The below speaks to the issue of whether the remains of the New Deal in the federal government are worth struggling for, tax break for the rich is worth struggling against. Are the reforms of the New Deal -Great Society Democrats worth struggling for even if today's Democratic Party is beyond the pale ? If so, what form may that struggle take ?
Was the big , surprise Fed cut a romantic gift to the Market, a bauble to the bubble ?
CB
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Stealing from the workers, giving to the filthy rich
Vice President-elect Richard Cheney was quoted in the media, just before Christmas, that the downturn in the stock market in 2000 is proof that George W. Bush's proposals for a $1.5 trillion tax cut and that the Social Security Trust Fund be opened to Wall Street investors are urgently needed to head off a recession. Now it's about heading off a recession?!
Bush and Cheney are not even waiting to be sworn in before they launch their drive to give away the budget surplus generated by labor over the last decade.
If the country is headed into a recession, that $1.5 trillion would be urgently needed to provide safety net protection for unemployed workers and the increasing ranks of the poor.
That Bush and Cheney want to give it to the rich proves just how tied they are to Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics. They want workers, employed and unemployed, to sacrifice, even in hard times, to insure record corporate profits. Even with smoke and mirrors, how are they going to sell stock market investments as a viable substitute for Social Security's guaranteed monthly benefits if we slide into a recession?
Already, millions of retirees with IRAs are losing in the stock market downturn. The Bush-Cheney plan is clearly to accelerate the war on social entitlements won over a century of hard struggle, to continue the enriching of the billionaires and the trillions in corporate profits.
The New York Times reported recently that more than 930,000 senior citizens were being summarily dropped from their health maintenance organizations. They are still protected by Medicare but have no prescription drug coverage, costing many victims thousands of dollars each year.
In his debates with Democrat Al Gore, George W. Bush stated clearly that he would support a prescription drug benefit "under Medicare." Now it is time to deliver.
No tax cuts for the rich. No Wall Street raids on Social Security. Give us the promised prescription plan.
People's Weekly World
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Charles Brown
*********** Isn't the larger point that big money has boxed itself in and has no good alternatives at this point? U.S. capitalists have lived in a dream world from Reagan through Clinton and now face the curse of answered prayers ? They wanted to recreate the laisser-faire paradise of a century ago and were remarkably successful, virtually guaranteeing a resurgence of the manic-depressive, boom-bust intensity of classic capitalism, guaranteeing agony and waste all around.
- Carl Remick