| Subject: You are not suppose to notice amid the cries for WAR! |
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Kathyrn
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Date Posted: 00:30:26 09/20/02 Fri
Author Host/IP: 209.240.198.62
In reply to:
It's F-ING IRRESPONSIBLE !!!!!!@#!@!!@#@!!!!! The Veeckster
's message, "Once Again, a Bush President sends Economy into TOILET!!" on 05:03:28 07/21/02 Sun
>Gee after 8 years of prosperity un der Clinton, and
>the elimination of the deficit, in less than 2 years
>under Bush the deficit is back and the Dow is at its
>lowest point in DECADES!!!!!
>
>
>What the FUCK!
>
>Get this moron outta office!!!!!
>
>Vote Democrat in mid term elections!!!
>
>
>Interesting article in today's NYTimes:
>
>July 21, 2002
>No Strong Voice Is Heard on Bush's Economic Team
>By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
>
>
>ASHINGTON, July 20 — With the stock market plunging
>the other day and surveys depicting Americans as
>increasingly worried about the way the Bush
>administration is dealing with the economy and
>corporate fraud, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill,
>the administration's main voice on economic issues,
>was in Kyrgyzstan.
>
>Mr. O'Neill's absence — after a trip to Africa in late
>May and before a trip to South America late this month
>— reinforced the view on Wall Street and in political
>circles here that President Bush's economic team was
>not responding sufficiently to growing economic and
>political pressures.
>
>"I'm constantly amazed that anybody cares what I do,"
>Mr. O'Neill declared on Thursday, according to a
>report from Bloomberg News.
>
>Another top official on economic matters, Mitchell E.
>Daniels Jr., the budget director, has aroused such
>animosity in Congress among lawmakers from both
>parties that his utility as a budget negotiator has
>been compromised.
>
>Political insiders say a third official, Lawrence
>Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, does
>not have the presence or the political skills needed
>to be the principal public spokesman on the economy.
>
>As Americans see their life savings diminished daily
>by falling stock prices and an election approaches
>that will determine which party controls Congress and
>the Bush legislative agenda for the next two years,
>President Bush may have a hard time getting his
>message heard because no prominent member of his
>economic team is regularly reassuring the public that
>the government's policies are sound.
>
>In a series of interviews, supporters and opponents of
>the president alike criticized administration
>officials' failure to deal deftly with economic
>policy. They contrasted that failure with the
>confident way Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and
>Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have handled
>foreign and military policy and the aggressive stance
>Attorney General John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge, the
>president's adviser, have taken on domestic security
>issues.
>
>"We desperately need someone the business community,
>the financial community, the press and the public can
>look to as the lead economic spokesman," said Robert
>D. Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs
>International.
>
>"We need someone who is out there day after day
>explaining the issues the economy is facing and
>explaining what the administration's policy is to
>address them," Mr. Hormats continued. "It's worked so
>well for Rumsfeld, they should have learned the
>lesson."
>
>Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a
>political action committee that supports conservative
>Republican candidates, said that if the stock market
>did not turn around and the administration seemed to
>be sitting on its hands, "Republicans will be wiped
>out in the House and the Senate" in the November
>elections.
>
>On all Republicans' minds, Mr. Moore said, is the
>recollection that the first President George Bush lost
>the 1992 election to Bill Clinton in part because of
>the public perception that he had not paid enough
>attention to the economy.
>
>Mr. O'Neill takes issue with the notion that he is
>AWOL. In Bucharest, Romania, on Thursday, on his way
>home from his weeklong trip to Ukraine, Uzbekistan,
>Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, he told reporters his travels
>gave him a better perspective on the global economy.
>
>In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the end of his Africa
>trip in May, Mr. O'Neill bridled at questions about
>his effectiveness. "If people don't like what I'm
>doing, I don't give a damn," he asserted. "I could be
>sailing around on a yacht or driving around the
>country." He added that the president had praised him
>for his original way of thinking. "As long as he gives
>me that leash, I'm going to use it," Mr. O'Neill said.
>
>A senior White House official who usually reflects the
>president's view said the criticism of Mr. O'Neill was
>"absolutely off base."
>
>"He has everybody's strong confidence," the official
>said. "The fact that he's traveling in a difficult
>week in the markets is unexceptional. He needs to
>perform all the duties of the secretary of the
>treasury, not just sit at his desk focusing on the
>markets on his screen."
>
>Mr. Daniels, the budget director, asserted that
>Washington was "in another of those periods of
>collective solipsism" and should not overestimate its
>importance in the financial markets. To deal with the
>economy, Mr. Daniels said, "This president assembled a
>tremendous team both in terms of their fitness for
>their jobs and the way they work together."
>
>Mr. Daniels has been pilloried on Capitol Hill for the
>spending restrictions he has demanded. Representative
>C. W. Bill Young, Republican of Florida, the chairman
>of the House Appropriations Committee, said Mr.
>Daniels was "only concerned about numbers" and "not
>concerned about what those numbers do for the
>country." Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the top
>Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee,
>said Mr. Bush was "ill served" by his budget director.
>
>Mr. Daniels says he sees himself as a lightning rod
>for criticism and his duty as protecting the
>president. Mr. Bush has nicknamed him Blade — possibly
>because of his wiry build or because of a sword
>hanging on his office wall, or perhaps because his job
>is to make cuts. Mr. Daniels suggested recently that
>his handle should probably be changed to Piñata,
>"because I think some folks think if they can knock my
>head off, all the goodies in town will fall out."
>
>Mr. Lindsey, who briefs the president two or three
>times a week on economic matters, said the president's
>staff focused on long-term issues, not "one week or
>whatever."
>
>"With the advice of his economics team," Mr. Lindsey
>said, "the president has been out in front leading
>consistently since he took office."
>
>Republican lobbyists and consultants who are in close
>touch with the White House say Mr. Lindsey's influence
>has waned since the early days of the Bush presidency
>and the deputy chief of staff, Josh Bolten, a former
>investment banker who carefully stays in the
>background, has become a more important adviser on
>economic issues.
>
>Mr. Bolten said that was not the case. Mr. Lindsey
>said, "The president continues to have confidence in
>me as far as I know."
>
>At the outset of the Bush presidency, the economic
>team was strikingly successful. Barely four months
>after Mr. Bush moved into the White House, Congress,
>then controlled by Republicans, approved his highest
>priority, the largest tax cut in 20 years.
>
>But since then, his economic agenda has stalled. With
>the Senate now under Democratic control, Congress has
>refused to make the tax cuts permanent, to give the
>president authority to negotiate trade agreements, to
>permit drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National
>Wildlife Reserve or to allow private investment
>accounts under Social Security.
>
>Within the administration, the economic advisers
>clearly lost out to the political staff this year on
>two important matters. In March, the administration
>decided to impose tariffs on imported steel. In May,
>the president signed a bill with vast new subsidies
>for farmers. Both steps violated cardinal conservative
>Republican free-market economic principles.
>
>Mr. O'Neill even said publicly, in ostensibly
>off-the-record remarks to 200 members of the Council
>on Foreign Relations in March, that he opposed the
>tariffs on steel because the United States should be
>the world's leader in promoting free trade. It was an
>unusual indiscretion in an administration that prides
>itself on loyalty.
>
>"When an administration is driven by politics, there's
>a sense in the markets you'll get bad policy out of
>it," said David Hale, chief global economist for
>Zurich Financial Services.
>
>In every administration, said Bruce Bartlett, a
>conservative economist who worked in the
>administrations of Ronald Reagan and first President
>Bush, there is competition between policy and
>politics. In this administration, Mr. Bartlett said,
>"the nonfunctioning economic operation is causing the
>political implications of decisions to have an undue
>amount of influence."
>
>The problem, Mr. Bartlett and many others say, is that
>there is no dominant figure on government economic
>policy like Robert E. Rubin in the Clinton
>administration, Richard G. Darman in the first Bush
>administration and Donald T. Regan and James A. Baker
>III in the Reagan years.
>
>Kevin A. Hassett, a Republican economist who worked
>for Senator John McCain of Arizona in the 2000
>presidential campaign, said: "There's an internal
>vacuum. People don't know who's in charge."
>
>In part because of this, the economic officials have
>rarely appeared on the Sunday interview programs on
>network television, a prime platform for a president's
>message.
>
>Adam Levine, an assistant White House press secretary
>who coordinates requests for those appearances, said
>the main reason was that the networks were more
>interested in foreign affairs than in economic policy.
>But last week, the networks asked for Mr. O'Neill and
>had to take Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans
>instead, because Mr. O'Neill was overseas.
>
>In other circumstances, said a Republican lobbyist
>close to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney
>could become the top voice on the economy and offer
>assurances that the administration had matters firmly
>in hand. But Mr. Cheney must stay in the background on
>this issue, the lobbyist said, because he has been
>tarnished by the Securities and Exchange Commission
>investigation of accounting practices at the
>Halliburton Company, the oil services giant where he
>was chief executive.
>
>Republican lobbyists and consultants who are in close
>touch with the White House say they expect changes in
>the economic team after the elections this fall. "They
>can't make any changes before then," one Republican
>said, "because it would look as if they were accepting
>the blame for a bad economy."
=======================
Bush and the rabid Neo-Conservatives figure once the bombs drop and the body bags come home you will be distra
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