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September 6, 2011
Presidential candidates pretend to know how to "fix" our economic woes. Yet, none address the true source of America's dilemma.
Watching the NAFTA/GATT debates was an eye-opening experience. The entire Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, had drunk of the Wall Street Corporate KoolAid. Free Trade they labeled it. As one legislator blithely put it, “We voted to give those low paying jobs away.”
Those few words are quite telling about the mindset of those in charge. In their arrogance, “we” the corporate body of elected officials, “voted” through an act of the will made a decision on the lives of Americans dependent upon those jobs to support families, “to give those low paying jobs away” decided that they were the anointed ones empowered to take an economic sword to wield and sever the artery of US production that bled jobs/factories/industries overseas.
Wall Street got fat off the blood of workers across America as manufacturers moved toward cheap labor, lower taxes, and fewer environmental and health standards. Bonuses enriched those corporate leaders that had bought those legislators. The legislators who had betrayed America by voting for those traitorous trade agreements then left public office to became lobbyists or find jobs with the very companies their decisions had benefitted. The stock market took an artificial climb as corporations “cut the fat” by firing employees and profits soared as they took incentives from the government to move their businesses from the country that had nurtured and protected them (using tax dollars taken from those whose jobs they had stolen to further enrich the coffers of the robber barons).
Americans, fat and happy with their 401 K expansion and the appreciation in the value of their homes, could shut their eyes to the plight of those workers now unemployed. Let them get re-educated for those high tech/high paying jobs was the mantra.
And then those jobs went overseas because while we weren't looking our education system had gone to pot ... bells and whistles without nuts and bolts. And then came October of 2008 when the Housing Bubble burst and we realized we had been sitting on an economy as baseless as the Dutch when their economy based on tulip bulbs burst. The “Housing Bubble” is just another example of how those same traitors that promoted NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO have manipulated laws, bought those regulators who were supposed to “oversee” their industry, raped the country and brought us to our knees.
Although taxes have been a matter of debate since the Constitution was written, a tariff and excise taxes are the only taxes mentioned in the original Constitution. Our forefathers recognized the need for government to protect the manufacturing interests of our country, realizing that a strong manufacturing base was our strength and the source of our independence. Those well paying jobs enabled citizens to buy from other citizens, thereby raising the quality of life for all the citizens of the country. This sense of well being and security made the country safer for everyone. That is why people from all over the world (including those countries where we have shipped jobs and where those businesses now must employ security forces to defend them) have wanted to come to America.
And now, who do we have advising our President and our Congress as to how to fix the current economic crisis that these policies have produced? I recommend the movie, “Inside Job” narrated by Matt Damon ( http://youtu.be/FzrBurlJUNk ).
Who has been prosecuted? Why not?
"Die religion...ist da Opium des Volkes (Religion is the opiate of the masses)," wrote Karl Marx in 1843 in his Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. While many reject Marx's economic dialectic as the moving force of history, his observations on society appear as applicable today as in 1843. By using religion to fire up the masses those with an agenda and having the power to achieve that agenda by distracting the masses from the real issues that need to be addressed. Confirming that this policy is nothing new, Charles Kingsley, Canon of the Church of England, four years after Marx wrote:
We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's hand book, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded, a mere book to keep the poor in order.
Marquis de Sade wrote in his novel Juliette: "This opium you feed your prople, so that drugged, they do not feel their hurts inflicted by you." While the Right is distracted by moral issues and the Left focuses on social justice, those whose religion is money continue to pillage unchecked.
De Sade also wrote:
I have studied your civil laws, they are good, but poorly enforced, and as a result they sink into ever further decay. And the consequences thereof? A man prefers to live amidst their corruption rather than plead for their reform, because he fears, and with reason, that this reform will engender infinitely more abuses than it will do away with; things are left as they are. Nevertheless, everything goes askew and awry and as a career in government has no more attractions than one in the arts, nobody involves himself in public affairs; and for all this compensation is offered in the form of luxury, of frivolity, of entertainments. So it is that among you a taste for trivial things replaces a taste for great ones, that the time which ought to be devoted to the latter is frittered away on futilities, and that you will be subjugated sooner or later and again and again by any foe who bothers to make the effort.
Our social services are overwhelmed and those same miscreants who voted for the changes in the economic structure of our nation that has put so many of those who now suffer from the consequences of those decisions whip up their constituents about the cost of welfare and the drain of providing health services for those who are now without the health care that those "low paying jobs" had provided. Another sleight of hand to distract the mob that would otherwise be calling for an accounting for those who created the need for so much welfare and publicly provided health services.
Have Americans been played a sleight of hand to distract us from actually following through in ferreting out the miscreants in our government and corporate structures (in which most of us are partial owner if we hold stock) and demanding justice and a change in the laws that created the opportunity for such malfeasance. And ... amazing thought ... demand that the laws that would address the crimes committed actually be applied!
Why am I reminded of Martin Niemoller's Sermons in Erlangen, Marburg, Göttingen and Frankfurt (January 1946) when he said:
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.