There are no jobs or virtually no jobs for young middle
class white males just out of college so why does anyone think a middle class young
black woman or young black man has a chance of getting a job?
There is a growing industry driven by global warming and peak
fossil fuel but that’s another post.
Teaching jobs are one of the last holdouts of middle class
employment; mostly because they are still union jobs. We tell people to get an
education and get a good job while the Republicans all across the nation are relentlessly
destroying middle class jobs such as education jobs to get at unions.
If we keep letting them do it; once the Republicans are done
their education pogroms the only jobs left will be in the service industry to
serve the .01%; as in "Victorian Service Industry" - Servants
and Housemaids.
So what do we tell the students in the Coatesville schools;
get a good education and you can work as a maid or care for horses on one of
our Chester County fox hunting estates?
Or is the best though extremely dangerous profession available
to them the illegal drug business?
That IS the way we are headed but it doesn’t have to happen
that way.
For starters please stop voting Republican.
Republican Party is a quasi-totalitarian religious cult.
It’s not the country club Party of Eisenhower anymore:
"Should any political
party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate
labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our
political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you
can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his
background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or
business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are
stupid." (President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)
Second, legalize all drugs starting with the easy one; marijuana.
Prohibition of Alcohol gave birth to worldwide organized
crime and Prohibition of Narcotic Drugs is continuing the growth of worldwide
organized crime. We keep fighting the “War on Drugs” and the drug dealers and arms
dealers keep winning.
If drugs were legal there the local economy of Chester
County like car dealers, retail stores and restaurants would take a hit but
there would be less “hits” with bullets.
SEE:
MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2011
This is the best description of the modern Republican Party that I
have seen so far:
Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the
Cult
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren,
Truthout | News Analysis
Barbara Stanwyck:
"We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah
- only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue
from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in
contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given
the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that
now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to
be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate
loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster
once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate
interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no
negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not
rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine
politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing,
however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of
Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with
exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as
a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the
party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of
crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot
outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King,
Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun,
Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional
directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of
characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a
nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple
of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the
Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine
legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War
II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would
use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and
global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension
is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were
willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees,
70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without
pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how
prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into
the FAA reauthorization.
Everyone
knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the
negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the
latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former
does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused
confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in
the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his
puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt
ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might
still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman
Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
It should have been evident
to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less
like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming
more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological
authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several
implications, none of them pleasant.
In his "Manual of
Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important
that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a
theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored
by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that
lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized
procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other
legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on
any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts
earlier rulings on analogous cases.
The only thing that can
keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of
political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras,
the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were
rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture
the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme
Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.
Far from being a rarity,
virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine
procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the
circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has
now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years
ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a
disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic
government to undermine democracy itself.
John P.
Judis sums up the modern
GOP this way:"Over the last four
decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an
insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and
threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and
Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment
trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican
Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened
to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later
led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
A couple of years ago, a
Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the
method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed
in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's
generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the
reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically
against government would come out the relative winner….
READ THE WHOLE POST on truthout AT:
Goodbye
to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
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