Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Sellout

Greetings good citizen,

I heard this on yesterday’s news but held off until today so I could jump on the ‘bandwagon’…although it’s still a pretty lonely parade float, the one that decries the ‘exercise in futility’ the ballot box has become.

If we flip backwards in time I have the, er, ‘comfort’ of knowing I was ‘right’ about the ballot box being ‘manipulated’. The media has convinced us all that ‘dissatisfied’ former Democrats (who are now Independents) are voting Republican in numbers large enough to sway the elections in their favor.

Logic, good citizen.

More or less 60% of voting aged Americans DON’T VOTE and that’s on both sides of the political fence! There are as many ‘disgusted’ old-time conservatives as there are ‘frustrated’ old-school Democrats.

Instead of voting for, well, ‘traitors’ (to their political ideals) they don’t bother to vote at all!

So what of the 40% that do get out and vote?

Are they as ‘evenly split’ as the (constantly lying) CO media would have us believe?

Short answer, no.

Unfortunately (for our nation) we have no way to ‘prove’ that except for measuring the turnout at ‘political events’.

Which is to point out the huge ‘disparity’ between the number of people (estimated at 2,000) who turned up for Glen Beck’s ‘Tea Party’ rally as opposed to the hundred thousand or so who turned out for Jon Stewart’s ‘apolitical’ ‘rally for Sanity’.

Which is to say, there are far more people that are fed up with the, er, ‘non-responsiveness’ of government than the same lying media would have you believe.

What I find, er, ‘interesting’ is that unlike the last election cycle, where the ‘race for the White House’ began right after the Republicans got slaughtered in the mid-terms, this time there is nothing but ‘crickets’. This time there aren’t even candidates sending out ‘test balloons’ to explore their prospects of getting elected. Both sides are, er, ‘unusually quiet’.

The ‘scary’ part is this isn’t as ‘unusual’ as it seems. Those who have ‘captured’ our political process are now ready to ‘pull the trigger’ on their plans to ‘dissolve’ our current (useless) government.

The ‘infamous they’ aren’t fielding any ‘new candidates’ because there won’t be any elections come 2012.

You will, eventually, see some ‘test balloons’ sent out by various politicians but that is only to provide the ‘illusion of normalcy’ for the ‘difficult to delude’ crowd.

Understand good citizen there are already people who are both (happy and convinced) that Sarah Palin is running.

There are also some who are convinced Hillary will make another attempt…

But that isn’t nearly as ‘incredible’ as fools how believe This guy will make a run for re-election.

Under a ‘you heard it here first’ I will once again ‘predict’ that Mr. Obama will follow in LBJ’s shoes and ‘refuse’ to run for a second term.

Especially in light of this latest fiasco:

Obama Caves on Tax Cuts for Wealthy, Capitulating to 'Bush-McCain Philosophy'

If this is how Obama plans to govern in the future, we’re in for a rough next two years.

December 6, 2010

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said over and over that he was running to "put an end to the Bush-McCain philosophy." Campaigning in Colorado just days before the election, Obama clearly stated his opposition to Bush-era economic policies and ridiculed the idea that "we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that it trickles down on everybody else. It’s a philosophy that gives tax breaks to wealthy CEOs and to corporations that ship jobs overseas while hundreds of thousands of jobs are disappearing here at home."

Now Obama, in a blatant reversal, is preparing to do just that, agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which my colleague Chris Hayes accurately calls the "single defining domestic policy of W."

In 2008, Obama presented himself as a clean break from the Bush and Clinton dynasties and a fresh face for the nation and the world. Yet once in office he packed his White House with holdovers from the Bush and Clinton administrations and continued or even accelerated key Bush-era policies, whether in the realm of counterterrorism, Afghanistan or offshore drilling. The latest "compromise" on the Bush tax cuts, extending the upper-income tax cuts for two years in exchange for the continuation of unemployment benefits, is simply the latest in a series of capitulations from the Obama White House.

Obama and Congressional Democrats bungled the tax debate from the start, even though it was clearly a winning issue for the president and his party. Even though everyone knew the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of this year, Democrats failed to develop an overall strategy for this issue last summer or force a vote in the Congress before the election [does anyone think this was an ‘oversight/accident’?]-- at a time when even Republicans like John Boehner said they’d vote to extend only the middle-class tax cuts if that was their only option. Yet Democrats refused to put the GOP on the spot or talk about the tax cuts during the campaign, blurring what should have been a core distinction between the parties; Democrats for the middle class, Republicans for the rich. As former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland said recently: “If we can't win that argument we might as well just fold up.”

Once Democrats finally decided to vote on only the middle-class tax cuts, last week, Republicans had all the momentum and the issue had become mere political theater. Even as Congress was voting on the Democrats’ plan, Obama signaled to Republicans that a more favorable deal was just around the corner, giving the GOP no incentive to side with Democrats. The Obama administration’s posture on the tax cuts is eerily similar to its stance on the public option during healthcare reform -- the president says he wants the policy, but does absolutely nothing to fight for it, either through his own bully pulpit or on Capitol Hill. Last week, Organizing for America asked Obama supporters to phone bank in support of the DREAM Act, repealing "don’t ask, don’t tell," and a pay freeze for federal workers (yet another concession to the GOP), but did nothing on the tax front.


There’s more but you’ll have to follow the link if you want to read it.

How much more ‘evidence’ do you need to convince you that we are now saddled with a government that won’t lift a finger to protect us?

You don’t need me to tell you that a government that doesn’t protect you is more of a threat than a benefit!

Here’s an example of what happens when the government fails to protect you…

[purloined from SAR]

Into The Wilds: One out of four Americans do not pay his bills on time. The actual un/under employment rate is 22%. The inflation rate for people who buy gasoline, eat food and heat their homes is 8%. Average credit card balance is $15,788, penalty fees on credit cards exceed $20 billion a year, and 27% of credit card accounts go into default.


Then we arrive at this example of ‘Downward Mobility’:

[Purloined from: Financial Armageddon]

As USA Today reports in "Economy Has Sent Executives to Jobs Down Corporate Ladder,"

Down is the new up for a great many working Americans.

With the job market growing modestly again this year, Corkett is among many Americans who have taken jobs a rung or more below the ones they lost in the recession. Unlike the unemployed marketing director who's manning the cash register at Walmart or the construction worker who turned to truck driving, these workers are still in their fields, but lower on the career ladder.


This is the same experience many of my peers are currently going through, many for the fifth or sixth time!

If there were a factoid that appears to be consistently omitted, it is the ‘persistence’ of certain phenomenon.

‘Downward Mobility’ is part and parcel with the ‘Global race to the Bottom’. As your ‘field of endeavor’ is off-shored, you become a ‘trainee’ in a brand new field, often competing with much younger workers for these ‘entry level’ positions.

Not for nothing, this is a factor of ‘our government’ failing to protect us…which makes it ‘part of the problem’, doesn’t it? (In case you were under the impression that a ‘captive government’ doesn’t affect the average individual one way or the other…)

So, this leaves us with a badly broken nation and nothing being done about it.

And this good citizen is where I leave you.

I have developed a (sustainable) replacement for the mess we currently suffer. That said, I am open to other ‘ideas’ (but they have to be ‘holistic’, like A Simple Plan is.)

Because there aren’t any ‘half-measures’ that will make/fix the current system, it HAS TO BE REPLACED!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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