Talk is Cheap

The biggest problem we have trying to stop the onslaught against the masses by the very few and their corrupt politicians is apathy. People in this county have taken everything for granted when in fact they are robbed by these crooks.

I for one believe the banks should have been allowed to fail when the crash happened. Then we could have rebuilt the banking system in this country.

Hedges:

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

Add the billionaire aristocracy to that. They are nothing but leeches and parasites.

This is also worth reading:

But since the crash things have gotten really bad, not for the robber baron class that Republicans represent but for the other 98% of Americans whose interests were intended by our Founders to be served by our democratic institutions. While the rich have gotten richer even more rapidly than before, our upper-middle class, our middle class, and our poor have suffered, losing our jobs, our homes, our hopes and aspirations to the predations of the robber baron class.

Bankers have taken more and more and more, and yet they produce literally NOTHING. Insurance companies have collected an ever larger percentage of America's GDP even though they produce literally NOTHING. These are robber barons, taking without giving, stealing without contributing, sucking our resources dry even as they ship our factories and our jobs overseas while filling our jobs here at home, particularly our well-paying technical jobs for which so many of us have been educated but remain unemployed, with LEGAL immigrants. They sell off our assets to foreign concerns, thereby siphoning off the profits away from the American economy, and shield themselves from taxes by forming shell companies with overseas addresses for corporate headquarters in one-bedroom apartments in tax havens.

If you think this is right, I wonder where you learned your sense of right and wrong. Perhaps on Milton Friedman's knee.

The latest two items that fuel my anger and hatred of these monsters who call themselves "Republicans" (besmirching the great Republican names like Taft, Vandenberg and Rockefeller, not to mention Abraham Lincoln), come to us from Michigan and Maine.

In Michigan, the TEA Party governor, Rick Snyder, just signed a bill passed by the Republican legislature cutting unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 20 weeks. This is being hailed by other TEA Party governors, notably Rick Scott in Florida (which, unbelievably, has an even higher unemployment rate than Michigan), as a great advance, and they are likely to follow suit. What the unemployed people in those states are going to do is a mystery -- the presumption on the part of supporters of these actions is that the main problem with our economy is that people are just freeloaders, rather than people who can't find jobs that aren't there to find.

They are sacrificing these people's lives on the alter of anti-taxation. That's what Republicans do, whether it's in the area of employment, child care, education, health care, police and fire services, roads, indeed all areas of government. Service to the public doesn't matter -- making the rich richer is all that counts.

And these megarich actually don't produce much of anything. Those who are "self made" got there through crookery or, if they got their money legitimately, other people were equally and probably more responsible for their "success."

And there is this?

Indeed the are, and I don't MISS the point; I am MAKING that point. Our Republicans and the CEOs and bankers whose biddings those Republicans serve are deliberately striving with all their might to lower American wages and benefits to the levels in those third world nations, "missing the point" that this will render the American economy here similar to those elsewhere, particularly as it relates to worker pay and benefits. This conveniently ignores the fact that American workers do not enjoy the low cost of living that persists in third world nations. We don't get to pay $50/month rents here like they do in the Philippines and Indonesia, even in our worst slums.

That's what these morons don't seem to understand at all, that it is far cheaper to live in these countries, even if those people are poor.

Our biggest problem is apathy even more than brainwashing of many people to con them into letting these robber barons pick their pockets even more.