Wake up, little Susie, wake up
We’ve both been sound asleep, wake up, little Susie, and weep
The movie’s over, it’s four o’clock, and we’re in trouble deep
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, we gotta go home.
-Everly Brothers-
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I'm relatively sure that our new "save your way out of unemployment, no job needed" austerity program will stifle the economy and thwart any meaningful recovery and that a good share of the people who held the gun to our heads to push this sorry debt ceiling bill, not only know it too, but desperately want that outcome so as to help push the Tar Baby out of office and privatize the presidency in 2012.
The Tea Terrorist Great Leap Backward may not let 20 million people starve as Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward did, but it's not only not going to put bread on the table, for many of us, that table may be a park bench.
Victory is so close they can almost taste it. Unemployment is so high so that millions don't have the money it takes to be heard, don't have the money it takes to buy the products that make the economy expand -- but corporate profits are up -- way up. Call your congressman? Write your Senators? Sorry Charlie, teabags come with strings attached and unless your letter is stapled to a million dollar check you might as well save the postage and stationery.
Corporate profits are up, and that's OK. We're selling overseas and manufacturing overseas and American workers are redundant -- and face it, America and what we used to think of as the American way of life, the American Dream, is a millstone around the corporate neck. It's a global economy now and global corporations owe no allegiance to the United States even if they're nominally American companies. They will use every strategy they can to avoid paying taxes in the US or benefiting workers who can be replaced and exploited cheaply in China and India. We're witnessing one of those strategies today. The only people not in danger of being outsourced or laid off or screwed out of benefits and pensions are the legislators and judges and corporate propagandists on the payroll and sorry, little Suzie Teabag, that ain't you. Wake up.
Now all that Social Security money and that Medicare money go right back into the economy, purchasing goods and services immediately. Minimum wage workers spend every dime they make. Nobody hoards food stamps. They don't want that. They don't want money in your hands, since it's money that might give you some political power, since it's money they could sit on and hoard and invest abroad with no taxes paid. Think it will go to creating American jobs? Are you stupid?
Your taxes aren't going down, theirs is. They're not creating any jobs you're eligible for or would accept, and your cost of living will be going up as the Dollar shrivels like Limbaugh's penis and your freedom and your rights and your privacy and your political voice and your retirement plans are dissolving in the rapidly rising water.
And they like it that way.
Something that old library-haunting grouch Karl Marx understood well might be appropriate here: the tendency of our economic system is EVER GREATER CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL IN EVER FEWER HANDS. Capitalism, when allowed to work without any oversight or brakes, tends towards monopoly, and serves the purposes of only a few rather than creating and distributing wealth broadly the way its founding theorists hoped it would. A couple hundred years of experience since Adam Smith's day confirm that claim, but since today's loudest defenders of the system would never accept the evidence of anything so pedestrian as history, nothing gets through to them.
ReplyDeleteNo large-scale system developed by human beings is perfect, and the arrogance of anyone who would suggest otherwise is as vast as deep space. Yet millions right here in River City do just that, to their own cost and just about everyone else's.
"Capitalism, when allowed to work without any oversight or brakes, tends towards monopoly, and serves the purposes of only a few rather than creating and distributing wealth broadly the way its founding theorists hoped it would."
ReplyDeleteFunny how even the Chinese Communists have noticed that distributing wealth is the goal of capitalism as much as the goal of Communism - but to us? Well, we can't get all the way through the word distribute. We're hung up on the concentrate part, just as Feudalists were.
We have an obscene and quasi-religious faith in that invisible hand even when it picks our pockets or even when it has us by the throat -- I mean cars and airplanes tend to go straight when you let go of the controls, but sometimes they need a visible hand to correct the course or to avoid obsticles.
It's the rules that differentiate sports from slaughter. Yes, the economic power of Capitalism is huge, but so is the power of fire, explosives and nuclear energy and we don't speak of those in terms of "job-killing regulations and taxes" or at least those not infected with greed and Tea Bag Dementia.
No, driverless, unrestricted, free for all Capitalism results in fewer choices, higher prices and yes, of course, monopoly - another obvioius thing hidden behind the sound and fury of the idiots' endless tales.
I will apologize in advance if I am being repetitive in re-posted a link to this 3-minute video of George Carlin. Many of you may already be familiar with it. But I find his words adroitly underscore the sad fate of our nation which you so eloquently describe in the Swash Zone. I've now made this video a permanent page on my blog.
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