Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Trickle Down Economics Perpetuates War

The Trickle down theory of economics has been a Conservative political anthem for a century. Even though most economists admit that it doesn’t work greed still prevails and old trickle down spreads around the world.
The theory is that if you get investors, foreign and local to invest in companies and give the companies large tax breaks, the profits they make will trickle down to the workers. It’s like the old Wobblies song (International Workers of the World) "there will be pie in the sky when you die THAT’S A LIE!"
The folks that put words and ideas into the mouth of Ronald Reagan in the economic insanity of the 1980s cut the top tax bracket from 70% down to 50% and then down to 28%. How well I remember Reagan’s budget director David Stockman telling American workers that the tax cuts would stimulate the American economy and benefit the workers.
Cold war profits soared, but the number of people below the poverty level
increased from (31.8 million) to (39.3 million) according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The federal budget deficit grew from $74,000 million in 1980 to $221,000 million in 1986 and what was called the greatest collapse of U.S. financial institutions since the 1930s left the working poor devastated and facing foreclosures on their homes.
From 1986 to 1989, 296 savings and loan institutions with total assets of $125 billion were forced to close and many workers realizing the American dream of home ownership for the first time lost their homes.
An April 10, 2007, editorial in the New York Times claimed a net loss of homeownership for up to one million families and challenges Congress and state governments to determine whom to hold accountable. It is not whom, but What."
Henry Wallace, vice President under FDR and Presidential candidate then, said back in 1948 "War preparations create record profits for big business, but only false prosperity for the people—their purchasing power shrinks as prices rise, their needs go unfilled, and they are burdened with new debts." He was right then, as Harry Truman prepared for the war In Korea and became the worst trickle down labor president in history, and Wallace would be right today.
Trickle down has never worked; it is not working now. It is a steroid for greed as Russian workers have found out and the Chinese are beginning to understand. It has caused the old cast system in India to be born anew. Countries, that allow foreign investors to buy into their companies and control the workers and the countries resources, quickly discover that trickle down does not trickle. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That is always a formula for social upheavals.
The major cheerleader for Wall Street, the Associated Press gleefully reported on April 20, 2007 that "the signs of a surging economy are every where in China, but Chinese leaders are trying to apply the breaks." It is not the inflation that they have caused that they fear; it is the workers anger.
In my book "The Genes Of Gregoria" I quote a Russian economist who was old, sick and dying. He earned many medals fighting the great war against the Nazis, but after seeing the boorish drunk Yelstin give away the nations resources and insert the trickle down, he shouts at his wife, "Is that what so many of my comrades died for…so a few Russians could get rich?"
At a book show in New York two years ago, a Chinese editor took my book home. Is that what you fear for China?" she asked by email "Yes," I replied. "Greed feeds on greed." Thousands of holocaust survivors living in Israel live in shameful poverty, as Trickle down is a stanchion of Israel’s economy. Some 80,000 of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living under the poverty line, according to the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund.
Trickle down creates and thrives on war. War profits do not trickle down they land on the workers drip by drip, but inflation keeps them at the faucet trying to survive. Those of us who call ourselves "peace people" do what we can issue by issue. We try, but only if we can cut off the serpent’s head will real peace arrive. The serpent is greed and it feeds at the trough of Trickle down Economics.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Am I A Racist?

THE CONFUSED AMERICAN LEFT ask, am I a Racist?
Jackie Robinson the icon of American baseball was the first black player to play in the Baseball major leagues. Both the political right and the politic left claimed Robinson as their own.
On April 15, 2007, the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's MLB debut, Major League Baseball invited players to wear the number 42 just for that day to commemorate Robinson.
Robinson made his Major League debut on April 15, 1947
What few Americans know is that the American Communist party was the driving force that broke the baseball color line.
The Communist newspaper the "Daily Worker" pounded the issue for years prior to Robinson’s emergence. A sports writer for the "Daily Worker" named Lester Rodney wrote pointed articles that not only embarrassed the wealthy owners of the teams, but brought demonstrators to Ebbets field in Brooklyn the home field of the Brooklyn Dodgers the team Robinson was to play for. Ebbets field became a shrine for the left. My own brother was one of the demonstrators. It was no wonder that the left felt Jackie was one of their own when the FBI opened a file on Jackie and brought him before the house un-American activities Committee after he appeared at the Harlem Solidity Center of the " International Workers Order," listed as a "Red" organization.
Years after Robinson left baseball he became a vice-president for the Chock Full O' Nuts
. Coffee Company that employed blacks in their many restaurants, and that is when I first met him in 1963. I was booking him on a television show to promote the Coffee Company. I expected him to arrive via a chauffeur -driven car, but no I picked him up at the train station and brought him to the TV station where I worked. After the show we sat in the car and talked. It was early and he did not want to wait at the station and be bothered by autograph seekers. I was already known as a Civil rights activist and that was a subject he welcomed. I was horrified when he told me that he was going to support the right wing candidate Richard Nixon for president. I mentioned the Daily Worker and the effort of the left to bring him to baseball, but he said that John Kennedy "couldn’t even look me in the eye." And the civil rights issue was his main concern. It was devastating to the Liberals and the leftists. It created a serious breach. Many thought that he had been bought off with the Chock Full Of Nuts Job. How could Jackie Robinson, who owed so much to the left turn his back on them?
It was a hard lesson for all of us and today I must think back at that time. Yes there were racists among us liberals then and even though Robinson was himself the grandson of a slave many doubted his mental ability to see Real America. There was much talk then about a prominent Professor’s theory that African Americans were mentally inferior.
Today the liberals are once again asking themselves the question," "Am I, after all, a racist?" On April 4,2007 a morning "Shock Jock" which is terminology " used to describe filthy mouthed low level characters who elevate themselves by using their power of the airwaves to insult people went too far. This time the shock Jock called "Imus" referred to a predominately black college women’s basketball team as a group of, "nappy-headed hos." If you are an intelligent adult you probable never heard the expression or know what it means. African American hair can sometimes be Kinky or nappy. Hair strengthener ads dominate Black magazines. The "Ho" I am told refers to whore. I myself while driving into the city have heard this man make such stupid remarks about one of his co-workers on the air, but this one gave the self declared professional Black leaders a media feast. The result was that Imus was fired.
Jessie Jackson who can smell a TV camera a mile away lodged a protest, and demanded Imus be fired. This is the same Black Jessie Jackson that once called New York City "Hymmie Town" a very offensive anti- Semitic remark and one that set race relations back many years.
In a recent survey by a television station 67% of respondents said they do not believe that Imus should have been fired for his remarks and that is a red alarm for America. The Imus issue has placed many Americans between Jessie Jackson; Al Sharpton and the other so called Black leaders and a white Shock Jock.
Black Television programs; modern Black music and Black attitudes in general are all in the line of fire. Liberal left Americans particularly Jews who can no longer deny or defend the blatant racism of Zionism and dreamed along with Doctor King about a better America are disappointed in Black efforts to help bring that about and are again asking themselves the question, am I, after all, a Racist.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

What do young Jews know

Germans are the most gifted and most highly educated people who ever devoted the full strength of a modern state to stopping the exchange of ideas; they are the most highly organized people who ever devoted all the coercive power of government to the abolition of their own intellectual life; they are the most learned people who ever pretended to believe that the premises and the conclusion of all inquiry may be fixed by political fiat."
Walter Lippmann. (1936), The Good Society
In 1939 my father, who always wanted his children to "fight through the smog
of propaganda and see the truth," took me to Union City New Jersey, not far from our home, to witness German American Bund members march through the streets, swastikas and all. I remember him shouting swear words at them in Russian and English. We joined other members of his trade-Union there. I was fifteen and confused. "Why?" I kept asking him, "are they not Americans?"
"Because they are afraid to be called un-German" was his answer. He explained that from the early thirties The German Students' Association conducted a propaganda campaign named "Against the Un-German Spirit" that led to the idiotic book burning.
and masochistic destruction of wonderful German culture that began to bloom again following the First World War.
Many first and second generation German Americans were afraid to oppose Nazism for fear they would be classified as" UN-German" and their life in the German communities in which they lived would become unpleasant. .
A February 1939 rally was held claiming that white gentiles were the "true American patriots and German Americans who did not understand that Hitler was their leader were Un-Germans." This Madison Square Garden rally drew a crowd of 20,000 who consistently booed President Franklin D. Roosevelt and chanted the Nazi salutation "Heil Hitler."
The German American Bund closely cooperated with the "Christian Front" organized by the anti-Semitic priest Father Charles Coughlin who spewed anti-Semitic
Hatred from his radio pulpit.
Does it all sound familiar? Perhaps Walter Lippmann could say the same thing about present day Israel.
Today in 2007 young Jews know very little, if anything, about the campaign to make Young German Americans afraid to be called UN-German and to make it unpleasant for them in their own community. Even if they did, I doubt that it would make any difference for as Henry David Thoreau said, "Every generation laughs at the old and follows religiously the new."
No, I am not Un-Jewish or a Jewish self-hater, or anti-Semitic. I am opposed to the atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people by out of control Zionism and I stand with the peace makers in Israel.
David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear