Fw: American Management Style

This is quite worthy, and beautifully stated.

----Forwarded Message----
From: professor0400@yahoo.com
To: professor0400@yahoo.com
Sent: Mon Jul 5th, 2010 1:19 PM EDT
Subject: Fw: American Management Style

For the past four years, and even before the 2008 elections, I used
slides in my presentations that basically said, "Who would want to be elected
president in 2008?" The conditions were such that failure was the only
option.

Who do we blame for the Great Depression? Most kids of our
generation learned that it was that mean old Herbert Hoover who was elected in
November 1928 and took office in March, 1929. The stock market crashed in
October 1929 and the Great Depression began. Now Hooverdid a lousy
job of trying to help the nation dig out from the stock market crash and his
policies only made things worse so he still deserves the condemnations of
history, but he didn't create the original catastrophe. That was Calvin
Coolidge and the GOP-business dominated interests of the "roarin' twenties."
How does history treat "Silent Cal?" Not as badly as it should. The last time
the richest 5% of Americans earned 90% of the national income was in the late
1920's… until now, when the same conditions prevail. The last time the stock
market went virtually unfettered and banks and other institutions could put
together and market any kind of financial deals they wanted was during the mid
to late 1920's… until now. The last time the nation left its natural resources
unprotected from unlimited exploitation was during the late 1920's to early
1930's… until now. Then we had a dust bowl and agricultural collapse. Now we
have the Gulf polluted and the fishing industry virtually
destroyed. Déjà vu all over again? (Quoting Yogi Berra)

Just as in the early 1930's, a GOP-controlled legislature refused
to take the hard steps necessary to reverse the nation's economic downslide.
Just as in the 1930's, a GOP-minority blocked via the filibuster many of the
changes proposed by Rooseveltto bring the
nation out of the depression. Just as the country had started to recover, in
1935-36, policies that had encouraged development, jobs and infrastructure,
were thrown into reverse because the "country couldn't afford the debt" … and
as a result, the nation suffered a "double-dip" depression that lasted 4 more
years. Look familiar? The same conditions prevail today. Déjà vu
all over again?

Today's budget woes, (deficits running around 15% of GDP, are of
concern, but still pale to other war-time periods in modern American
history. Look at the WWI and WWII periods when the budget deficits were
2-3 times current rates. We have fought America's longest war
and unlike any other wartime period, how have we been paying for Bush's wars?
In other wars, presidents and Congress called for tax increases to pay for what
had to be done. As Americans always do, we grouched and complained, but
we realized that some sacrifice had to be made. But for Bush's war, what
did we do? We've cut taxes to their lowest rates since the early 1980's
and drove up spending. The richest 1% of Americans pay taxes at a lower
rate than the middle 20%. GOP filibustering means that hedge fund
managers (the same guys that drove the economic collapse in the first place)
pay 10% of their multi-million dollar incomes in taxes while an American family
with an $80-100,000 annual income will pay on average 22-26%. Why should
anyone who makes their living from "investing" pay less taxes on that income
than others who make their livings teaching school or managing a small
business? Yet that is the result of the current filibuster and the
trade-offs required to get even a minimum of sense back into regulating
financial markets.

For the first time since the late 1920's, just before the nation
fell into a Great Depression, American workers earn less than 250 times the
senior managers of the companies they work for. As recently as 1980, this
ration was less than 10:1. All the conditions are there for economic disaster,
so the need for some deficit spending, even serious deficit spending is
evident.

But, the argument goes, our children and grandchildren will have to
pay for it all? Well as John Boehner, the GOP House leader said last
week, we could just raise Social Security retirement to 70 and unemployed
people could just take lesser paying jobs. This when a still uncontrolled
Wall Street is paying gazillion dollar bonuses and corporate farmers are
getting annual multi-million dollar allotments from the government. (Like
that farmer in Missouriwho posted a
billboard condemning the unemployed as just being lazy and Obama as a
socialist, too many Americans are looking for the easy answers without the
sacrifice. That farmer, we learned had been paid over $3 million in the last
few years not to grow anything.) Try to change the farm support program
and see if you can get re-elected.

We can eliminate the deficits in less than 5 years if we just go
back to the same tax rates that we had at the END of the Reagan years as president
in 1989. But can we raise taxes? Americans, among all the
industrialized nations of the world, pay the lowest tax rates… and yet we
complain. We'll we are getting what we pay for, bad schools, poor health care
(37th in the world), a collapsing infrastructure of roads, sewers,
water systems, bridges… you name it. In Arizona, the state has
closed half its state parks because it refuses to raise taxes. After all
the rich have their country clubs, they don't need to pay for parks by parting
with less than 1/4 of 1% of their incomes.

No, we will not raise our taxes a couple of percentage points, we
will continue to wallow and accelerate our status as just another banana
republic, with India, China and Brazil simply shaking the dust from their boots
on us. Thank you GOP, de-regulation and tax cuts have trickled down so
well.

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