Classless warfare

"Says it costs a lot to win, even more to lose" Deal - Robert Hunter

I am trying to wrap my brain around this whole income inequity issue. Obama has jumped on this horse like it came out of his own barn, you have to give the OWS folks some credit, they furnished the President with a populist message that he can run on and which just might invigorate a sagging campaign.

Income inequity goes hand in hand with the payroll tax cut, a tax cut that helps working people, and strangely enough the only tax cut that the Republicans are not in favor of. They like to trumpet that working people don't create jobs and bump the economy. Last I checked the 1% weren't creating too many jobs either. Unless you want to talk about the jobs they are creating off shore in places like India and the Marshall Islands. We have lost over 3 million white collar and manufacturing jobs in this country  since 2001 and huge numbers of IT jobs. I hope that you will remember the folks at the U.S. Chamber who said that they weren't concerned about the loss of 4 to 6 million american jobs, their corporate clients are doing just fine, thanks.

The reality is that the huge transfer of wealth to the upper 1% in the last thirty years, a transfer of which I have already provided you oodles and oodles of charts and graphs, ultimately destabilizes the whole system and helps nobody. Children today are told that they can be groomed to take over janitorial jobs. If OWS has done anything, it has shown the rest of us that the younger generation is not too happy about the shit sandwich that they have been dealt and left with.

I think that the attitude on the part of a certain segment on the right is, sucks for you, you should have won like we did. Now there are several ways to win; you can inherit wealth, the old fashioned way, you can build a better mousetrap or cancer cure, you can put your nose to the grindstone, you can steal it, whatever. I take my hat off to those fortunate few who were smart enough to win. The problem is what do we do for the rest of the bunch?

There is a conservative core in this country that is still smarting over the new deal. All of these tax cuts for the wealthy the last thirty years have performed just as expected and now not content to take the lion's share of the money, they want to take your pension and cut off the welfare state and all of those dreaded entitlements. If you want to help the poor fine, but don't make me do it. That's what churches are for. Make it strictly voluntary.

We need to all start rowing in the same direction in this country. The wealthy, the poor, the shrinking middle class, the carnivores, the parasites, the double dipping public servants, the trial lawyers, the capitalists, the commies, the privileged, the despondent, the tone deaf, gay, straight, conservatives, liberals, pessimists, optimists, black, white, green, witty, obtuse, the smart, the stupid, the informed, the brain dead, soccer moms, welfare cheats, Diamond Jim Brady's, Mother Theresa's, all of us motherfuckers. Just how in the hell do we get back on the same page?

I was listening to an NPR broadcast on New Balance Shoes, an old school, high quality, shoe company made in Skowhegan, Maine of all places. Old 19th century textile mill. That is in danger of going under because of the administration's new tariff deal with the Pacific Rim countries.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The TPP will boost our economies.
FIELD: President Obama committed the U.S. to a framework for the Trans-Pacific Partnership at the Apec summit in Hawaii.
OBAMA: Lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports and creating more jobs for our people, which is my number one priority.
FIELD: Nine countries will be part of the new Pacific Rim free trade zone. One of them, Vietnam, is the fastest growing exporter of footwear in the world. Vietnam's labor standards are among the lowest in the world and the pay scales in its footwear factories are even lower than those in China. Its emergence has come at a time when it still pays a hefty tariff on rubber footwear, but under the TPP, Vietnam could be exempted from paying any tariff at all. And that, says spokesman Matt Lebretton, would be bad news for New Balance.
MATT LEBRETTON: We have a president who has said that he embraces a manufacturing agenda, yet folks are embarking on something that could effectively put our 1,200 folks out of business.

If New Balance doesn't get a carveout, they could very well go under. Just like many of the avocado growers in my community have gone over with the advent of cheap chilean fruit and an attendant zillion new invasive bugs and pests that have tagged along with all of this new free trade. What do we in America get out of the deal again? Our corporations, which have all gone offshore themselves so that they can avoid taxes, can make piles of dough on products that they have built and assembled with cheap labor in third world countries.

I'm depressed. I look out on a Main Street in a Christmas season with very few shoppers. I own a building, that still has a sizable mortgage, on a street that has largely dried up and blown away. I never ought an expensive house or car, I did buy a building. The question is if my income and debts are sustainable.

Most people with a brain, which unfortunately is not most people, can see that suspending all of our environmental rules and regulations is not the answer we are looking for. Bit shortsighted, figuring that we have lo live on this garbage dump. Neither is the abolition and privatization of our public school system. Doubling down on fossil fuels gives us what, thirty to fifty years tops? Or maybe we need to let Blankfein and Dimon screw us out of this mess, reinvigorate that old trashy C.D.O. market, there will always be another sucker who is willing to be conned.

We never got it off on that revolution stuff. Mott the Hoople

Just where in the hell did we go wrong? Should we blame FDR for this whole nonsense about protecting the poor? Should we long for a two class society like they have in certain sections of latin america, where the serfs know their place? Can we point the finger at Freddie and Fannie for the ridiculous notion that those filthy poor people, you know what color they are, are deserving of their own shingle over their heads?

Gingrich announced today that he would "remove" Bashir Assad if he was elected. Weren't his colleagues recently grousing about intervention n Libya. But Syria, no problem. Fasten your seat belts folks. It's going to be a hell of a ride. Unless of course, those old mayans were right.