The essence of my perspective is covered in the title "Liberal heart, Moderate mind". When adequate time and motivation come together, I'll speak my mind on political issues here.... and sometimes, on music and arts... and maybe even post the occasional mp3.
Since the GOP won control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections, their agenda has been anything but the one issue they all campaigned on with such energy. How many times did we hear John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, and so many more Republicans ask "Mr. President, where are the jobs" as the mid-term campaign theme. They hit it over and over and over again...... at least until they won a majority in the House.
Then they did nothing on the issue of job creation. The focus was on trying to end funding for National Public Radio, and Planned Parenthood, and clean energy. They tried to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). They called it "Obamacare" and they said they were going to "repeal and replace". They did pass a repeal of PPACA in the House only to offer no replace of any kind. (Of course it was only a symbolic passage in the House as there was no way it would pass the Senate and certainly no way President Obama would sign it even if it had.) They tried to dismantle the EPA. Nothing about job creation.
This doesn't mean they didn't try hard to sell America on the spin that these bills were really about fighting for job creation. They added the term "job-killing" to any regulatory function of government. Jobs would suddenly appear they argued if they could succeed in passing their bills to weaken the "job-killing EPA." Businesses being prevented by the EPA from polluting air and water in their manufacturing is the cause of high unemployment they argued. If we simply let businesses put higher levels of arsenic and mercury in our water for example, they would be more free to hire more workers.
It's nonsense. They KNOW it's nonsense. But the lobbyists who fund their campaigns sufficiently enough to get them elected represent the very businesses seeking to maximize profits by not being required to keep pollution to a regulated level. The oil companies that make billions in PROFIT who still get billions in tax dollar subsidies heavily fund members of Congress. The Republican House uniformly votes down ending any of them. Subsidies that were designed to help establish an oil industry generations ago when it needed help to compete in the marketplace. They are way past that need for such help. Clean energy needs that help now. It has for some time, but the clean energy industry has not amassed enough money to match the power of the oil industry lobbyists or the campaign contributions they can make. Such financial power over members of Congress virtually assures their billions in tax dollar subsidies keep flowing to them no matter how little their need.
Arguments have been made by Republican Congressional members that our minimum wage is stifling to job growth. This May on ABC, Ron Paul even said "I think the question you have to ask is whether or not when you set the minimum wage it may cause unemployment.... The least skilled people in our society have more trouble getting work the higher you make the minimum wage..."
That might make sense if the minimum wage was more than twice what it is now. At $7.25/hour, if you miss 9 days of work in a year, you fall below the poverty guideline for a family of 2. Full time jobs typically require a 40 hour per week year round commitment. If making minimum wage requires foregoing 2 weeks vacation per year to just barely inch above the poverty guideline for a family of 2, then requiring such a low minimum wage is certainly not stifling employment opportunity to the least skilled workforce. No matter how unskilled the labor for a job is, when a worker commits 40 hours a week year round to performing that job for a business, that business better damn well pay that worker at least enough to stay above the poverty guideline.
Miss 9 days of work per year while working for minimum wage,
and you fall below the poverty guideline for a family of 2.
Minimum wage, job creation, clean energy, education, gay rights, women's health access, fixing crumbling bridges and roads, the arts. The GOP in Congress uniformly says no to all of these. However they INSIST that the wealthiest amongst us should not have their taxes increased by any measure, even if just to match the rate of taxes that the average citizen pays. They say no to ending billions in outdated oil subsidies.
The mantra of job creation was just a campaign slogan. They have not worked to this end. House Republicans have bills they claim are for helping job creation. They call them the "Forgotten 15". What they forgot is that those bills don't help job creation, they simply weaken regulations. Meanwhile, they unanimously vote no on every bill before them that would address any of these issues. Except one. The separated piece of Obama's Jobs Bill that offers incentives to employers who hire veterans. This is one that no matter how far out they have gotten, they know there is no way they can spin an opposition to supporting our returning vets. This one exception aside, it's no great puzzle to realize that the GOP is the party of NO.
In my last post here, I announced my new website - www.snarkysigns.com. It warehouses wall photo signs I create that comment on politics and more. Anyone is free to grab and share these images. There is no doubt the content leans decidedly left, often fitting the snarkiness of the pages' name, but the content I create for snarkysigns.com has certain lines it will not cross. Humor, satire and snarkiness aside, the content is designed to provoke thought, not thoughtless reaction.
I recently saw a Facebook sign that in my humble opinion crossed that line. It offered the occupy wall street movement as a unifying force to join, "…the KKK, the Nazis, the Radical Muslims, and the Democratic Party against a common enemy: Capitalism."
I don't mind the snark. I don't mind the satire. For many, the satire of the statement will show the ridiculousness of some's extreme attempts at demonizing the whole Occupy movement. What concerns me is the fact that too many will take this sign not as sarcasm, but as a validation of such connection.
Some may say I am being overly sensitive. That may be true on some level, for I would prefer to see positive change rather than just more division come out of the current protests. But anyone who would deny that the message offered in this Facebook sign could not be taken seriously obviously has not seen the threads of comments that tend to follow such images. For too many, such messages are not considered satire, but warnings of impending demise of everything American in nature. A modern day Red Scare. For these people, the level of fear and hate that is stoked by such images and messages is not something to be taken lightly.
After seeing this message, I decided to address this, and to clarify a few things that I notice about the occupy movement. The bulk of this post is adapted from what I wrote on a friend's Facebook page displaying the image in question.
Such an attempt to link Democrats to anything bad via occupy wall street (ows) is comical and pathetic. Even in the use of the term radical to imply violently dangerous rather than simply radical which means different from the current norm, these attempts at demonization through one step of association beyond Kevin Bacon are just pathetic.
Yeah, I get that tea partiers take any call of racism as a great insult. Many feel victimized by liberals who flippantly dismiss them all as racists. There are some on the left who stand guilty of this gross over-generalization. There also are many tea partiers who fail to distinguish between such generic demonization and legitimate offense taken directly from blatantly racist signs.
Many tea partiers may feel a sense of vindication or even take joy in any remote chance to label ows protesters as racist. Announcement of ows support by any known racist or character of ill repute can be seen as opportunity to put forth the very flippant generic dismissals they so detest, condemning the entirety of ows via the despicable character of a few late-comers. Yes, the American Nazi Party has officially endorsed ows, for as stated in their official release, they see it as opposition to the "…‘JEW BANKER’ influence…". Former grand wizard of the KKK, David Duke has also jumped on board, complaining of "Zionist bankers", even referring to Ben "Shalom" Bernanke. David even produced an odd, somewhat lengthy video, complete with stirring music and translucent American flag waving behind him that almost leaves one to believe he is considering a run for office yet again.
But David Duke's video speaks only for him. I rather doubt that David himself is out there protesting in any city. I suspect his support (as well as his history) remains essentially unknown by nearly every ows protester unless they stumble across it somewhere floating around the internet. His online video remains the extent of his not-so-visible ows support.
On the other hand, remember these blatantly racist images? The Obama-as-witch-doctor signs, the watermelon-patch-on-the-White-House-lawn signs, etc. They were definitely a minority aspect of the tea party rallies. Still, they were very plentiful. Especially given the size of the tea party. Compare the size of the tea party movement to the size of the ows protests. Ows is far greater in size and scope. Compare the ratio of racists or kooks to legitimate thoughtful protesters, and ows has a great advantage.
Some of the tea party's worst signs
Nonetheless, the kooks and racists need to be called out no matter the name of the rally. Sometimes that is hard to do, especially in concerns of racism - an ill that rarely presents itself so blatantly. Racism is usually subtle or hidden enough that it can never be pointed to directly.
Ows members and any potential leadership do need to speak to these elements directly. Maybe once ows forms into well-gelled organizations (like the tea party movement eventually did with Tea Party Express and a couple others), then maybe that leadership will speak directly in opposition to the David Dukes, etc. who are pledging their support to ows. For now, with any formal central OWS leadership still to be established, I see and hear many individuals denouncing the kooks and racists who join in support of ows. Me included. The ultra-conservative website The Blaze has been gleefully compiling the worst of ows supporters. Even they acknowledge within their documentation of ows anti-semitism that of the 3 examples they could find, there were others nearby who spoke out distancing the anti-Jewish rants as wholly separate from ows thought and goals.
But in order to speak out against the kooks and the racists among you, the moral violations or racism still have to be clear. In the massive groups of diverse protesters at ows events, how clear is it that there is KKK support? Would you, could you possibly know if someone was a KKK member if they didn't bring their pointed hood? Not unless they started yelling blatantly racist things. That level of open racism is very rare. Even the American Nazi Party does not wish to be blatant in displaying their racism. In their statement calling white supremacists to support and join with the ows protests, the official statement of ows support even says "— DON’T wear anything marking you as an ‘evil racist’".
How many of today's generation know who David Duke is? Even of those who know his name, how many would even know if they were standing face to face with David Duke? How many would know if they were standing next to a Muslim (wether radical or not) who supported violence and terrorism? How could one tell such a person from any other?
One cannot. Not unless they make it clear. There are very few ways to discern the affiliations of any individual at these protests. Other than the uniformed officers and uniformed military protesters, very few others display any affiliation via their dress. One can only tell if the support of the protester standing next to them is inappropriate through what they say, do, or the sign they hold.
I bet even very few of those holding the racist Obama signs at tea party rallies were yelling blatantly racist remarks with their vocal cords. Nonetheless, the signs were still pretty blatant examples of racism. How many were confronted with the blatant racism they were displaying? Or even for the damage they were doing to the root message of the tea party rallies? However many the answer is, it was not enough. Such displays went on for a good year.
Maybe ows simply has the advantage of having started later, and thus having more time to learn from that lesson of optics. Ows may still lack a central leadership to make such "official" declarations against the bad elements of "support", but there are a lot of individual such declarations. From all walks of life, civilian and military, employed and unemployed, those who feel the core messages of ows protests are important have no desire to allow the movement to be hijacked by the kooks.
Then there are those who race to define the whole thing as something it is not. It is not KKK, it is not a violent jihad, it is not nazism. This is absolutely laughable. So is the idea that it is anti-capitalism. Despite the occasional unthinking anarchist who just decries that capitalism isn't working as a reactionary meme, the long ignored issues being addressed via ows movement are not anti-capitalist. In short, ows is a reaction to UNCHECKED greed.
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Any system of government or economies are subject to the basic eternal human element of greed. Our republic is no exception. Democracy itself is not immune to the ravages of greed. Greed gone long unchecked is destructive. Take note, however, the key and critical part of that sentence is "long UNCHECKED".
In fact, greed can actually be beneficial, provided it is not given free range. Greed unchecked would destroy a true free market. Product safety, workforce conditions, proper disposal of manufacturing waste so as not to poison air and water. All these things unchecked (meaning lacking intelligent regulation) get sacrificed in the name of profit. It is the nature of business to maximize profit. Self-regulation on these matters does not work. Once a competing company foregoes any of these in order to squeeze out a little more profit, then the competition must do so as well, lest it be squashed out of business by the truly free market. Greed is fine. It actually helps business compete. UNCHECKED greed is disastrous.
With a decade of deregulation, especially in the financial industry, greed has been let loose to roam unchecked. Wealth disparity has widened dramatically ever since. You've probably seen all the various charts visualizing this divide that is decimating the American middle class. The rich get not only richer, but insanely richer. Meanwhile, the middle class stagnates at best, and falls into poverty at worst. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats, but as we have clearly seen for many years now, a rising upper class does not necessarily lift all classes.
Two months ago, if one was to predict that this November would see this level of protest against Wall Street and money in politics, they would have been laughed at. There is one critical element that allowed this level of protest to brew relatively quiet for so long. Growing wealth disparity. Without it, all the other issues would never see the intense level of protest they do now in ows.
Wealth disparity that gets out of hand nearly always results in some form of backlash. Look at history. Protest. Revolt. War. Societal change. Economic collapse. Right now, American wealth disparity is peaking, about equal to (and even surpassing by some studies) the level of 1928.
The greater the disparity, the greater the force of the eventual revolt. It is predictable. It is essentially human nature. Ows is fueled by a handful of ills in our society. All of them have a major economic component. All of them are intertwined at the core with the wild degree of wealth disparity. It may have been impossible to precisely predict "occupy wall street", but the writing has been on the wall that something was coming. Wealth disparity rarely gets this far advanced without some form of significant backlash.
There is however a big distinction to be pointed out. Opposition to UNCHECKED greed is not envy. Envy is an element of the human experience that anyone afflicted by it must learn to deal with, but it is not the driver in opposition to unchecked greed. Far from it. America in general loves to see success. Striving to attain it for oneself is the American way. We root for it not only in ourselves, but for our fellow Americans. Rather than viewing the multi-millionaire with envy, most Americans view him as an example of the financial success we seek for ourselves. It's not that economically frustrated Americans wish to simply take from those with more, it is that most Americans feel that we ALL have a stake in paying a fair share of taxes. Tax deductions and loopholes favor the rich, especially the mega-rich. Calls to tax millionaires' income at a percentage closer to what working class taxpayers pay is by no means a display of envy or a desire to punish success. It is a about seeking a singular successful America where we ALL share the costs and the fruits of a prosperous well functioning society.
In American thinking, it takes massive wealth before we cross the line of seeing something wrong. The very fact that there is such opposition to ows attests to that. At what point does wealth disparity go from being a healthy component of our economy, to being simply immoral? Where is a society's limit to accepting individual hoarding of massive wealth amidst the collapse of a middle class? For some, there is no such limit. But for a society, I believe we just hit that limit. This is the core of ows. It is not anti-capitalism. It is not even anti-greed. It is a stance against unchecked greed having gone so far as to wreck the national economy.
I realize some may never recognize this as the driving principle of ows, and some will simply overlook it, but it is evidenced most clearly in this quote that is being passed around so widely.
"I have no issue with those who do something useful, produce value, and make 100 times more money than me. I have MANY issues with those who produce nothing, destroy value, make others homeless and poor, scam the entire world, and make 10000 times more money than me. Those must go, along with the insane system that makes their scams possible." - Giulio Prisco
The question is will ows be the backlash that makes this change come about. I believe some shift is inevitable. Societies rarely tolerate a growth of wealth disparity this drastic without some form of adjustment. The $64 million question though is always - how chaotic or dangerous will that transformation be?
Ows is not free from violent clash. Police over-reach is well-documented on video. From Tony Bolgna's over-sensitive pepper-spray trigger finger in New York City to police riot gear, tear gas, and flash grenade purposefully thrown into a small crowd of people attending to the soldier whose head was split open when police hit him with a tear gas canister in Oakland, CA, there are multiple clear and blatant occurrences of police over-reach. When police were randomly grabbing people in NYC, Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas took them to task telling them if they want to fight, go to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yelling to the police "there is no honor in this!", he reminds them that the people they are hurting do not have guns. There are many more videos online of police over-reactions during ows protests. Simple google searches will find them in seconds.
By no means does this imply that all the protests are completely angelic. Any 24/7 encampment as crowded as many of these occupy events are will undoubtedly create issues of sanitation and opportunistic thieves. We also must face the fact that such encampments allow homeless junkies a place to blend in. Just acquire a tent, pitch it amidst all the camping protesters who don't know each other, and you have a nice little "safehouse" where you can shoot up without being seen. Far worse, of course are a handful of rapes that took place at ows camps across the nation. Police have not been called to deal with the rapes, for an obvious fear that police involvement would result in an end to the occupy encampments.
But yet, the occupy movement still grows. When police have gone overboard and put people in the hospital, anger only grows and so does the commitment of the protesters. Occupy Oakland vowed to shut the city down with a "general strike". They had a march to the port with numbers so large, it did manage to at least shut down the port. But as you can see from the video footage in these two links, rioters vandalized a few businesses along the way.
The night after the "general strike", this clip shows an officer blatantly shooting a videographer with a rubber bullet. Unprovoked.
It also shows vandalism where someone has sprayed "This is ours " on the base of a statue. Neither action is acceptable.
New York City may be the home of Wall Street and the central focus of ows, but Oakland, CA is where the whole thing is heating up the most.
Only time will tell wether the ows movement will result in positive change for the nation. Only time will tell wether the violence ends with the second military ows supporter now seriously injured with "non-lethal" methods of teargas and rubber bullets, or even with the videographer clearly shot intentionally with a rubber bullet while filming from a distance. Only time will tell wether such police over-reach escalates anger to the point of all-out national riots.
Only time can tell, but now is the time for true organization of the occupy wall street movement. Without it, the whole movement is in real risk of breakdown and potential national chaos if it continues as it is in Oakland. That would be a real shame, for it would leave the root cause untouched. That would only delay and make more costly the inevitable change to come.
My hope is that ows organization coalesces sufficiently enough to properly and "officially" address and denounce the kooks and racists, keep the anger contained to the issues, and avoid vandalism, riots and chaos. If ows falls apart without having changed the system that keeps destroying the middle class, then something else will erupt in its place. Maybe a week, maybe months down the line. But the longer we have this extreme level of wealth disparity and a system that allows it to continue unchecked, the next ows, whatever it may be called then, is just around the corner. History shows that such huge wealth disparity will always, somehow, eventually "self-correct".
ADDENDUM - The following video occurred on Nov. 9, 2011 at University of California, Berkeley. Students were protesting in solidarity with the national occupy movement as well as protesting large state cuts to education and tuition and fee increases. Non-violent protest met with blows by riot police batons. Stephen Colbert points out the disconnect between this action and Berkeley's own website that celebrates its history of activism. The school's website even promotes that it teaches how to protest safely. Look at the video. The students remained non-violent with hands at their sides. Wether they learned this stance in class or not, when the "police" meet non-violent protest with violence, no First Amendment expression is safe. As more and more such blatantly unacceptable examples of "police" over-reach accumulate, the need for some real changes becomes more and more clear. The more violence is used to try to silence the protests, the louder they will get.
A couple new blog posts are in the works. Topics like beating China at the solar energy race and points to consider about student loan debt will be posted in the coming days. For now, though, I am happy to announce my new website - www.snarkysigns.com. It is a gallery of wall photos I create. They are free to copy, post on Facebook, send to friends, whatever. Politically, they may lean left of center, but they all come from the same mix of liberal heart and moderate mind that makes up my perspectives.
For now, there are 3 wall photos at www.snarkysigns.com Two of them are shown in my previous 2 blog posts.
Here is the newest one, focusing on trickle down economics. Also known as Reaganomics, the idea is that giving big tax breaks to the rich puts more investable money in their pockets, and trusts that they will then create jobs for many people in lower economic classes.
It's a great sounding theory, but it assumes that the rich are most likely to invest that extra money via creating American jobs.
That is a big assumption. It is a big assumption at any point in time, but given the global competition for nearly all job markets, using such money to create American jobs would be a poor economic decision for these rich "job-creators". I'm not saying they never create jobs with much of that tax break. They often do. It's just that they overwhelmingly create FOREIGN jobs with that investable money. Especially now. The return is far greater than hiring an American workforce.
Foreign labor has no outrageous minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. It also does not require the employer (or the foreign employee) to contribute to Social Security through FICA tax. (Of course, the loss of income to the Social Security fund through both the employer and the American employee's halves is a related, but separate topic.) Add the lack of any health care cost burden in hiring a foreign workforce, and it's pretty obvious that very few "job creators" are going to trickle down that tax break towards creating American jobs. They will invest it where it gets them the greatest return. In our current globally competing workforces, America will usually be the LAST place that money is trickled.
The truth is, the biggest richest sponges at top only soak up more wealth as a result of trickle down economics while the lower class sponges tend to shrivel and shrink. Current international trade and labor laws accelerate the trend, sending jobs overseas and leaving many lower class sponges to simply dry up altogether.
Trickle down economics is a myth. We keep proving it over and over and over again. Yet current Congressional Republicans keep doubling down on that myth. They are so committed to this falsity, that they cannot ever refer to wealthy Americans as anything but "job creators". They repeat this misnomer continually now, despite the lack of jobs they touted in the mid-term elections, and despite the record low taxes we now "enjoy". The Bush tax cuts have been in effect about a decade now. Obama has cut even more taxes. (Over a third of the Recovery Act "stimulus" was tax cuts.) Many huge corporations making record profits have no tax liability, and some even get billions in tax returns due to all these tax cuts. If trickle down worked the way the myth says it does, we would have a near zero unemployment rate now.
Instead, the wealthy continue to get wealthier and the middle class is suffering heavily. Wealth disparity has grown so far out of control, that the inevitable backlash has begun. Despite voicing many concerns, the biggest central driver of the Occupy Wall Street movement is outrageous wealth disparity. We have gone from a society dreaming of being millionaires to commonly talking about our many billionaires. Remember that it takes 1,000 millions to make one billion. America has over 100 people worth at least 3 billion dollars each. That is no small jump.
The already wealthy get wealthier. The middle class stagnates, loses jobs to foreign labor and falls behind. The poor survive as best they can, praying that no cuts come to the crucial safety net programs that mean the difference between a roof overhead and living on the street, or hunger vs. starvation.
Trickle down economics only fuel this massive economic divide. That is the reality of trickle down economics.
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Sometimes I will blog about new photos I create and add to www.snarkysigns.com and sometimes I won't. To keep up to date on my latest, you'll just have to bookmark not only this blog, but www.snarkysigns.com as well.
I just started a new website that offers free wall photos. www.liberalheartmoderatemind.com has photos of political thought, humor and satire that you can grab and post on Facebook and freely share with friends. My previous blog post here featured my first wall photo creation in response to words by Penn Jillette. This is my second wall photo creation, and it features quotes from Republican Presidential Primary candidate Herman Cain. The quotes are real, even though the sign obviously is not. Here are the gathered quotes in a little more context.
First - Occupy the White House. Not a quote, but an obvious play on the Occupy Wall Street movement to set up the satire.
"I'm going to only allow small bills - 3 pages." This quote comes from June 7th of this year when Herman Cain was complaining about the length of the Affordable Care Act. The complexity of the 2,700 pages of the new health care law bothers him so much that he offers the quote here. On June 8th, Stephen Colbert comically points out that our US Constitution is 4 pages, and the Emancipation Proclamation is 5 pages.
"it's class warfare." On July 17th of this year, Herman Cain was interviewed by Chris Wallace on FoxNews Sunday. When Chris asked him about Warren Buffet's tax rate being lower than his secretary's, Herman Cain responds - " This whole thing about Warren Buffett's tax rate is just playing the class warfare card. This whole thing about talkin' about people flying' around in corporate jets - it's just class warfare." I agree that it's class warfare. When the ultra-rich can influence tax code in their favor through the influence of hired lobbyists to the point that the effective tax rate is lower for the rich than the middle class, then that is class warfare. Pointing out existing class warfare via the disparity the rich have in their favor through the tax code however is just simple observation.
OK. In double checking my quotes, I just realized that technically in this quote I should have placed ellipsis between "it's" and "class" since I missed the word "just" in between. Oh well. There goes my perfect transcription record. With that blunder noted, the next quote comes from a Face the Nation appearance.
On October 9th of this year Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain were interviewed together by Bob Schieffer. With Pastor Jeffers' recent comment calling Mormonism a cult amidst a Republican debate, Bob Schieffer squarely asks Herman Cain - "Do you think Mormons are Christians?" Cain responds "I believe that they believe that they are Christians based upon their definition, but getting into wether they are more Christian than another group, I don't think that's relevant to this campaign." I agree that one's faith or lack thereof is personal and should not be used as a means of political gain or image manipulation for various voter blocs. Not for the average citizen, not for the campaigning politician. Nonetheless, political reality must consider common views that prevail amongst any bloc of voters. One such reality is that many Christian conservatives do view Mormonism as a cult, and Mitt Romney's Mormon faith is frankly a political liability for him within the Christian conservative vote. Making a clear statement in support of Mormonism is somewhat risky for any Republican candidate - especially in the primaries. Yet just as risky, if not more, is clearly stating any non-acceptance of others' religion. Cain tries to straddle that line by not actually answering. Cain never says if he believes if Mormons are Christians. He cops out by saying that he believes that THEY believe they are Christians. He even adds the "…based upon their definition." Though a politician's religion only becomes an issue for me if they parade it around with great showcase, the way one handles such direct questions like this (at least to me) says a lot about a person's character. Especially when you compare this reply here to his statements about how others tell him they don't understand Romney's Mormonism in relation to Christian Protestantism. Cain tends to talk about others' religions and religious comments, and distance himself from the act of casting aspersions by saying that this is what OTHERS have said.
Back to July 17 again for the next quote. Talking to Chris Wallace about the debt ceiling debate, they discuss the idea to not raise it, pay out bond holders just enough to not technically commit default, then cut the remaining spending by 44% in order to not have deficit this year. Without one specific cut offered, Cain says that this is do-able by eliminating "non-essentials". He argues that a 44% budget reduction is not as drastic as it sounds by saying that you would have to go through "…program by program and find that money. Some agencies you might need to cut 60%. Some agencies you might need to cut 30%. To say 40% across the board. No. That's not how you get there. The way you get there is you take agency by agency by agency and look for those cuts and some of them are gonna be bigger than 40%.""
"Restructure Medicare." comes from the Sept 12 tea party/CNN debate.
October 9 again - Face the Nation. Talking about his 9 9 9 tax plan, Cain says that it will not hurt poor people. He says the plan is "…revenue neutral" continuing "This means people that are under-employed will be able to find a job that they are more qualified for.". Then he adds that this means those who "are low-wage earners, they can find a second job." Of course no explanation for these connections is offered. I can't find a way to make such a connection no matter how many times I scratch my head. When Bob Schieffer says some economists say this is wrong, Cain replies "They have changed our assumptions. That's why they say that it's not correct." There are actually more equally bizarre assertions on his 9 9 9 plan in this part of the interview, but let's move on to the next quote.
During the tea party/CNN debate on Sept 12, this question was asked. "All of you profess to be pro-business candidates for President. Can you be pro-worker at the same time?" Herman Cain discusses the work ethic of his family growing up and eventually says "One restaurant IS the basic fundamental business unit in this country."
In an online Wall Street Journal interview with Alan Murray, when Occupy Wall Street comes up, Cain reduces the movement to a sense of unwarranted entitlement and offers the absolute philosophy of individual responsibility in this statement. "If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself." Now, compare that sentiment to what he said a year ago on Oct. 14, 2010. "The American Dream is under attack because our government is being hijacked by the liberals in DC." Is this a complete change of philosophy over a year's time, or just blatant hypocrisy? Hmmm. Considering that he doesn't understand what Occupy Wall Street is about, I have to wonder. In this same interview he says "I don't understand these demonstrations and what is it they are looking for." He also says he believes that Occupy Wall Street is an orchestrated and planned attempt to distract from what he calls the "failed policies of the Obama administration." But he also prefaces that very assertion with "I don't have facts to back this up." (The last half of that WSJ interview had so many Herman Cain gems.)
"I'm the black walnut." is a phrase Herman Cain used when on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He has been referring to himself as a black walnut in various ways in the past couple weeks, often saying black walnut is not just the flavor of the week. (This started when Sarah Palin had said that Herman Cain was the flavor of the week.)
I am the 999 is not a quote, just the satirical reference to all the "I am the 99%" signs. (Humor and satire really wither when you explain it, doesn't it? - lol) Now for the last real Herman Cain quote on the fictional sign in this wall photo.
During the Republican debate on August 11 of this year, a moderator brought up an earlier remark of Cain's. She asks "When President Obama joked about protecting the borders with alligators and a moat, not only did you embrace the idea, you upped the ante with quote "a twenty foot barbed wire electrified fence". Were you serious?" With great humor, Cain replies "America's got to learn how to take a joke."
Listening to Herman Cain in various debates and interviews, I am happily taking the joke for now. He is pretty funny. As long as his joke never gets to occupy the White House. Then this comedy would quickly turn to national tragedy.
This wall photo just started circulating on Facebook.
(The left half of the above image.)
I added my 2 cents to Penn's thoughts, put them side by side with the wall photo and posted the resulting image above to my Facebook account. Clicking the image should enlarge it enough to read it.
Below is what I wrote:
I like Penn, but this part of his thought process I always thought showed him to be an idiot. Yes. An idiot. To believe that simply leaving "compassion" or safety nets to the sole responsibility of the individual or small non-profit group will ever be either adequate or consistent is pure fantasy. To leave the social and moral responsibility of offering a hand-up to those who are in desperate need to the whims of prevailing public perception and fluctuations of an individual's compelling sense to act is grossly insufficient. Subjecting critical assistance for an individual or family to the judgement of their neighbors, wether conscious or not, invariably leaves many unhelped. We once followed that path in America. The results made tough times not only tough but beyond disastrous. It is correct to say that helping poor people yourself is compassion. Regardless of what minimal safety nets against absolute poverty we may instill via government, the individual can always show true compassion by helping poor and suffering people themselves. Nothing stops anyone from doing so. Yet such individualized help proves woefully incapable of meeting the basic challenge. Despite any and all attempts to find common ground with opposing thought, when I am faced with such libertarian absolutes, I have no choice but to call them idiotic.
A friend recently sent me this link of a gentleman offering his perspective on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Below the link to the video is my response to mattwillwork's video post.
Some good very relevant points are brought up here. Mostly however, he obviously doesn't even get what he himself says - these people must be unemployed if they have the time to be protesting so much. Exactly! If this large lack of jobs weren't the case, OWS would not be such a large movement.
Despite the diversity of economic issues being raised with OWS, if there were jobs - even minimum wage jobs - available to everyone seeking work, then people would not risk losing that work by going to rallies, and the numbers of people turning up to protest could never reach the levels that they do. Realize, OWS is not a one-day rally. It is an ongoing movement growing quite rapidly and it has spread across the nation (and further). It has been going on for over a month non-stop.
Nonetheless, the vlogger here later comes back to the point of large scale unemployment by saying that the 90% of us who have jobs are laughing at you. That mentality - the ignorant willful whitewashing in one's own mind of the plight of the jobless who need help - brings to mind that classic Bruce Hornsby song. The one where the people waiting in an unemployment line because they can't find work are being belittled by passersby who yell "Get a job!". The vlogger even repeats this very belittlement. Not just an insensitive remark, but one showing a complete lack of understanding of what is driving the OWS movement.
He also chooses to assume that OWS is about simply demonizing corporations for the sake of considering capitalism a bad thing. That's where most OWS detractors are making awfully big and wildly inaccurate assumptions. I am not the only who has been writing that capitalism is not the enemy - greed gone unchecked is the enemy. It is the prime directive of business to maximize profits. Greed is a given. That's why balance is designed within the regulations that keep capitalism in check rather than allow it to consume and destroy an entire economy.
When our regulations and trade agreements (or lack thereof) offer a big profit bump by eliminating 2.4 million US jobs, replacing them with 2.7 million foreign jobs at a fraction of the cost, then that is what US business is going to do. Even the most "American" of big business still has profit maximization as the prime directive rather than greater American economic good. But the point is, no one (well no one who is honestly thinking about why they protest) is protesting to try to end business or destroy capitalism. The overwhelming majority realize that capitalism itself is one crucial piece of the American Dream. No one is going to make their own footwear or clothes. No one can deny that so many things we all rely upon on a daily basis are made easily available through a combination of business, and the national infrastructure that we all pay for.
But there is something else that cannot be denied - something at the very core of the OWS movement - the fact that greed of big business has gone unchecked. In America, CEOs average 475 times the pay of the average worker they "oversee". Next is Venezuela where CEOs make 50 times the average pay of the workers they "oversee". Big banks get free loans from our government while they turn around and throw people out of their homes by the millions rather than restructure crazy underwater loans. Apple makes all its products overseas so that they can pay a few dollars per hour to the people who actually make their goods, rather than paying American workers living wages to do so. All in the name of following the prime directive - maximize profits. A prime directive that is limited ONLY by what system of regulatory checks is placed upon it.
The only thing that keeps capitalism functioning smoothly is well-designed checks. Checks that do not allow the greed to grow so rampant that it actually eats the system that feeds it - like is happening now. Checks that do not allow Wall Streeters to bundle sub-prime loans and do large scale credit default swaps, selling moderate to high risk goods they created as low risk high value goods, thus collapsing the economy. No one has been taken to task for this. Probably because our regulators in the name of right-leaning ideology dismantled the regulations that used to protect our economy from that very risk. But even if it was legal, it doesn't change the fact that no one has been held accountable for this. We simply live with millions of foreclosures, higher jobless rates and allow those who made hundreds of millions off of this destruction to continue hoarding that ill-gained and destructive wealth.
No. No one in their right mind is saying business in itself is bad or that capitalism doesn't work. Just like the guy here points out, we all rely on business for the goods and services of modern day life. The overwhelming majority of OWS protesters though are saying that we have allowed greed to go unchecked for too long amidst our great system of capitalism, and we want balance restored. Exactly how to restore that balance is the big question. It will undoubtedly be fought over with great passion. But balance must be, and will be, just as it always does, eventually be somehow regained.
In the meantime, creating moment by moment events of fictional protesters is just one more distraction. Especially when the fictionalized characters suffer no effects of joblessness or poverty. The one jobless recent college grad in his example is lucky enough to be alright because his father makes plenty of money to support a whole family. For millions of real jobless Americans, no such financial backup scenario exists. This is the biggest fallacy of OWS criticism. There ARE millions of Americans who are not only without a good paying salary large enough to support an entire family, but even without low-wage work. There ARE millions of examples of fellow American citizens who through no fault of their own are jobless simply because there are far fewer jobs in America than there are citizens. Simply yelling at them to "Get a job!" does nothing to address the issue and only further demonstrates YOUR lack of understanding of the issues at hand.
The vlogger here starts his day-in-the-life scenario by calling the OWS protesters "...self-righteous and morally indignant hypocrites" for speaking out against corporate greed. The irony is that such a label applies to all of us speaking our minds through only one view of any issue at the exclusion of others. No matter how much I may seek to understand and take into account different perspectives before getting on my own soapbox, I accept that the phrase would have to apply to me. It clearly applies to the vlogger himself in his reduction of OWS protesters to being "all a bunch of fucking litterbugs" who are "young, stoned and unemployed" who fail to help others who have less than themselves. This despite the outpouring of food, water and more that so many protesters bring in bulk to give away to others. This despite the diversity of politico-economic issues so cogently addressed by so many protesters. No. Between this vlogger, myself, and the majority of the OWS protesters, the least "self-righteous and morally indignant hypocrites" are the protesters.
We can either realize that there are multiple economic issues being addressed through OWS protests, the least of which is the fact that America has far fewer jobs than it does citizens. Or, if it makes us feel better, we can simply dismiss the whole OWS movement by claiming that they are all dirty stoners who are protesting for "causes [they] don't understand." If that's the choice you make, don't forget to tell them all to "Just go out and get a job!"
Andy Harris
released a statement arguing against Obama’s jobs bill proposal. Andy writes: “Over Labor Day weekend I met with many small business owners
on the Ocean City Boardwalk – a common theme I heard from those potential job
creators was their desire to get government out of the way so that they could
do what they do best: grow their businesses and create American jobs.”
He HAS to
be kidding! Create AMERICAN jobs on the boardwalk by simply getting government
out of the way? The Dispatch noted Harris commenting that Labor Day is the last
weekend for many OC businesses to make money. Where is government standing in
the way of boardwalk businesses creating American jobs if they won’t be open
for business until roughly Easter of next year? Did Harris just conveniently
forget that the Ocean City business model of employment is 3-5 months of work, followed
by unemployment benefits for the remainder of the year for those workers who
actually ARE Americans? Given his Party's strong objection to sustained
unemployment benefits, I’m really surprised he would try to paint OC boardwalk
businesses as an example of potential American jobs. Does he not realize that
Ocean City now actively recruits a FOREIGN workforce to fill most of these
seasonal jobs? No longer do we see American college students filling the
bulk of these seasonal positions at OC retail stores and restaurants. Now they
are primarily Russian speaking workers. (Hop on the bus in Ocean City in the
summer and see if English is spoken as much as Russian.)
I’ll try to
give Harris some credit in his statement. Maybe what he means by getting
government out of the way for boardwalk businesses is eliminating the burden of
Social Security and Medicare taxes. Business owners don't have to pay this when
hiring temporary foreign workers like they do when they hire American workers. Maybe
if we just eliminate Social Security, we could have Ocean City boardwalk
businesses create American jobs again – at least for a few months per year. Or
maybe he is referring to the burden of having to pay a worker the outrageous
minimum of $7.25 per hour worked. Maybe that is the governmental burden he is
referring to. Maybe it's both.
Whatever
government regulations he may be eluding to, it is clear he has no idea of the
economic realities regarding American jobs. Not on the seasonal Ocean City
boardwalk, and not on the national scale.
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