Sunday, April 3, 2011

Reply

A reply I posted on another site tonight:


I lean left. To a tea partier though I might look like a commie. I think there is a problem with people in the media like Rush that have been pushing the debate further to the right making the center look left. I blame Clinton, a pro corporate consolidation, free trade Democrat. He signed laws allowing for media consolidation. If Republicans truly had their eyes open they would have loved Clinton. It’s the anti-regulation, pro-greed Republicans that hated him and spread ideas that he was a leftist.

I’m more convinced now than ever that Republicans in congress WANT to return us to the Gilded Age or 1920, all wealth and power in the hands of the very few. They complain about wealth redistribution while simultaneously lowering taxes on the most wealthy amongst us and cutting social programs and laws meant to protect workers from abuse. The sad part is that corporate media is complicit in the robbery. Corporate media doesn’t have an interest in reporting unbiased news, they want ratings which equal profits. Plain and simple. Republicans claim to want to balance the deficit but when they’re in power they have shown time and again they want no such thing! Perfect example: right now they want to cut spending but military spending is off the table. How else are all those munitions manufacturers and private security firms supposed to make unfettered profits on death and destruction?

I am sick and goddamn tired of the lies spread in our media where middle class workers and union members are disparaged by billionaires or people speaking on their behalf (knowingly and unknowingly). Do you know how high a 1 billion dollar stack of cash would be? Over a mile high if it was a stack of $100 bills! And these are the people lobbying congress for lower taxes, offshore tax havens, free trade and bank bailouts! They fire workers by the thousands and increase profits and still get multi-million dollar bonuses when their companies fail. It’s infuriating.

I do not dismiss the Tea Party. I think they are dangerous in two ways. 1. They are wildly misinformed people being whipped into a frenzy and a lot of them own guns. 2. They vote.

Everyone is so damn greedy and concerned about what programs poor people can access they don’t see the profits of their hard work swallowed by corporate executives. And if I hear one more person say that our corporate taxes are too high I might vomit.

Another bit that might cause me to retch: lower taxes = higher jobs. Not true. A company making profits having to pay less taxes means more profits for shareholders, not more jobs. 10 years of the Bush Tax cuts have shown us this. “Tax cuts may comfort the comfortable, to quote consultant Robert Shrum, but there’s not a convincing case that they result in new jobs.”

They claim to be supply and demanders but if that’s true the market sets demand and demand requires jobs, in spite of taxes. Greed and no tariffs will send the jobs to the places where corporations and pay people the least. Do we want to compete with workers in China or Vietnam on a level playing field?