But Caribou Barbie can see Russia from her kitchen window!!!

Wilson,

I know that is the most important issue according to the McCain campaign, but allow yourself to be distracted for just a moment by home foreclosures, the exploding debt, our addiction to fossil fuels, crumbling roads and bridges, 48 million Americans without health insurance and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From the article: Bush Is Not Incompetent

http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/incompetent.html

One of the goals of Conservatives is to keep people from relying on the federal government. Under Bush, FEMA was reorganized to no longer be a first responder in major natural disasters, but to provide support for local agencies. This led to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Now citizens, as well as local and state governments, have become distrustful of the federal government’s capacity to help ordinary citizens. Though Bush’s popularity may have suffered, enhancing the perception of federal government as inept turned out to be a conservative victory.

Conservatives also strive to get rid of protective agencies and social programs. The deficit Bush created through irresponsible tax cuts and a costly war in Iraq will require drastic budget cuts to remedy. Those cuts, conservatives know, won’t come from military spending, particularly when they raise the constant specter of war. Instead, the cuts will be from what Conservatives have begun to call “non-military, discretionary spending;” that is, the programs that contribute to the common good like the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEMA, OSHA and the NLRB. Yet another success for the conservative agenda.

Both Iraq and Katrina have enriched the coffers of the conservative corporate elite, thus further advancing the conservative agenda. Halliburton, Lockhead Martin and US oil companies have enjoyed huge profit margins in the last six years. Taking Iraq’s oil production off-line in the face of rising international demand meant prices would rise, making the oil inventories of Exxon and other firms that much more valuable, leading to record profits. The destruction wrought by Katrina and Iraq meant billions in reconstruction contracts. The war in Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan) meant billions in military equipment contracts. Was there any doubt where those contracts would go? Chalk up another success for Bush’s conservative agenda.

Bush also used Katrina as an opportunity to suspend the environmental and labor protection laws that Conservatives despise so much. In the wake of Katrina, environmental standards for oil refineries were temporarily suspended to increase production. Labor laws are being thwarted to drive down the cost of reconstruction efforts. So, amidst these “disasters,” Conservatives win again.

Where most Americans see failure in Iraq – George Miller recently called Iraq a “blunder of historic proportions” – conservative militarists are seeing many successes. Conservatives stress the importance of our military — our national pride and worth is expressed through its power and influence. Permanent bases are being constructed as planned in Iraq, and America has shown the rest of the world that we can and will preemptively strike with little provocation. They succeeded in a mobilization of our military forces based on ideological pretenses to impact foreign policy. The war has struck fear in other nations with a hostile show of American power. The conservatives have succeeded in strengthening what they perceive to be the locus of the national interest —military power.

Any attempt to blame the onrushing economic crisis on one instead of both parties is simply untrue. Obama is as clueless and helpless as McCain to understand it or stop it.

In 1933 safeguards were built into the system to prevent a repeat of 1929’s Great Depression in the Glass-Steagall Act. It and other laws were meant to control the rabid profiteering of bankers and Wall Street predators. Bit all of these laws underestimated the greed and stupidity of the interlocking milieu of politicians and profiteering corporate leaders who own the economy and the Democratic and Republicans Parties.

In the 1970 a Democrat, Carter, supported by the Republicans, began to dismantle those regulations. Speculators like Neil Bush target the S&Ls and 1981 Carters deregulation resulted in 3,300 out of 3,800 S&Ls losing big money: 1,000 of them the dust. Bush, along with other fat cat politically connected rabid speculators (of both parties) were bailed out at taxpayer expense by the Resolution Trust Corporation to the tune of about $124.6 billion: a further $36 billion or so was stolen from working people by increasing fees for depositors and jacking up interest rates on loans.

The unregulated speculative raid on S&N led too a decade of increased taxes on working people (not the rich!) and spurred inflation. It’ll be much, much worse this time because, in addition to the war, it’ll cost trillions, not a few hundred billions.

Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton finished what Carter started: they let the financial predators out of their cages who began a feeding frenzy. Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now Obama’s key economic advisor and CEO of CitiGroup, supported the deregulatory Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial act of 1999, which like DOMA, NAFTA, DADT and the Clinton/Bush genocides in the Middle East sailed though Congress with enormous bipartisan majorities: 90 to 8 in the Senate and 362 to 57 in the House.

A few years ago it all began to come apart. ENRON and WorldCom disintegrated, costing tens of thousand of jobs and revealing that the big auditing firms were little more than paid prostitutes, like the politicians who deregulated them. Those lost jobs were added to the hundreds of thousands lost to predatory profiteers who shipped them overseas with the blessings of Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes.

This year the dominoes began falling in earnest. And this time it’s not just a few S&L’s and a couple of hundred billion at stake. This time it’s FREDDIEMAC, FANNIEMAE, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and there’s conjecture that CitiGroup, Washington Mutual, Ford and a host of other companies, big and small, national and local are on the edge. And of course hundreds of thousands of jobs.

That’s up in the air for now, as is the awesomely momentous question; “Are we in the opening stages of a new Great Depression?” That's just not clear yet, but the fact that it’s a real question is an indictment of the Democrats and the Republicans.

Nero soloed while Rome burnt. McCain and Obama are doing a duet; neither they nor anyone in their parties has a clue about how to solve this crisis. Obama’s advisor, Rubin, was Clintons Treasury Secretary who promoted deregulation. McCain’s economic advisors just want us to stop whining and accept wage cuts and a drop in the standard of living.

However many trillions of dollars Congress and the next President toss at the feet of the speculators who their deregulation allowed to run and create this crisis, working people will be footing the bill. Unless there’s a deep recession and a depression with stagflation, in which case all bets are off.

This awful crisis is the work of both parties. And yet some people still deny that the two parties are fundamentally the same when it comes to fleecing working people, starting genocidal wars and pandering to bigots.

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Abraham Lincoln,

This is no time for fools.

No bailouts: let the rich lose it all.

No foreclosures, garnishments, or repossessions: let working people keep it all.

Vote for the union led and financed Labor Party or vote Socialist or Communist, or write in some one like Abu-Jamal Mumia for president or just stay home (except where things like Prop 8 are on the ballot). But don’t vote for either of the lesser idiots on the ballot.

Ganshorn is a tad bit confused. He apparently has a very different view of what rich is.

Huge inequalities of wealth and power have always been a defining characteristic of the American social landscape, but recently these inequalities have metastasized, growing ominously large.

The 300 odd billionaires in the United States are part of the one tenth of one percent of the population who boast of unassailable wealth and power. Their wealth tripled under Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton while our standard of living has fallen sharply. They got richer because of bipartisan support for tax cuts and deregulation of predatory speculators. (The Congressional Budget Office says that their combined wealth increased, in absolute terms and as a share of the national wealth, by about 50 percent from 1975 to 1990 and a further 50 percent from 1990 to now.)

That’s who most of us mean when we refer to the rich. But Ganshorn says that the rich include destitute seniors and other victims of the class warfare of the rich. That definition of the rich is very odd indeed. Fixed income seniors and workers are not part of the rich, they are victims of the rich.

Since 1975, while the rich raked it in, millions of us watched in shock as our standards of living fell sharply. Industrial areas became ‘Rust Belts’ and layoffs, speedups and outsourcing savaged jobs. Millions of jobs with decent wages and benefits vanished as the rich squeezed the last drop of profit. Working people average an annual drop in real income of from $300.00 to $400.00 every year. They are not the rich.

For the past three years higher living expenses have wiped out wage gains for most American workers and household incomes are dropping on average about $400 dollars a year. Elizabeth Warren, co-author of The Two Income Trap, who compared today’s two-income household with conditions in 1975 says that “After they pay for the basics - mortgage, health insurance, cars, child care and taxes - they have less money to spend than their one-income parents had.” They are not the rich.

Although roughly half are employed adults, about 45 million Americans have no health insurance, according to a report of the RW Johnson Foundation. They are not the rich.

However difficult things are getting for the “working poor”, whose standard of living is in free fall, the ultimate price is paid by those who’ve been shoved into poverty. The Census Bureau says that in 2003 impoverishment rose 3.7%, and for children it rose 6.6%. About 1.1 million fell below the poverty line in 2004. 12.7 percent of all Americans - 37 million of us – live in poverty. The figure is probably higher because it doesn’t include undocumented workers.

Poverty is soaring with the new economic decline. Additional millions could be thrust into poverty by an accident, ‘natural’ disasters, illness, wage cuts, or jumps in inflation and interest rates. The Department of Commerce said, in February of 2006, that a vital economic gauge called the Personal Savings Rate, dropped into negative territory for the first time since the depths of the Great Depression in 1933. Poor people are not the rich.

Poverty is coupled to the economic vampirism of the rich. The ‘malign neglect’ policies introduced by Reagan and strengthened by the Clintons and the Bush’s illustrate the price paid for living under governments run by, for and of the wealthy. The nightmare in New Orleans was an unnatural disaster rooted in harsh poverty; a broken health care system, unchecked criminality by police and others, a rotting infrastructure, social collapse, and abandonment by a surly, heartless regime. It’s a chilling forecast of our future.

Vote for the union led and financed US Labor Party. If not vote for socialist or communist candidates as a protest or join the scores of millions who sit it out because they’re smart enough to refuse to vote for the lesser bigot, the lesser warmonger or the lesser evil. And don’t forget to vote against all the anti-GLBT referenda and initiatives.

If John McCain wins, I'm moving to France!

Which, of course, would make me an expert on aviation.