We Are Screwed, Again!

I was beginning to feel hopeful for America. The people seem to be waking up and they now see that the Emperor has no clothes. Mr. Bush is at 69% disapproval in the polls. The poll numbers show that the Republicans will lose many seats this November and their majority at least in the House. Maybe in the Senate. Good news for America.
The American people are saying that they do not trust members of Congress, do not like where the country is going and they want it to stop. I expected that the Republicans would see the writing on the wall and change what they have been doing for the past five years. If my boss doesn’t approve of what I am doing on the job, I change or the boss fires me.
So why do the Republicans think their jobs are safe? That they can keep on screwing America?
The Congress just passed the newest tax cut. Once again, it only helps the very rich. Those making over $5 million per year, will get a $83,000.00 tax cut, those making over $1 million per year, will get a $36,000.00 tax cut. Those making between $36,000.00 and $75,000.00, (which is 75% of Americans) will get, hold on to your hats, a $120.00 tax cut. And those poor Americans who make under $36,000.00 per year, will get a whopping $12.00 tax cut.
This is such an upside down plan. Those who make $5 million don’t need any more money to help them buy food, housing, medical care, education of their children or gasoline. But those making under $36,000.00 need more of everything. Compassionate Conservatives, my ass! These Cons have no compassion, no sense of right and wrong, no knowledge of history and of what makes America strong. The middle class is why this country was so strong. Now, they are all about the upper class and the slave class. The middle class is disappearing fast. The middle class debt has risen during the 2001 to 2004 years, the last year that the data is available.

America’s middle class is drowning in debt. A typical middle income family earning around $45,000 a year saw its debt burden grow by 33.1% between 2001 and 2004, even after adjusting for inflation. Debt relative to income rose even more, to 33.9%, during this period for middle income families. Personal bankruptcies among these households are rising steeply. {Source}

Just how bad are these tax cuts? Over $76 billion in the next 9 years. This when we have two wars and more to come if they get their way. When we have almost $9 trillion owed to foreign countries in borrowed money. When we have so much infrastructure that needs to be fixed in this country. When so many American’s need health care coverage.

Last month’s budget-cutting bill would save $50 billion over five years by imposing new fees on Medicaid recipients, trimming the food stamp rolls, squeezing student lenders and cutting federal child support enforcement.
Debate will be considerably more rancorous today, when the House votes on a $56 billion tax package, the centerpiece of which would extend the 2003 cuts on the tax rates on dividends and capital gains through 2010. Those provisions alone would cost the Treasury $20.6 billion through 2010 and nearly $51 billion through 2015, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
Although the federal tax revenue has grown since the passage of the 2003 tax cuts — from $1.9 trillion in 2004 to $2.1 trillion in 2005 — the tax revenue measured against the size of the economy remains below the 2002 level and well below the level of 2001, when the first of Bush’s five tax cuts was passed. “The argument that tax cuts will grow the economy and pay for themselves is very attractive, but it’s just not true,”
The liberal watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice says that the richest 1 percent of Americans, with an average income of almost $1.3 million in 2009, would enjoy 53 percent of the value of the extension that year, while 78 percent would receive no benefit.
A recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve concluded that the dividend tax cut had no real impact on the stock market and prompted “only muted gain in total corporate payouts.”
In contrast, Americans for Tax Reform maintains that dividend payouts among the largest companies have jumped 59 percent, while the number of firms offering dividends soared after the tax cuts. {Source}

So, why would they pass these horrendous tax cuts now? Because it does not matter in the least what American’s want. They have a plan. They have used it in the last elections. It was used in 2000, 2002 and 2004. They will use it again in 2006 and by 2008 they will have perfected it. The Republicans will never lose control of the Congress or the White House. Which means they will never lose control of our courts. Democracy is over. We now live in a “Banana Republic”. Proof?

Night of the Uncounted: How to Disappear Three Million Votes?
First, consider CNN’s Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnight after the voting ended on Election Day. They show John Kerry defeated George Bush among women voters by 53% to 47%. And among men voters, Kerry defeated Bush 51% to 49%.
So here’s your question, class: What third sex put George Bush over the top in Ohio and gave him the White House?

Answer: The Uncounted.

In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government’s Election’s Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn’t locate to tote up.
Why doesn’t your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It’s right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election-in a footnote to the report on voter turn-out. The Census tabulation of voters voting “differs,” from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.

This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census’ whispered footnote, has not been reported.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical “glitches,” millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.

In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called “spoilage.” Spoilage, not the voters, picked our president for us.

I went to sleep election night with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead in swing states. But between 1:05 am and 6:41 am the next morning, goblins went to work. By dawn, the network’s exit poll for Ohio showed Kerry dead even with Bush among women, and down by five percentage points among men.
What happened? Were thousands of Bush voters locked in the voting booths, released at 2am, then queried about their choices? Not quite. The network’s polling company applied a fancy “algorithm,” a mathematical magic wand, to slowly transform the exit polls to match the official count.
And that’s bad. By deliberately contaminating the exit polls, the networks snuffed the canary that would signal that something was deeply wrong about the vote count.

Kerry won. (As Mr. Gore did).

We’ve got the body (the wounded elections), we’ve got the bullet holes (the missing votes), now where are the smoking guns? How does the GOP disappear the vote? And why do Democratic ballots spoil so much more readily than Republican ballots? How’s it done? {Source}

Cry for me, America. Cry for me, the whole world. And cry for all the earth. The “Shining City on the Hill” is gone. We are no longer the light shining brightly. We are gone. The shell remains, for awhile. We don’t know that we are a rotting corpse. But the stench of death is all around us. All you have to do is smell the feculent coming from this Congress. They just crapped on all the middle and lower class, again.
Yes, Virginia. There really are “Evil Doers”. They are the Republicans in power and those traitorous Democrats who go along with them. We are truly screwed!

Order Greg Palast’s book “Armed Madhouse” here.