Well it seems that the budget deal, has finally rent the Republican party asunder. What really happened is that Wall Street, which usually wants to support the GOP, has finally had enough. The shutdown scared the hell out of them and the threat to default was the last straw. Disruptive government is bad for business and those whackos in the House are bad for everything. The bankers are the ones backing the old-line Republicans against the Tea Party. Wall Street wants a clean financial climate, not the constant chaos that seems to be what the Tea Party engenders. This is, after all, a government that needs to be run, not a WWA cage fight.
And once again, we are faced with the fact that all the talk on TV that isn’t about the Ukraine or flight 370 is about the political points of view on the ACA and none of it goes back to the one important point; healthcare is a necessity. If we don’t have it what will Republicans replace it with? And the answer is one word – nothing. So can we stop all this negative talk and try to finally do something for the American people, even the ones who are too dumb to understand that they need this. Is that too much to ask of a Party that waves the flag, ad nauseam, but will never give up their lobby provided perks and vote for the good of their constituents.
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There are 22,000 homeless kids in NYC. This month, a brilliant reporter Andrea Eliot has written about one of them, Dasani, a very special young girl, who lives with her parents and six siblings in one 500sq. ft. room in a city shelter. The failure of the system, in the case of Dasani and her family is the story of our nation’s current failure to take care of its own. It is a direct accusation against those who are more concerned about having a welfare cheat ripping them off for pocket change then they are about the rich beating the system for billions in tax write-offs each year. It’s about the people who don’t want to spend the money to educate the children who will have to lead this country for the rest of the century.
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Readers of this blog are well aware of my feelings about organized religion but there may be one new light out there that is ready to use religion for the ends that have traditionally been ascribed to it. That man is Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church, a religion that over the last few decades has seemed to have abandoned its followers and moved away from their needs, entirely.
Of course the far right is onto the case immediately, especially when Francis attacks supply side capitalism, but once again the despised Newt Gingrich, has mysteriously come out on the side of the angels with his extremely astute comments on the negativity of a society that has such wealth, allowing the atrocity of 22,000 children living on the streets of our greatest city.
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The Republicans have made careers of attacking government. I have also had my fair share of doing the same, as has almost every talking head and columnist in the country but we must all realize that like everything else, government has it’s bad side and its good side. There are almost two million people working in the government at the present time. Like everyone else who is employed in this country most of them are at least semi-functional. Despite that, there is always a group made up of complete screw-ups. Most are honest but some are thieves. Everything you can say about people in general you can say about government because government is people.
The Right chants that we should cut government in the same breath that they rail about Obama’s failure to create jobs. Well, in the first place the only jobs that Obama can create are in government. It needs functional millionaires and entrepreneurs to create jobs in the private sector. Yes there are certain tax structures that will help job creation but none of them start with the words, trickle down.
Of curse, right now everyone is talking about how government is getting too deeply into our private lives and that is true about one segment of our government, the intelligence community. There are, in fact other segments of our government that need to get more deeply into our lives, especially those segments of our lives where we are being taken advantage of by large corporations that know we can’t, as individuals, fight them, simply because the resources to do so are not available to us. That is specifically why we have government, but that government can’t function if it is bought and paid for by big business.
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In an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Alan Greenspan says that despite the lower employment figures, despite the 31/2 % rise in expansion we are in worse shape than ever because business is fearful of a future where banks are not lending and businesses are not investing in capital projects. What Greenspan is not taking into account is that banks do not lend easily because interest rates are so low and it just doesn’t pay to invest in anything but the safest project and that businesses are not investing in capital expansion because heavy manufacturing is no longer the way our economy is going. The internet, biogenic businesses and service industries do not require the kind of capital investment that a factory does to build cars. The world is changing very fast and it seems that an old man like Greenspan just isn’t up to seeing that.
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Obama’s speech on the NSA problem was refreshing but not filling. It’s obvious that he believes that NSA is necessary, which some version of it surely is. Obama has always taken a position against Snowden while saying for political reasons that we must look into the problems that Snowden has revealed to the American public. This is more than a little two faced but he is, after all, a politician whose job it is to protect the country that elected him to follow their constitution, a bitch of a job.
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What the hell is wrong with Mary Matalan? She appears on This Week…. and makes the outrageous statement that Barak Obama can now be equated with Dick Cheney. Has she completely gone off the deep end? With absolutely no medical training, I am still able to make the statement that it appears that something very wrong has occurred in Ms Matalan’s life. She speaks as if she were stoned; her eyes are glazed and staring, her face does not move when she speaks, her lips barely move and what comes out of them is drivel. I have rarely agreed with Ms Matalan but now she seems completely non-sensei cal. I know that she and her husband James Carville want to promote their book but maybe Ms Matalan should remove herself from tube scrutiny until she solves whatever it is that is afflicting her physically and mentally.
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It’s pretty obvious that JP Morgan and its officers care about nothing but the bottom line. They have just rewarded CEO Jamie Dimon with $20 million in compensation for 2013 despite the fact that the bank has been fined billions over their criminal activities involving mortgage sales that helped start the national financial collapse of 2007.
This heinous activity, led by Dimon has resulted in tens of thousands of homeless people, starving in freezing conditions all around the country; but what the hell does JP Morgan care as long as their dividends are up. Dimon, the man who took taxpayers money after he had stolen taxpayers homes and lives is the hero of the1% but why was his company allowed to get away with a fine? Why aren’t Dimon and his henchmen on trial for their crimes? We will never have honest business practices in this country until the criminals like Dimon are held personally accountable.
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The great bottom feeder is at it again. Darrell Issa ® CA, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has taken up the cause of the loan sharks that perpetuate the payday lending scam that costs borrowers up to 400 percent a year in vig.
This is a scam that takes advantage of people who are already on the brink of failing financially and just gives them a little shove. This is the perfect place for Issa, who is redefining the term, “skell”. I can remember when the mob ran the loan-sharking business. I guess the mob really has moved to Congress.
400%! Christ, I used to work for a shylock when I was a kid and he only got 20% a week. Issa is, of course, the biggest sleaze operating in the congress right now. How he ever got to be chairman of the House Oversight Committee is anybody’s guess but he is always involved with all kinds of illegal activities, especially when they are in a position to make donations to re-election purses.
Issa and fellow Republican, Jim Jordan of Ohio, who’s on the sub-committee on economic growth, (laugh that one off), have appealed to AG Eric Holder to back off his investigations of these quasi-legal loan sharks. Why would honest men do that? The answer is that honest men wouldn’t.
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Robert Kennedy speaking about GDP:
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures, in short everything except that which makes life worthwhile,
That was 40 years ago and it is more true now then it was then.. GDP measures only one thing; how much stuff we produce. That thing is only relevant in an industrial society. We are no longer in an industrial society but in a post-industrial society. How much we produce is no longer relevant to how we as individuals are doing. It’s important for China to know what their GDP is, because they are still in an industrial society.
Example: In 1950 a factory in New Jersey produced 5000 cars a year and employed 5000 workers to do it. Today that same factory produces 10,000 cars but does it with 2500 workers. The GDP is up 100% but that process is only producing half as many jobs, so the rise in GDP is meaningless.. That’s what’s wrong with our economic society today. Capitalism is working but it is only helping a part of the population.
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Iranian president Rouhani explained on GPS this weekend that his country was willing to forgo nuclear weaponry but was not willing to give up their nuclear power generating ability nor their ability to create their own fuel. We’ve heard all the arguments about how sneaky the Iranians are but regardless of how they are viewed, their argument holds water. Who the hell are we or anyone else to tell them they can’t generate unclear energy to run their country? I know they have a lot of oil but maybe they want to sell their oil to the west so that those countries can poison their populations while Iran uses clean nuclear energy. No I don’t believe that, but what difference does that make? In the end, the only sensible outcome for these talks is to ban weaponry altogether and allow the use of nuclear power and the making of the fuel to create that power. This will include a lot of the very necessary face saving elements all around.
In this discussion we cannot listen to Israel. I’m a big fan of Israel but they have their own agenda and in this discussion, their fear of anyone in the region gaining any kind of power is really counter-productive. They chose to go where they are now, They are not really conducting themselves fairly with regard to the Palestinians and they have a heavy nuclear armament capability of their own. We have been, as we should be, very much a backer of Israel but we cannot let their right wing run our foreign policy.
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Watched Michael Chertoff, former Attorney General under Bush speak about Edward Snowden and I’m struck again as I was watching Mike Rogers and Diane Feinstein about how the government sycophants are willing to say anything to smear this guy. The whole bull about him being a spy for the Russians is so far out of the ballpark as to be its own big lie. Chertoff was saying today that one of the reasons he is suspected of being a spy is that he went to Russia. Hold on partners, that dog won’t hunt. He didn’t go to Russia. He went to Hong Kong, They threw him out and only then did he go to Russia and only because no one else had the balls to stand up to us and take him. The original plan was that it was only to be a stop on his way to Iceland or Venezuela. But the US put pressure on those countries and they backed down after offering him asylum.
Then after Snowden was trapped in an airport for the better part of a month Putin saw a way to stick it to us and offered him asylum. He didn’t pick Russia. We forced him to go there and now we are selling this bullshit about him being in league with the Ruskies. Do we always have to lie to make our points? Don’t we have anyone in the US intelligence sector or in the rest of the government with any real courage? Does it always have to come from whistleblowers and defectors?
Chertoff says that Snowden could certainly get a fair trial. Yeah just like Manning did. Chertoff is a hack and a very dangerous one, because most people don’t see his inability to see anything but the party line.
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Bill Kristol when asked about the fact that despite their opposition to Obamacare the GOP has no answer to it, has revealed that a group of Republicans will unveil their version of a healthcare bill soon. And it only took them six years. This is so typical of the Right. Don’t try to fix an already existing piece of legislation that despite its faults has many advantages. Try to get your own bill on the same subject passed, just so Obama doesn’t get any credit for anything. If there is no need for healthcare, as the GOP says, why institute their own bill? Because they know that they have been lying for six years, There is a need and they are just too stubborn to admit it, until they are forced to the wall,
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We’ve always known that the IRA and that jackass who runs it are certifiably insane but their latest move tops everything they’ve done before. The US government, in an attempt to stop the slaughter of elephants is about to pass a law prohibiting the import or sale of anything ivory except antiques that are over one hundred years old. There are certain contributing restrictions but basically that’s what the law is about. The logic is that if you kill the market, the poachers will stop killing the elephants. It makes sense, it seems, to everyone but the IRA.
They are frantically worried about guns that have ivory stocks, knives with ivory handles and gun tools that may contain ivory that may not be classified as antiques. So they want their members to flood the White House with letters demanding their right to own and trade firearms containing ivory. Basically they are saying f**k the elephants, we want our guns no matter what they are made of. What a bunch of petty, selfish, losers. They would be pathetic if they weren’t so dangerous.
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Former President George W. Bush was asked recently if he missed the job of being president. His reply: “The answer’s really no.” Of course not, who actually enjoys being bad at something?