Entries from June 2007
The next time that you hear one of your “less informed friends” say that if the Democratic party regains the White House in 2008 they will “tax and spend” the country until it is bankrupt, you may want to point out the latest report on King Georges spending habits.
Henry A. Waxman released a study of federal government spending that points out that the Bushtard cabal has spent more money on outsourced contracts than any other presidency in the history of the US.
Below is the introduction from Waxman’s web site with links to the full report. Bold highlights are by Mr. C.
Last year, Rep. Henry A. Waxman released the first comprehensive assessment of government contracting under the Bush Administration. The report, entitled Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration, found that between 2000 and 2005, federal procurement spending rose by over 80%, no-bid and other contracts awarded without full and open competition increased by over 100%, and contract mismanagement led to rising waste, fraud, and abuse in federal procurement.
This new report finds that the worrisome trends identified last year have worsened significantly. For the first time, (1) annual federal procurement spending crossed the $400 billion threshold, (2) more than half of this spending — over $200 billion in new contracts — was awarded without full and open competition, and (3) the total value of wasteful federal contracts now exceeds $1 trillion.
Procurement Spending Continues to Grow Rapidly
Last year’s report found that procurement spending had risen from $203.1 billion in 2000 to $377.5 in 2005. This year’s report finds that procurement spending increased to $412.1 billion in 2006, a new record. Contract spending has now more than doubled since President Bush took office. At the Department of Homeland Security, procurement spending increased by 51% last year alone. Since 2000, spending on federal contracts has grown more than twice as fast as other discretionary federal spending. For the first time, the federal government now spends over 40 cents of every discretionary dollar on contracts with private companies.
(more…)
Categories: US Economy · national debt
Mr. C just finished reading an interesting article on Globalreascearch.ca today called “It’s Official: The Crash of the U.S. Economy has begun“.
In it the article, author Richard C. Cook highlights recent articles in the Washington Post and other main stream media outlets on how the US economy will crash. The cause is because of stifling debt to China, multinational corporations moving most manufacturing job to China and other third world countries and the privately held US Federal Reserve being forced to raise interest rates.
Mr. Cook finishes the article with four possible outcomes, two of which Mr. C feels are likely and the other two being pipe dreams which involves the American public abolishing the privately held US Federal Reserve System and putting the ownership of US currency back into the hands of the American public.
|
|
It’s Official: The Crash of the U.S. Economy has begun
By Richard C. Cook
|
Global Research, June 14, 2007
|
It’s official. Mark your calendars. The crash of the U.S. economy has begun. It was announced the morning of Wednesday, June 13, 2007, by economic writers Steven Pearlstein and Robert Samuelson in the pages of the Washington Post, one of the foremost house organs of the U.S. monetary elite.
Pearlstein’s column was titled, “The Takeover Boom, About to Go Bust” and concerned the extraordinary amount of debt vs. operating profits of companies currently subject to leveraged buyouts.
In language remarkably alarmist for the usually ultra-bland pages of the Post, Pearlstein wrote, “It is impossible to predict when the magic moment will be reached and everyone finally realizes that the prices being paid for these companies, and the debt taken on to support the acquisitions, are unsustainable. When that happens, it won’t be pretty. Across the board, stock prices and company valuations will fall. Banks will announce painful write-offs, some hedge funds will close their doors, and private-equity funds will report disappointing returns. Some companies will be forced into bankruptcy or restructuring.”
|
(more…)
Categories: US Economy
Mr. C. just got thru reading an opinion piece from Barbara Ehrenreich which was posted on the Huffingtonpost. In it, Ehrenreich essentially points out that 80% of Americans support the upper 20% of the elite class. In case you haven’t been around since the early 1980’s and the era of Reaganomics, the average American worker earns about 7% less each year while during the same time period the income of the elite has increased by about 16% each year.
Just something to think about the next time you support one of these “self made men” for political office.
Banish The Bloated Overclass
By: Barbara Ehrenreich
Posted June 12, 2007 | 02:02 PM (EST)
Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a “Marxist.” If only. I’ve never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem.
But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday’s New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
As the Times puts it: “It’s as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent.” Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like “pretty thin gruel.”
(more…)
Categories: worker rights
Anyone who has experienced the “Health Care Revolution” in the last 20 years knows that if they are lucky enough to have insurance at all , you are paying through the nose and the level of service sucks. For the most part HMO’s are the worst of the lot , but often they are the only option that a normal family can afford.
Finally the “left” mainstream media is starting to pick up on the fact that the US health care system is only good if you are rich.
The following article will probably be ignored by most of the American press, but Mr. C thought it shouldn’t be lost in the media shuffle.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
US Health Care is bad for your health
César Chelala
Sunday, June 3, 2007
One of the most contentious issues of the U.S. presidential campaign will be how to fix what many agree is a malfunctional health-care system. Adding fuel to the fire is a study published last month detailing the shortcomings of U.S. health care when compared to the systems of other developed countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
The study, entitled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care,” released by the Commonwealth Fund in New York, finds that not only is the U.S. health care system the most expensive in the world (double that of the next most costly comparator country, Canada) but comes in dead last in almost any measure of performance.
Although U.S. political leaders are fond of stating that we have the best health-care system in the world, they fail to acknowledge an important caveat: It is the best only for the very rich. For the rest of the population, its deficits far outweigh its advantages.
(more…)
Categories: Healthcare
An editorial from Buzzflash.com today. So good Mr. C wants his reader(s) to see it.
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sat, 06/02/2007 - 6:21am. Editorials A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
The Democrats on Capitol Hill sure do need Sergeant Joe Friday to help them out.
You see, the D.C. Dems, especially now that that they are “investigating” the Bush Administration, keep tripping over dead bodies – and doing their damn best to convince themselves that they just stumbled over a rug, not a corpse.
It’s amazing how many contortions the Dems go through in order to avoid actually holding the Bush Administration accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Just look at the multiple legal, ethical, and perjury violations of America’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. He’s like one of the dead bodies that the Dems keep coming across – and then they claim that they won’t rush to judgement about whether or not the cadaver with multiple bullet wounds in its back was a victim of foul play. When the Democrats uncover a Bush Administration crime through an investigation, their response is to call for another investigation “to get to the bottom of this.”
After a fireworks display of smoking guns took place, the best the Dems could muster with Gonzales was politely suggesting that he resign. Excuse me, Sergeant Joe Friday didn’t close a case by telling a murderer that he should consider driving himself to jail, if he felt like it, but otherwise Friday would leave him to continue killing people. You know, sort of a voluntary punishment concept.
(more…)
Categories: Democrats
