Step up to the plate and come clean…Republicans: you cause all this mess and we are not going to let you forget it.
Deregulation, friendly tax policies, inexcusable subsidies, assault on labor unions, outsourcing, encouraging corporations to set up house elsewhere, getting into two stupid wars, trampling our Constitution with illegal eavesdropping and searches, imprisoning enemies without due process indefinitely and then torturing them…
Wall Street surged between 1990 and 2007, average Wall Street salaries (including bonuses) ballooned nearly 112 percent, from just over $190,000 in 1990 to more than $403,000 in 2007, according to a startling new study by the Fiscal Policy Institute. During the same period, the top 5 percent of income earners—those making more than $167,400 a year in 2007—nearly doubled their share of the city’s total income, from 30 percent to 58 percent.
Then the crash came. And who do you think our government (Republican-Bush) went to help? It was the banks and the Wall Street firms with unimaginable bail outs that facilitated those who caused the crisis because of their greed and incompetence to depart with generous severance packages and obscene bonuses while the rest of the country had to bite the bullet and pay for it so they could keep their Hamptons second or third home.
America’s poor and working class struggled, and its middle class was almost decimated as the Fiscal Policy Institute study shows, the median hourly wage shriveled 8.6 percent between 1990 and 2007. The gap between rich and poor got wider—while the rich claimed ever larger chunks of the pie; the poorest 50 percent claimed less than 8 percent of the annual income and the once robust middle claimed just above 34 percent, This is in New York alone, earning the honor of being the most unequal large city in America.
But inequalities don’t stop there; our seniors saw a pillaging of their retirement accounts. With the crisis in full bloom, many of the IRAs and 401s just disappeared…like mine did. How terribly ironic that this money actually existed…employers were matching dollar for dollar what the worker put in…that money went somewhere…please tell me who has it.
What we have here folks, is failure to communicate. Our government then was complicit with this whole scheme…a blown up kind of Ponzi scheme and it was President Bush and his Republican cronies that facilitated the opportunity for our economy to crash. I know they will not own it; they don’t even want to hear or even acknowledge it happened. But it is there for everyone to see no matter how they deny it, how they try to change the facts, how they change the subject and most importantly: how they think it was just swell and would like to come back to the same old shit.
Lastly, it is this insistence in not taking responsibility for the damage that is causing the recovery to be much more sluggish and certainly the shameless sabotage on the part of the Republicans to help the President enact needed legislation to fix the problems Republicans left behind. Obstructionism, saying “NO” and trying to reclaim the reins of power by lying to the American people can only last so long…they will eventually fall flat on their faces once Americans realize that the cause of their problems is a very sick and askew ideology: TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS, GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM and GOVERNMENT IS TOO BIG.
That is why it is not surprising that the Republican Teahadists are so willing to entertain the American public with distractions such as “Death Panels” and questioning the President’s birthplace. Now they are engaging us in a debate over the 2nd Amendment and gun ownership, they are threatening to de-fund the Health Care legislation that was just passed and most Americans want, they are also even talking about changes in Social Security which is solvent and will continue to be for the next 25 years. There is a reason for Teahadist Republicans to make all this noise and it is that while we are debating crap like that we are not talking about their participation and complicity in what has got to be the biggest assault on the middle class and the poor to benefit the very rich and the corporations.