Five years ago, on one of my "UFO Tours" (coined by comedian Bill Hicks, when you only appear in small towns in front of a handful of people so you start to doubt your own existence), I had a show in Burley, Idaho -- home to some of the warmest and most hospitable inhabitants I've ever hung out with.
Burley is a town of less than 10,000 residents whose median annual income is $27,981, far below the state or national average. The center of Burley is a Walmart. Across the street is a Rent-a-Center which is next door to a Check Cashing place. These three establishments are the jewels of capitalism. Walmart's bottom line is always the bottom line. Profit trumps all at the giant box store to end all box stores. Walmart's wages are so low you can only afford to shop at Walmart. A modern homage to sharecropping. Rent-a-Center allows their customers to pay high prices for low quality appliances and furniture in turn for monthly payments. Check Cashing places - providing payday loans and charging outrageous amounts for emergency lending -- are parasites of poverty.
If you're struggling to keep your head above water, which most people in Burley arguably are, it's death by a thousand (as in, everyone-takes-a) cuts.
So the center of town is a testament to freedom...for corporations.
And the town smells like dog feces. In the middle of winter it was about 20 degrees outside, and I looked under my shoe to see if I stepped in anything. The entire town smells like that. I asked why, and I was told it was because of pig farms outside of town. According to a New York Times Freedom of Information request regarding toxic water in the U.S., the City of Burley has had 285 EPA violations. When the report was issued in 2008, Burley was noncompliant 12 out of 12 quarters.
So the air and water around town are a testament to freedom...for corporations.
And this is how the GOP wants America to be for those who work for a living. When Republicans talk about freedom, they don't mean the freedom to be able to drink clean water piped into your home. When they talk about freedom, they don't mean a job that pays enough to live on. When they talk about freedom, they don't mean not being a victim of predatory lending.
No, instead they want the government to stay out of business regulation. Less regulation equals freedom...for corporations.
"I think having a moratorium on new federal regulations is a great idea, it sends a wonderful signal to the private sector that they're going to have some breathing room," said Minority Leader John Boehner in July of this year.
When the GOP talks about "breathing room," they don't mean clean air for us. They mean freedom...for corporations.
And if you think what they really mean is "free market" -- that's wrong. A free market's foundation is honesty and transparency. What the GOP claims as their "free market" principles are actually fixed market conspiracies favoring monolithic and monopolistic corporations at the expense of everyone else's quality of life.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies," wrote the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The "all regulations are bad" viewpoint, the "cut taxes at any cost" doctrine and the "let business reign" dogma of the right-wing caused the economic collapse of 2008. Wall Street and Banks were allowed to rule. Government ceded power to corporations. The economy became so hollowed out and dried up -- it cratered. If you want to see how GOP convictions work in the real world -- look at the final few months of the Bush Administration.
And if Social Security were privatized -- as Bush mentioned last week regretting not accomplishing - we would have had ten-fold the tragedy. How can the rigged faux-free market fix the problem of millions more seniors with no safety net? Quite simply: it won't.
It's understandable -- Americans are mad at the government for not working for us -- now we want the government to go away. Get drowned in a bathtub. More government? Freer business? Each feels like putting a hot compress on a burn at this point.
The fact is we have a choice in the midterms between profiteers or bureaucrats. And all things being equal -- at least the bureaucrats are accountable to "we the people."
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Richard (RJ) Eskow: Annoying Alan Simpson: The 310,000,001th Reason to Vote
The proposal is to eliminate medicare and force the elderly to buy insurance policies with an inadequate voucher. The elderly would need to wait until age 69 1/2 before they can get the voucher!
"Under his proposal:
-- Current Medicare beneficiaries, and those nearing retirement (55 and older), would get Medicare as it exists today. For everyone else, eligibility would begin at 69 and a half, and there would be a "standard Medicare payment" for the purchase of private health coverage.
-- At the beginning, Medicare vouchers would cover $11,000 of the cost of a health plan, which the proposal lists as the average amount of money that Medicare currently spends on a beneficiary. insurance.
-- Government payments would vary depending on an individual's income, health status, and initially region. Individuals with incomes less than $80,000 would receive the full amount, those between $80,000 and $200,000 would get half, and those above $200,000 would receive 30 percent. The government also would fully fund medical savings accounts for low-income beneficiaries.
The government also would automatically lower Medicare spending if the program's trustees determined that the percentage of funding from general revenues topped 45 percent. Currently, Medicare is funded through a combination of general revenues, payroll taxes and beneficiary premiums.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/October/26/Ryan-Medicare-plan.aspx
Semper fi
As Nancy Pelosi put it at a $50,000-a-couple fund-raiser, “Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where — because they won’t disclose it — is pouring in.”
Even allowing the menace of secret money, embracing this Paradise Lost epic means obscuring a few inconvenient facts: that Democrats were happy to benefit from millions of anonymous dollars in 2006, 2008 and today; that the spending by Rove’s group amounts to less than 1 percent of the total money spent on campaigns this year; that Democrats retain an overall spending advantage.
But legend rises above mere facticity, and this Lancelots-of-the-Left tale underlines a self-affirming message — that Democrats are engaged in a righteous crusade against the dark villain who tricked Americans into voting against John Kerry.
In short, it’s hard not to be impressed by the spirit of self-approval that Democrats have managed to maintain this election. I say that knowing it may end as soon as next Wednesday, when, as is their wont, Democrats will flip from complete self-worship to complete self-laceration in the blink of an eye.
From the NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=1
I think that is really needed in America is a very large, televised, constantly ongoing political convention; on in which all sides and stripes of the political spectrum get to participate, discuss, and re-imagine how what America was or is, but what America SHOULD BE.
My view of what is wrong with American society is that we have no cohesive map for map for the direction that we should follow.
Give the parties a chance to lay out their vision for the future, honestly.. We get glimpses with the elections, with individual debates, with individual candidates…but that is not enough.
That being said, we all know what each side stands for…but really, the problem with our candidate centered system is that it gives a free “out” for the party to say “oh yes, Candidate-so-and-so in Colorado is in favor of such-and-such, but we can assure you, we’re not ALL in favor of such-and-such…*wink wink*”
I think that what we would find would be two visions of the future of America that would be nothing alike…and this constant back and forth is getting us nowhere, except down the proverbial drain.
We need a new Blueprint. Constitutional Convention, people.
Semper fi
Semper fi
Either a government "of the people" will run the country, or corporations will run what little government is left, that's our choice.
"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Papers 12:442
Choose.
Government is ineffectual to the point of impotency. Look at the approval ratings for Congress (20%), would you buy a product from a company where only 20% of its customers recommended it's product?
The alternative? Big business, where efficiency is the mantra, and competition is king.
Decades ago business competition was all about making the best product on the market, happy customers were repeat customers. Now it's about undercutting prices to put everyone else out of business, becoming a monopoly, then customer be damned.
Cancer grows better than any other cell in the body. It displaces normal cells by being stronger, and better at reproducing itself. It also eventually kills the host organism, but it does very well for itself while it lasts.
Impotency? or Cancer? Whichever the choice, in the long run the afflicted species eventually dies out. Without real change in government and business, the United States will probably die out as well.
Efficient government can exist again...but it is a trend that must be started on a local level before the Federal will follow suit.
Dems favor government more than do Repubs. How much more is irrelevant, I vote Dem.
My dad had an oil corporation I am in my 20s and do not have to worry about money thats what profiteering gets you.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/new-add-ties-barney-frank-to-fannie-freddie/