NORTON META TAG

19 September 2013

Watch this ex-congressman leave everyone speechless on Meet The Press & If 80% of us are in or near poverty than THERE IS NO MIDDLE CLASS & more from Daily Kos 16SEP13

THINK Congress is addressing the "too big to fail" bak issue? Think the wall street and the bank-financial industry cabal is no longer controlling Congress? Think again, and watch former Rep Barney Frank D MA call out the plutocrats who have bought and paid for and control most of Congress. Followed by some other interesting stries from the Daily Kos....

If anyone doubts the complicity between the mainstream media and the titans of finance, one simply needed to watch Meet The Press with David Gregory yesterday. The seven plus minute segment started with David Gregory stating the obvious: An economy five years ago that was on the brink of collapse is now a high flying economy for the 1 percent and on the brink of collapse for the working middle class.
His guests were then-Secretary of Treasury and past CEO of Goldman Sachs Henry Paulson, CNBC mouthpiece and apologist Maria Bartiromo, and ex-Congressman Barney Frank. Most of the segment was the standard blabber of nonsensical statements on the economy.
There was Paulson stating that the economy is recovering but at a slow pace. He attempted to attribute that to a tax system that needed revamping. Ironically that is true but for a reason different than what Paulson would agree with. The economy needs a tax system that extracts more from those hoarding unearned money from capital manipulation that is not recirculated in the economy in the form of wages and reinvests it into the real drivers of the economy, the working middle class.
After Gregory enumerates the false excuses given by the titans of finance, the hoarders of America’s capital, he asks the important question: “Did Wall Street win in all of this?” Wall Street’s most verbose apologists immediately deflected. Maria Bartiromo said that we needed to get beyond the conversation of whether Wall Street or the bankers are evil. She said we need to talk about how you create sustainable growth. She said that would answer the issue of inequality because with growth comes jobs.
That was the most disingenuous answer possible. First, if one defines evil as knowingly harming a fellow human being, then evil correctly defines bankers and Wall Street. Secondly, of all the jobs that are being created or that would be created, the wages are normalized because of policies that allow outsourcing and because of the decline of the power of unions. In other words, the American worker is working for less and with little recourse or representation. This increases profits for the titans of capital which adds to income and wealth disparity even further. The American worker has not benefitted from their increased productivity. It has almost entirely gone to the top 1 percent.
The zinger of the segment however came from Barney Frank’s comment about the bankers. He said:
I do want to add one thing though to your question about those poor beleaguered bankers who have been forced to do so much to keep from not being able to pay their debts, that they can’t lend money. If they really are running businesses that are so stressed that they can’t do their basic work, why are they paying themselves so much money?
That statement left Bartiromo, Paulson and Gregory temporarily speechless with facial expressions that said it all. They were trapped and unable to speak to acknowledge the fact laid out by Frank. Their enslavement to the plutocracy was evident. Gregory had a nervous laugh as Bartiromo again deflected.
This is what America has become. The mainstream media and our politicians are nothing but wards of the plutocracy. 
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/16/1239386/-Watch-ex-Congressman-Leave-Everyone-Speechless-On-Meet-The-Press-VIDEO?detail=email
You can't tell me there is a middle if 4/5ths of us are almost poor.
If we are all poor or near poor than poor is the new middle.
There is a "working class" and the wealthy, that is it. The middle class is DEAD. And everyone, specifically Democrats, need to stop pretending otherwise.
In High School Econ 101 we were taught that there are poor people and working poor people. Working poor people have jobs but are still poor. If we are to cling to the notion of a mythical middle than we must admit that working poor IS the new middle class, and that means there IS no middle class because you are still fucking poor.
So we can lie to ourselves and pretend that there is a middle class in America, but there isn't. If you are working and still struggling you are not middle class, you are working poor, and by clinging to a dead phrase like "middle" we dismiss and excuse all of those poor people who used to be middle class but got left behind by decades of stagnant wages, rising costs of living and the vast disparity between the growth of the wealth of the super rich compared to everybody else. If you are in debt up to your eyeballs you are not middle class, some one owns you through your debt. If you work and still are constantly broke you are not middle class and you are being kept poor on purpose because how else can they get you to go into debt in the first place?
    So STOP trying to explain what the middle class is. It doesn't exist anymore. We live in a three income society, the laughable McDonald's/Visa budget even admits as much, you need TWO incomes just to be able to afford freezing to death during the winter because you have no money for heat or those sicknesses humans get from time to time, and even if you are married or share housing with someone neither of you can afford to lose work for a month or BAM back into poverty you go, so let's stop pretending there is a middle anymore.
If 80% of us are going to be in poverty or near it in our lifetimes than there is no middle class, there are poor people and rich people.
Whenever we talk about the middle class we are speaking of a thing that no longer exists. Not when 4/5ths of us are scrapping near poverty. Republicans only speak of the poor in disdain but Democrats treat the word "Poor' as if it were some four lettered swear not to be uttered in public, but the reality is simple, there is no middle class, it died a decade ago and was buried when Wall Street crashed the economy 4 years ago.
When we talk about raising the minimum wage we must remember that people who oppose raising the minimum wage are AGAINST trickle down, they are admitting it doesn't work because they will not allow it to do so. I say $10 an hour is NOT enough, how about double the current minimum wage for all workers including workers who earn tips and peg the growth of the minimum wage to the growth rate of Fortune 500 total executive compensation.
By pretending that poverty does not exist and lumping everyone in a mythical middle we are deluding ourselves from the real crisis facing America, because a nation where 80% of the people are at or near poverty is a nation that is one bad month away from total disaster.
And here are Republicans fighting to help starve Americans by denying them food assistance to supplement their suppressed wages. Let me ask those conservatives this, what happens when you drive people into poverty with low wages and starve them by rescinding food assistance? What alternative do you give those people? Tax cuts? More guns? But what about those Democrats who are afraid to seem too friendly to the poor by defending the working class instead of this mythical specter of the Ghost of Middle Class past?
Income inequality is not a problem, it is THE problem. We are all going broke and falling into poverty BECAUSE the wealthiest among us have decided that starving us and suppressing our wages is better for their profit line. At the beginning of the collapse Senator John McCain said "The fundamentals of our economy are strong."
If 4/5ths of us are going to be poor in our lifetime I would suggest that the fundamentals of our economy are fucked up and bullshit.
And someone should, you know, do something about that.
If 80% of us are poor than the middle is poor.
Taxes are not the problem. Government spending too much is NOT the problem. Are wages are too fucking low. That is the problem. Ignoring it won't make it go away. Part of the reason Bill DiBlasio won in NYC was due to the fact that he is telling the truth, the rich are richer than ever at a time when being poor is becoming the new middle BECAUSE the rich have invented a plutonomy for themselves at the expense of the rest of us. The sooner we deal with that the better, but first we must admit there is a problem. Coddling the rich is strangling the rest of us. Pretending otherwise is bullshit.
95% of the wealth is going to the wealthiest 1%. That isn't an economy, it's a casino with rigged slot machines. When the rich get 96% where will that other 1% of profit come from? When will the rich be happy? When it is 99%? 100%? Two years ago pundits bemoaned the fact that Occupy Wall Street had no official demands. I would like to ask the same of Wall Street and the super rich. What are your demands? How much profit does Wall Street need before they start paying decent wages again? How much profit does Wall Street need before we can raise the minimum wage?
And how bad does it have to get before the pitchforks and torches come out?
I say we are already there.
Rant off

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO MINISTRYOFTRUTH ON MON SEP 16, 2013 AT 10:04 AM PDT.

ALSO REPUBLISHED BY HELLRAISERS JOURNALINVISIBLE PEOPLEIN SUPPORT OF LABOR AND UNIONS, AND ANTI-CAPITALIST CHAT.


MORE FROM THE DAILY KOS......
No rest for the weary. Daily Kos may have won the campaign to stop Larry Summers from chairing the Federal Reserve, but there are many more reasons to check out the site. Here are just a few ...
Log in or sign up for Daily Kos. There is nowhere else you can write a blog post with a good chance to be read by tens of thousands of dedicated progressive activists.

Thanks for all you do,
Paul Hogarth, Daily Kos

No comments:

Post a Comment