Most honest followers of politics and even casual observers know that the annual State of The Union Address given by the President is an exercise of feel good, self congratulations mixed with a shred of ambitions and proposals for the new year going forward.  This year was no exception, but given the toxic state of Washington politics, the true state of things, and the fact that this year is an election year, I felt let down by President Obama.  While he pointed out some fairly obvious problems and some simple solutions that could be achieved, were it not for the obstructionist tactics of the republicans, he failed to set the tone needed to wake voters up to the importance this year of holding the Senate for the democrats, and the desperate need to take control away from the House of Clowns.  He also managed to lie with a straight face about his desire to create good paying manufacturing jobs while urging congress to fast track the further outsourcing of American jobs and standards by approving the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

The pre-game hype of the State Address was about how President Obama was going to lay out his new plans to use his executive authority where he could to get America working and to address the growing wealth inequality problem in this country.  It is true that there are a limited number of real things he can do with his executive power, such as requiring all government contract workers to be paid at least $10.10 an hour, but the real point of these moves is largely symbolic and meant to put political pressure on congress to act with legislation.   Raising the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hours is one of the more simple yet effective legislative actions that congress could take to help stimulate the economy and help the working poor.  I would say that in the list of contenders for top soundbites from the speech, “Give America a raise” directed at the republicans who always oppose raising the minimum wage, was the top.  Mr. Obama pointed out that today’s minimum wage was about 20 percent lower than it was during Messiah Ronald Reagan’s time.  This was one a few references and inferences to the undeserving and highly regarded hero on high of the republican party, which Obama still seems to think may win over hardened conservatives.

President Obama also asked congress to re-instate federal unemployment insurance  benefits immediately, that he said congress had “let expire.”  Here, in an election year, I think Mr. Obama should have chosen more honest language.  Calling the heartless and calculated blocking of extending unemployment benefits by republicans as letting “expire” is to me the epitome of what his wrong with President Obama’s tone and strategy in dealing with a republican party that is radical and far right of the majority of American’s beliefs on many issues.  The government shutdown this past year, caused solely by the republicans, was white-washed over, as a “rancorous argument” yet “important debate” that we needed to move past.  He then congratulated both democrats and republicans for a “compromise” budget that was passed.  As I’ve pointed out before, compromise is now defined as giving the super wealthy backed republicans most of what they want that goes against most of what the majority of American voters want.

Pretending that the problem in American politics is too much “partisan” arguing between two sides of good faith people who both want what is good for the country is a cop out by a president who is either blindly naive at this point (which I don’t think he is) or still unwilling to really fight for what is right.  He still wants to ask nicely for the right things while still be willing to settle for only a little of the right things.  The problem is not simply bickering between the democrats and republicans.  The problem is quite frankly, that all of Washington is corrupted to a certain degree by flood of bribery by the all powerful corporations and industries of the top .01 percent of the uber wealthy through their campaign “donations.”  Everyone knows this.  So instead of pretending like congress is just a bunch of good hearted Americans who passionately disagree over issues, the president needs to be more honest and direct and say “it’s true that both political parties are too beholden to the interests of profit over people driven corporations, but the republican party has consistently proven over the past few years that they represent outright contempt for the working class and the poor.  It’s time to throw them out of office altogether.”

He could point out any number of concrete examples, starting with changing his phrase “let expire” unemployment benefits to “killed any hope” of extending unemployment insurance.  He could point out that the Farm Bill was held up by republicans hoping that starving the poor and their children through more savage cuts to the food stamp program would somehow create jobs.  He could point to the record number of filibusters by republican senators that have been used by the minority party of the top 1 percent to undermine the principles of democracy.  He should remind everyone that the government shutdown was caused by House republicans also seeking to undermine our democracy by inflicting enough pain on the general population to cause democrats to surrender to the needs of the super rich.

Instead, he spoke in a lot of generalities, and again, channeling the tired rhetoric of President Reagan, talked about how he was going to “cut red tape” to get construction projects moving quicker and factories getting built.  After all these years of President Obama pledging to use his executive authority to cut red tape to get the economy moving, you’d think his scissors would be dull and there no more tape to be cut.  He also spoke of “job training,” a recycled President Clinton line of bullshit that suggests that there are many high paying jobs out there for average American workers, if only they could get the government training they need to fill those positions.  To solve this problem, he’s appointed Vice President Joe Biden “to lead an across- the-board reform of America’s training programs to make sure they have one mission: train Americans with the skills employers need, and match them to good jobs that need to be filled right now.”  So we have republicans suggesting that unemployment is caused by too many lazy people living off the fat of unemployment checks and not looking for those jobs out there, and the president suggesting that those jobs are out there, they just need government trained and recruited workers to fill them.  Both positions are baseless in facts, both are bullshit.  The republican position just demonstrates their outright hostility towards the working class, and President Obama’s position is just a false hope based on lies that he hopes will motivate people to vote for the democrats instead of the assholes.

Another lie that President Obama keeps propagating is borrowed from the tired playbook of Bill Clinton and Al Gore:  we need more secretive “free trade” deals passed in order to create jobs here at home.  We’ve all heard this crock of shit before, one of the ultimate successes of trans-national corporations, the selling of the myth that trade deals with poor, third world countries that undermine our labor and environmental laws and sovereignty, will somehow create jobs here.  President Obama once said he would oppose any NAFTA style trade deals if he became president, and that he would renegotiate parts of NAFTA as well.  Now, like his bullshit artist predecessors Clinton and Gore before him, he actually said in his address “We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment and open new markets to new goods stamped “Made in the USA.”  It reminded me of Vice President Gore debating Ross Perot on NAFTA, saying he had a family member in the tire manufacturing business being for NAFTA so he could sell his tires to Mexico.

I’ve recently written about how TPP is a larger and worse version of NAFTA that will continue to outsource American jobs and depress wages, but I’d like to include a link here to an excellent Op Ed this week in the New York Times written by David Bonoir, who was a democrat in office at the time of NAFTA.  It is worth the read and articulates very clearly the problem with TPP and so-called “free trade” and the reality behind the false propaganda that Obama now promotes now that he is president:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/opinion/obamas-free-trade-conundrum.html?hp&rref=opinion.  I strongly recommend that you copy and paste the link and read the piece.  

The president did forcefully defend ObamaCare and called out the House of Clowns for it’s forty something votes to repeal it, and highlighted and important and easy to understand benefit:  people with pre-existing conditions can no longer be thrown to the wolves so that insurance companies can continue to profit by denying care to the sick.  I’ve said before that the once the full benefits of the Affordable Care Act are realized and enacted, Americans will realize how much better off they are now with health care in this country than they were before.  We are still a long ways off from catching up to the rest of the world on how we provide heath care to all, but there are real and concrete and life saving and cost benefits that are now being fully realized, even with the fumbled roll out of ObamaCare.

To sum it up, our broken system of democracy will continue to putter along at an unacceptable pace, with wealth inequality unlikely to change anytime time soon, with fundamental problems still bandaged and window dressed up, and our leaders talking about how great we are as our benevolent leaders work hard to compromise us into a better position.  The elections coming up this year are important, but unless the democrats grow some backbone and a willingness to tell the unpleasant truth, the balance of power will not change that much, the poor will go hungrier, and the working poor will work harder for less while the corporate fat cats get fatter.  The president missed an opportunity to use the bully pulpit to light a fire under the ass of voters and his own party, but I guess it’s hard to do when you also work for the rich and powerful that really rule our country.

 

 

One thing that should outrage everyone in this country is that there are millions of Americans going hungry or worrying that they may go hungry.  What is outrageous is that it doesn’t have to be this way at all.  The United States doe not have a food shortage or a wealth shortage.  Theoretically, its citizenry does not lack in compassion. In practice though, its citizens have let one minority political party decide that the hungry and food insecure people, families and children should have their already inadequate food assistance cut even more.  The republicans in congress, self-proclaimed and self-righteous Christians, have gotten their way twice in the past 3 months in congress, managing to get in two cuts to the federal food stamp program now know as S.N.A.P.

The first cut to the food assistance program came this past November, just in time for the holidays.  Republicans let expire, by refusing to renew, the emergency, extra food stamp funding that was included as part of the economic stimulus of 2009 after the start of the financial industry caused Great Recession.  An article yesterday on the website Think Progress  cited a report from Food Bank New York City that described the impact of the food stamp cut in November on food pantries in New York, which resulted in many food banks running out of food and having to turn people away. ( http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/23/3195501/york-city-food-pantries-food-stamps/).  Food pantries and charities across the country had similar experiences over the holidays as they attempted to fill in the increased need caused by the republican sadism.  Fox Propaganda pundit Bill O’Reilly took to the airwaves over the holiday season saying that Jesus wouldn’t be down for the food stamp program because it was helping one group (the hungry) by hurting the other group (the rest of us).

Bill O’Reilly’s absurd and offensive comments are one of the best examples I recall lately that so beautifully demonstrates the outright vile hypocrisy of the republican party that tries to claim the moral high ground on social policy by identifying themselves as Christians with family values.  These fucking scumbags have not only waged a war on the working class, demonized the poor, and chastised the new Pope for criticizing their true god of greed that they call “capitalism” – these lying sacks of rotten dog shit, phony Christian posers have now literally cut the food supply to the poor even further, while claiming to have Jesus on their side.

The second round of cuts to the food stamp program has just been pushed through by the republicans, with the help of capitulating, pathetic democrats seeking a ‘compromise.’  Their claim to compromise is that they agreed to only 10 billion dollars in cuts to food stamps over the next decade instead of the whopping 40 billion dollars that the tea bagging House Republicans were seeking.  With no shortage of food in this country, and in fact with an overabundance of food helped in part by government subsidies to industrial farming, and with no shortage of wealth, and no shortage of bombs to drop on other countries, it cannot be called a compromise to further cut back food assistance to the poor in this country.  In fact, the only thing these democrats deserve to be called for the “compromise’  is COWARDS.  These same, near worthless ensemble of impotent, wet-mop democrats also managed to let the republicans dupe them into a ‘compromise’ over the holidays on the budget that did not include extending unemployment benefits, which of course republicans have now refused to do.  Bill O’Reilly’s Jesus must be smiling down from heaven in pride at what Bill’s colleague on Fox,  Sean Hannity calls “the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.”

Republicans have succeeded far too long in getting away with this claim that they are a political party of God and country, of Jesus and family values.  Liberals and democrats have let them get away with this for too long and taken a defensive posture until recently.  The super-wealthy power systems that run our country have managed through a variety of sophisticated propaganda techniques over the years to get many Americans to demonize and blame the poor, and to vote against their own best interests.  One of the tricks employed has been to play on the prejudices of people, and to exploit their religious beliefs.  The republican party is the model for this type of cynical propaganda. They’ve brought their game of deception a long ways over the past three decades, from President Ronald Reagan’s portrayal of the poor as Cadillac driving, black “welfare queens” and able bodied, unwilling to work “cowboys” eating steak on food stamps, up to the present, with Bill O”Reilly claiming Christ’s endorsement of cutting off the food supply to the hungry.

The republican party has also played on the religious beliefs of their voters as well, from abortion to gay marriage.  They have solidified a large voting block of conservative Christians with images of aborted fetuses and professions of commitment to the “sanctity of life” which of course they mean the fetus, or group of cells at conception.  They have solidified this support even though the republican party’s actual support of that life at conception ends with it’s birth into babyhood and childhood.  Cut the food stamps, cut the welfare, cut the school lunches, cut the healthcare, it’s the parent’s lazy fault if the child suffers.  That child who’s “sanctity of life” they pretended to care so much about before it was born for the purpose of motivating the compassionate conservatives to vote for them because they are against abortion.

Reasonable gun control, such as universal background checks on all gun sales, which has overwhelming public support, has been successfully thwarted as well by the gun lobby and republicans.  What strikes out at me is how the republican propaganda of God and country filters into the gun control debate on social media, such as Facebook.  Despite high profile school shootings of children, what lingers around now is not outrage over how control has once again been defeated.  What lingers around now are recycled, simplistic answers to gun violence:  it’s because we took God out of the public schools!  Gun violence in schools is apparently the fault of lack of  prayer in schools, or because of leaving God out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

But, what pisses me off the most at this moment, as I sit here comfortably fed, living in a wealthy country with a surplus food supply and a population that likes to think of itself as exceptional, compassionate, moral, Christian, family value oriented, and caring of children and the sanctity of their life, is the fact that our democratically elected government is actually deciding to cut food assistance to its most needy even more than it already has.  It pisses me off that the supposedly progressive democratic party is so utterly worthless sometimes when it comes to taking up for even the most basic causes of a progressive society, such as feeding its poor and needy, and helping its unemployed during a historically bad economic time.  So do me a favor, the next time a friend or neighbor is talking politics and supporting the republicans or just bashing the democrats, remind them that people in this country are going hungry because the political party they support has decided to deliberately and literally, take the food out of the hands of hungry children, women and men.  And that they claim it’s the way Jesus wants.

 

 

 

 

Here we go sailing into the new year of 2014 with democracy in the United States of America still in critical condition, with the rich and powerful continuing their assault on the working class, and foreign governments bribing our congress to affect our foreign policy.  Nothing new in this, but let’s take a quick overview of the most pressing crises impacting us at the moment.

For starters, it doesn’t seem to matter whether a democrat or republican holds the White House when it comes to so called “free trade” agreements, nor what the president in office said about free trade before being elected.  The U.S. government’s disastrous trade policies over the past couple of decades have enjoyed support from both houses of congress and all presidents, including the current leader, President Obama.  Once upon a time candidate Obama said that he never supported NAFTA and would not support any NAFTA like agreements, and promised to re-negotiate parts of treaty.  Once in office, not only did he reverse his pledge to re-negotiate it, but he has pushed through similar trade agreements.  Now, there is a huge  free trade deal that he is trying to push through congress called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will open up free trade with more poor countries such as Vietnam.  Apparently, it is becoming too expensive for American companies to run sweatshops in China and Bangladesh, and the corporations have written this new trade deal as part of their effort to ever expand and exploit the slave labor market, as well as circumvent environmental laws.  And, the Obama Administration has tried to have this pushed through congress through a procedure known as “fast track” which in essence tries to pressure congress for an up or down vote, with no amendments allowed, on the trade agreement.  This monstrosity has been in the works for over three years, and like the past sovereignty breaking “free trade” deals, it has been written in secret by corporate lobbyists, and under-reported in the media.

“Free Trade” shouldn’t be a partisan issue either way, it should be a near unanimous agreement against in.  Instead the opposite is true.  Although there has been superficial bickering over the years between the two parties over the various trade deals, in the end, the deals pass against the will of the American people as well as against the will of the citizens of the other countries involved in the agreements.  These agreements, purely and simply, are corporations agreeing on a new set of “international” laws that allow a way around any given country’s labor and environmental laws, for the purpose of exploiting the poorest countries for cheap labor and virtually no regulation of any kind.  For years, so-called mainstream economists and the press have made the false claims that these agreements grow economies by increasing exports and business globally.  In reality, they have done nothing but ship what was once good paying manufacturing jobs overseas where labor can be purchased for pennies on the dollar.  That these false claims are continually made with very little challenge to the complete lack of evidence is testimony to the power of the big business propaganda system.  When NAFTA was being debated under President Clinton, Ross Perot warned that if it passed, we would hear a “giant sucking sound” going south, the sound of American jobs and factories closing up shop in the U.S. and relocating to Mexico.  He was labeled a “protectionist” and “isolationist” at the time by NAFTA proponents.  Two decades later, he has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt to have been absolutely correct.  His only miscalculation was that he may have underestimated the negative effects NAFTA would have on Mexico as well, such as the destruction of their traditional agriculture due to  having to compete with the flood of U.S. government subsidized, industrial agriculture.  Almost every citizen who is even remotely aware of NAFTA and other free trade agreements knows that jobs are outsourced because of this.  It is no mystery where the manufacturing jobs have gone and why.  What is less known is how it is not just trans-national corporations that have benefited from these immoral trade deals, but U.S. pharmaceutical industries as well.  They have managed to get poor countries who cannot afford the monopoly pricing of U.S. drugs to stop making generic versions for their citizens on their own, and agree to recognize the pharmaceutical companies’ “intellectual property rights.”  So their citizens must die in greater numbers so that our big pharmaceutical corporations can enrich themselves even further on the scam they already have our citizens enslaved to, and our politicians bribed to uphold.

And here at home, the republicans are adding insult to injury by continuing their war on the working class and the poor.  The emergency federal unemployment benefits that the republicans refused to renew but said they would take it back up after the Christmas break and after the democrats caved to them on the budget, well guess what?  Defeated.  So now those 1.3 million unemployed Americans that have just lost their unemployment benefit check – the really generous one, on average about $258 dollars a week – they are really shit out of luck. The number of unemployed people who are about to lose their benefits will drive this number even higher.  Also shit out of luck are their children that republicans pretend to care so much about before they are born.  But educated idiot, Senator Rand Paul apparently won over enough simple minded and/or stone cold hearts of greed and selfishness in his party on the idea that extending unemployment benefits “:would actually do a disservice to those workers.”  This of course implies that these workers have gotten spoiled living off their generous unemployment check and have become just too lazy to go and get a job.  Again, not to sound like a broken record, but experts still say there are 3 job seekers to every 1 job available.  But according to the tea-baggers, the lazy unemployed are the reason there are no jobs.  Mind blowing, but logic is not needed for a group that has been successfully brainwashed and indoctrinated to idea that the poor are lazy or drug-addicted or stupid and deserve to be poor.

The same disdain for the poor is displayed in the republicans’ contemptuous treatment of the hungry as well, even if they are employed but making poverty wages.  The spine-less Senate democrats had already agreed 4 billion dollars in cuts to the food stamp program (SNAP) over the next ten years, but the House of Clown republicans rolled over on the House Wet floor mat democrats and got that cut up to 9 billion.  But there is a laughable excuse being given the narrative of the press, even the supposedly liberal New York Times, that the 9 billion dollar cut to the already inadequate SNAP budget is still a lot less than 40 billion dollars the House Clowns had wanted.  We are to be grateful that we didn’t get screwed over and pissed on as badly as republicans wanted.  That overly generous, slightly over $4 dollars a day on average of food stamp benefits that has repeated scene cuts over the years to the point where we have more food insecurity in this country now than we did years ago, was just burning the ass of republicans and conservative assholes like Bill O’Reilly who’d rather led a kid go hungry before he’d give one penny to the father of the kid if one penny might buy booze or drugs (refer to previous Rant on Christmas).

Here’s the real kick in the ass to all this:  a clear majority of Americans favor extending unemployment benefits, and a clear majority do not think we should cut food stamps.  The democrats have the White House, and the Senate.  The tea-bag caucus in the House of Clowns, and the still allowed to fillibuster, sad sack of republican shits in the Senate (because Harry Reid still hasn’t manned up and ended that abuse entirely) have  gotten their way on almost all this, against the majority of the voters and against the majority in government.  That is dysfunctional democracy at its finest.

On foreign policy, it was seeming like there were some breaks of light through all the dark clouds, with U.S. bombing of Syria seemingly dropped from the plans for now, and with the historical talks and temporary agreement with the Iranians, led by the Obama Administration and Secretary of State John Kerry.  But, just as we now enter what is anticipated to be an even more challenging and dicey six months of intense negotiations with Iran regarding their nuclear program, members of congress – democrats and republicans – are attempting to sabotage the entire progress and process.  There is a push in the Senate to add more sanctions onto Iran now, which would kill the temporary deal negotiated with not just the U.S. but our Western allied countries as well.  According to the opposition in congress over the Iranian negotiations so far, Iran is the Big Bad Wolf that can’t be trusted and is menacing Israel with nuclear weapons to wipe them off the face of the earth.  Therefore, more economic warfare against its innocent citizens, which is what the sanctions amount to, should be increased, not negotiated away.  Of course, this is just regurgitated rhetoric from the neo-cons like Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu, but apparently Israel’s war-mongering hawks donate a lot of money to Washington politicians, and AIPAC and other high powered Israeli lobbyists have been working overtime to bend U.S. foreign policy towards doing their bidding, fighting their wars, and supporting their oppressive and murderous policies towards the Palestinians.    We already have a system of legalized bribery know as campaign finance laws – or we should say lack of laws, thanks to the Supreme Court.  It adds insult to injury that not only are our politicians bought out by the big banks and financial industry, the big oil industry, the big pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, and the trans-national corporations, but we also know for a fact that the foreign government of Israel has high powered Washington lobbyist donating lots of money to our political system, for the benefit of their foreign policy, not ours.  Often times mention of this gets a person quickly labeled as “anti-semetic” which is just a strong arm tactic designed to quell debate and dissension from what the Israeli warmongers want, and all to often, they succeed.  This current sabotage of the Iranian negotiations is unfortunately another one of the few bi-partisan agreements which our congress can conspire in unison on.

Our democracy is broken, and we will continue to see disappointment as the popular will of the American people is undermined by the true rulers of our country, the concentrated and heartless wealth of the super rich and their narrow interests.

Let’s not go down without a fight and a voice.

This music video seems fitting for all the greedy and their brainwashed, tea-bagging masses:

http://youtu.be/8gZEox8Crwc