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    As a Matter of Fact...
    As a Matter of Fact...
    As a Matter of Fact...
    Ebook189 pages2 hours

    As a Matter of Fact...

    By Steven D. Brewer, Sr

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    About this ebook

    America is now a nation divided along ideological and economic lines and those divisions threaten to tear the very fabric of the nation apart. This book was not written for your reading pleasure, it is a resource book for those who seek the truth to the myriad of lies that are mega-phoned into America’s collective psyche 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The Table of Contents lists all the subjects within the book with links to each and return links to the Table of Contents at the end of each subject. You get presented with questionable facts or figures, you will have the truth within seconds with this book. America has slowly been dumbed down for the last 30 years or so to the point that almost half of our population believes the lies to be the truth no matter what facts you show them otherwise. This will be one of the most important elections ever in American history and will set the future for our children and their children and whether they enjoy the freedoms that we have or have them ripped away by an oligarchy ruled by the highest bidder. We need to ensure that the people of America are well informed so their resolve is not thwarted by lies or distortion of facts.

    What if you found out that for the past thirty years you had been lied to by people who have an agenda for America that is different from what your vision is for America, your future and the futures of your children and grand-children? That you had been told lies by an organization that uses its vast wealth to subvert our democracy for its own agenda. These are the people who pushed to relax and then do away with the Banking Act of 1933, more commonly known as the Glass-Steagall Act. That Act kept America safe for over seventy years from another Great Depression like economic event. The demolishing of that Act breached the wall that had been in place to prevent the investment banks from using depositor’s funds from the commercial banking side of their business, what the banks did leading up to the 1929 Stock markets crashes and bank failures. Once the inevitable crash happened in 2008, this organization has fought any meaningful reform of the financial sector so that the too-big-to-fail banks are right back at playing casino-type investing with depositors funds as shown by the admission of JP Morgan-Chase that it lost 2 billion dollars that it had invested in the same highly speculative derivative-securities markets that were a big part of the 2008 collapse of the world’s economy.

    This book has been written to present the truth to the lies mega-phoned by the politicians and pundits on the right, who get rich feeding those lies to the American Public. The information provided has been thoroughly researched over the past 13 years and sources have been provided where applicable. This book was not written to change anyone’s mind about anything, just providing the facts for anyone who still has an open mind and who cares about what is happening to our America.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSteven D. Brewer, Sr
    Release dateSep 26, 2014
    ISBN9781310775703
    As a Matter of Fact...
    Author

    Steven D. Brewer, Sr

    I am a 63 year old divorced father of four young adults and grandfather of two children. I am a Marine Corps veteran from the Vietnam era but was never in Vietnam.I have followed politics from when Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers union, thus firing the first shot in the war on the middle class and unions in general. I have never seen America so divided nor have I ever seen a "news" network putting out so many lies and distortions to keep that divide wide open (Dr Goebbels would be proud).There is so much that needs to get done but partisan politics across the country keeps anything from getting done. Politicians now accept what used to be called bribes before they did away with the ethics committee in Congress. They take money from corporations who give them the framework of bills they want passed. The bills are very anti-citizen and very pro-business as the businesses try to do away with year of regulations put in place to protect the many from the excesses of the few.The 2008 economic meltdown was the direct result of the gutting of the Glass-Steagal Act (the Banking Act of 1933) put in place when the 1% of the day ran the country into the Great Depression that had protected America from such a meltdown for over 70 years. I know I am setting myself up for some vicious attacks by the right because they will not be able to refute the numbers they will have to resort to their usual Modus Operandi... Argumentum Ad Hominem, attacking the man because you have nothing to debate the facts with.

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      Book preview

      As a Matter of Fact... - Steven D. Brewer, Sr

      The Lies

      New Deal Programs did not aid recovery

      Republican policies of fewer taxes

      Job Creators

      Frank, Fannie & Freddie 2008 Great Recession

      Fannie and Freddie caused the housing bubble

      The 53% Fallacy

      Lower taxes grow the economy

      Obama and Bernanke are devaluing the dollar

      Fear of government regulation slows investment

      The deficit is too high

      America needs to drill more for oil

      Smaller and less government intrusion

      America Not Founded as a Christian Nation

      Epilogue

      What America must do to survive and to heal

      Appendix

      Monthly Employment Numbers

      Yearly Employment Numbers (Census Bureau 1900- 1938)

      My Worksheet Labor Force 1900- 2014

      My Worksheet GDP Rate +/- 1947- 2014

      My Worksheet Income Levels 1967- 2012

      My Worksheet Poverty Levels

      National Debt Worksheet 1900 – 2012

      Recessions Length, Job Loss, Administration

      Manufacturing Wages for Industrialized Nations

      Jobs lost U.S. China Trade Deficit by State

      Trade Deficit

      Trade Deficit by Party

      Addendum

      About the Author

      Prologue

      A Nation So Divided Cannot Stand

      I started researching the information within this book shortly after the search for bin Laden was called off in the Bush Administration’s rush to invade Iraq. I watched in horror as Bush declared that Osama bin Laden no longer mattered, less than 6 months after those attacks caused the deaths of 3,000 men, women and children in those four planes and in the buildings they hit. The Bush administration stopped using bin Laden’s name when mentioning 9/11 and started using Saddam Hussein’s name less than 200 days after Bush stood on that pile of rubble telling America he would not rest until the ones responsible for the attacks were brought to justice.

      After 12 years of researching, I am compiling the information into this book with sources cited where necessary for anyone to verify. The figures I present in the book are from the archives of various federal governmental bureaucracies who have been gathering collating and archiving the numbers in the same non-partisan way since their inception, decades and even centuries going back to when America was first formed (the United States Census Bureau).

      America is now a nation divided along ideological and economic lines and those divisions threaten to tear the very fabric of the nation apart.

      What if you found out that for the past thirty years you had been lied to by people who have an agenda for America that is different from what your vision is for America, your future and the futures of your children and grandchildren? That you had been told lies by an organization that uses its vast wealth to subvert our democracy for its own agenda. These are the people who pushed to relax and then do away with the Banking Act of 1933, more commonly known as the Glass-Steagall Act. That Act kept America safe for over seventy years from another Great Depression like economic event. The demolishing of that Act breached the wall that had been in place to prevent the investment banks from using depositor’s funds from the commercial banking side of their business, what the banks did leading up to the 1929 Stock markets crashes and bank failures. Once the inevitable crash happened in 2008, this organization has fought any meaningful reform of the financial sector so that the too big to fail banks are right back at playing casino-type investing with depositors funds as shown by the admission of JP Morgan-Chase that it lost 2 billion dollars that it had invested in the same highly speculative derivative-securities markets that were a big part of the 2008 collapse of the world’s economy.

      This book has been written to show truth to the lies mega-phoned by the politicians and pundits on the right, who get rich feeding those lies to the American Public. The information provided has been thoroughly researched over the past 13 years and sources have been provided where applicable. This book was not written to change anyone’s mind about anything, just providing the facts for anyone who still has an open mind and who cares about what is happening to our America.

      Return to Table of Contents

      Sections

      Democratic & Republican Policies

      [1] Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics

      [2] My Worksheet for Employment Numbers

      [3] Worksheets for GDP change from prior year

      [4] Income Level +/- 1st 4 Quintiles & Top 5%

      [5] My Worksheet for Poverty Levels

      [6] My National Debt Worksheet

      [7] Recessions per Administration

      [8] Length of Recessions

      [9] Total Jobs Lost by Administration

      [10] U.S- China Trade Deficits

      The data in the above chart shows the effects of the two major parties’ policies on employment levels, rates of GDP growth, income growth rates, poverty rates, national debt growth, and number of recessions created with the length and job loss resulting from those recessions from 1900 to date. The base data is from the archives of federal bureaucracies which have been compiling the data and keeping these records for over one hundred years. These are the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the U.S. Treasury Department's TreasuryDirect and the U.S. Census Bureau (Foreign Trade Division FTD) & (HistoricalStatisticsoftheUnitedStates). Copies of the original charts are located in the Appendix with my worksheets compiling that data into the information listed above.

      The National Debt figures for the Democratic Party include the bulk of the cost of World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

      The House may hold the purse strings of the nation but prior to the current deadlock in Congress, Administrations and Congresses worked together for the American people. Republican administrations got their pro-business agenda into budgets by allowing Democratic Congresses to get their social agenda into the Budget too. I have used Fiscal Years to determine which Party the fiscal years' resulting numbers were attributed to.

      Return to Table of Contents

      The Great Depression, the Great Recession and the S & L Crisis

      The similarities between the Great Depression, the Great Recession of 2008 and to a lesser degree the S&L collapse are too great to ignore. The 1920s had great income disparity much the same as the 2010s do now. The economies in all three eras were booming and the administrations tended to look the other way when regulations were pushed aside or ignored completely. Labor was ostracized from any input about their working conditions or payment for their labor. The 1% of the 1920s had their own private security forces and paid off the local police departments and utilized both to quell any labor or public unrest. Today's 1% has at their disposal police departments that are fully militarized from Reagan's War on Drugs and from G. W. Bush's War on Terror, to quell any labor or public unrest. Neither the oligarchs in the 1920s nor the 1% of today are shy about using them to the fullest extent against any of the citizenry.

      During the 1920s, more than 70% of all workers earned less than $2,500, the amount thought to be the bottom level to maintain a decent standard of living. Today's workers, if they can find employment, face jobs at minimum wages that do not pay enough to maintain a decent standard of living. The 1% of the day in both scenarios amassed fortunes from the sweat of the 99%. They forgot the old adage that had helped business and labor work together for mutually beneficial ends, An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay! During the 1920s, the business sector pumped up the economy with easy credit for the 99% to buy things like automobiles and radios on payment plans with high interest. In the 2000s, the financial sector pumped up the economy with easy credit for people to get sub-prime mortgages that were usually written to fail with exorbitant interest rate hikes in adjustable rate mortgages. The sale of sub-prime mortgages was very lucrative but also very risky. These mortgages were bundled into securities called derivatives that were sold world-wide. Both scenarios were built like an upside down house of cards with the least of our society carrying most of the weight of the economy. With that much weight on the base it does not take much to bring that house of cards down, a slight breeze or the bottom cards getting wet from bad economic news. In the twenties, the stock market was being pushed upwards by the sale of goods to people with little credit and by everyone investing everything in the stock markets in hopes of striking it rich. Stock brokers were selling margin accounts at 90% (stock buyers needed only 10% of the loan) and bankers were buying those margin accounts with depositor’s funds and not keeping any funds in reserve.

      As with all economic bubbles the automobile and radio manufacturers had outpaced consumers with the modern manufacturing processes. Work slowed and people were laid off. These actions caused a selling panic in the stock markets which kept feeding on that panic. Stockbrokers tried to call in the margin accounts but the bankers had no reserves on hand. Banks started failing and runs on the banks, where depositors went in mass to try to get their funds out, causing more banks to fail. People lost confidence in the economy and stopped buying goods on credit and started returning what they had already bought as they got laid off and could not pay. This caused inventories to swell which caused more layoffs starting a sharp downward spiral of the economy and another round of panic selling in the stock markets. By the time the dust settled the stock exchanges had lost 14 billion dollars of wealth. As a result of the crashes and the actions of those who helped them to happen, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established to regulate and monitor the stock markets. The Banking Act of 1933 (better known as the Glass-Steagall Act) was passed. Glass-Steagall built a wall between the two types of banking most prevalent at the time; commercial (day to day) sector of banking and the investment sector of banking. To insure that depositors would not lose their savings due to bank management actions, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was established in 1933. The FDIC insured individual bank accounts up to $100,000, but recently raised that limit to $250,000.

      Many are under the assumption that the stock market crash of 1929 was the start of the Great Depression but it was not. It was the start of the three year recession of 1929-1933 which brought on the Great Depression aided by the inactions of the Hoover Administration. The administration bailed out businesses and banks in hopes that would stop the downward slide of the recession. It does not do either banks

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