The Looting Of America

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing click to enlarge There are a LOT of explanations as to why the stock market has been up while the impact on the middle and lower class has been largely negative and ignored. Somehow it is the fault of Democrats and the rich paying too many taxes. Remember back in the 2006 elections when the Republicans used the meme "investment class?" That was probably the best way to say "rich, white men" they could find. For the rest of America, little improvement has been seen. Manufacturing has disappeared from America and that was the engine that drove the economies of Middle America. Thanks to NAFTA and other associated trade "deals," we no longer balance our trade policies with tariffs to offset things like SLAVERY or environmental destruction. Nope, now it is a "free market." I guess you get what you pay for. Illegal immigration is another problem that is abused by the aforementioned "investment class." There are some jobs you just can't export so the best way to replace the wage slave workers overseas is to bring them here. America has an over-abundance of unskilled and undereducated people who will work below minimum wage and those workers have diluted the pay base for those jobs to UNDER what Americans can afford to work at. PLUS, many of these illegal aliens are working in construction - further driving the insane overproduction of housing that is bottom-feeding on sub-prime lending rates. We are down to skilled workers. That's safe. Right? Nope. Welcome to the land of H-1B visas! I remember back in 1995 and 1996, someone could go to a tech school and get a degree in IT Systems Administration and within a few years be making 50k - 60k a year. A very decent wage. Not shabby at all. That is gone now. With H-1Bs, companies harvest IT workers from India, Pakistan and elsewhere to come to the United States to replace American IT workers at half or a third of the cost. The same thing is happening with nurses. The dichotomy here is when we have an alleged "skilled worker" shortage, instead of building new colleges or funding more scholarships, we import talent from abroad and ignore the workers that are already here. So we have cut working wages to the bone during the last six and a half years and moved what production we could offshore. The offshore production was the cheapest we could buy and we really didn't pay too much attention to product safety or worker safety - just the bottom line. The domestic labor costs was forced down by using illegal workers and when that wasn't enough, we imported workers and under-payed them. The synopsis is this, Corporate America has done everything in it's power to avoid paying Americans living wages. That way they can extract the last bit of money from personal savings and retirement funds. It then gets funneled into their corporate accounts - thus driving up the stock market. So why is the stock market so high? That is America being looted and thoroughly milked dry.

Border fences and family separation

click to enlarge For a modern day example of what a border fence will do to us, we need to look at Israel and Palestine. This report is shameful. What difference does it make? What does make a difference is the appalling question of what prompted a soldier, or a Border Policeman, to open fire from a long way off at the boy and then to leave him bleeding on the ground until he died. What goes through the mind of the shooter, in the moments before and after he takes the life of an adolescent, who was in no way putting anyone at risk - even if he touched a fence that must not be touched? Three fences surround the abandoned airport, and last Sunday we saw no hole in any of them, three days after the unnecessary, criminal shooting. Fences and wall never work and leave nothing but disaster in their wake. Congress chats a lot about jobs, employment and economic consequences of a border fence, but they have yet too look deeper into the social consequences of such an atrocity.

The border fence is not a solution... unless you are Halliburton.

click to enlarge The only one who will benefit from a border fence will be the contractor and it will probably be someone attached to Cheney. And by all evidence seen from the war, Katrina and now Walter Reed, everything this man touches turns to shit. But it wouldn't surprise me if Halliburton got the border fence contract. That is how despotism rolls. But beyond that, fences and walls never work and the one planned for our southern border will just as much of a disaster - for humans, the economy and for the environment. The stupid man builds a fence, the smart one fixes the problem that created the need for the fence and Bush does not have that ability since he can't bomb the sweatshops illegal immigrants work in here in the U.S. Those are called contributors. That is Bush's only tool it seems - the bomb. Bomb them into submission, bomb them out of existence, bomb them into the stone-age, we have heard those lines before from the GOP. That is all they know. They are incapable of solving a problem where the solution begins with the human heart. Cheney's has nothing but springs and gears.