Victimizing the Poor and Vulnerable Has Become the American Way.

Ever wondered about injured individuals who receive large payouts after suing the corporation that harmed them? Turns out there is a very busy area of lawyering devoted to scamming the injured of their compensation. The more vulnerable the person the easier the taking.

In Today's Washington Post, this article about the area of lawyering devoted to scamming people horribly injured of the payouts made by the corporations who harmed them.

Why does this go on? Because there will always be people who see vulnerability as opportunity. Other people’s vulnerability/their opportunity. Our society allows predatory business to succeed. The successful are admired and emulated. The vulnerable are ripe for sport and amusement.

Simple trusting people can be manipulated for profit. Sometimes for entertainment. TV is full of this.

Here’s a neat example of how to torture poor children for entertainment.

We guilt the poor. We teach the poor they deserve their poverty. We teach them that an austere life is a just life, the system that aids the efficient funneling of money to people with money is right and proper.

The system by which this is done is elaborate and carefully constructed. Economic trickery has become part of government policy, not because the public wanted it but because the public was persuaded to accept it. By the same kinds of legal minds who earn their living by scamming the vulnerable. Austerity policies justify the permanent poverty and vulnerability of a large segment of the public.

How do people rationalize this behavior? It’s easy: whatever pays you money must be right. Whatever pays you the most money must be the rightest thing you can do. This is taught in our media and in our business schools, where the ethics classes are poorly attended. Victimizing the vulnerable is one of the easiest ways of making a comfortable living.

To justify your having the money and the poor not having it it helps to believe that they deserve comfort, security and happiness less than you do. That they actually deserve to be ripped off. That they are beyond undeserving of a good life, that they deserve a life of punishment.

The ultimate form of this rationalization is the criminalization of the poor. The Washington Post recently published this column about the criminalization of the poor.

To profit from this criminalization is the ultimate good. Thus preying on the poor becomes a killer business model. For-profit prisons are a fast growing business category.

Are We Like Greece?

There’s also this view of Greece. From the Daily Beast, a review of a new book about the Greek dilemma.

Is it a nation of tax dodgers? A place where nobody wants to pay the cost of public necessities?

What does this sound like? Sounds like America.

Sounds more than a bit like those Americans who bank in the Caribbean to avoid the taxes that would pave the roads––and employ construction workers. This 2013 article in the Economist estimates rich Americans have hidden $20 Trillion offshore.

Sounds a lot like the very profitable American corporations who pay no taxes and instead get corporate welfare paid to them. GE? Boeing? Verizon? Citigroup? Bank of America? FedEx? Senator Bernie Sanders compiled a list.

The grim austerity Greece is experiencing now sounds like Kansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin and a handful of other Republican-run states where austerity policies have taken a severe toll. They’ve lowered taxes on the wealthy and paid for it with deep cuts to public sector needs like schools and healthcare. Sounds a lot like what Germany is forcing on Greece, where the wealthy Greeks still evade taxes but teachers and doctors and nurses go unpaid.

Greece is the Word

When a nation is in a financial crisis it’s not always best to think like a banker. A banker cares more about his money than about the people involved. (It's easier that way.) There are certainly hard truths we need to face about the Greek crisis, and difficult problems that need to be fixed. But is a crisis the best time for a banker to extract his late fees and penalties? Does it matter if Greece recovers from this? For many of the financial experts discussing it, the money is less abstract than the people.

In the Guardian, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz returns us to a more rational discussion of what is involved and what will restore Greece’s financial health.

Even the conservative Daily Telegraph has a negative view of how Europe’s bankers have handled this. This writer says the Euro bankers set Greece up to fail.

Europe is a far different place than it was in the era of Keynes. We took Keynes' advice after WW2. By then we knew from grim experience not to treat a fallen nation the way Europe treated Germany in 1920.

I have an idea: look at how Germany was helped by the Marshall Plan after WW2. Maybe Greece would be treated better now if they'd invaded Europe instead of joining it.

From the Economist

From the London School of Economics

From TruthOut

German bankers think Greece has already been helped enough. The point is, after WW2 Germany was helped until they recovered. There should be mechanisms put in place that help repair the problems that caused the Greek crisis. Instead the European bankers, apparently, prefer to create a profitable lender-borrower relationship, and profitable relationships are meant to last, creating longterm profits for the lender. Did the European banks base their rescue plan on the model of payday lenders? (From the Guardian)

The Greek finance minister takes a very dim view of austerity.

The austerity model fails wherever it is tried. Why? Because it doesn't allow recovery. Instead it extracts the pound of flesh from the corpse of the debtor. Only money exists in the world of these bankers. No people, no communities, no societies, no nations, just money.

Economist Lars Syll on the failed austerity model

In Europe as in the U.S., it’s a case of Kiss Up, Kick Down. Pay the rich, gouge the poor. In any failed transaction the fault always lies with the poorer party. He always pays the penalty. (From the Washington Post)

Here are some key views from the bankers’ table via the New York Times

If Europe were a federal system like the U.S., the crisis in one state would matter to everyone. This idea gets a fuller airing at VOX.

Kiss Up. Kick Down.

The massive shift of wealth upward is being engineered as if it’s a war on debt. Make the working class feel pinched, get them in debt, and use that fear of debt as a rationale for paying them less and less, and cutting public efforts to ease the unfairness and relieve distress.

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent piece about The Austerity Delusion for the Guardian.

Another Nobel economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has been warning about the same things. But concentrated wealth can create its own reality.

The class who own for a living use large amounts of cash (they have trillions) to create ads warning about the debt being placed on the children of the people who work for a living.

But this is a bogus warning. They are placing the debt on working people by shifting their tax burden onto working people.

They say public debt will burden our children, but they only want to stop the spending that helps working people.

They are gung-ho about corporate military contractor spending and private prison spending. They oppose education funding and infrastructure funding, calling it wasteful. They oppose fairer taxation that would place the tax burden where it was when we actually had a prosperous working class and functioning infrastructure.

They oppose public spending, calling it a burden on our children. This is as insane as saying we should starve our children to protect their inheritance. It carries enormous social costs. This kind of narrow, self-serving greed is what erodes civilizations. It ultimately leads to collapse. Of course, the wealthy will have offloaded their wealth to remote islands by then.

Even in Kansas, working people are talking back. One waitress has caused quite a stir.

Would you like to see a picture of vast wealth on parade? They always gather to watch two persons of color beat each other up. Now they come in luxury jets instead of limousines. Who paid for that airport? The working taxpayer.

The Republican solution is to give the small class of people who own for a living (whose irresponsible behavior caused the Great Recession) a big fat bonus. A bonus that will perpetuate their wealth and eliminate their obligations to the society that made them rich.

Their hubris is breathtaking. Perhaps because their billions will buy ads to persuade the public to do what they want the public to do. They have only contempt for those who dislike concentrated wealth. People like Pope Francis. In this political climate Jesus wouldn’t have been let near a microphone.

The Real VA Scandal

The Republican half of Congress wants government to fail.

So they do everything they can to make it fail. To make the systems break down, to make Americans angry at their government, the government Republicans hate, the government Republicans now control through filibuster and obstruction.

In February Republicans did everything they could to block a major funding bill to help the VA deal with the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghan wars. And block it they did.

Call it a hostage situation. Republicans want to remove democratic government and replace it with a corporate structure run by their clients for making money.

Republicans are delighted with the VA scandal, because they set it in motion.

They started a war eleven years ago. Wars create veterans. Wars cause many thousands of amputations and other traumatic injuries which need to be treated. But Republicans in Congress didn’t want to pay for that part of the war, the aftermath.

They like veterans for parades but don’t like to pay for their healthcare.

When you defund veterans programs just when they’re needed most you are either cynical, unpatriotic or stupid. Take your pick.

How Is A National Economy Not Like A Household Budget?

Krugman is especially good today. He makes some crucial points, one in particular, that most Americans don't understand, and that the conservative power structure, the banks, the 1%, are determined Americans never understand:

"Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family. Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too."

The Austerity mantra tells us that nobody should spend more than they have in their pocket right now. No homeowners, no car owners, no college for you.

Unless you are a member of the 1% who have accumulated all of America's earning power over the past 30 years.

What income and savings ordinary working and formerly middle class consumers used to spend now belongs to the very rich and adds to the leverage that the 1% has to manipulate the economy.

The 1% also uses this leverage to manipulate Congress to ease their taxes and increase ours, to get our tax dollars to bail out the big banks but not help the homeowners who were wrongfully foreclosed, to get government to protect corporate earnings and CEO pay from taxes but cover any losses they might suffer through their own risky behavior.

The concentration of wealth also buys a lot of media, a lot of punditry, a lot of "expert opinion", a lot of public relations that can be used to persuade the mass of Americans that they don't deserve what they used to deserve, that austerity is good for them, that Americans should settle for less and quit grumbling.

Austerity policies take trillions out of the middle class consumer economy and put them into the well-stuffed mattresses of the 1%.

To what purpose? The rich can afford to play a long game. (Call it a long con if you like.) Their goal is to suppress working incomes to their lowest possible degree. They own for a living; they see working incomes as an evil. They have been suppressing working incomes for the past 30 years. What will eventually happen is the U.S. economy will begin to resemble a third world country, with large slums full of workers desperate enough to work for pennies and small gated enclaves of very wealthy people and their bodyguards.

Interestingly, the Austerity preachers give us Greece as an example of what happens if a country doesn't act according to the wishes of the very rich. But Greece is an example of the opposite. The Greek economy fell apart because its extremely wealthy stopped paying taxes and the consequences (unwise austerity policies) were forced upon the working population. But economies are made up of people who work and spend money, not just people who own for a living, who are rich for a living and do nothing productive. Why are the latter group made immune to taxes? What happens when trillions are taken out of a nation's economy and put tax-free in offshore banks? What happens is a Greek style collapse.

The Foolishness of Austerity Economics

Paul Krugman has been writing about the stupidity of austerity economics. Here's his column from this morning.

Also, there's a new book by David Graeber that fills out the long history of debt, explaining the usefulness of debt on a societal level, shared public debt. The national debt so hated by Republicans and FoxNews fulminators was created by a founding father named Alexander Hamilton. You can see his picture on the ten dollar bill in your pocket. How did we get to where we are now? The recent past is more dramatic and foolish and catastrophic than the longer more rational, more prosperous period between FDR and Reagan. We may be emerging from the catastrophe, but there are powerful people who hold our economy hostage: call them the Austerity Economists. The debt haters who also (no coincidence) created the most damaging debts we're dealing with now.

In the mid nineties, after Clinton had raised some taxes on high earners, fostering a period of sustained growth, there was also an effort made to balance the federal budget, to pay our debts down. Good timing, really. It's good to do this when the economy is up and revenue streams are steady. Keynes said this. But there was a worry among large investors: what would happen when the safest investment of all, the US Treasury note, became less plentiful, became rarer because the government was borrowing less? There was serious concern. Nothing bad happened.

Then Bush Jr. was appointed president, and the prudent Democratic money policies were thrown out. Taxes were cut and spending exploded. Unnecessary wars were declared and pursued profligately. War was paid for outside the budget. More taxes were cut. New security bureaucracies were created. A huge unpaid benefit was given to seniors. Regulations were relaxed on speculators. Huge pools of cash were sloshing around in the pockets of corporations and hedge funds, which was wagered recklessly. We experienced an investment class bubble. It wasn't a housing bubble really, it was driven by rich people with too much money chasing too few plausible investments during a period when average households were feeling stretched and losing buying power.

Then the economy collapsed. The last catastrophic gift from the Bush years. Obama was elected. Responsible people came back to the helm. Why has the economic recovery been so sluggish? Financial sector collapses take longer to recover from. The financial sector itself recovers––look at the profits of the large banks and hedge funds––but the damage to the wider economy, collateral damage done by their crimes to innocent people and households takes a long time to repair. Millions of people will never recover. Their incomes will never recover. Their future will be significantly diminished because of the foolish greedy things done by cowboys in the financial sector, and the millions of households harmed will never be able to earn and spend like they could before, like they might have if President Gore had been able to continue the more responsible policies of the Clinton administration. (The man was elected, after all.)

The most frustrating thing is the foolish Bush policies still have a lot of influence. His advisors took well-paid and highly influential positions in the large financial institutions that Bush failed to regulate, where they continue to influence financial thinking and coerce policy. Bush people still have hands on the financial tiller because our economy is largely controlled by large private entities. Even the public institutions are influenced by large financial players.

The most damaging and weirdly contradictory policy Bush's Boys have pushed, and they've pushed it hard, is Austerity.

Imagine a person is admitted to the ER with massive bleeding. The Austerity policy would dictate the doctors not waste blood donors' blood on this person. BushThink says it's better to give this blood supply to people who already have enough blood, who aren't in danger. If those healthy people don't need it now, it's best to store it in case they'd like to have it in the future. Austerity policy preaches restricting help. Hungry children are helped best by withholding food. It is a do-nothing policy.

The rationale is that households restrain spending when revenue stops. A responsible thing for a household to do. But an economy is not a household. Alexander Hamilton created the national debt to help the economy grow. The debt was an engine for infrastructure investment. It turned the U.S. from a backward nation into the largest economy in the world. Deficit spending bought the western half of the country. It laid the railroads (Republican president) and built the interstates (Republican president.) Why have Republicans turned from prudent and productive growth policies to unproductive and stingy ones? Possibly because their large donors no longer feel invested in this country––they're not as invested because they bank in Switzerland and the Caymans and Bahamas and they don't pay the same percentage of taxes the rest of us do. Massive deficit spending for WWII hoisted us out of the last Great Depression, something FDR's more cautious deficit spending failed to do during the 30s.

Another medical analogy: imagine a patient comes into the ER. His heart has stopped. Austerity policies would say Do Nothing. Wait. Pray. The more Keynesian doctors would use a defibrillator to jolt the heart back to life. Austerity doctors would say that's a waste of electricity. We had an economy in 2008 and 2009 that needed a jolt. TARP gave that jolt but subsequent stimulus was blocked and watered down by Austerity believers, do-nothing purists. These foolish ideologues, BushThinkers, also steered most of the stimulus into the pockets of the perpetrators of the collapse rather than into the households that would have spent the money. The bankers who got it banked it. They sat on it. They didn't see enough opportunities for profitable investment so the money didn't enter the consumer economy where it would have created opportunities for productive investment.

We have a political reality that gives veto power to the big banks through their proxies in the Republican Party. So we do nothing. There is a tacit veto preventing help from getting to the households that most need it, who would quickly spend it and stimulate the economy, who would spend that money at stores down the street. What's happened instead is the Big Money people, the BushThinkers, have taken the American economy and buried it in their backyard, waiting for their private opportunity to exploit it profitably, but an economy dies when it's buried. The BushThinkers think there are only two ways to invest money: in their offshore accounts or on split second wagers on the movement of the markets. This oscillation between ancient economics and casino economics isn't good for us.

The other rationalization for the Republican Do Nothing Austerity Policy (and you've heard it recited over and over again by the hedge funders' Republican proxies in Congress) is that to deficit spend now would swell the national debt and place a burden on our children. Which sounds rational to households without any money... but it isn't. It's not what we do as a community. Republican policies begin and end with the individual and damn the community.

Scrooge has become the dominant philosopher of the moment. "Let them die then, and decrease the surplus population."

Don't deliver money where it's needed; deliver more where there is too much already.

Don't deliver help where it's needed; help the people whose houses are full of underpaid help already.

Don't feed the hungry; feed the well fed, feed the overfed.

Don't supply medical care to the unhealthy; insure the healthy, treat the healthy.

America needs to get its head around the basic and necessary logic of the public sector. The thinking that sends policemen and firemen and paramedics and soldiers and rescue personnel toward danger instead of away from it.

Our national wealth should help in an emergency rather than hiding under the bed.

The Republican mindset that is blocking our national recovery says "don't help" and "think only of yourself". This thinking is what is keeping us down right now. It is defunding every effort to lift us out of the ditch using community effort and community investment.

To say, as the Republicans say, and talk radio and FoxNews repeat endlessly, that using government spending to stimulate the economy would place an unbearable debt on our children, really is saying that the best way to protect our children's inheritance is to give our national wealth to the wealthy so they can put it safely in the Cayman Islands where it can lie safely idle the way the wealthy lie safely idle. They're saying that the best thing to do with our nation's wealth is to put it back in the hands of the people who wagered it foolishly prior to 2008.

What the Republicans are saying is "Austerity is a good thing for the poor." And we're all more poor than we were in the Clinton years.

Austerity, though, is like starving your children to protect their inheritance.

Whose inheritance is it? Are these Austerity economists really telling us to give that inheritance to them? Are America's grandparents deciding to spend their grandchildren's inheritance on themselves? Is there a feeling among seniors that the younger generations screwed things up and can't be trusted with spending money? The victims are not the perpetrators here.

Whose bad choices created this lousy economy? Do we really blame the very households the bad economy destroyed? Was it really the bad decisions of the wealthy bundlers and resellers of mortgages? Was it the predatory lenders? Was it the hedge funds who diverted investment away from productive categories into bizarre financial wagers? Was it the wealthy exporters of jobs, whose export of jobs is still subsidized by Bush era policies we haven't been able to end?

Was it the older generation of Reagan worshippers who decided the economy could be left unregulated? The same generation who voted themselves ample retirement but have decided to remove that prospect for their children and grandchildren? The same generation who now have free healthcare but seem happy to withhold healthcare from their children and grandchildren? We can understand their reasoning a little if we realize that once people retire they cease to be workers and become reliant on investments; their loyalties change. You could say they become different people, at once powerless and powerful. They exist in the pocket of their investment groups. They might not even be aware of the shift in their mindset. They're conflicted because they need government but they're owned by the bankers who manage their investments for them, and lobby Washington for them.

Meanwhile, because of the Republican veto of any sustained stimulus, the economy sits and waits. The generations who are still working, whose jobs are insecure, whose incomes have been flat since Reagan flattened workers' incomes, wait, and put off plans, and curb their spending, and worry. And the generation that has graduated and found its careers stalled since 2008, waits too. This last group may never recover because the generations who benefited from the long, sustained, secure and broad prosperity created by the policies of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ, have spent their waning years supervising the dismantling of those policies and the degrading of the American economy. They decided to follow the wealthy speculators who sold the American economy and banked their gains offshore.

AUSTERITY IS HOW THE RICH TEACH WORKING PEOPLE TO BE POOR

Krugman is right again. Today's column is about the stupidity of austerity measures during a recession.

What is it about Big Men (and it's usually men)? When they screw up, they screw up Big, and after they screw up they spend the post screw-up period arranging ways to blame everyone else.

The big money people, the hedge funds, the investment banks, bet long on dubious items and they leveraged themselves to do so. When their bets failed, they couldn't pay up so they were bailed out by us.

But that wasn't enough. They couldn't bear taking any blame for what they'd done, so they blamed the people who were victimized by their greed and overreaching. They blamed the people whose jobs were axed because of the downturn they, the bankers and hedge fund gamblers, had caused. They blamed homeowners whose home values dropped because bankers had wagered those home values too high. They blamed the homeowners' children and the homeowners' dogs. Once they'd blamed everyone but themselves they arranged to punish them. The punishment is called Austerity.

But austerity doesn't work. Let me rephrase that: it works badly. It has a very powerful effect, but the effect is negative. It is like surgeons bleeding a patient who is suffering from loss of blood. It is like an airline pilot whose plane is in a stall deciding it's a good time to conserve fuel.

Austerity is like starving one's children to protect their inheritance. Who does it benefit? The bankers who manage the funds.

Austerity is a financial form of anorexia nervosa, and just as dangerous. It's been proven dangerous, ineffective, wrongheaded and stupid over long years of painful experience. The problem is most people don't have long memories or good understanding of these things and bankers have the money (provided by the taxpayer bailout) to buy advertising and network air time and political influence. They are able to sell anything they'd like, and austerity is what they'd like now––for us, not for them.

Austerity forces everyone to sacrifice to make sure the bankers don't need to. They caused a problem, and we are fixing it––but we are only fixing it for them. We are paying for the damage they did and this payment period is prolonging and deepening the harm done. Austerity causes broad harm to avoid inconveniencing a small group of bankers.

AUSTERITY IS HOW THE RICH TEACH WORKING PEOPLE TO BE POOR. This is a phrase that should be heard more, but without the kind of money bankers have it's not likely to be heard very much on radio or television.

Welfare for Billionaires––Only Billionaires

If you count corporate welfare and tax subsidies of rich people and private companies, the U.S. is a welfare state but one that supports the rich and corporations rather than the poor and working classes. A prof from Washington State University explains it very well.

Moyers & Co discuss how a political system steered by billionaires benefits billionaires.

(Big surprise.)

Meanwhile... The sad and disastrous fact is the billionaires have their money and are content to allow the western economies to collapse rather than forfeit any of it to support such "socialist" schemes as roads and universities and libraries and hospitals. As if the public good is an anarchist plot. A prosperous nation is an insult to their belief system. Infrastructure made it possible for them to get rich, in fact multiplied their wealth-creation with the efficiencies cooperative systems create, but they think nobody else exists in their closed system of spas and resorts and private clubs. Money is created for THEM. People work for THEM. Their idleness is akin to the idleness of the old Roman gods, luxurious and self-justifying. Meanwhile the lives of those who work for a living are growing narrower, shorter, meaner and more unpleasant. To reward actual work––as opposed to dividends on riches–– would inconvenience the lucky 1%. Austerity is killing the European economy rather than inconvenience rich Europeans. Austerity is how the rich teach working people to be poor. It's not happening by mistake. Here's an enlightening article from the New York Review of Books.

How patriotic is it to offshore your millions? Is it worse when those millions are earned from exporting jobs to countries where people work harder and longer for a dollar a day? Is it OK if you sing God Bless America while you are doing it? That's Romney's approach.

Good Economics vs. Bad Economics-You Choose

It's time to choose sides. Despite what you hear on the money programs and from the Wall Street cheerleaders, there are very good economists who think austerity economics is a bad idea. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, our most recent Nobel economists, are on the Democratic side of this argument, the side of the 99%. Others are stepping up too.

"On November 13th 2011, economists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst drafted an open statement to the Occupy Wall Street movement pledging their support. Since then, more than 250 economists from around the world have added their names. Read more at econ4.org "

To be fair, there are two sides to this argument. Having watched the documentary Inside Job, I know that some economists know exactly who butters their bread and it isn't working people. It's the people who now have all the money who butter their bread. Some economists are happy to tailor their ideas to suit their benefactors.

Then there are the mouthpieces for the 1%, who earn a lot of money just by being mouthpieces. For instance, there's Ann Coulter, who said recently that she thinks the horrible dirty worthless people of the Occupy movement should be gunned down by the police. It worked on the Vietnam protesters, she says.

Larry Summers, who led Obama's economic team, doesn't come off very well in Inside Job, but he is on the right side of the argument now, favoring aggressive stimulus and tax cuts to working people––instead of more billions thrown at the rich, at corporations and banks. He's no fool.

Concentrated wealth got us here. It made our economy topheavy and fragile. It sucked the life out of the consumer economy by making working people less prosperous and less able to make ends meet.

Our economy will only revive when working people feel prosperous again, confident that their jobs are secure, that their health and their families are secure, that their children have a future. We need to shift from the Reagan economics of concentrated wealth. Those economic policies promoted and exploited broad insecurity and vulnerability rather than broad prosperity and strength.

Today, more than 2 million Brits took to the streets to protest their government's austerity policy. What is Austerity? It's the rich elite's answer to global recession. "We have money so we get to buy. Everybody else is poor, so they should live that way."

AUSTERITY IS HOW THE RICH AND POWERFUL TEACH WORKING PEOPLE TO BE POOR.

That is where austerity measures bite. They bite the poor, the working people, the middle class who are getting poorer every year. Austerity bites the victims of the global collapse which was caused by the very rich.

In this country it's the Republican economic policy. They want most Americans to be a lot poorer, a lot less secure. When Americans are afraid they work harder and longer for less. That's the long term Republican goal. In the short term the Republicans simply want Americans to suffer, figuring an unhappy populace will vote for Republicans next year. They are happy for Americans to fail in order for Obama to fail.

Do you want to see what effect Republican policies have? Look at the map of the British austerity measures put in place by their Conservative government.

Austerity doesn't work during a recession. It hasn't before. It won't now. Imagine an airline pilot in a stalling aircraft. Does he see the emergency as an opportunity to save fuel? No. He pushes the pedal down and accelerates out of the dive.

Here are some sound commentaries from economists on the intelligent side of this argument, setting out the dire consequences of these ugly conservative policies. From EconMatters.com

From CNN

Here's Robert Reich's useful and persuasive debunking of the Republican austerity policies.

Sadly, cable television is dominated by a Republican network and talk radio is all Republican all the time. And a lot of Americans are easy to fool.

Today's Must-Read from the Wall Street Journal

Today's must-read is an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by economist Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He isn't the first to dispute and disprove the Big Lie that's dominating the public conversation and shaping our national policy right now: the bogus idea that austerity creates jobs.

We've gotten to a dangerous point in our history. Our policies appear to be driven from the minority side and entirely based upon an unproven, actually a widely disproven, belief system.

The so called "genius" of unregulated markets and low taxes caused the mess we are in, so the Republicans and their massively wealthy sponsors are pushing public opinion toward doubling the bets on the bad policy. Voodoo Economics remains the Republican policy. Or call it religion.

As proved true with Iraq, Republicans don't care if something is true. They think they can make it true. In the words of the Bush White House "We create our own reality." And maybe they can make good things come true for a narrow group of very wealthy Americans.

What is happening is exactly what they said they wanted to happen. They want to kill government, our representative government. They want to kill democracy. They want to be rid of a government that can and will protect the public from pollution and poisonous products and fraud and financial collapse. These things don't bother them. Often they profit from them.

Are they willing to kill the government that builds roads and bridges and educates our children? Apparently yes. They look to a different future. They are taking their tax cuts and investing them in China and Indonesia and India, not here. They are guessing that poorly educated Americans will be more eager to do as they're told, and will work for much less. That is the Republican future.

It's a bold plan, but it isn't what anyone voted for. The only logical reason to shrink government spending at a time when business is flat is to depress the economy to make Obama unpopular and get a Republican president in 2012. So killing jobs is a good thing, for them. A flat economy is a good thing, for them. The Republican client list is holding trillions and is happy to wait another year and a half for the economy to get better.