I heard Speaker Boehner say today that we are involved in three wars. A thought immediately crossed my mind. I thought there is a fourth war. There is a war on the American people. Legislation that is being crafted today is nothing but a war on the American people and life as we have known it.
I’m reading the book on France Perkins, “The Woman Behind The New Deal” by Kirstin Downey, and I came to the beginning of a chapter that really shook me up because it could have easily been written about today. Here is that paragraph from page 197 of my paperback book:
By the time the Roosevelt administration came to power, the labor movement had disintegrated, with union membership falling to 5 percent of the workforce. The American Federation of Labor had more than 4 million members in 1919 but fewer than 2 million in 1933. Companies in the 1920s had set out to break the unions, and succeeded. As joblessness mounted, the remaining workers faced falling wages and lengthened work hours. Union leaders had to fight the insurmountable combination of implacable employers, a receding economy, and hostile courts. Many lost hope.
So, let’s get back to that war that I’m talking about. After WWII our country blossomed. The GI bill allowed many people to go to college that would not otherwise have been able to go. This was an investment in our country and something had to be done because there wouldn’t be jobs for everyone after the war anyway. A lot happened to develop and improve industry in our country. Through education many people were able to elevate their lives and gain that “American Dream”. Today, all of that American Dream stuff is being assaulted. The average American has a difficult time with normal life today because there are many things happening that make it difficult financially, from the cost of gas to wages to the cost of health care.
We are fighting in the Middle East and our focus, energy and money seem to all be put over there, not here. The programs that helped get the “commoners” to the top are being systematically dismantled so there is no room for that American Dream.
The politicians have been using mind control on us for years. I cannot repeat how many times I’ve heard how inept the government is at running anything. The answer for these career politicians is to privatize everything they can get their hands on. You might be thinking why they want to privatize everything. I can give you one very good reason. Many of the people we elect for Congress are super wealthy. They own or are invested in many corporations. These are the same corporations that will be running those private companies that will be running everything from Medicare, Medicaid and who knows what else to education. http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/index.php
So, I asked my sister the other night who owns the Milwaukee Bucks? I had been to the Open Secrets page I’m sharing with you and I thought who owns the Bucks as they are listed on the site first. It’s Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat. Now, he may be a good guy. I don’t really know. I just know that it doesn’t seem to matter if they are Republicans or Democrats, many of them are just what I’m going to label “Richicrats”, you know the aristocrat, wealthy, people of our country. They certainly aren’t you and me!
We have been told that private industry can make things cheaper because they have to compete for the job, unlike the government. I find this interesting especially when you think about all of the no bid contracts that were happening in Iraq with private industry. A lot of our military spending is on private corporations like Kellogg Brown and Root or Halliburton. What is amazing is how much the military spending has increased in the last ten or so years. http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/fy11_growth_since_2001/
The only true “sacred cow” is the military, even though we spend a lot more money than any other nation. http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/US_vs_Global/
We sit back in fear and so we keep spending on that military. We have been programmed that we must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here. We say, “Whatever it takes!” to keep us safe. We can lose our liberty, our freedoms and now our way of life but hey, don’t you feel safe?
Many programs, formerly labeled sacred cows, are being dismantled by the government elite in the name of “saving our country”. We have to “share the sacrifice”. We have been told this and how is it being done? Systematically, over a period of many years unions have taken a big hit. Business went over seas and yep, it was the unions fault because after all they wanted too much money, so they had to go. The private sector unions were hit first and now of course the public sector unions have to go. This was a big first part of the plan. Health care is another problem. Business cannot pay for health care. It costs too much. What can we do about that? Single payer might be a fair option but no, we have health care which is set up to continue to feed the “for profit” insurance industry. This certainly does nothing for the rest of us. What does Rep. Ryan want to do? We’ll call it something else, like a shared sacrifice, which sounds so patriotic, but really it is dismantling Medicare and Medicaid and giving more money “vouchers” to the American people so they can “purchase” health insurance from yep, you got it, private insurance companies that are for profit. Public education has been a bastion of our society. I cannot even imagine our country without a good public education system. So, over the last several years we have been told how bad education is in the United States. What I find really interesting about this is how closely this talk aligns with the beginning of NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND. If I was a cynical person, I might be thinking that NCLB was a smokescreen for the beginning of the dismantling of public education as we know it. That couldn’t possibly be. Could it? Now, think about college education and how outrageously expensive it is to go to college today. Our kids are stuck with an ungodly amount of debt if they go to school. They end up being slaves to a system because they have to work to pay back their school loans. They take whatever job they can get so they aren’t in default of their school loans. What does Congress do about this? They take away Pell grants and put many of those loans our kids are getting in the hands of for profit companies. Our kids can’t get enough government loans, so they go the other route and they pay dearly.
Now the Republicans are hitting everything from the WIC program to Planned Parenthood. Who might use these programs? I know it won’t be any of them or their children because they don’t need them. My friend at Modern School has put up a good post showing where all that money is going that he got from the Center for American progress. I will be posting it here.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/tax_breaks_infographic.html
Yes, let’s hit the most vulnerable Americans because they don’t have the power to fight back and hey, if they’re homeless, they won’t be voting anyway! These greedy politicians have done a good job of getting us to look at our neighbors with an eye of scrutiny. We see those lazy bums living near us that just don’t want to work. We’ve been told that they just want to live off the government. They’re useless. They need to learn how to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps, stop whining and get to work” because after all we did! I’m laughing as I’m writing this because if anyone has a problem with welfare it is the corporations that get the real welfare like bank bailouts and tax breaks beyond the scope of anything the little guy next door is ever going to get. We have been told that the “job creators” have to be pampered or they will take their jobs somewhere else. Guess what? We pamper those job creators and they still take those jobs somewhere else.
This is the real war. It’s an all out assault on the American people. If you are lucky enough to have a secure job, you may think I’m a nut. However, if you have ever had to think before you paid a bill because you’re not sure you can afford to pay it right now, or you have a kid in college, or you have a health emergency, think about what I’ve written. So, here we are left with no hope. We always thought if we got a good education, we could go far in this country. Some still can, but it usually is based on who they know, not necessarily what they know.
However, there is one thing really interesting about all of this. In my mind, I see wages falling and gas prices going up which could mean that manufacturing might be able to happen in this country again. If the companies can get us down to where we are just happy to have a job, even if it pays peanuts, it might be more affordable for them to do business here. After all, the cost of oil and gas is kind of restrictive for shipping costs. We are being turned into a nation of cheap labor. Instead of China joining us and growing their middle class, we are becoming a nation of the wealthy and everyone else. Don’t worry about those factory jobs. They’re probably coming back. They just might be paying peanuts and you might have to get a couple of more jobs to pay for your home and utilities. Don’t worry because your kids can always help out. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/31/maine-republicans-seek-to-loosen-child-labor-laws/