But don’t worry, the recession has been over for more than a year. Hey, y’know what, let us just not talk about the growing disparity between the rich and the poor and just go about our day. The proles don’t know they are proles, so just ignore the situation.

Boy, I sure hope they keep those tax cuts for the rich, they have it soooooooo hard.

Well, history has proven time and time again, that when the gap gets too big, the poor will take matters into their own hands.

I hear the term “eat the rich” from time to time, but I understand that it would be nothing but fat.

Right wing policies ALWAYS help the rich at the expense of everyone else.

ALWAYS.

the feudalization of Amerikka

Bush’s tax cuts for the rich took $50 a week over eight years out of workers from wages lost. Over $21,000 overall. $7.34 trillion:

http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/bush-tax-cuts-cost-the-average-american-21-000-over-the-past-eight-years

Could have had the money and not had to borrow it.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/StockInvestingTrading/cost-of-the-bush-era-11-point-5-trillion.aspx

….and by the way, you will not see it reported on TV in the US, but the French are on strike and in the streets over their asswipe right-wing president:

http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/23-09-2010/115053-0/

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/08/world/la-fg-france-protest-20100908

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/8028120/More-misery-for-travellers-as-Spanish-workers-go-on-strike.html

In France they don,t put up with it:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/8028120/More-misery-for-travellers-as-Spanish-workers-go-on-strike.html

the rich have made congress write all the laws in thier favor so that now the american dream is onlypossible for them. this is economic slavery.

the rich have made congress write all the laws in thier favor so that now the american dream is onlypossible for them. this is economic slavery.

And you seemed surprised!! Its all by design, TAX CUTS, TAX CUTS, TAX CUTS!!! The rich get richer and the rest of us, can buy a pair of shoes.

this country cannot increase its wealth without a very strong middle class. But unfortunately a very strong middle class threatens the rich who are now on a one-way ticket to be in poor. It’s apparent that they want to be rich right now and who cares about those who come after.

If we don’t do something about the strength of the middle-class very soon we will not have a country

it is disappointing that everything that happens around the world is not reported here, but everything that happens in the US is reported all over the world. It’s hard to brainwash people if you’re reporting things from other countries I guess

It is time to redistribute the wealth. How about going back to the good old days of having a 90% top bracket. And while we’re at it, we should confiscate the 7 Trillion Bush gave to the rich.

But wait, with the Congress in the rich’s pocket, the only way to achieve a real distribution is the way it was done in Laos. How about the USA “Killing Fields”?

Up the revolution!

The score is in , Ronnie Raygun wins ! How is that “trickle down” working for you ?

As long as I can watch “Dancing With The Stars” all is well.

‘look what our children have to look forward to’

Feel trapped like a slave to the system yet?

quote from Jesus “what you do to the least among us you do to me. ”
If I remember correctly.

(not that I’m overtly Xtian, some ideas have their merit
can’t help much what we’re brought up exposed to.

I embrace a spiritual path that looks to many sources…. i.e
never name the well from which you will not drink”

quote from Jesus “what you do to the least among us you do to me. ”
If I remember correctly.

(not that I’m overtly Xtian, some ideas have their merit
can’t help much what we’re brought up exposed to.

I embrace a spiritual path that looks to many sources…. i.e
never name the well from which you will not drink”

quote from Jesus “what you do to the least among us you do to me. ”
If I remember correctly.

(not that I’m overtly Xtian, some ideas have their merit
can’t help much what we’re brought up exposed to.

I embrace a spiritual path that looks to many sources…. i.e
never name the well from which you will not drink”

Congratulations to Saint Ronnie Raygun and his disciples who have been working diligently for several decades now to get us back to the guilded age of haves and have nots with no middle class. They have been successful.

Congratulations to Saint Ronnie Raygun and his disciples who have been working diligently for several decades now to get us back to the guilded age of haves and have nots with no middle class. They have been successful.

The top 25% now own 84% of all the wealth in America.

Someday, not by me, the rich will be taken down in the USA. They are traitors. They are not Americans, and I would recommend exporting them, but no country has done anything that bad to us to deserve them.

Bingo. Corporate media control the message and if you don’t know what goes on in the rest of the world, then you can keep believing the jingoism of ‘how great ‘murikkka is’ compared to everywhere else.

It doesn’t matter that only 21% of Americans own passports. Why would they want to go to those socialist hellholes in Europe? They’re just full of elitists and culture. Pffft! We know our tract housing, urban sprawl, Walmarts, strip malls, drive thrus, tent cities, homeless, empty buildings, empty homes and dormant factories are what makes America great.

All the Whiners out threr belley aching about OBAMA did not do this or this or this, or that. You like the artical above VOTE for the RIGHT the GAP will even get bigger….. WAKE UP !

Mmmmm……
Israel and Colombia would be a good start…..

Working great, my shoe is full of blood.

Im in Paris,
Well, they are ALWAYS on strike. It took me 4 hours to get home by metro, normally a 45 minute commute. I respect it, but sometimes (like, 3 times a week) its a real pain in the ass.

This is an ongoing problem and will continue to as long as we have few rules governing what corporations can and cannot do with their assets and under what conditions they can declare bankruptcy and avoid paying any and all of their pensions, voiding their union contracts, and various other responsibilities.

It’s ironic that even as corporations have succeeded in re-structuring the personal bankruptcy laws to get the last bit of blood from the lowly turnips, that is, the people they have forced out of the workforce through various acts of downsizing and other economic gambits, the corporations themselves seem to have almost no rules they must obey.

Most of the largest corporations pay little or not taxes. Many, according to David Cay Johnston’s research, in his books, “Perfectly Legal” (2003) and “Free Lunch: (2007), make as much or more money on the lucrative deals they sign with state and local governments to locate in their areas than they do on the services they deliver. Most are aware how this applies to such high ticket items as sport stadiums and golf courses, but it also applies to various retail outlets and other types of businesses.

What is astounding is that various locales feel the need to entice businesses to come to their consumers. And businesses have been highly successful in playing one region or one area against another in a kind of free lunch bidding war where jobs [even part-time minimum wage jobs] become an asset more important than the products the companies make or the stores sell. Part of this is because we are a big nation but most of it goes back to the ideology that has separated the North and South for years.

In his masterful tome, “The Rise of American Democracy” (2005), Sean Wilentz gives a brief (relatively) encapsulation of the Constitution of the Confederacy, a document that was created almost immediately after the election of 1860 designed to “create a republican government formally based on racial slavery.” What struck me when I first read it was the way it reinforced something that I discovered when I first read W.E.B. Du Bois (pronounced “boys”) history of the Reconstruction in the south, “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935), that is, except for slavery, which the South always claimed they would end in their own time anyway, the current structure of the American government reflects far more Southern ideology than it does the ideology of the more liberal northern states. Indeed as a result of reading Du Bois and Eric Foner’s book on the same period “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), I realized that the South may have lost the Civil War but the won the battle of ideology. Wilentz does a great job of encapsulating what brought me to that earlier conclusion.

It is only two paragraphs, so I will quote most of it here:

[T]he [confederate constitutional] convention designed a central government with minimal powers, except with respect to protecting slavery and the slaveholders supremacy. The Confederate plan at once weakened the executive branch (by limiting the president to a single six-year term) and strengthened it in order to curb congressional fiscal excesses (by giving the president a line-item veto over appropriation bills and by giving cabinet officers nonvoting seats in Congress). This constitution made difficult central government expenditures on anything other than national defense and delivering the mail. With a few notable exceptions about river and harbor projects (which planters needed to get their cotton safely shipped), government aid to ‘internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce’ was banned. All congressional appropriations required a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. A tariff was permitted for raising revenue but not for protecting home industries, although the provision was worded so vaguely that the distinction would have to worked out by later Confederate congresses. The constitution’s suffrage and representation provisions basically replicated those in the U.S. Constitution, leaving broad latitude to the states, but with one exception—a formal exclusion, from both state and national elections, of all person of foreign birth not citizens of the Confederacy. Suspicious outsiders would have no formal political voice.

The convention and its constitution codified what most secessionists meant when they spoke of liberty—the liberty of whites to own black slaves and take them wherever they chose [a result of “Dred Scott v. Sandford” (1857)], with only minimal obligations to the federal government. With that core conviction, the southern reaction of 1860-1861 brought about what would in time represent a momentous shift in American politics, away from the hierarchical conservatism of Federalism and old-line Whiggery, now all but vanished, and toward a southern hierarchical conservatism, based on the presumption of white supremacy, the supreme political powers of local elites, and the proclaimed virtues of ‘small government.’ (778-779)

The earlier books I mentioned on Reconstruction go into far more detail to show how these basic principles were incorporated into policy after the South “lost” the Civil War and under U.S. government military rule was restricted to a small cadre of local white politicians, carpetbaggers, copperheads, and black political leaders, who weren’t nearly as corrupt as our more popular, mythical, and racist representations would have us believe, in fact, of all groups identified here, they were by far the least corrupt.

It is this loss in the war of ideas that have benefited corporations more than anything else in American history. It is still going on and unless we begin regulating and creating rules that prevent corporations and rich individuals from an increasing aggregation of wealth while remaining basically unaccountable for the decisions they make and the actions they take we are going to be in extreme distress in the coming years, and the overall economic picture will not change much.

What I am suggesting then is a two-prong attack that dramatically increases the rules governing what corporations can and cannot do, that is, boards that not only regulate but also keep close watch on corporations and their activities, and levels of taxation of corporations and the rich that enables a dramatic reduction in the debt and greater support for social programs including retirement, unemployment, and health commensurate with those of other industrialized nations. Corporations should be restricted from moving their manufacturing to other locations, or leaving the country. They should be accountable to a regulatory agency so that Carl A. Gerstacher’s “dream” of buying “an island owned by no nation…and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow Chemical Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society,” which is finally, the dream of all companies, shall not come to pass in the midst of America [quoted in Arrighi’s “The Long Twentieth Century” (1990); 83). On the other hand, no corporation should be allowed to police themselves or to practice what Bush called “voluntary compliance”—all compliance shall be mandatory. No other industrialized nation gives such flagrant violators as we have, such leeway.

These are of course first steps but they would begin a process that could eventually lead to a more equitable distribution of wealth and a better quality of life for all. As one of the pundits said last night, what can a person buy with $8,540,000, that they can’t buy with $8,500,000. They can afford to pay that $40,000 in taxes. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have recently come out in support of the return to the Clinton era tax rates for the wealthy. In fact, contrary to what we have been told over and over again by the media, a majority of rich people have come out in support of these tax increases.

It’s obscene

Innerestin, innit? We have to go to Pravda and Al Jazeera to get the straight poop. (“Sarcosy” sounds like a malignant skin disease, btw.)

Hey Neighbor! You just better hope that handjob doesn’t hire Blackwater (OK. Xe) for “Security” there. As for what the French want, I have found them to be delightful in many ways, but they have not struck me as overly accomodating to people who aren’t exactly like them, or don’t, for example, speak French well. Next time you’re in Prague we’ll bend an elbow or two, whattayasay?

Hey Neighbor! You just better hope that handjob doesn’t hire Blackwater (OK. Xe) for “Security” there. As for what the French want, I have found them to be delightful in many ways, but they have not struck me as overly accomodating to people who aren’t exactly like them, or don’t, for example, speak French well. Next time you’re in Prague we’ll bend an elbow or two, whattayasay?

And I got pissed all over for ten years, untl I ran away.

Hey Elmer, old pal! In 1968 I was in Germany, in the army, when election time rolled around. I wrote you in on my ballot, rather than voting for either of two warmongering cretins who must not be named! So hi!

Congress is the rich for the most part.

The poverty of the spirit condemn the rich for their greed in this life.

Soulless and Godless they line their pockets at the expense of the poor. God will judge such people.

The idea of the American dream and America as the land of oppurtunity has died…

Some things to google:
“The American quality of life has been going downhill since 1975″
“Childhood poverty comes at great cost to U.S. economy”

American Roulette
In our winner-take-all casino economy, the middle class is getting royally screwed. A call to arms for populism, before it’s too late.
http://nymag.com/news/imperialcity/26014/

Our three-decade recession
The American quality of life has been going downhill since 1975.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-costanza10mar10,0,7077076.story

G. Carlin was right: “they own this fucking place”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
“It’s called the American Dream ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Laughing all the way to the bank:
http://img135.imageshack.us/i/trickledown.jpg/

Our education system is so poor that the middle class have voted themselves out of existence by supporting Republican, neo-con policies. Sadly Clinton’s signing of NAFTA did not help either. The political class of elites has sold us all down the river and due to our schools that produce idiots, we are getting screwed on both ends.

BTW: I teach at the college level. 80% of my students cannot reason their way through a simple three sentence paragraph. 90% can’t write a well-reasoned paragraph and many do not even read/write at a college level (60%). Our high schools are giant time wasting factories and now we want to lengthen the school year to do more ineffective work. We are destroying ourselves.

Look at the best private schools; they don’t have overcrowded classrooms or overworked teachers. They have low teacher-student ratios and portfolio based learning across the curriculum. They do not teach the children to be compliant slaves and sit in rows quietly at desks. The classrooms of the rich are multifaceted, open-ended, well equipped, have mixed curricula and engaged faculty from the college level. These things, especially the advanced faculty, not teachers with E.D. doctorates, but actual PhDs, can change a classroom.

In 1968 twas finishing up my tour in Vietnam. Another mistake we didn’t learn from.

Conservatives, Tea Baggers, Right Wingers, Fox News, Republicans, all of them aka Red Coats, consider this news to be a success, a winner, things are going back to the way it was before the American Revolution they cheer.

The Red Coats are having a party and they aren’t done yet. Notice the Pledge Against America the Republicans just made? Notice how Fact Check tore that Pedge to shreds? The Red Coats plan is to win big by making sure America doesn’t know what their plans are this election, because if we knew we will realize the goal of the Red Coats and that goal isn’t in the best interest of the People of the United States.

Oh dear god. I mean no disrespect but you’re not very thoughtful are you? By singling out right wing policies you infer that left-wing American policies don’t “ALWAYS help the rich at the expense of everyone else”. You need to take some time to understand that right and left wing policies are two sides of the same fascist coin. The bankers, corporations and their ilk use the sciences of agriculture, biology, ethics, and sociology to keep us feminized and controlled. Freedom is important – freedom to text message while driving and freedom to defend our property with a .44 magnum. There is a lot of danger in a nation that employs liberty as guiding philosophy. But there isn’t a danger of falling under the boots of international tyrants. Without our tax dollars AND the tax dollars of the rich. The corporations… I mean the government cannot continue spending recklessly to enslave it’s population and subjugate nation-states around the world. This is key – a feudal lord must have financing – it’s our money that provides for this European style insanity. I work with die-hard, anti-gun, pro liberal Europeans but they will NEVER go back so long as their visas hold because a 14000 dollar base ford focus costs near 30000 euros plus 5 euros a LITER of gasoline. Oh they talk about returning like Jesus to Jerusalem but they will never go back unless they’re forced to. We need to understand that both parties are seeking to divide us – it’s a martial tactic and one that works quite well (it has for 3000 years). When someone takes a crap in the punchbowl of liberty it ruins it for everyone.

The non-jews where happy at first seeing people driven from their property – FREE STUFF! People what your daddies and their daddies told you is true.. nothing is free. Take a look at the reconciliation act please. Step-up! we can rule ourselves. As old Abe Lincoln said

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

This site pisses me off because it’s so partisan when the route is so clear. Follow the constitution – it has made us great. Beloved freedom – it has made us great! Private banks and allied government will make us slaves.

And this surprises us because?…

Very helpful site. Great post, looking forward to your feed updates…

This is a really great blog. Thx to the auther