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devoish (98.71)

Enter, Real Populists

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June 23, 2010 – Comments (5) | RELATED TICKERS: BP , GS

by Jim Hightower,

You can yell yourself red-faced at Congress critters you don't like and demand a government so small that it'd fit in the backroom of Billy Bob's Bait Shop and Sushi Stand, but you won't be touching the corporate and financial powers behind the throne. In fact, weak government is the political wet dream of corporate chieftains, which is why they're so ecstatic to have the tea party out front for them. But the real issue isn't small government, it's good government. (Can I get an amen from Gulf Coast fishing families on that!?)...

...Wall Street billionaires crash our economy but are bailed out at our expense to continue their banksterism against us.

— We're told to accept a "jobless recovery" and to sit still for a "new normal" of perpetually low wages, continuing losses of American jobs, and steady erosion of union and consumer power.

— We're presented with two flagrant examples of murderous corporate greed —first, at Massey Energy's deadly coal mine, then at BP's deadly offshore oil well — yet no corporate executive has even been arrested.

5 Comments – Post Your Own

#1) On June 23, 2010 at 7:01 PM, alberta911 (76.39) wrote:

Arrest your government.....For such an aggressive country you all are very quiet about this corruption

The IRS has identified many errors and discrepancies in the implementation of Obama's first-time homebuyer tax credit, including a ridiculous amount of money going to people who definitely didn't buy a home (via Washington Independent). Like prisoners on a life sentence:

2,555 taxpayers receiving credits totaling $17.6 million for homes purchased prior to the dates allowed by law.1,295 prisoners receiving credits totaling $9.1 million who were incarcerated at the time they reported that they purchased their home. These prisoners did not file joint returns, so their claims could not have been the result of purchases made with or by their spouses. Further, TIGTA found that 241 prisoners were serving life sentences at the time they claimed that they bought new primary residences.10,282 taxpayers receiving credits for homes that were also used by other taxpayers to claim the credit. (In one case, TIGTA found that 67 taxpayers were using the same home to claim the credit.) TIGTA auditors have not fully quantified the total of these erroneous credits, but all indications are that the total will be in the tens of millions of dollars.

The IRS will try to recover $26.7 million of fraudulent claims. Who knows how much this will cost the notoriously inefficient organization -- and you can be sure the real amount of tax credit fraud is a lot higher.

As for saving the housing market, the verdict's still out.

 

 

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#2) On June 23, 2010 at 7:38 PM, chk999 (99.98) wrote:

You can always tell a populist, but you can't tell him much.

Have you noticed that populists are almost always guys?

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#3) On June 23, 2010 at 7:50 PM, blesto (31.71) wrote:

We need another Teddy Roosevelt.

Here's a good speech. And an excerpt:

"When I took the office the antitrust law was practically a dead letter and the interstate commerce law in as poor a condition. I had to revive both laws. I did. I enforced both. It will be easy enough to do now what I did then, but the reason that it is easy now is because I did it when it was hard.

Nobody was doing anything. I found speedily that the interstate commerce law by being made perfect could be made a most useful instrument for helping solve some of our industrial problems. So with the antitrust law. I speedily found out that almost the only positive good achieved by such a successful lawsuit as the Northern Securities suit, for instance, was in establishing the principle that the government was supreme over the big corporation, but by itself that the law did not accomplish any of the things that we ought to have accomplished; and so I began to fight for the amendment of the law along the lines of the interstate commerce law, and now we propose, we Progressives, to establish and interstate commission having the same power over industrial concerns that the Interstate Commerce Commission has over railroads, so that whenever there is in the future a decision rendered in such important matters as the recent suits against the Standard Oil, the Sugar - no, not that - Tobacco - Tobacco Trust - we will have a commission which will see that the decree of the court is really made effective; that it is not made a merely nominal decree."

He also saved American Football as we know it.

My kind of President!

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#4) On June 23, 2010 at 8:29 PM, ChrisGraley (31.45) wrote:

How about effective government instead of big government?

Isn't Obama wanting to sue Arizona for enforcing the law right now?

Too much power always leads to abuse.

 

btw I must have been populist before it was popular because nobody would agree with me before.

I guess populist is a term that you use when your political beliefs are no longer popular. 

As far as the whole jobless recovery thing, maybe if the current party wouldn't have used the stimulus bill for a record amount of pork, supporting tea-pot museums and golf courses named after Senators, and would have used that money to actually create jobs, they would still be the Populist party.

They had a chance to show us an effective government, so they shouldn't be upset when we don't want to make an ineffective one bigger. 

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#5) On June 23, 2010 at 11:17 PM, rwebankrupt (77.99) wrote:

Alberta put on your glasses

Enter, Real Populists not Enter Capitalist Canadians

Yes your federal government has a lawsuit against Arizona and I think the Guld states

Chris I remember you and yes you were the first populist back went it was not in vogue 

 

 

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