Via Buzzflash: Screw the Deficit: Let's Get Back to the Work of Creating Jobs and Rebuilding America
Screw the Deficit: Let's Get Back to the Work of Creating Jobs and Rebuilding America
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 04/15/2011 - 6:38am. RICHARD STITT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUTPersonally, I don't see our country's deficit as the most pressing priority. Although it didn't take watching the History Channel's startling revelation, The Crumbling of America, to convince me that rebuilding our infrastructure is an imminent priority, it did magnify the pending calamity which we have confined ourselves if we do nothing.
But, saying No to everything and doing nothing except tax cuts for their wealthiest election campaign contributors is exactly what Republicans want. Maybe they will wake up if we have a tsunami, a major earthquake and a Fukushima-like nuclear plant meltdown. But that would require preparation and attention to our collapsing infrastructure which would require siphoning tax dollars away from their benefactors like the billionaire Koch brothers.
We are doing nothing because the Republicans say we can't afford it. We can't afford to fix crumbling bridges and roads, collapsing dams and levees, rebuild our water delivery systems that are absorbing toxic chemicals, poisonous fertilizers and human fecal waste, rebuild an electricity grid that is 100 years old and totally inadequate to receive power from new energy sources such as wind, thermal and solar, repair the tens of thousands of miles of roads and highways, aging rail systems, health care clinics and hospitals, communications, strengthen air quality requirements, food safety inspections, water purity, build more schools and hire more teachers, train doctors, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, medical caregivers and of course, equitable, affordable and accessible health care for all American citizens.
There are currently over 1500 bills contained in the 112th Congress in the House of Representatives. I mention this because there are literally scores of bills that are near and dear to the hearts of the corporate-owned Republicans who represent a total sell-out to the behemoth agribusiness, health care insurance and pharmaceutical industries, Big Coal, Big Oil and the Wall Street swindlers and the too-big-to fail banking and financial industries. Some of their bills, unbelievably strip funding away from Homeland Security, ostensibly because security inspections and protections slow down the flow of incoming shipments of cheap, foreign-made goods into America.
Here is but one of the withering attacks on the EPA in the Republicans' irrational goal for freeing up corporate polluters and oil drillers to pollute with impunity, excising regulations that seek only to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/
H.R. 1405 is symptomatic of the Republican Party's selling out of America to their wealthy contributors, driven by an almost insane obsession to gut every federal agency, privatize Social Security, voucher out Medicare for seniors, impoverish the young by offering no safety net at all when they reach retirement age and drive down America's standard of living to the level of a Third World country.
Other Republican-sponsored bills are part of their withering blitzkrieg of legislation that borders on larcenous, extortionist attempts to squeeze more and more out of what is left of America's middle class by transferring ever greater amounts of our country's wealth to the richest 2%.
H.R. 87 is a Tea Party Michele Bachmann-sponsored bill that seeks to repeal the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform Act and her accompanying bill, H.R. 86 that lowers the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/
Her colleague, David Dreier, is the sponsor of H.R. 99 which lowers the corporate tax rate to 25% and lowers the capital gains tax from the obscenely low 15% down to 10%.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/
The Tea Party is the vile extremist element of the same depraved failed Republican Party and there is little difference ideologically between their feigned schisms. Even the lachrymose Speaker, John Boehner, stated on record that there is no daylight between his ovine flock of Republicans and the rotted ideology of the insidious hate-Obama Tea Party.
Screw the deficit. We can put Americans back to work with a Manhattan-like project that brings in new technology, newer, better and stronger building materials and alternative energy. We can wean our country away from the dependency on fossil fuels such as dirty, air-choking sulfur dioxide-spewing coal and oil refinery atmosphere-heating carbon dioxide emissions. We can create real jobs that pay decent livable wages and salaries. We can once again be the envy of the free world and exemplars of human diligence, intelligence and endeavor.
All the howling over the deficit will disappear once millions of Americans get back to work, earn fair and livable wages while home ownership will be a reality, not a dream, and states will have enough incentives for businesses to invest in America, not China, India or Bangladesh where their citizens are exploited in the same manner as were those 146 young people who died in a horrific fire at the Triangle Waist Company factory in New York City in 1911.
But, as long as we are burdened and weighted down with the doctrinaire dictates of cowardly Republicans and their Tea Party spawn who are satisfied with legislation by scare tactics, fear, paranoia and capitulation to the corporate greedheads, we will remain stifled and inhibited from progress.
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