Economic Cause and Effect

If President Obama wants to put people to work, he should consider investing in our infrastructure instead of funding wars where even if we do become the winner, we still lose. Now he wants to give away $5,000 to employers for each new employee hired. This is a bonanza for anyone already planning to hire more employees. The great government giveaway under the corrupt Bush administration and now the overly generous Obama administration is still going strong but nothing will avert the ultimate reality that recessions are inevitable and there is little government can do to prevent this natural cycle from taking place other than eventually just making it worse.—Stephen Wheeler, Santa Barbara

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In light of the current and disastrous state of affairs, particularly with respect to the economy, perhaps your avid readers might like to actually learn some of the most basic (and most glaring) facts, as evidenced by the calamitous events—all stemming from the Republican economic ideology, i.e. laissez faire, free market capitalism.

The following is an article that I wrote in July 2008. My argument has now been proven beyond a reasonable doubt:

Republicans hold as their own the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Both Roosevelt and Lincoln are undoubtedly turning in their very graves at the utter desecration of this country in the (mainly) Republicans’ corporate wars of pure and venal greed and the unconscionable acts of power lust therein.

Further, the Republicans have the nerve to hold Ronald Reagan as their highest “hero” when Reagan, by utterly dismantling the very anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws that Teddy Roosevelt himself, in his wisdom and prescience, had put into place. And as a direct result of this alone, Reagan has caused such horrible suffering and struggling amongst the hardest working people in this country. The filthy rich get unimaginably richer while the rest of society is left working eighty-hour work-weeks, most often with no health benefits, and alas for less pay every year. The hardest working Americans are not even making ends meet.

It is inexplicable that people do not see what is going on all around us. Deregulation has been a nemesis to America! Look at every corporation in every single industry: the airline industry, the banking industry, the health care industry, the insurance industry, the telecommunications industry—the list is infinite and the utter destruction from pure, unbridled greed is everywhere.

The super-rich, super-powerful, and politically well-connected special interest groups and lobbyists are consistently and tirelessly striving for less and fewer government regulations, while, at the same time, the CEO’s, CFO’s and the other highest echelons of these industries are bursting at the seams with huge amounts of money—and then they are left free to take full advantage of all the loopholes that their lobbyists have worked hard to pass through legislation so that they can run amok without restrictions or regulations; they are left free to run any company in any industry into the ground, without any legal restraints or moral obligations, and more often than not, without any risk of penalties; all the while, these CEO’s, CFO’s, etc., etc. continue taking for themselves huge, incomprehensible salaries, bonuses and severance packages. And then, to top it all off, they have no qualms, indeed have the nerve to ask for and receive government bailouts. Each and everyone else, the bottom 98% of the population, the same workers that are working for these very companies, in these very industries, work longer and harder for less pay and fewer benefits every year.

The fact of the matter is that the most indispensable workers that actually bring success to a company or corporation cannot and do not even make ends meet. And this last and utterly fascist [Bush-Cheney] regime, also known as the Republican party, through it’s greedy and thoroughly damaging short-sighted foreign and domestic policies, has brought this country very, very close to it’s knees.—Christina Marlowe, Summerland