Divide & Conquer

The Biden speech just before Labor Day had everybody’s pants on fire. Has he given up on unity? His attack on Trump, and specifically his MAGA followers, looked like he might have, but that doesn’t consider the way Biden managed to get Republicans to vote with Democrats on the Gun Bill and other legislation he has passed.

The fact may be that the White House has finally recognized the difference between Conservatives and MAGA nuts and is looking to separate them into opposing camps much the way Democratic candidates for congress and governorships are doing in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Georgia.

Right now, according to the polls, there are a lot of Republicans who are going to vote for Democratic candidates in those states simply because Trump was able to force his unacceptable candidates through the primaries. Unfortunately for the GOP those candidates that came with the Trump blessing are often raving assholes like Dr. Oz and Hershel Walker whose lies and insane platforms have forced any reasonable voter to flee the GOP and pull the lever for a Democrat.

Biden understands that there are such voters out there. That’s who he is appealing to when he condemns MAGAS who are just an embarrassment to any responsible Republican that has seen his party turn into a safe haven for the madness professed by the sociopathic Trump.

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Just finished reading “The Four Winds” by Kristin Hannah, a brutally depressing but brilliantly written novel of the depression and more pointedly the “dust bowl” of the late twenties and thirties. It depicts millions of hard- working farm families being victimized by the system of company farms but still continuing to promote the American way, as their lives disintegrate around them.
In that era it was corporate farming that stole from their workers through the company store system. Now it is Big Pharma and the major manufacturing corporations that build factories overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.
Part of the family, a young mother and her two children flee to California, lured by the promise of work and the possibility of rebuilding their shattered lives, but once they arrive, they are faced with the greedy reality of the corporate farm system and a lifestyle more gruesome then the one from which they fled; more terrible because these people, the Okies and others who fled to California were actually starving under the guns of corporate farmers who kept cutting wages until these desperate people were forced to resort to striking for a living wage. It’s interesting how the greedy millionaires of that era used some of the same “Anti-Communist” propaganda as do todays Super Right Wing, tax avoiding billionaires who while not creating the company store farms of the thirties, have ripped away the jobs and sent them overseas to places where the wages wouldn’t support a flea, but the profits are monumental.

I mention this just to reiterate that things never change. Greed is always with us and those who profess it must always be kept in check or they will crush the dreams of those who depend on them for a livliehood.

I have never been a huge supporter of unions because in my earliest connections with them I often found them to be as dishonest as the corporations they professed to be fighting, but I have also been very much aware that there wouldn’t be unions if they had not been preceded by greedy  management, which abused its workers and cheated them out of fair pay for a fair days work. Sure, there are lazy, shiftless workers who take no pride in their output, but for every one of them there is someone who is willing to do a day’s work for a day’s pay. That was true for the people of the dustbowl and it’s true today.

Certainly, we are much better off today than we were during the Depression. There is no dearth of jobs today; in fact, we have far more of them than we have people to fill them.

Yes, we have inflation, but there is really no comparison between life during the Depression and the way most people live today.

And speaking of the dearth of workers to fill what are especially blue-collar jobs, isn’t it time we stopped trying to cut off immigration and started using those desperate people who are fleeing horrifying conditions in their homelands and putting them to work in the jobs that are begging to be filled?

Trump was too stupid to understand this need so he fought, unsuccessfully, to build a wall that he hoped would keep these migrant workers out. That exacerbated the problem of not enough workers to do the menial jobs that had traditionally been done by the last wave of immigrant workers.  Now we are living with the results of his ignorance. This was a stupidity born of his having never recognized how fortunate he had been to always employ cheap non-union labor n his building projects in NYC.

Let’s hope that Joe Biden can figure out a way to solve the illegal aspects of the problems caused by the current flood of immigrants and implement legal platforms on which he can create a new, legal, immigrant work force to fill all the jobs that are currently going begging.

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One of the major aspects of Joe Biden’s reconciliation legislation is about giving Medicare the power to negotiate fair prices on pharmaceutical drugs. The bill isn’t aimed at beating the drug company’s brains out. It just wants to get the American people a fair deal from the greedy pricks that have been charging them ten times the amount for the same drug they are charging people in every other country.

But like everything that happens in Washington, there is always someone trying to scam the system.

Canal Partners Media, A top Democratic media buying firm, a company that gets paid to work the media for the Democratic Party, is also placing ads for drug industry front groups that are working hard to block these same Democrats from lowering drug prices.

Who the hell is Canal working for and why haven’t the Democrats fired their traitorous asses?

It seems that the back-stabbing slime at Canal haven’t learned that you can’t serve two masters, especially when they are at war with each other.

Though all the ads for the pharmaceutical front groups are filled with lies, the most egregious is probably the one that states the drug companies are not interested in profits. Really? Is this principled non-interest in profits what drove Purdue Pharma to push addictive drugs on pain maddened patients? Or what drives the entire industry to charge their own countrymen ten times what they charge foreigners just to keep those foreign markets from creating their own industry?

Profits are exactly what this issue is about; they are exactly what the entire drug industry is about. Profits are why that greedy swamp doesn’t develop vaccines for non-universal diseases. There simply isn’t enough profit in it.

You may have noticed how they developed a vaccine for COVID19, a universally toxic disease, in record time because they saw a world-wide market and trillions in profit but now take a look at Ebola, a deadly disease that is pretty much relegated to the jungles of equatorial Africa, a disease that has been with us for decades but still has no cure or vaccine. Could that possibly be because there aren’t enough people who acquire that disease or who have the money to pay for a cure? Why don’t we let the drug companies answer that?