* The Poor are entirely at fault for being poor.
* The Ecology is not an important part of the public health.
* The Workers have no human rights.
This archive contains insights into this ideology...
* Why those with extreme wealth exhibit psychopathic tendencies [link]
* How Will the 99% Deal With 70 Million Psychopaths? [link]
* "Suffering? Well, You Deserve It" [link]
Monopolist propaganda describing "Self Regulation" for monopolist corporations is the logic of children, yet its justification governs the relations between the People and the private cartels which monopolize the economic life of the People.
The following column is published by hundreds of monopolised newspapers and online newsjournals across the USA, for an upper middle-class readers. The author, a respected personality who is held in high-esteem by educated conservatives, censors the direct connection of anti-worker business practices and the increase in poverty, and misleads the audience to believe that poverty is a creation of anti-poverty social programs!
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"The slow decline of America since LBJ launched the Great Society"
2014-05-16 by George F. Will [www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-the-slow-decline-of-america-since-lbj-launched-the-great-society/2014/05/16/21f70a8c-dc5c-11e3-b745-87d39690c5c0_story.html]:
[begin extract] Between 1959 and 1966 — before the War on Poverty was implemented — the percentage of Americans living in poverty plunged by about one-third, from 22.4 to 14.7, slightly lower than in 2012. But, Eberstadt cautions, the poverty rate is “incorrigibly misleading” because government transfer payments have made income levels and consumption levels significantly different. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, heating assistance and other entitlements have, Eberstadt says, made income “a poor predictor of spending power for lower-income groups.” Stark material deprivation is now rare:
“By 2011 . . . average per capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the U.S. average for 1980. . . . [Many] appliances were more common in officially impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of 1980. . . . DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are now typical in them — amenities not even the richest U.S. households could avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty.”
But the institutionalization of anti-poverty policy has been, Eberstadt says carefully, “attended” by the dramatic spread of a “tangle of pathologies.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined that phrase in his 1965 report calling attention to family disintegration among African Americans. The tangle, which now ensnares all races and ethnicities, includes welfare dependency and “flight from work.”
Twenty-nine percent of Americans — about 47 percent of blacks and 48 percent of Hispanics — live in households receiving means-tested benefits. And “the proportion of men 20 and older who are employed has dramatically and almost steadily dropped since the start of the War on Poverty, falling from 80.6 percent in January 1964 to 67.6 percent 50 years later.” Because work — independence, self-reliance — is essential to the culture of freedom, ominous developments have coincided with Great Society policies:
For every adult man ages 20 to 64 who is between jobs and looking for work, more than three are neither working nor seeking work, a trend that began with the Great Society. And what Eberstadt calls “the earthquake that shook family structure in the era of expansive anti-poverty policies” has seen out-of-wedlock births increase from 7.7 percent in 1965 to more than 40 percent in 2012, including 72 percent of black babies.
[end extract]
The "Christian" Capitalist ideology of Billie Tucker, Leader of a "Tea Party" in Florida (2011-05) [link]
"Work for a better wage"
2014-05-13 letter by Leo Pribble of San Francisco to the editor of the "San Francisco Chronicle" newspaper [link]:
I'm so tired of the whines I hear about raising the minimum wage. Minimum-wage jobs were never meant to be career jobs. If you want better pay, get a better-paying job. Oh, you might want to invest in yourself and get an education. Best start is to pay attention in school. Stop whining. Be proactive. Help yourself and help others. Encourage better education.
"Exposing Reich's errors"
2014-05-18 Letters to Insight from the "San Francisco Chronicle"
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140518180813/http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Letters-to-Insight-May-18-5484778.php]:
Robert Reich's article "Exposing right wing's lies" (Insight, May 11 [https://web.archive.org/web/20140518181542/http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Lies-the-right-wing-tells-5466796.php]) is so flawed, I barely know where to start.
His first claim that "the middle class and poor are job creators" is obviously wrong. Poor people cannot create jobs through their purchases because they have very little or no money and purchase almost nothing.
Next, his claim that people are not paid what they are worth due to the decline in unions is ridiculous. Anyone in today's job market knows if they have marketable skills, they will be fairly compensated based on their ability.
His assertion that "we do less than nothing for poor and lower middle-class kids" is just plain wrong. The numerous programs that these very same people take advantage of - after-school programs, tutoring, free breakfast and lunch ... the list is endless - prove Reich wrong again.
Finally, Reich should realize that the minimum wage was meant for people who are just entering the job market. It was never meant to support a family.
[signed] Raymond Moreno, of San Francisco
"How the Super-Rich Are Abandoning America"
2013-11-04 by Paul Buchheit from "CommonDreams.org" [http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/11/04-1]:
As they accumulate more and more wealth, the very rich have less need for society. At the same time, they've convinced themselves that they made it on their own, and that contributing to societal needs is unfair to them. There is ample evidence that this small group of takers is giving up on the country that made it possible for them to build huge fortunes.
They've Taken $25 Trillion of New Wealth While Paying Less Taxes -
The 2013 Global Wealth Databook shows that U.S. wealth has increased from $47 trillion in 2008 to $72 trillion in mid-2013. But according to U.S. Government Revenue figures, federal income taxes have gone DOWN from 2008 to 2012. Even worse, corporations cut their tax rate in half.
American society has gained nothing from its massive wealth expansion. There's no wealth tax, no financial transaction tax, no way to ensure that infrastructure and public education are supported.
Just how much have the super-rich taken over the past five years? Each of the elite 5% -- the richest 12 million Americans -- gained, on average, nearly a million dollars in financial wealth between 2008 and 2013.
2. For the First Time in History, They Believe They Don't Need the Rest of Us -
The rich have always needed the middle class to work in their factories and buy their products. With globalization this is no longer true. Their factories can be in China, producing goods for people in India or Europe or anywhere else in the world.
They don't need our infrastructure for their yachts and helicopters and submarines. They pay for private schools for their kids, private security for their homes. They have private emergency rooms to avoid the health care hassle. All they need is an assortment of servants, who might be guest workers coming to America on H2B visas, willing to work for less than a middle-class American can afford.
The sentiment is spreading from the super-rich to the merely rich. In 2005 Sandy Springs, a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, stopped paying for most public services, deciding instead to avoid subsidizing poorer residents of Fulton County by hiring a "city outsourcer" called CH2M to manage everything except the police and fire departments. That includes paving the roads, running the courts, issuing tickets, handling waste, and various other public services. Several other towns followed suit.
Results have been mixed, with some of CH2M's clients backing out or renegotiating. But privatization keeps coming at us. Selective decisions about public services threaten to worsen already destitute conditions for many communities. Detroit, of course, is at the forefront. According to an Urban Land Institute report, "more municipalities may follow Detroit's example and abandon services in certain districts."
3. They Soaked the Middle Class, and Now Demand Cuts in the Middle-Class Retirement Fund -
The richest Americans take the greatest share of over $2 trillion in Tax Expenditures, Tax Underpayments, Tax Haven holdings, and unpaid Corporate Taxes.
The Social Security budget is less than half of that. Yet much of Congress and many other wealthy Americans think it should be cut. These are the same people who deprive the American public of $300 billion a year by not paying their full share of the payroll tax.
4. They Continue to Insist that They "Made It on Their Own" -
They didn't. Their fortunes derived in varying degrees - usually big degrees - from public funding, which provided almost half of basic research funds into the 1980s, and even today supports about 60 percent of the research performed at universities.
Businesses rely on roads and seaports and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, communications towers and satellites to conduct online business, the Department of Commerce to promote and safeguard global markets, the U.S. Navy to monitor shipping lanes, and FEMA to clean up after them.
Apple, the tax haven specialist, still does most of its product and research development in the United States, with US-educated engineers and computer scientists. Google's business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model. Microsoft was started by our richest American, Bill Gates, whose success derived at least in part by taking the work of competitors and adapting it as his own. Same with Steve Jobs, who admitted: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
Companies like Pfizer and Merck have relied on basic research performed at the National Institute of Health. A Congressional Budget Office study reminds us that The primary rationale for the government to play a role in basic research is that private companies perform too little such research themselves (relative to what is best for society).
5. As a Final Insult, Many of Them Desert the Country that Made Them Rich -
Many of the beneficiaries of American research and technology have abandoned their country because of taxes. Like multinational companies that rationalize the move by claiming to be citizens of the world, almost 2,000 Americans, and perhaps up to 8,000, have left their responsibilities behind for more favorable tax climates. The most egregious example is Eduardo Saverin, who found safe refuge in the U.S. after his family was threatened in Brazil, landed Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard, benefited from American technology to make billions from his 4% share in Facebook, and then skipped out on his tax bill.
An Apt Summary?
Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot and member of the Forbes 400, had this to say about any American who might object to all the greed: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?"
Happy Little Helpers are handsomely rewarded if they work well.
* "Goldman Sachs Paid CEO Blankfein $19.9 Million" [link]
* "For Services Rendered? Wall Street’s Big Paydays For Trade Negotiators" [link]
Happy Little Helpers are smart enough to be studious, but stupid enough to not think, as can be shown in the following example:
Happy Little Helpers are not capable of thinking like a person of lower-income.
A government contractor working against their employer is technically treason, punishable by life-sentencing, and execution. Edward Snowden released records gained while employed by the USA clandestine services which show the "turn-key" dictatorship employed by monopolists against the people of the world. Edward is a USA Citizen, and, because of his crime, is being taunted by high-ranking government officials, whose messages are publicized by the monopolized media, shaping the perceptions of the captive audience concerning Edward. In the following examples, notice how John Kerry shapes the message, using words and phrases designed to elicit an emotional response.
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"U.S. Kerry says Snowden should 'Man Up' and return to U.S.", 2014-05-28 by Philip J. Victor from "Al Jazeera" [http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/28/kerry-snowden-nsa.html]:
Secretary of State John Kerry has blasted former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as a “confused” man who “betrayed his country,” rebutting the whistleblower’s claim that his exile in Russia is the fault of the U.S. government.
Kerry's comments came ahead of the scheduled airing on Wednesday evening of Snowden’s first sit-down interview with a U.S. network. In excerpts released by NBC, Snowden — who fled the United States after leaking classified documents detailing massive surveillance by the U.S. government — said he “never intended to end up in Russia.”
“I had a flight booked to Cuba onwards to Latin America, and I was stopped because the United States government decided to revoke my passport and trap me in Moscow airport. So when people ask, ‘Why are you in Russia?’ I say, ‘Please ask the State Department,’” Snowden said.
Kerry reacted bluntly to the accusation. “For a supposedly smart guy, that’s a pretty dumb answer,” he told NBC. Snowden has previously said he acted out of “good conscience” to protect privacy and basic liberties.
“If he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice,” Kerry said. “But to be hiding in Russia, an authoritarian country, and to have just admitted that he was really trying to get to Cuba — I mean, what does that tell you? I think he’s confused, I think it’s very sad, but this is a man who has done great damage to his country.”
[end excerpt]
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"Kerry: 'Pretty Dumb' Snowden Blames U.S. for Stranding Him", 2014-05-28 from "NBC News"
[http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/kerry-pretty-dumb-snowden-blames-u-s-stranding-him-n116126]: Secretary of State John Kerry tells TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie that a “real patriot” would return home.
(CONTINUE READING [http://www.today.com/video/today/55275926])
Secretary of State John Kerry tells TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie that he would be “delighted” for former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to return from Russia to make his case, and that a “real patriot” would return home. Kerry’s comments were in response to Snowden’s exclusive interview with NBC’s Brian Williams. (Video at original source link).
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