Three plague rats, three plague rats, see how they ruin...

[mqbush]

Reagan cut upper bracket taxes and increased military spending. The resulting Katrina-like flood of red ink forced Reagan to raise taxes, “the largest tax increase in American history in 1982 and another major tax hike in 1983.” (Jonathan Chait, The Big Con).
Elder Bush tried the same thing, and a deficit crisis forced him to raise taxes as well. The one thing that can be said about Younger Bush is that he was fanatical enough to resist to the end admitting he was wrong, as every other supply-side ideologue president has been forced to do. Maybe it was understandable; his boss, Dick Cheney, said in 2002 that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” (Ibid) Everyday citizens knew that Reaganomics was stupid, and were proven correct.

Supply-side economics saddled this nation with massive debt each time it was implemented. But it might be possible to posit that these beguiled simpletons meant well. They believed that upper bracket tax cuts would help the economy, and it took three strikes against our economy from these Republican presidents to finally retire that catastrophic doctrine. At least I hope it’s gone, never to return.

Bill Clinton showed us that even such awful reverses can be fixed in time. More damaging than such deficit debt is the alliance, the collusion of corporations and the government. Our government has been giving our tax money to corporations for years as subsidies and as inducements to leave the country and take our jobs away. In exchange, business uses its wealth and advertising skills to sell us a glossy centerfold picture of America artfully airbrushed with jingoes, dollar signs, and a scapegoat villain of your choice with head bowed and bloody. As long as we’re distracted by this picture, we won’t pay attention to what’s going on. This corporate/government alliance is fascism. When corporations privatize their profits, but socialize their costs, that’s not the socialism we’ve been hearing about the past few days. But the taxpayers now own something they might be able to benefit from. True, buying these failed ventures is like buying a junk car and trying to make reliable transportation out of it, but at least it is something real we’ve paid for, and that’s OK socialism.

Even the crushing burden of supply-side idiocy-induced deficits and the cost of nationalizing these failed firms can eventually be paid down. But we have to have a healthy economy to do that. The worst of the three economic plague rats aims to bring us down for good.

Global economic control by a few transnational entities can’t establish that lock on all the world’s wealth until the populations of all countries –including the US- are desperately poor and willing to work for pennies. Work forces have to be totally interchangeable and disposable. All cultures have to be McWalmartized, to simplify the manufacture and distribution of basic necessities worldwide. If this lock is ever completed, the human race will be stuck in a new Dark Age for all eternity.

But even this economic globalization can be,-has actually been,-fought off in some places. We can finish off these three plague rats and have a much better world than the one looming darkly before us. We cannot let any lesbian Arab couple on food stamps distract us; we can’t be that suicidally foolish. Now is the time to clear our heads of nonsense and focus on structuring economies to be useful to society instead of enslaving society to business.