Since my own posts tend to ‘ramble’, I’ve recently reverted to ‘stealing’ the work of others, more for the sake of clarity than anything else.
My primary ‘go to’ source Some Assembly Required provides these first two items
Priorities: The US cannot afford to provide minimum benefits to millions of the unemployed (at a cost of $60 billion), but can give the top 2% of taxpayers $750 billion for Christmas. The Fed had enough money to bail out big European banks, but not enough to rebuild the US infrastructure. The US can continue to pay for unwinnable wars, but not for decent healthcare. And so it goes.
I mean, just how ridiculous can the conservatives get? On one hand they are screaming about the deficit and on the other they are doing contortions to make the ruinous Bush tax cuts permanent!
How can the CO media expect us to believe that ANYBODY voted Republican?
This merely re-enforces my theory that the ballot box is useless, voting without verification is like electing a King, doesn’t matter how you mark your ballot, the outcome is already decided.
Then we have shit like this:
Crass Warfare: Over 80% of the retirement income for the bottom 40% of elderly Americans comes from Social Security, but for the top 20%, Social Security is only 18% of retirement income. So those who don't need it will deem it reasonable to take it away from those who do.
Again, Social Security isn’t perfect but we are better off with it than without it because the alternative would be what used to happen on a regular basis, a strike followed by a ‘confrontation’ with the police/military where a bunch of defenseless workers would get dead.
Then, in the dark of the night, somebody on either side of the conflict would burn the plant down, ‘resolving’ the conflict.
This brings us full circle with the ‘division of labor’ concept, a methodology you have NO CHOICE but to participate in.
Worse good citizen, the ‘deal’ of trading your time for the money to buy what you need instead of having to make your own keeps getting shittier.
Your pay buys less with each passing week and the only thing you can do about that is to work another job…if you’re lucky enough to find one and you don’t mind being sleep deprived…
Also from today’s Some Assembly Required we have this story which dovetails nicely with yesterday’s post about public servants chasing the homeless off of ‘public’ lands.
Next is the circle of home equity extraction, the newer houses with the big first and second Wall Street mortgages. These houses mostly look OK -- except the foreclosures with the brown lawns and grass growing in the cracks in the driveway. This area has the car dealers and strip malls that used to sell the nice cars or nice goods that feasted on those "take money out of your house" refinancings or second mortgages. Now they have nail and hair salons or are just "for lease."
Then you get to the areas of older houses, more of them boarded up than you want to see, boarded up stores on a few of the corners of the larger streets. Lots of the still-occupied houses have bars on the windows.
Then you get to the old, crumbling downtown where there are many empty storefronts, some boarded, a few government buildings here and there.
And somewhere is "the old plant." One or more closed-up, fenced-off, rusting old factories or mills with broken windows, maybe part of it falling down, where the people used to work, the jobs moved to Mexico or China.
Much of the country is like this now. So many of the older small towns, crumbling, the money sucked out by the Wall Street elite. The factories sold off, closed. The people can't make a living, the towns can't make a living, the country can't make a living, the Wall Street elite making a killing.
Welcome to the still expanding ‘economic desert’ good citizen.
You can’t live where there is no way for you to support yourself or your family, that’s a simple fact of life.
The next couple of months constitute ‘hard winter’ here in the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures at this time of year typically dip below freezing and stay there for weeks at a time.
If the only thing standing between freezing to death and sunrise is your car’s heater then $3.00 a gallon regular gasoline is a real hardship.
This is an especially difficult choice when you factor food into the equation.
What’s my point?
Why did ‘the plant’ shut down? The plant’s owner either put a boatload of money into his own pocket by off-shoring the place (don’t have to pay those foreigners sick time, healthcare, pension or retirement benefits or even holiday pay for that matter! It’s a ‘win-win’…just not for you.) Or the poor bastard didn’t see the writing on the wall and his competitor, after buying off his Congress critter of the moment, imported the identical product at prices the domestic manufacturer couldn’t match.
Either way, in the end YOU turned out to be the ‘fuckee’ (and most of you don’t have to ask which ‘end’ you took it in either!)
While most pundits blame this situation on ‘short term-ism’ (the inability of most business managers to see beyond the end of the current quarter.)
Sadly, this is ‘mis-direction’. At the root of the downfall of Western industrial society lies ‘market saturation’ and the dimwitted 'masters of the universe'(s) inability to deal with it (in a practical manner.)
Instead of concentrating on ‘innovation’ they decided to broaden the market and that meant introducing the ‘ability to pay’ to areas where it didn’t exist.
So they took YOUR job and gave it to the beneficiaries of ‘charitable’ education initiatives.
That’s right, they used ‘public funds’ to build schools where they trained the children of the most populous portion of the planet to take your fucking job!
What do you suppose we should do to these ‘TRAITORS’?
See, if you commit ‘treason’ you betray your own society, which makes you a traitor.
Don’t you find it interesting that ‘modern intellectuals’ are anxious to away with the idea of ‘nationality’? Could very justifiable charges of treason have anything to do with these claims?
These are the juices I’ll leave you to stew in until tomorrow’s offering.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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