What would Apple do? Run a totally protectionist country that's what!

Earlier this month The Wall Street Journal ran an article about how Apple, the corporate computer giant, has more money that the US government and an opinion piece suggesting how Apple would run the United States government since they seem to be doing such a great job in running a profitable company.

First of all it upset me that there is a company, and probably lots of other US companies, that have more money at their disposal than the US government. Can't they pay for all of the wars in the Middle East and leave the US Government out of this?

The opinion piece upset me because the author cited all the things that he thought Apple would do to run a successful country, but he forgot some important aspects of the Apple business model.

Apple's brand is the cutting edge, because they operate in a country that made the cutting edge possible through a high standard of living. Living in the United States has had the same appeal as Apple products, because this is such a great place to live, everyone wants to immigrate here, just like everyone wants to buy Apple products because they can perform like no other products. They are always the first to market with innovative ideas, and the United States has traditionally been the first choice of many citizens of other countries looking to escape their less than desirable living conditions. Therefore, the United States has the cutting edge thing down pat, especially when it comes to quality of life.

The other thing that Apple does so well, which was completely overlooked by the WSJ author was that Apple's business model is totally protectionist. You have to buy all your apps, music, videos, and other content for Apple devices directly through their iTunes store. Apple hardware and software comes directly from Apple. There is no other competition. You buy from the iTunes store and nowhere else. There is no opportunity for free market competition. They set the price they want, they make the profits they want. That is what has made Apple so successful. That, the cutting edge thing, and nothing else.

If anyone dare suggest protectionism for the United States economy, they will be at the very least verbally drawn and quartered by politicians , the media and the wealthy lobbyists that control them. How can you isolate the United States in the new global economy? It would be such a step backward. It would be a step backward for wealthy people who want to bring labor costs down to nothing, and the American standard of living to unimaginable lows.

But this doesn't make any sense, don't you want to protect what you have? The wealthy want to protect what they earned by not paying any taxes. I wish this country could protect what it has through tariffs and limited trade, but Washington will not do this because it has its hands tied by big business and big money.

We must adopt the Apple model of protectionism if this country is to survive, and escape this bottomless pit of recession. Only this will save us.

Congress and Budget Blithering

I can't believe I haven't posted here at all this year. Just like many of the people who would take the time to read this post, I am a working stiff. I have work off-the-books overtime just to keep my job, and I have to enroll in courses and study just to prepare for the time when I may no longer have a job, which may be soon. The economy isn't getting any better, and I need to brace myself for when I have to start collecting unemployment just like many of you are or will be.

I am only posting here now because I am so upset about the banter between President Obama and Speaker of the House John "Bonehead" Boehner over raising the debt ceiling and passing a budget. President Obama has been very weakly trying to get across the message that we need to tax the wealthy, while Boehner very loudly states he just wants budget cuts, cuts and more cuts.

Boehner's Congressional District suffers over 9% unemployment just like the rest of the country, how high does unemployment have to get before someone runs against this Bozo and takes his seat away from the Nazi Republicans out to destroy this country.

Federal budget cuts will just amount to more unemployment. The government needs to step in an create jobs, not take more jobs away. Already the US Post Office plans to cut thousands of jobs, and if Boehner gets his way more Federal jobs will just disappear, but no one is calling him a "job killer" the label that House Republicans put on the health care reform bill. Let's face it private industry is not going to pick up the slack for all of the government jobs we are going to loose with the substantial budget cuts that Republicans pose.

Actually, private industry will wind-up suffering as well, as budget cuts result in the end of government contracting, and laid-off federal employees will stop spending money in the retail and food markets which will beget more lay-offs. The unemployment that the budget cuts will create will cause such a great feedback loop of more unemployment that the economy will have no other recourse but to crash again, this time probably harder than before.

In their book "Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit from the Next Global Meltdown," authors, David and Robert Wiedemar and Cindy Spitzer predict that government jobs will be a safe haven from the next big ecnomic downturn which they predict will befall us within the next couple of years. (They were right about the real estate bubble in a previous book published before the crash, but who couldn't see that coming?) With all of the Federal spending cuts coming their will be no save haven in Federal jobs or any government jobs for that matter.

Let's face it, there is a huge budget deficit and the only way to close the gap is raise revenue and tax the crap out of the rich and add large tariffs to imported goods, something Congress and the President are very reluctant to do because the rich have them in their pockets.

You know the wealthy have Boehner in their pocket because he comes from a fairly rural district with 9% unemployment. A few of his siblings are even unemployed according to Wikipedia. With his background he should really be a Democrat, but you know the wealthy and the corporate interests are bank rolling him, so he will keep fighting to run this country into the ground.

If the Republicans have their way and all we have is cuts, cuts and more cuts to the budget in a time where the Federal government really needs to step in and spend money to create jobs, you are going to see an economic collapse greater than the one we saw in 2008.

As predicted, the rich will continue with their tax breaks

I can't believe there was a double-team press conference with President Obama and former President Clinton, telling the American people that our economic stability depends on the rich retaining their tax breaks. Completely outrageous. How are we going to pay for the endless war in the Middle East? Not to mention the extension of unemployment benefits? Why is thought that by letting the rich hang on to their money, they will spend it to stimulate the economy and not horde it for a rainy day, and the forecast looks like nothing but blue skies ahead for the rich while it pours down on the middle class?

Government needs to take control of this horrible economic situation, and stop letting the rich, the plutocrats, run this country into the ground. Now more that ever it is easy to communicate with your congress representatives. Take the time to contact them and tell them that you do not want to see the rich continue their tax breaks.

Democrats and Republicans, the old two man con?

Here is a theory of mine that I would like to share with you. I think the American people are being set-up, with one of the oldest tricks in the book, the two man con. I think at some point after the FDR presidency the wealthy powers-that-be got together to figure out how they could stop the scourge that is the American middle class. Using their money and influence they financed the campaigns of both Republicans and Democrats and pulled the strings so that whoever was elected would be the candidate that would do their bidding.

Their first soldier was Richard Nixon who went to China to lay the groundwork for the mess we have now, the one where all of our manufacturing jobs are moving over there. After Nixon managed to engage himself in criminal activity, the American people wanted anyone but a Republican. What the proponents of plutocracy came up with was Jimmy Carter an inexperienced Georgia Governor from a peanut farming family.

President Carter did an incredibly poor job, especially when it came to handling the economy, it would almost seem that his policies help exacerbate the stagflation that lead to his ultimate defeat by super Republican, Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor turned puppet for the Republican party, did intentional and irreparable damage to social security, and drove the national debt sky high.

The gilded age he created was so great that he got his Vice President, George Bush, senior in for another term before the economy collapsed in in the late eighties and early nineties.

Then the proponents of plutocracy found Bill Clinton, who they assumed was another inexperienced Southern hick Governor this time from Arkansas. But, "Slick Willie" lived up to his nickname, and this Rhodes scholar was no hick by any means. He knew how to play ball like a Republican, so much so, one would wonder if he was a shill from the Republican party with his approval of NAFTA among many other very conservative policies. Also, thanks in part to the Internet economic bubble, he managed to even get elected for a second term.

The Republicans were not going to stand for three terms of Democrats. If they let this go on the United Stated could have the longest Democratic presidential run since FDR, and there was no way that was going to happen. The powers that be then stuck Al Gore with the unpopular Joe Lieberman which lead to a narrow defeat in Florida, by George W. Bush.

Bush appeared as clueless wonder, that relied heavily on his Vice President to make important decisions. Decisions that would ultimately lead to the financial mess we are in now. For his second term W. was virtually unopposed by John Kerry, another very conservative Democrat, that offered very little different from the Bush campaign, and therefore he was was easily defeated.

But W. who cared more about sending soldiers to the Middle East and sending jobs overseas did absolutely nothing to help the United States economy which had turned into one great Ponzi scheme.

Realizing that the no one in as single election term, Republican or Democrat could get the economy out the quagmire it had been placed in the purveyors of plutocracy knew that they had to get yet another inexperienced Democrat in office, to make sure that the Democratic party will look completely inept and they could have four years to find another Republican to at least appear to come to the rescue.

They found Barack Obama, who had about seven years of experience representing Illinois in the United States Senate, and that's it. Just as the powers-that-be have planned, he appears to be either taking no action or similar action that Republican president would have taken in reaction to the current economic crisis; like Nero, he just fiddles while Rome burns.

So there you have the basic pattern, aggressive Republican (Nixon) inept Democrat (Carter) aggressive Republican (Reagan & Bush), inept Democrat Bill Clinton (inept only in that he was a very economically conservative Democrat), aggressive Republican (George W. Bush, but it was really Dick Cheney), inept Democrat Barack Obama. Isn't there anyone else out there who thinks this pattern is not coincidence? Can we do anything to stop this? If we re-elect Obama will we get four more years of him doing next to nothing to further the economy along? Or will he be followed by another heroic looking Republican, who will pretend to be coming to save the day when he or she is actually just furthering along the destruction of the United States as we know it?

Government's answer to controlling spending: Layoffs and more layoffs

The Tea Party republicans are really making their voices heard, "We don't want to pay any more taxes, period!" Actually, it is more like we don't want to pay any taxes, but that's another story. The general politicians response on the federal, state, and local level is to have hiring freezes, pay freezes and now they are talking about layoffs, major layoffs.

Now, gee, with unemployment rates in many states at an all time high, do more layoffs really make sense? The government is still going to have to pay out unemployment for many former employees for who knows how long.

This is not a smart strategy. I am sure there is waste in many other areas of government that have nothing to with employee salaries and benefits, but they are not favorable targets like poor working class people.

Ages ago government jobs had to offer great benefits and pensions in order to compete with private industry. Now private industry jobs are disappearing faster than ever, and therefore government no longer wants to offer jobs with benefits to its workers. Instead of just laying off people indiscriminately, government should go to their workers' labor unions and ask them to grandfather their benefits, and make sacrifices in order to keep their jobs, and not even think about job cuts to contribute to the welfare rolls.

I recently heard a quote from some congressional committee looking to save money, that many federal employees are making six figure salaries and doing much better than their private sector counterparts. The reason federal workers in the DC area make so much money is because housing is so damn expensive, to quote former NY gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan, "The rent is too damn high!" Therefore they have to pay workers big salaries. Housing subsidies for government workers would be one way to justifiably lower federal workers salaries, but just making stupid comments like federal workers are making more than private sector workers is just ridiculous, and meant to get Tea Party yahoos all roused and riled up.

During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created the Work Projects Administration, which actually created jobs for the many unemployed. This is what we need now, not Tea Party Republicans pushing their government shrinking agenda.

Laying off government workers is not a solution to our economic woes, it will just contribute to already out of control unemployment, and do little else. It is just another way the rich want to make sure that they don't have to pick up the bill through increased income taxes which is what they should be doing.

Apple and Amazon and proprietary software: not a model for free trade.

Both Apple and Amazon like to maintain monopolies and don't like free trade, at least when it comes to selling applications and software for their products.

When you buy an iPod or an iPhone you have buy all the mp3s and Aps through Apple's iTunes. There is no chance for buying competitively priced products when you own one of these devices.

It's the same when you buy Amazon's Kindle, the electronic book reader. You can only buy books through the Amazon website. So if you buy a Kindle you have to buy all your books from Amazon and there is no chance for getting them through another source. There was controversy as well, when Amazon set the maximum price for a book at $9.99 and refused to let publishers charge more, when actually they should charge less because in the electronic format you can reproduce books infinitely at very little cost. The publishers wanted to charge whatever the market will bear. The controversy ended when iPad came out and let publishers charge whatever they wanted.

Now you can buy a competitors product and have more options, but you are then shut out from many of the cool apps or other exclusive content from these companies.

In other words their business model is protectionist, and these companies are thriving on it. Why can't this model work for trade in the United States?

Now if it is OK for these companies to have devices with exclusive content, why isn't are trade regulated that way? Why isn't it OK to regulate who you trade with and what gets traded with tariffs and regulations?

It is OK for these companies to make money with exclusive content, but when you try to protect jobs by saying things like you can only hire American workers for certain jobs that is not OK. Or companies that offshore workers have to pay higher taxes which would give them incentive not to offshore workers, that won't work either.

The Apple and Amazon business model should be the model for how the United States handles trade and protects jobs for its workers.

FDR bashing, the new right-wing hobby.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was probably one of the greatest presidents that the United States has ever had. His four term legacy led to the right seeking term limits of presidency and the office has never wielded quite the same power again.

Now the right-wing dings are trying to re-write history to show that his so-called socialist policies like social security extended the great depression and did not end it.

Everyone knows that FDR's policies set up the United States for the Golden Age of prosperity that was 1950's and 60's, and since then it has been systematicaly destroyed under the guidance of Richard Nixon and more recently and more devastatingly by Ronald Regan (and Clinton and both Bushes didn't help things either).

They are now calling Obama a socialist and he is far from it. He is not touching income tax on wealthy Americans and he probably never will. It looks like the change he promised is not coming, and the US Government is proving once again it is really big business's bitch.

Please right-wingers, don't drag FDR's name (or his initials for that matter) through the mud. And face facts, the country did improve greatly after his presidency. And it is right-wing ideology that is destroying this country, not a move towards socialism.