Wanna get rid of Reagonomics?

[Octafish]

Vote for Bernie Sanders.



He doesn't hang out with Them.

[daleanime]

1. Massive K&R.....

[Octafish]

17. Rich have gotten richer in the wealthiest time in history while the Middle Class disappears.

We are living in the wealthiest times in human history and the "authorities" have rigged the game in their favor.

From a few years back (before the stock market REALLY took off):

7/8 of ALL WEALTH in Human History created since 1981.

Pruneface's budget guru David Stockman must've added up all the GDP and estimated the stuff from the middle ages. Whatever. His real point is that most of THAT has ended up in the pockets of the greedhead plutocrats' pockets.



In 1985, the top five percent of the households – the wealthiest five percent – had net worth of $8 trillion – which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five per cent have net worth of $40 trillion. The top five per cent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.” -- David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7009217n&tag=related;photovideo

"In 1985, the top five percent of the households, wealthiest five percent, had net worth of $8 trillion, which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five percent have net worth of $40 trillion," he explained. "The top five percent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980." -- David Stockman

SOURCE: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/28/60minutes/main6999906_page4.shtml

And to think there are kids in America who would go to bed hungry every night, if they only had a bed.

[Armstead]

2. That sums it up perdfectly -- Clinton equals Reaganomics Lite

[Octafish]

20. The real effect of 'Reaganomics'

Ronald Reagan promoted the idea that conservatives prefer to leave the economy to the market. Nonsense – we've been gulled

by Dean Baker
The Guardian, Feb. 7, 2011

At the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, his most important legacy has gone largely overlooked. Reagan helped to put a caricature of politics at the centre of the national debate and it remains there to this day. In Reagan's caricature, the central divide between progressives and conservatives is that progressives trust the government to make key decisions on production and distribution, while conservatives trust the market.

This framing of the debate is advantageous for the right, since people, especially in the United States, tend to be suspicious of an overly powerful government. They also like the idea of leaving important decisions to the seemingly natural workings of the market. It is therefore understandable that the right likes to frame its agenda this way. But since the right has no greater commitment to the market than the left, it is incredible that progressives are so foolish as to accept this framing.

In reality, the right uses government all the time to advance its interest by setting rules that redistribute income upward. As long as progressives ignore the rules that are designed to redistribute income upward, they will be left fighting over crumbs. There is no way that government interventions will reverse a rigged market. For some reason, most of the people in the national political debate who consider themselves progressive do not seem to understand this fact.

To take the most obvious example: fighting inflation has come to be seen as the holy grail of central banks – a policy that it is supposed to be outside of the realm of normal political debate. On slightly more careful inspection, the inflation-fighting by the Fed and other central banks is actually a policy that is designed to ensure that the wages of ordinary workers do not grow too rapidly.

When central banks jack up interest rates to tame inflation, the CEOs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan won't be out on the street. The people who lose their jobs will be factory workers, store clerks and other less privileged workers. Raising unemployment among the group of less educated workers keeps their wages down. In other words, controlling inflation is about making sure that the wages of less educated workers don't rise relative to the wages of more educated workers. And the central banks have a licence to push as hard as they like in this direction.

Incredibly, the vast majority of progressives go along with this central bank squeeze. They accept the absurd notion that this upward redistribution by the central banks is simply apolitical monetary policy and agree not to criticise the central bank. As a practical matter, there is nothing that Congress could plausibly do in the way of downward redistribution that would offset the upward redistribution from the Fed's tightening.

CONTINUED...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/07/ronald-reagan-republicans

[Ferd Berfel]

26. We wouldn't really know if it was 'lite' until it was too late

[Cassiopeia]

3. Voting for Hillary is a show of support for this way of thinking.

[Octafish]

23. You are absolutely correct.

Pete Brewton brings up the concept of how politics today represents the overlap of several worlds: Organized Crime. Secret Government. Unconstitutional Political Action.

Pete Brewton's book, “The Mafia, CIA & George Bush,” is a must-own for those interested in the workings of the Bush Organized Crime Family. Written by a former Houston Post reporter, the book documents, literally, the way the Mafia, the CIA and those connected and related to George Poppy Bush -- and to the late Lloyd Bentsen -- looted more than 1,000 of the nation’s Savings and Loans institutions — and pretty much got away with it, scot-free.

Capitalism's Invisible Army protects and advances those connected to Big Money and the extraction industries like Big Oil -- while using the rest of We the People as mopes to dupe and tax, and as fodder for cannon and sport. Poppy's son, George W Bush, may have unwittingly revealed the crime family motto when he uttered at a press conference: "Money trumps peace."

[hifiguy]

35. She or any repug will be the tenth term of Reaganomics.

Enough is e-fukkin'-nough.

[1StrongBlackMan]

4. That is half correct ... A more accurate statement would be ...

Vote Democratic.

[PonyUp]

5. Same thing as saying vote for Bernie. n/t

[1StrongBlackMan]

7. No ... it's ... not. eom

[Octafish]

9. Ever hear of ''Wealth Management at UBS?''

UBS is a Swiss bank that is enjoying better days, thanks to the US taxpayer and a number of key US political leaders.

Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.

SNIP...

As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions––including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs––have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation––the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/

About UBS Wealth Management

It's Buy Partisan

After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought on former President Bill Clinton. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what's a $16 trillion bailout among friends?



It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:

President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool

SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html

One of my attorney chums doesn't like to see his name on any committees, event letterhead or political campaign literature. These folks, it seems to me, are past caring.

Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.



DUers should know what nation's "news media" aren't reporting: the Buy Partisan connections between what's best for the few and what's best for the many.

[1StrongBlackMan]

10. And this is related to ending/not ending reaganomics, how? ...

I my mind, this meme is as silly as writing:

Want to avoid future Sandy Hooks? Vote HRC!

[Octafish]

11. DEM Clinton and GOP Gramm worked to repeal New Deal legislation that protected the US taxpayer.

Now they work together at UBS in Wealth Management.

Sandy Hook has nothing to do with DEM and GOP Banksters. Why the sideshow?

Oh, yeah.

[1StrongBlackMan]

12. That is quite the stretch ...

and the "sideshow" is to point out how ridiculous the meme is.

[Octafish]

13. Clintons got millions from UBS.

UBS got billions from US taxpayer.

What's not to like?

[1StrongBlackMan]

15. And that is related to Reaganomics, how? eom.

[Octafish]

18. Reaganomics has brought the greatest wealth concentration of all time.

These are the wealthiest times in human history. David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, estimates that 7/8th of all wealth ever created came after 1981. Most of that has ended up in the pockets of the 1-percent.

You should learn more, 1StrongBlackMan:

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich

Then even you might understand why We the People deserve a change. You know, before the Middle Class is totally extinct?

[tk2kewl]

29. b/c clintonomics is a kinder gentler reganomics

[1StrongBlackMan]

30. No.It's.Not. eom

[tk2kewl]

32. You're right, Reagan never dreamed things could be as rigged in favor of the rich, corps and Wall St

[hifiguy]

34. Blammo, drop the mic.

And you were right the first time.

[SidDithers]

6. The "Father of Reaganomics". Who was that again?...

His name has slipped my mind.

Sid

[Octafish]

14. When did the taxes on the rich go up?

When did Wall Street hedgefund managers start to pay a bigger percent of their profits than their secretaries pay in taxes?

Oh, right. You wouldn't know.

[SidDithers]

16. Paul something, right?...

Damn, it's on the tip of my tongue.

Sid

[Octafish]

19. Tell us what you know, SidDithers of DU.

It's got to fill a book.

[SidDithers]

22. Robbins... Rogers...

Damn. I hate getting old. Memory is the first thing to go.

Sid

[Octafish]

24. When did the extra military spending go down?

It's about 60-percent of federal spending now.



Where are your priorities?

[SidDithers]

25. Wait, I thought this was a thread about THEM that created Reaganomics...

You can't even remember who the Father of Reganomics was? Isn't this entire thread about the THEM that created Reaganomics? You even put up a picture of THEM.

I keep trying to stick to the original topic of your thread, and you keep trying to go off on a tangent.

Why is that, octafish of DU?



Sid

[Octafish]

27. That's why I post what I want. I want to get rid of Reagonomics.

You want to bring up the father of Reagonomics? Go ahead.

So far, you've done nothing but waste time. Why is that? If you're siddithers of DU, it's what you do.

[zappaman]

38. I think the name you are looking for is Paul Craig Roberts.

He's a writer now who thinks the Boston bombings and Paris attacks were "false flags".
I don't know anyone wacky enough to ever source him on DU for anything though.
And since he birthed Reaganomics, I can't imagine any good Democrat would ever bring his words here...

You welcome.

[Octafish]

40. Asst. Sec. Treasury who said War Inc runs an Evil Empire.

The Evil Empire Has The World In A Death Grip

Paul Craig Roberts, Feb. 22, 2016

In my archives there is a column or two that introduces the reader to John Perkins’ important book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. An EHM is an operative who sells the leadership of a developing country on an economic plan or massive development project. The Hit Man convinces a country’s government that borrowing large sums of money from US financial institutions in order to finance the project will raise the country’s living standards. The borrower is assured that the project will increase Gross Domestic Product and tax revenues and that these increases will allow the loan to be repaid.

However, the plan is designed to over-estimate the benefits so that the indebted country cannot pay the principal and interest. As Perkins’ puts it, the plans are based on “distorted financial analyses, inflated projections, and rigged accounting,” and if the deception doesn’t work, “threats and bribes” are used to close the deal.

The next step in the deception is the appearance of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF tells the indebted country that the IMF will save its credit rating by lending the money with which to repay the country’s creditors. The IMF loan is not a form of aid. It merely replaces the country’s indebtedness to banks with indebtedness to the IMF.

To repay the IMF, the country has to accept an austerity plan and agree to sell national assets to private investors. Austerity means cuts in social pensions, social services, employment and wages, and the budget savings are used to repay the IMF. Privatization means selling oil, mineral and public infrastructure in order to repay the IMF. The deal usually imposes an agreement to vote with the US in the UN and to accept US military bases.

CONTINUED...

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/02/22/the-evil-empire-has-the-world-in-a-death-grip-paul-craig-roberts/

Sounds like Paul Craig Roberts reads DU, just not the part of DU you "contribute" to, zappaman: the part that fights the BFEE.

[SidDithers]

45. That's the guy!...

He's also a racist shithead white nationalist, if I recall correctly.

I'm just glad that nobody on DU would ever use an asshole like that as a source.

Sid

[zappaman]

46. "I'm just glad that nobody on DU would ever use an asshole like that as a source."

Me too.

[SidDithers]

47. Did you know that Paul Craig Roberts has done fundraisers for hate site VDARE?...

It's true, he praised them to high heaven a while back, trying to get them funding.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070208212620/http://www.vdare.com/appeals/072506_pcr.htm



He's also a huge fan of what Pat Buchanan has to say. Pat fucking Buchanan!!

But the most fearsome fact is that the demonization of white people in the universities today is more extreme than the demonization of the Jews that was a prominent feature of German university life for 60 years prior to the rise of National Socialism.

Demonization of whites is the weapon used by multiculturalists to breakup western civilization. But teaching hatred has other consequences. Demonization has already demoralized some whites, making them ashamed and fearful of their skin color.

By the time whites become political minorities, decades of demonization will have prepared the ground for legislation prohibiting their propagation and, perhaps, assigning them to the gulag as a final solution to “the cancer of human history.”

http://web.archive.org/web/20110719200202/http://www.vdare.com/roberts/west_future.htm


Now, I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to excuse that kind of racism. Those are not progressive values in the very least.

This is the asshole who is the "Father of Reaganomics".

Sid

[Octafish]

48. Nice smear.

Old, too.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6101684

Still haven't posted anything in support of Gov. Don Siegelman, SidDithers of DU.

[SidDithers]

50. Are you accusing me of smearing Paul Craig Roberts?...

I don't like racists, and he's a racist asshat who deserves all the vitriol that I can muster.

Sid

[randys1]

51. How do you smear a fucking piece of shit racist? New one to me

[Octafish]

53. No. You use him to smear me.

It's what you do.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2080243

[SidDithers]

55. Why would pointing out that PCR is the "Father of Reaganomics"...

as well as being a racist piece of shit, be a smear of you?

That just doesn't make any sense.

He's the "Father of Reaganomics", and here, we're in a thread critical of Reaganomics. He's the creator of the economic system you're condemning. One would think you'd be just as critical of the "Father of Reaganomics" as you are of Reaganomics itself. Especially given PCR's very public, and disgusting, racist opinions.



Sid

[zappaman]

57. Kind of shocking that OP did not know who the father of Reaganomics is.

But I'm sure I speak for him when I say thank you for the information!

[Octafish]

49. You make me feel like a democrat, zappaman.

I let all others think for themselves, even people who have small dicks or smaller minds.

[zappaman]

56. As usual, you are the epitome of class!

Say, now that you know Paul Craig Roberts is a piece of shit, will you be sourcing him?
I hope not.

[DefenseLawyer]

31. Milton Friedman.

You were thinking of PeeWee Herman.

[SidDithers]

36. Nope, try again...nt

Sid

[immoderate]

8. Bulls eye! Break the chain of Reaganite presidents!

--imm

[Octafish]

21. Is This Barack Obama's 2nd Term? Is it Bill Clinton's 3rd? Or Is It Ronald Reagan's 9th?

They say that elections do matter, and that there are real differences between Republican and Democratic presidents. But backing up the view to 30 years, that difference looks a lot more like continuity, both at home and in America's global empire.

By Bruce A. Dixon
Black Agenda Report managing editor

The answer is yes to all three. Ronald Reagan hasn't darkened the White House door in decades. But his policy objectives have been what every president, Democrat and Republican have pursued relentlessly ever since. Barack Obama is only the latest and most successful of Reagan's disciples.

SNIP...

In Barack Obama's case all he had to say was that he wasn't necessarily against wars, just against what he called “stupid wars.” Corporate media and “liberal” shills morphed that lone statement into a false narrative that Barack Obama opposed the war in Iraq, making him an instantly viable presidential candidate at a time when the American people overwhelmingly opposed that war. Once in office, Barack Obama strove mightily to abrogate the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq which would have allowed US forces to remain there indefinitely. But when the Iraqi puppet government, faced with a near revolt on the part of what remained of Iraqi civil society, dared not do his bidding, insisting that uniformed US troops (but not the American and multinational mercenaries we pay to remain there) stick to the withdrawal timetable agreed upon under Bush, liberal shills and corporate media hailed the withdrawal from Iraq as Obama's “victory.”

Barack Obama doubled down on the invasion and occupation of large areas of Afghanistan, and increased the size of the army and marines, which in fact he pledged to do during his presidential campaign. Presidential candidate Obama promised to end secret imprisonment and torture. The best one can say about President Obama on this score is that he seems to prefer murderous and indiscriminate drone attacks, in many cases, over the Bush policy of international kidnapping secret imprisonment and torture. The Obama administration's reliance on drones combined with US penetration of the African continent, means that a Democratic, ostensibly “antiwar” president has been able to openly deploy US troops to every part of that continent in support of its drive to control the oil, water, and other resources there.

The objectives President Obama's Africa policies fulfill today were put down on paper by the Bush administration, pursued by Bill Clinton before that, and still earlier pursued by Ronald Reagan, when it funded murderous contra armies of UNITA in Angola and RENAMO in Mozambque. It was UNITA and RENAMO's campaigns, assisted by the apartheid regimes of Israel and South Africa that pioneered the genocidal use of child soldiers. Today, cruise missile liberals hail the Obama administration's use of pit bull puppet regimes like Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, all of which shot their way into power with child soldiers, to invade Somalia and Congo, sometimes ostensibly to go after other bad actors on the grounds that they are using child soldiers.

CONTINUED...

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/barack-obamas-2nd-term-it-bill-clintons-3rd-or-it-ronald-reagans-9th

"Cruise Missile Liberals"...ouch!

[Zorra]

28. oooh, well done, Octafish.

[Octafish]

41. Democrats created New Deal. Reaganomics works to reverse it.

Here in Michigan, the Reagan rich turds like the DeVos and Koch GOP have foisted "Energency Managers" that take away our democracy, transferring what taxpayers built to their cronies through piratization.

The Flint water crisis, history will record as the facts now show, was driven to put pressure on the Detroit water works. One of Detroit's big customers, the loss of Flint revenue would put pressure on the Detroit to sell.

Questions emerge over motives behind ending Flint’s ties to Detroit water system

By James Brewer and Jerry White
World Socialist Web Site, 29 January 2016

New evidence has emerged that challenges the official explanation of why Flint’s state-appointed emergency manager decided to end the city’s half-century practice of buying water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD). While the move was explained as a cost-cutting measure, an April 2013 email surfaced this week revealing that DWSD officials offered to sharply reduce rates to Flint, with a potential cost saving of hundreds of millions.

With the approval of then-state treasurer Andy Dillon, Flint’s emergency manager rejected Detroit’s offer and decided to join a competing multi-county body called Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), which had a multi-year plan to construct of 70-mile pipeline to link Flint directly to Lake Huron. The April 2013 decision set into motion the city’s switch to the highly polluted Flint River in April 2014, a move that was supposed to be temporary, until the pipeline was completed.

The highly corrosive water caused lead to leach from the city’s antiquated pipe system, resulting in the poisoning of city residents and irreparable neurological damage, particularly to thousands of children, which will have multi-generational effects.

Dillon made the “ultimate decision” to switch Flint from Detroit water, according to released emails from Governor Snyder’s office. While the former state treasurer claimed the switch to the Flint River was not linked to his decision, Snyder’s former chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore, recently told the Detroit News, “I think the Flint River was always part of the KWA plan.”

Earlier this week, Bill Johnson, the former public affairs director of the Detroit water system, released an April 15, 2013 email from then-DWSD director Susan McCormick. The email sent by McCormick to her board describes a proposal for an immediate 48 percent rate reduction from $20 to $10.46 per 7,500 gallons. “When compared over the 30-year horizon the DWSD proposal saves $800 million, or said differently—saves 20 percent over the KWA proposal,” she wrote.

CONTINUED...

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/29/dwsd-j29.html?view=article_mobile

Real, true bastards.

[hifiguy]

33. We have had 35 years of this horseshit.

Neither Clinton nor Obama challenged the basis of this voodoo nonsense. And it is time for a drastic change. Go BERNIE!

[Cassiopeia]

37. Not only did they fail to challenge it

they reinforced it in a massive way.

Clinton could very likely do more damage to society than any of the Republicans. It will take a Democrat to finish off the middle class and end the most important protections the poor have.

[hifiguy]

39. And that's at the top of

Her owners' wish list. Feudalism for all !

[Octafish]

52. These are the WEALTHIEST TIMES IN HUMAN HISTORY.

David Stockman, a Father of Reaganomics, indicated most of the $40 trillion in new wealth since 1981 has settled into 60,000 pockets or so.

That's a problem not only for Democracy, but for survival....which spells bad things for those who can't afford to buy their own government.

Taking Stockman: How Nixon, Reagan, Bush and their GOP Demolished the Economy

Pierre Tristam
FLAGLERLIVE | AUGUST 1, 2010

Back in 1981 David Stockman was the wonderkid of the Reagan administration–the director of the Office of Management and Budget who’d craft in actual budgets the trickle-down miracle Reagan had promised on the campaign trail: lower budgets, lower spending, higher tax revenue. But trickle-down economics was a wish, not a reality. It’s never worked. Lower taxes don’t generate more revenue. They generate deficits.

Reagan knew it. So did Stockman. So did their guru, Friederich von Hayek. The deficits were intentional all along. They were edsigned to “starve the beast,” meaning intentionally cut revenue as a way of pressuring Congress to cut the New Deal programs Reagan wanted to demolish. “The plan,” Stockman told Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, ” was to have a strategic deficit that would give you an argument for cutting back the programs that weren’t desired. It got out of hand.”

A 1985 interview with von Hayek in the March 25, 1985 issue of Profil 13, the Austrian journal, was just as revealing. Von Hayek sat for the interview while wearing a set of cuff links Reagan had presented him as a gift. “I really believe Reagan is fundamentally a decent and honest man,” von Hayek told his interviewer. “His politics? When the government of the United States borrows a large part of the savings of the world, the consequence is that capital must become scarce and expensive in the whole world. That’s a problem.” And in reference to Stockman, von Hayek said: “You see, one of Reagan’s advisers told me why the president has permitted that to happen, which makes the matter partly excusable: Reagan thinks it is impossible to persuade Congress that expenditures must be reduced unless one creates deficits so large that absolutely everyone becomes convinced that no more money can be spent.” Thus, he went on, it was up to Reagan to “persuade Congress of the necessity of spending reductions by means of an immense deficit. Unfortunately, he has not succeeded!!!” Those three exclamation points, unusually effusive for an economist, are in the original.

Keep in mind: Hayek is speaking his disillusion with the GOP’s misapplication of his theories in 1985. To this day he remains a favored mask of budget-wreckers pretending to be fiscally conservative while pushing for more tax cuts. Those wreckers are at work in Congress today as they argue for an extension of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which were far larger than Reagan’s of 1981 and 1986 (in 1986, Reagan agreed to some tax increases, but mostly in the Social Security payroll tax, meaning on the middle and lower classes).

Stockman resigned from the Reagan administration in 1985, himself disillusioned. Today in The New York Times, he writes a damning piece that sums up Republican duplicity on budgets and fiscal responsibility going back to the Nixon administration. “IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians,” Stockman begins, “the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase. More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.”

In a piece entitled “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse,” a clever play on the biblical image of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Stockman outlines four major Republican breaks with discipline that set the stage, then compounded, American bankruptcy, beginning with Milton Friedman convincing Nixon to default “on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.”

CONTINUED...

http://flaglerlive.com/8577/david-stockman-reagan-nixon-bush-trickledown/

"Trickle Down Government" doesn't even begin to cover what we are experiencing.

[hifiguy]

58. The biggest heist in history

all to benefit the wealthy.

[Octafish]

59. ''Reverse Robin Hood'' is how Jesse Jackson put it.

"Reaganomics. Based on the belief that the rich had too little money and the poor had too much. That's classic Reaganomics. They believe that the poor had too much money and the rich had too little money so they engaged in reverse Robin Hood - took from the poor and gave to the rich, paid for by the middle class. We cannot stand four more years of Reaganomics in any version, in any disguise..."

-- http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/d95bd53d9c9b4a1f837ceed66a46edfe

That was 1988.

[hifiguy]

60. When a dispassionate history of this era is written

in another hundred years or so, one of the primary questions will be "Which person of this era caused the most unnecessary human pain, death and suffering?"

It should come down to Milton Friedman and Adolf Hitler. I go with Friedman, and it's not even a truly hard choice. Nazism as a force in the world died with Adolf. The madness of Friedmanism rolls merrily on as Accepted Truth.

[AzDar]

42. K & R

[Octafish]

54. The Dark Age of Money: Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism

America, we have a problem, a financial problem that gets ZERO coverage in Corporate McPravda:

Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism

The Dark Age of Money

by JAMES C. KENNEDY
CounterPunch Oct. 24, 2012

EXCERPT...

Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.

SNIP...

The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.

If you say that this is nothing new, you miss the point. Friedman does not differentiate between some third world country and his own. The ultimate difference is that Friedman has created a model that sanctions and promotes the exploitation of his own country, in fact every country, for the benefit of the investor, money the uber-wealthy. He dressed up this noxious ideology as ‘free market capitalism’ and then convinced most of the world to embrace it as their economic salvation.

SNIP...

[font color="green"]Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.[/font color]

SNIP...

Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests. Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations. Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress. The $700 billion was just the wedge. Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit. All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/24/the-dark-age-of-money/

We need to get back to the day when people were more important than profits; when peace trumped money. I'm so old, AzDar, I can remember when that was what being a Democrat stood for.

[hifiguy]

61. Friedman was unquestionably one of the handful of Worst Human Beings

of the last couple of hundred years.

[Octafish]

62. He married well.

GE NBC Royalties.

Where integrity soars.

CHOCOLATES AND NYLONS, SIR?

By David Podvin, Jan. 9, 2002

In 1992, shortly after being named moderator of Meet The Press, Tim Russert was having lunch with a broadcast executive. The mealtime conversation was about the pros and cons of working for General Electric’s NBC subsidiary. Russert expounded on how being employed by GE had brought him to the realization that things functioned better when Republicans were in charge.

“You know, Tim, you used to be such a rabid Democrat when you worked for Pat Moynihan,” said the executive. “But now that you’ve gotten a glimpse of who’s handing out the money in this business, you’ve become quite the Jaycee. Were you wrong about everything you used to believe so strongly?”

“I still believe,” Russert said, leaning across the table. “I believe in everything I ever did. But I also know that I never would have become moderator on Meet The Press if my employers were uncomfortable with me. And, given the amount of money at stake, millions of dollars, I don’t blame them. This is business.”

The executive agreed. “But are you concerned about losing yourself? You know, selling out?”

Russert pounded the table. “Integrity is for paupers!”

When Tim Russert joined NBC News in 1984, he began a personal transformation from Democratic congressional aide to broadcaster-in-charge of General Electric’s political interests. His early efforts for the network drew some criticism from the GE corporate suites as being “too knee jerk”, a euphemism for “insufficiently pro-GE/ Republican”. The executives at General Electric viewed with hostility the Democratic Party that wanted to burden them with obeying laws that the company preferred to break and complying with regulations that it preferred to ignore. While Republicans turned a blind eye to the serial environmental crimes and bribery committed by GE, the Democrats were less submissive. The company was especially upset that the Democratic Party had taken a position against transferring public ownership of the broadcast airwaves to the media conglomerates.

CONTINUED...

http://makethemaccountable.com/podvin/media/020109_Russert.htm

Most journalists I know make between $25-50,000 per. Unlike the millionaire class of journalist, I also know them to tell the truth in their reporting and writing.

[hifiguy]

64. I thought Milton Friedman was married to another U of C economist.

Wasn't talking about the Moustache of Understanding.

[Octafish]

65. Sorry! My bad.

I have a problem with repeating my mistakes. I got it in my head somewhere that Lord Greenspan and Baron Friedman were married to Barbara Walters or the that other lookalike trophy correspondent. Before brain seizes totally:

The Risky Steady State and the Interest Rate Lower Bound in PDF form:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2016009pap.pdf?utm_campaign=Hutchins+Center&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=26643560&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_oLd5LvVRHjiRR7d558VmRpCmJ3LI1QDu5PG4Wfohv5vI4xNCRqs6VAb1dAeDn3Br1UqvV4ZLpztfxJUblJ6PJtLQlcg&_hsmi=26643560

Nothing like the Finance and Economics Discussion Series and a vodka and rainwater to get me back on track.

[hifiguy]

66. Well our aristocracy is pretty inbred.

Not quite to the extent that rendered Charles II of Spain an actual imbecile. But they're on their way.

Charles had neither a pleasant life nor a successful reign. He was physically disabled, mentally retarded and disfigured. A large tongue made his speech difficult to understand, he was bald by the age of 35, and he died senile and wracked by epileptic seizures. He had two wives but being impotent, he had no children and thus, no heirs. Which is what happens after 16 generations of inbreeding.

See also: http://madmonarchs.guusbeltman.nl/madmonarchs/carlos2/carlos2_bio.htm

[Octafish]

68. Same thing happened in my family.

The family tree has all the branches on the left side of the page. For generations, cousins married cousins to keep the family farm inside the family. It was embarrassing at wedding when the usher sits everybody on the left side of the aisle. The farm's still ours, too, although we all own 1/4,096th of an acre and we all look like our eyes are about half an inch apart with one big eyebrow, but hey! It's mine and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darryl's and cousin Darleena's.

[hifiguy]

69. Yikes! Sounds like the Kallikak clan.

I'd like ya to meet my wife, and sister.

Bobby Joe Jim Jack, there's only one woman there.

Eeyup...

[Wilms]

43. I would just like to add...

^

[Octafish]

63. Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy

From 2001:

The Silent Takeover

Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy

Part 1

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Living In A Materal World

by Noreena Hertz

Arrow Books, 2001, paper


The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

EXCERPT...

p14
Over the last two decades the balance of power between politics and commerce has shifted radically, leaving politicians increasingly subordinate to the colossal economic power of big business. Unleashed by the Thatcher-Reagan axis, and accelerated by the end of the Cold War, this process has grown Hydra-like over the last two decades and now manifests itself in what are diverse positive and negative forms. Whichever way we look at it, corporations are taking on the responsibilities of government.

And as business has extended its role, it has ... actually come to define the public realm. The political state has become the corporate state. Governments, ( by not even acknowledging the takeover risk shattering the implicit contract between state and citizen that lies at the heart of a democratic society, making the rejection of the ballot box and the embracing of non-traditional forms of political expression increasingly attractive alternatives.

***

Living In A Materal World

p24
The rise of the New Right

The watershed came in 1979 and 1980 with the election first of Margaret Thatcher and then of Ronald Reagan - politicians from the New Right, who enthusiastically advocated the free market and were determinedly hostile to the concept of an

interventionist state. Rejecting Keynesianism, the grocer's daughter and the Hollywood actor embraced the views of economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. These economists didn't dispute that markets could and did fail; but they believed that the free market was capable of allocating goods and services more effectively than the state could, and that government attempts to combat market failures did more harm than good. They harked back to the ideas that had shaped economic policy from the Victorian era through to the Wall Street crash, that 'The role of the state was to enforce contracts, to supply sound money . . . to ensure that market forces were not distorted and, essentially, to provide the best environment for business to flourish, evoking memories of the 1920s US President Calvin Coolidge's dictum, 'The business of America is business.'

The extent to which this new religion embodied a coherent ideology, a creed of Reaganism or Thatcherism which could be adopted by other states, remains a matter of dispute. The two leaders' goals and priorities were often different. Thatcher adopted monetarism - emphasising tight control of the money supply - whereas the Reagan administration was dominated by supply-side economists, who advocated tax cuts to give the greatest incentive to production. But there were themes running through the policies of Reagan and Thatcher that gave a discernible character to their politics, and made it possible to identify their followers in other countries. Their views are easiest to define in the negative: as a rejection of all the pillars of the post-war Keynesian consensus. In place of the goals of full employment and a generous welfare state, the New Right favoured the reduction of inflation and cuts in public spending (which they regarded as a major cause of the current economic malaise); rather than a mixed economy, they wanted the state cut back to its core, with many of its functions privatised or contracted out.

The New Right felt that too much had been expected from government in the post-war period. Its view was that the role of government should be to alleviate the worst evils of the human lot and provide a framework within which people and communities could pursue their various goals - not, as in previous decades, to positively guarantee general welfare. John Moore, Thatcher's Social Services Secretary, explained in 1987: 'For more than a quarter of a century after the last war public opinion in Britain, encouraged by politicians, travelled down the aberrant path towards even more dependence on an even more powerful state. Under the guise of compassion people were encouraged to see themselves as "victims of circumstance". According to the New Right, the welfare mentality had bred indolence and dependency.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Economy/Silent_Takeover%20_Part1.html

I wonder what ever happened to the peace dividend, Wilms? If only we'd had a Democratic administration around to use it build a better USA! Oh, wait a second.

[Wilms]

67. Fond memories of the Peace Dividend.

And, yes. That "Stay the Course" in Iraq while the BFEE regroups administration we had.

Hope Peddlers.


I'd just like to add...

What the hell...I'll post the whole album.

[Octafish]

70. Outstanding album, thank you.

You've probably seen this, Wilms: Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture on Truth, War and the Big Lie

[Wilms]

71. Ouch.

He did a great job.

[PonyUp]

44. kr nt