Addressing my past criticisms of President Bush...
 

Addressing my past criticisms of President Bush...

I'm starting this thread to address my past criticisms of our "fearless leader," President George W. Bush. In the wake of a newly resurgent economy in the US, which I happy and grateful for, I guess the question on the minds of some MoFos might be--"what does Django have to say about that?" At least considering that some of us have been resurrecting old threads of mine containing my strongly critical comments of the US administration.

So here I go addressing what I have said in the past:

As far as I am concerned, most, if not all, of what I said in the past still stands, and I stand by it. My concerns were primarily motivated by human rights concerns and questioning the integrity of the US administration's actions in the aftermath of 9/11/2001, esp. in its treatment of minorities.

Point is, regardless of the newly resurgent economy--and it's questionable how much of it Bush is responsible for and how much of it is governed purely by a rise in consumer confidence and spending and an increase in production following the depletion of overstocked inventories in the wake of Y2K--can we accept lies, corruption, bias, double standards, hypocrisy, favoritism, blatant deception and, especially, totalitarian practices in positions of political power? IF WE COULDN'T IN THE CASE OF CLINTON, WHY SHOULD WE IN THE CASE OF BUSH? What makes Bush so special that we have to sit back and do nothing while he continues his reign of terror? Clinton was relentlessly hounded by the Republican opposition for supposedly lying to the American public. I even remember this one time when Charleton Heston issued a public statement accusing Clinton of lying. Whether or not this was justified, I'm not in a position to say, as Clinton was a far cry from moral rectitude, in spite of his intelligence and resourcefulness. But if Clinton was brought down for lying to the public in the context of a powerful domestic economy, why should Bush be exonerated from his heinous crimes against humanity by an economy that has only recently begun to become resurgent in the final months of his first (and, hopefully, last) term?

Here are the facts, as I see them:

FACT: The Bush administration BLATANTLY LIED TO, MISLED AND MANIPULATED THE AMERICAN PUBLIC in its attempt to justify the war against Iraq--a war that has produced some heart-rending casualties and horrible scenarios, even though it did succeed in its primary objective--liberating Iraq from Saddam's dictatorial rule. The fact is that the basic motivation of the war--weapons of mass destruction and a supposed connection with Al Quaeda--was an outright deception from the start.

FACT: The Iraq war was driven primarily (if not solely) by a profit motive--the major beneficiaries include US oil barons, defense contractors and contractors for the rebuilding of Iraq, such as the Bechtel group, etc. All of which have indisputable ties with the Bush administration--Bush himself has major interests in the petroleum industry, defense/armaments contractors contribute heavily to the Republican fund as well as support the NRA, and the Bechtel group is largely constituted of Reagan administration retirees in its management.

FACT: The Patriot Act and the appointment of Tom Ridge indisputably undermine the civil liberties and privacy rights of American residents. Furthermore, they are severely threatening to human rights in America--esp. the rights of minorities.

FACT: The Bush administration is closely allied to and affiliated with Pakistan--a totalitarian military regime that even now sponsors, supports and harbors fugitive Al Quaeda terrorists--the real culprits of 9/11.

FACT: Several US citizens and residents have been apprehended and forcibly detained purely on the basis of suspicion, owing to their ethnicity, in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. Some may call it racial profiling--I call it discrimination, prejudice, bias and institutionalized racism.

FACT: While Bush has launched a deceptive and morally questionable war against Iraq, his longtime nemesis, he remains closely allied with the Saudis, while, in fact, Saudi Arabia's human rights record is one of the worst in the world, and, in addition, ALL of the 9/11 terrorists, in addition to Osama bin Laden, were of Saudi origin.

There is no resurgent economy. We're at rock bottom, what did you expect? It's a bounce.

Well, then, what I said applies all the more! All the more reason for Bush to be removed in the next election!

Add to that the $87 billion price tag attached to the aftermath of the Iraq war--an additional burden on the US taxpayer.

I'll get to Django's weekly diatribe a little later.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but what freaking dimension do you live in? Do you block out, mentally, any news which doesn't allow you to live under the delusion that we've elected the economic Antichrist?

I think sunfrog has a point. The economic recession, after carrying on forever, is currently experiencing an inevitable resurgence--just part of the natural cycle, in my opinion. As a matter of fact, the overstocked inventories, following Y2K, have been depleted, and production is on the rise again to restock those inventories. This is leading to a resurgence in the economy, more than anything else. Jobs are slowly becoming available. People are slowly becoming more and more upbeat. Thus consumption is also on the rise. I'm not sure how the administration, with its ongoing war in Iraq, is playing a role in any of this. Tax breaks don't mean very much if you don't have a job. The victory in Iraq may have boosted public morale for awhile, but the subsequent news of ongoing trouble in occupied Iraq is having just as much of a demoralizing effect. So... is Bush in any way responsible for the current economic resurgence? I don't really believe so.

It's only "part of the natural cycle" in the sense that when things go wrong, people tend to favor change or reform of some sort. A recessive economy will not inevitably bounce back if some change is policy is not made.

As for "carrying on forever" -- I'm virtually positive it was one of the shortest recessions in American history. That claim, like the overwhelming majority of criticisms leveled against Bush, is utterly lacking any historical perspective.


I'm afraid that's simply not true. The three highest indicators which led the way during the third quarter boom were Fixed Residential Investment, Fixed Investment, and Fixed Nonresidential Investment.

The idea that this boom is the inevitable result of a mass restocking following Y2K (which took place almost three years ago now, don't forget), doesn't have much basis, as far as I can see. It seems more like a logical-sounding theory than it does an economic reality. This is proven through the fact that the original annualized rate of 7.2% had inventories making a sizable retraction from the growth. That is, that remarkable rate of growth did not rely on inventory, but was in fact hurt by them.

Inventories are significantly responsible for the revision to 8.2%, however, but as the original number shows us, they are not the bedrock of this "bounce."


Setting aside the fact that the unemployment rate was never particularly high, tax cuts mean loads to you if you happen to employ other people. A struggling business will almost inevitably look for ways to cut back on its staff. A thriving one will almost inevitably look for ways to expand and growth, thus necessitating more employees.

People forget that jobs come from businesses and corporations. They tend to think of employees and employers as enemies, rather than partners (which they are; they quite clearly depend on one another).


Of course he is. The GDP has reacted noticably to his policies.

http://www.movieforums.com/gdp.gif

June 7th, 2001 is the day Bush's first tax cut was signed. His second was signed in late May of this year. IE: just a month before the booming third quarter began. If you maintain that Bush is not the one responsible, can you point me to another change between now and then which can claim the credit, instead? And please, no more vague assertions about morale. Long-term economics is not subject to arbitrary mood swings.

In addition, I find it horribly convenient that when the unemployment rate rises, or the GDP falls, your kneejerk reaction is to unlease your bile on Bush. But when we experience the largest annualized rate of growth in 20 years, you go searching for reasons to hand someone else the praise.

:laugh: Why do I find that arrow hillarious as hell?

I won't pretend to be qualified or knowledgeable enough to assess the data and assertions you have presented here. I'll leave that to the economists to work out. I'll simply state the facts I base my claims on:

1) The recession has been carrying for a couple of years at least. It may not be as long as the Great Depression, but it was long enough to do a great deal of damage.

2) I'm not sure you understand my point regarding inventories. I'm not sure I understand your point either. What I said was that inventories were vastly overstocked following Y2K in anticipation of a panic situation. As a result, production was on the decline for awhile. I believe this factor contributed to job layoffs, which, in turn, negatively affected consumption, and so on and so forth. Now that inventories have been depleted, it seems that production is on the rise again.

3) I'm not sure if tax breaks necessary compel businesses to expand and grow and employ more people. I think that growth comes about as a response to demand. If the demand is down--the economy is recessive--I don't see growth happening. Tax breaks may make a little more money available to a business, but hardly enough to justify widespread re-employment of a workforce. On the other hand, if the economy is expansionary, if production is on the rise necessitating a larger workforce in anticipation of high levels of demand, businesses will start employing even if it means running up a short-term budget deficit. So I don't think your point is valid.

4) I can't comment on your chart, because I'm not aware of the sources. All I can say is that I know for a fact that the stock market went down in a major way in the latter part of 2001, especially following 9/11, and has only begun to recover in the last 6 months or so.

:) - i think it's a bit to far to the left personally ;)

Hmm, so the tax cuts included corporate tax. I didn't know that - i assumed it was just income tax etc.

Yods, surely "arbitary mood swings" do affect economics - what about confidence in the stock market? There's a lot of speculation and chinese-whispers rumour-mongering that goes on. Articles i've read speculate/claim that drops and rises have occured which reflect expectations concering the war etc for example. (not everything in economics is logical - what about that international merger Chrysler went thru that caused them to get kicked off that measurement-system for the top 500 US business etc [whatever it's called], coz they were now "half"-german, and so investment/confidence in the company dropped etc. Altho that's not really emotional in cause the reaction looks like it was - or at the very least, fairly uninformed)

As for bush-baby - it seems his policies have affected the turn-arounds, but I see bad precedents in the reduction of social-welfare that surely must accompany such tax-cuts (and the increased burden on middle-earners seems a bit ****ed up)

Any idea if this stat i've read is true: 40% of US wealth is owned by the wealthiest 1% - sounds ridiculous but it's from a credible source and was compared with a 18% in-the-top-1%'s-hands assessment of the UK

ps. EDIT: would your "old man" say what GW has been doing recently is "jawboning"/talking-down the dollar? i.e. all the kerfuffle with China? ;)

p.p.s. i'll do you the favour of not talking about how he's shot himself in the foot with the steel-tariffs ;) - wise and economically sound leader that he is..... ;)

That remains arguable, at best, and still does not account for the other grave concerns that I and many others have with Bush and his administration. My point was that even if he is (partially) responsible for this belated economic turnaround, which, as I said, remains arguable, it still does not justify the fact that he has deliberately lied to and misled the American public, as well as the other serious issues I've listed above.

Oh Djangs, stay on the point. I hate the evil little monkey boy as much as you do - but considering that economic incompetance is one thing that could swing voters come election time (and god are things looking entrenched otherwise from what i can glean), don't you think it would be a good idea to investigate that as a stand-alone issue? His foolishness over steel-tariffs etc are a chink in his knuckle-dragging armour, and something that should be followed up. His apparent games with the dollars' strength are another.

I'm not saying you shouldn't push for an investigation into the war. You should. But for all intents and purposes the economy is another matter. (as much as the ole petrodollar-system will rear its head over time ;))

Sure, the economy is a crucial factor, but my main reason for starting this thread was to investigate the other issues I mentioned. Also, I don't hate Bush... I just seriously question his competence and capability as President of the only superpower in the world. Add to that the fact that he has a below-average IQ (the lowest IQ in the history of the American Presidency, apparently) and the fact that his entire presidency seems to hinge on waging an unjust, unjustified war against Iraq... sure economic competence is a crucial factor, but only because the economy has recently begun to swing around... and I don't really believe Bush is responsible. My real concern is that Bush is simply lacking in ability, conscience and moral fibre, intelligence and integrity, and simply does not deserve to be President of the United States. He is seriously compromising the credibility of the US Presidency--far more than Clinton ever did with his bedroom antics. I don't consider myself qualified enough to investigate the role he has played in the economic turnaround (which I am indeed grateful for), but I suspect, based on whatever limited knowledge I have on the subject, that it is not very significant. My personal concerns are the ones I have listed above.

Exactly where did you find this information?

Whether it is or not, that whole bit sounds so totally ripped from somewhere else.

Heheheh, i wish i had your self-control and magnamity sir Djouster :p . I just hate him....for:

-causing my country to make itself a target for terrorists (without having satisfactory plans for tackling said international terrorism, but instead increasing it and providing it with a new base. Him and his Reagan-ite cronies handled Iraq like an eye-catching juggling ball while turning it into a ticking-time-bomb free-for-all)
-prompting the worst misdeception by a british government of its own populace and parliament for decades.
-Over-seeing extentions of the socially-destructive, poverty-divide-increasing "over-capitalism" that other countries will no doubt mimick if the gimicks seem to pay off on a bare-faced profit-for-the-upper-echelons level (while numerous dollar-only product pricings mean everyone has to keep the US economy smiling, or there's will start sliding too)
-Denying that global warming is almost certainly affected by human behaviour, when even his own state departments say it's so, and pushing future-hydrogen energy "solutions" which will produce yet more gas-attacks on the world's delicate stores (not to mention "polluting" said reports with vague wording of the science where there is as little doubt as has ever been seen on an international scientific scene of such complexity, to the extent that the departments gave up on publishing them.)

Oh and there's more, but i just popped my head round the door for a while, before writing an encore to the text that i'm fighting with ;)

Here's a near mystical muse on the fiscal state of play from the FT a few weeks back. S'all greek to me tho :)

http://www.golgot.freeservers.com/Do...-doomsters.htm EDIT: working now, for those that care to masticate like a cow on it ;).

I read it on the internet, at a pretty reliable source. I will, in due course, dig up that source and present it before you.

Not ripped off at all.

:yup:

You don’t by chance remember if your source was the Lovenstein Institute in Scranton, Pennsylvania do you? And if it wasn't, I would be very interested to know exactly what your source was.

To be perfectly frank, I think perhaps you are pretending to be "qualified" enough to assess the data. If you didn't believe you were, would you really be stating -- several times, no less -- that he doesn't deserve the credit?

This simply isn't true. It is my understanding that the word recession is an economic term with a precise meaning, and does not merely refer to any period in which growth is less rapid than the period before. Under the actual definition, the recession was quite short. Slow growth, in other words, does not constitute a recession.

More importantly, though, is the fact that it didn't do a "great deal of damage" by any reasonable standard, unless you are intent on ignoring our economic history. As I alluded to in my last post, the exaggerative claims about the economy are stunningly short-sighted. You'd think we've always lived under 4% unemployment and 5% annualized growth with the way people were crying foul. I guess you can thank Reagan and Clinton for spoiling us all.


Ah, I see. My mistake; I thought you were using this to explain the surge in growth. The clarification is appreciated.


I couldn't disagree much more. This is an echo of your previously stated demand-side view of economics, which I'm afraid doesn't hold any more water now than it did when we discussed it months ago. The demand is there. People always want things, but don't always have the money to act on their desire. Most get their money through employment; employment provided by businesses. Ergo, a climate friendly to business is a climate friendly to hiring.

If there's one single economic principle that everyone here should be able to agree on, it's that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. This has been more or less empirically demonstrated. The only potentially valid gripe against them is that a certain base level of taxation is needed to provide various social services, or that certain tax cuts may unfairly target certain income brackets. But there shouldn't really be any debate as to whether or not they do, in fact, increase overall growth. They most certainly do, as the chart provided in my last post helps to illustrate.


The source is Economy.com -- it's a simple chart generated from raw economic data. I can send you the numbers themselves, quarter-by-quarter, if you like. I welcome you to verify it.

As for the stock market: it took a bit of a downturn around the middle of 2001, but almost totally rebounded (over 10,000) around the end of the year. The big drop came in the middle of 2002, when it sunk to roughly 7,600. You're right, however, when you say that the recovery has taken place primarily over the last 6 months, as each of the last two quarters has seen a job of roughly 800-900 points.

That's neither here nor there, though, unless you can show that the drop in mid-2002 is somehow Bush's doing, or that the growth in the last quarter is not. So what of it? Is the GDP surge that immediately followed his first tax cut a coincidence?


While you're almost certainly telling the truth when you say you read it on the Internet, I don't believe you are when you say you read it from a "pretty reliable source," because it's already been debunked. I wouldn't feel too bad if I were you, however...like your claim about the Veterans, you're not alone in being duped by this one.

Caitlyn gets points for identifying the fictional institute from memory. :)

Actually, now that I look at it a bit more closely, it's supposed to be a tad farther to the left, I believe, as June takes place in the 2nd quarter.


You're correct; which is why I included the "long-term" qualifier. People can be duped for a bit, sure, but if, say, an economy is friendly to new business, the entrepreneurs therein will inevitably perceive this, even if not right away. What I'm really getting at is that economics is not all smoke and mirrors. It's about the incentive structure, and when you step back and analyze the long-term picture, people and businesses tend to react in the ways you would expect them to to their economic situation.


From what I understand, every single income bracket has been given a cut. I also believe the wealthy have been given a larger cut, proportionately, but given that they've been taxed disproportionately for some time, this isn't inherently unjust. I believe the wealthy still pay far, far more than their "share," so to speak.


I'm not sure. Sounds high to me, but I really couldn't say. I suppose I can try to find out, if you wish. I would be a bit curious, myself, as to what the number is.


He's written a bit about it lately, I believe. He regards it as being the only real threat to what looks to be a period of growth capable of rivaling Reagan's boom in the 80s and Clinton's in the 90s.


Depends on whatcha mean. He shot himself in the foot by introducing them in the first place, but at least he's realized his error. I never said the man was perfect; his "strategery" could use some fine-tuning. :)

I got the same e-mail several months ago… :D