Original text and editing by:
A G Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
"A good slave works for food alone."
Q of the week:
Q:When is foreign investment treason?
A:An example of free enterprise treason resulting in immediate and predictable damage occurs in the case of moving manufacturing out of our country. Many displaced Americans become homeless. Sometimes their families join the men in the jungle but more often the unit breaks up so that the women and children can get public assistance. Occasionally, since welfare reform limits lifetime benefits to three years, the families get back together on the streets. With the average life expectancy of a homeless person at three to five years we can see that such reunions are rare.
"The Stone Truth"
The entire story has been separated from the "Volunteer". click Stone to go directly to the latest episode:
Education:
Religion:
Delusions:
Conservatives have told us often that they support the tried and true. They eschew theories and new ideas, like people having money enough to live debt free for instance, with specious but catchy slogans: "tighten YOUR belt", "lean and mean", "good for investors" . Their principles and the ideas that flow from them are always designed to keep themselves rich and the rest of us poor and in economic chains.
What theories flow from their principles and how are they proved? Deregulation and privatization are two examples.
Deregulation of the airlines has led to choked airports, overcrowded and cramped planes and high airfares that have become taken for granted. The occasional price wars are the exception, not the rule. Loosing of communications has led to high basic rates and a mountain of additional, often hidden charges. The energy industry has created a crisis that might destroy our nation.
Privatization of prisons has been disastrous. After the breakouts, our police forces have to pick up the pieces at great additional expense to the public. Contract Post Offices interpose another mouth at the trough. That is why privatization always fails. Corrupt military contracts should have taught us long ago that corporate welfare is more expensive than the government tending to its rightful business, our common affairs and well being.
But for all their blathering about tried and true and the glories of their corrupt brand of free enterprise, conservatives never seem to learn anything from experience. They cling to their delusional theories until the bitter end. That's because it's merely our suffering they must endure. They will be wealthier than ever as a result of their apparently crackpot schemes. Though many of them are as deluded as they would have us be, the con artist originators of their theories know exactly what they are doing. The rest of us better wise up before it's too late.
Economy:
How affluent are the least wealthy 60% of Americans? Would our economy have been strong through the nineties if that group had not taken on more debt? Will three to six hundred dollars each cure our problems? If we had decent wages we could afford to consume our economy back to health and pay taxes to fulfill our common needs.
The tax cut is supposed to help. Anyone but a conservative could see that the economy needs higher wages and fixed prices so the lower end can consume in volume. But they are blinded by their principles. They can't see beyond their individual selfishness and greed. They have no clue about the cumulative effect of their consuming avarice. They don't even know what a real economy is or who really makes it go.
We can't afford to play their game any longer. We shouldn't have to borrow what is ours and pay interest to do so. We shouldn't be grateful for the bones, like the tax cut, they throw to us, especially since our work put the meat on their tables in the first place.
We should demand that the elite support our system in proportion to the benefit they get from it. [Ed. note: 20% of the population will get 71% of the tax cut. They pay less than forty percent of the tax. In light of that redistribution of wealth, the new tax law might be considered direct taxation by the elite's corporations using their politician puppets as tools to take our money.]
We must end the bonds of debt and force higher wages and fixed prices. The first workday after Labor Day, 2001 can be National Sickout Day. The threat, if serious (as indicated by letters and emails to politicians), may cause the infintile conservatives to forget their failed theories, which are based on principles the rest of us are foolish to tolerate. If we assert ourselves sufficiently, they will provide the relief from low wages and high prices that people really need.
Politics:
Conservatives, who have created the puritanical moral tone with which they attempt to mislead America, are now telling us all college students drink illegally so lay off. I agree. Now tell them to abandon their anti-human hypocricy. Their weak, knee-jerk flip-flopping on the moral issues of which they run afoul should surprise no one.
Morality has been devalued by conservatives as they developed the public perception of personal wrong doing into a political weapon. To turn their bludgeon against them reduces us to their childish level. It strips our nation of dignity and takes the focus from significant issues. So let's forget moral indiscretions until the next time Bush begins to preach to us about his publicly professed principles.
Law and order:
The corruption of the Supreme Court in the theft of the presidential election last fall was a passing disease that temporarily weakens the separation of powers. The trivialization of the high court is a self inflicted blow to their credability from which they may never recover. Why grown men and women would condescend to rule on the use of golf carts in the PGA is incomprehensible to a normally intelligent human being.
The Supreme Court has the power to pick and choose over the cases they will hear. Why did they choose this case? Are the current justices so cowed by their masters that they must demean themselves with sports rulings? [ED. note: I know that's not fair. The ruling was about the Disabilities Act. But conservatives deserve a taste of their own semantic medicine. They spend so much time spinning and twisting the truth to their own ends, though, that it may have been inadvisable. Perhaps it presents them with a vulnerability they don't have to manufacture within themselves for projection onto us. I would hate to be guilty of lending originality to conservative arguments.]
Energy:
Price caps to stop energy trusts from profiting by our suffering would displease the one per cent of the population who own almost everything. They whine that such humanitarian measures are not consistant with their principles of free enterprise and theories of supply and demand. The theories have only been around for a couple of hundred years. Give them a little time. They are sure to work in the long run. And we'll be economically flogged by the masters if we refuse to pretend to believe their lies.
I for one believe conservative theories have always performed as expected. Their realization unfailingly results in more of the common wealth being concentrated in fewer hands. It is the rest of us, not the elite, who need to wake up. The stylized smirk that the president sports tells me he doesn't fear you will open your eyes any time soon.
Maybe he's right about the low probability that he'll have to take responsibility for his avarice. Don't you hate a guy that gloats? But can we be sure he has no respect for us? Perhaps instead of under-estimating our intelligence he's merely assessing us with his own.
"We don't need rhetoric. We need leadership." Thus George dismissed the possibility of meaningful action and offered more words for the California energy crisis. The Houston corporations, whose price gouging is causing much of the suffering, are not to be criticised for asserting their free enterprise right to profit from the sufferings of people.
That's what happens when we worship the sacred economic cow. We need to differentiate between material and abstract economy and begin to favor the real vs. the imaginary. The former is what we need to survive. The latter is what the wealthy elite need to maintain their priveleged existence.
Foreign Policy:
Call home foreign investments and indict non-compliant CEOs for treason! The right of an employer to increase profits by displacing American workers, often condemning them to homelessness and death, conflicts with the right to life of the victims of this greed. Whose freedom should take precedence? Does George W. Bush support the treacherous employers or the American people? The answer is not to be found in his hollow assurances.
Each employer looks only at her/his own bottom line. The cumulative effect is to destroy the base for the demand that they claim to be more efficiently suppliing. Individually they think they are smart. Collectively they couldn't be more stupid. If we continue to believe in their foolish economic theories, such as the belief that the service economy can support us, we may starve.
And who does George support? I know whose side I'm on. I see W. beyond the barrier.
Medicine:
We need a subspecies of clones to work at McDonald's. They will work for less than minimum wage and never complain. In fact, they won't even be real humans. We can buy and sell them like any domestic animal, unless we're broke because they have our jobs. [Ed. note: remembering the credualty with which "A Modest Proposal" was accepted a couple of centuries ago, I hasten to add the preceding does not, as far as I know, reflect the desire of any intelligent being, especially my own.]
Editorial Column:
Are we deluded to believe that conservative devotion to the wealty elite is the "right thing" for our country? Since the birth of America, hundreds of thousands of working and middle class citizens have died to protect our freedom. Many more have made sacrifices large and small to support war efforts.
A popular bond poster during WWII depicted the face of a smiling young pilot with a fighter plane in the background. All was overwritten by the slogan, "You buy 'em, we fly'em". That tells the whole story. We worked for frozen wages in the factories to make the war technology. We payed the taxes and loaned our money to the government to pay our own wages and pursue the war. We died on the battlefields to preserve our right to serve our country in all things. What did the one percent who own everything do beside war profiteering?
The children of the rich owners seldom fight and die in wars. The elite create no material thing. They don't even pay taxes. (Their loopholes live in infamy.) They only take the profits of all that we do. "The system works", but not for us. We die on the battlefields and succomb to debt at home, while their incomes and net worths soar.
I need telephone service and dependable, private network access. If you can help with this or cash donations, contact me:
agkaiser@hotmail.com
Please forward. If this has been forwarded to you and you wish to be added to the list to recieve it directly, email the request to:
agkaiser@yahoo.com
If you put Collector Request in the subject I am less likely to throw it out, unread, with the junk mail.
If you wish to be removed from the list, reply with "remove" in the subject or body.agkaiser@hotmail.com
Greg Kaiser