Ketchup is a vegetable
This is the way they drown government in a bathtub.
Just ask Ronald Reagan and the NeoFeudalists. . .
When ronald reagan came into office 25% of the U.S. population was part of a labor union.
When was it that the U.S. living standard peaked? When did we begin our spiral into decline?
Who attacked our citizenry and proposed the removal of the middle-class wage base?
The ketchup as a vegetable controversy or ketchupgate refers to a proposed United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Drug Administration directive, early in the administration of Ronald Reagan, that would have reclassified ketchup and pickle relish from condiments to a vegetable, allowing public schools to cut out a serving of cooked or fresh vegetable from hot lunch program child-nutrition requirements.
Release of the proposed directive for required public comment in September 1981 met with outrage from nutritionists and Democrats.[1] Charges of greed and indifference were made by media and pundits. The administration responded their concern was to address "plate waste" and to serve what students would actually consume. Focusing more unwanted attention on the matter, a mid-level political appointee at the USDA touted the directive's language as an example of the "New Federalism" (returning rights to the state level) touted by Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign, in that the final decision to implement would be made on the state level. Reassignment of that employee the following month led to charges of a political firing.
The New Federalism - Circa 1981 revived in 2007 by the Cato Institute and now popularized on Glenn Beck.
The problems with federal aid for state and local activities have long been recognized. With the coming fiscal crunch caused by rising costs in Social Security and Medicare, ending funding for food stamps, school lunches, and WIC would deliver valuable savings to start getting the federal budget under control.
Reagan's handlers (he couldn't think his way out of a wet paper bag, goddamn drunk movie star-paris hilton equivalent prop for General Electric and corporatist elite) decided they were going to implement a New Federalism either by direct cuts in the 80's or by maximizing u.s. debt. Bush (another pawn) continued those policies.
The New Federalism
April 27, 2010 (today)
Bernanke Says U.S. Needs Budget Deficit-Cutting Plan Soon
Mr. Bernanke said the U.S. will ultimately have to decide between raising taxes, cutting Social Security or Medicare, or spending less on everything from education to defense. Although he didn't make any specific recommendations, he signaled that changes to the tax system should be a priority.
This has been the conservative strategy all along. The collapse of the new deal era and the return to a neo-feudalism that was in place in the 1870's when the average lifespan in the u.s. was 40 years and massive poverty existed everywhere with no restrictions on labor laws.
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This is how we drown government
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The strategy all along was to bankrupt society and force smaller and smaller government until it can effectively be "drowned in a bathtub"
April 26, 2001 - The Nation
Grover Norquist: 'Field Marshal' of the Bush Plan
Norquist gained notoriety as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's right hand in the mid-1990s--helping to design the 1994 Contract With America. . .Today, he can barely suppress his glee at how much the movement has succeeded, saying that politics is shifting to the right while he remains constant. "I started out as a right-winger, and when I retire I want to be a squishy middle-of-the-roader," he jokes, chortling at the thought. To Norquist, who loves being called a revolutionary, hardly an agency of government is not worth abolishing, from the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration to the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts. "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
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if we lived in a plutocracy how would we know?
Deregulation and privatization created massive wealth for the elites and destroyed the consumer protections that the middle class needed to survive.
In this was the underpinnings of the decline of u.s. society, our current economic collapse and the rise of the plutocracy in america.
Starve the government, cut it in half every 25 years. . .force it into bankruptcy, cut all domestic spending, drive the middle class into poverty, create a modern feudalism with roving bands of serfs moving from location to location working for a meager wage. When they say "New Federalism" this is what they mean.
Offshore Tax Evasion Costs U.S. $100 Billion, Senate Probe of UBS, LGT Indicates
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. loses about $100 billion annually due to offshore tax evasion, according to a Senate probe that is taking aim at Swiss bank UBS AG and Liechtenstein's LGT Group for allegedly marketing tax-evasion strategies to wealthy Americans.
100 billion dollars can sure buy a lot of ketchup packets.
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