Long article in DK by Hartmann about the Two Santa operation the Rs have been running since b4 Reagan Santa Claus Is About To Drop a Bomb On Biden Photo by hue12 photography on Unsplash The only thing wrong with the U.S. economy is the failure of the Republican Party to play Santa Claus. —Jude Wanniski, March 6, 1976 Spoiler The stock market is falling, a reaction to GOP threats to shut down the government: it’s all part of their plan. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week warned us that the GOP is about to use Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santa Clauses” fraud again to damage Biden’s economy and our standing in the world. And, sure enough, Mitch McConnell verified it when he said last week there would be “zero” Republican votes to raise the debt ceiling. Yellen responded yesterday by telling The Wall Street Journal that if the Republicans force a shutdown of the US government like they did to Obama in 2011, “We would emerge from this crisis a permanently weaker nation.” But the GOP is adamant: they have their strategy and they’re sticking to it. Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary: First, the Two Santas strategy dictates, when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and cut taxes to run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results: it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy; it raises the debt dramatically; and it makes people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.” Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, Republicans must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!” Shut down the government, crash the stock market, and damage US credibility around the world if necessary to stop Democrats from spending money. This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs and even Social Security, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus right in the face. And, sure enough, here we are now with a Democrat in the White House. Following their Two Santas strategy, Republicans are again squealing about the national debt and refusing to raise the debt ceiling, imperiling Biden’s economic recovery as well as his Build Back Better plans. And, once again, the media is covering it as a “Biden Crisis!” rather than what it really is: a cynical political and media strategy devised by Republicans in the 70s, fine-tuned in the 80s and 90s, and rolled out every time a Democrat is in the White House. Jude Wanniski hatches the scheme that saves the GOP Republican strategist Jude Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in The Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs. There was genuine despair across the Republican Party, particularly when Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency. Wanniski reasoned the reason the GOP was losing so many elections wasn’t just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal as the Santa Claus party. On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the party of Scrooge because they publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps. The Democrats, he noted, got to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic New Deal — as well as their “big government” projects like roads, bridges, schools and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to construction workers and made our country shine. Even worse, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all this stuff — and those taxes on the rich didn’t have any effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact). It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes from the morbidly rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections. Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But because the Republicans hated the idea of helping out working people, they had to come up with a way to convince average voters that they, too, have the Santa spirit. But what? “Tax cuts!” said Wanniski. To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head. (Everybody understood that demand — “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of their money in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory output goods and services.) To lay the ground for Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and said the reason economies grew wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things but, instead, because business made things available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he said, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying. At a glance, this move by the Republicans seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But if you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense. To help, Arthur Laffer took that equation a step further with his famous napkin scribble. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up! Neither concept made any sense — and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies — but if Americans would buy into it all they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness. Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy. He said straight out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” would use their extra money to build new factories so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth. George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in The Wall Street Journal — was horrified. Ronald Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing nothing in growth. But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell “voodoo” supply-side economics. Democrats, Wanniski told the GOP, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools and Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” the Democratic Santas brought every year as well as the growing economy that increasing union wages and the money from social programs in middle class hands. Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors, Jude’s theory went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions and that money would trickle down to workers through the defense industry, which had reacted to Eisenhower’s warning by building factories in every single one of America’s 435 congressional districts. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people’s taxes! For working people the tax cuts would only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars, part of which would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions. There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They’d be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes, or, even better, anti-Santas by cutting spending on their own social programs. Either one would lose them elections. Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in twelve years than every president in history up till that time, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined. Surely this would both “starve the beast” of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks. And that's just how it turned out. Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, strengthen labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system. A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insider Alan Greenspan and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin sat him down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to raise taxes and cut the size of government. Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous programs, declaring an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.” Clinton was the anti-Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as Republican politicians campaigned on a platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases. State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, ultimately, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to the White House. Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Winniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part: “We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...” Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year: “When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they'd died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That's why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.” Two Santa Clauses had gone mainstream. Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when they were in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about it and hook in the economically naïve press as soon as Democrats again took power. When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas scheme in a Wall Street Journal eulogy: “...Jude's charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ... Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.” The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work. They held power for forty years, made their donors trillions of dollars, and cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today. Think back to Ronald Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.6 trillion in his 8 years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in American national debt in all of our history. Nary a peep from Republicans about that 218% increase in our debt; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy. When five rightwingers on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush he reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding over a trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 trillion. There was not a peep about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy: “Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.” Bush and Cheney raised the debt by 86% to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looks like its his). Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again. So much so that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him. Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by almost $7 trillion, but the GOP raised the debt ceiling without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended it altogether for 2020 (so, if Biden won, he’d have to justify raising the ceiling for 2 years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful). And now Republicans are getting ready to use the debt ceiling debate to drop their Two Santas bomb right onto President Joe Biden’s head. After all, it worked against Clinton and Obama. Why wouldn’t they use it again? And if Republican debt-ceiling default threats could lower the stock market, as they did to both Clinton and Obama, all the better: Republicans could just blame the Democrats in power! Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated, and by whom, for the past 40 years. Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will begin to call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam. HartmannReport.com
https://slate.com/business/2021/09/unemployment-insurance-benefits-economy-jobs-hiring.html Wow who could have possibly known
cleaning up some bookmarks, this popped for me How Reaganism Turned Ray Rosenberry & Joe Stack Into Terrorists Image by Лечение Наркомании from Pixabay They are the new faces of American terrorism. Floyd Ray Rosenberry and Joe Stack both grew up in an America before the neoliberal austerity and tax-cut policies of Reaganism gutted our country. They both mourned the loss of the middle-class prosperity of that time in America and looked to rightwing commentary to make sense of it all. They then both turned to terrorism. Spoiler Rosenberry — the guy who drove his truck into Washington, DC yesterday and threatened to blow up part of the city — complained in his live Facebook feed that he was there in part because he and his wife were being screwed by America’s unique for-profit health insurance industry while healthcare and jobs were being diverted from good white Americans like him to dark-skinned “illegals.” “They keep allowing these illegal Mexicans in here,” he told folks on Facebook, echoing voices on rightwing hate radio and TV. “All these illegal immigrants from Afghanistan. You don’t have free health care for us. You’re f***ing giving it to them.” He’d posted memes on Facebook from racists like Donald Trump Jr and voted, for the first time in his life according to his wife, for white supremacist Donald Trump. White people in distress like Rosenberry are uniquely vulnerable to rightwing demagogues like Donald Trump, particularly when they’re told that a dark-skinned “they” are responsible for their economic woes or loss of status. He believed Trump when he said that “the system is rigged” and refugees want to murder and rape white women, and that Trump and his rich friends were going to “drain the swamp” and restore the glory days of America’s white working class. He seems to have particularly bonded with Trump’s racism. “Joe Biden, the South is fed up,” Rosenberry said, going into an extended rant about how his doctor just said his insurance company would no longer pay for the pain shots in his back and wouldn’t pay for his wife’s facial skin cancer treatments because they’d determined they were “cosmetic” — because in his mind that healthcare is, as he said, instead going to brown-skinned “illegals.” Rosenberry is just the most recent in a long line of white formerly-middle-class people Reaganism has broken who were then recruited by rightwingers with racist memes. Altogether too many of them are turning to terrorism as a remedy, as the FBI has been highlighting ever since Tim McVeigh — another of these guys — blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people, 19 of them children, and injuring 680. Joe Stack, in February of 2010, woke up in his cozy middle-class neighborhood, set his home on fire, then drove to the local airport just outside Austin, Texas. He hopped in his single-engine Piper Dakota airplane, took off from Georgetown Municipal airport and minutes later, like a missile, dove his plane right into a glass-façade office building named Echelon 1 that housed a local IRS tax collection office, instantly killing himself and an I.R.S. agent and Black Vietnam Veteran named Vernon Hunter who was working at his desk in the building. When the American economy went into meltdown with the Bush Crash of 2008, working-class people (of all races) like Joe Stack were hit hard. He was a software engineer who watched his clients and income dry up, yet he didn’t get a bailout like Wall Street. His bills piled up, he sunk into debt, and the taxman was knocking down the door. Uncle Sam needed to bail out billionaires and hundred-billion-dollar transnational corporations — many of which, coincidentally, paid no American corporate income taxes — but they had nothing for Joe. To make matters worse, from Joe’s point of view, talk radio voices complained that Black and Hispanic Americans were “living on welfare” that was unavailable to a white formerly-middle-class homeowner like him. Joe appeared calm on the surface, a regular guy who lived in a run-of-the-mill middle-class home on Dapplgrey Lane in North Austin. He played guitar in a local band. But there were clues: he named his band “Last Straw” and his only album was titled “Over the Edge.” There was a quiet desperation consuming Joe Stack, and he was nearing a breaking point. “[Joe] seemed like one of us ducks floating down the river,” Stack’s brother said, “We just didn't realize he was paddling so furiously under the water.” Eventually, Joe Stack got tired of paddling. That’s when he resorted to becoming the nation’s first suicide bomber. “I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different,” wrote Stack in his manifesto. “I am finally ready to stop this insanity.” At that time, the best chance Americans of all races had to peaceably change their broken political and economic system was through free and fair democratic elections. But one month before Stack’s fateful flight, the Supreme Court took that option off the table with their Citizens United decision that, for the first time in American history, legalized political bribery. John F. Kennedy warned us, at that time in the context of the Civil Rights movement, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” As Stack wrote in his suicide letter, “I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be whitewashed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt. It will take nothing less.” Rosenberry’s terrorist rant and sim-attack on the Capitol was a similar plea and, ironically, comes the same day the Center for Economic and Policy Research published new data showing that if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation — something that stopped with the Reagan Revolution — it would be around $26 an hour right now. And if we had Medicare For All, the medical bills that buried Rosenberry and his wife wouldn’t exist: both would have gotten the help they need and neither would be deeply in debt. Just ask any Canadian. Rosenberry and Stack were right about how much we actually do need a revolution against Reaganomics and the devastation it’s wrought across the American landscape, reversing the damage it’s done to every race and economic group except the top 1%. Sadly, both men had been listening to the counter-revolutionaries — the mouthpieces for America’s rightwing billionaires and largest corporations — who told them that cutting taxes on the morbidly rich would “trickle down” and that their troubles were because “those people [of color]” were making off with what was once theirs. Nobody bothered to tell Rosenberry and Stack that they were being robbed by a white rightwing billionaire class intent on owning almost everything. It’s like the old 1930s cartoon of the billionaire, the white working class guy and the Black working class guy, sitting together at a table. The billionaire has a huge plate of cookies in front of him, the white guy has one cookie and the Black guy has none. “Psssst!” the billionaire leans over and whispers to the white guy. “That Black guy wants your cookie!” When JFK became president, top CEO salaries rarely exceeded $3 million a year. As the economists at CEPR wrote yesterday, “The picture would look very different [today] if CEOs got paid $2-$3 million, as would be the case if we had the same pay ratios between CEOs and ordinary workers as in the 1960s.” But Reagan’s obscene tax cuts lowered the top rate from 74% to 25%, slashed corporate taxes, gutted the estate tax and drilled thousands of special-interest loopholes into the tax code. It started an estimated $7 trillion transfer of wealth from working class people to the top 1 percent. George W. Bush added his own trillions of dollars in tax cuts that sped up the transfer of wealth from people like Rosenberry and Stack to obscenely rich oligarchs like Bush’s own dynastic family and the Trumps. And then Trump himself gifted his morbidly rich buddies with another $2 trillion in just one year, all borrowed on our national credit card and all still in place, further draining American resources that could otherwise be used for housing, education and healthcare. Meanwhile, the multimillionaire hosts on billionaire-owned rightwing media continue to blame all the ills of America on immigrants and people of color. Rightwing billionaires have been robbing and pillaging our nation ever since Lewis Powell started organizing them and then, put on the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, authored the Bellotti decision that set up Citizens United and legalized political bribery by corporations. Thus began the Reagan Revolution and the destruction of the mostly-white American middle class. Tragically for America, that’s not a message that future Rosenberrys and Stacks will ever hear if they just listen to AM radio or Fox “News.” As a result, we live in increasingly dangerous times. First published at HartmannReport.org
Chapo's semi-ongoing series about George HW Bush covered a lot of this, mostly using some book (I forget which) which is a lot of speculative history about him by reading various tea leaves.
Is it really conspiratorial to question what we know about the FBI and the CIA In the 60s and 70s might set up even a president?
Citations Needed had one of my old professors from UO on, Daniel HoSang, talking about bullshit rightwing populism tropes. It was pretty interesting to hear the difference between his thoughts on a casual podcast talk, and what I remember of the way he was as a professor, which was much more like "this is what happened, and you draw your own conclusions." I just thought it was a particularly nice example of alleged liberal academics teaching liberal bullshit at liberal universities like UO. He never talked like this in our class. Granted it's just some undergrad class from 10 years ago that no one cares about, but I thought it was interesting.
Maybe the lesson here is that I should have read at least one thing that my professors had written instead of using that time to damage my brain and my liver
Citations Needed is a great podcast. The content is always on point. But sometimes both their voices get so whiny and bitchy it's hard to listen to. I had the same issue with Jeremy Scahill on Intercepted.
Lol Dore is a clown. Got caught editing news articles to make them seem antivax and said it was all the producers fault so he got fired.
Funny that I’m currently 45 minutes into this video rather than watching The Toffees. So far it’s about YouTubes algorithm doing a poor job of getting black leftist creators in the same rabbit hole as white YouTubers.
Yes. Good criticism. I’ve watched a few of his videos. He’s good. I have too much ADD for one this long tho.
Yeah im at the 1 hour point and its getting in to the debate-bro aspects of left tube, like hasan and destiny and such and why they have some issues
I assume that a lot of their fans were once people who that were Sargon of Akkad fans. It's good that the toxic masculinity has been quelled a bit but the desire to watch people get OWNED and DESTROYED remains. I've tried watching some of the debate bro stuff and it just isn't for me.
Posted this on the book forum, but belongs here too Finished this morning. So so so good. Tells the history of the US, through StL. Starts with the Lewis and Clark Expedition and ends with Ferguson. Learned so much. Really dove into free soilers vs abolitionist, capital vs workers and using race to divide, redlining housing covenants, local tax codes ect, Basically all the endemic and systemic issues you read about , localized to familiar places I grew up around and familiar names I grew up hearing about. That said - you dont have to be familiar w StL for this book to hit home. Strong recommend from me. Would be happy to send a copy to anyone that's interested
1. Fuck Joe Machin 2. This chart by UVa puts his actions in perspective. West Virginia is the most right-leaning state in the country, per their formula 3. Still, fuck Joe Manchin https://centerforpolitics.org/cryst...ublican-friendly-to-most-democratic-friendly/