Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann from Minnesota has called upon Americans to once again converge on Washington in a last minute protest to stop the House from passing the health care reform bill. Bachmann asked tea party protesters and all concerned citizens to not just protest outside the Capitol, but actually go to congressional offices and visit their representatives.

I had the misfortune of riding the Metro train into Washington Thursday, along with a sizable group of these protesters, where I was able to look at a goodly number of them up close and to listen to some of the conversations.

That experience seemed to perfectly mesh with a story I was at that moment reading in the Washington Post, which said that about 75 percent of the country’s 17 to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service, largely because they are poorly educated, overweight and have physical ailments that make them unfit for the armed forces.

Glancing from the paper up to the people surrounding me on the train, it was quite obvious that the story was basically correct. Listening to the conversations only confirmed that feeling.

Will this be the caliber of citizenry, which might be influencing how you or I will live in the next few years, or the way, in which our children and grandchildren will be forced to live?

President Obama’s Wednesday trip to Wisconsin, to emphasize the need for an improved education seemed more necessary than ever before…

Technorati Tags: Bachmann, Caongress, conservatives, Education, Health Care reform, military, obesity, protest, tea baggers

While perusing some other parts of the blogosphere, we have encountered some fresh postings challenging readers to come up with things that George W. Bush did wrong. Therefore it appears advisable to re-post this article, which originally has run here on October 1, 2008.

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Lets add up the very dubious “achievements” of the last eight years.

First: The stolen election of 2000, which started it all.

Second: The attacks of September 11, 2001.

Third: The approval of the Patriot Act and its effects on our democratic system, including the creation of the all-encompassing Department of Homeland Security, illegal wiretapping and domestic spying, the firing of U.S. Attorneys, Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, creation of a police state and an atmosphere of overall paranoia and so forth, and so on.

Fourth: The push towards the invasion of Iraq, along with totally untrue “justifications”, such as the presence of weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaida being centered in Iraq and the “urgent” need to depose Saddam, etc, etc.

Fifth: The inept and I mean INEPT attempts at nation building, which of course – besides the actual conquest of Iraq – have caused the longest-lasting war in U.S. history and have cost the lives of approximately one million men, women and children and over 4,000 American soldiers, with tens of thousands of young men and women being crippled for life.

Sixth: The total monetary cost of this artificially created conflict is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars and counting. Making certain specific, but often not even specified corporations very, very rich in the process – with U.S. taxpayer’s money, of course.

Seventh: Causing the United States to slide from a position of a beacon of freedom to most of the world, to a universally despised entity, which allows and in fact employs torture, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons and all kinds of nasty methods, formerly the domain of the most unsavory of regimes.

Eight: The deregulation of all kinds of industries, including the airlines and of course, the financial (read: debt repackaging mills) sector.

Ninth: The creation of the largest national debt and government deficit in the history of the known world. As a matter of fact, the debt clock on Wall Street – which has been switched off during the Clinton administration, because it wasn’t needed – was turned off again, this time, because they run out of digits….Yes, folks. Our national debt now totals some $56 trillion. That’s about $480,000 for every household in the U.S.  Isn’t it amazing that we had a surplus under the philanderer Clinton and a totally crippling debt under the teetotaler Bush?

Tenth: Becoming an economic cripple, with foreign creditors holding huge chunks of whatever real wealth remains in the U.S.

Eleventh: Not producing very much of anything any longer, allowing other countries to take the technological lead in many areas, allowing our infrastructure to crumble (besides the anti-terrorist barriers in front of government buildings), having an educational system that continues to produce illiterate adults, who often have no idea what lies beyond the borders of their counties and spend an incredible amount of time watching the moronic offerings of the television industry. And lets not forget the government’s peerless performance during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Twelfth: And this is the crowning, but not surprising touch of the last eight years: The seeming collapse of the debt repackaging mills, which George W. Bush had the gall to call “our financial system” and of course, another super urgent call to bail it out at a cost of another $700 billion, to a trillion dollars of taxpayer’s money. This, after bailing out Bear Stearns, Fannie May, Freddie Mack, AIG and others.

I will leave the 13^th point out of this discussion, as we all fervently hope that it won’t be needed and that point number 12 is the last serious point of damage that the present occupant of the White House and his corporate masters will cause to all of us.

In closing, allow me to congratulate all of those who have re-elected Bush in 2004!

Technorati Tags: 9/11, afghanistan, bush, damage, iraq, neocons, patriot act, torture, war

Ronald Reagan and his Merrill Lynch Treasury Secretary Donald Regan

Reagan and Bush 41 quadrupled the national debt in only 12 years. Bush 43 doubled it again in only eight. It is now 10 times higher than it was in 1980 when Reagan was elected.

The hero of the conservatives, Ronald Reagan begun an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence. While the taxes on the super-rich went as high as 90 percent in the past – still leaving them more than enough for a lavish lifestyle – the so-called “trickle down Reaganomics” lowered those taxes by about two-thirds. The rhetoric of course emphasized the tax benefits for the average Americans, who were ostensibly the beneficiaries of those policies.

All of this, while the Regan administration kept preaching about “small government, free markets and democracy”.

Those who actually believed in the above Reagan TV commercial should be seriously surprised that the Federal debt as a percentage of GDP fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980, rising for the first time in decades under Reagan and Bush 41, falling under Clinton and rising again under Bush 43.

Even though some people like to portray the Reagan legacy as an anti-communist success story, Reagan’s biggest legacy was the change in America’s financial rules.

Let’s start with the tax cuts for the rich, following with turning the federal retirement from a Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) to the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). The former was (and still is for some long-time federal employees), a pension system, based on years of service and FERS consists basically of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), a 401k setup, in which untold billions of federal worker’s retirement funds get largely invested in various Wall Street schemes every two weeks. It was in effect an enormous gift for the Wall Street apparatus, while depriving millions of government employees of a viable retirement option.

At the same time, the Reagan administration deprived the Americans of the ability to deduct interest payments for anything not directly related to their primary real estate holdings.

This of course has started the epidemic of rising household debt.

Lets not forget the super-costly S&L crisis, brought about by Reagan’s deregulation.

Lets not blame poor Ronnie for everything. After all, he only started the ball rolling, even though it was in a very big way. As you probably realize by now he was only the front for all of the shady financial “wizards”, who relentlessly continue their lobbying and machinations to the present time.

The next really big breakthrough in their efforts came with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 or CFMA (H.R. 5660 and S.3283), which in fact removed regulations of all kinds of financial crookery (called “products” by the industry) and which has returned the U.S. stock markets to the days before the 1907 Wall Street crash – in reality to legalized betting, which happens to be illegal outside of Wall Street. It was Bill Clinton, who towards the end of his second term signed this bill.

Let’s also not forget Enron and a whole bunch of other events, for which nobody has really gotten punished in any meaningful way.

Lets not forget Greenspan, Rubin, Summers and others, who continue to play important roles in our economy.

And don’t for a minute forget the fact that former and present Goldman Sachs executives are sprinkled throughout both the government and our financial system, continuing in their unrelenting mission.

Technorati Tags: bush, clinton, Economy, goldman sachs, greenspan, Reagan, reganomics, Rubin, summers, takeover, US, wall street

OK, we got a Nobel Peace Prize, now what?

Despite what anyone could possibly say we turned Iraq into not only a mess, but also several hundred thousand people have died in the process and we managed to spend untold billions of dollars to do it.

Will Afghanistan/Pakistan turn into a similar – this time a nuclear-armed mess?

The shadows of Vietnam are almost unmistakable: More troops, changes of strategy, changes of generals – all for naught. It looks like still another quagmire.

Maybe it is time for our fearless leaders to dig up some history books and re-learn the experiences of others and finally realize that at this stage many Afghans prefer the bloody Taliban to the corrupt Karzai regime. Yes, folks, the Taliban might be severe in their religious beliefs, in their punishment and in their treatment and attitude towards women, but for the most part they are at least honest. To be sure their religious rules and methods are no worse that those of Saudi Arabia – a country with which we have pretty close relations.

Go ahead, visit some of the smaller Afghan towns and villages and ask the people, whom they would prefer out of the two lousy choices. The answers might surprise you.

In the meantime, we wonder if our two ongoing wars will bring about songs as good as the Vietnam War did…

Technorati Tags: Afghan, iraq, Pakistan, Vietnam, wars

We are mirroring this very interesting piece after our friends at BadGalsRadio.

Something to think about.

As a wise person said some time ago: ” In the U.S. you live to work and in Europe, you work to live”. How about Asia and Africa?

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America is the Newest High Tech Sweatshop

As is Tradition – It’s Thirsty Thursday and today we’re serving our Tea Cold

Did You Realize This was Happening ?

when we look at the problems in the economy today, little do we realize that the undocumented worker problem includes so many degreed H1B Visa Holders.

how did this happen ?

we’re really not sure but it looks like a simple case of Bait and Switch.
the H1B workers were lured to Offshore Positions and then the positions never materialized; or they were significantly different than advertised. Business Week did an exhaustive study on the problem.

when you think of what the Off-shoring phenomenon did to the American economy – you can understand why this problem was kept hidden so well; for so long.  the people who are being trapped are well educated, just looking for  a better life. much like the American Tax Payers they are replacing in these jobs.

The real question is – What is Going to Stop This ?

are congress and the department of labor in conversation on this problem ? are they looking at the impact to the American workforce ? have they looked at the impact to the economy ? is there anyway to fix this ?

and what of the companies involved –

are they going to be held accountable for both sides of the issues ?
for what they did by decimating the american workforce ? and as well for turning H1B workers into literal slaves. there is no way this can be ignored.

there are more than a million people under scrutiny because of this malfeasance. the US Dept of Immigration and Naturalization; as well as the Department of State are equally culpable. they issued these H1B Visas to these workers and did nothing to monitor them. some of americas’ largest states house the largest H1B Visa Worker populations – ie: California,  New Jersey, Florida, Texas.

New Jersey by far seems to be the epicenter for the east coast – and New Yorks’ financial district is supplied from this source; so they can’t deny their part in making this financial crisis worse.

These are all States heavily invested in Offshoring and Offshore profiteering.  Very much like the pirates who founded each state.  ahhhh how history repeats it self with irony.

could some of these angry underpaid tricked people be the future terrorists that we fear within our country ?
People always talk about fearing their co workers going “Postal”. well if they do, in this case you can be assured that they have the right stuff to do us alot of harm. Do not forget that many of them know our deepest and most intimate secrets – because they wrote the software and monitored the security of the networks.

they work for Your Bank, Your Mortgage Company, Your Credit Card Companies, Even Taking Calls for  Your Pharmacy and Your HMO.. Yessssss it’s turned things totally inside out. but you can be assured that the greedy pirates who set up this whole Offshoring profit scheme; are sitting high up in their concrete towers, on wall street laughing, at the rest of those who fell for this obvious ponzy scheme.

Whomever thought replacing Tax Paying Citizens with non taxed non citizens was  a bonified genius, the all american winner - lets give that guy an american freedom medal for stupidity above and beyond the call of need.

Quite Frankly Scarlet My Dear,  it Appears that America Is Now the Prisoner of it’s Own Greed.. Would You Care for One Lump or Two Dear ?

Technorati Tags: labor, slavery, sweatshops, work