News You Can’t Use

News blurbs are in standard type my commentary is italicized.

A man was shot in the stomach in a robbery attempt while leaving a Pizza Hut restaurant.  He ate at Pizza Hut- he probably just felt like he was shot in the stomach.

A 460 pound con artist who claimed to be a preacher had thirteen complaints lodged against him. Nine of those complaints were for busted furniture.  “I think it’s terrible of him trying to hide behind God like that” one complainant said.  He’s asking an awful lot of God, don’t you think?

A relationship expert was commenting on the Obama's’ level of affection when she stated “they’re hugging and kissing, they’re fisting…” The horrified host quickly corrected her saying “I think it’s called a fist bump.”  Nothing I can add here.

Rand Paul supporter headstomps protester.  Later says “It wasn’t as bad as it looked”  I guess how bad it looks depends on which end of the tea-bagger thug’s jack-booted stomp you happen to be on.

Nevada Senate Tea-bagger candidate Sharron Angle bans two media outlets from covering her campaign for daring to ask questions about the economy and foreign policy.  Now they start to show their true colors- what is their plan? rule in absolute secrecy?

Campaign finance reform failed so badly that corporations and foreign governments can secretly “donate to” (not buy I’m sure) candidates with unlimited amounts of undisclosed cash.  Don’t worry though, I’m sure the twenty bucks you gave to your favorite politician will get you just as much consideration and access as the hundreds of millions paid by China and Saudi Arabia.  

 

The Rant Is Overdue

If I see one more of these ignorant tea-baggers driving around in a forty thousand dollar gas guzzling behemoth with a “Don’t tread on me” sticker on the back I’m going to lose it, big time.  What a bunch of selfish, whining cry babies.  Lets have a little perspective here, shall we?  Never in the whole history of the world has there been a country of whom its citizenry has been asked so little, has been less put upon, or had more given to them than the American people.  Unless you happen to be Native or African American of course, then you’ve got tread marks to spare.

Just being born in this country puts you about a 1,000.% ahead of any one else living on this planet.  The indignation with which they decry the wrongs they imagine done to them rings as hollow as their leaders promises to- well, I was going to say what their leaders promise but I have no idea what that might be, other than to “take our country back!”  Take the country back from what?  The voters?  I think these tea-baggers really believe they have been wronged in some way.  The demographics of this country are changing fast and it scares the hell out of them that soon they will be a minority.  This  causes them a fear reaction bordering on panic.  Just what is needed- a bunch of old white panicky voters hopped up on fear and anger.

Right on time to be served by the tea-baggers the only thing they do have to offer other than a witches’ hat full empty slogans, more fear and anger.  You would think by their rhetoric that the current president has been in office for the last twelve years ruining the country.  It’s no wonder their jack-booted thugs stand on the necks of old ladies who oppose them, or is that just Rand Paul supporters?  That Alaskan teacher who hung the “worst governor ever” banner at the Sarah Palin event better watch out or she might be next.  Did you see empress Palin’s reaction when she found out the protester was a teacher?  “oh, one of THOSE” she said as she turned her head while rolling her eyes.  Not a surprising reaction considering the tea-baggers are so far right of the republican party that only the most fanatical bible bangers need apply,  They make no secret of the fact that the religioneers strongly oppose science, learning, and knowledge at every turn.

Cha-Cha-Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes….

These are just a few changes I would make to ease things along.  I’ll post more of them as time goes on.

The first thing that I would change is the name ‘football’.  The whole world calls what we call soccer football, and since many more people call it football than soccer we should be the ones to change.  Not to mention that since the rules of “soccer” ( soccer? I don’t even know her! )prevent picking up or touching the ball, football makes a lot more sense.  So American (and probably Canadian) football should become- are you ready for this?- “sportsball”.  And not just because it sounds like something Mr. Burns would say (“How about that local sportsball team?”)  It sounds cool too, we can have sportsball helmets and sportsball matches and Canadian sportsball teams.  Best of all we can all go back to ignoring soccer! Good ol' American spotrsball!

The next thing we should change is Christmas.  Every year it’s the same tired old controversies- Christmas is getting to commercial, they’re trying to take Christmas out of the holiday- they’re calling it a holiday tree/sale/season!  This one is easy.   Take all the non-religious crap away from Christmas and move it to New Year’s.  Gift giving, Santa, trees all the commercial crap becomes New Years presents, New Years trees, Santa comes on New Years eve.  This will leave Christmas a totally religious holiday for the Christians to do whatever it is they like to do(deny themselves, pray, go to church)  while the rest of us can enjoy our secular commercialized sales, gifts, trees, and New Year’s Day cookies in peace without offending or forcing religion down anyone’s throat.

We should also institute a ‘personal space’ zone. Each individual would be entitled to three feet of unoccupied space in all directions around him/herself when in public.  Too many times especially in grocery stores I have about eight seconds to chose a product from the shelve before there is a stampede of customers just dying to see what I find so fascinating. (“what’s he looking at?”) They also like to block the shelves like defending NBA guards as if their lives depended on me not getting a box of “Pop-Tarts”.  Once I was in an almost uninhabited bank when this lady came in and stood in line right behind me.  And when I say right behind me, I mean RIGHT BEHIND me!  She was so close I could not only hear her breathing but could occasionally feel her touching me.  If she hadn’t been so attractive I might have said something.  Please- can’t we all just give each other some space?

More to come.

Patrionomics

This one may require not a small amount of patience on behalf of the reader as I am about to make some observations and some suggestions that will most likely be considered not only un-American, but by some could even be called treasonous.  So I ask that you take a deep breath, read slowly, and keep an open mind while remembering that these are only ideas and cannot hurt you.

What amazes me the most about the good citizens of this great and fair nation is how few of them question the conventions that they have been taught (or had programmed into them) since they were very young.  As I recently said to a very good friend of mine, just because you have been told all your life that something is true, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true.  I guess that I should understand this phenomenon as I was the same way in my younger years.  Early in my fragile education somewhere around first or second grade I can remember my teacher saying something along the lines of how this is the greatest country in the world and that no one anywhere does anything better than we do.  While this happens to be true in most cases the implications of her statements were that they are absolute truths and to question them is not only not permitted, but that doing so is somehow un-American.

The first of these dogmas is that God is the sole property of the United States.  That God created and protects the United States (and sometimes Israel) and no other nation may claim him or invoke his name.  For them to do so, especially against the U.S. would be sinful and possibly prove that the God they called on is most likely satanic.

The subject on which I would like to focus  (too late) for this article is our system of economics.  From the very beginning the wealthy elite who hold power in this country have created a new holy trinity inexorably linking capitalism with the principles of democracy and freedom and that questioning the validity of this linkage is unpatriotic or even treasonous.   All our lives we have been taught capitalism is the only good system and it is in some way righteous or that God himself is a capitalist.  That any other system is wrong and incompatible with the American way of life.  What the powers that be  fail to mention is that it is a good system for them.  Although history has shown that a capitalist system with the proper restraint and protections may be a great path to start and build a new nation,  its utter dependence upon constant growth, expansion, and unbridled consumption are clear indicators that such a system is unsustainable over the long term.

Saying some of these things to the average person usually sends them into a blind panic, they don’t know whether to argue, fight, or just run. Most of them argue then run.  Running seems to be the end result as if they must get as far away as possible from the idea of questioning such an established tenant.  Like they have never even thought once in their long lives “I wonder if what I’ve been told is true?” or “Things don’t seem to be working out all that well, I wonder why?”  Maybe the first amendment should have included freedom of thought as well as speech.  Questioning is not treachery.  Please for the love of God think for yourselves, it is not a crime despite what you’ve been told.  Trust me. 

note;

Campaign finance reform went the other way and now hundreds of millions of dollars are anonymously pouring into both parties coffers with absolutely no accountability.  I have no doubt that our election are being influenced by China and Saudi Arabia at the very least not to mention probably Russia, North Korea, and Iran as well.  Good luck to you United Statesians who contributed twenty dollars to your candidate, I’m sure your money bought you just as much concern. 

Tea For Two… <years> Three Tops.. I Promise.

Every few years the system turns over in its grave and brings us a new bounty of horrors on the political front.  The current cycle of childish nonsense has delivered to us the newest abomination known as the tea party.  These tea-baggers are so politically far-a-field they would be frightening  if they weren’t so funny.  I guess they could be funnily frightening.  Fortunately for the entire country United Statesians ( ‘Americans’ to me includes both American continents.  Only United States citizens are arrogant enough to think they are the only ‘Americans’ )  have very short attention spans and are easily discouraged or distracted.  Which means that even though these movements flame up quickly and take on all the rage of the latest “if you tickle me there you go to jail” Elmo, they tend to burn out to a smolder before they can do any serious damage to our fledgling society.  Remember something from a few years ago calling itself the Promise Keepers?  A bunch of overweight conservative white guys clogging up arenas raising their hands and bibles, singing and crying like a bunch of giant babies with pituitary gland problems and loaded diapers promising to lead, protect, and spend time with their families.  You know, the kind of stuff they should have been doing all along. This movement burst into a furor as middle-class America clamored to not be left out or to be the last to conform to the latest pointless craze. And for a while you could not go hardly a day without hearing about these bandwagon jumpers (“Hey, look what they’re doing! ).  But as it turns out, not only is doing the right thing a thankless and unappreciated job, it is also a lot of hard work.  Disillusionment led to boredom as dedication and resolve began to wane.  So all too soon they slowly drifted away and went back to playing golf, ignoring their children, cheating on their wives, and hanging out in titty bars.  The point is that a grass-roots movement like this has limited longevity as it loses cohesion due to internal power struggles and the inability to structure its efforts into a common organized goal.  Usually that life span is about two years.  Three tops.

I see this new tea-baggers (my name for them) movement as possibly being the last gasp of the extreme right of the republican party.  This group cannot see how increasingly isolated  they are making themselves with their exclusionary rhetoric that appeals primarily to  the angry and  the fearful.  Alienating just about every minority or ethnic group because they feel that they alone are right and are therefore unwilling to listen or empathize with any dissenting viewpoints.  What they don’t (or refuse) to understand is that in a very short time all of the groups they so easily dismiss will together outnumber themselves and that their unwillingness to compromise  will leave them a marginalized and powerless fringe of society.  Tea baggers see their country changing around them and it scares the hell out of them.  So badly in fact that out of a sense of desperation they espouse ideas and policies that most reasonable candidates would keep hidden in the darkest recesses of their own minds.  I really believe that this particular movement is actually dangerous.  It is intolerant, inflexible, divisive, and borderline militant.  Accusing anyone who disagrees with them of “hating or trying to destroy America” (there goes that word again) or of being a “unpatriotic traitor”.  If these people get any real power you can just say goodbye to any personal freedoms such as speech, religion, or privacy.  As well as any social programs that even slightly helps any of the under privileged citizens of this great country.  It is hard for me to believe that any of these hard line fanatics could be serious contenders in this election.  Their candidates are remarkably laughable possessing little to no practical experience and zero credibility . I guess it is simply a testament to how angry everyone has become, but if any of them somehow manage to get elected I’m sure they will be one-termers once the electorate sees how ineffective they will be.

If you think that that these Republicans or their Tea-bagger friends are going to cut taxes and/or spending, think again.  There is no way that they can at this point.  We need to spend seventeen trillion dollars on bridges, dams, levees, roads, and the electrical grid right now.  The government has neglected the critical infrastructure of this country for decades and now we have to pay the price or there will not be a bridge left that is safe to drive across.  If they do cut spending then the whole nation is likely to fall apart before our very eyes.  If spending is cut the first thing to go will be any help for the poor, sick, and old.  Followed closely by any protections for consumers, workers, or the environment.  However don’t completely despair, military spending should just about triple.

Now that Wall street is again making record profits and plans to hit new astronomical records in bonuses, why is there still no job creation in this country?  Could it be that corporations are delaying hiring to help their easily controlled candidates in the upcoming election?  If so it would be a despicable and unconscionable act to continue to allow people to suffer and take away a party’s fair chance to at lease try a new idea when they could have been helping to make things better instead of protecting their own selfish interests.  Unfortunately I believe you have to spend to create jobs, just like in WWII.  That worked doubly well as a lot of the unemployed were conveniently killed.  Maybe this time we could learn a lesson and just execute the jobless and save the expense of destroying and rebuilding half the world.  As for creating jobs I have no idea what kind of jobs they would be after corporate greed was allowed to send the entire manufacturing industries over seas.  “We can’t afford to make our expensive cheap products here” is the age old refrain.  Here is how you make it feasible to manufacture here- a five hundred dollar per product import tariff.  Where else could they sell their products?  Only United Statesian consistently overconsume on a scale large enough to keep them in their giant bonuses.

Unbelievably, some of these morons are still calling for the privatization of the social security system.  What were these people doing during the last three years while Wall street was flushing the entire U.S. economy down the toilet?  Watching SpongeBob Squarepants reruns?  Social security is far from a perfect system but it is vital to the very survival of most of the elderly and disabled in this country.  You cannot risk putting that much temptation  into the greedy hands of the unscrupulous dirtbags that seem to ruin our economy every decade or so.  Wall street has been salivating over the s.s. fund since it was first created, to them it is nothing but a free source of wealth that they can plunder at will.  Losing a large portion of the fund to the fees of a private managing company would be bad enough but it wouldn’t stop there.  It would all be “lost” in risky investments or traded back and forth between companies until it is completely swallowed up by fees or just embezzled at which time the bankers would simply throw up their hands and say “oh well” and walk away scot free and that much richer for their trouble.  Either way you will end up paying twice as much to refill the fund because I do not believe that even a group as heartless as the tea baggers will stand for millions of geriatric homeless dying in the streets.

The Republican party has dusted off some of their oldest and worst ideas in the not so new ‘pledge to America’.  Sounds just like their old ‘contract with America’ that for some reason most everyone thought was a good idea.  Which it was not.  Basically it consisted of forcing all the new Republican Congressmen to vote only how the party told them to, if they did not they would not be endorsed in the next election.  Why in the hell would anyone want a Senator who would vote against the best interests of his district and its citizens because of the aims of the party.  This sounds like lunacy to me, but both parties believe that the power and well being of their party is their primary responsibility and infinitely more important than the people they represent. 

After seeing the most recent sound bite from Tea-bagger empress Sarah Palin (“we can see 2012 from our house!”) I nearly became physically ill. The snide condescending hatred in her voice permeated her words and sickly sweet smile. Fine, you don’t agree with the current president, then how about coming up with some useful ideas instead of a bunch of pointless slogans.  You had your chance and you lost- so if you are not willing to help, shut up.  As far as  the rest of the tea bagger candidates go, all I can do is quote Derek Jacobi from ‘I Claudius’ who said in reference about the progeny of his family tree “ We’ve certainly had a terrifying crop this season”.

101 Damnations

You’ll never see it coming how this title ties in.  I have a standing  morning appointment three times every week.  This obligation requires me to drive past a small and little known family services clinic.  The two trips during the business week are uneventful, however the Saturday morning journey offers a bit of a distraction.  Every Saturday morning, rain or shine, high humidity or freezing ass cold there is a small band of abortion protesters on the public easement in front of the clinic and across the street waving signs and bibles at everyone unfortunate enough to have to walk or drive by.

The fun part of this sideshow besides laying on my horn as i slowly drive by (and watching these religioneers[not a real word] try to puzzle out whether it is a honk of support or one of derision ) is watching the escalation of the conflict.  First an off duty police officer was added to the mix, paid for by the clinic to keep the peace and make sure they stay off private property no doubt.  Then in an attempt to protect their clients’ privacy and to possibly help to dampen the effects of the protesters bullhorn they added an eight foot privacy fence.  Undeterred after two weeks of yelling at a planked wall the pro-lifers started bringing ladders and actually began erecting a small scaffolding each and every week so that they could now look over and yell at people on the other side of the fence!

To these protesters I have this to say;  don’t you have anything better to do with your time?  If  you really think that screaming slogans at people from a court ordered distance is going to encourage anyone to reexamine their decision that late in the game, you’re nuts.  Yes, I said nuts.  I don’t care how you feel about abortion, for it or again’ it, if you are standing on top of a scaffold in the freezing cold so that you can whinny at people over an eight foot fence like some kind of judgmental screech owl, you’re a nut.  The decision to terminate a pregnancy is a very personal, painful and agonizing choice, one which I do not believe anyone would make without all due consideration.  All your angry name calling chants, and catchphrases only serve to push more reasonable minds further away.  Sometimes even wanted pregnancies have to be terminated due to medical complications, try to imagine how much more pain your heckles and taunts inflict on an already hurting and conflicted person in this instance.  You have no idea why those people are visiting these clinics or what their circumstances are or how much they may be suffering already so how about trying to practice a little  of that Christian charity and compassion I hear so much about. 

Instead of wasting time and money building scaffolds and renting bullhorns (although any right-to-lifer worth their salt should have their own bullhorn) try doing something sensible or maybe even something helpful.  Like stop opposing sex education and birth control.  Education is not permission and the head in the sand belief that if you don’t tell your children about reproduction they will never figure it out own their own is simply quite ignorant.  They’re going to figure out how their equipment works whether they know anything about reproduction or not and regardless of any kind of abstinence pledge they may have signed to make you happy, they are going to put their limited knowledge into practice.  The most responsible thing that you can do is to teach them how to protect themselves and not ruin their entire futures unless you want sick or dead children or to be grandparents at the ripe old age of thirty-seven.  Or both.  Your choice.

I feel that the clinic is missing an opportunity to fight fire with fire as well.  If it were me I would schedule the landscaping contractor to perform their services at the same time the protesters show up each week.  Let them scream themselves silly and hoarse ruining  their voices trying to compete with the mowers, blowers, and weed whackers!

And while we are on the subject of foolish behavior, please leave those poor homosexuals alone.  Don’t they have enough problems already without you relentlessly hounding their every move for no good reason?  Doesn’t the constitution give every one the right to the pursuit of happiness (with them though i believe the emphases is less on the hap and more on the piness) ?  The most confounding of these policies is the decades long boycott of the Disney corporation of all things. All just for doing something nice in offering health benefits to same sex spouses of its’ employees for God’s sake!  The religioneers are not going to tolerate this outrage no siree, how dare they do something to help someone.  Just wait until God hears about this! They have no protests against companies that poison the environment and their workers while ripping off consumers.  No protests against corporations using child slave labor.  Not a word against the alcohol, tobacco, or firearms industries which kill millions every year but they fly into a blinding rabid fury because someone they don’t know is getting healthcare coverage.  Un  be  lievable.  Having been raised a reluctant Baptist, it should come as no surprise to me that these religioneers would consider that the absolute worse thing you could do, the greatest crime you could commit on this Earth is to love someone.  I told you you wouldn’t see it tie in.  God bless Disney.

funny footnote:

All this sex education stuff was easy for me.  I knew all the anatomy and processes including their medical names, how they worked, and what caused pregnancy and std’s by the middle of second grade.  Well ahead of most of my classmates but not all.  Just a benefit of growing up in the seventies I guess.  Some of my contemporaries were already trying to fool around with each other to varying degrees of success early in the fourth grade, so by the time the school board thought it was appropriate to teach reproductive science- eighth grade health class- all they succeeded in doing was embarrassing themselves.  I did not know until much later that that is when sex ed was taught.  the health/gym teacher kept sending me to the library during class and I was too happy to be free to ever wonder why.  Only later did i find out that in yet another example of my mothers complete insanity, she had listened to the religioneers hysterical cries of “ don’t let you children take sex ed, they’ll teach them how to have SEX!”   knowing full well that she was banning me from a subject that I already knew everything about.  Un be lievable.

Kratz Enough!

I see that the Wisconsin district attorney Kenneth  Kratz finally agreed to step down.  Why he was spared the humiliation of being fired I will never understand, but then again there is a lot I do not understand.  Like how does a douche like this putz get to be so arrogant and self important anyway?  Whatever cachet Kratz may have thought he had to control his own destiny after being caught sending sexually explicit texts and emails to the wives of men he was prosecuting for domestic violence was a self-delusion of the highest order.  At first this idiot thought he was just going to continue in his position with no repercussions as if nothing at all had happened.  Even as complaints and calls for his firing mounted, he refused to budge, he would not give up his office.

This is the point where I would have publicly and shamingly(not a real word) fired him, but still he was allowed to stay.  As the pressure grew he decided to magnanimous and offered to “get some counseling” however leaving his job was still out of the question.  Someone thinks an awful lot of themselves don’t they?  How could anyone be so delusional as to think they are so important that not only can they violate every code of ethics but to also decide how or if he should be punished.  Or think that the public outrage would be sated with the idea of him “getting some counseling”.  This idiot presumably went to college.

I’ve always wondered, what do you do after you’ve utterly destroyed your career, obliterated your credibility, and flushed your integrity down the toilet?  What do you say to the next employer when they ask why you left your last position?  Windup, “Well, that’s actually a very funny story.  It seems that I predatorily sexually harassed a lot of women who were already victims of male chauvinist assholes such as myself, violating their trust one more time and possibly killing their faith in men forever.”  Boom.  Out of the park.

Pop Torts

A lot of things sound like a good idea when you hear them for the first time, but it is only when you dig deeper and really think things through or barring that, rush ahead and put them into practice that you see the folly of ill-considered plans.  A case locally that comes to mind was the idea to raise additional funds for the school system by confiscating the vehicles of drivers convicted of DUI’s.  Sounds good on the surface, punish drunk drivers and help educate the children- great!  What kind of vehicles these planners thought they would be getting i have no idea, probably BMW’s, Jag’s, and Benz’s no doubt.  The plan begins to fall apart when the the cars start rolling in.  Worthless beaters every one.  Cars that no one in their right minds would buy or even take for free.  No one stopped to think that anyone with a car worth taking would be able to afford a slick lawyer to get it back.   The school system not only didn’t get any new money they had to pay to store or have hauled off a bunch of old junkers.

the same thing goes for mandatory sentences for drug dealers.  Seemed like a good way to fight the drug war until you realize now you have to release a bunch of violent rapists and murderers to make room for the endless parade of pot sellers.  Which makes no difference in the drug war anyway.  The “drug war” has been waged for decades yet there is not one person I know who cannot get any kind of drug they want with a few phone calls within 24 hours.  Huge waste of time and money.  On a related topic, this too could be fixed by instituting my policy of there being no such thing as prison overcrowding, if you can close the door there is room for one more.  I also want to start an organization dedicated to abolishing the parole system in this country.  I am so tired of seeing these slags released from jail and going out to commit more crimes and create more victims almost immediately.  Maybe some prisoners are rehabilitated, but it is not worth the risk.  I would call this group Die in prison. org.

The new slew of proposals are just as frightening.  Limited government is the newest battle cry, however I wonder how many people follow through their thinking to the logical conclusions.  Nature abhors a vacuum and if you take power away from one group another quickly fills the void.  Limited government is code for corporate control of America with unelected robber-barons calling all the shots.  You’ll get no vote with their policies or for their leaders.  Bad idea. 

Tort reform is another somewhat older cry with the same trick ending.  Using highly publicized reports or runaway jury awards to undeserving plaintiffs to call for reforms, it is a thinly veiled attempt to institute monetary caps or take away your right to sue entirely.  First of all these abuses are exaggerated in the press, and are usually overturned on appeal or simply never paid.  Second, caps will only hurt the people who truly deserve these awards to pay for a lifetime of medical care.  What other type of reform could they implement if not caps?  Who will be deciding which suits are justified and which ones aren’t?  A second set of jurors?  It is the juries job to decide if a case is justified not a lawyer, politician, or insurance company’s.  Some would say that the system is unfair to the insurance industry, but they are the ones that can afford the best lawyers, I’ve seen this first hand.  No one forced these companies to be in the insurance business,  they chose to be in the risk business and their investors chose to buy their stocks.  Risk is their business, and sometimes you lose.

This one is so ludicrous I could hardly believe what I was hearing.  Idiotic town councilmen trying to pass pants ordinances to make people pull up their shorts.  You have got to be kidding right?  In my town the police are so busy with more serious crimes that they will not come out to your house for vandalism of even car break-ins.  So this moron wants to tie up valuable police time and money following around baggy pantsed idiots and handing out fashion tickets.  Probably having to show up in court as well to waste even more time and resources.  I just hope they implement mandatory sentences for these scumbags. 

Quote time

   I don't like ass kissers, flag wavers, or team players.  I like people who buck
the system.  Individualists.  I often warn kids: “Somewhere along the way, someone is
going to tell you `there is no “I” in team.'  What you should tell them is, `Maybe
not, but there is an “I” in independence, individuality, and integrity.'”

    Avoid teams at all cost.  Keep your circle small.  Never join a group that has a
name.  If they say “We're the So-and-Sos” take a walk.  And if, somehow you must join,
if it's unavoidable, such as a union or trade association, go ahead and join.  But
don't participate; it will be your death.  And if they tell you you're not a team
player, just congratulate them on being so observant.

                -George Carlin
                -from
                “When will Jesus bring the pork chops?”

The American Scream

The friend i was speaking of in my earlier post (minimum rage) had said something else to depressed me that I had almost forgotten about.  That she was thinking about giving up one or both of her jobs and trying to get on at Wal-Mart.  The dream is still alive I guess.  Is this the best the American people can hope for in today’s world, a slim chance to get a low-paying no room for advancement 38 hour a week position at Wal-Mart?  What a time to be alive. 

A few years ago when the automobile industry imploded, a lot of the blame was heaped on the auto workers union.  Although some of their benefits were a bit outrageous, i doubt that they were as big a part of the problem as the exorbitant executive salaries that permeate American corporations.  Even if some of their demands were over the top, they are almost justified in light of all the abuses carried out against workers for so many years.  Union auto workers were among the highest paid of the working class and blaming them for the meltdown sent a loud and clear message to America, that it is too much to hope for to expect to earn a higher standard of living if you are a simple working class person.  That the idea of being able to comfortably buy a home or send your children to college is out of reach.  Why should it be so unfathomable that a lowly worker could make a better than average living for themselves  even in the richest country on earth.  That the best they can hope for is a lifetime of hard work for low pay and endless struggle and debt.

The problem is that management seems to only see the labor force as a huge financial burden rather than an asset.  As if the products construct themselves so they have no idea why they have to pay all these workers so much money.  I saw the same attitudes while working construction a few years ago.  there was never a contractor who ever made even a single dime on any job.  They just could not understand why they had to pay their employees so much.  Meanwhile the company owners tried to outdo each other in seeing who could buy the most expensive truck.  They also had new motorcycles, boats, their kids and wives had new vehicles, the wives were also on the company payroll (even though they never came in or did any work).  But they never made a dime because they had to pay their employees so much!  These same so highly paid employees wore rags to work and drove old rusted out beater 72 ford pick-ups that only black magic could keep running.  most of these poor saps never even saw their paychecks as their wives would start arriving at the office Thursday afternoon to sit and gossip in their cars while waiting for their husbands checks to come in.  Work hard all week and go home on Friday and be given an allowance by your own non-working wife.  What a time to be alive.

The majority of the taxation of America seems to be the sole burden of the middle class as well.  You can’t tax the poor, at least not much- they don’t have any money.  The wealthy can pay sleazy lawyers and accountants to shelter and hide most of their assets so no luck there.  Companies are given huge tax breaks by local and state governments in exchange for moving  to or staying in a particular area to provide jobs for workers which they can then tax.  (free land is also usually provided)  So now the working people of this country not only pay their own fair share of taxes, they get to make up the difference for corporate welfare that is doled out while the wealthy and their companies skate home free. 

Like I also said in that earlier post, the highest paid employees in a company produce no goods or any services that a consumer  would pay for.  Yet their salaries are drawn off profits from the goods and services provided by the working class.  Sounds like welfare to me.