Garrison Gibson: books and blog

Isaiah 14:24 ‘The LORD of hosts hath sworn, saying, Surely as I have thought, so shall it come to pass; and as I have purposed, so shall it stand:’

Senator Grassley was whining on some television news blah this morning about taxes and Congressman Wrangell-D New York. Because I was working only the gist was available…Senator Grassley is worried that Charley Wrangell, Korean land war veteran could become chairman of the ways and means committee!
–photo by N.A.S.A.
When the Republicans of the Senate and House are on a spending spree of six years running the notion that a Democrat might wrest the ways and means mint away must send shivers of terror down their rubbery spending and fiscal responsibility ‘spines’.
It was the concept that people earning more than 200,000 dollars a year should pay taxes, or at least the unfairness of it that seemed to get Grassley’s goat. When the nation is on a spending spree the rich should be paying higher not lower taxes.
It has been pointed out by serious economists that deficit spending is a tax on the future. That is the poor of the present have any federal benefits and spending that might have been allocated to them presently and in the future taken away while wages rot, and the rich today get more federal spending to support their economic infrastructure now and in the future without substantive taxes. It seems that the rich should pay the highest taxes because they get the most out of the nation financially.
Several problems of course exist when a non-creative repressive class of rich oppresses the majority of the people yet have a broadcast media to propagandize and divert democratic political remedies.
So I will point out why capitalism isn’t a substitute for democracy nor should be. Market forces cannot replace rational management in environmental issues for example. Not only is the time paradigm out of skew in oil exploration, development and sales, it is blind to future environmental impact scientists could predict presently.
Oil drilling in Louisiana has caused the ground to sink with the removal of liquids. In Alaska the same phenomena could occur one day when the permafrost melts because of global warming, and the coastal plain might drop below sea level and take the mushy beswamped tundra with it, along with pipelines with millions of broken welds and sundry equipment corrupted by bad planning engineering environmentally.
It is hard to believe the cold war was strategized for the west by market forces, unless it was corporatist ownership seeking a post-war dictatorship perhaps. I can’t believe that consumers desires for better coffee or faster cars in some way was a market forces indicating the creation of marv’d nuclear warheads or a 500 ship navy.

While I supported the end of communist aggression against free enterprise, I also support the end of corporatist aggression upon democracy. Corporatism tends to corrupt market forces, and market forces are blind to social needs in a democracy. It is possible that some business people believe that democracy is about market forces itself, and giving the ‘consumer-voters’ shelved candidates of an acceptable character is best. That may produce a mediocre cup of coffee or even an Edsel but not a fiery political reformer willing to tackle the issues of an oppressive social class bleeding the nation’s security in order to enrich itself as supreamists earning more in a year than many poor would in a thousand lifetimes.
I had a really good example of the fallacy that market forces can replace adequately democratic government, yet I can’t recollect what it was presently…maybe later. For now I will write that the rich seem to be taking their profits and reinvesting them globally while running up a federal deficit to leave the poor holding the bag.
The course of importing cheap foreign workers to provide cheap labor to accompany cheap wal-mart goods mollifies many Americans not displaced by that trend with low-cost stuff. All the easy living non-creative ‘managers’ want high incomes and expensive environmentally displacing homes with real wages that don’t increase much. Big homes, big TV. and big cars with foreign fuel…all it takes is a vast federal debt, pollution and millions of illegal aliens. There is no free lunch for any nation, and when the Grassley’s and other leaders let the nation’s infrastructure rot while building up foreign nations the nation’s advantage slippage increases, while China builds oil wells or exploratory drilling in the Florida Strait.
Senator Grassley and his kind representing the grass roots of penthouse gardens don’t realize that some other way needs to be developed to work for a more perfect society politically while letting free enterprisers have their way in their own sector apart from the public sector.
If democracy is to survive and exist anywhere it needs to be made of peers socially and incomes not invested in the United States should be taxed at a somewhat higher rate. Some corporations are vast global organizations seeking to exploit anyone they can anywhere for profit in some instances. Democracies need to be as wary of that as of any other sort of authoritarian government. With corporatist propaganda rule of the broadcast media democrats seeking to have any sort of local government will be called communist or whatever label the corporatists believe might best sucker ‘the masses’.
What if General Eisenhower had done the Second World War by ‘market forces’? Operation Market Garden might have at least returned French bread or pastries! Government challenge and response, or cause and effect, action and reaction as well as planning generally cannot be in response to market forces but should coincide with the valid needs of society. Market forces, as a way for a democracy to operate a government is far worse than ‘voodoo economics’.
The United States needs to have no federal deficit or debt rolled over from year to year, it needs to have a no net loss of biota or species policy, halt illegal immigration and invest in new technologies that will eliminate trade deficit producing areas…a trade surplus through better products instead of through sanctions.
Corrupt federal politicians out of touch with common sense and over beholden to global corporate inertia may not realize that some people don’t earn 200,000 dollars in a lifetime, much less in one year. I personally believe that very few people deserve higher earnings beyond 10 or 20 times that of the lowest earners in the U.S.A. Sure their are some people of brilliant merit inventively, but do they even get patents any more, or doesn’t everything trickle up to the corrupt?
Excess earnings should go into rebuilding the nation environmentally, socially and in areas of transportation, education, energy and security.