Good Labor Day thought for those outside the gated communities

I never said he wasn't a union guy at that point of his career, and he should have remembered his roots in that part of what was otherwise an outstanding presidency.

By the way, what's a presient?
Be careful who you call a moron. Or is it a moran?

 

See, this is the typical childish bullshit that your political heroes are glad you have because they do it so well. If Bush came up with a plan for ending the Iraq War, your people would hatchet it to death because, after all, it would be a Bush idea.

 

If.

 

Count on it. They'd chop it to pieces.

 

Since no plan is forthcoming, the point is moot.

 

Such is life for the tired one, his political hero in ruins, dwelling in the land of "If", where the slithy toves do myre and gimble in the wabe.

 

Happy 12th, Zeke!

 

Cran, have you read "What's the Matter with Kansas"? It offers some insight into why people vote (and think) against their own self-interest.

Part of the problem is the sleight-of-hand politicians engage in when they stir folks up on "values" issues - less attention gets paid to matters like trade and employment and the economy.

I'll never forget visiting Canton, Ohio on the eve of the 2004 election and seeing a Bush placard on every lawn. The city's unemployment rate was sky-high, businesses were closing left and right, downtown looked gutted - but voters were paying more attention to the War and to the "values" stuff. And while the war should trump personal interests in an election year, it struck me very odd that folks seemed so much more concerned by who could marry whom than with their own economic self-interest. That was the nature of the debate there. No one - and I mean no one - talked about employment. So there's that.

I think, too, that it's too complicated and exhausting for folks to make sense of big-ticket, big-picture items like NAFTA. As long as the cookies and chips at Wal-Mart still sell for 88 cents, things are okay. Another race to the bottom that most voters can't make heads or tails of.

Unions might have been a big help in defending against or at least explaining some of this stuff, but were undone by the corporate campaigns to demonize them, and by their own corruption, greed and hubris.

It just breaks my heart when I read young people here bashing unions as inherently bad. They're only as bad as the people who comprise them, and if you don't think weakened unions are part of the problem with newspapers being run as 25% profit centers for media conglomerates, you're crazy.

One of my crackpot dreams would be to see unions reimagined and remade in the 21st century. Worth fighting for, though. Because except as a group, how do we fight for our rights?

 

Yawn's contention that Clinton Era economics sacrificed the middle-class to the false gods of the balanced-budget and "free" trade seems to me irrefutable.
Ye gods.

 

it's not your fault. it's not your fault. it's not your fault.

(damned genes)

 

It's a very cynical game, politics. Sort of a high-stakes version of "Look, your shoelace is untied!"

But people get what they deserve in the end whether it's a non-matching 401-K instead of a pension plan or a president they consider the kind of guy with whom they'd like to have a drink at the corner bar.

At least our country is still safe from same-sex marriage for the time being.

 

I recommend this to Cran, and anyone else who's interested in the current state of the wage-earning American Dream. It's in rotation on cable these days, too.

http://www.walmartmovie.com/