http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/austerity-wall-street_n_1690838.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
WASHINGTON -- The poor and middle classes have shouldered by far the heaviest burdens of the global political obsession with austerity policies over the past three years. In the United States, budget cuts have forced states to reduce education, public transportation, affordable housing and other social services. In Europe, welfare cuts have driven some severely disabled individuals to fear for their lives.
But the austerity game also has winners. Cutting or eliminating government programs that benefit the less advantaged has long been an ideological goal of conservatives. Doing so also generates a tidy windfall for the corporate class, as government services are privatized and savings from austerity pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens.
U.S. financial interests that stand to gain from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security cutbacks "have been the core of the big con," the "propaganda," that those programs are in crisis and must be slashed, said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas.Advocates of austerity measures have sold their proposals as a means to improve the economy."It is an error to think that fiscal austerity is a threat to growth and job creation," declared European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in July 2010."We're going to cut spending to get the debt down, help create jobs and prosperity, and reform government programs," vowed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, in a February 2011 commentary for Real Clear Politics. Ryan would later declare that his budget plan, with far more aggressive austerity measures than those ultimately enacted by Congress -- including $6.2 trillion in spending cuts -- would have spurred $1.5 trillion in economic growth and created 2.5 million jobs.Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the bipartisan commission that worked on the plan, is a director at Morgan Stanley, the sixth-largest American bank and a financial institution for which the United States made huge commitments to help it weather the economic downturn. Morgan Stanley took $10 billion in bailout funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program and received more than $100 billion a day in cheap loans from the Federal Reserve at the height of the past financial crisis. For weeks, Morgan Stanley borrowed more money from the Fed than the company's stock market value.That solicitude for the profits of big corporations shows up in Simpson-Bowles too. The plan offers multiple corporate tax reform proposals, but one, which calls for shifting to a so-called territorial tax system, would be especially advantageous to Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks. It would allow U.S. companies to permanently avoid paying U.S. taxes on overseas income, including money stashed in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands. According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, Morgan Stanley operates 273 sub-companies headquartered in such tax havens.While Social Security advocates have attacked the plan, the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for corporate CEOs, has praised Simpson-Bowles. So has Peter Peterson, who served as Richard Nixon's commerce secretary before founding Blackstone Group, a major private equity firm. Peterson has long advocated cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and he started a think tank devoted to federal debt reduction in 2008.
with all this rhetoric where is the break for "we the people", where is the hiring of "we the people" other than in their stump speeches, where is the sunshine in "we the people's" lives? do you think we should listen to European banks aren't they on a bigger cliff then we were? with every answer they come up with it only profits the right wing constituency, not "we the people", when are "we the people" going to act like we are one more flush from circling the drain?
you know what to do in order to change this narrative, if you don't know, "vote republicans out", now you know recognize.
