Living The American Dream 2010

"Well it's Saturday night and I just got paid -laid"

Elvis Presley -December 1956

You know the rate of unionization in this country peaked around 33% in the 'fifties and it's been headed downward ever since. It was about 25% when Ronald Reagan took office. It was eleven percent when Clinton took office and now it's down to between seven and nine percent. The real wage in this country in terms of spending power peaked out in 1973 and has been in a slow retreat ever since. Today Randy Rhodes had a new introduction to her show. She played a George Carlin rant from 2005 and it's just as timely today as then. "Network" came out in 1976 and that movie is downright prophetic for right now. Carlin was talking about the lobbyists and how they own the politicans and own America and we're all working for shit. Someone described it as the 90% of workers that are in dead-end jobs they'd rather be doing anything else than. The politicians own government and they own us. They would like to turn us all into serfs and own our land, too. The real estate crisis brought us close. Still others are in search of the American Dream. In Bongledesh women there make all the garments we sell in the high class department stores here and are working for $45.00 - - a month, and they just got a raise It used to be $25.00 a month. Meanwhile immigrents in this continent try to get into this country crossing hundred miles of 115 degree arid deserts, all for the privelege of working twelve hours a day in the hot sun for $35.00 dollars a day. That's a lot of money to them. I heard some democrat say the other day "what would we ever do without them?" Back in 1973 the chief executive officers typically worked for 26 times the median wage of ordenary workers. Now it's something like 350 times their wages, and climbing. We look for signs we are getting out of this recession. It's good news one day only to be bombed with bad economic news, on a whole host of fronts, like today. They say upward mobility is so non existant in this country now you'd have a better chance advancing in England than here. I never I thought I'd ever hear anybody say that.

I caught the last half of last Sunday's Simpson's episode which featured a British reality show involving placing TV cameras all over Springfield and Ned Flanders would point out everyone's misdomeanors. And Bart Simpson set up a "safe zone" on their property where everyone could come and comit their favorite sins in privacy, because the cameras missed that spot. Today we guarentee personhood for corporations. We grant them protection from the first, fourth, fifth and fourteenth amendments to the constitution. And yet human beings don't have the privacy of corporations. If a woman was spied on the way she is by some corporations it would be grounds to have the guy arrested. But corporations are above the law. Some people say that the government is taking away our privacy. Apparently the Supreme Court ruling discusses "Having a reasonable expectation of privacy", but the kicker is that our "expectations" are going down and down as we give corporations more information about ourselves, volentarily or involentarily. Of course corporations place tracking cookies on our computer so they'll know where we've been. Now I hear they are putting GPS devices in boxes of detergent. They say now they are putting GPS devices in our clothing that can't be removed- - and that all they have to do is drive by our house or aim a device at us and they know what products we've bought and where. But as I was saying it used to be that for the government at least to put a GPS device on our cars or our ankles that first we would have to be duly convicted. Parents want to know where their teenage kids have driven so put devices on their cars and on their phones. Do we turn to government for protection against the prying eyes of the corporation? My biggest fear above all these things is these companies who employ people based on their Facebook entry. That to me is strictly private and should never be looked at by a corporation any more than they would look at our private love letters. Of course the movie "Quitters" was based on an organization that spies on you to quit smoking. But that movie has become a reality because now employers track you day and night with a blanket prohibition against smoking. Given all of this the direction the Supreme Court will take in the future is of heithened importance.

In light of all the government attrocities and being in bed with big corporations and Wall Street you wonder why they even care about the paultry sins of Charlie Rangle or Maxine Waters. Her sin was to get TARP money from the government for a bank owned by her husband or something. And yet Goldman Sachs thinks nothing of driving compeditor Lehman Brothers out of business with the help of the government. People think nothing of the TARP bank bail out and seem to have developed instant amnesia on the subject forgetting that it was Bush who did that. People are wondering whether they are going to use some amnesia drug on us this fall, like the pills Hope was taking, that causes us to do unthinkable things, like vote for Republicans, and have no memory of what we did or why we did it. Obama wants Rangle to end his carrier with dignity at age eighty. Yet I heard on the Bill Handel program that the evidence against Rangle and Waters was so weak, they won't be booted out of congress. In fact they won't even be centured, but merely receive repermands for their conduct. So Obama was wrong. The roll over and play dead strategy was rejected by Bill Clinton when he was under file, and aquiecence should likewise rejected by Waters and Rangle.

Last week congress wasn't on verbal viagara from listening to Thom Hartman. They didn't get "over stimulated" from KFI, but all the same they suffered from an uncontrolable Weiner. The C-Span video has both Wiener and the Republican who came right before him. Wiener was outraged that the Democrats would be blocked in their attempt to pass the jobs bill or whatever to help small businesses. Republicans were using procedure dodges to delay and finally not have an up or down vote, which means more tyrany of the 41% minority. They ended minority rule in South Africa two decades ago. Congress should follow suit. The filibuster is being used in ways our forefathers never intended or dreamed of. The other night I got a "town meeting" call from my Congressman, Ed Royce. The topic under discussion was small business and the prospect of jobs stimulation. The great obsession was that these Health Care taxes will kill small business, and if that doesn't then it will be the death tax or else the tax on carbon. Of course none of these taxes are included in the Obama Stimulus bill- - but these Republicans don't seem to care. But I finally hung up the phone, while contemplating dialing zero for a question- - when some woman called in and asked Congressman Royce what he was going to do to investigate ACORN. When I heard this question I had had it. These people were all working off the same corporate political check list agenda. Of course congress won't even vote 9 - 11 emergency the disability relief they so richly deserve for their sacrifice in time of maximum need. I don't know what is with these Republicans.

We need to change our corporate tax laws to prevent corporations from taking their job positions overseas. And yet congress is so much in the grip of these trans global corporations, they stripped all such "buy USA" provisions out of the stimulus bill from last year. Of course currencies are being manipulated. In a true "free market" there would be no trade surplusses or trade deficets, at least in the long run, because the country with the surplus would have its currency rise on the exchange and the one paying out all the cheap money and flooding the world with that would have its currency devalued so that things were again in ballance. Adam Smith is not dead. It's just we don't properly carry out his ideas. "The invisable hand" should not be thrown out, but it does need to be adjusted. Of course I could picture Carlen's response to Nancy Reagan's "Just say NO" campaign to instead a "Just say NOW" campaign, to legalize marijuana. This would save a lot of trees and cut way down on chemical polution. If we taxed marijuana we could make a lot of money. I thought Republicans were for making money. The chance of "reefer madness" breaking out in society is virtually Nill. So Whites don't have to worry about defiant Blacks stairing them down and threatening the order of society. It's too bad George Carlin isn't still alive because he'd be a real good candidate to run for President next time.