No More ZIRP For US Government

The US Debt Death Dance continues with the entire elderly population sitting, watching in horror with a gun to the forehead is interesting since we are at war.  We just increased our war against Libya, with London kicking out the Libyan staff there and installing the rebels in a coup de force.  The whining about the budget is most astonishing here since we are at war.  Bush started his wars while cutting taxes and now this insane tax cutting regime continues as the rich evade paying for their wars which they want very badly.  They have basically declared war on nearly all Muslims and are planning a major global war against China while doing hot business with China.

.

These insane things run alongside the US bailing out the entire NATO banking system via letting the Federal Reserve with no oversight by anyone, lending over $16 trillion to private investment bankers and international central banks!  At ZIRP rates which is, for free.  This unleashed a global commodity/stock exchange inflation flurry which, in turn, is now causing revolutions, riots and defaults across the entire planet.  Returning to the author of all this, the US which has run trade and budget deficits nonstop during nearly the entire Cold War and now the War On Terror, the very rich have skipped out on paying for this nearly continuously since 1980 with Reagan’s ascendancy to the throne.

.

Russia calls for “immediate end” to Libyan conflict  and so  Russia won’t recognize Libyan rebels – Lavrov.  The former KGB officers know defeat when they see it, they have seen it happen before, in Russia so when they say, “There is no military solution to Libya situation”, we should take them seriously.

.

In Congress, which is now the Knesset on steroids, there is no ability to see looming defeat because the wars have been paid for via cheap credit.  So never, ever has there been a call for even the slightest sacrifices by the rich.  The rich, incidentally, own our military/industrial complex and make huge profits off of it and they seem little inclined to see this wealth return to the state to pay for the wars which fuel rises in their incomes.  They literally want to eat their cakes and bomb them, too.  This one-way feed whereby debt piles up while wars rage is a great way to bankrupt a country.  Many an empire in the past has tried this and all had the same dire end: bankruptcy.

.

The wealthy have pushed as hard as possible, the idea that the poorest half of the country that holds approximately 2% of the wealth compared to the top 10% that holds over 50% of the wealth, be taxed heavily for these insane wars, too.  Trying desperately to guilt trip the lower working classes who have seen jobs vanish and wages collapse, to pay for wars that enrich the wealthy even further, beyond their wildest dreams, is pure insanity.  Yet, this meme has been ruthlessly pushed by wealthy publishers, AIPAC and other creeps who don’t care if the country goes bankrupt, they just don’t want to part with a farthing of their own wealth no matter how dangerous this is in the future.

.

And history is very clear about this: empires that go to war and then bring back no loot and spend via debt on adventures that bring back little or nothing, countries that do this while letting the elites pay no price for this, countries that tax the poor to pay for fruitless wars, end up dead.  That is, their own people revolt and the foreign adventures collapse while the government at home collapses.

.

We have exactly one socialist in the Senate.  He is a voice of reason who is often ignored.  Here is his latest public statement about the mess in DC:  Majority Rule? – Newsroom: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont)

.

With the clock ticking on an Aug. 2 deadline for raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, another major national poll found that Washington is out of touch with a big majority of Americans who want to see a combination of government spending cuts and tax increases as part of any deal to bring down the U.S. budget deficit. Asked if it is better to cut programs, raise taxes, or do some combination of the two, 56 percent in the new overnight Reuters/Ipsos poll favored a combination approach. Sen. Bernie Sanders for months has advocated that shared sacrifice approach. The idea is popular everywhere in America, it seems, except on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have ruled out ending tax breaks and closing loopholes for the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations.

 

.

Since the dawn of religions created by fearful humans, when something goes bad or gods had to be fed human blood, the elites usually didn’t sacrifice themselves to save their followers, they sacrificed someone who was much more helpless.  Prisoners, children, virgins, whoever: they tended to toss these into the maws of the irritated gods.  So it is in modern times: when there is a need for any sacrifices, the rich and elites all point to the rest of us and tell us to go jump into a fiery lake, not them.

.

In the last decade, the very rich who incidentally, own our military complex, have thrown multimillion dollar coming of age ceremonies for their own spawn while at the same time, sending the children of the working class and the poor into the wars which bring these huge profits.  Celebrating their brats turning into ‘adults’ (these ceremonies tend to come at 13-16 years of age for the children) with sybaritic displays while the children (often quite young, themselves) come home mutilated, psychotic or dead, is part and parcel of the gulf between the rich and the poor which is ultimately the cause of the future revolt that will happen here eventually.

.

Here is a good speech by our only socialist Senator:  Plutocracy: If Corporations and the Rich Paid 1960s-Level Taxes, the Debt Would Vanish – Newsroom: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont)

.

If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year.

.
In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.

.
Similarly stunning numbers have come, earlier this month, from MIT economist Peter Diamond and the University of California’s Emmanuel Saez, the world’s top authority on the incomes of the ultra-rich. These two scholars have shared some fascinating “what ifs” that dramatize how spectacularly the incomes of our wealthiest have soared over recent decades.

.
In 2007, Diamond and Saez point out, taxpayers in the nation’s top 1 percent actually paid, on average, 22.4 percent of their incomes in federal taxes. If that actual tax burden were to about double to 43.5 percent, the top 1 percenter share of our national after-tax income would still be twice as high as the top 1 percent’s after-tax income share in 1970.

.
So why aren’t we taxing the rich? Why are we now suffering such fearsome “debt crisis” angst? Why are our politicos so intent on shoving the “fiscal discipline” of layoffs and cutbacks – austerity – down the throats of average Americans?

.
No mystery here. Our political system is failing to tax the rich because the rich have fortunes large enough to buy off the political system. Again, some numbers can help us better visualize that plutocratic big picture.

.
In 2008, the IRS revealed this past May, 400 Americans reported at least $110 million in income on their federal tax returns. These 400 averaged $270.5 million each, the second-highest U.S. top 400 average income on record.

.
In 1955, by contrast, America’s top 400 averaged – in 2008 dollars – a mere $13.3 million. In other words, the top 400 in 2008 reported incomes that, after taking inflation into account, amounted to more than 20 times the incomes of America’s top 400 a half-century ago.

.
But 1955’s top 400 didn’t just make far less than 2008’s top 400. The rich in 1955 paid far more of their income in taxes than today’s rich. In 2008, the new IRS data show, the top 400 paid only 18.1 percent of their total incomes in federal income tax. The top 400 in 1955 paid 51.2 percent of their total incomes in tax.

 

.

The free ride to many wars is now ending.  Before, Republican Presidents starting with Reagan, figured out that the public would buy into crazy wars if they didn’t have to pay for them.  So the idea of using debt to pay for wars become the Holy Grail of the military/industrialists who thought Pentagon spending could double every 4-6 years and no one would notice this is a classic hockey stick graph which leads to infinity.

.

Now that the rich are talking about cutting social security and Medicare and possibly all other services used by American citizens while increasing the war spending, Public support is finally waning for defense spending – Stripes Central – Stripes.  And about time!  The majority of Americans want the war gravy train to stop.  If we have to starve at home or die of disease thanks to our wars, then it is much easier to just stop the wars, isn’t it?

.

The monster GOP creature created by Big Business allying itself to Nixon’s Southern Strategy is blowing up in their faces.  So, Business Groups Press G.O.P. on Debt Ceiling.  They do NOT want a default.  This will boomerang back on them and destroy their schemes.  Of course, they don’t entirely control the GOP, the GOP is also the Knesset and right now, the expansion of wars against Muslims is very much something that the Knesset desires so the levers of power are foreign as well as domestic.  AIPAC doesn’t want peace nor a reduction in either Pentagon spending nor the billions lavished on the Israeli Jewish elites who hold dual citizenships, or actually, triple or quadruple citizenships in various NATO countries.

.

Here is proof the rich are not struggling, they are spending wildly on goodies:  Auction Round-Up: Record Sales At Christie’s, Warhol Records And The Market Booms.  The poor babies can’t be taxed, they need millions of dollars to bid up the price of various valuable antiques and objects of desire!

.

 

The chaos in Congress is telling: they have no idea how much we spend or how the budget works anymore.  This is easy to understand: in our police state, a good hunk, around 20% of the military budget is SECRET!  Debt crisis: Republicans scramble to rewrite plan following figures bungle

 

.

 

In an embarrassing development for John Boehner, the Republican Congress speaker, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) ruled on Tuesday night that his bill would have only cut spending by $850bn (£517bn)over the next decade, not the $1.2tn he had aimed for. Republicans are now racing to rewrite the legislation, and have pushed back a congressional vote on the plan from Wednesday to Thursday at the earliest…Analysts have suggested that America may have more time to resolve the crisis than the government has admitted, with Barclays Capital calculating that the country might be able to function until 10 August before needing to borrow again…

.

…The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that banks are now holding on to more cash, bolstering their liquidity levels in preparation for a US credit rating downgrade that could potentially prompt a second credit crunch.

.

The banks were reliquified by the Fed just 2 years ago and now they are setting themselves up to float above this mess which they and their buddies created in the first place.  When the GOP ideology of no regulation of credit markets, no usury laws, no taxes on the rich first were proposed by Reagan’s gang, the bankers cheered.  Now that the mess they endorsed and pushed for is pushing our empire off the cliff, they get cold feet.  Well, all the cash holdings they have are dwarfed by the FOREX cash held by foreign powers, all of whom ran up huge trade surplus profits against the US since Reagan.

.

THEY are getting nervous and Chinese warnings have been disregarded.  The US cannot print its way out of this mess without using the Weimar option which is to destroy the value of the dollar until it can’t buy even a loaf of bread with a wheel barrel of cash.  Foreign powers hold tons of US debt and if it is suddenly priced at above 3% per annum, this means our government will be forced to spend 100% revenues on interest and this will be money flowing OUT of the US to pay for our red ink, not into the country.

.

We run a red ink system here.  The GOP pretends to fix it but the obvious fixes are not even being considered.  Stopping our wars, shutting down our global empire and taxing the rich and above all, stopping foreign domination of Congress via AIPAC and other associations is life and death for our nation.

.

The pirates and gnomes running Goldman Sachs, an entity that ought to have been forced into bankruptcy, a monster bailed out at great cost by our own central bank, is freaking out over all of this:  Goldman Sachs: US Faces Credit ‘Downgrade’ if it Counts Eventual End of War as ‘Deficit Reduction’ 

.

Senate Democrats have issued a new “savings” plan that would nominally pare the projected deficit by over $1 trillion simply by assuming that the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually go away by virtue of those wars ending.  This has spawned a myriad of criticism, including a leaked Goldman Sachs memo warning that the nation faces a credit downgrade if it tries to use this sort of on-paper gimmick instead of actual cuts in spending.

 

.

This would work if we really were stopping, not expanding, our wars against Muslims.  But the truth is, these ‘reductions’ are so tiny, they are meaningless.  We plan to stay in expensive Afghanistan forever.  Ditto, Iraq.  Afghanistan has gotten a lot more expensive since we killed off our alliance with Pakistan with our illegal assassination of bin Laden.  As usual, even in death, he gets the last laugh.  He is probably sitting with Geronimo right now at the Gates of Death, gloating.

.

Goldman Sachs wants real cuts?  HAHAHA.  Cut them!  Of course, they run our government via bribes to politicians, etc.  And these creeps pay little to no taxes.  They scheme to enrich themselves and beggar us.  And as typical of such fiends, they want cuts to things that keep us alive while evading responsibility for funding our government.

.

Here is a nutty Mormon who thinks it is funny, going bankrupt:  GOP lawmaker admits he’s extorting Congress to rewrite Constitution | Raw Replay

.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Monday that he is giving Congress ten days to pass a constitutional amendment that would make raising taxes nearly impossible. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, he will do everything in his power to force the U.S. to default on its debts.

“Okay, in ten days you want to change the United States Constitution by two-thirds vote in both houses?” Matthews asked. “That’s what you’re demanding.”

“Yes,” Lee admitted. “If possible we can’t change the Constitution just in Congress but we can submit it to the states. Let the states fight it out.”

“You want the Democratic Senate, by a two-thirds vote, to pass a constitutional amendment or you want the house to come down?” Matthews pressed.

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying and I’ve been saying this for six months,” Lee said.

.

I grew up in an End of Times household where the adults worked tirelessly to create nuclear missiles so this would happen.  I was told, ‘This will protect us!’ even as we talked about how we were going to die.  ‘That’s OK since Jesus will save us,’ was the answer, one that I seriously doubted.  Nay, I feared.  Insanity of this sort infects religious believers which is why the many religious wars raging around the planet, sucking us in, are so dangerous.

.

Thousands of years ago, humans invented religions due to fear of death.  To save themselves, they then created the concept of human sacrifices to save themselves from angry gods.  This meant killing someone, of course.  So, to save themselves, our ancestors killed others!  Who didn’t deserve to be allowed to be saved, of course.  This is a fundamental problem with all religions even if they ceased sacrificing humans and animals to bloody gods.  The impulse is still very much there.  It is part of our brains.

.

This idiot from Utah thinks it is funny if he destroys the nation in order to stop overspending money.  Did he vote for the military budgets?  Yup, enthusiastically, every time!  Did he vote to raise taxes every time he doubled the Pentagon spending?  Nope, never.  Perhaps making it impossible to raise taxes will fix our military problems by stopping all wars.  Except this won’t happen.  They will use this as a way of cutting social services to zero.  For the rich want everything and they want to share nothing.  Again: this is Ice Age thinking.  Eliminate all rivals and then one can hunt mastodons in peace.

.

Due to insane religious nuts like Senator Lee, the elites have decided to have a legal but unconstitutional coup:  ‘Super Congress’: Debt Ceiling Negotiators Aim To Create New Legislative Body.  Good lord, what’s next?  The guillotine?  French Directory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

.

Under the French Constitution of 1795, qualified property holders elected 750 legislators, who divided themselves into the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. This bicameral legislature had a term of three years, with one-third of the members renewed every year. The Ancients held a suspensory veto, but possessed no initiative in legislation.

.
The constitution specified the executive as consisting of five directors, chosen by the Ancients out of a list sent to them by the Five Hundred. One director faced retirement each year. Ministers for the various departments of State aided the directors. These ministers did not form a council or cabinet and had no general powers of government.

.
The system made provision for the stringent control of all local authorities by the central government. Since the new constitution sought to create a separation of powers, the directors had no voice in legislation or taxation, nor could directors or ministers sit in either house. The law guaranteed freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of labour, but forbade armed assemblies and even public meetings of political societies. Only individuals or public authorities could tender petitions…The finances had been so thoroughly ruined that the government could not have met its expenses without the plunder and the tribute of foreign countries. If peace were made, the armies would return home and the directors would have to face the exasperation of the rank-and-file who had lost their livelihood, as well as the ambition of generals who could, in a moment, brush them aside. Barras and Rewbell were notoriously corrupt themselves and screened corruption in others. The patronage of the directors was ill-bestowed, and the general maladministration heightened their unpopularity.

.

The end result was Napoleon.  When the Weimar government floundered, the end result was Hitler when Germany finally went bankrupt.  Since the military is sucking down a huge, huge hunk of our budget, if this is endangered and the wages of the military aren’t paid on time, they will take over the government just like we saw in Egypt.  This will fix nothing since the military leaders want more wars which is what happened when Hitler and Napoleon took over bankrupt empires that still had strong military systems pretty much intact.

.

Both Hitler and Napoleon promised guns and butter and brought in lots of loot for a while until military defeats reversed this and the people let invaders (Russia in both cases!) overthrow their armies.  In the US, we have a very dangerous military machine that is mainly overseas.  If Congress doesn’t pay them or if the US debt is degraded and thus, less desirable, we will have a coup more likely than an election.  The military will not tolerate civilian spending if they have to be cut, too.  Ending the many wars goes against the grain for the military which wants more of these wars for it increases their power.

.

Even if the soldiers don’t want more wars, the generals at the top do.  And until the soldiers revolt (and they certainly did in the Vietnam War!) the generals will cheerfully expand wars to infinity.  This is a big mess the US has to discuss. Do we want eternal, increasingly expensive wars of attrition run by assassins?  Or do we want peace and plenty?  The rich want the former, the bulk of Americans wan the latter.  But enough Americans want the End of Times to tip the scales in favor of the elites who want wars to enrich themselves.  This is a tragedy history has written so often, it becomes tedious to even bring up the many examples of this dynamic and how stupid it all is since we know the obvious end results.  History is utterly clear about this.  Fatally clear.

Email:

emeinel@fairpoint.net

MAILING ADDRESS:

EMS NEWS

P.O. BOX 483

BERLIN, NY 12022

Make checks out to ‘Elaine Supkis’

Click on the Pegasus icon on the right sidebar to donate via Paypal.