RWNorman's Beer, Food and Politics

How About That?

"The government has the same requirement to protect its citizens as corporations have to protect their shareholders." - Nick Clegg, British Deputy Prime Minister, 09/21/2011

What an interesting statement in this day and age.  And how true.

We have been the brunt of a joke for 100+ years as the people.  Virtually nothing which has become the norm has included the people unless they provided something of worth to the corporations, and yet the corporations continued to deprive the people of something of worth.

He later followed with "when birth is justice" which strikes a particular note with me because such an idea personifies why we should question who is drawing the lines, but also why should anyone think there are lines to be drawn in the first place? 

The concept of birth being justice supposes that there are lines to be drawn by the haves against the have nots.  It creates a faux position of rights which don't exist.  They cannot exist because there never was a reason for them to exist.  The haves have, but the concept of the depression of the have nots by the haves isn't a foregone conclusion.  In fact, it is one of the inevitable conclusions based on the predator/prey concept of life. 

It is an abdication of responsibility by the government to protect the people from the wealthy, the corporations, and the laws designed by the wealthy, the corporations, which gives them the ability to advance whilst shutting down the ability of the people to advance.

The score card has been tallied, the figures published, the concepts called into question and rejected, and we only have the final battle of whether the government is the advocate of the people, or the instigators of desires by the wealthy.

I never would have believed that I would have to lend my ear to Nick Clegg to find the right words, for I thought I had tried them all.  Perhaps I was just shouting into a wet sponge, and the hours, days, years, spent were for naught because there was no one there to hear.

We have allies in the governments of the world.  We just need to learn where to look for them.

Face it, if we can have major social change, economical adjustments, and bailouts across the world, all in the name of globalization, then the US Supreme Court's suggestion that foreign laws cannot influence our court system, even being designed by foreign law, is flawed.

For if corporations of global expanse have the ability to operate upon all the laws of the world, then the United States has to recognize that globalization has, in fact, already affected how we should interpret law.

And so the people of the world need to use this new right to their advantage.  If an American company does damage to another country's environment, then via the same laws that they do business in this country, we all have a stake in the outcome.  By going global all corporations actually create an environment whereby they have to abide by all laws.  They have misinterpreted their ability to abuse law.

I'm sorry, but if you apply simple logic, then the one (corporations) cannot become global whilst the other (countries) remain sovereign and assailable by corporate special interests.

And in this combative assault against the interests of the people, even with the help of government, they have created an environment where the people are now the ones requiring protection.

Perhaps we need a Horton Hears a Who moment, where the very existence of somebody other than corporations becomes recognized.

I have suggested a 14 million unemployed march upon Washington, DC, because I believe in peaceful protest, and I believe that when 14 million people are out of work, then they have to time to protest.  In fact, should be taking the time to protest.

Numbers mean a lot of things, but one that means most is tens of millions of people asking the government to do their job in protecting the rights of its citizens just as corporations protect the rights of their shareholders.

We are all shareholders of the United States of America.  We should demand no less.

Creating an Environment for Job Creation, Outdated Models

There are several avenues in this particular subject because we have consistently developed numerous different models of doing business, but seemingly have failed to realize when these models did not pan out as designed.

One of those models is "just in time inventory" which historically has caused plant shutdowns due to numerous different problematic assumptions.

First, the concept of just in time inventory supposes that all aspects of the model do and will function exactly the way necessary to function.  We know this not to be true simply because we have come across a continually growing set of circumstances which impair the ability of this function.

I've gotten to the point of calling just in time inventory "its about damned time inventory" whereby the lack of product has become built into the delivery.  Every system which has a flaw will ultimately have that flaw exploited by circumstances, causing greater and greater failure rates due to that inherent flaw.

Just in time assumes that all systems involved with delivery are optimum, that no intervening circumstances can adversely affect delivery, and that once arrival of product has been achieved, there are operational systems in place to offload that product and get it out of the way for the next delivery.

All of the above factors are a fallacy in design, and actually don't even fit the least assumption, which means that any flaw, as I said, will, under natural cause and effect, be exploited to the detriment of the model.

There are no methodologies that allow for everything to work in lockstep time and time again, ad infinitum without fail.  Such is an impossibility, even in a manufacturing environment where most all aspects are strictly controllable and run fairly well.

It is on the outside of the system that creates the problem.  Trains derail, planes don't always run on schedules, and trucks can run out of available fuel.  Since we have gone global after the development of this just in time environment, the entire world itself imposes itself upon the prospects of being able to maintain an already failed model.

Where we fail is our inability to recognize a failed system, much less come up with the creation of new systems that allow growth.

We are hunkering down without investment, without even the basics of a desire to recognize those failures.  And part of those failures are extremely hard to look at because, like just in time, our models are more important than our historical data.

It is easier to continue to support a failed model, suggesting that such a model can be tweaked and returned to a viable system when the design of the system was itself flawed from the beginning.

And I must add that any system designed to operate upon the state of roads, railroads, and trucking in a just in time delivery system ignores the fact that those roads, railroads and trucking are now 30 years older without the proper maintenance to support the initial model design.

So what we are seeing is a conflagration of multiple failures, allowed to grow over time due to the lack of maintenance, and we still expect to see auto parts getting to the car manufacturers, we fail to see steel, now coming from China, to get to new construction locations, and we fail to see any recognition of the problem from the people who have been elected to stave these types of problems off.

This created a new model to combat the old, failed model, which in turn, created new avenues of failures.

Since we could no longer depend on just in time delivery of inventory, business decided to start up these big club stores, where purchasing in excess of one's individual needs was drummed up because people couldn't expect to go to the store during an emergency and buy toilet paper.

This is one of the strangest manifestations of trying to fix a failed model with another failed model, but the ramifications spread like a virus in a number of industries that placed Americans in peril.

For instance, you can't go to a club discount store if you don't have the vehicle to move the product to your house.  Well, you can, but to what purpose?

Once you get the product home, you have to be able to store it, which no one has had since the days of the cellar (no, not a basement, a cellar to store root vegetables and so forth).

Cheap loans caused people to move up to larger houses with greater storage availability even when they didn't require the greater living space.  But the apparent trend of HAVING caused the requirement to store what you had, and history isn't really kind when the obvious is presented.

This is one of the failures of the original "just in time inventory" even though it was originally designed to offer manufacturers the ability to have minimal storage facilities for parts, and it turned into having maximum storage facilities for product to the consumer.

Of course, the offset is that one has to trim some other item out of their lives, such as certain larger homes becoming parts of a "controlled access" gated community, and the greater size of the house ate up the available land, causing people to lose the ability to park their own vehicles.  Many of these communities have no parking on the street, so the owner has given up the ability to maintain friendships and community due to the lack of parking.

This is a major problem, particularly when trying to maintain a level of family in a house big enough to allow for a nicely sized family event, and yet you can't use the house because of the lack of parking.

When my family converges upon my sister's house for Christmas, the whole block is shut down.  Its not like she doesn't work out accommodations with her neighbors, but again, because the larger housing necessitates a smaller availability of parking we actually impose ourselves upon her neighbor's lives.  In fact, all of us have become pretty friendly with her neighbors because they all have become a part of the family.

These are all big and little ripples of the concept of just in time inventory, or more specifically, due to the failure of the model of just in time inventory.

I recognize that to some, this might be a stretch, but facts are facts.  I have a small house, but I also have enough street parking available that we have had a few jazz parties where everyone gets not only a chance to park, but a chance to sing.  We easily had 50 people in the house at one time.

I can't go to my sisters-in-law's house and do that even though the house would accommodate a larger group of people than mine.

And the point I'm trying to make is that 30 years of a failed system of moving product to market specifically to cut costs in the manufacturing process has failed the American people, on the whole, by the ripple effect.

It doesn't just stand in this particular circumstance, but to recognize that such is the case one has to actually do the work and figure out just how much over the past 30 years we have been manipulated into doing our normal things in the manner they desire.

Would anyone from 50 years ago buy a case of tomato sauce?  Is it necessary to have packages of toilet paper so big that one needs a minivan to get it home?  Do we need cases of Pepsi or Coke?  Do we need a "refreshment" refrigerator for kid's drinks in addition to the one?  Cooking shows even support the idea of a refrigerator for storage and one for  interim cooking steps.

Don't get me wrong.  I understand the idea of a pantry, even if it is twice the size of a 1930's kitchen, but how has the extrapolation of housing storage helped create the house hungry world in order to HAVE a month's worth of toilet paper?

Let's face it. These efforts made by people;  to buy a minivan, to purchase a new, bigger house even though parking is limited;  the concept of storing household products rather than buying them when you need them, is all a recognition of the fact that you may not have "just in time inventory" work for you.

So we have to be aware that new business models are being presented to us via the ripple effect, and it seems that the greater mistakes these business models make, the greater adverse effect it has on the people.

Creating an Environment for Job Creation, Water

I'm kind of sick and tired of the endless tirades of Republicans suggesting that government cannot create jobs, or that regulations are stifling growth.  I'm tired of hearing about business not being able to be certain of the taxes they'll pay or the rules they have to abide by.

And then it struck me.  If capitalism is a growing beast that moves in different directions based on market expectations and the ability of consumers to consume, they why are the Republicans offering nothing but stagnation?

Well, stagnation in terms that all that has been will continue to grow in direct relationship to its history.  Vast corporations will not only continue to be vast corporations, but small businesses may get larger, but they actually won't be making any more money.

They will fail based on the stagnation the Republicans offer as the next great thing, which wasn't all that great of a thing when they offered it the first 15 times.

For instance, let us take something as simple as water.  Well, besides water being the basis for life, it is also a major factor in a company's products, particularly in manufacturing.  Now let's just assume that there were no rules and regulations on any company's ability to use water and return what was left to the watershed.  Ignoring the obvious impact upon the population, what would really happen.

Downstream small businesses would be left to try to manufacture quality products with polluted water.  It might be that product-destroying heavy metals would be incorporated into the downstream products, causing a loss of market share because of inferior quality.  That is a loss of money that the smaller business has to overcome to remain solvent.  But without rules and regulations, they have no recourse in terms of law to allow them to use clean fresh water for their product. They would either go down the tubes or they would have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to filter their water intake to get a clean enough product to sell, automatically driving their cost up in doing business and prices to the consumer.

Now the upstream company doesn't care about any downstream company, so this would be the methodology to continue to use water for the creation of product.  Whilst the first downstream company would filter for the pollutants of the upstream company, every subsequent downstream company would have to expend more and more money to filter out pollutants from each and every one of the upstream companies.

In fact, if there were competition between and upstream and downstream company, the upstream company could sabotage the downstream company with numerous effluents that would cost a fortune to filter out.

The possibilities are endless, without rules and regulations.

Or, using the same example, the upstream company not only uses the water but they, in turn, build a system whereby their use of clean water takes in more than they need, and they turn around and sell it to downstream companies via their own system of water pipes.  Ah, that sounds like capitalism, now doesn't it?

But what sounds like capitalism becomes a monopoly, and the output of the water, when demand increases downstream, becomes tainted with pollutants because the upstream company cannot supply the demand and maintain the cleanliness of the water.

And what happens when the upstream company becomes a downstream company of the newest upstream company, which you know will happen.  The basic principle of capitalism is advantage.  First to market, best product, and cheapest costs are all advantages you hear about, but without rules and regulations we're talking about the Wild West of capitalism.

Billy the Kid became an outlaw because there were too many competing law enforcement agencies and no rules or regulations which described the exact law they were able to enforce, nor where they might apply that enforcement.  The bad guys became the good guys at a meeting of a couple "citizens".  Even Wyatt Earp was a Town Sheriff who had problems with a County Sheriff and so had the federal government make him a US Marshall.

There were so many bad guys in good guy clothes that no one knew who was in charge, and the railroads owners and cattle barons even had the Pinkertons.
The Pinkertons were later used to try to quell a worker uprising at a Carnegie mine where both sides lost lives.

Mongolia is in the Wild West of gold mining, where corporations without rules and regulations are using clean water with abandon and polluting the entire ecosystem of the Mongolian steps.  The population has dropped, both in the attrition of the extremely long-lived Mongolians, but also via the drop in child bearing.  An entire culture is being wiped out as you read this.

Water.  What a wonderful thing.  You can go for a month without food, but you can't go without water for much more than a week, if that.  We spend the first nine months of our existence in water before we are born.  We are use to water.  We thrive with water.  We excel at many methods of finding water, from the tribes of the Kalahari to the dowsing of new wells to dig.

And the cool thing is, for all practical purposes, our water is limitless as long as the planet doesn't get to 900 degrees.  Our planet recycles water at a tremendous rate, and yet somehow we are finding ways to out-pollute our planet's recycling of salt to fresh water in leaps and bounds.

Even with six billion people on the planet we couldn't out use the abundance of clean water on the planet if it wasn't for companies taking massive quantities to make the products they sell.

Now don't get me wrong.  One of the concepts of being a human is to become a better human, which means the development of groups, tribes, city-states, nations, and yes, even companies.

But none of these things have come about without rules and regulations.  Without laws, rules or regulations, there is no certain expectation for a civilized society to operate within.  The expectation is that one will not use resources to their advantage without taking others into consideration.

And here is where the divergence of intelligent thought has moved into the nether world.  Capitalism advocates, nay, requires that the only good the company needs to do is to the benefit of the limited few; the shareholders.  Those whom are not shareholders are of no benefit nor concern.  In the past one hundred or so years, this divergence has become an operational problem for most of the world.

Companies, now vast corporations, exceed the bounds of single countries, use their ability to hide in the country of their incorporation whilst they wreck havoc on other countries and their populations across the world.

Capitalism has become a cancer on humankind; nay life on earth, just as cancer now attacks humans in every part of the world.  I make the wild hair assumption that cancer will become so prevalent in the future that humans will ultimately adapt to live with it or expunge it from their systems.  But in the mean time, we could help eliminate it if we continued to provide more rules and regulations on how to proceed with the concept of doing business.

And to my way of thinking, this cancer causing agent which we may or may not survive is the constant demand that rules and regulations limit corporations from the certainty of their profits.

Now that I've gone around the world and back in time, let me just say this.

No one guarantees you anything in this world.  If you arrange to get a guarantee, you are stuck with the arrangement of that guarantee and can look no further.  Less rules and regulations on the side of corporations guarantees that the work force they desire will ultimately become sick from the lack of rules and regulations, and not only will the corporations not be able to create their products, they will have no one to sell them too.

We are already seeing this.  America has become a nation that does not consume, and it has only taken 4 years to do so, which is why corporations won't hire because they don't have a market.  So they are shooting for developing a market in China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa.  They can train the workers, give them some money in their pockets (not too much), and then sell them things.

I will even go so far as to predict, under current Republican strategy, that the iPad 2 will be the last BIG thing here in the United States.

We have no space.  I can't buy something else without having to move something out.  My parents (I'm 60) still want to buy me Christmas gifts and I keep moving the family into making donations for the poor, which has actually been pretty successful.

I can buy what I want if I can justify it to myself, but I'm not rich, nor even employed.

Corporations killed this country.  The Supreme Court helped.  Now they can elect anyone they want with enough money spent, and we, the People, are at a serious disadvantage.

And hence the rise in the call for less rules and regulations, because they promise us jobs that will never materialize.  Why should they?  We aren't buying anything.

At this point I'd say don't even buy that "extended warranty" because you either won't get to use it, or they won't honor it in the first place.

I just had that same experience myself after the earthquake that hit the Northeast, and then Hurricane Irene.

Power fluctuated so much that only one half of my house lost power.  Literally.  One side of my breaker box had no power, the other side did.  The strangest electrical situation I've ever run into.

It screwed up my 2002 purchased range, being digital, and when I called the company supplying the extended warranty, they took the information, but immediately started telling me about what circumstances applied where they wouldn't honor the warranty.

Now call me stupid, and I'm not, but I already knew that they would make disclaimers right off the bat.  They don't support the customers, they support the industry, just as associations do.  They aren't there to fix your problem, they are there to take your money and then you still have to go buy a new product.

This is what defines capitalism today.  Just as I said.  If you aren't a shareholder, you are sheep to be fleeced but because they didn't kill you, you can be fleeced again next year.

Rules and regulations make a difference.  They keep you from being fleeced as much as the corporations would like to do the fleecing.

Zilch

This is exactly how much the Republicans have done for this country during this administration.

Of 788 amendments offered on the Affordable Health Care Act, 721 were Republican, of which 161 were passed.

When the bill came out of committee it had passed with 13 Democrat votes.  All 10 Republicans voted nay.

The obvious thing is that the Republicans were trying to swamp the bill with trivial amendments, often not having anything to do with the bill itself, and delay the vote.  They simply did not want the bill to get to the floor.

Go back to day one.  The President tries, time and again, to get Republicans to at least attempt to work across the aisle, but to no avail.  He held meetings on C-Span with all of the Republican leaders of both houses and was railed against as if he were some spoiled child who didn't deserve to be in the same room with them.

John McCain even said "We just had an election about that point", to which the President replied, "And I believe I won that election, John".

At every turn not one single Republican has really tried to work across the aisle on matters important to the American people.  Oh, there's been a couple of supposed working groups with both parties, and in the case of the Gang of Six, they actually got good work done largely based on how to implement Bowles-Simpson.

But largely any dealings with the Republicans have been a sham because they had no desire to deal honestly with the needs of the American citizens.  They would negotiate, if you can call saying "No" a negotiation, but sooner or later they would simply walk out and stall, or say, ok, but now the line is over here, forcing new negotiations that start with the word "No".

I know there have been times in our history where the level of discourse fell to zero and even led to a civil war, but this isn't a real difference of social or economic ideologies as the Republicans represent.  It is that their constituency is no longer the people that elected them, but the people with money and power who have a hidden agenda in working to create a new type of America.

A new type of America where the little people are systematically restricted from exercising the right to vote.  State after state have passed onerous laws that probably won't get passed the US Supreme Court, but that won't happen before the 2012 election.

So students, who don't need government issued photo IDs to attention college, the poor, who have gone through their entire lives living in the same neighborhoods and have never needed a photo ID, the elderly who can't easily get out to acquire a photo ID, all will be effectively found legally restricted from voting.

Obviously the Republicans have an agenda, of which a part is to disallow the President the opportunity to help the American citizens, and whilst most people are not watching, they are stripping those same American citizens of their right to vote.

Add to that the state by state movement against Unions, particularly in their assault on bargaining power, and the Republicans are apparently betting on their own little Tri-Fecta here, none of which would be good for the average American.

The Republicans are strictly doing the work of their chosen constituency, which are the rich and wealthy (no, they are not the same thing), who have almost instant access whilst you and I can only get a canned email reply.

These people move into and out of the federal government, often leaving it changed more than one would think possible, and then move into lobbying positions so that they can continue the relationship, writing laws specific for their clients, regardless of the consequences for the 300 million other Americans.

Isn't it amazing on retrospection, that the Credit Card corporations fought so hard to get extremely limiting Bankruptcy laws enacted during the Bush administration when they already knew that they were helping kill the housing market.  They knew they were helping to kill many a student's ability to repay their student loans.
So with the obvious foreknowledge they chose to push for more restrictive bankruptcy laws because they knew that far more bankruptcies were going to be forthcoming.

There are other zilch movements against the people by the Republicans, all of which show the direction they wish to go.

The Paul Ryan budget passed by the Republican House has nothing for the American people.  Nada, Zip.  It takes on all entitlements, essentially kills Medicare in ten years, and all to save about the same amount of money we could get in return for some serious economy building produced by government spending.

In 1945 the war was won, but our spending was 125% of GDP.  Yet somehow we paid for the rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan, of which the requested $26 Billion was cut to $13 Billion by the Republicans.

We also made loan guarantees to returning veterans for the purchasing of homes and going on to further education.  These two things essentially gave a jump start to a whole new layer of people, those called the Middle Class.

I have to do an aside for a second here.  I really hate the concept of Middle Class because by stratifying the American people by classes based on the amount of money they have or make, it really allows for the constant hammering by the Republicans to talk about elitism and class warfare.

Well, the Republicans are the elitists, as they are showing now, and obviously there can be no class warfare because the Republicans aren't showing any class at all.

In fact, just because the are all in lockstep with the Republican leaders, I find the imagine that keeps coming to mind a little on the fascist side of things.

And believe me, we have had enough fascists who have had a good amount of input how the Republican party should move forward to essentially gain a one party system.

The problem is just how stupid do the Republicans think the American people are?  We're a little over 2 1/2 years into this administration and these people believe that no one remembers just who was in charge of congress when billions were spent on Medicare Part D, guaranteeing big Pharma with lavish prices for medicine that no other country in the world pays.  Or when the spent $4.2 trillion in unpaid tax cuts with the continued mantra that tax cuts don't need to be paid for.

Or the possible ultimate requirement of $3 Trillion for unpaid for wars.

These guys really don't have any legs to stand on, and the American people are going to have to make a stand for themselves and demand that a few thousand people don't get to take their lives away.

Because that is what is happening.  On Christiane Amanpour this morning the CEO of Google said people are just going to have to get used to taking a job that pays less because those are the only jobs that are going to be available.

How do you pay for a lifestyle one has built for 30 years on making half or even less than half of what you made before?  Why do only the rich and wealthy get to continue to have their same lifestyle?

How about a married person with two children taking a 1/2 cut in pay, probably without any benefits, and have the hopes of putting their children through college?

All of these factors are not what is necessary, they are what we should strive to negate.  Our children are our legacy to the world.  If we can't afford to give them a good education the end of America is right around the next corner.

If all we can do to rebuild the economy is give even greater tax cuts and cut back on regulations that maintain a level of relative protections for the people, then we might as well kiss it goodbye now.

Again, Zilch.  Every single element of the Republican stance is built upon the destruction of the American people as a political force and as a work force.  And if it is not built in this foundation, certainly the result will be the same thing.

We are one hundred years in the past.  No, not the Great Depression, the one before that.  Here is an except from the Economic History Association.
"The Depression of 1893 can be seen as a watershed event in American history. It was accompanied by violent strikes, the climax of the Populist and free silver political crusades, the creation of a new political balance, the continuing transformation of the country's economy, major changes in national policy, and far-reaching social and intellectual developments. Business contraction shaped the decade that ushered out the nineteenth century."

The point being that business itself was the culprit and has been in each and every depression or recession this country has experienced.  People have consistently been taken advantage of, bullied, even shot and killed to support business.

The social changes that the Republicans keep talking about as being bad for the people were not Democrats making changes, but the people themselves demanding changes.  During some of the violent strikes against absolutely abhorrent working conditions and business policies, the government had used troops or "contractors" such as the Pinkertons, to go dispel the crowds with any means available to them.  Many workers fighting for their own right to be human were shot and killed.

This stopped with FDR, who sent in the troops during a dispute between GM and the workers, who had taken control of the production facility for 44 days.  The troops, however, were not sent in to stop the protest, but to protect the protesters from being harmed by the company.  Unions were given their rights to collective bargaining, which is why I say the court must find the individual state laws as stepping on federal law, so it has to be unconstitutional.

But again, the point is that the Republicans really want to put the American people all the way back to 1893, and they are saying that the only way today's corporations and investors will create any jobs is under that set of circumstances.

And they are making every effort to pull it off.

Corporations don't want to invest because they know something the Republicans apparently haven't figured out yet.  The American public are no longer the masters of consumption.  They have either saved any extra money or they've paid down their debt, or they've gone bankrupt.  Certainly millions have lost the ownership of their homes.  Probably a more realistic unemployment number is closer to 20%-25%, due to the number of people that fell off the unemployment roles during the Bush43 years of employment contraction.

Corporations have also spent trillions of dollars over the past 30 years consolidating power by purchasing competitors, leaving the concept of a free market in a shambles because competition is a large part of that concept.   If there is no competition then there is no "market" subject to the whims of the consumer.  So you can simply ignore the idea that any actions taken by the Republicans actually supports a free enterprise market, because it doesn't.

If a young innovative company comes along with a new technology that could supplant a corporation's control in that area, that company will be bought out and the technology withheld from the market.  How is that a free enterprise market?

Even Teddy Roosevelt understood the need to eliminate monopolies, and corporations have come up with many innovative ways to purchase their competition and make it look like there were still competitors.

Look at what has happened to what is called "the news" today.  It is no longer news, it is media, and as media it can and does have a slant towards controlling what you think and how you act and make purchasing decisions.

Except for now you can't purchase anything, so for right now they control your political decisions by constantly telling you lies or feed you misinformation.  They manipulate how you gain access to data by paying fees to companies like Google to give their chosen websites the highest visibility.  Hell, even I can do that, having this blog pop up within the top of the list for certain key words, but I don't have the money.

They do.  They have more than $2 Trillion dollars they are sitting on because you and I aren't purchasing the new whiz-bang items and because it is cheaper for them to get $2 Trillion dollars worth of interest even at today's minimal rates than it is to invest.

So what they are investing in is Republicans.  And even if we give them all the tax breaks they want, and throw caution to the wind with deregulation, they still won't invest.
America is no longer important to these multinational corporations.  They have real markets to develop in China, India, and Africa.  These are largely untouched resources for product, but not product manufactured by Americans.

The next great thing we can do is to employ ourselves by offering 50 years of innovative thinking to any takers.  Today's computers and smart phone capabilities offer tremendous advantage to individuals towards becoming their own contracting firm.  Today you might get a contract for fixing this problem, and tomorrow a contract from an entirely different corporation for fixing that problem.

You need not be employees anymore, but you can become employed.

The trick is to think outside of the box that the Republicans and corporations have drawn around you.  It is their fault if they don't recognize the vast human resources offered in today's market, but it is our fault if we think we have nothing to offer.  We all have something to offer, and we almost all have methodologies to offer such knowledge.

We can set up co-ops, pools that offer technologies which allow one to have better resources available.  We can create new technologies with the involvement of many who may not currently be employed, and keep this technology away from hungry corporations looking to maintain their own control on the marketplace by establishing diversity as the standard operating principle.  Everybody owns a piece because everyone created that piece of the pie.  The guy with the plan for the pie can't take the individual pieces, therefore no one has the ability to sell out the others.

We have to think about how to build our own employment without the threat of greed getting in the way.  Tomorrow's worker is not a slave to corporate wealth and dictates, to the political destruction of unions.

No, you or I, or anyone for that fact, can offer their expertise for a price, and in doing so, can also decide who in the "free market" gets a piece of the knowledge.

Turn about is fair play.  We do nothing for ourselves if we don't learn how those who would do us harm accomplish their tasks.

On The Backs of Others

I was watching C-Span's Washington Journal this morning when a woman called, identified herself and her race (black) and then went on a pretty well done rant about the current talking point memos that "everyone should be required to sacrifice".

Her point threw me off a little bit at first, which was that "African Americans have sacrificed enough".  I kind of immediately took a negative turn towards the statement because we all are in the same boat and everybody is going to get wet when it sinks.

But after a couple of hours of thinking about it, I'm almost ashamed of myself for negating her thoughts because mine might have been more wide-reaching when everyone is adversely affected by the political and economic situation in this country today.

She's right, in each and every aspect that I can perceive.  Now I'm not going to go through a lot of "African-American" stuff here because we're talking about Americans who happen, by virtue of birth and through no choice of their own, are black.  And even by saying that I'm somewhat separating myself from "them", but I'm not.  I'm differentiating between my being a white American and her being a black American.  Plain and simple.  She has an African heritage, I have a European heritage, but we are both Americans.

This is one of the problems that continues to occur time and time again, which is that there is some fundamental difference between the humanity of a person due strictly to the chances of their birth and the color of their skin.

The fact is that there aren't many people who don't have some level of all races in their genetic makeup.  Well, maybe Stephen Colbert because Dr. Henry Louis Gates did a genetic makeup on him and said he was the whitest person in America.

But the rest of us are the polyglot of races that have made this country great, and this woman is absolutely right.

Not because of the history of white treatment of blacks, although certainly that is true, but because even today blacks bare a burden that should be abhorrent to all of us.  Every single thing that white Americans take for granted is somehow only available to blacks if "we" GRANT them that particular thing.

Like the right to vote, or sit at a Woolworth snack counter, or go to a truly integrated school and getting all the advantages of the better schools.

Our American Heritage was built on the whip-scarred backs of black America without one thought of just what we were doing, and this woman was right.

Even when the economy was going great guns during the Clinton years and job creation was up into the 10s of millions, most black Americans had absolutely no ability to take advantage of the prosperity.

And today our black population has disproportional unemployment even in excess of our Hispanic Americans.

How long can America continue to keep an entire culture, an entire and major piece of our history hidden by continuing to demand that somehow "the sacrifice be shared by all" when no sacrifice was share in making this country in the first place?

I'm not suggesting that anyone be given a free ride, as the Republicans continue to suggest happens by "these people", particularly with people that don't look like them, but I'm suggesting that if you want to have all the people doing the heavy lifting, then you have to make certain that everyone has the strength necessary to do the job.

This comes down to almost every aspect of life for blacks in America, although not all blacks.  I don't want to get into that conversation right at the moment, but let us just say that even among the downtrodden there are those that weren't actually quite so downtrodden.

But percentage wise, all blacks are still at a disadvantage in today's America.

Because of the dispersal of all people in our society, some communities are black due to the affordability of living there, but in most cases, schools are failing their students, so we have high levels of dropouts.  Of course, our schools are failing all of our students, and the dropout rate is way too high across the board, but let's face it.  There's no really rockin' school in Harlem knocking out blacks that go on to get Ph.D's.  And that's not their fault, it is America's failure.

You see, we have this propensity to determine that people are different, and in that difference, there is some level of humanity that has not been achieved, thus schools almost as good is good enough.  In fact, had we continued with the idea of separate but equal, and actually put as many good teachers in both school systems, applied all school programs equally across the board, our black citizens probably would have been better off in their dreams to achieve an education and gainful employment.

I'm not saying it should have been this way, but when you look at history it is often easy to speculate on what some crucial decision point might have had.  The idea presented in Brown v. Board of Education was the correct way to do it, but the concepts applied after by the courts on bussing was absolutely incorrect.

Communities are communities and should function as such.  In my case growing up with the growing pains of integration, all of the children in our small town were part of the community and integration was logical.  But in cities like NY with 13 million people, trying to take children from one community and sending them to another community was a stupid mistake, not to mention the problems attendant with sick children and a subway ride by a poor parent to pick that child up and take them home.

This is what I'm talking about.  The whites at these same schools didn't have to be concerned for the most part.  Picking up a sick child might have been an inconvenience, but most likely didn't adversely affect that week's take home pay.  The effects are disproportional and always against black people.

We have consistently, and by court orders, set up inconsistencies that were and still are adverse to the lives of most of our black Americans, and it is time to stop.

A perfect example is the complete rearrangement of an entire city by bussing blacks out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and virtually not letting more than half of them back.  We took their homes, destroyed the ambiance of New Orleans, and in the meantime we took over all the schools and privatized them.  Well, except for a couple of the "black" schools, which have re-energized themselves and become programs any school system would be proud of.

So this woman, speaking on C-Span today was absolutely right.  There is no rhyme or reason to have a totally separate group of people always on the sidelines, busting their asses every day of their lives with only the expectation that their children won't be killed in drive-by shootings, and that perhaps they will achieve the thankless task of working a menial job, or perhaps two or even three.

But I'm sorry.  This woman didn't take it far enough, for you see, there is not a single country in the world developed by those of European descent that hasn't had problems understanding that they weren't the be all that they proclaimed to be.  And it isn't just trouble because of blacks.  It's a perception problem that still exists today, exhibited by a number of countries in Europe, which can't come to grips with the Arab influx into their countries.

We have the same problem today because Republicans want to demonize Hispanic people, utilizing the "illegal immigrant" label when a good third of our country was originally Mexico.  One hundred and sixty years holds sway over thousands of years of family affiliations between what now is two different countries.  What a way to make things work.

I guess winning a war means you automatically get to denigrate the people who have lived on the land for a couple of thousand years.  Or, if you brought them in as slaves then obviously they weren't completely human, even as those "slaves" were torn away from their families who had thousands of years of history.

Yes, I'm ashamed of myself for feeling a little disgruntled by this woman's statement that African-Americans had sacrificed enough, but she's right. 

Four hundred years of slavery, and today's environment is only a little better than slavery in the first place.  Yeah, she's right and America hasn't done right by a major part of this society and is yet again trying to denigrate a new segment of our society.

I'm not talking about social denigration, which occurred, with each new wave of even European immigrants such as the Irish running from the potato famine during the same time as the Mexican-American war, or the Jews in their fleeing a catastrophic growth of genocide under Hitler.

I'm talking about today.  I'm talking about laws designed to put black people behind bars when white people walk.  I'm talking about suspecting that any black person is a criminal, or doesn't have academic credentials, or isn't actually breaking into their own house on the campus of Harvard because they lost their keys.

Some people would like to simply ignore the situation as if all of that was decided 60 years ago, when the fact is that it was decided about 150 years ago with the Emancipation Proclamation and the problem keeps rearing it's ugly head because the decision made no major difference in the views of the population for the vast majority of blacks.

We haven't recognized the full-fledged American citizenship of a large percentage of our American population, and we're trying to act like there's no reason to do so because it is already the law.

But if you look at the immigration laws being passed by the southern states theses days, it looks an awful lot like the Jim Crow laws of the 1950s, and ultimately they will be used against our black Americans as easily as the immigrants.

Four hundred years of American history built on the backs of slaves.  Yeah, this woman was right.  Perhaps if we actually made everyone equal, then the sacrifice could be shared equally, but not until then.