webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

austerity

belated? premature? 10/17

see 2 santas

term generally refers to europe, but just saw that health care cuts lead to patient dumping in cold and suicide in US

often used as excuse to cut "reform" social safety net?

see also emergency mgr

disambiguation

see Zinn on who decides who get sacrificed

---

621 aha // to deficit bogeyman to prevent spending $ on ppl, infra, social safety net. educ see 2 santas BS

---

---

mma

Right-wing media touted Milei’s austerity schemes. Now Argentina might need a US bailout.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent floated a financial lifeline for the right-wing leader even as Trump cuts lifesaving foreign aid across the globe

Written by John Knefel

Published 09/26/25

Right-wing media figures have long embraced Argentina President Javier Milei and his extreme austerity and privatization measures, which have now plunged his country into chaos and even triggered the possibility of a bailout from President Donald Trump.

Conservative pundits have consistently celebrated Milei’s drastic cuts to pension programs and social services, sometimes offering them as a template for domestic policy. When Milei took office in late 2023, he implemented a suite of right-wing economic policies — deregulation, privatization, slashing public sector employment — and took steps to artificially bolster Argentina’s currency to bring down inflation. His government saw temporary success in taming inflation, but his policies created widespread misery and he’s now facing a political backlash that threatens to compound Argentina’s troubles.

With the Argentinian economy in free fall, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent assured global markets that the Trump administration would consider extending a series of extraordinary bailout measures to help Milei’s beleaguered government. On September 24, Bessent went as far as to admit the Trump administration’s goal was to provide Milei support to “bridge him to the election.”

For all the support Milei has gotten over the years from conservative media, Fox News and others in right-wing media have barely mentioned the potential bailout at all.

Conservative pundits have embraced Milei — some even prior to his victory in November 2023 — and have repeatedly pointed to his social spending cuts as a model for Trump’s administration.

The promised lifeline to Milei comes amid Trump’s escalating military campaign against Venezuela, which has included extrajudicial strikes on several boats in the Caribbean, and what The Associated Press terms “a unilateral wave of attacks from the Trump administration against Brazil” after former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, was sent to prison for attempting a coup. Those attacks have included blistering, retaliatory tariffs on Brazil as punishment for Bolsonaro's prosecution. The bifurcated approach — a carrot for Trump’s allies, a stick for his enemies — illustrates MAGA’s broader goals in Latin America.

Trump’s supposed beneficence to Argentina stands in stark contrast to his unprecedented cuts to foreign humanitarian aid and reveals his commitment to defending anti-left-wing politicians and market fundamentalism.

The move may have come as a surprise to some, given Trump's dismantling of the government’s foreign aid capacity, but what’s on offer to Argentina isn’t life-saving food and medicine to those in extreme poverty. Instead, it’s a lifeline to a far-right government hell-bent on eliminating social services and exposing its citizens to the discipline of the market. It’s a project shared by Trump, the Republican Party, and their right-wing media allies. In other words, Milei is too big to fail.

In December, The New York Times reported that Milei’s slash-and-burn approach has plunged more than 5 million people in the country into poverty. Although some financial elites praised his efforts to trim inflation, the effects for working class Argentines have been disastrous. Public sector wages cratered by 15 percent as Milei has forced workers into precarious gig and contract labor, part of his larger plan to privatize large sectors of the economy.

Unfortunately for Argentinians, Milei’s bloodletting has failed to cure the patient. Unemployment hit its highest level in four years in the first quarter of 2025, ticking down only slightly in the second quarter, largely due to jobs added in the informal economy. The economic downturn helped drive a loss by Milei’s party in recent local elections in Buenos Aires, which then spurred a run on the peso and a stock market collapse. Milei is facing legislative elections next month, further adding to the political crisis engulfing his administration.

Milei responded to his recent electoral loss by promising to “deepen and accelerate” his regulatory and privatization schemes. That level of commitment to right-wing economic orthodoxy may help explain why Trump recently Milei, at a bilateral meeting during the United Nations General Assembly, as having “done a fantastic job.”

:{---

===

an 12 24

Republicans are already revealing their eagerness to cut earned benefits for millions of Americans, if one House Republican is to be believed.

In a recent interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.) said that he aims to convince his fellow lawmakers that "hard decisions" need to be made about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if his party is to succeed in its goal of making sweeping budget cuts.

"75 percent of the budget is nondiscretionary," McCormick said, referencing the three programs that provide income and health insurance to retirees, low-income Americans and the disabled. "There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved and we know how to do it. We just have to have the stomach to actually take those challenges on."

READ MORE:**Lawmaker vows 'strong resistance' if Musk agency recommends Social Security or Medicare cuts**

New Republic writer Hafiz Rashid highlighted McCormick's interview to make the point that Republicans are "chomping at the bit at some of their favorite targets" in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's victory. And he noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has also mentioned the possibility of making cuts to those three programs in order to fatten the Pentagon budget, along with "the infamous conservative manifesto Project 2025."

"While McCormick pledges to talk to the Democrats about such cuts, the GOP is unlikely to get much traction with the opposing party, especially since Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the House where a single vote or two could tank their legislative agenda.," Rashid wrote. "Even if the GOP manages to win over a couple of Democrats, any plans to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid will get pushback from powerful organizations such as the AARP. Older voters who rely on the programs also make up the base of the Republican Party, and politicians from both parties should be wary of provoking them."

Notably, McCormick didn't mention one of his party's more costly goals: Extending Trump's 2017 tax cut package that overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the rich. Politico estimated that an extension would require roughly $4.6 trillion over 10 years, which even some Republicans were worried about.

Watch the video of McCormick's comments below, or by**clicking this link.**

READ MORE:['Biggest challenge': Even Republicans are nervous about Trump's new $4.6 trillion tax cut

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-infrastructure-coverage-centers-corporate-front-groups-pushing

zach p

Sinclair Broadcast Group has in recent days aired misleading criticism of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals from organizations that are corporate front groups or push an anti-spending austerity agenda. But the facts and commentary from economists and other experts show that much of this criticism is disingenuous.

Sinclair sought commentary from pro-austerity organizations funded by corporations and right-wing donors

On March 30, Sinclair’s morning program The National Desk -- which airs on 68 Sinclair-owned or -operated local television stations -- interviewed Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl, who opposed spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure and was critical of including spending to combat climate change. Anchor Jan Jeffcoat chose not to disclose the Manhattan Institute’s funding from the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests.

Also on March 30, Sinclair chief political correspondent Scott Thuman included commentary in his report from Elaine Parker, chief communications officer of the Job Creators Network, which aired on dozens of Sinclair TV stationsbefore re-airing on The National Desk the next morning. Thuman failed to disclose that Job Creators Network is a conservative organization and a corporate front group for wealthy donors.

On April 1, Sinclair national correspondent James Rosen included commentary from Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in his report on Biden’s infrastructure plan, which also aired on dozens of Sinclair stations before re-airing on The National Desk. But Rosen failed to mention the pro-austerity nature of the organization and its namesake.

These pro-corporate Sinclair guests’ commentary on Biden’s infrastructure bill was misleading or lacked full context

The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl claimed the price tag for Biden’s infrastructure plan is “just too big” to pay for and that Biden’s plan to rate the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% “would return us to the highest corporate tax rate in the OECD,” referring to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. He also said: “The bill will simply not be paid for. Like a lot of what we’ve had with the stimulus, a lot of it's just going to go on the national credit card. So whether you think the infrastructure is helpful or not helpful, it’s probably going to be paid for mostly on the national debt if it’s enacted.” But Riedl’s comments are misleading at best and flat-out wrong at worst.

Job Creators Network’s Elaine Parker hid the context of the business tax deduction she warned about removing when she said: “This is actually going to hit right at the heart of small businesses with that repeal of that 20% tax deduction. … That is the very tax deduction that helps the smallest of the small businesses, the heart of the middle class, and the employees who work for them.”

And the Peterson Institute’s Adam Posen left out necessary context when he warned: “This is the first truly credible inflation threat in decades.” But senior economists have pushed back against this kind of fearmongering over inflation.

Economists and other experts agree Biden’s infrastructure spending plan is needed and beneficial

The fact is, massive investments in infrastructure are badly needed. An April 2 New York Times article explained: “Roadways and bridges are still in use decades after the end of their projected life spans. Sewer and water systems are aged and decaying. And a changing climate threatens to worsen old vulnerabilities and expose new ones.”

Reuters reported that the American Society of Civil Engineers said that “surface transportation, water systems, and schools are the most in need of help,” and that the U.S. “needs to spend $2.59 trillion in the next 10 years to fix existing infrastructure.” Biden’s infrastructure plan includes money for both existing and new infrastructure, such as energy and housing.

Economists from financial analysis firms have predicted that Biden’s infrastructure plan will create millions of jobs over a period of several years. Axios reported that S&P Global “predicts Biden's infrastructure plan will create 2.3 million jobs by 2024” and “raise per-capita income by $2,400.” And as USA Today reported, Moody’s Analytics expects Biden’s infrastructure plan to be more beneficial in the long term:

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, says the projects won't begin in earnest until 2023. He expects the economy to grow just 1.3% from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the fourth quarter of 2022, with the Biden plan adding nothing to the gains.

…

Over a longer period, Biden’s plan would be a big positive, economists say. Zandi expects it to add about half a percentage point to growth in 2023 and 1.6 percentage points the following year. The blueprint, he reckons, would add about 1.4 million jobs in 2024 and 1 million jobs in 2025.

By 2030, the economy would be about $700 billion, or nearly 3%, larger than it would be without the upgrades and an additional 2.7 million Americans would be working, Moody's figures show.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/the-gop-can-try-to-destroy-bidens-presidency-and-they-are-laying-the-groundwork-right-now/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05**/how-do-we-escape-the-death-economy/**

the coronavirus pandemic, enabled and accelerated by Donald Trump, has killed more than 60,000 Americans. At least a million Americans are known to be infected. The numbers of dead and infected are likely far higher than officially reported.

Beyond the tens of thousands already dead or who will die in the months ahead — and not including those whose lives will be shortened by the virus — the coronavirus pandemic has caused economic ruin in the United States.

At least 30 million Americans are unemployed, close to one in five adults in the workforce. Again, the real number is almost certainly much higher. Leading economists warn that this pandemic may lead to a second Great Depression — and conceivably even an economic calamity worse than the one that transformed our country and the world in the 1930s.

Note this report from Politico:

Across Wall Street and the economic world, forecasters are quickly ramping up their predictions of massive job losses and declines in economic activity by as much as an annualized 50 percent in the second quarter of the year. They’re offering estimates unseen since the Great Depression that began in 1929 and continued for a brutal decade, reshaping governments and economies across the globe.

Morgan Stanley economists on Monday said they now expect a 30.1 percent annualized decline in gross domestic product in the second quarter, the worst quarterly performance in 74 years. The firm’s estimates assume the virus peaks in April and May before growth starts to recover. But if the peak comes later and economic disruption continues in the second half of the year, they wrote, U.S. growth for even the entire year will be down to levels last seen in the early 1930s.

In total, the American economy has lost trillions of dollars because of Donald Trump’s willful, malicious, corrupt and likely intentional negligence in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

This crisis has left millions of Americans desperate for such basics as food and shelter. Many unemployed Americans — and others who have seen their salaries and work hours reduced — are either on the precipice of homelessness or are now without a stable place to live.

The richest Americans do not live in the same world as the middle class, working class or poor. They have largely insulated themselves from the impact of disasters, both manmade and natural. Moreover, the plutocrat class finds ways to profit from human misery.

As reported by Business Insider,dozens of America’s billionaires have become even more fabulously rich during the pandemic.

The “coronavirus relief bill” provided more than a trillion dollars in relief for multinational corporations and other large businesses. In that same bill, Republicans gave the very richest Americans $90 billion in tax cuts. Writing at GQ, Luke Darby explains: “The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, calculates that 80 percent of the tax cuts in the coronavirus relief legislation will go to people making more than $1 million annually — just 43,000 people — and will cost $90 billion in 2020 alone.”

Small businesses have been left unable to access promised loans and other supports. The average American will only receive $1,200 in assistance from the coronavirus relief bill.

Donald Trump has said there will be no more direct payments to the American people beyond the pittance provided so far. Yet the Trump family and his allies are evidently using this national emergency to enrich themselves.

Trump has not been subtle — or apologetic — in using the coronavirus relief money as a personal slush fund to pay off his political allies and friends and to punish his enemies and other Americans he deems disloyal.

Once again, the rich and the powerful are leveraging a human catastrophe to further empower and enrich themselves while others suffer. I recently spoke with someone who knows about this first hand: John Perkins, author of the bestselling “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” He is an expert on how economic and political crises present unmatched opportunities for the rich and the powerful.

For several decades beginning in the 1970s, Perkins worked for multinational corporations and global finance organizations, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

His job was to prey upon developing and “Third World” nations by offering “solutions” to the very economic and political crises that his employers and clients had caused. If those countries and leaders refused Perkins’ “bargain,” then the “jackals” — meaning mercenaries or foreign military forces — could be sent in to destabilize or overthrow those governments.

In this conversation, Perkins explains how the destruction caused by the coronavirus pandemic offers an illustration of why America and the world need to move beyond a “death economy” — where all areas of life are financialized and profits rule over people — and toward to a new way of thinking and living that he describes as a “life economy.” Perkins also outlines how the corporate oligarchy and its leaders plan to flourish both during and after the coronavirus pandemic.

Economic hit men like him, Perkins argues, have long operated within the United States, reducing local economies to rubble to generate profits for multinational banks and corporations.

As usual, our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Given the state of the world with the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump’s regime in the United States, how are you feeling? What is your emotional state?

It wavers. I’m a very hopeful person. I proceed from a fairly reasoned standpoint in my thinking. Over the last several decades I have been thinking and writing about how we as a species need to make changes in the way human beings relate to each other and to the planet.  We need to move from what I call a “death economy” into a ‘life economy.” A life economy is one that pays people to clean up pollution and regenerate destroyed environments. A life economy also develops new technologies that do not ravage the Earth. As I travel around the world, I have seen signs that we are moving in that better direction. The coronavirus is a reminder we need to move much faster towards creating a life economy.

Given your background working as an “economic hit man” for some of the world’s largest corporations, banks, the IMF, the World Bank and other organizations, how do you make sense of this moment?

People often ask me, “In order to move from a death economy to a life economy, don’t we all need to be hit over the head by some terrible crisis?” I believe that is not necessarily the case. Half the world is already in a state of terrible crisis. We’ve been struck by hurricanes, fires, tsunamis and earthquakes. These are once-in-a-hundred-year events that are happening every year or so now.

Planetary ecosystems are changing rapidly in ways that are not conducive to life as we know it. These are also events that are local in their impact as much as they are global.

With the coronavirus the world is in crisis. No outside force is going to show up and come to the rescue, making everything better. We’re all in this together. Everyone on the planet is talking about this pandemic.

People deep in the Amazon are feeling it. People who live in the Himalayas are feeling it. People in all the major cities are feeling it. I am not sure if I really see any possibility for true recovery from this pandemic. I would not say that it is impossible. But I do believe that it is highly unlikely that there is a return to a state of “normal” as previously understood before the coronavirus pandemic. We will have to create a new type of normal — and that may be something that we will have to recreate frequently, because the health experts and scientists are warning that the coronavirus is not going to end soon. It is likely to be something recurring and may very well mutate over time.

Societies all over the world experience sudden economic change. The coronavirus is not novel in that respect. In Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and elsewhere, economies were changed, sometimes overnight and mostly for the worse, by the actions of the United States and other Western countries. The bankers and financiers have that much power. Most Americans have never experienced such shocks and do not have the vocabulary or emotional and cognitive skills to make sense of it.

I was in Ecuador when it was forced by theIMF and the World Bankto use the dollar as its currency. In that one moment everything changed. The people that had their money in sucres — which was all of the lower classes and most of the middle class — lost half their money relative to the world economy. People who had their money in dollars — the rich families and the foreign corporations in Ecuador — increased their net worth and spending power. That happened the minute, the second, the dollar was put into effect. Similar shocks are hitting the United States and parts of Europe as well as Asia, places which are not used to such sudden economic change.

How do plutocrats and other financial and economic elites make sense of a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic? How do they see crisis as an opportunity to maximize profits?

First, we have to be careful about generalizations: If you’re the executive of an oil company right now, you’re probably not feeling very good. If you’re the president of Boeing, you’re not feeling good right now. On the other hand, if you are someone like Jeff Bezos who is the CEO of Amazon, or the CEO or other senior executive of a company that deals in computers, online services and similar technologies, then there is tremendous opportunity available. Such companies are going to thrive. Universities are at a critical juncture right now because of this crisis. Their deans and presidents are saying to themselves, “OK, there’s an opportunity here for us to move more and more into online schooling and get rid of tenure, get rid of our buildings. We don’t need all this maintenance. We don’t really need all these buildings. Where are my opportunities here to cut way back on expenses, cut back on tenure, do all of our classes virtually?”

If you happen to run a grocery business or a restaurant, you are suddenly seeing the importance of being able to do things through the internet and providing services where you deliver to people’s homes or where people come up to a window and buy things. What one sees in terms of opportunity and challenges from the coronavirus is really a function of their economic and social location.

I think we do have to ask ourselves what happens if the government is not able to subsidize all these people that don’t have jobs, and they can no longer buy food? These big supermarkets that are currently thriving by selling things remotely and delivering to the home or having people come up in their cars or whatever, how are they going to protect themselves from the starving people? These are questions that are hypothetical now, but those horrible events may very well happen in the near to far future, depending on how the coronavirus pandemic continues or not.

For decades you were an economic hit man. Looking at the United States, what are some of its vulnerabilities and choke points? How has the coronavirus exposed those societal and economic weaknesses?

The coronavirus pandemic has shown the world that the United States is very ill-prepared for any real emergency. That lack of preparedness is true on any number of levels.

The Trump administration appears to be paralyzed. The national government keeps wavering on what to do. President Trump is wavering almost every day. It is hard to understand what he really wants. This is a leadership crisis at the highest levels. Trump is causing a crisis in confidence among the American people during the coronavirus crisis.

It is not just Trump. The coronavirus is really exposing many other deep problems in American society. America spends roughly $700 billion a year on weapons. The country just spent $2.2 trillion to fight this virus. Wouldn’t it have made more sense if the United States put a lot less money into the defense budget and a lot more money into preparing for emergencies such as the coronavirus? Money on a proper health care system or even a guaranteed income?

Economic hit men are now working within the United States and not ,just abroad. Predatory gangster capitalism has made the coronavirus much worse here in the United States. Flint, Michigan, is one example of that fact and its horrible outcomes for real people.

Flint is a city that at one point was the beating heart of the American car industry. Consider what the death economy does to itself. It consumes itself into a state of extinction. Here in the United States, the corporations dispatched their economic hit men to places within the country where the corporations could operate with fewer taxes, cheaper labor costs and the like. The corporations basically abandoned Flint. Production was largely moved overseas. The economic hit men and corporations also targeted the American people through debt — health care debt, college debt, credit cards.

The economic hit man has become stronger since I first wrote my book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” in 2004. Now every major corporation has its own economic hit men. They are operating both within the United States and around the world on behalf of huge multinational corporations.

You are advocating a move from a death economy to a life economy. At present, Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their propagandists and supporters are a death cult that wants older people, people with pre-existing conditions, the poor and working class and any others they deem “less than” to go out and risk their lives for “the economy.” How does that fit into your framework? Trump and his allies want exactly the opposite of a life economy.

Such encouragements are absolutely disgusting and very disturbing. One has to suspect that such behavior is being driven by the desperation of Donald Trump and his family, his son-in-law’s family and other Trump allies who have huge holdings in real estate and are probably losing enormous amounts of money because of the coronavirus pandemic. They are actively trying to figure out a way to take advantage of the pandemic. I am sure that is happening.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/greece-battling-virus-with-austerity-hit-health-system/

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/paul-krugman-harsh-austerity-measures-left-many-lasting-scars-in-the-2010s-and-the-political-damage-was-enormous/

gt recession austerity

==

==

UK National Health Service staff to lead protest against Trump visit amid rising privatization concerns

Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams

The demonstration plans come as new research reveals that nearly £15 billion in health service contracts have been given to private firms since 2015, casting doubt on Tories' claims that NHS isn't "up for sale."

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Heather Digby Parton / SalonDecember 24, 2018

So long, Republican Congress, and good riddance.

no lnx

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 24, 2018

Poor Paul Ryan. The golden boy of the Ayn Rand crowd was once assumed to be a future president, or at least one of the great statesmen of the Republican Party. He was considered a rarity among Republican pols — a policy wonk with the polish and personality of Ronald Reagan. (I know that sounds crazy, but people really did think that.)

When Barack Obama came into office he saw Ryan as a partner in reducing the federal deficit and the White House went out of its way to feature him prominently in various domestic policy "summits" that were held in the early months of that administration. Obama's opinion changed after he tried to negotiate with Ryan and his cohorts in the House Republican leadership, but it took years for the political media to see Ryan for what he really was: a callow ideologue without much character when the chips were down.

Paul Krugman had his number back in 2010:

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his "Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

But oh, did they love those blue, blue eyes of his.

Ryan never wanted to be House speaker. He wanted to be president. But when John Boehner was finally forced out by the Freedom Caucus and his heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy, tanked his chances with loose talk about using the Benghazi hearings to hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Ryan was the only person  all Republicans could agree on. He reluctantly signed on. And in doing that he ended up signing his political death warrant.

Ryan's performance as speaker showed him to be feckless, hypocritical and weak in just about every way. He couldn't control his crazies on the one hand and couldn't deal effectively with the crazy in the White House on the other. He ended up being a yes-man for an unfit president who didn't even understand how the three branches of government work. Krugman nailed it again this year upon word of Ryan's retirement. Commenting on the media's surprise, even now, that Ryan and his cohorts have blown the deficit up to unprecedented proportions and happily enabled Donald Trump, Krugman wrote:

[T]he principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

And if you ask why Ryan never took a stand against Trumpian corruption, why he never showed any concern about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, what ever made you think he would take such a stand? Again, if you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?

Surprise. Paul Ryan is just another partisan hack. Still, I don't think even I expected him to be as terrible at the job as he has been. As he takes his farewell tour, which President Trump generously stepped all over with his silly government shutdown, it pays to recall just what a disaster he has been and the rubble he leaves in his wake.

First, let's recall that when Boehner saw the writing on the wall, he at least made a deal to keep the government open and raise the spending limit for two years as a parting gift to the American people. Granted, he wasn't negotiating with an insane president, but he did have the insane Freedom Caucus in the House, allied with the meddling Ted Cruz in the Senate at the time. He spent every last chit trying to calm things down on his way out the door. Ryan's just rolled along with all of Trump's lurching about on the budget and the wall and is leaving in the midst of total chaos.

We have finally reached the end of this two-year period of total Republican control of the government. It's important to look at what they did when they had it. They managed to pack the courts with unfit, inexperienced extremists in the mold of the man who nominated them. No matter how few people agree with their agenda or vote for them in the future, they will have a strong influence through the extremist right-wing judiciary they have installed in lifetime positions. That's one mission they actually accomplished. Of course, that had nothing to do with Paul Ryan.

They managed to get tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, their Holy Grail, enacted. That was just a generous gift to their big donors, no strings attached and no expectation that it would benefit average Americans. It hasn't.

They just passed a criminal justice reform package that was backed by the Koch brothers and other big-money libertarian types, one suspects just in time to help a spate of rich white guys heading off to jail. (Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed this through having lived through his father's incarceration for fraud. What a family.)

They couldn't get Obamacare repealed, although Trump's minions have been working overtime to sabotage it from within. They didn't get Trump's wall. The national debt has exploded and the president is on the verge of being impeached. That's quite a record.

But don't worry. This will work out just fine for them. It's just a more extreme version of what they always do. They wreck the economy and destroy all faith in government. Then when the Democrats win as a result of their malfeasance, they stand on the sidelines and wail about fiscal responsibility and demand that Democrats cut services for average people. Like clockwork, rich media celebrities will undoubtedly stroke their chins and sagely advise the people to "grow up" and "take their medicine" by giving up things like health care and retirement security.

Look for Paul Ryan to be batting those baby blues and wringing his hands on TV over debt and deficits any day now. It's a beautiful scam and it's been working for decades. If you didn't know better you'd almost think they planned it this way.

==

Haiti’s deadly riots fueled by anger over decades of austerity and foreign interference

Vincent Joos, Florida State University

After weeks of protest in Haiti, sparked by a sudden rise in fuel prices, at least seven are dead and the prime minister is out. Foreign creditors pushed for the price hike as an austerity measure.

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/michigan-drinking-water-flint-2558239374.html

Michigan Gov. Declares Flint Water Safe, Stops Free Bottled Water, But Residents Aren’t So Sure

Declaring Flint's drinking water now safe, the Michigan government announced Friday that it would stop providing free bottled water to the city's residents, Reuters reported.

A statement from the office of Republican Governor Rick Snyder said that tests taken over the past two years had shown the water to be just as safe as or safer than the water of other Michigan cities.

"The scientific data now proves the water system is stable and the need for bottled water has ended," Snyder said in a statement reported by Reuters, adding that the water now meets national safety standards.

The Flint water crisis began in 2014 when the city switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River in a money-saving move that ended up costing at least 12 lives by causing an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.

The Flint River's more corrosive water also caused lead to leach from the pipes into the drinking supply, which is especially harmful for the cognitive development of children.

Flint switched back to Lake Huron water in 2015, but the crisis has led to a breakdown in trust between local residents and government officials.

In January 2017, more than 1,700 Flint residents sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for damages, accusing the EPA of failing to inform them of the crisis and failing to force city and state officials to act.

Michigan Department of Health director Nick Lyon was charged in June 2017 with involuntary manslaughter for his role in at least one Legionnaires' death by failing to inform Flint residents of the danger.

Community members and advocates now say it is too early for the state to stop supplying bottled water.

CNN reported that Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, one of the first to sound the alarm about the crisis when she noticed the rising lead levels in the blood of children she treated, tweeted disapproval.

"This is wrong. Until all lead pipes are replaced, state should make available bottled water and filters to Flint residents," she wrote.

Michigan State Representative Sheldon Neeley, a Democrat whose district includes Flint, agreed, calling the decision cruel according to Reuters.

"Governor Snyder has failed to address the psychological trauma that his administration put the people of Flint through. The fact is, the people of Flint don't trust the Snyder administration or the science they pay for—science that previously allowed our city to be poisoned," Neeley said in a statement .

...

AlterNet [1] / By Thom Hartmann

The Corporate Right-Wing Agenda Is Driving Thousands of Americans to Attempt Suicide

August 3, 2013 |

Virginia’s suicide rate is now the highest [3] it’s been in the last 13 years; Virginians are now three times more likely to die from suicide than they are from homicide.

And Virginia is not alone.

Over the past decade, our nation’s suicide rate has been steadily climbing, rising a staggering 23 percent.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 700,000 emergency room visits in 2010 alone for self-inflicted injuries.

The fact is, America’s suicide rate is on the rise, and Conservative economic policies are to blame.

In a study released in May [4], Professors David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu of Oxford University in England found that suicide rates in both the U.S. and U.K. increase when working class wages and wealth decline.

The study calculates, for example, that there were 4,750 “excess” suicides during the recession period in the U.S., compared with suicide rates before the recession.

Stuckler and Basu conclude their report by saying that, “what we’ve learned is that the real danger to public health is not recession per se, but austerity.”

That’s right. The very same austerity policies that Republicans in Washington are constantly pushing on us are the same policies that are driving Americans to kill themselves.

And these findings are nothing new....

catalan indep, gov't uses to distract from rw fails, corrupt

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-30-2017/

after Greek podemos, spain was expected to be next

sebastian fahberg (sp)

==

harvard, bogus austerity study

Reinhart & Rogoff

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15639

Lauren Kurtz is a total babeNexus Media

Because science is transparent, it is also self-correcting. Researchers can interrogate, criticize and improve upon each others' work. In 2013, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts made headlines when he found a number errors in an influential study authored by two Harvard economists. The paper showed that economic growth slows down in countries with high national debt, and it was used to justify austerity measures following the Great Recession. Herndon, 28, published a paper which called attention to the errors and refuted its conclusions about national debt.

This is how research works. Researchers evaluate and attempt to replicate the findings of their peers. They have every incentive to prove each other wrong. Herndon's work earned him the acclaim of serious economists, weeks of fawning press coverage and a star turn on The Colbert Report.Any person who could do the same for climate research would be similarly celebrated.

If E&E, Judicial Watch or any other groups were to find and publicize flaws in peer-reviewed climate research, they would be doing a public service. But, overwhelmingly, the data show that humans are driving the warming trend. So instead, right-wing groups go after emails, looking to defame scientists.

"Scientific transparency is obviously important," Kurtz said. "What we want to preclude is scientists having to live in a fish bowl."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Nexus Media.

umass

Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff Thomas Herndon∗ Michael Ash Robert Pollin April 15, 2013 JEL codes: E60, E62, E65 Abstract We replicate Reinhart and Rogoff (2010a and 2010b) and find that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period. Our finding is that when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not −0.1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogoff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower. We also show how the relationship between public debt and GDP growth varies significantly by time period and country. Overall, the evidence we review contradicts Reinhart and Rogoff’s claim to have identified an important stylized fact, that public debt loads greater than 90 percent of GDP consistently reduce GDP growth

===