By David Glenn Cox

Abandoned home. Photo by Jay Santiago.

I heard this news story the other day, “The worst housing downturn in seven decades,” okay, lets be honest about something here. They are referencing the “Great Depression” of the 1930’s when the American population was only a 150 million people. So just by the weight and the sheer volume of the numbers and of the dollar amounts involved, we are talking about a home foreclosure crisis which, by itself, becomes an event unprecedented in the annals of American history and in all world history, as well.

After over a decade of perpetual war, suicides among active duty military personnel exceed three each week. 164 last year, 159 the year before and that’s still only counting those on active duty. We can build better armored tanks or the stealthier aircraft but people break, they’re fragile. You can’t put young people under murderous stress after training them to do the opposite of what they have been taught all of their lives without breaking some of them. The war has become unpopular now and so is no longer newsworthy, but they still must grind on, doing the ugly work of empire.

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Part of the Plan
By David Glenn Cox

Why did President Barack Obama choose this week to bring up Israel and the 1967 borders as a basis for peace negotiations? It will raise a lot of hackles, but in the end it will become a tempest in a teapot. Israel will never give up one inch of ground under any circumstances, nor will the US pressure her to do so. This is a diversionary tactic, kicking the cat to cover the truth and the truth is bad. It is as bad as the truth can come.

Boston Globe- Nearly two years after the recession ended, the pace of construction is inching along at less than half the level considered healthy. Single- family home building, the bulk of the market has dropped 11 percent in that time. And there is no sign it will improve soon.

Builders are struggling to compete with waves of foreclosures that have forced down the price for previously occupied homes.

WASHINGTON (Market Watch) – Resales of U.S. single-family homes and condos fell 0.8% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.05 million in April, the National Association of Realtors reported Thursday.

The drop came as a surprise to Wall Street. Economists surveyed by Market Watch had expected sales to rise to 5.25 million.

Home sales are within 100,000 units of 2008 figures. Home prices have fallen versus last year on average of 6 percent, or one half of one percent per month. This year home prices have fallen on average of over 1 percent per month. There is currently a back log of 5,050,000 homes for sale in the United States. Two million of those homes are in foreclosure and almost one million more are being held off of the market by the banks. The number of bank owned homes has doubled since 2007 while major banks expect several million more foreclosures in the years to come.

“It remains a heavy weight on the banking system,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “Housing prices are falling, and they are going to fall some more.”

Housing prices have fallen steadily each month for over three and one half years. They have fallen longer and farther than they did during the Great Depression. Economists predict a three year back log just in foreclosed homes. Who is going to purchase those homes? You? Me?

John Stumpf CEO of Wells Fargo bank said, “While there are increasing signs of demand for loans from business customers, retail customers are still cleaning up their portfolios.”

Is that what we’re doing? We’re cleaning up our portfolios!

The civilian non-institutional population has added 1.8 million workers to its ranks in a calendar year, but the number of employed Americans has only inched up by 300,000. The participation rate in this economy has dropped from 65.1 percent in April 2010 to 64.2 percent. The employment-population ratio has fallen from 58.7 percent to 58.4 percent, while the numbers of Americans no longer counted in the ranks of the employed has climbed by nearly two million citizens in barely twelve months.

Wages for the average American worker rose forty three cents an hour year to date or $17.20 per week before taxes. Those working in the retail trade saw their wages increase by miserly fourteen cents per hour, a paltry $5.60 cents per week.

Bloomberg- Fed funds, the U.S. overnight inter-bank lending rate, is projected to open in a range of 0.10 percent to 0.12 percent, within the Federal Reserve’s target of zero to 0.25 percent.

The central bank will acquire Treasury notes due from August 2018 to May 2021 as part of its plan to purchase $600 billion more of Treasuries through June and reinvest its maturing mortgage holdings. The Fed expects to reinvest $250 billion to $300 billion from mortgage-backed debt and agency securities into treasuries during that time.

Or more simply, the Federal Reserve is inflating the money supply to cover the losses caused by falling Real Estate values. Workers wages can’t keep up with fuel inflation, let alone inflation over all. Savers with money invested in bank CD’s paying 2.14 percent can’t keep up with inflation. There is seasonal growth in this economy, but there is no actual growth. The economy is foundering and even bank stocks are starting to slide. Even Wall Street, which has soared fueled by free money, is starting to stall out.

Bloomberg- General Electric Co and Intel Corp have devoted a growing pool of their non-U.S. earnings to investments in other countries.

Seven publicly traded U.S. corporations represented on President Barack Obama’s advisory council for jobs and competitiveness – including General Electric Co. and Intel Corp. — have devoted a growing pool of their non-U.S. earnings to investments in other countries.

As a group, multinational companies with current or former chief executive officers on Obama’s jobs council have, over the past four years, almost doubled the cumulative amounts they’ve reinvested overseas, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

By doing so, companies may be able to take advantage of faster-growing markets or lower production costs, and they can defer U.S. income taxes on profits from overseas sales. Underscoring the difference between corporate interests and the national interest, they’re also investing money elsewhere that could be helping the U.S. economy, said former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

“That’s a signal that they are betting less on America,” Reich said. “We’ve got to understand there’s a fundamental difference between the competitiveness of these companies and the competitiveness of America and American workers.”

Robert Reich means well, I suppose, as well as any apologist for this administration can mean well. The Obama administration has no answers for these problems because this is their policy! Let the banks do as they wish, let the Federal Reserve do what ever it wishes. Let millions of American’s be thrown from their homes and let corporate America profit from third world wage scales while trying to work in just one more cut corporate tax rate scam before the elections.

If I were in this White House, I’d want to talk about Israel too. I’d want to talk about anything except this economy. I’d hide my head in shame at the ongoing causal criminality and official negligence.

This administration has no plan to fix the economy because this is part of the plan. Or as Herbert Hoover once put it, “Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body – the producers and consumers themselves.”

Let the markets heal themselves.  Our leaders live on such a high and mighty detached plain and think in terms of numeric statistics rather than in human suffering. For a President, a Congress or a decent civil government, defending the well being of the people isn’t the main thing, it is they only thing.

There is no excuse that can justify the disenfranchisement of our people. There is no excuse which can justify its failure to educate its children. There is no excuse which can justify planned cuts to social programs while military budgets are still bloated.  There is no excuse which can justify sending  billions of dollars in foreign aid while our own people suffer, and there is no excuse which can justify American business sending employment overseas without being made to suffer themselves.

This is our country and our home, and when our politicians tell us that these things can’t be helped we cannot accept that excuse. When they tell us free trade cannot be helped we cannot accept that excuse either. If our politicians will not protect us we must change them and when our economic environment becomes toxic and predatory we must change that as well. Systems of government must protect the lives of the citizens from the challenges they face and when the greatest challenge they face is from the economic system itself then the answer becomes obvious.

We cannot save only a selected few in our economy, we must save all or save none. We cannot sit back and tell New Orleans, Tuscaloosa or Joplin that it is in your best interest that government stay out and let the free markets heal your wounds and rebuild your houses or your jobs because this is the only legitimate purpose for government. This position is neither liberal nor conservative, Capitalist or Socialist it is a human position. If we as a people are not committed to our neighbor’s well being, then society is sliding backwards into the abyss.

If our government is not likewise committed, then let’s have the funeral and be done with it. For a government that is not committed to the well being of its people it is unworthy of salvation and deserves burial if only to hide its stench.

Barack Obama chooses to discuss Israeli borders issues and the check’s in the mail but for Tuscaloosa and Joplin and for the millions of unemployed, foreclosed upon and outsourced Americans Barack Obama sends only his condolences.

“How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?”  Malcolm X

Little Rambo
by David Glenn Cox

Three cheers for Barack Obama he got Osama Bin Laden and now perhaps, he can direct his attention towards the collapse of the American economy. The value of an American home dropped an average of 8.2 percent in the last twelve months, 28 percent of homeowners are underwater on their mortgages and new home sales are near record lows. Those are astounding figures especially when the decline in value is added to the last three years of falling prices. Home prices aren’t just falling they’re imploding, a collapse unrivaled in American history.

This is directly due to the federal government’s abdication of its duties to the people. Rather than to do what was necessary to salvage the Real Estate market and the American people. The Obama administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve have put all of their faith and our money into saving Wall Street rather than Main Street. Zero to .25 percent interest rates have reinflated the Wall Street bubble yet employment numbers are tepid and stagnate. Wages are falling and consumer confidence is low and credit hard to obtain.

Each year since 2008 we’ve been told, this year will be the peak of home foreclosures crisis and yet the following year we are told the same again. The Obama administration offered first time home buyers a $6,000 tax credit to purchase a home but with an 8.2 percent drop in home prices those purchasers are already behind the eight ball. Twelve billion dollars, tax dollars down the drain in a governmental bait and switch, a corporate give away wrapped up in gift paper of public assistance.

New car sales are still below the numbers of those being crushed each year and yet somehow with a straight face the Obama administration speaks of recovery. April is the month when spring hiring begins in earnest. Last year the administration called this green shoots when all that it was, was springtime. The Bureau of Labor statistics announced new 244,000 jobs this month while down the street from me the local ice cream shop opened for the season. The grass has begun to grow and swimming pools are preparing to open for summer. Yet despite all of these new jobs the administration has created the unemployment number went up!

Volatility is returning to the markets, four dollar a gallon gasoline will strangle any hope of recovery like a baby in a cradle. When I bought my first car for five hundred dollars gasoline was at .46 cents a gallon and the minimum wage was $3.00 per hour. It meant that I could buy six gallons of gasoline for an hour of labor. Today that would be less than two gallons while the number of Americans working for minimum wage has risen by forty percent.

The U-6 unemployment number for April is 15.5 percent a scant drop of one percent year over year and only 1.5 percent from the a record high of 17 percent. Three hundred thousand new jobs created in a calendar year while three million more Americans are counted as “Not in the labor force.” Wage growth for those fortunate enough to have jobs is statistically insignificant. Wages are rising by pennies an hour while inflation is discounted and ignored. A two pound can of coffee is now a pound and a half and a half gallon of ice cream is now one and a half quarts.

These converging forces of high unemployment, rising inflation coupled with zero wage growth means nothing less than the strangulation of the economy. The home bubble is gone what is now eroding is the meat of the economic body. What has Mr. Obama suggested to cure this illness? What has Congress suggested to cure this illness? Nothing! They have ignored this economic withering and growing lethal danger to the economy. The Federal Reserve has acted under Ben Bernanke’s watchful eye; the Fed under the title of quantitative easing has inflated the money supply yet again.

During hurricane Katrina George W. Bush played air guitar while an American city drown. Bush then flew overhead in Air Force One and stared blankly out the window at the catastrophe and was rightfully pilloried for his callousness. Yet Barack Obama might as well fly over us in the space shuttle his coolness not to be confused with aloofness.

An economic catastrophe equal to the Great Depression and the administration’s economic policy is to allow the Federal Reserve to do what ever it wishes to do. Obama stands on the deck of an imaginary aircraft carrier and declares victory and goes home. Never has an American President done less to aid the struggling citizenry since perhaps Herbert Hoover. The politics of Ronald Reagan combined with the cluelessness of Herbert Hoover and now with the new and improved smirk of little Rambo.

President Obama recently went to the Texas border region to preach again for his neo liberal immigration reform. The cluelesness of the captain of the Titanic shouting, “Bingo in the Grand Salon everyone! Bingo!”

These politicians are not stupid people, they are well aware of what is going on around them and so we must ask ourselves, either, the federal government is lost in its own intellectualism and fishbowlism and are unable to form a consensus? Or they know exactly what is going on and have decided to save themselves and the top ten percent by keeping the public occupied with wars and birth certificates until they fill all of the available lifeboats. Or even a darker and sinister version where they intend to sink the economy Weimar Republic style.

Inflating the economy while shrinking wages, Social Security then becomes irrelevant without a politician ever laying a finger on it. Retiree’s will still get a check each month with the caveat of “don’t spend it all in one place.” Keep in mind that the investor class no longer needs America. They have built for themselves a new one in continental Asia. This new one is growing at 10 percent per year and is everything that the investor class could have ever dreamed of, coal fired electrical plants with plans for more nuclear plants. No civil or worker rights to deal with, no unions or activists or environmental controls. A neo liberal paradise of high profits and low taxes of masters and slaves.

Senator Charles Schumer recently sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano asking for tighter security on Amtrak trains. Schumer asked not only for more money but for creation of a no ride list! Suddenly Democrats are all in favor of the war on terror. The irony, thousands of uninspected shipping containers arriving on our shores each week. A President that preaches open borders with a failed narco state while a member of his own party wants to control who will be allowed to ride America’s trains.

A government that treats its citizens as a commodity to be controlled and relegated, legislated against and when it suits their purposes or simply ignored.

That leaves us with our options as being what? A single neo liberal party state where Democrats support tax cuts for the rich, wars for aggrandizement with a burgeoning state Gestapo organ and a Republican Party that answers, “That, but even more so! God, guns and abortion control and getting government off our backs by cutting even more taxes.”

American politics run on money, fringe candidates are ignored and can receive little backing. The media will ignore these candidates as not having any standing while national publications will praise characters such as Michele Bachmann to the stars as a credible candidate. When we look forward we can only see one footstep at a time yet when we look back over our shoulder the picture which emerges is dark, ominous and frightening.

The 2000 selection, 9-11, the Patriot act, the TSA followed by the stealth Obama and a federal government which ignores the well being of the general populace while supporting tax cuts for the rich. Franklin Roosevelt once said, “When there is no vision the people perish” the question that we face today is, what if they have a vision but their vision doesn’t include us?

What is the value of a government that ignores the well being of its people? Can such a thing as that be called a Democracy? Cuts to social programs and education on the one hand with insane senseless military spending on the other. Opposing invisible boogey men that only make themselves visible when we invade their country? A Republican Party that declares open war on the public and public employees and a Democratic President who is always glad to meet those Republicans halfway as a starting point in negotiations.

The answer to this situation is the only answer possible. When the bully steals your lunch all of your pleading for its return only amuses the bully. You could go around the school yard and collect signatures on a petition and then maybe when the bully sees the size of your petition he will give you your lunch back. It is only when the bully fears for his own future that the bully will decide to give you your lunch back.

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
(Mario Savio)

After the success of the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro held public tribunals where the enemies of the people where put on public trial. They were required not only to give back your lunch but they were made to apologize for taking it in the first place. This is your country
and your lunch.

Kingdoms of Greed
by David Glenn Cox

The standing stones of the just have fallen, even their shadows are no more. It galls me and irritates me like sand in my teeth this fantasyland America. A Nightmareville, a dream gone horribly wrong, what sort of country is this that just abandons its own people? Sentences them to a slow death and poverty all to protect the private kingdoms of greed.

My god, this country once built more automobiles than anyone else on earth and now its factories are shuttered as its name plates vanish. Replaced by imports manufactured by workers earning $5.00 per hour. Last year a record low in new cars sales at thirteen million or one new car per thirteen workers. Deduct fleet sales, government purchases more like one new car per twenty five workers or fifty workers.

One million less new cars sold this year than will be placed on the scrap heap, shredded and sold as junk to Asia where remorseless hammers pound out new products in slave wage factories.

One million more homes in foreclosure and the politicians have no answers. The banks have answers though,

Bloomberg – Bank of America Corp. (BAC) was accused by a top official at the Iowa attorney general’s office of engaging in a divide-and-conquer strategy by undermining support for the settlement of a nationwide probe into foreclosure practices, a person familiar with the matter said.

The bank tried to get attorneys general to break away from those supporting the proposed accord, Iowa Assistant Attorney General Patrick Madigan said during a recent conference call, according to the person. A second person familiar with the settlement talks said the bank sought to sow dissent among the states, eight of which have publicly criticized the proposal’s terms.

The banks which acted illegally now look to subvert even the process which lets them off with a slap on the wrist. The sufferings of millions of men, women and children are subverted and discounted all in the name of greed. This is what America is about, only here; only in this place could such a thing be possible.

Bloomberg – Even with last month’s gains, housing may remain a weak component in the economic recovery that began in June 2009 as unemployment, falling property values and stricter loan rules push foreclosure filings to a record level.

“We continue to just tread water along the bottom,” said John Herman, a senior fixed-income strategist at State Street Global Markets LLC in Boston. “The housing market is fairly depressed. We think home prices will fall further.”

“Fairly depressed”? Home prices have fallen further and for a longer period than in the last Great Depression and yet they dare to speak of recovery. How can that be? Two thirds of all wealth in America is held in real property and as the market slowly bleeds to death they dare to speak of recovery.

They speak of recovery while out of the other side of their mouth they talk of budget cuts. They talk of birth certificates instead of building the economy and spending cuts while the two corporate parties whisper to one another with a wink, tax cuts. The truth is they don’t want to build the economy, they like this one just fine the way it is.

Exported jobs means high unemployment, high unemployment means lower wages and falling union membership. They are bleeding the economy like a medieval physician in hopes to keep the patient alive but too weak to fight about it. An economic coup de tat, a nation of hamburger stands and Wal-Mart greeters.

A nation of Eloi reared on psychotropic television, waiting for a recovery that’s not coming while holding the bag wide open expecting fresh snipe for dinner.

The other day the durable goods report showed an increase for the third month in a row based primarily on aircraft orders. Aircraft which increasingly are built with imported components so rather than manufacturing aircraft they are merely assembling them. If I import shoes from China and shoe laces from Mexico what has been accomplished? Those thirteen million American new cars are built in increasing numbers in Mexican factories. These American automakers have plans to double their production in Mexico by the end of the decade while the Obama Administration proposes using America’s international trading bank to co-sign loans for Mexican car buyers.

So called Free Trade is the hammer which drives the pin in your shackles. There is nothing free about it, rather than bringing the scabs to the coal mine they have simply taken the coal mine to the scabs. American meat packers place help wanted ads in Mexican newspapers and feign innocence as the illegal workers are hauled away as criminals. Maybe they were hauled away just before payday? I suspect it would be so in this economy.

Demonize the workers not the criminals, that’s the standard operating procedure. Turn one worker against the other. Buy up both political parties and then pit them against each other in a show business Wrestlemania spectacular. The Republicans want to have you shot immediately but Obama has offered a compassionate conservative compromise where you won’t be hung until dawn.

Hope? Change? It is almost comedic now isn’t it? A Democratic President in favor of a less draconian form of dismantling of Medicare and Social Security.

Who would have thought such a thing was possible that an American government could take on Stalinized programs to starve our own people. To deprive them of jobs, education and opportunity. Herbert Hoover and the anti- New Deal. Who would have thought that a nation which claims to love peace would be at perpetual war? And even more so, unable to win even a single campaign, where the head of the defense department becomes the head of the CIA and vice versa. That is a stunning policy that reverberates with totalitarian resonance. A nation at war with the world and at war with its own people.

The battle on the home front is fought with photon tubes and flat screen life like color. Drone attacks on the cerebral cortex, a jangling of the nerves and excuses built in advance. Why is the economy struggling? High gas prices, why are gas prices so high? Libya, does America get any oil from Libya? No, we don’t. Is Gaddifi a danger to America? Not as dangerous as Bank of America, Wells Fargo or Goldman Sachs as they profit from your misery, as they soak up the succor that is rightfully yours in this anti-New Deal environment.

In the last Great Depression the economy as a whole recovered in ten years but it took the banks more than twenty years to recover. In this Great Depression the opposite is true, massive aid was supplied to the banks and the balloon was reinflated. The banks appear prosperous while the recovery on Main Street is nowhere in sight. The trouble that the banks now face is that a quarter of a percent interest rates are now depressing the market.

As the old loans are paid off at the higher interest rates there are fewer new loans to replace them. These fewer new loans are at lower interest rates which means less profit for the bank. One in six Americans no longer even have a bank account and the credit card business has shrunken by twenty percent. The banks have only Wall Street and that balloon can only be inflated so much, for so long before the grim reaper’s sickle returns again for the harvest.

Corporate Fascism where the leaders seek to do what is expedient for the corporation rather than what is correct for the country. They have added trillions to the national debt to save the banks but only temporarily. For the little engine of greed is running out of steam. The machine of war is making America a pariah state.

Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet was “not selected for procurement” by the Indian Defense Ministry in a possible $11 billion dollar deal neither was Lockheed’s F-16 fighter aircraft and the official reason given was,

“A remaining uncertainty is that the defining nature of the U.S.-Indian strategic partnership might trump the purely operational and technical considerations” that have given an advantage to the European companies.”

That means America’s relationship with Pakistan and Indian calls for trade concessions including unencumbered nuclear fuel sales. Our policies are alienating nations all around us.

Bloomberg – “Obama led a delegation of CEOs, including Boeing’s Jim McNerney, on a November visit to India in which Obama urged increased trade between the two countries that he said will support tens of thousands of U.S. jobs.”

The President of the United States prostrates himself for the military industrial complex but to the Indian government the Europeans look much safer to bargain with and less likely to interfere in their politics. How does the corporate state react to such a loss? The US Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer promptly resigned,

“I have been personally assured at the highest levels of the Indian government that the procurement process for this aircraft has been and will be transparent and fair,” Roemer said today. His statement was released by the U.S. Embassy hours after it announced that he has offered his resignation for “personal, professional and family reasons.”

He failed the corporate state’s masters where results are all that matters. A corporate state which puts profits over its people’s well being. What would you call that? If the Taliban cut off a surgeons hands in Afghanistan what would you call that? Terrorism? How is that terrorism any different than closing a plant in Indiana? The corporate state practices economic terrorism and economic treason as they unlock the gates to drag in the Trojan horse and sell you into bondage.

Average bonus for a Wall Street employee $128,500 in 2010
Porsche sales up 29 percent in 2010
Cadillac sales up 36 percent in 2010
Rolls Royce sales up 171 percent in 2010
Tiffany & Co. profits up 29 percent in 2010

One in five American children live below the poverty level.

Forty four million Americans are on food stamps almost double the 2007 number.

The US economy has ten percent fewer middle class jobs and wage growth for working people has been flat for a decade.

Half of all American workers earn $25,000 per year or less.

The President and the Republican’s in Congress are pushing three more free trade agreements.

Upon the Wreckage of Oligarchy
By David Glenn Cox

Some days I wish that I could leave this country, just sail off in a sailboat and forget about my own two years of living in a dirty garage. It is only a pipe dream though; an emotional safety valve to allow the overflow of inputs to blow off into a bucket of fantasy like the bucket that I once washed myself in. What more can be said besides “I’ve grown to hate the land of my birth.” Raised as a liberal Democrat I’ve come to despise even the very term Democrat as just a meaningless label, empty syllables, like patriot. I’ve come to despise that word as a well, as nothing more than a euphemism for right wing clap trap and more of the usual bull sh*t.

President Obama calls himself a Democrat so what does that term actually mean? He’s a corporate shill who stands at a podium of a private university where the annual tuition is over $42,500 per year to tell us of sacrifices that we must make.

A cheap theatric as Republican Ryan paint us a black future and Obama paints it in shades of gray. A choice between Ryan’s reactionary reductions plus more tax cuts and spending cuts or Obama’s bipartisan deficit reduction panel. A quick glance at the work of Obama’s cat food commission will show that the corporate shill has all ready begun enacting it’s spending freezes and employment freezes. Any idea where the cat food commission got most of their ideas from? Their ideas were lifted directly from the pages of the 2008 Republican national platform.

“From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity.  More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.” Barack Obama

Excuse my language here but, bullsh*t!

Just bull sh*t; from the first days as a nation we put our faith in protective tariffs. Out of our fear that the mother country would swamp us financially to regain what she could not militarily. There was no currency on Earth so strong as the British Pound nor so weak as the American dollar. British manufactured goods were at their zenith while American manufactured goods were but infants.

Then this hearty band of self reliant individualist began their self reliant trade of brewing corn whiskey. Their healthy skepticism of too much government ended at the barrel of government muskets. The issue wasn’t strong drink; the issue was a means of storing a corn crop and adding value to an agricultural product.

Where bankers taxed thusly? Where shopkeepers taxed thusly? No, it was a tax imposed on poor planters by urban gentry.

The imposition of taxes on the poor multitudes for the benefit of the wealthy few.

“As a result of these bipartisan efforts, America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000.  We went from deficit to surplus.  America was actually on track to becoming completely debt free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed.  We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -– but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending.  Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -– tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.” Barack Obama

“We went from deficit to surplus,”
“We were prepared,”
“We lost our way,”
“We increased spending,”
“We didn’t pay,”
“We made the problem worse,”

We have been busy haven’t we? Barack Obama blames you and I for this fiscal mess. We paid the US Chamber of Commerce to lobby Congress. We insisted the Supreme Court illegally decide a Presidential election. We insisted that the two wars continue and we insisted that Obama raise military spending above Bush era levels and most of all we demanded that Barack Obama continue the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. We, you and I made him do that, he didn’t want to but we made him do it. Pardon me, but bull sh*t.

The greatest economic downturn in over a century and what does our leader propose? Tax cuts, that’s what we wanted was tax cuts! The President’s $786 billion stimulus package was 35 percent tax cuts. After deducting those tax cuts for big business that left $510 billion for the three hundred million American people. In Germany they passed a stimulus package of $550 billion for one hundred million Germans. A stimulus of more than three times the size of the one Barack Obama said that we wanted.

For workers only unemployment extensions but a jobs program? The jobs program was simply more tax cuts, wasn’t that what we wanted? I must have missed it but there must have been this huge public outcry for more corporate tax cuts because Mr. Obama only does what we ask him to do.

April 14 (Bloomberg) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.

Senator Carl Levin, releasing the findings of a two-year inquiry yesterday, said he wants the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine whether Goldman Sachs violated the law by misleading clients who bought the complex securities known as collateralized debt obligations without knowing the firm would benefit if they fell in value.”

Republican Tom Coburn said; The subcommittee’s findings show “without a doubt the lack of ethics in some of our financial institutions who embraced known conflicts of interest to accomplish wealth for themselves, not caring about the outcome for their customers. When that happens, no country can survive and neither can their financial institutions.”

These collateralized debt obligations were labeled a triple A when they were actually junk, rated by bond agencies who were being paid by the banks. Banks that profited from your loss, bankers paid multimillion dollars bonuses that Obama compared to baseball player salaries. These criminals walk the streets unmolested while one million school age children are homeless on any given night in America. You know whose fault the corporate shill says that is? According to Mr. Obama that’s your fault too!

A government that offers its people nothing, no help what so ever, only to yell down from the rescue helicopters to the victims of this economic hurricane, “You’re on your own, what do you want from me? I gave you tax cuts!” Ten million homes made empty, forty million plus Americans put out in the road and the shill offers assistance only to “credit worth consumers” while the rest of you can just f*ck off and die. Well I say bull sh*t!

Real earnings declined 0.6 percent while consumer’s prices rose 0.5 percent in the last thirty days. Unemployment numbers have been reduced on average less than one percent under Mr. Obama’s program of corporate tax cuts. So what does Mr. Obama now suggest? He suggests working with the Republicans to cut even more taxes which has now become his hallmark.

“So that’s how our fiscal challenge was created.  That’s how we got here.  And now that our economic recovery is gaining strength, Democrats and Republicans must come together and restore the fiscal responsibility that served us so well in the 1990s.”

Three million Americans added to the rolls of poverty under this administration and a majority of those are children. Unemployed persons March 2010, 13,062,000 Number of unemployed persons counted March 2011, 11,754,000 a reduction of 1,308,000. Numbers of persons no longer counted as in the labor force March 2010, 73,363,000 and the number of persons not counted in the work force March 2011, 74,016,000 an increase of 1,653,000 people.

“And now that our economic recovery is gaining strength,” bull sh*t!

Governors from Florida, Arizona, Indiana, and New Jersey have now proposed cutting unemployment benefits while Michigan and Missouri have all ready capped benefits at twenty weeks. The Chamber of Commerce in Missouri says these cutbacks will save businesses as much as $124 million a year in taxes. What does it mean for the mothers and fathers? What will it mean for their children? “The states need to start taking a stand against a federal government that will not live within its means and will not control it’s spending,” said Chamber CEO Daniel Mehan.

A simple choice is offered, two visions of leadership that both lead down the road to hell. Benign neglect or aggressive assault. Both visions offer tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor. Both visions that offer a future where Americans will work harder for less. In the last three years the number of Americans working for minimum wage or below has jumped forty percent. The number of Americans who own their own homes has fallen below that of Europe. This isn’t the promise of a bright future but a threat to your future by fascist oligarchy where both parties actively seek to achieve the same goals.

They are adding fuel to the pyre that will eventually consume them. The flames of which that shall dance joyously in the eyes of working people. There is no escape, there are no sailboats which could carry us away and I could not go even if I had the means. I have children and friends with children and I have a vision of a different place laying its foundation upon the ashes of neglect and upon the wreckage of oligarchy.

A nation at peace, a nation where children walk to good schools with full bellies. A nation with health care for all and decent jobs for all. This is not a pipe dream but a clarion call to look over the horizon because the choice is yours and the dawn is ripe with possibilities.

Oh Brother Where Art Thou?
by David Glenn Cox

If you listen closely you can hear a sound in the distance like the sound of a piece of paper being torn in half. I read a very cogent article yesterday which accurately described all the failings of Barack Obama’s administration. Not just its failings towards the electorate but its failings towards the constitution itself. The first comment listed under the article consisted of two words and I quote, “F*ck You!”

Apparently this person took offense to the author’s description of the President. No counter arguments were offered to discredit the author’s arguments. In another article, the Supreme Court upheld an Arizona program to allow contributions to church supported schools in lieu of paying state income taxes. The case was brought by the ACLU and the high court ruled by a five to four margin against the ACLU and a commenter said, “That’s why we need to keep a dem in the White House.” Except, the Obama administration sided with Arizona and against the ACLU. To this White House at least, public funds should be used to help religious schools.

There is a fog, a state of misperception. Despite the actions of the most corporate leaning president in American history there is a cadre of perhaps millions who will argue, “yeah but!” I’ve seen this before, they’re a close your eyes and click your heels three times and say, “there’s no place like home” crowd. Years ago when I lived in Montgomery Alabama there was a preacher who started this full gospel church. The music would begin low as the choir sang soft spirituals. Then the lights would come up and the band began to play with a driving beat as Reverend Coy burst through the doors. As he walked down the center aisle he preached, shouting of glory as a dozen robed choir members followed behind him dancing and singing and beating on their tambourines. Brother Coy shouted the gospel of God loving you and because God loved you, you should give thanks and money to God and then God’s rewards would be showered down unto you.

God certainly loved Brother Coy in his Armani suits, his diamond rings and his Rolex watch. The church was growing; people were coming from miles around to see the show, er ah, the sermon. One day a question arose about some money that was to be applied to the mission’s fund. Reverend Coy immediately asked the mission’s director about the missing funds. The mission’s director, Mrs. Reverend Coy suggested they ask the church’s finance director Reverend Coy Jr. It developed into a milieu and in the confusion and investigation Brother Coy loaded up his twin engine private plane with Mrs. Coy disappeared one night into the hinterlands never to be seen again.

The congregation was divided into two camps, those who thought Brother Coy was a crook and those who believed that Brother Coy had been wronged and had fled town to avoid the shame of religious persecution. To them Reverend Coy was a righteous man; to them it was the Reverend’s underlings that had caused the financial problems. They believed because they wanted to believe. They didn’t want to admit even to themselves that they’d been made fools of and taken advantage of by a side show huckster. The church was broke and soon closed its doors but still has its defenders today.

In a fog of corporate money and corporate media American political parties have devolved down into Hollywood for ugly people. Professional political mud wrestling in the Neo- liberal arena, Michele Bachmann recently spoke to a Conservative conference in Iowa. Eager to woo the Hawkeye voters she wove a tale of her ancestral past. She too was an Iowan, she explained, except that it was all lies. Everything word out of her mouth after she said, “Hello, my name is Michele Bachmann” was pure fabrication. She pulled out every old saw except being born in a log cabin and walking five miles to school in a snowstorm uphill both ways.

The faithful believe because they want to believe and because they want to believe the hucksters are eager to give the faithful their good show. Good guys and bad guys, Tom Mix and the Rustlers or Rebecca from Sunnybrook Farm. When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs exploded during a press conference he excoriated the “professional left” claiming that those who disagreed with the administration needed to be drug tested. His fury wasn’t so much aimed at the disagreement as at a public that wasn’t buying into his script. Gibb’s and his staff had worked long and middling hard to create a plausible narrative in which, a fighting President did everything he could to battle Simon Legree to save the widow’s farm and to get us the best health care deal he could.

Gibbs was like a Prima Dona actress and when the crowds don’t cheer long enough is certain it must be because they are ignorant hayseeds who don’t appreciate true art. Everything is carefully scripted and stage crafted. When Barack Obama made his recent comments about US actions in Libya he appeared before eight, count them eight, American flags. Each flag carefully laid out so that ripples in each flag matched perfectly. The President in a dark blue suit then proceeded to give American’s a message that was in content ninety nine percent pure unadulterated horse pucky and stage craft and one percent truth. His message was no truer than Michele Bachmann’s but the stage crafting was much better.

What this administration can do to language could put Winston Smith out of work; Smith never would have anything to put down the memory hole, because this administration never says anything that doesn’t have at least three meanings to it. Yesterday the President announced the beginning of his corporate reappointment tour.

GET INVOLVED TODAY
President Barack Obama just announced the start of his 2012 campaign. And he’s counting on supporters like you to drive this campaign forward.

Join us in the fight to keep building a better, more prosperous America. Are you in?

As the 2012 election begins, we know grassroots support will be more important than ever before. President Obama is working every day to keep changing America – and while he focuses on the job he was elected to do, we have an opportunity to start mobilizing on his behalf.

Sign up for campaign updates and see how you can help build on our progress.

He’s counting on supporters like me! Who are those supporters like me? Corporate executives? Wall Street traders? Hedge fund managers? We can’t stop the torture at Guatonomo if we can’t stop the torture of the language at home. An open ended sentence, a bandwagon approach that vacantly offers the mythical destination of forward. Where is this place forward? It doesn’t say, is forward more jobs? It doesn’t say, is forward a tighter control of corporate criminals? It doesn’t say, it doesn’t say anything but it sure sounds good, doesn’t it? I’m going to go out and get me some of that forward!

The next line is my absolute favorite,
“Join us in the fight to keep building a better, more prosperous America. Are you in?”

Are you in? Poverty?
Are you in? Foreclosure?
Are you in? An unemployment line?
Are you in? The military on your fourth tour?
Are you in? A panic trying to pay increased tuition?
Are you in? Desperation trying to keep your family together?
Are you in? The street?

“Join us in the fight to keep building a better, more prosperous America,”

Wages for American workers are flatter than a pancake and this “us” has offered only tax cuts to big business to correct the situation. This “us” program is the same as Herbert Hoover’s and Ronald Reagan. This “us’ is Sphinx silent on assistance for organized labor. This “us” created a commission to cut benefits for the poor and elderly and now this “us” wants you and I to help him?

Maybe you and I aren’t included in his “us” at all; perhaps when he says “us” it is Newspeak for those who have profited under his administration. Maybe when he says “us” he means Lloyd Blankfein who just got his $19 million dollar bonus. Or “us” could be the BP executives who earned a bonus for safety or the executives at GE or the other Fortune five hundred companies working inside this White House. I bet this “us” is the new millionaires because it sure ain’t me babe!

“President Obama is working every day to keep changing America – and while he focuses on the job he was elected to do,”

It all depends on what your definition of is, is. You couldn’t squeeze the truth out of this bunch with a wine press. The truth’s just not in them, a planned one billion dollar campaign based not on ideas but adjectives and platitudes, forward, better and prosperous. “Yeah but!”

Yeah but, if we don’t support Mr. Obama (F*ck You!) in his campaign for his corporate reappointment then you’ll get a miserable Republican alternative. If you don’t help Jerry you’ll get Tom. If you don’t help Tweety you’ll get Sylvester. Truly, a Republican alternative would be far worse than Mr. Obama the same as polio is worse than malaria but it is all part of the narrative. Over three hundred million Americans and our choices are Barack Obama or some barbaric Republican de jour and with a straight face they call this a representative democracy.

A medicine show where ideas are written out of the script and warm and fuzzy feelings and stagecraft are written in. Barack Obama and the Democratic Party plan to spend one billion dollars and the Republicans plan to spend a similar amount but not to win an election but to convince you that there is an election to win. The Republican’s are more extreme than ever because they are supposed to be, it is all part of the script. To make the faithful come out and vote for Brother Coy one more time or the devil will takes us all to hell. To make you forget your embarrassment and shame at being taken in by a side show huckster.

A pointless election, an election that won’t bring us jobs or prosperity, that won’t bring us better schools or new opportunities only more of the same.

In the year 2000 a Presidential stolen election and in 2004 another stolen Presidential election.  A Democratic candidate who concedes before the votes are even counted and without even telling his running mate. In 2008 Barack Obama, a Republican shill, these aren’t elections but illusions of elections mere election theater.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
George Orwell

To Grind Your Bones to Make their Bread
by David Glenn Cox

Our government has become malignant, that much is obvious. A corporate coup de’ tat has taken place. When reactionary forces attempted to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt’s administration their plan was to place a corporate minder in the cabinet. Roosevelt would have still held office but the corporate minder would have had the ultimate veto authority. The plan collapsed when it was exposed by General Smedly Butler, the administration said little about the affair. The perpetrators knew that they were on the hooks of treason charges and so the New Deal moved forward.

This time however the situation has changed but the principle is the same. Rather than subvert an administration reactionary forces have simply created one from whole cloth.  In a cynical and orchestrated campaign the American populace was presented a choice between an elderly ne’er do well millionaire with a psychotic illiterate beauty queen running mate or a young vigorous young man with a beautiful wife and two small children. Understand? Sarah Palin was the poison pill; she was chosen to guarantee that moderates would flee from the Republican Party.

With sinister and bitterly astute planning the reactionary forces sneered, we’ll give them their African American President. So joyous was the population over democracies victory over racism that it failed to notice a corporate cafeteria administration come to flesh. The Pentagon to be run by a Republican hold over from the CIA, the Treasury to be run by a Federal Reserve protégée, the Secretary of Health, a Democratic Governor whose running mate was the former chairman of the Kansas Republican party and who cut funding for health care while Governor.

They are no more than Judas goats, operatives working for the interests of the highest bidder. Throw away you party appellations; the parties of blue and red when combined make purple the color of royalty. Let us begin to realize what we now face clearly, let us understand that we face a long and bitter struggle yet in that struggle is an opportunity to change the world.

The time is now to begin to understand in fullness the complexities of what we face. The events in Madison Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine and other states are no less than the forced subjugation of the American workforce. One leg of the triad along with corporate outsourcing and an on going program to lure Mexican workers across US the border for the express purpose of driving down wages. The public divides and screams invectives at each other, the illegal immigrants are hauled off in chains by the bus loads while the true criminals remain unmolested and are called sir in their corporate office suites.

Bernie Madoff is a celebrity in jail because he is one of a kind. A multi trillion dollar scandal and only one man goes to jail. That’s amazing isn’t it? Fourth quarter banking numbers (Bonus Time) and profits are way up! Print the checks, first quarter numbers way down with lots of losses. Gee, I wonder what happened?

Who is left in charge of mortgage rescue? The same criminals who robbed the bank in the first place. What was done to rescue the banks? They were given access to $14 trillion in immediate aid but what was done to rescue the people from economic collapse? An $868 billion stimulus package with 35 percent of that in the form of tax cuts. Over ten million homes foreclosed and as a percentage home prices have fallen further and longer than during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. What does the corporate minder say? He says we will just have to wait and see; meanwhile interest’s rates are kept artificially low to allow the pillage of the public coffers to continue.

With ten million homes foreclosed and an average of four people per household that means at a minimum, forty million Americans have been dispossessed. What does the corporate minder have to say about this crisis forty times larger than Hurricane Katrina? Nothing! What does he offer the American people in the way of help or assistance? Less than one fourteenth of the amount offered to help rescue Wall Street less 35 percent in tax cuts. The corporate minder is the king of tax cuts; he puts Ronald Reagan to shame. Obama has offered twenty five different tax cutting schemes not including his phony capitulation to the renewal of the Bush tax cuts.

Our foreign policy is an absolute disaster by any metric you might choose to measure it. I watched a discussion on Link TV recently about Libya from Saudi Arabia. The question was asked, “Why was the US response so tepid?” The Saudi analyst answered that it was due to the US failure to gain victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. That because of that failure the continued military operations were dragging down our economy making our economic recovery nearly impossible so we were unable to do much in Libya.

That’s not a story you’ll see in US media, no sir! The failure of US military operations? As one hundred thousand workers demonstrated in Madison Wisconsin and the New York Times ran a photo of the lead tractor in the tractor parade. Visible besides the driver were perhaps a dozen demonstrators. Imagine, a story about Woodstock with a picture showing a dozen people.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland…? A full decade of war for the conquest of the world’s resources. So that those with much can have more and those with little can have less. To grind your bones to make their bread, to offshore your jobs and break your unions, to defund your schools and your social programs. These are not the things that must be; there has been no divine decree from heaven. These are the policies of filthy greedy creatures without souls or even a sense of common humanity. These monsters must be confronted even unto the end of the Earth, if not for yourself then for your children or perhaps your children will have no children otherwise.

It is easy to stand on Speakers Corner perhaps and to shout charges at the faceless reactionaries. So instead let us talk of another way, neither red nor blue but a third way. The first order of business is jobs, our country needs jobs. This is not a difficult problem to solve; it has been solved many times by many nations.

Public works jobs need to be funded and that isn’t a difficult task either. Take for example the Bush/Obama tax cuts that assume $200,000 or five grand a week is a middle class income. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer imposed a 50 percent tax on banking bonuses, that’s a good start. A twenty five cent per share stock transaction fee is another good start. Corporate America regularly dodges or avoids $60 billion in tax liabilities annually. The corporate minders plan gives corporate America a free pass on all federal liability for each worker they hire. Of course if you don’t need workers it wouldn’t matter if they offered them hookers and new cars.

The third way calls for a progressive income tax system with a top rate of 50 percent. A charge on incomes over $25 million dollars with tax deductions on profits earned by worker hires. The government will tell you the economy is improving but what would grocery store sales look like without the Food Stamp program? Banking profits don’t cure an economy they deplete it. Concentrated wealth starves out growth, as AT&T tries to buy T-Mobile to create a cell phone monopoly with promises that they’ll be nice and fair. (They Promise)The third way would break up monopolies and buy into these companies until we control them and then turn them into non-profits.

With a WPA/ TVA style alternative energy program we could put thousands of Americans back to work while creating new technologies and eliminating the need for fossil fuels. A ten year project Apollo program building an alternative energy grid of wind and solar and geothermal would rapidly make coal, gas and nuclear non competitive. Jobs, infrastructure and progress. It is not our inability that holds us back but special interests. In Norway all oil and natural gas are sold to private companies by a state concern. The profits are put in a sovereign wealth fund and the interest is used to fund government programs. We give our wealth away to those who would starve our children and pollute our world.

I shouldn’t say that, we don’t give it away but we allow it to be sold by the campaign donation and a knowing wink. The corporate minder has put up $8 billion dollars in government loan guarantee’s for two nuclear power plants the people of Georgia don’t want. The congressional budget office says the odds of those loans being repaid is no better than fifty/ fifty. Georgia power is all ready trying to raise rates to bill consumers for a plant that is not yet begun and might never be completed. This is what America calls free market Capitalism?

It would do no good to build a new energy grid without new opportunities. You must fix the hole in the bucket to have any chance of filling it. Repeal of Taft–Hartley would be a good start. A domestic content law would be a good start as well. A fair trade agreement that would be based on reciprocal trade as we can’t hide from the Chinese elephant in the room. Chinese workers earn around a dollar and hour and Americans cannot complete because they cannot live on such a wage. The wealthy grow wealthier, the workers on both sides suffer as American workers are pushed out of jobs and Chinese workers must compete on low wages alone.

Let’s be frank, China is a brutal totalitarian state. It’s one China two policy state accepts the worst of both systems. A totalitarian state feeding on unregulated Capitalism fueled on the backs of the poor.

Our other major trading partner Mexico; is a failed state and a brutal plutocracy. It is a model for the economic prison to be called the United States that is being built for us as we speak. Mexico exports more oil than Venezuela and yet it runs a huge deficit. Mexico exports nearly as much oil as Iran yet millions of its people live in abject poverty, 50 percent own nothing, they have no assets of any kind. Under the NAFTA agreement the US spends millions of dollars each year to repair Mexican infrastructure up to 100 Kilometers inside their border, this while US bridges collapse into the Mississippi river.

The answers are out their, there is an escape from this horror show, there is a third way. The cat can be belled and declawed and Grendal can be struck down and his arm nailed to our lodge door. The first step is in understanding what is actually going on all around you. There is no two party system, there is no free trade, and there is no war on terror. There is only the war declared on you!

“If seers can hold their own in facing down petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with impunity, and then they can even withstand the presence of the unknowable. (Don Juan Matus)

Two Visions
By David Glenn Cox

There’s something wrong going on here and I think most of us all ready feel it even if we don’t understand it. We can feel something in our bones, an aching, a feeling, an intuition, a mournful dirge like a collective pit in our stomach, waiting for the other shoe to drop or the hangman to pull the lever. The smell of a grave’s fresh turned earth in our nostrils. A sense of loss and of losing, the feeling of a life slipping away. A sense of knowing that something is bad wrong and unsure just to what to do about it.

Can Capitalism be saved from itself? Will the phoenix rise from its own ashes again only to circle again above the injured looking for to select more innocent victims? With rumors of benevolence, whispers of appetite with the bared teeth of a carnivore.

Should Capitalism be saved from itself? More the sales pitch than a system, it is greed in a three piece suit. Clear cutting life’s landscape to make pencils and junk mail. Bellicose bragging of job creation while grabbing the lapels of ones own suit. A Janus message of creating higher profits through job destruction and profits are the only god that is worshiped.

A poison, a cancer, infecting and corrupting all that it comes in contact with. The perverted typhoid Mary notion that everything has a price and its only fair value is the the price that it will fetch by the pound. A Grendel that wants to consume everything in the whole world as if it is its birth right. Trying to buy Manhattan Island from the natives again and offering only the same trinkets, chains and death. Exploitation for the express purpose of exploitation, murder on the half shell at our everyday low,low prices.

Capitalism’s fatal flaw, it’s Achilles’ heal is to buy only what it cannot steal, raping what it cannot woo, a big slice for me and none for you. Towers of Babble in ruins among the rabble, dark boiling clouds harbingers of disaster, Capitalism is a carnivore whose favorite food is its own tail.

I’m torn and quartered, clear and distorted, aching from the siren’s song in my ears, ready to fight and ready to just get along. Divided and united, pacified and incited, innocent and indicted.

Two visions, the first filled with nonprofit food co-ops expanding into general merchandise. Feeding the hungry and helping the needy with the profits that are driven back into expanding the non profit model. An honest bank with clear intentions, with no fine print offering a safe place to keep one’s money, low interest loans designed not to expand credit but to shrink it. Serving up tail to the beast until the beast is no more.

A co-op, a union of Americans working for other Americans for the benefit of Americans rather than shareholders. Carpenters, painters, farmers and electricians working inside the co-op for the co-op. Jobs for workers and help for Americans. A firewall against Capitalism, a Grange, a toe hold, a freehold.

Schools that stay open until six o’clock with intramural sports, study halls, art and music. Americans need jobs, students need schools. The children need athletics and sports, they need art and music and they need thought. They need to learn the concepts of the world, Homer instead of Homer Simpson and Plato instead of Play-doh. These things were once provided to the public for free and they can be again. Schools where each is taught at their own level but where all are taught to look up and to reach higher.

These things are possible, jobs with living wages are possible but the murderous Capitalist Grendel says No! You must live your life in permanent struggle and in perpetual uncertainty. You must fear for your job and fear for your health and fear night and day for the rest of your miserable life because it makes you easier to manage.

The red devil is gone, slipped from sight no need to keep up the pretense of wrong or right or how the superior economic system is replaced now by economic blight. Thirty years war on workers, thirty years of wage decline for the owners of this country. Mass exploitation and in Wisconsin a naked power grab oh, and its happening in Ohio as well. Could that just be a coincidence, is it that hard to tell? Millions forced from their homes as the vultures circle, moving back in to buy up those homes with government assistance and acquiescence to make a nation of home owners a nation of tenants. Their goal is to create a nation of Pottersville’s but they’ve gone too far, they’ve passed through the Aegis gate.

They want to create nation of nonvoting peasants with two school systems, a private system for the wealthy and an overcrowded and underfunded system for the peasants. A tourniquet around the neck of the middle class held by the Democrats and twisted by the Republicans. A service economy that manufactures nothing but misery and creates new laws to tie you up and tie you down. My yin side says build plan, work, strive to improve the situation.

My yang side says go to war, open up the gates of hell on these bastards. These corporate criminals who are pushing our children’s heads under water for a new Mercedes and a house in the Hampton’s. There are some principles of civilization that can be taught no other way. Charles the First in England learned a lesson that reverberated throughout Europe. The French Revolution ended forever the rule of monarchy in France. It opened a decade of blood and wars but to a starving French peasant what other real choice was available? To just take it? To make the starving pay the taxes to support the opulent lifestyle of the aristocracy?

Do you think that the issues are so different today? Saudi Arabia is mobilizing troops and opening fire on demonstrators because anti-government demonstrations aren’t allowed in the Kingdom. If Saudi Arabia goes the way of Libya, then you’ll be looking at nine to ten dollar a gallon gasoline and the economic pain the working people of this country have suffered thus far will go from a headache to a kidney stone. If it comes to a civil war in Saudi Arabia guess whose side of the struggle your government will support?

Bradley Manning is being held incommunicado and forced to endure humiliation and god knows what other punishments. Treated no differently than a Gitmo inmate. Is he a terrorist or a suspect, an American citizen or a peasant? Can stress positions and electrodes to the genitals be far off in the land of the deceived and home of the Whopper? The prison camps in Guantanamo Bay and in Baghram Afghanistan are concentration camps. Do you understand that? Your government operates concentration camps and now is using the same type of tactics on American Bradley Manning

During the last Great Depression the Federal Government under Herbert Hoover made loans to big business and offered nothing but prayer and platitudes to the people. It brought America to the brink of revolution. In this Great Depression the Obama administration has followed in Hoover’s footsteps to the letter but it has looked the other way as the largest financial crime in the history of planet Earth goes on unmolested. Can you accept that quietly? The theft of your children’s future?

Capitalism is a slaughter house of many mansions and many chutes. Created to give each the illusion of freedom and prosperity until you’re pushed up the chute to discover that you are unemployed or sick. Then Capitalism will offer to save you, if you turn over everything that you’ve worked for in your whole life or are willing to work for what you once earned as a teenager. A crooked crap game where they’ll get you sooner or later even if they have to just rob you in the parking lot.

It is a fable, a fantasy, a fiction, a fornication, where you are taught to believe that you are the Brady bunch when in fact you’re the Joad family. Living in a representative democracy that neither represents you nor is democratic. Revolution isn’t a choice, revolution is a fact of life. War has been declared upon you, your family and your children. This war on the public has forced millions out of their homes and into the streets as refugees. Forced millions out of their jobs into meager exsistence looking for work hat in hand or a part time day worker without future or benefits. The corporations of America dodge sixty billion dollars in taxes annually while the wealthy pay half the rate of what they paid twenty years ago and a third of what they once paid little more than generation ago.

The war has begun it is only a question of fight or run.