The Job Creator Argument

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Frankly the state of the world is a bit much for me to handle without having a neurological meltdown.

But I have to address the “Job Creator” mythology.

It is absolutely true that when people have money they create jobs. They hire accountants, gardeners, child care providers, employees to help with their companies. In the late 1980s after the Reagan years (the man who perpetuated the myth of the ubber rich as “job creators”) one percent of the population controlled 90% of the world’s wealth.

After the 1990s, more specifically by 2001 (before George Jr could completely unleash his plan to  finish off the American Dream)  10% of the population in the US controlled 71% of the wealth here. Now that’s still not that awesome, but as we all know during the 1990s there were more millionaires in the US than ever before and chains that started during this period (like Starbucks) were forced to give employees a living wage and excellent benefits to entice people to work for them. The economy was healthy and the US debt was set to not only be paid off but there was to be a surplus which would have gone a long way to save Social Security and other much-needed social programs – that is before George Jr. decided to murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (both civilians and soldiers but we’d prefer not to think about all the innocents who died so they aren’t even counted in our stats) and thousands of American soldiers, for what amounts to some personal vendetta against Saddam Hussain under the cover of fear that 9/11 provided. And of course his half-hearted attempt to find Osama Bin Laden which he later said after thousands died, he didn’t spend much time thinking about.

We are in this financial mess because of these horrendous wars as well as deregulation of multinational corporations. We can put some blame on Clinton for deciding the US was going to become the brains of the world and the rest of the world would be our manufacturing plant. This certainly cut off options for a great many Americans and dramatically changed corporate culture – impacting it in a very negative way.

The myth of the “Job Creators” broken down in the most base terms: You have 10 millionaires – they employe 1,000 people. You have 100,000,000 millionaires – they employee 10,000,000,000 people. It is sort of akin to a body in motion stays in motion – meaning more money circulating, enables more products to be made giving people more jobs and the opposite is also true – less money circulating through the economy makes new products harder to buy, get off the ground and become successful and therefore fewer jobs are created. The best metaphor was something I heard on NPR from an economist. He said (I’m paraphrasing here): It’s like a poker game. If all the players keep winning in equal measure then the game can be played infinitely. But if one guy keeps winning hand after hand, eventually all the players go broke and the game collapses.

This is in essence what happened to our economy.

After a certain amount of wealth money just ends up out of the circulation in the economy – take for example a guy who has 10,000,000,000.  Most of that money will inevitably sit in a bank, or in bonds or in investments because he is not able to utilize all those resources. His money will just make more passive income for him, accumulating residuals on work he is not doing. And control of this much of the world’s resources creates an imbalance that is antithetical to the tenets of DEMOCRACY. There’s a reason Republicans aren’t called Democrats. They are not of the people for the people. At this point I’m not sure anyone in our government is. It seems money, privilege and lobbyists have poisoned our system from the inside out.

The argument that the “working poor” are “lazy” and that the wealthy are productive is ass backwards. I have met innummerable people who work 16-20 hours a day seven days a week doing multiple jobs just to make ends meet for their family. Unless you count the amount of time Donald Trump talks about how awesome he is to the media, then he couldn’t possibly be working as much as those he deems”lazy.”

Check out the outrageously sociopathic and offensive interview Trump did with Piers Morgan where he states the Chinese “just work harder” (oh, yeah and they have no child labor laws or protection for workers – think Dickinson’s England) and he pines away for the Chinese ability to “not have to get permits” for anything. He is a disgusting man and about as sick as it gets considering Climate Change, and the fact that more than half the US population lives in poverty despite the fact that many of these people have two people both working full time and often more than 40 hours a week. Trump also endorsed Michelle Bachman who I actually was working on a post about. I’m going to deconstruct her chart. I think someone must have put LSD in Trump’s hair spray. He’s beyond out of touch with reality.

Pray that the meek truly do inherit the earth because the wicked are fighting for control right now. May those without conscious live in the hell they are creating for the rest of us who care about our fellow beings and have empathy for others.

Many blessings to the good people of this world,

Denise

War is here… now

Here’s my answer to a reader about Donald Trump and all that he represents:

Besides Donald Trump being a dangerous horrible idiot he’s also a narcissistic egomaniac. I think he really believes he could win the presidency because he’s a dangerously delusion person. Of course he would completely ruin this country if he were elected into office because he is about as diplomatic as a live grenade. Do I think he could win? Well all I have to say is Arnold Schwarzenegger. People seem to be in love with celebrity – we have replaced the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses with morons, narcissists and idiots. Perhaps we need the old religion which had more examples and pathways to the Great Spirit. Perhaps we yearn for connection through those who mirror us. Unfortunately if this is true we are in a very sad state.

We are currently in a class war – one that dates back to the blowing open of the gates – the Watergate era, followed by the first truly corporate president Ronald Reagan. I’m not sure Reagan knew the damage he was doing. I like to believe that he was hoodwinked by the right to be the spokesman of their (internal in terms of doing it inside the government) coo without really knowing he was. His son, whom I greatly respect, is primarily the reason I believe Ronald senior was most likely a descent man used (as so many middle and lower-income people are being used now) by the wealthy to advance a truly amoral agenda.

I always scoffed at the notion of “trickle down economics” firstly because I grew up in a very affluent neighborhood (that we didn’t belong in – we lived in a townhouse on social security checks and life insurance my father had bought years before his passing when I was 10). I knew the hearts and minds of the very wealthy in ways very few are privileged to know. I knew their children who espoused their values without the crust of age and experience to keep their real feelings and philosophies covered. I heard some of the most unimaginably amoral, immoral and hideous things said as common truths – social Darwinism was a given in the most extreme sense of that statement. There was no empathy for the underprivileged, only a social club that went into the ghetto to teach illiterate children as a sort of bait and switch to their true value system which was the belief that the wealthy are better – they deserve more, they are supreme and the poor are lazy, stupid and deserve what they get even if that means suffering and death. Hideous but absolutely true – many probably won’t believe me. In fact I know people won’t believe me because I’ve been telling people, friends, descent human beings this since I was entrenched in this bizarre world where people went to church on Sunday and then sucked the earth dry of every resource in order to hoard it for themselves. Yes, it is easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than a wealthy man into heaven. I saw this first hand.

The first stage of the war against the poor and middle class was to dismantle the unions. Sure some were bloated, some were corrupt but lest we forget what life was like before they existed – just pick up a book by Dickens and you’ll see clearly the way the rich like it. The civil war – a rich man’s war to keep their slaves, using the poor southerners via their racism and pride as a tool against their interest (living) to fight a war that only the wealthy truly had a stake in and only the wealthy benefited from – this is a perfect example of the way many of the wealthiest one percent would like to see our country go – if they could have slaves again, they’d do it in a heartbeat, hence the dismantling of the minimum wage, next it will be age restrictions for working if they get momentum on the wage issue.

There are two kinds of rich – old money or the idle rich as I like to call them, who do nothing but live off the achievement of some great, great, great, great, grandparent who actually contributed something to the world during their time and then invested the family money for generations to inherit. These idle rich hate the “Nuevo riche” the people who newly acquire money – meaning the people who actually earned the money they became wealthy from, the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs of this world. You know the people who actually really produce jobs for regular folks, not the people who live off the fat left over from their (once common low to middle-class) ancestors. Those “old money” people spend their days taking care of themselves and their money, buying influence, protecting their interests and making sure they can make more money in the market. It’s interesting that they are usually the very same people who accuse poor people of being lazy when truly they have no purpose on this planet and are more akin to tics than human beings. They live off all of us who actually work and keep their world moving forward. The biggest way they contribute to the economy is through buying things, fancy furniture, fine art, clothing, etc.

Now here’s the thing. The 1960s was a very scary time for them, coming off the heels of the most financial growth of anytime during American history. The middle class grew to enormous proportions, the rich got richer as did everyone. You’d think that the wealthy would look upon the economy booming and love it because it means more money in their coffers. But with more money, more education came and people started asking questions. Why do we have to fight the communists in Vietnam? Isn’t that a sovereign nation with the right to decide its own fate? Riots took place, the left became extremely radicalized and the wealthy started to become the target of the growing understanding that a capitalist culture is antithetical to democracy as it stood. Money buys influence and effects legislation. The tying together of corporate interests with the government is fascism and as we all know corporate interests are generally not in line with what’s good for the average person, such as toxic dumping, air pollution, and endless problems associated with industry. Not to mention the corporate bottom line is biggest when they have low overhead, cheap labor and don’t have to pay taxes. Break up the unions, you break up people’s collective bargaining power, work on the congress – lobby for tax breaks for corporations and pay less taxes you get the idea.

All of this has been going on – this war began after FDR put in place regulations to control monopolies (the original source of the world financial crisis that plunged us into the Great Depression as well as Europe, especially Germany). It was those regulations or laws, which were based on the same sort of laws we as ordinary citizens would have to follow (in principle) that kept capitalism on a relatively even playing field. The breakdown of which over the past 30 years we are now seeing the results of.

Forget the history lesson above, here’s the point I want to make invention, intellectual leaps, progress and solutions don’t come from the rich, even jobs don’t, only a very small minority of jobs come directly from those newly rich people who actually are contributing members of society. Invention and intellectual leaps come from the middle-class, the class of people educated enough to want to reach upward and grab the golden ring not people sipping Manhattans while tanning themselves in Tahiti. The wealthiest one percent don’t have an incentive to solve anything, for them everything is solved, they are taken care of. Sure there are those rare individuals who want to contribute and who I salute like the young documentary film maker who exposed his world in “The One Percent,” an excellent entrance into the way people are indoctrinated into this bizarre entitled ideology and also a revelation on many other fronts.

If we lose the middle-class we become a third world country. And we also lose any chance we have of solving Global Warming, of advancing civilization or developing space travel. The rich will own us (as they wish to) and we will eventually be pushed into fighting or dying or both. They have successfully used racism/sexism/homophobia and fear to divide us. They have so confused the average person that he/she often votes against their own interest.

It is not a coincidence that the world is literally being flooded, deluged with tornadoes, earthquakes and soon hurricanes at unprecedented levels. It’s a wake up call: we must come together and fix what is broken.

I ask those who have the power and money to actually make a difference in this world these simple questions: What will it be worth when you have everything and there is nothing and no one left to lord it over or give it to? Are you that insecure you need to feel better than other people, is that what blinds you to the suffering and pain surrounding you? Do you love your family? If you answered yes to that, then what the hell are you doing to preserve this world for them?

Many blessings to the good and may the greedy find the world as wicked as they are,

Denise

Why Won’t Sarah Palin talk to the Press?

Why won’t Sarah Palin talk to the press? Well, according to the tarot it looks like the McCain camp is afraid of scaring off those top one percenters who would see her as a huge liability in terms of her understanding of the economy and the work force. She’s great for invigorating the extreme right (the Republican base), but not so good for engendering confidence in the very wealthy (those few really in control of Republican policy) and truly conservative. It seems they are also worried she will come off as over-confident, arrogant, bossy, authoritarian and cocky, but with little to back it up. 

She looks good in photo ops though… I guess being a sports caster and beauty queen has its advantages.