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.

Form the RawStory article Obama and the “Gang of Six” from which I got the above video:

James K. Galbraith: “Gang of Six” Plan is all about cuts not increased taxes; Obama represents Wall Street faction of Democratic Party

When I first heard that the Gang Of 6 proposal would lower the top marginal income tax rate rather than raise it, I felt that this would unlikely raise enough revenue. Galbraith comes right out and says what I wanted to try to not to believe, the proposal to raise taxes will in fact be a tax cut for the wealthy. In the usual lingo of politics, words have the opposite meaning to politicians as from what they mean to ordinary people in every day usage.

Even George H. W. Bush called this kind of thinking by politicians Voodoo economics.

Quoting for the RawStory transcript of the above video in the article Barney Frank: ‘There are worse things than default’

“What do you say to the president?” Mitchell asked. “Is it better to default? You know, you’re the ranking member of Financial Services. You know what’s at risk here with the ratings services and everybody else that have now gotten into this situation… Is he going to lose the Democratic caucus?”

“Yes,” Frank predicted. “I’ve already voted to raise the debt limit. I voted to raise it earlier this year straight forward. And by the way, it’s not my debt limit. I voted against the war in Iraq and I voted against the Bush tax cuts. On my debt limit, I got a couple trillion left to go. I was very generous. I voted to raise the other people’s debt.”

“I don’t think the president should allow the irresponsibility of the right wing to say, ‘We’re going to shoot you if you don’t do this.’ No, I don’t want there to be a default but there are worse things than default. And worse things than default are wrenching the American government out of shape, losing the principle of majority rule that’s been such and important gift from America to the rest of the world, inflicting pain on the most vulnerable people in our society, continuing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize military budgets all over the world and cut back on people here.”