In the above video House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi explains what this fight is really about. Let me be clear about what she meant. The middle-class gets to share the sacrifice among its members. The ultra-wealthy class gets to share the wealth among its members. This is a guaranteed way to keep the unemployment levels high. The middle-class will be so worried about their jobs that they won’t have time to riot in the streets.

You notice that when Republicans claim that some economic policy has failed, they say it is President Obama’s stimulus plan that failed.

Well, the stimulus plan halted the precipitous drop in employment levels that never were supposed to happen with the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy. (At least Bush told us that these tax cuts would create jobs.). So if anything failed, it is the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy. Yet the Republicans want to get rid of what stopped the downward spiral of the lesser depression and keep what started the downward spiral of the lesser depression.

How do they manage to sell this to the American public? Well, they have their own Faux Noise channel and the astro-turf political organizations funded in secret by billionaires.

Even MSNBC, the supposed left leaning network, is so afraid of the power of the right wingers or so in cahoots with them that they have gotten rid of Keith Olbermann and Cenk Uygur because they tell the truth too much. In this country, even the left wing is to the right of center. No wonder this country is about to topple over.

As if you needed another retelling here is Obama’s 5 big mistakes on CNN.

Obama has lost his way so badly that even his core liberal supporters should be questioning whether they have got the right man in the job.

The indictment has five headings:

1. Obama has ceased to lead on the economy
2. Obama does not effectively use the domestic powers of the presidency.
3. Obama cannot communicate empathy for Americans in economic distress.
4. Obama over-relied on banks and bankers.
5. Obama is not a good negotiator

First Keith Olbermann and now Cenk Uygur. Do you see a pattern here?

You can see the speech in the above video. (Or you could have, had the White House been competent enough to make their video sharing code work.)

Ok, I give up. Here it is from MSNBC

I guess we can all bend over and kiss our donkey’s good-bye.

His balanced approach is so lop-sided, that I don’t know how he has the gall to ask us to support it. He wants the biggest sacrifice to come first from the people who have received the least benefit from the policies of the last 30 years.

Leave out the issue of fairness. His balanced policy approach will sink our economy. The Republican’s approach will smash the economy to smithereens as if it had been hit by a bomb. He asks us to choose between these two options.

Both sides should be forced to sit down and listen to every recorded speech Franklin D. Roosevelt ever made in a non-stop marathon. They should be given no food nor drink until they have heard every last word or agree to save the economy, whichever comes first.

Just to give you a hint at what is in the article New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked, I have the following snippet:

Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush’s unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

…

Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to “input data” and thus alter the results of Ohio’s 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: “Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not.”

Brent Abrahamson of The Massachusetts Observer  has put together a nice presentation around another speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The video part is shown below.

Brent’s text emphasizes the difference between the “We, the people” part of the preamble to our Constitution and the “I, me, mine, every person for him or herself and the devil take the hindmost” attitude that has returned since Roosevelt’s time.

My ears and eyes perked up when I heard the reference to the admonition here loosely quoted of “grave dangers of rightist reaction in this nation if such reaction should develop if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to so called normalcy of the 1920s then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”

Brent Abrahamson of The Massachusetts Observer  has put together a highlight presentation of a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt at Madison Square Garden (October 31, 1936). By putting this together, Brent has made a great contribution to the current debate. If you like it, frequent his website and send him email of your approval. Let’s make this video go viral by viewing it and promoting it to our friends to view.

I heard things in this speech the second time around that I had missed on first listen. You might have the same experience.

The link, The Massachusetts Observer, also has a transcript of the speech highlights. Here is a snippet of that transcript:

And, here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and newspapers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.

But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen, they attack the integrity and the honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.

The Limits of Compromise by Eugene Robinson explains in yet another way what is at stake in the debt ceiling/deficit/debt crisis.  In the following excerpt, first he explains one situation where compromise made the rescue of the economy much less effective, and then he relates this to the current situation.

A classic example is the attempt to restart the economy following the worst downturn since the Great Depression. When Obama took office, the crisis was acute; consumers and businesses were shell-shocked, and there was real danger of a self-reinforcing downward spiral. Any follower of British economist John Maynard Keynes—and Obama was being advised by dedicated Keynesians—had to recommend a very large pulse of government spending.

In the spirit of compromise, however, one-third of the stimulus package put forth by the White House consisted of tax cuts—which a Keynesian would say are much less stimulative than direct government spending. History will note that this nod toward bipartisanship did not inoculate the stimulus from constant criticism by Republicans, despite their eternal love for tax cuts. However, it likely diminished the effectiveness of the stimulus, thus giving Republicans ammunition for their claim that it didn’t work.

We are at a similar juncture right now. Conservatives and progressives should be able to agree that the long-term national debt of $14.3 trillion is a serious problem. Effective solutions, however, do not lend themselves to meet-in-the-middle compromise.

He closes with the explanation of the headline:

Progressives who say no—who acknowledge that we must reduce the debt but in ways that do not kill economic growth or gut entitlements—are being partisan for the best possible reason: Much is subject to compromise, but not our future as a great nation.

I like the way Robinson has boiled the issue down to some essentials.  I’ll only mention some of my quibbles to set the record straight.  He probably couldn’t have squeezed this in and had as effective a column as he did.

He mentions that Obama was advised by dedicated Keynesians.  He fails to mention that he was also advised by dedicated anti-Keynesians.  Having not studied economics himself, how was he to decide which side to trust?  Apparently he put more faith in the anti-Keynesians much to the detriment of the economy.

Robinson mentions ways to reduce the debt.

There are basically two ways to reduce the debt as a percentage of GDP: Cut government spending or make the economy grow. The problem is that doing more of one means doing less of the other.

I wish he had stated the second way as  “raise government revenues.”  Making the economy grow is actually only one of the ways to make the revenues rise.  Another way to raise government revenues is to get rid of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.  Such a step would also help grow the economy and more specifically employment rates.

With all the propaganda the Republicans are spewing about the Bush tax cuts, probably many people still believe that getting rid of these tax cuts would actually be a job killer.   So the believers of the big lie might not connect Robinson’s call for growing the economy with getting rid of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. He could have put in a plug for this Big Truth to counter the Republicans big lie, but that might have taken him off his main point.

In the video above, Dennis Kucinich lays it on the line. It is harder and harder to ignore the truth of what he is saying. The Republicans and their wealthy friends are doing their darnedest to make it clear to everyone who is paying attention. I have faith that the message will finally break through, I just don’t know when or what catastrophe has to happen for enough voters to wake up.