Posted on 10/09/2011 1:56:58 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The struggle for America is financed by the most successful people in the country, working through some of the most worried.
Occupy Wall Street, and its campout demonstrations by underemployed Americans, is backed by labor unions and armed with share-the-wealth ideas from the liberal-advocacy groups financed by George Soros, the currency speculator who ranks high on the new Forbes magazine list of the richest Americans.
The tea party cut-the-government movement, born from similar if better-dressed rallies a few years back, is funded by other wealthy Americans, like the industrialist and antiregulation brothers Charles and David Koch, who rank just above Soros on Forbes' top 10.
President Obama, who said he wanted to bring Americans together, is blamed by both sides for failing to end the long slump and get more Americans working.
Two roads. How did we get here? How do we get out?
Win and lose
The United States won World War II. Everybody else's factories got bombed, leaving us to sell and finance cars, planes, power plants, and movies for all nations. U.S. workers demanded higher wages and spread the wealth, buying homes, cars, and college degrees, and fast food and cable TV. Government retirement and medical programs made it less ugly to be old or poor.
Then rising costs drove investors abroad. In the sluggish '70s, President Jimmy Carter warned Americans that the party was over. Time to live within our means. Work more, vacation less. Study engineering.
Heck with that, we said, and elected Ronald Reagan, a man who wasn't afraid to borrow piles of money to stimulate growth.
For the next generation, under both parties, U.S. policy let nasty factory jobs move to Mexico and China, while expanding our role as the world's financier.
Beyond the investment pros and financial engineers and CEOs hugely compensated by other CEOs sitting on their boards, the people who made the most from the debt explosion, Americans whose parents built Chevys and bent steel became stockbrokers, real estate salespeople, and suburban builders, and rode the boom.
But in 2008, we ran out of borrowers. The government had to rescue the banks. The economy stalled. Construction, bank, and real estate jobs dried up. People looked to Washington and asked, "What next?"
Left and right
Economists like Nobel Prize winner Dale T. Mortensen, who spoke last week at Villanova University, say that private- sector demand is likely to stay weak and that greater government spending is the only thing likely to get the economy growing and bosses hiring anytime soon.
Would-be Obama replacements like Texas Gov. Rick Perry say government needs to step out of the way, cutting not just the Environmental Protection Agency, but also Medicare and Social Security and extended unemployment benefits. That way, natural market forces can reassert themselves, and businesspeople can grow us out of this mess.
That's roughly happening in Perry's state - where increased oil and gas exploration and cheap immigrant labor continue to feed a growing economy - and in Gov. Corbett's Pennsylvania, where Amazon.com is quietly hiring thousands of temporary workers at the low-wage warehouses that are replacing retail stores. At the same time, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell sink concrete drilling pads in upstate farms and forests, delivering cheap fuel, though not yet the hoped-for industrial renaissance.
But even in Perry's Texas and Corbett's Pennsylvania, a lot of Americans aren't ready to do many of the unpleasant jobs a government-free labor market would force on them.
In petitions filed this fall with federal courts and the Labor Department, landscapers, farmers, lumbermen, and food processors complain that they can't get reliable U.S. workers, even with 9 percent unemployment, even at above-minimum wages. They are still bringing in foreign workers under government special visas, for jobs Americans won't take.
Stale, mate
Will we go left or right? In 2012, we'll likely elect either Obama, who has been unable or unwilling to win support for a spend-more recovery, or Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, whose record as Massachusetts governor doesn't make him look like the man who would cut Social Security to promote a balanced budget and freer labor markets. (Though military cuts will likely continue, under a rare bipartisan consensus.)
The likely result: more of the Washington threats and paralysis that businesspeople say discourages investment. Big companies can adjust to high or low tax rates, but they hate not knowing when the rules will change again, wrecking plans and projects.
More muddle won't calm the tea party and libertarian activists who started mobilizing on Independence Mall and other public assembly sites in 2008, or the Occupiers now hanging out at Wall Street and Philadelphia City Hall.
They'll be with us - they will grow - until business, or government, starts spending and hiring for real.
"Conservatives hail it and liberals dispute the story, but one thing is certain about the Lone Star State's employment success: The number is real":
Texas - The Job Engine [LA Times OpEd - July 3, 2011] "....At the same time — and this, of course, is the tough part for those on the left to swallow — it is clear that the state's limits on taxes, regulations and lawsuits are contributing to the job machine. "The most important thing I think that's happened to us is tort reform," Fisher, the Dallas Fed president, has said. He added that when John Deere and other companies have decided to hire in Texas, they've been largely driven by steps the state has taken to cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice suits and to make it harder to bring product liability and class-action cases..."
Betting on Rick Perry - a winner in a GOP year, with no need in the world to win liberal approval [The American Spectator -- October 2011]: [excerpt]...."As for where the job growth has been, three sectors of the economy have grown faster than the energy sector, which alone added 40,500 net new jobs in 2010. Last year, Texas added 57,900 new jobs in trade, transportation, and utilities; a total of 53,400 jobs in professional and business services; and 44,900 net new jobs in the hospitality industry.
For each of the past seven years, CEOs polled by “Chief Executive” magazine have rated Texas first in the nation for economic development climate and job growth. What is the secret of Texas’s success? Rick Perry isn’t shy about his answer. “It’s all about four points,” he told me. “First, don’t spend all the money. Keep the taxes low and under control. Have regulations that are fair and predictable so business owners know what to expect from one quarter to the next. And reform the legal system so that frivolous lawsuits don’t paralyze employers who are trying to create real wealth.”
If there is on issue which Perry has made a personal crusade, it is lawsuit reform. Working with the legislature, he has helped pass curbs on frivolous lawsuits, implemented a first-in-the-nation system under which loser pays all court costs in many lawsuits, and reformed medical malpractice law.
Dick Weekley, the co-founder of Texans for Lawsuit Reform, says Perry showed genuine political courage in resisting calls for watered-down reforms that wouldn’t have addressed the core problem. He recalls that in 2002 Perry vetoed a bill strongly supported by doctors that would have required them to prompt payment from health maintenance organizations. In the eyes of the tort reform advocates, the bill was a Trojan Horse compromise negotiated between doctors and trial lawyers. “There was a huge response from physicians [against the veto],” Kim Ross, the former top lobbyist for the Texas Medical Association, said. TMA went so far as to endorse Tony Sanchez, Perry’s millionaire Democratic opponent in the 2002 election. “Perry sent a signal that he wanted real reform and would stand his ground,” Weekley told me. “Soon the medical lobbyists playing footsie with the trial lawyers were gone and the obstacles to real reform started falling.” [end excerpt]
Where is all this Tea Party money they talk about? Here in Central Texas, we have one woman who risks her own money to rent a bus and we pay her for our seats.
I want some of that Koch money I’m always hearing about!
COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONARY groups...
If the author of this tripe spent 30 minutes on FreeRepublic once a week he would know better than to produce crap like this. It is the moochers vs. the producers and frankly, we have had enough.
Oh, and it wasn’t Reagan “who borrowed massive amounts” it was Tip O’Neil who SPENT MASSIVE AMOUNTS the gummint didn’t have. Let’s get the record straight on that much, anway.
But this is what the public is being fed.
We need leadership in the White House and on the Hill.
Thank goodness the states are beginning to get it right.
Liberals continue to spout off about the Koch brothers financing the Tea Party. Examples, please! Did the Kochs pay for a bus to take demonstrators to Washington DC? No. I paid for my plane fare, hotel room, food and taxi fare myself.
Oy.
The writer seems very irritated. That's pretty much all I get from this piece, other than that he casually equates the Tea Partiers with the Occupy Wall Streeters, as if they are both sides of the same coin. With that kind of thinking, no wonder he's got nothing to offer.
Moratorium on immigration immediately unless that immigrant has a critical skill and does not come from a nation that is unfriendly that to the US.
End the entitlement class forever. The only thing that should be handed out to young people that are physically able to work is birth control. We have GD gangmembers who are drawing lifelong benefits because they were shot, claiming disability and PTSD. Their babysmamas are getting tax returns and not working. Hey, “It’s free, swipe your EBT.”
You don’t work, you don’t eat. That will solve all that nonsense about the jobs Americans won’t do.
He knows the truth so he has to SPIN like crazy to keep it under wraps.
Sorry Me and My family Paid our own way,Travel By Car for 5 Hours each way,Hotel,food ,Diapers for our 2 month old Grandaughter. If someone funded this please forward address.
On second thought ,Forget it,I was Proud to do it
This tripe about the evil Koch brothers funding the TEA party is lefty inventions of facts.
There is no single entity named the TEA party, it is an idea of Freedom, expressed by citizens of America, completely spontaneous, and individually organized.
Who would the Koch brothers fund and for what purpose?
Have heard the creepy occupiers called “The Flea Party” and “The Pee Party.” Pretty damned accurate.
That’s my question. At the two Tea Party Rallies I attended in Washington, I had to buy the gas and pay the parking fee with my own money.Had to buy my own lunch too.
I'll bet that the city didn't have to spend a dime cleaning up after you or anybody at the Tea Party Rallies.
Kick-ass graphic. Thanks!
“How did we get to the tea partyers and the Occupiers? “
The reason is that the government isn’t listening. The tons of mail Emails and phone calles to senators are ignored, or answered with a form letter of political ointment.
Can someone please tell me where/how the Kock brothers spend their money, regarding the tea party? I can imagine those guys might want to help out, and maybe they do, but where and how? What is alleged? What is true?
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