to me – what kind of people give their money to other people to kill people for what every rational person knows to be lie. Designs were made prior to 9/11 to invade Iraq. I have no moral right to claim a superior political position but I do have a moral responsibility to acknowledge that I’m paying for the suffering of someone else. And now after spending 2 billion dollars plus each week for nearly the last 5 years a President who should have been impeached years ago and a cowardly complicit Congress have decided that most Americans are having difficulty paying the mortgage, the rent, the grocery bill, for gas and heat and they need to address the problem by basically giving everyone a couple hundred dollars to go shopping.

Didn’t George Bush try this tax rebate plan in 2001 before he went on vacation to stimulate the economy by giving people $600? We all remember what happened after that but how many of us remember administration officials hitting the airwaves within the week after 9/11 telling Americans “don’t worry, be happy, go shopping” so much for conservative claims about balancing the budget and fiscal responsibility.

When the Republican dominated Supreme Court selected George Bush as president the Clinton Administration had a budget surplus. Imagine that - Bill Clinton who the Republicans claimed to be just another tax and spend liberal actually had a budget surplus. Does anyone remember what a gallon of gas was in 1999 or the cost of a barrel of oil - how about less than $1.50 for gas and around $30 a barrel for oil.

It didn’t take George long to spend the surplus, invade the Social Security trust fund much like previous administrations, take care of the oil companies by insuring multi billion dollars profits and put the U.S. economy in the tank for decades to come by waging a war and cutting taxes for the wealthy, for those that have the most to lose if this country was ever really threatened.

The newest/latest stimulus package of giving Americans a couple hundred bucks to spend will not turn the economy around. We’re broke. How much longer can we spend two billion dollars plus each week waging war in Iraq? Apparently a lot longer for according to the mainstream candidates in each party we’ll be in Iraq for at least another decade yet they all claim to be the “candidate of change”.

Maybe it’s like Yogi Berra once said: “it’s déjà vu all over again”. The last time this president tried without success to get the country out of the economic doldrums that story which affected many Americans was suddenly swept off the front page by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. That catastrophic event called for in the now forgotten Project for a New American Century and authored by the same neo cons aka neo fascists who wrote that it would take such an event to occur in order for them to implement their policies. took center stage by making Americans focus on terrorism and forgetting the economy, the nations as well as their own.

With recent saber rattling about Iran’s threat to world peace, the tough guy rhetoric from our cheerleader-in-chief, and the Pentagons poorly edited military threats committed by Iranian speedboats we can only hope that the 2008 economic stimulus package does not have a similar catastrophic event that followed the financial cure in 2001. If it does we should remember Ari Fleischer’s chilling admonition to Americans who thought they had a freedom of speech after 9/11 “people need to watch what they say”. In essence just shut up and shop until we drop.

Eventually the empire will crumble under the weight of its own economic debt created by the moral bankruptcy of a political system that exists to perpetuate and protect the status quo in a world that is in a constant state of flux.