I hope this clears up a few things for some of you

Not that he'll ever do it...

...but if Obama really wanted to get the country behind him he'd do something drastic to put Americans back to work like starting another New Deal type jobs program. He's far too corporate and timid to do anything so bold but when you stop and think about it, it's just what we need.

Corporations are sitting on a mountain of cash and not hiring because there is no demand for what they are selling. Yet there is a huge demand for for public infrastructure to be rebuilt of fixed. There is a huge need to our country to get off foreign oil and other fossil fuels that are destroying the land and water. So if Obama, independent of Congress, started a jobs program that put people back to work fixing our schools, bridges, national parks, and other public institutions and if he mandated that all federal buildings and all buildings that house government offices and or operations install solar panels that are made in America and otherwise 'greened', then people would have money to spend on things like electric cars, flat screen TV's, houses, clothes, and other things.

Some will scream that what I am proposing is 'socialism' and they're right. I am advocating a blend of socialism that will put Americans to work because it's obvious that the private sector isn't going to do it. And frankly, it's not their mandate to fix and rebuild our public infrastructure, that is the job of the federal government. Now, like back in the 1930's, government has to step in and do what the private sector won't and when it does, the country will be better off in all ways.

Now, how do we pay for such a thing? First, we end the Bush/Obama tax cuts. Second, we cut defense spending, most all foreign aid, farm subsidies, and we use half of the money to hire Americans to fix up and rebuild America. Third, we legalize marijuana, tax it, and use that money in the new New Deal.

It's not like we don't know whether my plan will work or not. It will. And we know that because it has in the past, massive public spending on putting Americans to work on public works brought us out of the Great Depression and it gave us things like dams, schools, bridges, highways, national parks, and more. And the people who worked on those jobs spent that money on things like houses, cars, clothes, their kid's education. They didn't sit on that money like private sector corporations. We know from the past 30 years that trickle down economics doesn't work for most of us, it does however work for those at the top. We know that cutting the taxes of the wealthiest and on the corporations doesn't create any jobs. But we do know that aggressive on federal public works projects puts people to work, benefits all sectors of the economy, and it lifts people out of poverty.

And if people are too busy working and enjoying the fruits of their employment, then they are too busy to riot, I'm just saying.

This is why they lost two world wars

Sometimes when you look for hot war action, it finds you. Where you least suspect it.

Pity the poor conservatives

I was mulling over the huge legislative legacy of the late Sen. Teddy Kennedy (Immigration Act of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1967, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Occupational Health and Safety Act and Low Income Heating Energy Assistance Program in 1970, The Cancer Act in 1971, Title IX, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act and the Crime Act, all in 1994, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Act, the Pediatric Graduate Medical Education Act, both in 1999, etc, etc, etc. Hat tip to Vikkitikkitavi for reminding me of all the great stuff Kennedy did.) and over all the other things that liberals and progressives have done for working and poor people (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Workman's Comp. laws, work place safety rules, 40 hour work week, paid vacations, collective bargaining, etc, etc, etc.).

So we on the left side of the political spectrum have much to be proud of and that's one hell of a base to work off of as we try to get single payer not for profit universal health care for all in the USA and as we work to reign in big business and bring sanity back to the market place.

Then I got to thinking, what do conservatives have to be proud of? What accomplishments do they have to write about on their blogs? The denial health care to their fellow citizens? Being on the wrong side of yet another civil rights fight in the gay marriage issue? Do they clap their hands with glee when taxes on the rich are cut once again, even though most of them will never see one of those tax cuts? Are they proud of the hundreds of thousands dead Iraqi's? Are they proud of the torture and lies of the Bush/Cheney administration?

Fox Noise and talk radio may constantly trash liberals and progressives but year after year, time after time, we're the ones who have helped the most people, while the conservatives have helped only the wealthy.

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.

That boy ain't right

So Willard Mittens Romney is gone now, he's "suspended" his campaign. Is suspended Mormon speak for "quit?" Or is it the new right wing buzz word?

It really should come as a shock to anyone that he spent so much money and got so little in return for it. Look at the guy, what does he look like to you? He looks like a used car sales manager to me. He looks like the guy who "approves" the great deal the other slimy slaesperson just made you on that '79 Cordoba you've had your eye on. I'll say one thing for him though, he gets his "pack up and quit" gene from his father. He's his daddy's boy in that regard all right.
Willard's daddy was a Michigan businessman who ran for Governor of my home state in the 1960's. He won and for all the world for a time he looked like just the man to break the grip LBJ and the Democrats had on this country. He talked openly about how he'd use his business acumen to fix this nation if he were President. He started going around key states in 1967 on speaking tours and he finally confirmed later that year that he was going to run for President in 1968.

But then one hot summer night in 1967 in Detroit something happened that made the bottom fall out of his Presidential plans, the city erupted in race riots. A Rutger University website about the riots gives this nice summary of the early events, "The Detroit Riot of 1967 began when police vice squad officers executed a raid on an after hours drinking club or “blind pig” in a predominantly black neighborhoods located at Twelfth Street and Clairmount Avenue. They were expecting to round up a few patrons, but instead found 82 people inside holding a party for two returning Vietnam veterans. Yet, the officers attempted to arrest everyone who was on the scene. While the police awaited a “clean-up crew” to transport the arrestees, a crowd gathered around the establishment in protest. After the last police car left, a small group of men who were “confused and upset because they were kicked out of the only place they had to go” lifted up the bars of an adjacent clothing store and broke the windows. From this point of origin, further reports of vandalism diffused. Looting and fires spread through the Northwest side of Detroit, then crossed over to the East Side. Within 48 hours, the National Guard was mobilized, to be followed by the 82nd airborne on the riot’s fourth day. As police and military troops sought to regain control of the city, violence escalated. At the conclusion of 5 days of rioting, 43 people lay dead, 1189 injured and over 7000 people had been arrested."

I was alive during those riots and I remember how the city was on lockdown for months afterward. It was like a war zone and everyone's nerves were frayed as we all waited for the other shoe to drop. Almost over night white folks began their flight out of the city and into the suburbs and as things grew more and more tense in the city itself people began to question George Romney's handling of the crisis. He showed himself to be a friend of the upper classes when he saw to it that places like Grosse Pointe were heavily defended against the maurauding black folks while the inner city, which was where I lived at the time, was left to smolder and burn.

Not long after the riots ended the national press wrote off Romney and he quietly scaled back his speaking tours as he tried to mend his reputation by attending to things in Michigan. No one blamed him, well no one in their right mind anyway, for being behind the riots but many blamed him, and rightly so, for his clumsy handling of the situation during and after the riots.

So basically when the going got tough, George Romney bailed on his Presidential plans, just like his son did. Sometimes it's too true that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. So long Mitt! I'm hoping you'll come back for the 2012 or 2016 Presidential race, maybe by then you'll be the left wing independent you were back in the days of Saint Ronnie and when you tried to run to the left of Ted Kennedy. Either way, I know the blood of a long line of quitters and losers runs through your veins.