With a tsunami of economic pain swamping America’s working families, our stalwart national leaders are rushing to provide aid and comfort. Unfortunately, not to workers, but to CEOs, Wall Street speculators, and every pampered plutocrat with a Gucci-clad lobbyist.
At least President Obama recognizes that the workaday majority has been knocked down: “Our economy as a whole,” he says (with what passes for keen insight in today’s clueless Washington) “just isn’t producing nearly enough jobs.” Indeed, as one economic analyst put it, “June’s employment report [is] awful from start to finish.”
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So, congressional leaders and the president have been trying to cut a deal – not to launch the bold, can-do jobs program that America urgently needs, but to slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other essential programs that most Americans count on.
Adding to this Kafkaesque disconnect from reality, Republican leaders are locking arms (and minds) to prevent any cuts to the insane tax handouts now going to billionaire hedge fund speculators, Big Oil, and multinational corporations that are hiding massive profits in offshore tax havens. While they cut the poor, no tax giveaway to the rich is so revolting that GOP lawmakers refuse to kiss it right on the lips – even the $300 million a year doled out in tax breaks for corporate jets, or the subsidy that Uncle Sam gives to yacht owners. Seriously, jets and yachts! Sen, Jon Kyl whined that Democrats “want ordinary Americans to believe that they will not be affected by the president’s tax-increase proposals.”
If anyone knows what planet Kyl lives on, please beam the news to him that ordinary Americans don’t have corporate jets and yachts. We can laugh, but clowns like Kyl are destroying our middle-class to make America safe for plutocrats.
“Job growth feeble in June,” Austin American Statesman, July 9, 2011.
U.S. battles slowest rally since Great Depression, Austin American Statesman, July 2, 2011.
“Industry Set for Fight to Keep Corporate Jet Tax Breaks,” The New York Times, July 8, 2011.
“Corporate Cash Con,” The New York Times, July 4, 2011.
“Taxes And Billionaires,” The New York Times, July 7, 2011.
“GOP Tax Giveaway of the Day: The Hedge Fund Loophole,” www.thinkprogress.org, July 8, 2011.
“If the Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers Paid Taxes Like You and Me, We’d Cut 44 Billion of the National Deficit,” www.alternet.org, June 30, 2011.
“How Dracula Hedge Funds Are Sucking Us Dry,” www.alternet.org, July 9, 2011.
“U.S. Firms Build Up Record Cash Piles,” www.wsj.com, June 10, 2010.
Facts About Wealth That Every American Should Know, www.osjspm.org, 2011.
“What Obama Wants,” The New York Times, July 8, 2011.
“No, We Can’t ? Or Wont?” The New York Times, July 11, 2011.
“Democrats Oppose Talk Of Cuts to Social Security,” July 8, 2011.
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