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It's All About Capitalism
I hear the liberal (they call themselves progressives these days) pundits spouting all kinds of analyses. Analyses about the rich, about the Middle Class (I contend there is no Middle Class any longer in this country), about poverty, about Congress being packed with millionaires...and, yes, they speak well on these subjects...BUT...I listen to them prattle on in their learned ways...BUT they all miss the point, the true point, and that is they all talk around the actual problem we have in this country and that has to do with the distribution of money. It has to do with Capitalism. Our corporations are run in the manor of the old plantations. Their eyes are on PROFITS and nothing else. The way to make the most profits? That's easy: low wages, the lowest of which are slavery. If you don't have any money to start off with, you're sunk in this country. You must find the cheapest ways to exist.
When I was a kid growing up in West Texas, it was quite obvious to me by the time I reached puberty that success didn't have anything to do with ambition or education or wisdom, it had to do with connections. By connections I mean not only where on the social scale your family was positioned but who your peers were (who you hung out with), how lucky you were (and by luck I'm mean "being in the right place at the right time"), and how talented in terms of what the society needed most you were. In my hometown, your talent had to do with how well you played sports, especially football, or on how charming and personable you were (in case you had ambitions to become a Christian preacher or a politician) if you didn't play football but were class president or if you were a girl how good a cheerleader or dance organizer you were...simple talents like that. My ambitions at a young age were to be a writer or a musician, neither talent worth that much in my hometown. I knew from a young age that if I were to make it, I had to get the hell out of my hometown, either that or buckle down and learn the insurance business or marry an oilman's daughter.
Henry George on Wages
"THERE IS no common rate of wages in the same sense as the common rate of interest, which is relatively specific at any given time and place. Wages vary with individual abilities. As society becomes more complex, there are also large variations among occupations. Nevertheless, there is a certain general relation between all wages. This concept — that wages are higher or lower at one time or place than another — is quite clear. So wages must rise and fall according to some law.
There is a law as basic to political economy as the law of gravity is to physics. The fundamental principle of human action is this:
People seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion."Clearly, this principle will tend, through competition, to balance rewards for equal exertion under similar circumstances. When people work for themselves, this operates largely through price fluctuations. The same tendency governs relationships between those who work for themselves and those who work for others. Given free conditions, no one would work for someone else if they could make the same amount working for themselves" (from chapter 15 of Progress and Poverty).
Obama Continues to Kiss Republican Ass
President Obama continues to amaze me. He talks out of one side of his mouth one way and out the other side another way. He's dark and scary on one side, the death list and commander-in-chief and aides-picking side, but he's all peaches and cream on that side that blows hot air into the ears of those who voted for him and expected progressive change from him. Like on gun control. President Obama says we need it, at least a ban on assault weapons; yet there's no sign we're going to get any gun control at all during this session of our still Republican-led Congress. I mean, come on, gun sales are going through the roof. Why spoil such phenomenal sales with a ban on assault weapons, at least not until the current stock of assault weapons have been sold out.
And then there's this bullshit about this so-called sequester rearing its ugly head on our poor asses this month. All of this debt talk while the god-damn stock market soars higher and higher, up now over 14,000. A solution to the debt staring these Congressional idiots right in their ignorant faces: put a stock transfer tax in place...but then how do you do that when Obama picks a god-damn Wall Street nutjob to head the SEC? Obama continues to wallow in the slop of Capitalist Pig Wall Street.
I thought it pretty sleazy of Michelle Obama to grab some spotlight time by appearing on the Oscars. And wearing a new slick designed-just-for-her dress that must have cost thousands of dollars to boot. That to me and old Thorstein Veblen (my Economics mentor) is a sign of conspicuous consumption and at a time when half the damn country is in poverty. And now Michelle is trumpeting this new Obama super-PAC bullshit where people who are Obama supporters are going to wallow like pigs in the slop of big bucks. I see Michelle Obama now following in the footsteps of Hillbilly Hillary by seeing a chance for her own political moves after she and Barry have retired to their Westchester County, New York, mansion (they say they're going to live in Hawaii, but I'll bet you a dime to a doughnut they have a mansion here in the 48 somewhere politically viable), maybe one next door to the Clintons.
So the old District of Corruption keeps on keepin' on the same old downhill paths while all the cats with their hands in the pot are getting richer and richer and farther away from those beneath them, like the poor bastards who have to clean their shitcans and wait on 'em hand and foot and guard them and keep them safe for democracy.
I was reading where one of the biggest crooks in the District of Corruption, Mitch "Piece of Shit" McConnell, has had his income soar from being worth a mere 4 million bucks a year or so ago to around 22 million lately. Where did those extra 18 million bucks come from? Oh, that the American people (the stupidest people in the world) had the guts to throw these bums out on their pompous asses. Of course, if you promote such revolutionary ideas, watch out for one of those drones to come floating in over your vulnerable ass when you least expect it.
Here in New York City today (March 1st), the extremely crooked Metropolitan Transit Authority pirates are raising fares on the commuter trains and raising the tolls on all the bridges coming into the Apple. I assume it's necessary to pay all those big-shot salaries and consulting-firm fees and to also make up for the huge cost overruns on the world's most expensive office building, Number One World Trade Center that once was called the Freedom Tower. By the way, I'm proud to say, I didn't think these shysters could come up with an uglier structure than the old World Trade Center towers, those the amazing Saudi-Arabian jihadists blew down in one of the greatest military invasions in the history of military warfare, but, hey, with this multi-billion-dollar White Elephant, they've managed an architectural miracle...Number One World Trade Center is a max-tacky piece of crap building. [That area of Manhattan, by the way, has been declared a serious flood zone now that Hurricane Sandy showed New York City it's not an invincible location.]
Want to read something that'll make you puke as you try to balance your check book, pay off your credit cards, and worry about how you're going to meet the next mortgage payment on the house? Here ya go: http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/
thegrowlingwolf(yes, I'm a Capitalist pig wolf in sheep's clothing)
for The Daily (Weekly) Growler
More Art from (my old friend) Will Shuster:
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