Trickle-Up Economics
by Paul Craig Roberts
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Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.”
One can understand why the banksters are worried. The company, now known as Gold Sachs, has a large responsibility for the financial crisis and the fraudulent “securities” that wrecked the world economy and Americans’ pensions. A former Gold Sachs CEO had control of the U.S. Treasury during the Bush regime, from which he diverted $750 billion to bail out the banks, thus supplying them with free capital. Gold Sachs made $27,000 million during the first three quarters of 2009 and is paying out massive bonuses, leaving the busted taxpayers with the debt and interest charges.
Little wonder the U.S. can’t afford health care for the uninsured and unemployed. It is far more important to finance multimillion-dollar bonuses for investment bankers. I mean, what would we do without capitalism?
Of course, it is not really capitalism. It is an oligarchy or a financial plutocracy.
In a failed state, the government’s priorities are totally separate from those of the people. The U.S. can’t afford health care or a bailout for jobless homeowners, but it can afford a pointless war and multimillion-dollar bonuses for banksters who wrecked the economy.
Millions of laid-off workers lost their health insurance subsidies on Dec. 1, the day President Obama announced a $30 billion “surge” in Afghanistan.
The expensive “surge” came 24 hours after the Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement of home foreclosures in its metro area. In Michigan, 48 percent of mortgages are on properties that are worth less than the loan, according to a report from First American CoreLogic.
As bad as it is in Michigan, the state ranks seventh in foreclosures, so six states are in even more dire straits.
Why does President Obama think the U.S. can afford a war in Afghanistan when the U.S. economy is falling apart? Massive joblessness. Massive homelessness. Millions of Americans without medical care.
The additional $30 billion for the war comes on top of the $65 billion already appropriated for the year. These appropriations are always fattened with supplementary appropriations. The true cost is well in excess of $100 billion.
Who’s going to pay for it? Democratic Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee proposes to raise income taxes on everyone earning more than $30,000.
This is called “trickle-up” economics. You tax the little guy and give the money to the armaments companies.
There was a time when Democratic presidents represented the little man, and Republicans represented business. Today, both parties represent the moneyed interests. On Dec. 3, at the jobs summit with business leaders, Obama said, “We don’t have enough public dollars to fill the hole of private dollars that was created as a consequence of the crisis.”
In other words, all the public’s money has been spent on the banks and the wars.
Despite Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and the ease with which Obama won the presidential election over McCain-Palin, the Democratic Party has totally collapsed. The Democrats have abandoned every constituency. Democrats have discarded the American people. Democrats, in pursuit of campaign contributions, represent the moneyed interests on Wall Street, the munitions companies, the insurance companies, the agribusinesses that have destroyed independent farmers, despoilers of the environment, unaccountable police and the builders of detention centers. The exception is Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
The Democrats have become Brownshirt Republicans.
The American people, except for the 1 percent of super-rich, have been abandoned.
Obama had a different message during the presidential campaign. On May 4, 2008, he went to Elkhart, Ind., to sympathize with the unemployed. On Feb. 9, 2009, just after his inauguration, he returned to Elkhart to say:
You know, we tend to take the measure of the economic crisis we face in numbers and statistics. But when we say we’ve lost 3.6 million jobs since this recession began—nearly 600,000 in the past month alone; when we say that this area has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America, with an unemployment rate over 15 percent; when we talk about layoffs at companies like Monaco Coach, Keystone RV and Pilgrim International—companies that have sustained this community for years—we’re talking about Ed Neufeldt and people like him all across this country.
We’re talking about folks who’ve lost their livelihood and don’t know what will take its place. Parents who’ve lost their health care and lie awake nights praying the kids don’t get sick. Families who’ve lost the home that was their corner of the American dream. Young people who put that college acceptance letter back in the envelope because they just can’t afford it.
That’s what those numbers and statistics mean. That is the true measure of this economic crisis. Those are the stories I heard when I came here to Elkhart six months ago and that I have carried with me every day since. I promised you back then that if were elected president, I would do everything I could to help this community recover. And that’s why I’ve come back today—to tell you how I intend to keep that promise.
What’s the story in Elkhart nine months after President Obama reaffirms his promise? “Long-term unemployed face dwindling options.”
Lawrie Covey, 58, has been out of work for two years. “I can’t even get a job cleaning rooms at a local motel.” Her son, who was night shift foreman for a local manufacturer and who lost his job after eight years, was splitting the rent. Winter is upon them, and the heating bill is rising. Their transportation is 20 years old and needs a new radiator. Both her and her son’s unemployment benefits have run out.
Covey has fallen back on her experience growing up on a farm. She is raising chickens and picking wild mushrooms and has a garden. If she makes it through the winter, she hopes to get a couple of baby pigs to raise to see them through the next year.
Covey, to whom President Obama made a promise, could just as well be an Afghan peasant. She doesn’t count any more than the thousands of Afghans who have been murdered in their sleep by U.S. air strikes on “terrorists.”
She voted for a president who spent all the money on wars based in lies and deceptions and on Gold Sachs, the richest institution in the world.
The maniacal left-wing hates Ronald Reagan because “he cut taxes for the rich,” but Obama is loading up the poor with enormous debts that imply hyperinflation in order to make Gold Sachs too heavy to lift and in order to reward the munitions industry for its service to world peace and American hegemony.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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1 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 7 December 2009:
Late in his column, Professor Roberts hints at a movement of people living off the land as the unraveling of the economy continues. Will localism prevail as left-wing writer James Howard Kuntsler happily maintains? Can Sean Scallon expect a stream of suburbanites make their way to his rural patch of rural northwest Wisconsin? Can the plutocracy maintain legitimacy when living standards drop along with American fiscal sanity?
2 Comment by Allen Wilson on 7 December 2009:
We may be facing some kind of open revolt within the next year if people start going hungry on a mass scale. The multicultural imperial party is over, the ruling clas just dont know it yet.
It’s October 1989 all over again and Honecker is watching the parade, secure behind the wall……..
3 Comment by Mark Schaeber on 7 December 2009:
I suspect that Mr. Wilson’s prediction will only come to pass if the Social Security checks and Medicare/Medicaid payments stop coming. Given the state of American Imperial finances, that day may be sooner than we think.
One watches, and one hopes.
4 Comment by Miles Gloriosus on 7 December 2009:
An empire collapsing in real time: Surreal, isn’t it?
5 Comment by Robert on 7 December 2009:
“There was a time when Democratic presidents represented the little man, and Republicans represented business.
The Democrats have abandoned every constituency. Democrats have discarded the American people. Democrats, in pursuit of campaign contributions, represent the moneyed interests on Wall Street, the munitions companies, the insurance companies, the agribusinesses that have destroyed independent farmers, despoilers of the environment, unaccountable police and the builders of detention centers.
The Democrats have become Brownshirt Republicans.”
Yes, this is all very good, as Professor Clyde Wilson has suggested from time to time on this very blog after a lifetime of study and musing over the possible remedies, “The Republican Party must be destroyed even, when or especially after, the democratic party committs suicide.
6 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 7 December 2009:
Martin Kelly is a Scottish blogger who likens political parties to gangs. Who could blame him?
7 Comment by CS on 8 December 2009:
We live in a laughable Banksta Banana Republic. Roberts is incorrect about the Dems abandoning their constituencies. The hordes of precious “other”, still flooding in to the tune of 1.5 million per year even with an actual unemployment rate of around 22 percent, are getting lots of affirmative action, welfare “stimulus’ and the like, while the other major Dem constituency, Bankstas, have looted away with total abandon. Unlike the Gay Old Pedophiles (Repubs), who have lied for three solid decades on abortion, gun control and a host of other issues, the Dems actually do keep most of their their promises, which is promote the destruction of what was once known as America. The one exception is the case of ending the war. That was a fairly obvious lie even before the ascension of the MauMau Messiah to Sodom-on-Potomac’s Cherry-Blossom throne since we all know that the prime goat-pasture land in Afghanistan is an important strategic asset to the mental well-being of Bankstas, along with noble burden of making the Umma safe for sodomy and feminism.
8 Comment by Michael Ezzo on 8 December 2009:
Unfortunately, when you are starving and living in a tent, I assume you would have no time or energy for revolt since you would be spending your entire life — like an animal — just seeking day-to-day subsistence. But the fact that you aren’t paying taxes means that at least Washington can’t benefit from your efforts.
9 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 8 December 2009:
Don’t think the bankstas can be easily dislodged from power. Their cunning and their resources are nearly limitless. Study the election of 1876, when the Rothschilds bought the press and the Democratic Party to squelch a populist uprising.
10 Comment by Bryan on 8 December 2009:
Dr. Wilson
What sources would you suggest to study the 1876 election?
11 Comment by Dan on 8 December 2009:
The Democratic Party caters to animal appetite and rage, and both appear as robust as ever.
12 Comment by Patrick on 8 December 2009:
Success for the globalists is when you and I have the same standard of living as a family in Croatia. That is the objective of Copenhagen, massive deficit spending, bankrupting wars and the disenfranchisement and eradication of the middle class. Our children will be brainwashed in the public schools to believe that the greedy capitalists were to blame for global warming and USA financial insolvency just as lies are told today about our two century ‘history’. Even in today’s schools they teach the USA affluence was due to exploitation of blacks, women, native Americans; obscene consumption of natural resources and despoiling of the environment; and 200 years of military aggression in subjugating others countries territories and resources. As the American dream dies, the plutocrats see a New World of opportunity.
13 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 9 December 2009:
Bryan, No. 10. Actually, 1868 is a better example. My point is that the banksters have ALWAYS got their way. When unwanted opinions
on the currency issue were rising at the Democratic grassroots, August Belmont, New York agent and relative of the Rothschilds, got himself appointed Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and secretly bought the leading party newspapers. George Pendleton, who should have been the Democratic presidential candidate was torpedoed and replaced by Seymour and then Seymour was undermined by his own party leadership. Financial issues are complicated but essentially, the bankers wanted their war bonds paid off at face value in gold, though the bonds had been sold for half their face value and Union soldiers and contractors had been paid in the government greenbacks. Belmont kept a veto over the Democratic nominee, making sure he was a “hard money” man, until grassroots pressure and depression brought Bryan into power. Tilden in 1876 was on his payroll. The mainstream historians generally ignore or write superficially about surface events. All of the “mainstream” nationalist historians are beneficiaries of the rich in one way or another. Look at Alexander Delmar, HISTORY OF MONETARY CRIMES for a contemporary account. The early 20th century historians, Beard and his students, wrote honestly about these events, but they have been supplanted by “liiberals” who tell this period of U.S. history as a story of evil Southerners and enlightened “Progressive” social reformers.
14 Comment by Eagle on 10 December 2009:
Professor Wilson,
Are you recommending Charles Beard? I thought his was the materialist interpretation of the origins of the republic that Forrest McDonald sought to correct? I have often heard Beard derided and McDonald elevated by conservatives. I have read neither and am wondering who is recommended and why on the telling of the republic’s early political and economic history.
15 Comment by Bruce on 10 December 2009:
I’m glad that Eagle asked. I saw Beard’s book cited frequently in The Dispossessed Majority and picked up a used copy. What do you think of him Professor Wilson?
16 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 10 December 2009:
Beard was a very brilliant and honest historian. He was not a materialist but an anti-imperial idealist. He merely documented how economic motivations played a part in historical events—such as the machinations of Hamilton. Beard never advocated that economics explained everything, though some people claiming to follow in his footsteps did. Every patriot ought to honour Beard for the courage he showed in exposing Roosevelt’s machinations in getting us into WW II and his accurate prophecies that entry into the war would lead to an American empire which leads to domestic tyranny and in which we people are sacrificed for imperial ambitions. Beard sacrificed his position as the preeminent American scholar and spent his last years suffering unstinted abuse. Forrest McDonald was an enfant terrible who established his reputation countering Beard’s evidence about elite economic motives in ratifying the Constitution. The truth is somewhere in betwqeen, in my opinion. Dr. McDonald is a learned and talented historian. He is also an unabashed nationalist who thinks Alexander Hamilton was the great figure of the American Founding,
an opinion which I find neither accurate nor “conservative.”
17 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 10 December 2009:
Beard was honest about the economic grasping of some of the Founders. On the other hand, the Republicans, as always, were hypocritical. There is a story that Chief Justice William Howard Taft said of Beard’s thesis about the Constitution: “It’s true, but he shouldn’t have said it.”
18 Comment by Steve Berg on 10 December 2009:
Professor Wilson would you be so kind as to post a list of Beard’s books that you have found to be most valuable?
19 Comment by Eagle on 10 December 2009:
Professor Wilson,
Thank you for the clarifications. This is different from other impressions made about Beard and I trust your opinion on the matter a great deal.
I did not realize McDonald favored a nationalist/Hamiltonian structure. I thought he was the one who had written books about states’ rights (‘E Pluribus Unum’ comes to mind) and was in some circles even accused of honoring the Confederacy’s viewpoint. Perhaps I am mixing up historians named McDonald?
20 Comment by Jeremiah Whitmoore on 10 December 2009:
Forrest McDonald claims to be a paleoconservative. He, along with Pat Buchanan, adores Alexander Hamilton. We should not mistake them for Southern Agrarians. I’m glad you mention that Mr. McDonald is a talented and learned historian, because he most definitely is.
I’m not so fond of Alexander Hamilton myself, but many paleos such as Buchanan are. There must be something to the man after all. I just cannot imagine what it is.
21 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 10 December 2009:
“The Democrats have become Brownshirt Republicans.”
The Democrats have been the traitor party since the 40’s when they sold Eastern Europe to their fellow reds for one more term for the moral and physical cripple they had set upon decent Americans so he could complete his work of destroying their remaining moral fiber; they redoubled in treachery in the 50’s when their atomic spies saw to it that generations of Americans would have to grow up in terror of nuclear incineration; they robbed my parents of their candidate when they stole their votes here in Chicago in ‘60; in 1968, they sold out American fighting men who had just shattered the massive Tet offensive, in the greatest counterattack since the Battle Of The Bulge; and again in ‘91 when by following their foul instincts they were unerringly led to an obscure traitor and draft-dodger. The democrat party should have been disbanded and its minions disenfranchised long ago.
“Covey, to whom President Obama made a promise, could just as well be an Afghan peasant. She doesn’t count any more than the thousands of Afghans who have been murdered in their sleep by U.S. air strikes on “terrorists.”
Blow it out yer ass, Roberts: that number is a putrid lie to begin with and what deaths there are by airstrike are on the Taliban who live with them for the express purpose of getting them killed but not before they rape their little boys.
“She voted for a president who spent all the money on wars based in lies and deceptions ….”
Again, you would know about lies – how much are you getting to shill for Kucinich?
22 Comment by Jeremiah Whitmoore on 10 December 2009:
Gilbert,
Do you believe the war in Iraq was a war of necessity or that it was a just war?
23 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 11 December 2009:
@22 Jeremiah Whitmoore:
I have no “beliefs” about Iraq, and in my opinion no one should. I can and do hope that, from amid all the drifts of paper, the din of rhetoric, alarms, charges, counter-charges, there will slowly emerge the truth. If that happens before I die, then I will have something to believe, but not before.
24 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 11 December 2009:
“I have no “beliefs” about Iraq, and in my opinion no one should”
So you have no opinion, then, on casualty estimates?
25 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 11 December 2009:
#10 McDonald is a very prolific, talented, and independent-minded historian and is the same McDonald that you mention. I still see his basic viewpoint as Hamiltonian, what he considers original and pure Hamilton which he reconciles with the State rights and Southern sympathy.
26 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 11 December 2009:
#18 by Beard
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War
Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy
Rise of American Civilisation
The Supreme Court and the Constitution
The Discussion of Human Affairs
There are some “Progressive” aspects of Beard that may jar a bit, but he provides a great antidote to the lying Republican nationalist
historians and the liberal court historians too.
27 Comment by Steve Berg on 11 December 2009:
@26, Thank you very much Professor Wilson. Once I get done grading this semester’s final exams, I will get busy on Abe Books (No relation to Lincoln, I hope) and purchase them.
28 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 12 December 2009:
And here I had always believed Seymour and Tilden were genuine free marketers. Elections of that period (1868-1884 or so) are some of the least written on – Dr Wilson, recommendations on literature?
29 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 14 December 2009:
24 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 11 December 2009:
“I have no “beliefs” about Iraq, and in my opinion no one should”
So you have no opinion, then, on casualty estimates?
J. W. asked about my beliefs, not about my opinion. Since your remark makes an inference about opinion, it must refer to my criticism of your posts on the thread following PJB’S November 17 article “Is America A Serious Nation?”
On that thread, you made some claims about casualty figures, among other things, that I thought were inaccurate, so I spent a couple of days reading articles and looking around in the published studies on this and used the results as evidence to argue that you were wrong. You had ample opportunity to defend your position, but did not. Slipping in a one-liner weeks later insinuating that because I declined to declare a belief about one thing, I am disqualified from arguing a position on another matter altogether, is a cheap shot that doesn’t even have the merit of being logical.