The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part V)

This is a continuation of my analysis (which the media is not offering) of a politically motivated debt crisis. For those who want to read earlier parts, see my posts "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)," "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)," "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)" and "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part IV)."

In my concluding paragraph of Part IV I said: “In my next post on this subject, I will address why in this recession raising taxes on the rich will not hurt the economy, while reducing spending will, which is the opposite of what Republicans and our media is telling us.

Now I know that what I am about to address is already the accepted conclusion of most of my readers, though probably not all, but keep in mind that the purpose of my blog is not to rest on “truisms," but to examine the facts, and to make sure that we do not fall into the same trap that Tea Partiers adhere to, That is “I have my opinions don’t bother me with the facts.” I want to provide the facts, because I believe that opinions, not backed by facts are worthless.

With that preamble, allow me to address the subject and again I quote from impeccable non-partisan sources not liberal ones. Thus from Market Watch, a part of the Murdoch empire:

As of the first quarter, non-financial U.S. companies held $1.84 trillion in cash, a whopping 27% more than in early 2007 before the recession. Yes, it's good to have a rainy-day fund but at some point companies have to put that cash to work hiring new employees or buying equipment or expanding operations.

So clearly it is not lack of resources that is preventing hiring. So why would tax cuts, which would increase that which they already have in abundance, cause them to behave differently. It defies logic. Similarly if they paid more taxes and their huge stash of cash were reduced, how would that effect anything, except maybe there tendency to make more acquisitions, which generally result in a reduction in jobs as part of reducing “redundancies” after a merger.

So what is keeping them from hiring? The purpose of hiring people is to produce more goods to meet demand. Clearly, if there is no demand, no company would want to increase supply. In fact we wouldn’t want them to, for an excess supply over demand causes prices to go down, causing deflation, which is precisely what we must avoid.

On the other it has been argued that we need to cut spending, but Ben Bernanke, a Republican, appointed to head the Fed. by George W. Bush recently said:

… overzealous cuts to government spending could derail an already fragile recovery and … a U.S. debt default could wreak financial havoc.

But finally, with the maniacs (also known as the Tea Party) on the verge of blowing up the US and world economies, Nancy Pelosi speaks which true to form is not reported widely by the media. See here for audio.

Allow me to quote her speech in part:

This isn't about deficit reduction, this is about dismantling the public sector," she said. "If our purpose is reduce the deficit, we certainly can do that. If our purpose is to dismantle progress in the middle class, we won't be a party to it."

See here for the text.

And finally Paul Krugman, who so often in his column saw the ideal, but never the practical, and never could come to grips with political reality speaks wisely and insightfully:

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can't bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

Next time: What can and should we do about the deficit and the imminent insolvency of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Where can we and should we cut?

The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part IV)

I wrote the following a few days ago. The days are now counting down, and what has been unthinkable to most has now become almost inevitable. The consequences are almost too hard to imagine. If it happens, interest rates will go up by at least 1% causing the deficit to increase by another trillion over ten years. So much for those who claim to be concerned about the deficit.

The media seems to have forgotten that Speaker Boehner actually had reached an agreement to cut four trillion from the deficit with the President weeks ago. He then consulted his caucus and came back and said it couldn’t pass. No one seems to have questioned that claim. But it is almost surely untrue. What he was reporting was that a majority of the Republican caucus would not go along. It is almost a certainty that if he had decided to put it to a vote, it would have passed, mostly with Democratic votes, but with enough Republican votes to make a majority if the speaker had put his effort behind it.

It would have meant that he would have lost his speakership and maybe his seat, but he would have saved the country. Whatever happened to “Country First?”

As I indicated in my posts "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)," "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)" and "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)," the Bush Administration with the active support and connivance of his Republican Congress, set out to create as big a deficit as they possibly could, and taking a surplus in excess of 200 billion dollars, and projected surpluses so great, that many, including then Fed Chairman Greenspan, predicted that all of the national debt would be wiped out before long. In fact, as New Economic Perspectives wrote:

...on June 29, 1999 the Wall Street Journal ran two long articles, one boasting that government surpluses would wipe out the national debt and add to national saving...

It was argued that wiping out the National debt would be a disaster and steps must be taken to prevent this. This was the argument used to justify the huge tax cuts, which were originally intended to be permanent, but when the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) projected the results of these cuts beyond 10 years, the deficit became so large that it was concluded that it couldn’t be sold. For that reason it was passed with a 10 year sunset provision, but with the intent that after the ten years arguments would be found to make them permanent, which is exactly where we are now.

But as the Bush Administration continued, it became apparent that tax cutting was not the end all because spending accelerated as well. Not only were we spending huge amounts on the war in Iraq, but with huge increases in Defense spending. In addition the Bush Administration, with the support of Republicans in the Congress, actually added to the benefits given by Medicare in the form of Part D, which would for the first time cover pharmaceuticals, adding greatly to the deficit within the Medicare architecture. At that time I remember writing to a friend that I thought that this was a deliberate plan to make it unsustainable.

I arrived at this conclusion because I was aware that the Americans for Tax Reform, headed by Grover Norquist, which was dominating Republican policy had summarized his view with the now famous quote:

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

In pursuit of this goal he has pressured almost every single Republican, not only in Congress but at all levels of government to sign a pledge reading:

“I, _____, pledge to the taxpayers of the (____ district of the) state of ______ and to the American people that I will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and business; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.”

It is interesting to note that this refers only to income taxes, but what is the Club’s position on the Capital Gains tax?:

Rather than increasing the Capital Gains tax...Congress should instead be looking at reducing it. Preferably to zero.

Or let us look at the policies advocated by the Club for Growth:

A flat tax, but until that can be obtained it recommends:

-Permanently extend the reduced income tax rates set to expire at the end of 2010.
-Lower or eliminate the dividend tax rate.
-Lower or eliminate the individual capital gains tax rate.
-Lower or eliminate the corporate income tax rate

While this clearly indicates a desire to eliminate the progressive nature of the income tax and to put the whole tax burden on those who earn their living by working, it hides a much more insidious objective. Since any tax that lower income earners could pay would of necessity have to be quite low, and since according to National Taxpayers Union, the bulk of income taxes are paid by the top 50% of earners who pay 97.30% of all Federal Personal Income Tax paid, and according to the Heritage Foundation “The Top 10 Percent of Earners Paid 70 Percent of Federal Income… while the bottom 50% paid only 3%” (they don’t say where the remaining 27% comes from) and since the top tax rate in the US at present is 35%, a flat tax of let us say 10% would reduce total tax receipts by well over 50%, making it impossible for the government to fund much more than the military. I suggest that is exactly what is intended, not simply to spare the rich from paying taxes.

Or to return to the oft-quoted statement of by Grover Norquist, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

That is exactly what these policy prescriptions would accomplish and what is intended.

(In case the reader is wondering why the top 10 percent of earners pay 70% of federal income taxes, allow me to point out that in 2006, which are the latest figures available, the top 20% of earners in the US earned 61% of all income and the top 1% earned 21.3%. Even if we had a completely flat income tax 61% of the tax would be paid by the top 20%. Wealth is skewed even worse, with the top 1% owning almost 35% of all wealth in the US and the rest or 99% combined owning only a little over 65%. See here, which is well worth reading.)

Some might ask why anyone would want so much money, should remember that wealth is power, and no human has ever had enough power. Furthermore, the acquisition of wealth is part of a game or sport, and its ever-greater acquisition is winning the game.

In my next post on this subject, I will address why in this recession raising taxes on the rich will not hurt the economy, while reducing spending will, which is the opposite of what Republicans and our media is telling us.

The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)

In my posts entitled: "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)" and "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)" I set forth an analysis showing that the urgency of the deficit has deliberately been exaggerated, for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to use it as a wedge to decimate all the protection that we have built up, not only from the deprivations of our senior years, but from all the threats that modern technology, if unchecked, subjects us to. Many of these, such as the FDA keep our food and drugs safe, or the EPA which keeps our water and our air from being ever more contaminated, the SEC that keeps our securities safe from rigging (at least when properly funded and properly headed) than it is. I could go on and on, but let me mention a few more such as our schools and libraries, our National Parks, our National monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Or the agencies that are supposed to prevent oil spill disasters, such as the Valdez spill in Alaska, or the more recent one in the Gulf of Mexico. Even our safety in riding an interstate bus depends on Federal Regulation, which the recent fatal bus crash in the Bronx dramatically reminds us.

They all need adequate funding and inadequate funding, which I am afraid is what is happening in the cuts that are quietly being agreed to, will decimate the protections on which we depend.

But let me address the elephants in the room: Social Security and Medicare. If you think the attempt to end Medicare and Social Security is something that Republicans feel is necessary to solve the deficit think again. It has been their goal since at even before the Administration of Ronald Reagan, who before he became President denounced the then incipient passage of Medicare with the following:

We do not want socialized medicine…behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Norman Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism…We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” He went on to say: “The doctor begins to lose freedoms, it’s like telling a lie. One leads to another. First you decide the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government, but then the doctors are equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him he can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

(Emphasis added)

You can find both the quote and a video of the speech here.

When Reagan became President he became somewhat of a pragmatist and, as far as I can find made no effort to have Medicare repealed. In fact, despite his rhetoric on Social Security where he had scorned Social Security as “as an involuntary, quasi-socialistic example of government running amok” and argued, in a nationally televised 1964 speech for GOP candidate Barry Goldwater, that Social Security should become a "voluntary" program. But as President he made an agreement with Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. It raised the payroll tax, it raised the retirement age from 65 to 67 to be phased in by 2027; it required government employees to pay into Social Security for the first time; and beginning in 1984, includes up to one-half of Social Security benefits as taxable income for taxpayers whose adjusted gross income, combined with half their benefits and any tax-exempt interest they may have exceeds $25,000 for a single taxpayer and $32,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly. Benefits received by married taxpayers filing separately are taxable without regard to other income. Appropriates amounts equal to estimated tax liability to the Social Security trust funds. These reforms extended the life of Social Security by many decades.

But this sort of compromise is not one the new inflexible ideologues of the Republican Party are seeking. George W. Bush proposed in 2005 doing away with Social Security and substitute for it private investment accounts. “While the White House has helped convince more than two-thirds of those polled that Social Security is heading for a crisis or possible bankruptcy without change, 56 percent disapprove(d) of his approach…” wrote the Washington Post in March of 2005 The proposal went nowhere.

So it was obvious that the determination to abolish all that had been accomplished by Roosevelt –Social Security; by Lyndon Johnson - Medicare and Medicaid, by their own Richard Nixon –the EPA and all the other programs, e.g. Theodore Roosevelt – Food and Drug Administration or our under funded National Parks the first of which having been created in 1896 under the Administration of Ulysses S. Grant, would, if they have not already been, be either abolished or have their funding severely cut. Rahm Emanuel once said” You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," but here there is a desire not only to take advantage of a crisis, but one that doesn’t really exist, and that to the extent that it does, was deliberately created by them, for the very purpose of finding a rationale, an excuse, to do what the public would not otherwise let them.

In case anyone doubts that even our National Parks and all conservation efforts are under attack, see what the non-partisan Wilderness Society has to say or regarding the arts and NEA funding see Advocate For The Arts.

Every decent program conceived by either party in years past, before the Republican Party became an irresponsible radical party, is endangered.

But before I close, and despite the risks of making this too, long allow me to revert to my last post: “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)” where I quote from the Economist.

I believe this quote is so important that with your indulgence I will repeat it here:

Mr Ryan's plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programs for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus's plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.

I'm curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus's budget proposal. But it's hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes "courageous" and "honest". And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is rooted in class.

Yes, the conservative, Economist, is more inclined to tell it the way it is than the so-called “liberal” and so called “un-biased press.”

This struck me last Friday night when I listened to the highly respected PBS program Washington Week where in their endeavor to sound non-Partisan, they ended up explaining nothing and made this epical battle over the future of our country sound like a squabble between of playground kids, or as though, or at best, it was a sporting event. Worse of all, when they finally, did concede that great philosophical divides are what drives the power play, they defined it as, “Big government vs. Small Government” which is exactly the way Tea Party members, and indeed Republicans in general, would like to define it, for in polls when the issues are defined that way Republicans win, while if it is defined as specific programs that are endangered, from Medicare, to SS, to our clean air, water, etc. Democrats win. Thus as the Economist points out, we do not have to look for “Fox News” to find a “disparate treatment… rooted in class.”

It is very discouraging that we can not find unbiased reporting on such an important subject even on PBS – or are they too worried about funding from the Republican Congress and Corporate underwriters.

Again in order not to make this unduly long I will, in my next post, “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part IV)” review how they planned, nay, plotted to create this crisis for the very purpose of gutting all these programs.

The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)

In my recent post “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)” I pointed out that (1) the urgency of the deficit is a hoax (2) that the Republicans deliberately created it (3) that they created it as an excuse for decimating and even abolishing all the accomplishments of numerous Administrations, both Republican and Democratic and (4) that merely allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would go a long way toward reducing the deficit.

Allow me to elaborate on this with additional facts.

As the Republican/Bush tax cuts turned the Democratic/Clinton surplus into a large Republican deficit our then Vice-President Dick Cheney said, "Deficits don't matter.”

On August 5, 2009 Forbes, hardly a liberal publication reported:

Still, Cheney was true to his word, as the White House of George W. Bush raised the federal deficit every year it was in office. When Bush started his presidency, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product hovered at 60%. By the time he exited, it was closer to 80%.

(The National Debt is the total amount of debt incurred since the founding of the Republic. The Federal Deficit is the amount of debt incurred during a given year.)

Well, I guess Republicans can change their minds, can’t they. Maybe they realized they were wrong and deficits are a threat to the American economy. Well, they came up with the Ryan budget, which abolishes Medicare, and with an almost straight party line vote passed their own budget, because that is necessary to balance the budget. Really!! Guess what?

On April 22, 2011 The Economist, hardly a liberal publication, had this to say:

Mr Ryan's plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programmes for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus's plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.

I'm not really sure what "courage" is supposed to mean here, but this seems precisely backwards. For 30 years, certainly since Walter Mondale got creamed by Ronald Reagan, the most dangerous thing a politician can do has been to call for tax hikes. Politicians who call for higher taxes are punished, which is why they don't do it. I'm curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus's budget proposal. But it's hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes "courageous" and "honest". And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is a structural bias rooted in class.

Yes, the conservative Economist is more inclined to tell it the way it is than the so-called “liberal” and so called “un-biased press.”

Even Charles Krauthammer, that beacon of the Right, writing in the Washington Post:

You cannot govern this country from one house. Republicans should have learned that from the 1995-96 Gingrich-Clinton fight when the GOP controlled both houses and still lost.

If conservatives really want to get the nation’s spending under control, the only way is to win the presidency. Put the question to the country and let the people decide. To seriously jeopardize the election now in pursuit of a long-term, small-government, Ryan-like reform that is inherently unreachable without control of the White House may be good for the soul. But it could very well wreck the cause.

Please note that he is not worried about wrecking the country, only wrecking, “The Cause”

He then inadvertently exposes his own hypocrisy by advocating:

…tax reform along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles commission that, in one option, strips out annually $1.1 trillion of deductions, credits and loopholes while lowering tax rates across the board to a top rate of 23 percent.

Which is exactly what, among other things, Republicans have been opposing, because it would increase revenues, something they are adamantly opposed to.

In order to keep this post within reasonable length, I will address other aspects in my next post, which will be named “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)”

The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)

This is undoubtedly a startling statement to make in the light of all that is coming out of Washington and from our media. But the statement is absolutely true.

We have stopped questioning the urgency of resolving the deficit because we have now been pounded with this proposition for many month, more than a year, by the media, by the Republican Party, and now even by our Democratic President.

But none of this makes it true! Well it is fair to ask, if it is not true then why are all these sources more or less on the same page. I submit that each has its own rationale.

Republicans have created most of this deficit and are now trying to panic the country into dealing with it by draconian cuts, I submit with deliberate intent to justify their long sought goal of decimating all the social programs and regulations, going back not only to Franklyn Roosevelt, but even to his Republican namesake, Theodore Roosevelt, who was President from 1901 to 1909.

The media because in part they slavishly report what any political mouthpiece declares without questioning its validity, and in part because much of the media is the mouthpiece of the Republican party, such as the media empire of Rupert Murdoch e.g. in New York City of Fox News, The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal to mention just a few and the rest because it is safer to go along then to strike an independent course.

And finally, the President, because once this has become a truism in the public mind, it is political suicide to try to oppose it.

But those of us who try to go beyond the “common wisdom” can, and indeed should, always question that which has become accepted by constant repetition.


In fact many articles have been written raising questions, but I will refer to one in particular because it is not a political one, but appeared in a stock market advisory letter published by Fidelity Monitor in its May 2011 issue.

I quote the pertinent portions of the article:

Predictions of doom and gloom have become the latest sensation. Media hounds tell us the Federal debt will grow unchecked. Inflation will surge. Foreigners will unload treasuries. The dollar will crash. From the pundit’s point of view, bold predictions get you air time. And if you’ve made a number of wrong predictions, like PIMCO manager Bill Gross has, you’ve got nothing to lose by throwing another one out there. Especially if the publicity helps bring new money into your bond fund...

A high level of government debt, by itself, is not enough to cause a currency to collapse – if it was, the yen would have gone bust over a decade ago…

But the doom and gloomers seem convinced that Congress will remain gridlocked for the next 20 years while deficits grow unchecked. Even if that’s what ends up happening, it still may not necessarily tank the dollar. It would probably take a decade for the Federal debt to reach 200% of GDP (comparable to what Japan has now). By then, a positive trade balance could make it relatively easy to finance with domestic capital, just as Japan does…

The newsletter industry has it own cadre of doom and gloomers. Some have been perma-bears since the 1970s. The Hulbert Financial Digest has tracked some of these guys throughout the years, and they have horrible track records. Fear, it turns out, does wonders for selling books and attracting television viewers, but in the long run it destroys value.

Once you embrace a doom and gloom theory, there can only be a bad outcome. Sooner or later, conditions improve, and your portfolio misses out on the rewards that come with a solid investment strategy.

For the full article see here.

Now let me address my assertion that Republicans have created most of this deficit. In 1992 at the end of the G.H.W. Bush Presidency, the deficit stood at 300 billion dollars. By the end of the Clinton Presidency in 2000 we had surplus of in excess of 200 billion dollars. At the end of the G. W. Bush Presidency in 2008 we had a deficit in excess 400 billion dollars and a recession bordering on a ’29 depression to boot.

To be sure, as Republicans have claimed, the deficit accelerated markedly during the first year of the Obama Presidency, but of course the recession cut tax receipts markedly and required substantial additional outlays, but despite this, the Council on Foreign Relations, as can be seen from the chart above, projected a substantial decrease in the deficit in the years to come, based not on a cut in expenditures, but on the assumption that the Bush tax cuts would not be renewed, which as a result of the Obama compromise with Republicans did not occur. But if nothing else it shows how canceling the Bush tax cuts would by itself have made a major dent in the deficit without any cuts. This, I believe was a major blunder on the part of the Administration and one that I cannot understand.

But let me be clear! The deficit does matter! It needs to be reduced over time. But there is no urgency about doing this, and it can, and should be done with some targeted cuts, which I will identify hereafter, and with mostly revenue enhancement.

But I have up to this point not adequately covered my contention that the deficit was created with deliberate intent to justify their long sought goal of decimating all the social programs, as well as regulations that benefit the general public, going back not only to Franklin Roosevelt, but even to his Republican namesake, Theodore Roosevelt, who was President from 1901 to 1909. In order to keep this post within reasonable length, I will address this in my next post, which will be named “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)”

Perpetuating False Myths: The US Constitution - Discussion II

Pam Tisza responded to my post: Perpetuating False Myths: The US Constitution with a comment that was not entirely on point, but was sufficiently timely for me to publish it with my comments thereon. She wrote:

There are so many horrible things happening, and your blogs make me feel as if there is someone in this world thinking. I am very upset about the many restrictions to voting that are being passed in so many states. Do you have any thoughts on the subject, AND any suggestions for counteracting this gross attempt to return to the era of the poll tax without a tax???

I had actually been following this development with some dismay, and so it was with alacrity that I responded as follows:

You are quite right about Republican activities of voter suppression. But this has been their tactic for a very long time and not enough denunciation has ben directed against it.

One might have hoped that the courts would hold this to be a constitutional right, under the due process clause or the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the Constitution which provides that: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," but the US Supreme Court in CRAWFORD et al. v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BOARD et al. decided otherwise in 2008 voting by a 7 to 3 majority that there was no infringement

At least as early as the 1992 election for New Jersey governor, which was won by Republican Christie Whitman, Ed Rollins, the then prominent Republican campaign consultant bragged in a Time Magazine article that:

..."street smart" New Jersey Republicans had doled out $500,000 in "walking-around money" to black ministers and Democratic Party activists on Whitman's behalf. But in this case the payments were actually sitting- around money, designed to counter Florio's heavy support among black voters by discouraging them from turning out on Election Day. As Rollins told the journalists, "We went into black churches and we basically said to ministers who had endorsed Florio, 'Do you have a special project?' And they said, 'We've already endorsed Florio.' We said, 'That's fine -- don't get up on the Sunday pulpit and preach. We know you've endorsed him, but don't get up there and say it's your moral obligation that you go on Tuesday to vote for Jim Florio.' " He added that Republicans had paid "key workers" in black Democratic strongholds to "go home, sit and watch television" instead of delivering voters to the polls. Bragged Rollins: "I think to a certain extent we suppressed their vote.

In the 2004 election the following was reported by The NewStandard:

News surfaced Tuesday evening that the Bush campaign's Florida office has a list of the names and addresses of 1,886 voters in and around Jacksonville, Florida, a predominately black city inside Duval County, where official voter registration figures show Democrats have a nearly 50,000 person edge over Republicans.

In an October 26 broadcast of the BBC's Newsnight, investigative journalist Greg Palast reported that Florida Bush/Cheney campaign officials are keeping a spreadsheet they call a 'caging list". The broadcast included portions of an interview with Ion Sancho, the Leon County election supervisor who headed up statewide recount efforts on the orders of the Florida Supreme Court back in 2000. Sancho has raised the possibility that the "caging list" will be used to challenge the eligibility of voters at the polls, an action permitted by an arcane law passed in 1895.

During an interview with The NewStandard, Sancho called the legislation "a holdover Jim Crow law" and said that challenges based solely on the Republicans' spreadsheet won't be deemed credible in his county.

Also during the 2004 election Representative Dennis Kucinich commented on allegations of voter suppression in Ohio during the 2004 election:

Dirty tricks occurred across the state, including phony letters from Boards of Elections telling people that their registration through some Democratic activist groups were invalid and that Kerry voters were to report on Wednesday because of massive voter turnout. Phone calls to voters giving them erroneous polling information were also common.

John Pappageorge, a Republican state legislator in Michigan said in the summer of 2004:

'If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election.

Pappageorge later asserted he was quoted out of context stating, "In the context that we were talking about, I said we’ve got to get the vote up in Oakland (County) and the vote down in Detroit. You get it down with a good message."

In September of 2009 ACORN, a community organization dedicated among other things to getting as many minority voters as possibly registered to vote was destroyed by setting a trap or as the Metro New York Labor Communication Council described it:

A pimp and his prostitute walked into an ACORN office — hidden cameras somewhere — and snookered, after considerable editing, two ACORN employees into telling them how to evade taxes on the work they were doing. Fox News took it up, followed by the more “respectable” media. A bandwagon of horrified conservatives and liberal congressional representatives, and a president, took to the low road– and an organization that did more for people needing housing than ever before, and registered more than 1.3 million poor people and people of color to vote, was knocked off the road; consigned to the scrapheap of history.

A cartoon on that web site summarized it very well:

This year I have received e-mails from various sources such as from Governor Martin O'Malley reading, "Maine is the newest addition to our growing list of states that are playing recklessly with voters’ rights. The Republican-controlled legislature just passed a bill to end same-day registration and make it harder for people to cast their ballots, and the Tea Party-backed Republican governor is ready to sign it into law."

The non-partisan League of Women Voters complained about: "...a surprise move, the House leadership has scheduled a vote this Wednesday, June 22, on legislation to abolish the Election Assistance Commission, HR 672. With many continuing threats to the right to vote, now is not the time to terminate the only federal agency that devotes its full resources and attention to improving our elections."

And from Florida I got the following: "The GOP-led Florida Legislature just passed a terrible bill that will make it harder for people to register to vote and limit early voting. Conveniently enough, these new rules target Democratic voters, and they come just in time to have a disastrous effect on the 2012 election."

And finally in another message from the League of Women Voters they wrote: "More than 2/3 of states have passed or are considering laws that would make it harder for people to vote. Because of ONE case of voter fraud in 6 years, a new law disenfranchises 620,000 Kansas residents who lack government ID. An "emergency" Texas bill does not consider student IDs valid IDs to vote, but will allow anyone with a handgun license to vote."

The only recourse good government forces have against this onslaught, since apparently the courts will not take action, is to publicize these outrages.

I continue to be disappointed by the New York Times, which even as this problem escalates has not seen fit to address it in its news pages. The last time that I can find any reference to this problem in the Times News section was in October of 2010 and then it turned it on its head with the headline: "Fraudulent Voting Re-emerges as a Partisan Issue," though in its editorial pages it spoke loud and clear on June 11 of this year. As far as I am concerned it is the News section that defines a paper and not its Editoral Page.