Today in America, you are rich if you make $250,000 and you are poor if you have no income at all. And that is the case for over 2 million Americans. So, although at one time making $250,000 was not necessarily being rich, now it is. It’s pretty simple isn’t it? If you make not one dollar, and someone makes a quarter of a million dollars, has 250,000 times more dollars than you do, then that person is rich compared to you, who make nothing.
Yet Republicans treat both groups the same. They give no money to the rich. And they want to give no money to the unemployed….those we just said were poor, because they earn nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Hence, feed the rich;starve the poor, because that’s usually what happens to someone who has no money. They eventually starve to death.
So the poor could go to work. 99% of them won’t mind. On the contrary, they virtually all want and seek jobs. But the Republicans are the ones who control the jobs. About 12% of America works in the public sector. 88% of Americans work in the private sector and their jobs are controlled by those who own the companies. The companies are owned 67% by the top 1% of individuals and that number is climbing. That group is actually people with slightly more income per year than $250,000 but $250,000 is close enough.
Why are there no jobs? Well, let’s see. One or more of these top one percenters makes the decision to make something that a lot of people will buy. There are 15 million unemployed Americans, most of them intelligent, hard-working citizens, but without a college education. The owners of the company with the new product decide that they can hire people cheaper in China or India and if they do hire someone in the U.S., they hire some management people whom they pick from a pool of unemployed who are college educated.
So a lot of the college educated are still out of work but some get hired. The vast majority of the high school graduates are passed over because they would make at least $15/ an hour and the Chinese work for $3 an hour or less. Of course when you move tens of millions of potential jobs overseas, then the domestic economy begins to feel it. Then companies do less well and the economy begins to suffer and more people are laid off.
Now why do people need to make at least $15 an hour? Why not $3 an hour. Or $1 an hour? Because of the cost of living. People who are employed at the $250,000 per year level spend a lot of money. And there are a lot of Americans. So those who make $100,000 and $80,000 and so on also keep the standard of living pretty high…thank God. It’s what we all want. But it is not enough to keep the economy going when one out of ten people is unemployed, and another one out of twenty can only afford rent and food and another one out of twenty is barely existing and another tens of millions of jobs go overseas and nothing is left here to replace them they only spend it on themselves, but it does raise the cost of food, automobiles, real estate, entertainment, and health care.
So the person who lives on $2,500 a month pays about 20% in taxes because they pay a higher percentage of their total income for FICA (which stops at $104,000 for the rich and for which the Republicans now say you should be returned nothing…no Social Security, no Medicare) and state and local taxes, plus sales taxes. So the idea that these small percentages, which for the poor are more and for the rich are less as a total percentage of income necessary…means that the poor pay virtually no taxes is wrong.
The 30% of net income for a mortgage that the rich pay or can pay is at a minimum…$4,000. The person making $30,000 a year has maybe $800 per month, even though they may have the same basic familiy costs for food, health care, children’s education and clothing expense and minimum vehicle costs…gasoline, repairs or new car costs…for basic transportation needs.
So the example of why we should not allow just anyone to have athletic scholarships is Senator Scott Brown. The one time jock and male model from Massachusetts when not slouched in his chair, doodling and thinking about “going outside to play” during committee meetings, denies unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who have been unemployed for over 2 years. He doesn’t care. He’s got a job and it pays well. It is really not difficult to characterize him as an insensitive oaf, and a new member of the Neocon Fascist club that he seems to have wished for all his life.
He now joins racists like Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Charles Grassley of Iowa plus fellow Right Wingers Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. In the meantime, he sits in the seat held by such dedicated and distinguished people as John and Ted Kennedy, Edward Brooke and John Kerry.
It is a total disgrace for the once-proud people of the formerly great state of Massachusetts. We have seen more and more of the Right Wing…Mit Romney and now Scott Brown…creep into the voting patterns of the formerly intelligent and educated populace of Massachusetts. One wonders if the trend will cause Sarah Palin to eventually settle in Boston. She would be a perfect complement for someone like Scott Brown.
Brown says he wants to help. What he actually wants is to help himself to a better position among the Fascists. They love someone who has the guts to lead people to their annihilation. Let’s be specific: Sen. Max Baucus introduced a proposal recently to extend benefits through 2011. It would have cost of $56 billion. That’s expensive but these are people who have totally run out of anything..no jobs nor prospects of jobs either through a private sector still creating and sending jobs to China.
Let’s face it. There are no jobs. None through a public sector that is cutting government because of debt they incurred by continuously lowering taxes for no economic justification whatsoever. They are cutting government simply because they have lowered taxes for the rich and because they have sold off the government assets that did provide income in order to pay for some of the revenues that they cut to help the rich and their businesses.
Scott Brown is just another crooked politician on the take from big oil, big health care and big business. He’s a dumb ex-jock with nothing to offer, intellectually and physically lazy.
Do we want more homeless? Do we want people begging on street corners? Do we want people shooting bank clerks and convenience store clerks so that Scot Brown’s campaign contributors can have an $830 billion tax cut and he won’t vote to give just about 6% of that back to keep 2 million people from starvation? We’re not talking about homelessness. That has already gone up thanks to George W.Bush, Dick Cheney, Christopher Cox and people who think like Scott Brown.
In 2007, we knew that we had about 650,000 people homeless. We could identify them, where they slept, where they got their food from charitable organizations. In October 2008 we had the great Bush Stock Market Crash and the bottom dropped out of everything. By 2009, we knew that we had over a million homeless. Then the numbers started to get out of control. By 2010, we were told that there were 2.5 million homeless with about 1.3 million of those now being children. Today, with 2 to 3 million more foreclosures that number is estimated to be over 3 million people.
Since last couple of years, demand on food banks has gone up by 50%. People who were barely surviving are now falling below survival and the pull on society is greater and greater. It is exactly what the Republicans want. Some of the Right Wingers are simply–hard to imagine but clearly true from what they say publicly–Fascists. They don’t give a damn about people who don’t think like themselves. Believe in what I believe, they say, and we’ll take care of you, bring you into the Party, give you a political job and you will make it. That’s Fascism.
Still others who have good jobs, good schools for their kids, and good lives with plenty of money and health insurance and security….don’t know and many don’t care what is going on around them. They listen to one of the 9 out of 10 Right Wing propagandists on the radio going to work or coming home and they believe what they hear. Until they lose a job. Or a brother loses a job. Or a neighbor loses a job. Then, occasionally, as the polls are gradually beginning to show, they learn the truth about the oligarchs and the military industrial complex and the non-competitive, confiscatory rates of the health insurance business and its iron grip on Americans with its control of health care.
So the extending benefits for the 2 million long-term unemployed were forced by Brown to expire while Scott Brown moved on to plan a series of fund raisers for his re-election this week. He should be ashamed of himself. Not once in 40 years has the Federal government failed to extend benefits for the long-term unemployed when unemployment numbers were over about 7%…i.e., in a Recession where very few jobs were available.
The people of Massachusetts should be embarrassed, even humiliated by this phony, and by their acceptance of him as their representative in the Senate. He is more typical of the cruelty that one expects from an ex-slave state than one of the original founding states that fought to protect civil rights and the union and the welfare of all its citizens. Every day that Scott Brown is in the Senate, Massachusetts loses credibility as a state with citizens who support enlightened, progressive policies.
The Neocons are trying to ruin the country. There is no longer any question or doubt. This action by Scott Brown and the idea that they are trying to dismantle both Social Security and Medicare at the same time that they have attacked the last bastion of collective bargaining, the public employees indicates that they want to destroy the middle class. At the same time they have driven so many loopholes into the tax code for the rich that thos in the upper brackets under a million bucks a year are paying 21-23% of their income in taxes…and complaining…and the multi-millionaires are paying between 15% down to almost zero.
That 67% of corporate owners do not want to create jobs here in the U.S. GM, which is now mostly privately owned…is owned by large investors. They make and sell more cars today in China to the Chinese than they do in America to the Americans. But those big investors make hundreds of millions, or will, and U.S. workers make less, have worse health care plans, have smaller pensions and less job security than at any time since the era of the last Robber Barons, pre-World War I America.
We need to get rid of people like Scott Brown and his Fascist friends and get some good Americans back in the Senate. For the time being, that means Democrats. There are no good Republicans left. Only bad Republicans called Neocons, whom we on this blog call by their real name: Fascists.