Christine Lagarde, (click title to entry - thank you) the French finance minister, warned her US counterpart Hank Paulson that he had to bail out US investment bank Lehman Brothers or face global financial collapse, but her advice went unheeded....
The economic collapse of 2008 was the beginning of the maneuvering of public opinion against itself.The 'belief' that cutting taxes would stimulate jobs was the beginning of the attack on the conscience of America. There needed to be taxes placed on the wealthy as soon as the First Quarter of 2009.
The banks took their money and ran. When it was evident the USA's economy was being abandoned as a house of cards, taxes on those that benefited from the bailouts in unreasonable ways should have been taxed. The bailout was supposed to stop the economic decline of the Middle Class, maintain workers in their jobs and stabilize fedreal and state treasuries, was also suppose to prevent retirement losses and home foreclosures due to job losses. All that was suppose to be buoyed by the bailout. Why would anything change if the banks were provided with the equity they lost because of bad investments when AIG was pushed over the edge?
When President Obama and the Democrats were faced with initiating the Recovery and Reinvestment Act a Windfall Profits Tax should have accompanied the bill along with tax increases on the wealthiest Americans whom were also benefitting from the bailout.
The problem was for any initiative that would maintain federal and state budgets through tax increases was so strongly opposed by the people as a means to further economic deterioration it became impossible to even discuss it. It was a political issue that has lead to the election of Republicans that state they can 'leap the worst' deficit in a single bound. Not possible. Not without raising taxes.
So, with extremists in the Governorships of the States, they cut taxes further and in doing so plummeted their treasuries into the 'negative' range. It was a 'designer' way of breaking the unions and destroying pensions.
The public employees have to have unions. It is the individual against a government entity with nothing but rules and regs and elections to confront, it is impossible to find fairness. If a public employee has a grievance their chance of being able to have it resolved without ample legal bills is impossible. The unions provide a lot of support for the individual public employee so they can receive fair treatment while maintaining their income and assets. It just has to be and to remove their bargaining power is to victimize the individual employee.
The 'packages' of pay, benefits and pensions is just that, a package which is the compensation for their work hours. Pensions accumulate large amounts of cash and equity. Those pensions have a fiduciary relationship with the public employee. It is part of their compensation package. That can't be taken lightly, nor should it be. Those pensions provide economic stability for employees and their families no different than Social Security and provides stability to the USA economy. The attack on pensions and employees is a hideous concept and one that needs to end.
No citizen in the USA or otherwise ever expected to fund a compensation package for Goldman Sachs, but, we did and now our country's budgets are stressed and a target for further exploitation by the wealthy, cronies of Republicans.
It has to stop and people need to be able to live good lives in the USA. Enough of the attack on the Middle Class. We have all had enough. The Republicans should never have been elected in November and many of us stated same, but, the country wasn't ready to hear it.
Good night.
