Mr. Incompetent Himself-Alan Greenspan Is The Heart Of The Fix The Debt Jihad

Whaddya Know? Professional Economy Wrecker Alan Greenspan Is at the Heart of the Insidious 'Fix the Debt Campaign, by Dean Baker, Alternet.org

Alan Greenspan will go down in history as the person who has done more damage to the U.S. economy and society that anyone who was not a foreign enemy. In fact the destruction he wreaked through his incompetence would also exceed the damage caused by almost all would-be enemies as well.

Greenspan accomplished the remarkable feat as Fed chair of ignoring the growth of the $8 trillion housing bubble. This bubble could not have been easier to see if it had been 500 feet high and lit up with huge neon signs saying "Huge Housing Bubble." But Greenspan insisted the bubble was not there.

And Greenspan somehow didn't recognize that the collapse of this massive bubble would devastate the economy....

If we had a political debate that was driven by evidence, where the accuracy of one's past judgements played any role in the credibility granted their current opinion, then Greenspan would be relegated to the role of ranting fool. His opinions on the economy would be given slightly less credibility than the mumblings of a street drunk...

"The Campaign to Fix the Debt started to come together at a salon dinner held in the backyard of Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, in the fall of 2011. An influential group of economic, political and business leaders — including the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and Mark Bertolini, the chief executive of the Aetna insurance company — huddled in a too-small tent in the pouring rain."

Click the link to read the complete article.

These predators, or I should say sociopaths, really want to convert the United States into a total kleptocracy ruled by the corporate royalists who feed their underlings consulting fees and duty-free jobs after doing their corporate bidding while serving in government or in mindless think tanks funded by the corporate royalists.

The latest to receive a duty-free job is PA Congressman Jason Altmire, who now has a job with Florida Blue, since his Blue Dog role in the Congress was ousted by a Teabagging nutbag from his district. The revolving door of do-nothing jobs with benefits continues.

Their desires are to keep wages and salaries low or stagnated, jobs at a premium, and the consumer indebted to them via credit cards, and mortgages.

When will the working class voters wake up to their manipulation by the GOPsychopathetics they elect?

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

The Fiscal Cliff and the CEO Corporate Psychopaths Inside the Campaign To Fix The Debt

This country is filling up its time with frenzied talk about the Fiscal Cliff. The real story is how the corporate financial clots are hardening up the arteries of the nation’s circulatory system, which is made up mostly by hard working middle and lower class Americans. But, the GOP, which are “clot” deposits clogging the arteries restricting the flow of blood, or prosperity by layering their austerity proposals, or fatty deposits, upon the clots. Instead, they want to produce a cardio infarction that would lead toward a middle and lower class austerity diet, while those have caused the infarction would continue to suck off the government’s teat feeding from the glutinous trough of tax cuts, tax abatements, tax write-offs, bail outs, low tax rates, no-bid/bid government contracts, benefits from discounts when using public lands, benefits from military protections, such as trade lanes, government grants, subsidies, and list can go on and on and on.

Currently, we are seeing a feeding frenzy facilitated by the Campaign To Fix The Debt corporate groupies who want to stick-it to working people. They don’t believe that people, who don’t wear $1000 suits to work, or have padded expense account credit cards, or drive high end luxury cars to work, or have their executive assistants do their dirty work for them should be able to retire at 65 and receive their Social Security checks.

These corporate crybaby predators want the age extended so those who get their hands dirty, or strain their bodies, or are on their feet all day have to work extra years to receive what they have paid into by the age of 65.

These corporate crybaby predators don’t want these hard working people to receive Medicare, or Medicaid, at the price they are hoping to pay. They want cuts to Medicare so these people, who make the things that corporations make and sell, have to pay more for it straining their retirement budgets, while these CEO and CFO corporate predators, who, on average will receive $9 million, will retire in luxury.

These corporate crybabies are today’s modern day psychopaths.

From Dr. Brian Moench, written on Truthout.org—“Schizophrenics, Psychopaths Holding America Hostage”:

“A 2005 British study compared the psychological profiles of 39 senior business executives at leading British companies with those of mental patients in the UK's Broadmoor Special Hospital. The business leaders scored a clear "victory" in the three traits normally used to identify the emotional dysfunction of psychopaths: histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and compulsive personality disorder.



Other studies suggest that financial elites, like psychopaths, are more likely to feel like rules and societal constraints don't apply to them. Mitt Romney's entire business and political career, especially his approach to paying taxes, is the freshest, most conspicuous example of this personality trait.”

The piece goes on to talk about the CEOs behind the Fix The Debt efforts:

“Enter the 71 corporate CEOs behind the current Campaign To Fix The Debt. These are CEOs making the media rounds and spending $30 million dollars pounding the table on achieving federal deficit reduction exclusively by dismantling the social safety nets - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security - while they sit on their own massive retirement funds averaging $9.1 million. These are the same CEOs who have contributed mightily to and benefited personally from the deficit they now want closed. Their companies have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies' tax bills - companies like Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, AT &T, and Boeing. And no, they are not offering to reduce their feeding at the public trough, instead they want us to turn away the poor, disabled and the vulnerable, calling government support for them "low priority spending."

“Meanwhile, CEOs of the major fossil fuel companies have enough scientific expertise to know that their business model of extracting all the carbon they can get their hands on threatens the very survival of all of mankind, yet they are undaunted in doing exactly that. Who cares about the collapse of civilization when there are quarterly profits to be made? How are these captains of the fossil fuel industry not psychopaths?”

This is what America is dealing with inside our legislative branch of government. We have all kinds of deniers. Those who believe the Earth is only 6000 years old. Or, that climate change does not exist. Or, that a woman’s body can naturally abort the seed of a rapist. Or, that an aspirin held between a woman’s legs will prevent pregnancies.

We have psychopaths and the mentally deranged making decisions for the rest of the country. Most live inside the GOP, ie. The Grotesquely Oligarchian Psychopathic Party. This GOP is made up of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, and other “fatty deposits” that are not wanting to believe that a majority of the American people have said “NO” to their agenda and their presidential candidate.

They don’t want to hear what the American people have said:

• Raise tax rates on all those earning over $250K.
• Leave Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone.
• Make deep cuts in the defense budget.

And, here are some added pieces that the American people want to include in this Fiscal Cliff budget deal (or some facsimile thereof):

• Eliminate the cap on Social Security and then, means test anyone earning over $500k.
• Put into place a Wall Street financial transaction tax on all short term transactions.
• Tax dividends and capital gains at a 32% tax rate for anyone earning over $300K per year.
• Raise tax rates on all income over $250K.
• Cut tax loopholes for anyone earning over $500K.
• Demand that the government negotiate with drug companies for lower drug prices on behalf of all Medicare and Medicaid recipients just as it is done for the Veterans Association.
• Begin to reduce the amount of private contracts for work that military personnel can do.

Doing what I have listed could save the government a great deal of money, and bring about the desired level of new revenues the president is asking for.

Eliot Spitzer wrote on Alternet.org instituting a financial transaction tax in his piece titled

“Tax the Traders! It Would Solve Economic Crisis and Stop Reckless Activity”.

These high end corporate crybaby psychopaths and their legislative stooges in the GOP don’t want to see any government stimulus in order to put Americans back to work doing jobs that cannot be exported. They hate that!!!

They don’t want to admit that China is the world’s leader in manufacturing as a result of huge amounts of government stimulus. They love to ship jobs overseas, especially China, because of their large injections of government cash in the building of a successful industrial infrastructure.

In the article written by Dr. Stephen Leeb, on Seekingalpha.com, titled “A Bright Spot in the Global Economic Landscape”, we read just how successful China is and how Japan, in spite of its fiscal problems won’t institute austerity programs upon its people, but instead, believes in adding more stimulus into the economy.

“One bright spot in the global economic landscape, despite its many detractors today, is China. That country's economy appears to be stabilizing and is likely to accelerate in the months ahead. We learned recently, for instance, that China's manufacturing activity increased last month for the first time in more than a year. This is the latest in a string of reports in the last few months supporting a turnaround in China's economy. The de-stocking cycle there appears to be ending, and the rebuilding of inventories coupled with greater investment and government spending on infrastructure should drive domestic demand higher.”

“Looking further east: Japan, the world's third-largest economy, contracted by 3.5 percent in the third quarter on an annual basis - and the fourth quarter is shaping up to be equally bad. If so, it will mark the fifth time in the past 15 years that Japan's economy has fallen into recession.

Japan is less concerned with austerity, but still has a tough road ahead. To combat this situation, Japan's government is adding more stimulus, announcing a new fiscal package last week worth 880 billion yen ($10.7 billion), while the Bank of Japan expanded its asset purchase program in October to about 91 trillion yen ($1.1 trillion). Moreover, Shinzo Abe, the presumptive next prime minister after elections are held in a couple of weeks, has vowed to take additional monetary measures to drive down the value of the yen to spur the economy.”

These high end corporate crybaby predators, led by Peter G. Peterson, of the Peter Peterson Foundation and founder of the Comeback America Initiative, are wanting to gorge themselves on more and more government money and profits.

This is from Huffington Post, Richard (RJ) Eskow, in the piece “'Fix the Debt' Shows Its True, Billionaire-Funded, Anti-Tax Colors”:

“Peterson's Hydra-headed operation has gone by many names over the years, including the "Comeback America Initiative," "The Can Kicks Back," and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, to name just a few. But while the guises have been many, the message has always been the same: Gut Social Security and Medicare. Shrink government. And absurdly, reduce tax rates for millionaires and corporations in the name of deficit reduction.”

This is the agenda of American’s current number of corporate psychopaths.

Here is some propaganda spewed by one of the financial sucking predators on the right.

[Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt] “MacGuineas herself has been an extreme anti-tax ideologue for quite some time, using her billionaire-funded platform for years to write appropriately revenue-unfriendly commentary, often with chirpy sales-brochure-ish titles like "The Corporate Tax Is Dying!" (Exclamation point included.) That 2005 piece, published in Legal Affairs, included statements like this one:

"American corporate tax rates are higher than those imposed by most of our trading partners, and that disadvantage takes its toll."

Not so. The official tax rate is on the high-end, but the actual taxes paid by US corporations are lower than those of most other industrialized countries.”

This is what the GOP is great at---lying, and then, lying some more!!

Here is more from the Maya Monster:

“MacGuineas proposes a severely regressive consumption tax that would hit consumers far harder than corporations. (There are arguments for well-structured "VAT" programs; MacGuineas doesn't make any of them.) She also argues for eliminating home mortgage deductions and employer health benefit tax breaks, which would have a devastating impact on the middle class.

MacGuineas is also given to arguing for another position: means-testing Social Security and Medicare. That's not surprising, since the idea was first widely promoted by another Peterson entity, the Concord Coalition. And while the idea may sound reasonable, the Concord Coalition's idea of "high earners" who ought to see their benefits cut starts at a lifetime average annual income of only $20,000 per year.”

Here is more from the Huffington Post author:

 “With all these tax breaks for high earners and corporations, do MacGuineas and Crew have any ideas for raising revenue? Actually, they do: take it from the struggling middle class. MacGuineas co-authored a paper with economist Martin Feldstein arguing for a cap on individual income tax deductions -- a move that would effectively gut employer health insurance and other vital middle-class programs. (Feldstein's name may ring a bell with viewers of Inside Job, which explored his use of government positions to promote deregulation -- to the great advantage of corporations he served as a board member.

That's the hidden agenda behind the Peterson/corporate/billionaire lobby: cut tax rates for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations; end the payroll tax; downsize government, including Social Security and Medicare; and gain a little added revenue by shifting the tax burden onto the middle class. And that's why the lobby's "Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget" runs articles promoting "rate-reducing tax reform" and others with titles like "Reducing Both Tax Rates and the Deficit is Possible."

Mr. Eskow concludes:

“Let's be clear: This crowd doesn't really care about deficits. It never has. It's an anti-tax group, which pursues its goals by fighting to downsize government programs and "reform" the Internal Revenue code.  Its natural allies are the Republican Party, the nation's mega-corporations, and billionaires.”

“Fix The Debt Campaign's Bipartisan Veneer Masks Conservative Backing”, written by Paul Blumenthal and Christina Wilkie, you will find a link to the list of the high end corporate crybaby psychopaths comprising the Campaign To Fix The Debt cabal.

Here is link for you.

http://www.fixthedebt.org/uploads/files/CEO-Fiscal-Leadership-Council-Membership.pdf

I want to conclude this piece by saying that President Obama and the Democrats MUST squash the dangerous group of psychopaths inside the Congress who are “clotting” up the system preventing it from moving forward toward improved health.

In addition, the Congress, the President, and Eric Holder must go after people like Florida Governor Rick Scott, and others around the nation that worked very hard to suppress the vote, intimidate voters, and control the outcome of the election through their tampering of the process.

We have learned that the organization called Anonymous had allegedly “firewalled” Karl Rove’s computer servers that were programmed to sabotage the Obama vote in Ohio. Rove did not know that his servers were blocked by Anonymous’ interventions numerous times. That is why Rove was shocked when Ohio went to Obama and was trying to convince Fox News to just wait for the real results.

http://www.examiner.com/article/anonymous-claims-karl-rove-tried-to-hack-steal-the-election

 Scott must be investigated, along with those in Ohio, and elsewhere, who did what they could to Fix The Vote in favor of Romney. We cannot allow this corruption, and treasonous acts to go untouched. We must speak out and push for justice, along with the Congressional Democrats and the President to not waver in regards to the debt problems.

The clot thickens!

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)