Betwen Barack and a hard place.

Now that the Republican and Democratic National Conventions are over, Americans will have to turn to media ads and the debates to see and hear the final mudslinging before casting their vote.

I understand that the choices are not very good.  The Democrats for me talked the talked, telling the American middle class what they wanted to hear, that they are the middle class's party and they are the only ones interested in its preservation.  But they haven't walked the the walk, and taken the right actions to restore the economy.

What really scares me is that they have accused the Republicans of actually planning to raise taxes on the middle class in their vision of economic recovery, and the Republicans are not vehemently denying it!  They should have been at their national convention quoting George H.W. Bush's infamous line, "Read my lips, no new taxes!" but they know they are not dumb enough to let history repeat itself.  The Republican economic plan would only add gasoline to the fire.

So the choices are basically, another four years of a do nothing President, who will now be a lame duck with really little incentive to do anything, and a crazy Republican who thinks that that by raising taxes on the middle class and slashing government spending left and right, that all of our economic woes will be over.

I am going to have to vote for Obama, because I truly feel that doing nothing, is a much better scenario than what the Republicans have proposed.

Mitt Romney is "all about jobs" all about sending them overseas that is....

Regardless of whether or not you believe Mitt Romney when he says that he was not responsible for sending thousands of jobs overseas when he was allegedly running (or not running) Bain Capital, you still have to ask what his plan is for creating jobs when he is elected President, and will these be well paying head-of-household jobs, or menial minimum wage job?

What will his strategy or, "statergery" as George W. Bush was known to call it, for creating new jobs.

Are lots and lots of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and big business the answer?  I don't think so.  If you put more money in the hands of the wealthy who says they are going to spend it? Why not just invest in gold, stocks and bonds and forget about creating jobs?  If you give more tax cuts to big business they will only invest countries like mainland China where the labor costs are low, China should probably have plenty of jobs in the future thanks to people like Romney.

Will it be through austerity measures? You know the Republicans are into shrinking government.  Therefore the massive downsizing of government and the laying off of thousands upon thousands of government workers would create more jobs?  How does that work?

Would keeping interest rates low so his Wall Street buddies can continue to play high-stakes casino with our economy be the answer?  Another burst bubble and companies folding like Lehman Brothers would create more jobs for sure.

Will cutting back on social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid  be the answer?  By forcing baby boomers to stay in the workforce longer to retain a decent standard of living and benefits,  the job market will remain closed to young workers looking for their first job.

Would ending Obamacare create jobs?  With not everyone having to have insurance, insurance companies would not have to hire all those extra people to cope with the new higher demand for insurance coverage.

Mitt shouldn't focus on defending his reputation, it is just not worth it.  What he should focus on is showing the American people his great plan for creating jobs, which he won't because he has no plan or intention of creating jobs, at least not in this country.  The media should really stick it to him, and demand to know his plan for turning around the American economy, because I don't think he really has any.

An alternate retort Romney could have come up with would be to say, "Hey look President Obama, if you think off-shoring is a bad thing, you had four years to get Congress to pass legislation to stop off-shoring and you did nothing."  Of course the problem with that is Romney has no interest in stopping off-shoring when elected President and apparently neither will President Obama. 

Neither of these candidates want to help this country.  The American voter's choices are really between the devil and the deep blue sea.
 

Only clean elections and an end to corporate lobbying can save America...

Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg address said that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."  I am not sure that it ever existed, at least not in the United States, especially not now.

What we have now in the United States is a government for the wealthy, the multi-national corporations, and any special interest that can rub more than two Lincoln pennies together.   And because of this the U.S. government appears to have its policy skewed on a seemingly inexorable path to the destruction of the middle class and everything that set America apart from the rest of the world. 

The only way to really have a democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people is for a constitutional amendment that will put an end to corporations, and the wealthy lobbying congress, and financing their political candidates of choice.

Only individuals should have the right to lobby the legislative and executive branches, and election campaigns should be entirely state run to put every candidate on an equal footing. 

However, the problem lies in the old saying "Money talks and BS walks."  There is little incentive for politicians to do the right thing and enact campaign finance reform.  There is great incentive for them to line their pockets with cash, which in any other profession would be called payola, and be totally illegal.  And suggesting that lobbying come to end would be unconstitutional. 

The Constitution needs to be amended to protect the rights of and empower the individual and greatly limit the rights of corporate entities.  Then we can really have the government Lincoln envisioned.

Please just give Obamacare a chance....

What a surprise the supreme court did something kind-hearted for a change and let the Obamacare legislation stand as is! 

I think the future effects on the economy will probably put an end to it without the GOP's plan for continued fierce opposition.  Republicans are getting all riled-up for no reason   Well, the reason probably is they want to just oppose Obama for the 2012 election in spite of Romney passing similar legislation in Massachusetts when he was governor there.  I think they should just give it a rest and give Obamacare a chance, and see what happens.

I believe healthcare premiums will now go through the roof, and it is not like they haven't been doing that anyway.   Health insurance companies will soon have to insure everyone regardless of per-existing conditions, which I would imagine would raise the cost of premiums.  Last year my work's healthcare plan's cost only went-up only 3.6 percent, a far cry from the 12 to 15 percent it had usually gone up in the previous years.  I think they were holding back waiting for the supreme court ruling.  If the Supreme Court held off until 2013, I think I would have seen an other year of a moderate premium increase.  Now that the Supreme Court has made its decision, premiums will now get back on their sky-rocket increase trajectory.  It was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.  If the Supreme Court shot the Obamacare legislation down the health insurance companies would sing the MC Hammer song "Can't Touch This"  thinking they are now invincible and then drive premiums up.  But now, since the Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare, insurance companies are going to get their revenge by raising premiums to new astronomical highs. 

The bottom-line is that the medical profession and the health insurance industry both know the variant of the old science fiction villain cliche, "You will pay for your life, dearly."  And you will.  Without price caps doctors and insurance companies can charge anything they want, and they will.  Obamacare is likely to fail as an alternative to the current mess we have now, but I think we should at least give it a chance to see the actual effect on the market.

A social medicine system similar to what they have in the UK is what we need, but we remain light years away from it.    

My fast food conspiracy theory...

Burger King just released their latest product, an ice cream sundae covered with bacon bits. It consists of bacon atop vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and delivers 510 calories, 18 grams of fat, 61 grams of sugar to the consumer.
With the recent war on transfats that has forced some states to pass legislation to ban the use of certain oils to make fast food staples like french fries, it looks like fast food restaurant chains are looking for new ways to kill us.  What could be better than a ice cream sundae topped with bacon?

Why are they trying to kill us?  One reason may be that coporation controlled fast food restaurants want to make sure Americans don't live long enough to collect Social Security or Medicare, the longer we live, the more strain we put on these social resources. 

I really think that corporate America doesn't want to see Americans living so long, not long enough to collect social security or cash in their pensions.  This will leave more money for the corporations in the long run. 

As families are forced now to have both mom and dad working, families turn to fast food as a cheap alternative to having to cook a meal every night.  Not only are famlies deprived of wholesome home coooking, but they are also exposed to a lot more salt and fat than they would normally be exposed to at home or even in a regular restaurant. 

Having the worst dining opitons be the most convenient seems to be the way corporate America likes it. 

Perhaps my theory is far-fetched, but regardless I just think this is another way that the shrinking middle class has to suffer in the face of coporations and the wealthy controlling our fate.

Immigration reform means more people compete for fewer jobs.

That new immigration policy President Obama announced was a real humdinger.  It will allow 800,000 illegal aliens who had come to United States when they were sixteen years or younger to reside and work here. 

Mitt Romney has refused to make any real comment coming out against this policy because it would seem that he would not want to offend the Latino community whose vote is very important for the upcoming election.  However, I believe that the Republicans want this new policy even more than the Democrats do.  It will mean 800,000 more people competing in a shrinking job market, driving labor costs down even further, now if we could only get rid of that pesky minimum wage....

The country that is renowned for having a very strict immigration policy is Australia.  I checked online to see what their unemployment rate was like since the current economic downturn is supposed to be worldwide.  The statistic I found was that in April 2012 their unemployment was only 4.9%.  Wow, that's about equal to the United States unemployment rate before the economic downturn in 2008.

It is very easy to see the purpose of immigration, which is to bring labor costs down.  It may make sense in times of prosperity, but it does not make sense in times of despair.  "But things are looking up" you say.  I don't think things will look up until our unemployment rate is the same as Australia's.

No Democrat or Republican is pushing for a mandate of the E-Verify system to establish a nationwide citizenship verification system.  E-Verify was put into place after 9/11 in order to enhance security, but no one wants to use it to get rid of cheap illegal labor.  

Also the Republican controlled House of Representatives voted down the "U.S. Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act" which was aimed at giving the right for a person to ask to speak to a customer service representative in the United States.  Over 500,000 call center jobs in the last six years have been lost to off-shoring and this bill would have prevented the loss of even more jobs.  

By looking the actions of both the Democrats and the GOP and the actions of both the executive and legislative branches of our government, Americans can see that we are the victims of a two man con came.  A game that will bring the same 30 percent unemployment that some European countries currently have to the United States.  Neither party is looking to alleviate this unemployment situation, they appear to only want to make things worse.  Is there no one out there who can help us?

The job situation and the real road to serfdom.

A reporter friend of mine recently got laid off, as the economic downturn and advancements in information technology have taken a great toll on jobs in the newspaper industry. He was a bureau reporter for a newspaper in a relatively small market, and he knew it was coming and wasn't surprised when it did finally come, it was like what took them so long? It was a family owned newspaper, therefore the publisher had a little bit of a heart, I guess.

What kills me is that he replaced a reporter who held the position for almost thirty years, and who retired on his own terms. It took him several weeks to get out of the office and retire completely. I am just angry that the previous generation had this kind of job security, one that Generation X or our children will never have.

And you get people like Thomas L. Friedman, author of the books "The World is Flat" and "That Used to Be Us," who say that it is good thing. That we all have to reinvent ourselves and work our butts off to provide a unique service or product just in order to have the right to survive. All the while knowing that the previous generations just had to fall off a log in order to get a life long job or career. This is ridiculous we are heading backwards instead of forwards. In fact, I think we are heading all the way back to the dark ages, but more on that later.

I am encountering all sorts of people in every age group and every level of education who are either recently laid-off and struggling to find a new job, or entering the job market for the first time and unable to find work. With the recent poor jobs report and companies like HP announcing as many as 25,000 layoffs, I cannot imagine things getting better anytime soon.

But this is the dream of the wealthy, those that own the means of production. They have and will continue to off-shore as many jobs as possible. They will make sure that labor markets worldwide are like the labor markets in China. They will make sure that our working future is a lot like Foxconn in mainland China. Foxconn manufactures electronic components for companies like Apple, and runs what basically sounds like a labor camp where the workers live miserable lives making only two dollars an hour. Their only means of outlet appears to be suicide as they protest their poor working conditions. This is our future, but it sounds like the past.

There is a famous book that conservatives use as their economic manifesto. It is called the "The Road to Serfdom" by an Austrian economist,  Friedrich August Hayek.  It basically warns of the evils of socialism and how if government is allowed to grow out of control we will all become "serfs" of an oppressive overlord government.  Ah, but that wasn't feudalism.  Feudalism was where there was no government at all.  There was just a feudal lord who was the landowner, the knights who were like his sword-for-hire security detail, a type of police or enforcers, and the serfs who worked his land and produced crops for the feudal lord.  The wealthy people of the United States and probably the rest of the West want desperately to go back to this system.  A system where only their word is law and workers have absolutely no rights.   You can see this as the rich so desperately want to downsize federal and state governments, but always have a hand in their local government to make sure that they have more than their fair share of power in the area where they live, they desperately want and need to micromanage their own backyard. 

But why would Hayek call his book "The Road to Serfdom"?  Because the wealthy are notorious for saying something is white when it is actually black.  Look at the accounting firm Arthur Anderson who tricked shareholders into thinking everything was OK by calling Enron's losses profits.

United States is moving to real serfdom, much more quickly than I have expected, as President Obama has refused to take any helpful action for getting Americans back to work.  What scares me is now I am hearing a lot of Democrats say well maybe we should vote for Romney, just to shake things up a bit and see what he does.  The most shocking place I have encountered this suggestion is Paul Krugman's new book "End This Depression Now,"  where he basically states that Romney has some moderate economic advisers that might advise him to do the right thing and move away from the supply-side self-correcting market model we are following now, to a more Keynesian approach.  This is not bloody likely.

I am certain that if re-elected Obama will continue to do nothing about the unemployment situation, but I am also certain that whatever action Romney will take, it will only make things worse.

Just a note about the picture above.  It was a dispenser of an employment advertisement magazine called "Top Jobs" and it now used for garbage.  A perfect statement for what's going on in this country.