A Warning to this new Congress

America: Where we were, where we are (guest post)

How many of you recall a time in America when the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family? That used to be the norm. For three decades after World War II, we created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. During those years the wages of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled. More than a third of all workers belonged to a trade union -- giving average workers the bargaining power necessary to get a large and growing share of the large and growing economic pie (now, fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized). CEO pay then averaged about 40 times the pay of the typical worker (now it's over 300 times). 

In those years the richest 1 percent took home 9 to 10 percent of total income (today the top 1 percent gets more than 20 percent). The tax rate on highest-income Americans never fell below 70 percent; under Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, it was 91 percent (today the top tax rate is 39.6 percent). Some of this money was used to build the largest infrastructure project in our history, the Interstate Highway system; some to build the world's largest and best system of free public education, and dramatically expand public higher education. We enacted the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to extend prosperity and participation to African-Americans; Medicare and Medicaid to reduce poverty among America's seniors; and the Environmental Protection Act to help save our planet. And we made sure banking was boring. 

Then came the great U-turn, and for the last thirty years we've been heading in the opposite direction. The collective erasure of the memory of that prior system of broad-based prosperity is the greatest propaganda victory conservatives and the privileged have ever achieved. But the fact we did it then means we can do so again -- not exactly the same way, of course, but in a new way fit for the twenty-first century and future generations of Americans. It is worth the fight.

--Robert Reich

Quote of the day

"I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center."

--President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/dwight_d_eisenhower.html#EQdeettu2JEmCjIV.99

Quote of the day

"A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations."

--President Dwight D. Eisenhower

We need to get this hog out of the trough

Last evening I watched the movie "Why We Fight", about the United States build-up to attack Iraq in 2003, the actual attack and its aftermath.

Very enlightening, for sure.

Besides President Eisenhower's warning to keep the "military-industrial complex" in check, which is so frequently repeated lately, it was illuminating on exactly what we've don over there and showed a rather direct and blatant connection between Darth Dick Cheney, Halliburton, KBR and the situation.

So this morning I searched for some US Department of Defense data on our military budget and came up with some staggering information.

No surprise, really. We've heard some of this stuff for years.

As a country, we all seem really concerned, still, about Russia--or the people and land mass that used to be called Russia.

First of all, you have to know that the United States GROSSLY outspends ALL OTHER NATIONS ON THE PLANET in this ugly, wasteful, paranoid defense spending. We pay about 711 billion dollars a year on all this stuff.

Keep in mind, we have acres and acres of old military jets and other equipment, decaying in the desert. That's where a lot of this spending has gone.

Other nations spending, you might ask?

Number 2 on the list, in terms of spending, is all of Europe at $289 billion.

China? No. 3 at $211 billion.

Russia is number 6, for pity's sake, at $70 billion a year.

Why the paranoia, Amerika?

Who's the real "war monger"?

Why are we still fighting World War II by being in Germany and Okinawa, etc?

Why are we still building nuclear submarines? The next war will absolutely, simply be an air war. We know that. That's the way we've fought our most recent wars. (I refuse to call them skirmishes. It's too tame for what we do.)

Either that or it will be the continuing war with terrorists, which we've, again, known all along and you don't fight terrorists with nuclear submarines.

Between what we send overseas, mostly to the Middle East, for oil and what we waste on Department of Defense spending, this is clearly not sustainable.

We'll go bankrupt keeping this up.

Not as though we aren't already.

We have to get this pig out of the trough.

We'll all be and do better for it.

We need to have our Congressional representatives stop voting to continue these stupid, expensive, useless appropriations for war.

We can certainly educate, clothe, house, feed and nurse a whole lot more people with all that money.

It would be far better spent on "butter" than guns.
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Anup Shah, World Military Spending, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Saturday, March 01, 2008

Whither now?

I've thought for a long time that the "turning point" for us, the United States of America, was John F. Kennedy's assassination. A long time.

It's not that it has anything to do with me, of course, and my generation at all. I've thought that, in a much larger sense, a historical sense, that it was at that point that we were no longer the naive, well-intentioned people we were, up to that point. I don't think I'm being naive here, either.

And ever since then, through the 70's, 80's, 90's up to today, it seems we've been going downhill, as a nation.

It was after that that Jack's brother was also killed, then Martin Luther King, and they were both intelligent, strong people who wanted us all to be better--to be a better people--to be the people we could be.

Then there was Milhouse (the lying scumbag), and a brief window of time with a weak follow-up President. After that, a weak one-termer who, again, wanted us to be better people but he got caught up in minutiea of his Presidency (carrying his own bags, for God's sake) that he didn't get to the important matter of his own work. Besides, we didn't want to save energy, anyway.

Then 8 long years of an affable idiot whom way too many people loved--and who almost wrecked us.

A dolt to follow him but who, unlike his son, kept us out of Iraq.

Then 8 important, good years by a man who couldn't keep himself in his pants.

That brings us to now to this nearly fatal time with a self-absorbed man of small imagination, organization and strength who, along with his friends, is also long on greed.

So we come to a point in time where the dollar is at record lows, energy at record highs and we've seemingly lost nearly all control we ever might have had.

And the issue, now, comes to this: if a barrel of oil is pegged to the euro soon--again, God forbid--you may mark it down in any history book to come, that it was at that exact point in time at which the United States became the Britain of a new world order. In short, a second-rate power.

May this not happen anytime soon, if ever.

(Be sure to look below at a great "Zippy the Pinhead" comic from yesterday and some new pictures).

Great Value for the Money

You wanna hear great value?

You wanna hear money well spent?

You wanna hear about a great return on investment?

Look no farther than our own goverment.

The same government that has $2000.00 toilets--or whatever--is able to get a whole lot out of very little, really, but not in a good way.

In our newspaper today, it told of Representative John Murtha, from Southwestern Pennsylvania, getting a mere $30,000.00 from DRS Technologies, a military equipment company.

And for this paltry $30,000.00 investment from DRS--which is also tax-decuctible, keep in mind--what did Rep. Murtha get for DRS? Why, $30 million in earmarks from our goverment.

Is this a great country or what?

Check this out:

"The House committee alone has 23,438 earmark requests before it, so many that its website for accepting requests froze up and the deadline for receiving them had to be extended."

So much for the Democrats cleaning up government, right?

Is it any wonder firms line up to hand out $2,000.00 here and $10,000.00 there for their own representative? For thousands of dollars in contributions, companies get back millions from their government representative and government. Read: you and me.

Oh, yeah. It's a sweet deal all right. And it's repeated again and again in the halls of our governments.

President Eisenhower warned us of the "military-industrial complex". Sure. And we heard it. Ralph Nader has been warning us for years.

But have we really done anything about it?