RSS
 

What a Disgrace!

28 Apr

What a disgrace!

The very idea that Barack Obama should be called upon to provide his birth certificate to prove his eligibility for the presidency is absolutely absurd. Actually it is beyond absurd—way beyond absurd—and beyond ludicrous. Any number of adjectives could be used. You could call it demeaning. You could call it a distraction. All of those appellations are of course true. But none of them can provide an adequate description of what is going on; nor can all of them together. We have told the President of the United States, “Show me your papers!” As much as I don’t want to say it, there is one and only one way to put it. The term that best describes what is behind all this is simply pure, unadulterated

RACISM!

Oh, no, you say? It’s not that at all, you say? It’s just a simple request, you say? Everyone who runs for president should have to prove his “natural-bornness,” you say? My reply to that is this: Nonsense! Why have none of you asked for that proof before? Why have you never said, “Show me your papers!” before? Why, now? Why, only now that we have a black president, is this proof being requested? You know as well as I do why! The answer is simple and it’s as plain as the nose on your face! The answer is

RACISM!

There will be many excuses. I’ve already spoken of some of them. But they all boil down to one thing. They say “He’s not one of us. He’s different from us. He wasn’t, you know, born in America. He’s not, you know, a Christian. He’s, you know, a Muslim or a Kenyan.” What is really meant by those nice sounding, euphemistic phrases is this: “He’s, you know…..BLACK!” To deny this is to deny reality. “Show me your papers!” What we have here is nothing but

RACISM!

As you might recall, we fought a war about this 150 years ago. I know, I know, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery at all; it was all about states’ rights. Rubbish! It was about slavery. And slavery was abolished because of that hard fought war. And we have since seen many lives lost in the struggle to ensure the civil rights of all our citizens. And here we are in the 21st century. And here we are, 222 years after our remarkable Constitution was created, still listening to people like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and that bullying, bloviating buffoon, Donald Trump calling for the duly elected president of our beloved country, the United States of America to prove that he is a natural-born citizen and eligible to hold the office he was elected to—and to prove that he is “one of us” and not “one of them” because he is, after all, BLACK! “Show me your papers!” I can call that nothing less than what it is, and what it is is nothing but

RACISM!

Some have called the 3/5 compromise about slavery that was included in our Constitution in order to form the original 13 state union our “original sin.” And that it was! And we continue to be plagued by it. As long as these despicable remnants of that original sin, racism, continue to exist in our country, we will never live up to the full potential that our founding fathers envisioned for us. They did expect us to become that “city on a hill” that we hear so much about, and they set the foundation for us to become that city. But as long as we resort to living in the past as we seem wont to do, we will never achieve that goal. Because that past holds not only the evil seed that was planted in our Constitution, it holds the evil fruit that that seed has ripened into—the fruit of our doom,

RACISM!

“Show me your papers!”

What a disgrace!

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

 

They Created the Deficits! It Isn’t ABOUT Deficits!

13 Apr

I was going to write something exactly like this about this subject. Now I don’t have to. Dave Johnson has done it for me. This article lays bare the real and ongoing motives behind the Republicans’ “budget crisis” and what they’re doing to destroy the middle class in this country. Don’t fall for it!

Read this and other progressive articles at Campaign for America’s Future

“They Created the Deficits. It Isn’t ABOUT Deficits.
by Dave Johnson, April 7, 2011

“Watch what we do, not what we say” — famous quote from a Nixon official, explaining that they make up the stuff they say to distract and divert people from understanding what they are doing.

They say they are trying to cut deficits. They are doing something else entirely.Remember, they created the deficits, on purpose, so they could use them now to get what they want. Remember, Bush said his deficits were “incredibly positive news.” Remember, Reagan said it was about “cutting the government’s allowance.” They created the deficits, on purpose.

Now, with their “strategic deficits” ruining us, corporate conservatives have whipped the public into a deficit-fear hysteria. They are using that hysteria to push through dramatic changes to our country that have nothing whatsoever to do with deficits, and even in many cases make the deficits worse. It isn’t about deficits.

In Wisconsin they claimed they were outlawing public-employee unions as a deficit-fighting measure — after the unions had given in on every demand to cut pay and benefits. The plan was to defund the unions, not to cut deficits. They only said it was about deficits, as cover. It wasn’t about deficits. They used the deficits as a smokescreen to get what they really want.

In Washington they are using a supposed deficit fight to defund the Environmental Protection Agency and Planned Parenthood and public broadcasting and so many other things that We, the People (government) do for each other. They are proposing to abolish Medicare! They want to privatize or at least cripple Social Security. They are gutting Medicaid, Food Stamps and regulatory enforcement. They say it is to cut the deficit. It isn’t about deficits. They created the deficits to get them to this point.

And as we go through these fights over “deficits” do not ever forget that theyjust finished passing even more huge tax cuts for the rich. It isn’t about deficits.

They say it is about deficits, they do something else entirely. They always say it is about whatever the public is stirred up about, and then push for their agenda. Always. It’s what they do.

“Nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes” - Tom DeLay, 2003

If the public was all worried about green cheese on the moon they would be saying that the way to fight green cheese on the moon is to defund unions, abolish Medicare, get rid of regulations, cut taxes on the rich, etc. Don’t be distracted, don’t be diverted. It isn’t about deficits. They created the deficits.”

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Politics

 

How to Fix the Budget! It’s Not What You’ve Been Told!

03 Apr

Let me make it perfectly clear before we start out that I am very much a progressive, a liberal, a proud Democrat. Then let me tell you why. A wise man once said that you can never stand still. You can either move forward or you can move backward. In this world there is no such thing as standing still. Liberals move forward; conservatives claim to maintain the status quo, but in reality they move backward.

Today conservatives no longer practice the “standing still” type of moving backwards; they are actively working to take us back to the 18th century or even further back. The far right fringe has taken charge, and the adults in the party are seemingly afraid to speak up to reclaim their once respectable Republican heritage. This is most evident in their laughable antics as they make an effort to come up with a plan to balance the national budget. Ronald Reagan would probably be ejected from the party; Lincoln would most certainly be.

They mistakenly call our current out-of-balance situation a spending crisis. That is false. And it is a lie that they expect the American people to believe. If they can get the American people to believe it, they can get them believe that it I’ll take “shared sacrifice” to overcome it. They neglect to say that this budget crisis is one of their own making; a crisis manufactured by giving monstrous tax cuts to business and the already incredibly wealthy, the wealthiest 2% among us who already have the largest share of our national riches since the 1920s. And that that richest 2% will take no part in this “shared sacrifice.” This increasingly wide gap between the rich folks and the rest of us is a recipe for disaster! Remember what happened at the end of that decade, the 1920s, the so-called “Gilded Age”? A period none of us would like to see happen again—the Great Depression!

What we have today is not a spending crisis at all. What we have today is a revenue crisis! The obvious answer to this manufactured crisis is to reverse the policies that got us into it. That would be to let the Bush tax cuts on the upper 2% expire. In a reality based world, that would have happened last year. What we got out of that agreement was much less than we should have.

In 1941 Richard Gephardt made a very perceptive comment: “If you want to live like a Republican, you have to vote for Democrats.” Very perceptive indeed! And yet the country is full of otherwise seemingly intelligent people who consistently vote for Republicans. The only explanation is that they have heard the lies so many times that they have come to believe them. Somehow I think a certain Mr. Hitler would be proud of how well these Republicans have learned from him and adopted his tactics. But I digress. That’s a topic for another day!

Today’s Republican party inexorably lacks what President George H. W. Bush termed “the vision thing.” Their ideas are consistently small-minded, short-sighted and mean spirited. Rather than having the courage to suggest raising taxes as they should be doing, they have instead chosen to attack the reeling middle class, an easy mark for them since their masters are the large corporations and the very rich, those who contribute to their campaigns and fill their pockets, and to whom they are very much beholden. They seem to have convinced many in the middle class that it is in their best interests to hand their money and their freedom over to the very wealthy. Does this sound as if I am suggesting something along the lines of class warfare? Well, I guess I am. But this is a war declared not by me, but by the rich on all of you, the good people of the middle class. It is high time they began paying their own way!

As I’ve said one way to help achieve a balanced budget is return our tax structure to some semblance of fairness. But there are in fact places where we spend far too much. These are not education (Aren’t our schools producing enough poorly educated kids now?), social programs (Don’t we have enough families without enough to eat and losing their homes?), environmental programs (Ever hear of climate change?) or infrastructure (Remember the collapsing bridges and crumbling roads?); these programs need MORE funding, not less. These are investment areas, not expenditure areas. A failure to invest significantly in these areas is foolishly short-sighted and a definite commitment to moving our country backward. The failure of Florida to joyously grab the high-speed rail project is an example of extreme tea party myopia on the part of Gov. Rick Scott. John Fitzgerald Kennedy challenged us to get to the moon by the end of the decade—and we did it! If today’s attitude had been the operative one in President Kennedy’s day, he might have challenged us to get to Omaha by the end of the decade—and we would probably have only made it to Memphis!

One of the places we spend far too much is defense. We are senselessly involved in two wars and in two half wars. The two whole wars are of course Afghanistan and Iraq; the two half wars are Pakistan and, now, Libya. It is long since time for us to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are both the vestiges of failed foreign policy and only serve to weaken our position and lower our standing in the eyes of the world. The generals talk of “winning” but there is no winning there. The only thing we are accomplishing is throwing good money after bad (the budget crisis connection) and killing and maiming our own American soldiers, sailors and airmen, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis. Pakistan is a dire threat to the national interests of the United States, but is probably best handled without direct military intervention, and Libya is hopefully short term commitment that can be taken care of by providing support to our NATO and UN allies.

The United States is responsible for 46.5% of the world’s expenditures on defense. The next biggest spender is China—at a measly 6.6%.* Hmmm! Maybe this would be a good place to look. We no longer have the Soviet Union to contend with now. In fact today they come in at number five with 3.5%. Not much of a threat anymore, I’d say. And despite the phenomenal costs of those two “whole” wars we’re fighting, we really have a very poor ROI, don’t we? The so-called war on terror? That seems to best taken care of by good police work. (Hey, that’s what John Kerry told us in 2004!) So there’s not much point in continuing down the zillion dollar expenditure path, I would suggest.

Another place ripe for the picking is health care. You’ll notice that I didn’t say Medicare or Medicaid. The real problem is not with Medicare or Medicaid. They are shackled by the same thing that the rest of the health care industry is shackled by: the rocketing cost of health care in this country. Nickel and diming Medicare and Medicaid will not solve any fiscal or budgetary problems. On the contrary any attempt to do so will only make the lives of many millions of Americans more miserable than they already are but will also serve to mask the real problem of the runaway cost of health care.

Unless the Congress stops trying to fool the American people by shaving costs around the edges and gets down to attacking the real “800 pound elephants in the room,” there will be no reduction in the budget deficit to amount to anything and the national debt will continue to balloon.

Did I mention Social Security? No, I didn’t. Don’t need to. There is no problem with Social Security. This is a self-supporting program that workers pay into in order to have something to depend on when they retire. This is a program that has sufficient reserves for many, many years to come. Several studies show that whatever negative balance it is experiencing at the moment will be righted by the changing demographics of the future. Again, a topic for another day.

So there you have it, dear readers. The secret to solving our budget problem—and all our problems— is to think BIG! Don’t be taken in by those small minded “leaders” who tell you that the only way to solvency is to cut back on educational opportunities for our children; or on support for those less fortunate among us; or on new energy initiatives; or on building and repairing our roads, bridges and railroads; or on investing in the internet and modern-day communications. They’re pulling your leg. No, they’re flat out lying to you! They would like to tell you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. But I tell you that the man behind the curtain is a charlatan. He will lead you and your country down the road to ruin.

Think BIG not small. We are Americans. YES WE ARE! We can remove any obstacle in our way. YES WE CAN!

—OGGIE

* Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook 2010.

 
No Comments

Posted in Politics

 

No to Term Limits; Yes to Public Financing

22 Mar

I occasionally get a stray email asking me to support a Constitutional amendment instituting term limits for members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives. And every time I do I chuckle and shake my head. This is an idea that is frequently proposed by people who think that it will make them look wise—but it doesn’t. This is an idea that will not only not fix the problems that our Congress faces, but an idea that poses insurmountable dangers to our democracy. Let me explain.

The problem with Congress is money. Or should I say the pursuit of money by individual congressmen from lobbyists. The problem is most assuredly not the length of time they spend as civil servants. In fact, quite to the contrary. The longer a legislator remains in the legislature, the more adept he becomes at his job and the better he becomes at legislating. That should come as no surprise to anyone. Practice makes perfect, after all. By limiting his time by law to 12 years—or any length of time for that matter—we automatically throw the baby out with the bath water. That makes no sense. We have in this country built-in mechanisms for removing incompetence from public office. These mechanisms are called elections. Making these mechanisms work as they are designed to requires an educated and informed electorate, as Thomas Jefferson warned us, an electorate that understands the issues and digs deep enough to know where each candidate stands on them. That, though, is a topic for another day.

From the moment they initially announce for a run for office, and in most case long before, politicians become beggars at the troughs of anyone who will give them money. That of course is almost certainly not you or me, but rather the likes of big business, big labor, big anything. And, because all the other candidates are begging for the same money at the same troughs, the competition is fierce and the money chase is won by those who spend the most time and effort doing it and by those who—and this is important!—by those who promise the most in return for that money.

There are at least two problems with this way of doing things:

1. Once they are elected, these legislators are of course mightily beholden to those whose troughs they dined at. Again that is not you or me. That is that part of corporate America who have so cheerfully given their financial aid. You didn’t really think they did that out of the goodness of their hearts, did you? They really want to get something back from that congressman they financed. And they expect it—in spades. After all they did buy him, didn’t they? Did I say “buy?” I did!

2. The other problem with this way of doing things is that, because of the astronomical cost of running for office nowadays, they spend a good part of their time—a very good part of their time, in some cases over half their time—operating their begging machines in order to finance their next campaigns. And of course they spend the rest of their time (after all there are only so many hours in a day) doing the will of their financial backers—that is to say, working for someone other than you and me.

I ask you what good would term limits do? The answer to the question is of course “none at all!” As I’ve said, the problem with the system we have in place is not the length of time they are in office, but the amount of money involved. Any attempt to put a limit on someone’s time will only make them squeeze their money grubbing into a much shorter period of time. They then would only have a few years to grab all the money they can. You know, make hay while the sun shines. That sort of thing. That makes them even more dependent on their benefactors, those other guys. And allows them even less time to do their jobs. And certainly unable to do them intelligently. Why? Because they haven’t had time to learn it, with all that begging and all. What we will then have is perpetually rookie Congress. Don’t believe me? Take a look at what we have in Tallahassee! That’s what you get with term limits: the fourth largest state in the union, a state with California issues and a backwater legislature to solve them!

So, what would I propose instead? Since our Supreme Court has blitheringly come to the nonsensical and damaging conclusion that corporations are people and money is speech, it would necessarily be a Constitutional amendment. The amendment would provide for the mandatory public financing of all federal elections with far less money involved (and far fewer annoying TV commercials and phone calls to boot—another great benefit!) and prohibit the use of all private funding. Any attempt to infuse private funds into an electoral campaign would result in stiff and mandatory jail sentences for the perpetrators. Simple and concise. That would be prohibitively expensive, you say? Not so! It would cost far less than what we are doing right now. No more of your hard earned money spent on outlandish boondoggles or outrageously expensive benefits for those rich benefactors.

And here’s the best part: those congressmen would now be working for you and me—for us!. We would really be their employers. We’re not who they work for now, you know! They work for those other guys now! Think about it!

So, would I support a Constitutional amendment to fix our broken electoral system? You bet, I would! It really needs fixing. Would I support an amendment instituting term limits for Congress? Not on your life! But would I support an amendment instituting public financing of elections? In a New York minute!

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

 

GOP Injects Politics into the School Board!

21 Mar

So the Republican Executive Committee, under the ever specious leadership of Blaise Ingoglia, has decided it has the authority and wisdom to evaluate and recommend candidates for the School Board position vacated by Mr. Pat Fagan. I would argue that the REC has neither the authority nor the requisite wisdom to do so.

The position up for grabs, and sure to be filled by one of Gov. Rick Scott’s cronies, is by law a nonpartisan one. It was made this way for a reason. It was made this way because of the importance of public schools in the education and development of the eager minds of our children and grandchildren. Our children and grandchildren are our future and our most valuable resource. We can’t afford to minimize the significance and the longstanding consequences of the actions we take as we choose the way we mold these young minds. To politicize this process is to cheat those children out of a quality education and to fail them miserably.

Now it seems that Mr. Ingoglia is attempting to place this decision smack dab in the middle of the political arena by gathering a group of his right-wing henchmen to recommend to the governor a candidate “who would be the best for the students while being a good steward of taxpayer dollars.” Such arrogance is really quite amazing. The idea that their choice of a candidate would be “best for the students” rather than best for Mr. Ingoglia, his pocketbook and his party is absurd. What is also absurd is the idea that they would have a cogent idea of what it is to be a “good steward of taxpayer dollars.” Their record in this arena has consisted primarily of giving huge tax breaks to developers while cutting services to the middle class in this county.

Mr. Singer, the Chairman of the DEC, has it right. This interjection of politics into the school board arena is “improper” to put it mildly. If not Illegal, it is surely unethical. Certainly no one could object if a group of concerned citizens chose to interview prospective candidates. But the Republican party? This is troubling and political indeed! And shameful! Even Mr. Scott should be aghast at this and should tell Mr. Ingoglia to back off!

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Politics

 

Ybor City Museum

27 Dec

On Friday we took a trip with our daughter Cindy and her husband Alan to the Ybor City Museum.

Ybor City is a National Historic Landmark District. If you live in the Tampa Bay area or have visited here and haven’t been to the Ybor City Museum you’ve missed a wonderful opportunity to learn about the history of the city and area.

The exhibits of the museum illustrate the founding of Ybor City by Vicente Martinez-Ybor. Ybor City is a quintessential and important part of the identity of the city of Tampa, the Tampa Bay area and the state of Florida, and relate interesting and little known anecdotes about the history of the United States.

Tampa was at one point “The Cigar Capital of the World” thanks in large part to those immigrants from Cuba who were displaced by the Ten Years War, the war for Cuban independence from Spain.  The part the city played in the “Spanish American War” and that war’s Cuban front was significant and helped shaped the United States into the country it is today.

You’ll learn about the different social clubs, one for each nationality living in the city (two for the Hispanic inhabitants). Each of these clubs provided for the social, educational and medical needs of its members.

And Senor Ybor furnished the workers with their own houses which they were encouraged to buy rather than rent, a feature that ensured a stable, loyal work force.

At the museum store next door you’ll find among other things the world’s longest cigar, a creation of Wallace and Margarita Reyes of 193.3 feet in length.  And you’ll be able to pick up a copy of “La Gaceta”  the nation’s only tri-lingual newspaper, printed in English, Spanish and Italian.  And it’s a real bargain too:  only 50 cents for all three languages!

And don’t forget to pick up a supply of hand-rolled cigars if you’re a cigar afficionado!

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Places I Like

 

Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Year

24 Nov

The above headline appeared in today’s “New York Times”. American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, the highest since records began being kept in 1960.

And yet these companies continue their lack of hiring and investment. Not only do they fail to provide the jobs that they should be providing, they continue to blame the Obama administration for their ills, the same Obama administration that rescued them and the rest of the country from falling into the abyss of a second Great Depression.

They, and others, continue as well to propose the notion that we must immediately cut government spending in order to achieve deficit reduction and a balanced budget. While balanced budgets are the end to which we should all, including the federal government, aspire, this is neither the time nor are the conditions currently in place to do that. One of the chief reasons we have the huge deficit that we do is the fact that rather than investing in our country, we have engaged in unnecessary and unjustified wars around the globe. We have lost a deplorable number of American lives, have caused an intolerable number of civilian deaths and spent incredible amounts of dollars in a quixotic quest to wage the “War on Terror”, a misnomer if ever there was one. Such a war cannot be won by any stretch of the imagination. The results so far have been our loss of credibility in the eyes of our allies and the rest of the world, destruction of an enormous magnitude and the gift to terrorist organizations around the world of the best recruitment tool they have ever had. Are we safer because of this “War on Terror”? Absolutely not! All we have achieved is the opportunity and responsibility to do some nation building in remote parts of the world where we have wreaked colossal destruction and where the population doesn’t want us there in the first place.

While these wars have been going on (and for some time before actually), we have sorely neglected investing in our own nation. The state of our infrastructure is deplorable. Bridges are falling into rivers and highways are collapsing while we build in Iraq and Afghanistan. Except for our post-secondary schools, our education system could well be termed the laughingstock of the civilized world. Our race to the bottom is evident in a “CBS News” report titled “US Education Slips in Rankings”.

We have fallen behind and will continue to fall behind, approaching third world status, until we come to our senses and begin to invest in our children and our infrastructure.

And, while it is not only the federal government that is at fault, it is the country’s radical lurch to the extreme right that leads our way to our obscurity and our demise. Candidates’ constant pledge of “no new taxes” and “tax cuts for the rich” are the prime reason we no longer seem to be able to afford these investments. Until the pandering that occurs because no one has the courage to tell the voters that we need investment and “someone (you, the voter) has to pay for it” stops, this slide will continue. But perhaps the larger part of the problem is the private sector. While the Chamber of Commerce and the corporations of the private sector continue to lament the “failures” of the Obama administration, this same administration continues to be an extremely business friendly administration, one of the friendliest on record. Yet in spite of the record profits that are reported in the “New York Times” article, these businesses do not reinvest in our (yours and my) future. They sit on them and expect more tax cuts. Not only do they whine about needing more tax cuts, they want to rob from the old and the poor by raiding Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. What kind of good citizens and patriots are these!

Lest you get the idea that I am advocating reckless spending, let me explain something to you that I learned long ago. There are two types of expenditures: expenses and investments. Expenses are typically items that provide very little return on investment (ROI). Prudent investments, on the other hand, are items that result in extremely high ROI. For example families save or borrow money to send their children to college. This is a prudent investment (in most cases at least) because the amount of money spent (invested) is repaid to the child many-fold during the course of his life in increased wages.

Make no mistake, any money spent on improving our education system and rebuilding our infrastructure is money well spent. So is money spent on the health of the nation’s citizens. Not to do so is foolish beyond comprehension. We are being very foolish!

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Politics

 

Robert Reich’s “America’s Two Economies”

06 Nov

America’s Two Economies, and Why One Is Recovering and the Other Isn’t.

The next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the “American economy” is doing these days, watch your wallet.

There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.

The one that’s mending is America’s Big Money economy. It’s comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.

The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That’s partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It’s essentially free money to America’s Big Money economy.

Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They’re merging and acquiring other companies.

And they’re going abroad in search of customers.

Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They’re selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America’s biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.

So don’t worry about America’s Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America’s largest corporations are heading upward.

But there’s another American economy, and it’s not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.

Last Friday’s jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That’s better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 34,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.

Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force – including everyone too discouraged to look for a job – we’re down about 22 million.

Or to put it another way, we’re still getting nowhere on jobs.

One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn’t working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.

And that means the bills aren’t getting paid.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans – 53 percent – are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.

Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.

Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.

And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can’t refinance their homes. They can’t get home equity loans. Banks don’t want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.

And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.

Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.

Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren’t so sure. The economy has been so bad they’re angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.

But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Politics

 

“Tone Deaf in DC”

06 Nov

The election is over. The American people have spoken. And no one in Washington is listening.

The Republicans are mired in their fantasy world of squeezing the government smaller when it needs to be expanded to get us out of the ditch they drove us into. They say that their “absolute first priority” is to repeal the long-awaited and long-needed Health Care Bill that provides so many excellent benefits for so many Americans. And their other “absolute first priority” is to ensure that our President, Barack Obama, does not get the second term that he so richly deserves. Curious, isn’t it, that prior to the election they were screaming “jobs, jobs, jobs” and now that they’ve been elected, their priorities have changed from something beneficial to the American people to some entirely political rant, designed to rouse the rabble.

My dear Democratic Party seems at times to be in disarray. Many of the members of the Democratic party, in their sometimes typical, timid way, exhort their fellows to be more like Republicans. Why in God’s name would we want to do that!

Neither party seems to have a coherent plan at the moment to get the country out of its doldrums and back on the road to recovery. It’s time we Democrats got back to the basic concepts that our party was founded on and that we know work. Be proud to be liberal progressives! We’ve done a lot for this country! And can do a lot more!

Listen to Jim Singer, Chairman of the Hernando County Democratic Executive Committee! Follow Jim and other Democratic voices on the “A New Beginning” blog on their website. Adopt his principles of outreach to the community and assistance to those of us who are less fortunate than we are! That’s what will pay off for the country and for the Democratic Party!

Becoming “republicanized” is not our role. If people want to vote for a conservative with Republican ideas, why would they vote for a cheap imitation? We need to offer them a choice—a choice between moving the county backward (the Republican way) or moving the country forward (the Democratic way)!

To borrow a phrase from Wilford Brimley, It’s the right thing to do!

Here’s an article by Bob Herbert of the New York Times called “Tone Deaf in DC” Read it. This is the right thing to do too!

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Politics

 

Robert Reich’s “The Perfect Storm”

19 Oct

Better pay attention to Robert Reich’s article “The Perfect Storm“.

We middle class Americans are subsidizing the upper class in record amounts. This upward redistribution of wealth does absolutely nothing to create jobs or make businesses flourish. In reverse Robin Hood fashion, it steals from the poor and gives to the rich. It make us all poorer.

Despite what you hear, much of this money that you’re giving up and allowing to be funneled to the those corporate elites dwelling in upper class America is funding the Tea Party movement in an attempt to take over the country by capitalizing on the fears and concerns of ordinary Americans. We’re on the verge of completely ceding our hard won democracy to the plutocratic thugs who want to see the rest of us as lackeys and serfs.

Read, pay attention and wake up, America!

—OGGIE

 
No Comments

Posted in Politics

 
« Older Entries