Three Immediate Economic Problems, Republican Lies About all Three and Our Response
Why and How we Must get Down and Dirty and Drive the GOP into the Ditch
By
David Gottfried
Note that Trump’s entrance into the 2016 Republican convention was choreographed to mirror Hitler’s arrival in Nurenberg, for a Nazi Rally, in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film “The Triumph of the Will.” In the beginning of the film, we see Hitler arriving in Nuremberg by plane. As his plane is landing, descending from the clouds, the film suggests that Hitler has come from heaven. As Trump enters the convention, the background is fuzzy, luminous, almost ethereal and brilliant. Trump is made to appear to have landed from some majestic Valhalla as did his hero, whose book, “Mein Kampf,” had a place of privilege, on Trump’s nightstand, according to Trump’s first ex-wife.
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I say about the Republican Party what Mary McCarthy said about her fellow writer, Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes, include “and” and “the,” is a lie.”
Today, I must direct my ire at Republican lies regarding current, immediate, economic issues.
Three major economic issues have been afflicting the United States for the past few months:
1) Interest rates have been rising as the Federal Reserve keeps raising the discount rate (or the interest rate it charges the most elite banks in the nation) in an effort to combat inflation;
2) Emergency financial relief programs, designed to help poorer people during the covid epidemic, are being phased-out, and poorer people have, consequently, seen their living expenses rise; and
3) Republicans are threatening not to raise the debt ceiling unless Biden bows down to their demands to reduce spending.
I don’t want to rub my readers the wrong way with too many fancy shmancy words, but there’s a five-dollar German word that pinpoints what everybody is missing in today’s discourse regarding the economy. The word is “gestalt,” and it means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. More specifically, it means that four items, each weighing four pounds, when combined do not weigh 16 pounds; they weigh a whole lot more because when they are united, they produce a certain synergy which none of those items, on their own, could possess.
Each of the aforementioned economic phenomena increase recessionary pressures, the risk of an economic downturn, and may make output shrink.
A) Interest Rates: When interest rates go up, a company is less likely to build a new factory and a consumer is less likely to buy a home or a car. Increases in interest rates are notorious for triggering recessions.
B) Covid Relief Programs: Of course, some of the economic trends that are taking place are almost completely ignored in the political discourse because the poor are ignored. More specifically, almost no one is discussing the substantial losses that poor people are just beginning to suffer because certain covid relief programs are ending. For example, a few dozen million people are seeing sharp reductions in food stamps. The food stamp allotment went up in the beginning of 2020 because of covid, and now food stamp benefits have waned to the miserly, meagre levels that existed before the pandemic. People I know whose food stamp allotment lasted until the 20th of the month are now finding that their monthly benefit is exhausted by the 10th of the month.
They are not starving; they are simply spending less on underwear, and they won’t buy sunscreen this summer (and they’ll get more skin cancer). Mark my words: Purchases at Walmart’s and Target will plummet. People who own stocks in those companies will see their portfolios shrink, will make fewer purchases and investments because they feel less secure, and we have the makings of a good old fashioned republican recession. (More about the party who created this recession in a moment).
Also, cutbacks are taking place in Medicaid because covid relief programs are ending. Quite frankly, I don’t know most of the programs that are being phased-out because our inane media is too busy talking about who is dating who, and the media is like Lou Reed’s song, New York Telephone Conversation:
C) I think you all know why a failure to raise the debt ceiling can be immeasurably dangerous: If the United States, the entity with a credit rating that would be the envy of Midas, fails to pay its debt, people will fear that just about everyone may default on its debts. That will make interest rates spike like an appendicitis patient’s fever spiking to over 105 degrees, and for the reasons explained above, high interest rates are the poison which palsies economic growth.
Put all these factors in play at the same time and you have put a fentanyl patch on your arm, swallowed a few hydrocodone tablets and given yourself a heroin shot for good measure.
Very simply, unless the Democrats recover their testicles, or unless the Angel of Death of the Book of Exodus appears and starts killing Republicans in Congress as he killed the first born of the Egyptians, we are in route to a rootin tootin big ole depression.
Do you protest the fantasy, in the immediately preceding paragraph, of republicans doing their patriotic duty by dropping dead ? Please understand that religious fantasies of murder are as American as not only apple pie but as American as apple pie with enough lard in the crust to clot your carotid artery and make you as dumb as a character on “Green Acres” or “the Beverly Hillbillies.”
For 15 years I heard Republicans salivating over the death of gay people from AIDS, I heard them saying that AIDS was G-d’s glorious will, I heard them say that an earthquake in San Franciso was G-d’s punishment for faggots. And I saw them use their Sadistic Conception of Religion to win Republican conventions with what purported to be the word of G-d but seemed to be the rants of demons in covens. (At the 1964 Republican convention, which was dead-set against the Civil Rights Act supported by Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, delegates, believing that racism was ordained because Noah, of the Old Testament, had a son who was evil and was black, walked up to a black delegate from a Northern State and put out their cigarettes all over the black delegate’s suit)
It's time to accept it and act upon the realization that the Republicans in Congress, collectively, are an assemblage of cowardly contemptible foes of Democracy who will do whatever is necessary to appease the most extremist, hysterical, illogical and downright psychotic cretins in their midst.
Do you actually fail to believe that they are all irredeemable liars.
Don’t you realize that they want America to default on its debt because they want a recession because that would screw the Democrats in 2024.
Don’t you remember that they wanted Obama to fail on health care so he would lose in 2012.
Don’t you remember that they corrupted the Affordable Care Act so they could hurt Democrats at the polls. For example, the Affordable Care Act provided that a state could expand Medicaid coverage, and offer it to people formerly not poor enough to obtain Medicaid, and that all that a state had to do, to expand Medicaid coverage, was to ask the Federal government to give it more money to expand Medicaid coverage.
For example, if the State of Texas wanted extra money for Medicaid, all it had to do was ask Washington for, say, a billion dollars to expand Medicaid and to offer it to the “less poor,” and Texas would get the money. The money would help the Texas economy by bringing in another billion dollars, help Texas hospitals grow (and they would hire contractors to build new wings to their hospitals) and help Texas poor people. But Texas and about two dozen red states said no.
Why did the Republicans turn down money which would have made their states richer and made the poor healthier ? They wanted the poor to be bereft of improvements to their medical coverage, to believe that their condition did not improve because Obama was just another lying liberal, and they wanted poor people to become more disillusioned and, consequently, never vote again.
And sometimes I want to stab the lying phony liberals of the phony liberal media because their news coverage doesn’t tell the people these things. For example, in 1984 the media gave us film footage of Reagan visiting senior citizens centers; they omitted mention of his cuts to senior centers. And that’s why I hate the current internet culture: People are transmitting images to each other; they do not transmit facts or ideas.
Remember: Republicans win only because people don’t know what’s going on.
They win by claiming that Democrats cause deficits because they are tax and spend liberals when in fact Republicans keep scaling new heights in their effort to create bigger and more staggering deficits, e.g., Reagan complained that Carter was reckless because deficits reached 40 billion. And Reagan’s deficits were 200 billion. And Trump’s deficits were like taking an acid trip to the realm of infinity.
And then after creating enormous deficits, so billionaires can live tax free, they claim that we have to cut spending. We have been cutting spending since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Today, the FDA has about 20 agents to examine all food and drugs coming into this country. They have not trimmed vital government programs; they have amputated their limbs.
They claim that Biden ran away from Afghanistan when in fact Trump agreed, before he left the Whitehouse, to give Afghanistan to the Taliban and their savage, barbaric allies. If Biden had stayed in Afghanistan, people would argue that American commitments mean nothing because America had reneged on its commitment, made by Trump, to leave Afghanistan.
They claim that they are great negotiators, but when Trump spoke to the President of Mexico, and asked him to pay for the “wall” because he had already told the American people that he would make Mexico pay for the wall, the President of Mexico told him that it was not his job to bail him out for political promises that he hadn’t thought through.
They claim that they believe in morals and ethics and goodness, but their satanic savior, the Orange headed ogre of ogres, steals millions of dollars by enrolling people in a “course” about real estate that makes the typical sham seem high-minded, steals millions of dollars from contractors all over South Jersey by wrongfully claiming bankruptcy re his corporations’ assets (his corporations appeared to have had no money because he cleaned-out the corporate accounts and transferred cash to his personal accounts), routinely worked with the Mafia and aided and abetted the mafia in their criminal enterprises, takes money from the Russian government (numerous articles in reputable news sources have thoroughly documented his long running stealing sprees) and conspires with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
And the phony liberal media keeps returning to his sex scandals.
E Jean Carroll, the lady who claimed Trump raped her in a dressing room in a department store, has given us a story that sounds too much like a shopaholic’s sexual fantasy. (“I was trying on a pair of panties in the dressing room that were so darling that big bad Trump ran in and ravished me.”) It will do to the Democrats what Lenoard Bernstein did to the Democrats in 1972.
Bernstein held a fundraiser for the black panther party that was well-attended by New York’s wealthiest and snootiest liberal fag hags. They were the sort of people who made frothy proclamations about revolution while coldly demanding that their servants bow lower. America, upon witnessing New York’s conception of radicalism, which was something along the lines of Trotsky eating tea and crumpets with Mrs. Astor, went overwhelmingly for Richard Nixon over George Mc Govern.
After seeing Carroll bring a second suit, after winning her first suit (I am not going to discuss the legal doctrine of “merger” which holds that you can’t bring a second suit to add to your winnings from the first suit), for a rape for which she says she does not remember the date (I suppose she forgot the date because if she had given a specific date, Trump could prove that he had been out of the country on that date), American women, who are waitresses and who are pinched by loathsome man almost every day of the year, and American men, who have seen their manufacturing jobs sent overseas while snappy New York bitches wax poetic about the “new,” clean, impersonal economy, will marvel at what a spoiled nauseating bitch she is and will pray for a day when certain New York broads may be barefoot and pregnant.
In any event, Trump is a bastard, the Republican party is a vast retinue of contemptible cowards who cater to his every catcall and cutting aside, and the Democrats, quite predictably, are helping that man regain the throne.
How do we stop him?
I am tired of hearing people like Michelle Obama say things to the effect that when they take the low road, we must take the high road.
Man, stop sounding as soft and cutesy and faggy as cartoon characters such as Casper the Friendly Ghost, Dudley Do Right and the Pillsbury Doughboy (Give me a Hollar if you remember those quaint creatures of childhood TV.)
Let’s have fun. Let’s get down and dirty like Lenin and Stalin and Richard Nixon.
There is a fool proof way to fuck the Republicans up their wrinkled old assholes.
Sex.
One can only go so far by claiming that a Democrat has been shtupped up the butt. If you say that about a Dem, he won’t lose that many votes because the Democratic Party’s flavor of the month is sodomy with a side order of bondage.
But, shit, say that about a Republican and they’ll have tempestuous nervous breakdowns in living color.
The Republican Party has always had a very big crop of closet queens. After all, many queens feel that the best way to mask one’s queenliness is by purporting to be an anti-queen and a macho man. We have had scandals of this nature before. In or around 2004, a Republican Congressman from Florida, whose claim to fame was a congressional initiative to protect children from sexual predators, was revealed to have had extended correspondence with male teenage Congressional pages of a quasi-sexual nature.
Hell, some of the most prominent Republican fear mongers and haters are so plainly queer. Take Lindsay Graham. When he was younger, he was the archetypal blonde boy cocksucker in the pantheon of gay porn stars.
It’s all very simple: Tell the republicans that they better roll over and play dead or we will expose them for getting shtupped up the butt.
Of course, we should have been able to shut them up when we pretty much proved that they were on the take with Russia. I said it before and till the day I die I won’t forget it: A few years ago, I saw an article in the NY Times which said that there is an audio tape of leading Republican legislators acknowledging that Trump was a recipient of funds from Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.
We should have been able to screw them for flatly treasonous behavior, but Trump, I truly believe, handicapped prior investigations by threatening to direct his mob ties to kill key witnesses and/or prosecutors. And, of course, Americans, so seduced, and their faculties so traduced, by celebrity culture and the canonization of all that glitters like a diva in heat, are mostly interested in stories about sex.