Cents and sensibility

There is a place, a place that every conservative politician, every teabagger, every Republican should hate. In this place they have strong labor unions that protect workers, high taxes that are used to pay for universal health care, and heavy regulation on business and industry. According to the conventional wisdom, which no conservative or teabagger or Republican really possesses, this place should have a floundering economy that's mired in permanent recession or worse. This place must be hell on earth. But instead, they love this place but they don't ever want to see it's success replicated over here.

What and where is this magical place you ask? Well, it's a country over in Europe and it's an economic powerhouse even though it has stringent regulation on business and industry, even though it has 'socialized medicine,' even though it's workers are overwhelmingly represented by unions and they get three more weeks of vacation that Americans do.

It's Germany.

That's right people, Germany. By all accounts what with the strong unions, the workers getting more time off than we've ever gotten in this country, the high taxes, the redistribution of wealth, the socialized medicine, and the stringent regulations on business and industry Germany should be a basket case. According to the right wing economic pundits and the Milton Friedman acolytes, Germany should be the little country that couldn't. But guess what? Not only is Germany surviving. it's thriving. And it's doing so because of the high regulations, the high taxes, the strong unions, the universal health care, and the numerous holidays it's citizens enjoy.

The reason why the global downturn hasn't hit Germany is simple, there is still demand in Germany for manufactured goods because German workers can afford them. And German workers can afford them because they have strong jobs, employment security, a strong social safety net, and a government that is forward thinking and creating alternative energy jobs. And also because of the fact that on all German, and most European, corporate boards workers have a voice because it's required by law that workers have a seat at the top table.

Germany is doing so well in fact that the buildings and the memorial monument being built at 'Ground Zero' in New York city are being built with steel imported from Germany. Imagine that, the Germans with their highly regulated industry that relies on 'expensive' alternative energy, high unionization, with their highly taxed workforce, can still export steel cheaper than it can be made in the USA.

So the next time you hear a teabagger, a right wing TV or radio pundit scream about unions, keep in mind Germany is one of the most highly unionized countries on earth and it's an economic powerhouse. When they say that fair and equitable taxes and socialized medicine will kill an economy, remember that Germany has high taxes and government run health care and it's the economic leader in the western hemisphere. When they tell you that regulation is strangling business and industry, tell them that Germany has much more regulation that we here in the USA do and that German companies lead the world.

For years they said that if you look closely at the design of a bumblebee it shouldn't be able to fly and yet it does. Well, now I'm telling you we can have a fairly taxed country that has single payer health care for all and one that regulates business and industry in the interests of the highly unionized people. And we actually had that country once, we had it starting in the aftermath of the Great Depression and we kept it going until we allowed Reagan to dismantle it starting in the 1980's. We can do this, we can learn from the successes of post war Germany and we can be great once more.

If we are broke, here's why

The right wing incumbents and the 'serious' right wing media pundits, who are actually just shills of the ultra conservative Heritage Foundation, love to claim that as a country we're 'broke.' They use that line of bullshit to justify their anti worker, anti poor, and anti benefit agenda. Of course you and I know the reasons why we're 'broke' and that's because they gave the richest among us a tax break, they refuse to tax businesses fairly, we're saddled with two wars, and we're living with the failure of the war on drugs.

But for the sake of argument, let's say they're correct and we are broke as a nation. And if they are correct, in addition to the reasons I just gave, we're broke because Wall Street and big business with it's short term greed has wiped out the middle class. We're broke because the poor and working poor have no money and they have no money because big business outsourced their jobs, which once pulled them up to the middle class and enabled them to buy homes, cars, and send their kids to college, and they replaced them with hourly jobs at the Wal Mart that pay slave wages. Big business decided to invest it's money over in China, thanks in a large part to Milton Friedman and his daft economic policies, and in India, and in doing they stopped investing in America and American workers, and I include Canadians in that as well, since after all Canada is in north America. Big business decided to draw a line in the sand here in the USA to keep 'socialized medicine' out of the hands of the people and in doing so they increased the cost of doing business here which in turn gave them a reason to outsource jobs to China and India. And I have nothing but sympathy for my Chinese and Indian brothers and sisters who are now toiling like army ants to make all those cheap goods that are supposed to be resold here in our local Wal Marts and Walgreens. Those workers over there are getting the shaft as well because they're paid pennies on the dollar compared to what they'd have to pay Americans, which means they're working harder for less money to make shit that we're supposed to buy but can't because we're all out of work or underemployed so that big business can make record profits.

Another reason why we're broke is because of rising gas and food prices. They made sure we're a car dependent country and they know we all have to eat so they're raising prices to in order to make more profits and Wall Street will reward them by raising their stock price which means that the rich get richer while we all get soaked, yet again.

So what part of that economic model do you not find unsustainable? What part of the 'broke' they keep screaming about is really the case? We're fucking broke because of short term greed and colossal stupidity. The only way we can get on our feet as a nation again is for the labor movement to rise up and and take back the gains it made during the Great Depression and in post World War 2 America. In fact, it needs to go deeper than it did before. We need worker representatives on all boards of corporations. And don't tell me they can do it, they do it in Europe and other countries and it works out fine. We need to stop swallowing the right wing talking points and stop believing the lies about tax cuts and benefits. If tax cuts stimulated the economy and created jobs, then the first round of the Bush tax cuts would have prevented our current recession. They didn't of course and they never will. Tax cuts only work for the rich. What really works to create jobs are the two things right wingers and their conserva-Dem partners in crime hate:

• regulation
• and massive government investment in infrastructure.

Regulation doesn't strangle or stifle jobs, it spurs innovation and creativity, which are two tings that big business hates because of the inherent risk involved with innovating and being creative. Regulation drives innovation. And as we saw in the days of the New Deal, massive government investment means jobs that pay a living wage which means the workers have money to spend in their communities which means that businesses flourish and more people are able to buy houses, cars, and send their kids to college.

But how can we pay for a massive investment in our country when we're broke? Why we raise taxes of course. We end the Bush tax cuts and we end the wars of terror and the war on drugs. We use all that money to pay for single payer national health insurance and to put Americans back to work. And then when our economy is humming again, our tax revenues will go up and we can afford to keep doing what's needed to keep our country in the black.

And we'll keep doing it until we forget how we got prosperous and we start swallowing the lies that business needs less regulation and that taxes should be cut so the rich can create more jobs.

Twenty years ago in China...

Twenty years ago in China the top people in the Chinese Communist party who were running the country saw the writing on the wall. They saw that they could not run a huge state run economy any more. They saw that their economic system was going to collapse in on itself like the Russian one was doing at that time, so they decided to make drastic changes. The brought in Milton Friedman to help them make the switch to a capitalist corporation based economy. And Friedman and his cronies did the bidding of their Communist paymasters, in fact they did it very well indeed.

However, the vast majority of the people in the cities who faced the loss of their state pensions, their jobs in the state run factories, and a radically different way of life took to the streets in protest when they got wind of what was going to happen. In Beijing they took to the streets and they protested for days and the protesters congregated in the massive public space we know as Tiananmen Square. A small minority of the protesters decided to use this anti capitalist protest as a platform to protest against the Communist party that controlled China and to agitate for democracy, but by and large the vast majority of the people who were protesting in Tiananmen Square over those few days in June of 1989 were protesting against the coming capitalist take over of their economy.

The corporate media in the west, especially the corporate controlled media in the United States decided to frame the whole protest as a pro-democracy protest. They conveniently ignored all the protesters who were railing against western corporations and capitalism, and instead they focused on the tiny minority who were shouting pro democracy slogans. When the tanks rolled in and the army began shooting, the western corporate media were able to condemn the repressive measures the Communist government used to quell the protests on one hand, while on the other they were able to fill their corporate coffers with profits made off the backs of those same protesters who were forced into working in western factories in the ensuing years. The people they lionized as heroic and brave twenty years ago are slaves to the corporations that own the media outlets today.

The Chinese people don't want western style democracy now and they didn't want it twenty years ago. They wanted to keep their secure jobs. They wanted to keep their rent controlled apartments. They wanted to keep their government pensions and their way of life. They didn't want this:
or this
and they didn't want to become wage slaves and to have to work 14 hours a day in factories like this Nike shoe plant in China.
The millions of warm bodies who follow orders willingly were long coveted by western multi national corporations, they viewed the Chinese population as a mass of people just waiting to be exploited for their gain. And twenty years ago, they finally got their wish.

So while you enjoy all those goods that say 'Made in China,' you can thank those tanks that rolled into Tiananmen Square. They didn't take away democracy from the Chinese people, instead they brought in western multi national corporations so that a few people could become wildly wealthy while the rest of us lost ground. And if you really want to learn from the events in China twenty years ago, then you need to learn to stop shopping at big box retailers, stop supporting multi national corporations, and you need to start buying locally from locally owned businesses.

The return of 'Pop Culture Friday'

I didn't much care for the past few Friday's worth of pop culture questions on the Onion AV Club Blog but this week's question I liked. This week they asked:

If you could make a single book, film, or album required material to graduate from high school, what would it be?

I'd make all the high schoolers read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Ms. Klein, a current imaginary celebrity girlfriend, lays out the case for why Milton Friedman's philosophy of the free market uber alles has been a disaster for all of us the world over. It shows just how destructive the influence of the US has been in trying to implement it's favored brand of capitalism on steroids. And even though the book is unrelentingly downbeat until the very last chapter, it needs to be read over and over again until the facts sink in that unrestrained capitalism is not a good thing and that there is no such thing as a free market. Welfare is part of our existence, whether it's welfare for the poorest among us or welfare for corporations in the form of tax cuts and Ms. Klein's books shows us exactly why we need to keep the welfare for the poor and do away with welfare for the wealthy multi national corporations.

This is the end

If you have not heard of the two judges in Pennsylvania who were found guilty of taking bribes to send juvenile offenders to privatized juvenile prisons then please click here to read all about it. Go on, I'll wait while you go read it.

Oh, you're back. Wow, that was quick! You're a fast reader, actually it's one of the reasons why I like you so much.

Now, tell me, after reading that story were you surprised at all? I sure as hell wasn't, however I was shocked. I'm shocked that it doesn't happen more often. What those corrupt judges did is the logical end of the privatizing of our government. A private jail or juvenile facility makes no money if it sits empty, so why not bribe a judge to send a few hundred kids your way? There's no need to let a little thing like due process of law get in the way of a company's Gawd given right to make a profit is there? Heck, that jail was just sitting there costing the taxpayers money before, now it's full up and making some lucky stiff a few bucks, and that's the American way isn't it?

Ever since St. Reagan held our country hostage while his buddies plundered our treasury there has been a head long rush to privatize the essential services that our government provides. His toady Bush the elder continued it. So did Bill "I never met a corporation I didn't like" Clinton. And Bush the younger nearly perfected it in his years as governor of Texas and while he was flailing about as our President. They were all part of the sickness known as "the free market."

Someone got the bright idea that profit should be made off of government services and if the government was going to do it then we should let private industry take over that function of the government. So we basically auctioned off bits and pieces of our federal, state, and local governments over the past thirty years. The proponents of privatization say that the private sector can do things more efficiently than the government can. They say that not only can private industry do it better, they can do it and make a profit at it. However there two problems with that theory.

First of all private industry can't do the job of governing better than the government. The motive for profit will color every decision that's made. Tough decisions that should be made in the public interest and with the public's best interest at heart will come in a distant second to the need to make money at any cost. The need to make profit will trump the need to do what's best for all of us every time.

Secondly, the profit made in the privatization does not go back to the community or to the government. It goes instead to the bank accounts of the people who work for the companies who now do the job of our government. And the result of that is that your community suffers, as does mine. If your local government contracts with a private company to do the firefighting in your area the company is not likely to invest in top of the line fire trucks because they are not cost effective, so they buy less effective fire trucks so that they can maximize their profits. The sole purpose that private fire fighting company is in business for is to make money. But the sole purpose of a government funded fire station is to fight fires and to benefit your neighborhood. There's no profit motive and so they can focus on getting the best equipment and not have to worry about the bottom line.

The logical end of privatizing our government is that our government ends up being a government for the corporations that's run by the corporations and if you can't afford to help them make a profit then you don't get any of the benefits. As I said before, a private jail makes no money if it is empty therefore people must be arrested and imprisoned in it. A private fire fighting company makes no money by helping to prevent fires, so sooner or later they'll resort to starting them. If a private company is in charge of deciding who gets food stamps then they'll make damn sure that hardly anyone gets them because they'll no doubt be paid a bonus for trimming the fat off the food stamp rolls.

Our current system of health care is privatized. And how that's working out for us? Well, millions of Americans can't afford the expensive insurance that's out there and the ones that can afford it find out that their health care is rationed and controlled tightly by insurance companies who want to make a profit no matter what, even if it means denying life saving procedures to people who need them.

The privatizing of our government has been nothing short of a fiasco that has made our communities less safe and on the whole poorer while it makes the bank accounts of the corporations fatter and fatter. Hopefully now that America has rejected conservative politics it will also reject the privatization of our government as well.

How's that workin' for us now?

Some of you may not be old enough to remember when St. Ronnie, patron saint of greedy corporations and big business, said that government wasn't the solution to the problems facing our country and that indeed, government was the problem.  

Well, a succession of US Presidents, including Bill Clinton, after him took his mantra to heart and they cut government programs and used that money for corporate welfare and they privatized many essential governmental services.  I got to wondering how all that has worked out for us and here's what I came up with:

• We've had more food and product recalls than ever before. 
• FAA inspectors have been told to go easy on airline safety checks.
• We've had more deaths due to shoddy FDA tests on drugs than ever before.
• We are losing millions of dollars a day to companies like KBR, Halliburton, and Blackwater in what are known as "cost plus" contracts with the federal government.  Cost plus means the companies in question don't have to be competitive in price, they charge the government what ever they like for what they provide and we have to pay for it,
• Corporate America is running, or should I say ruining, the Labor Department, HUD, the FDA, the USDA, and many other cabinet level offices and departments.
• Corporate America is writing our laws and paying our legislators to vote for them.  Case in point, I refer you to the Medicare Prescription Drug program, it was written by big pharma lobbyists.  
• Our legislators are not beholden to us, they are beholden to whoever pays for their reelection campaigns.

Our government is supposed to be a government of the people, that is run by the people, for the people.  Instead ever since St. Ronnie hoodwinked us, it's become a government of the corrupt corporations, that is run by the corrupt corporations, in order to line the pockets of rich white men and women.  Reagan started it, Bush the elder continued it, Clinton went along, and Bush the idiot perfected it.  And we're all getting screwed as a result.

Maybe after the other shoe drops in the current financial meltdown we can kick these greedy bastards out and we can rebuild our country like FDR and the Democratic Party did after the Great Depression.  All those programs and laws that they enacted helped people like you and me, the working class that built this country.  And they, Reagan, Bill "NAFTA is good!" Clinton, the Bushes, and their enablers in Congress, dismantled them.  

The period after the Great Depression, which by the way was brought on by out of control capitalism which is what we have today, and after World War 2 was the most productive period ever for working class people.  Our parents and grandparents were able to climb out of poverty, buy homes, cars, and give us baby boomers great childhoods because laws were written that reigned in big business.  Big business still made money, they just didn't make as much as they wanted, some of their profits went back to their employees and to the cities and states where they had their factories and stores.  The big difference between then and now is big business doesn't care about you or me anymore, they don't have to care because they got the laws changed in their favor.  The money that used to go to our parents and grandparents and to our communities now goes to the people at the top of the corporate food chain, look at how much their pay has increased and look at how much yours has decreased.

St. Ronnie led us all down a rathole.  And then him and his buddies in big business filled the hole in with dirt.  It's time to dig out and take back our country, our economy, our Congress, and our world.  What Wall Street wants is not what's good for us, less restrictions and less taxes on big businesses and the rich is not the answer, the fact that they do not pay their fair share is the fucking problem.  It's time to make big business and the rich pay their fair share again and to have some regulation again. 

The Shock Doctrine

I finally finished reading this great book last night and you can read my review over at the Winter Reading Challenge blog.

If I ever meet you Ms. Klein, I'm giving you a high five for writing such a great book.

Oh okay, if you insist, I'll give you a medium five.

I must be doing something right

I awarded myself a gold star for pissing off the whiny right wing corporate apologists. Their henchmen have been reading my blog for awhile now and I've pissed them off so much so that they are finally commenting. One is so unhinged that I have such divergent viewpoints from him that it drove him into a fit of name calling frenzy awhile back. He's been back and he's not too happy that I am using my blog to speak out about how the corporations abuse us all. He's so angry about it that he's not only been leaving long winded comments, which I delete without reading, on my blog and he's going to other people's blogs who agree with me and he's leaving diatribes there as well. I love shaking up their corporate loving world view by putting my non corporate media approved opinions out there for them to read. I can imagine my would be tormentor and educator in his lonely little studio apartment in Queens wailing every time he sees another anti corporate post on here. Then after he gets done wailing about how wrong I am and his neighbors hit the wall to make him quiet down, he jumps on his lap top and writes his long winded drivel which I delete with out reading. Poor lil fella, I guess I hit a nerve in his empty lil life.


The other inane commenter I had recently hated my answers to the questions he asked about my post about Chile and that thug Milton Friedman's role in the coup of 9-11-73. I was nice enough to respond to his concerns and answer his questions but he didn't like it when I told the truth about "Saint" Milt. He excoriated me for relying heavily on Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine for my answers. The thing about that book is that unlike a book by Malkin or Coulter or Lucianne Goldberg Jr's new book is that Ms. Klein's book deals in facts and not opinion. Ms. Klein conducted interviews with pertinent people in the periods of history that she writes about and she documents all her other sources as needed. She did actual research and wrote a true and honest account of the damage done to this and other countries by the Chicago School of Economics wunderkind Milton Friedman. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter would do well to emulate the rigorous research and scholarship that Ms. Klein puts into her books.


It pleases me to no end that I am making a difference with my little blog.