It doesn’t take much for a thinking person to follow the news and become angry and feeling hopeless, but yesterday’s world wide, fast food worker strike and a couple of other things have left me feeling some of what Brand Obama promised but disappointed us with:  Hope.

As a few good policy makers continue to push for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, and as a majority of Americans support it, and as it continues to fail to pass because of republican obstructionism, the new labor movement developing among fast food workers and retail workers is a refreshing and welcome development in our corrupted democracy.   I have bemoaned over and over how our publicly elected officials refuse to side with the majority of citizens one many key issues, like Social Security, healthcare, minimum wage, unemployment benefits, food assistance to the poor, net neutrality, the subsidizing of Big Oil companies who are posting their largest profits ever, the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly protections, campaign finance, the size of the military budget. . . the list goes on.  There are many, many issues like these that a clear majority of Americans agree upon, yet the opposite is carried out by our voted-for lawmakers and leaders.  But you’ve heard that rant before.  Now, it appears that this sentiment and resentment has grown enough to propel a true democratic push in our country for a livable wage and a more egalitarian society.

Fast food workers walking off the job in protest of poverty wages and demands for 15 dollars an hour began as a movement in New York City about eighteen months ago, has grown in size, scope, and support.  Similar walk of the jobs in protests have also been carried out by retail workers recently during the holiday season.  Yesterday, the labor movement of fast food workers striking – with no protection of not being fired by their slave-master corporations – went global.  Organization of the mass protests were aided by different labor groups, such as Service Employees International Union and others.  The organizers say that the strikes were carried out in 150 American cities, and in 80 cities in other countries.

These protests remind me of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Together, these growing movements show that enough of the general population is catching on the fact that the wealth they help to create by working for the corporations has not “trickled” down into their pockets, and that simply voting for democrats over republicans is not going to change the balance of power enough.  A population that has grown weary and cynical of what their senators and representatives promise about jobs and the American dream, has begun to move from apathy to action.  These public displays of protests of wage unfairness and poor working conditions in a stagnant, increasingly service based economy offer hope that after years of declining wages and dwindling benefits and job insecurity, the workers and creators of the wealth want a more fair share of the pie.

A 2013 University of Berkley study found that a stunning 52 percent of families with fast food workers are on some form of public assistance.  The study can be found with this link  http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/publiccosts/fastfoodpovertywages.shtml

and it’s findings may surprise you as to how badly honest, working Americans are being abused by the so-called “job creators.”  As I have pointed out before, that a wealthy, gigantic corporation like McDonald’s or Walmart that pays it’s employees so little that many of them end up still in poverty and in need of food stamps or healthcare, speaks volumes about the concentration of power that has occurred among the uber wealthy.  Billion dollar corporations are in practice having their profits subsidized by tax payers in the form of some type of government assistance.  At the same time, numerous American corporations such as General Electric, don’t pay any federal taxes.  And at the same time, the wealthy tyrants at the top have successfully waged a propaganda campaign in this country that has created an outright hostility and suspicion towards the poor.  How many times have you heard an average, working American ask the question “why should I have to work hard all week to give some of my money to someone who doesn’t wanna work?”  The way to start answering that question is to point out that many of these people in need of government assistance are working, for giant, profitable corporations that thank you very much for your subsidy to their slave labor.

Another good way combat the sneaky and misleading ways that the argument against raising the minimum wage is carried out by business and right wing media outlet propagandists, is to email or post on Facebook or other social media, this link, which shows you the demographics of low paid workers, and who and how many would be effected by raising the minimum wage.  One common trick that has been employed is to mislead the public into thinking that an overwhelming majority of minimum wage workers are simply teenagers earning extra spending money.  They do this by citing various numbers about minimum wage workers, but they do this without telling you the fast food industry has a median pay of $8.69 an hour, a paltry amount above the minimum wage, technically.  But technically, it’s still a poverty wage and the total number of low wage workers that would experience an increase by simply raising the minimum wage to the proposed $10.10 an hour.  This amount is still too low, in my opinion, especially taking into account the lack of benefits at most of these low paying jobs.  Here is the link for you to copy, past and then spread to your friends and neighbors:  http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percent-workers-benefit/#.U2U45NHfyKo.facebook

I would personally like to see a world wide boycott on an agreed upon day of all fast food chains, and Walmart.  Boycotts have a history of not working, but it would be a powerful message, and the only one the bean counter CEO’s understand – loss of money – if everyone chose on the same day to absolutely not give money or business to any of these greedy companies.  This may be a pipe dream, but the courage of these workers, the impressive organization and it’s global reach, and the spotlight it is shining on unfair labor practices have made. . . hopeful, dare I say.

Other good news:  Senate majority leader Harry Reid and a few other Democrats are proposing a constitutional ammendment that would give congress the power to regulate campaign finance, the form of legalized bribery that our divided Supreme Court as recently ruled as “free speech.”  Given the floodgates that the Supreme Court’s undoing of decades of congressional oversight (weak as it is) over big money donations to campaigns has unleashed, this constitutional amendment is necessary, and needed immediately.  I can’t imagine the majority of Americans would object to this, but I can imagine that enough corrupted politicians will make sure and kill any chance of it – their corporate puppet masters will demand it. But the fact that it is being proposed in real legislation, is a positive sign that even weak kneed democrats are realizing the dire straights our democracy is headed towards with billionaires now allowed to donate unlimited amounts of “free speech” to politicians to serve their needs.

And another hopeful sign occurred last night on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” when Ed Schultz interviewed a young college millenial, a democrat and campaign organizer, who, wearing a shirt that proudly displayed her political party, pushed back on Mr. Shultz’s framing of a question that conveyed the extremely annoying notion that Hillary Clinton will be the democratic nominee, pointing to Elizabeth Warren as another woman worth a serious look out, and that milleanial’s are already growing tired and catching on to politics as usual.  Obama had more charisma than Hillary did, and this certainly helped him pull out that upset in the primaries then, and Elizabeth Warren has more charisma and something even more valuable: a backbone.

Maybe there is hope that enough Americans are waking up to the obvious injustices and doing something about it.

 

 

 

Aside from issues like refusal to raise the minimum wage to a livable wage, or failure of almost half of the states to accept the federal government’s free expansion of Medicaid to give millions of more poor people health care, or President Obama’s behind the scenes, secretive effort to impose another “free trade” agreement on our country and others in the Pacific, aside from all this. .  . what really burns my ass and sickens me right now is the sense of hopelessness I feel when the seemingly inevitable match-up between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush for the presidential election of 2016 is brought up.

It’s bad enough that even before the mid-term elections, there is so much early speculation of who will run for president in 2016.  Part of what is driving this, besides a pathetic, mainstream media infra-structure engaged in continual propaganda, is what could be termed America’s infatuation with celebrity and dynasty.  If Hillary Clinton, wife and first lady of former popular President Bill Clinton, were not preparing for a likely run; and if Jeb Bush,  former governor of Florida and more importantly, brother to George W. Bush, America’s former most un-popular president in modern times, and son to the first President Geogre H.W. Bush. .  . perhaps there would not be as much interest in the 2016 contest.  Americans may not really care all that much about 2016 yet, but if it involves all the superficial trappings of a bad reality tv show, then by all means, let CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and all the rest beat the horse into the ground.  And in the process, beat it into our heads that our political oligarchy has already settled on a handful of puppets to serve them in the future.

Polls indicate that American voters continue to feel more cynical and apathetic than ever.  “Hope and Change” worked good for one group since President Obama took the helm at the start of the Great Recession:  the Wall Street financial industry.  They are doing fantastic.  Their architects of the economic melt down were appointed high level positions in the Obama Administration, or received huge bonuses after the bail outs.  Their stocks are soaring.  The financial regulation that was threatened was watered down to a level tolerable to them, and the too big to fails are even bigger now.   And they have no need to fear any politician reigning them in too much, so long as one of their two puppets, Hillary or Jeb, gets the next presidency.  But Americans DO have a choice to not accept this, they just have to be willing to look a little harder and a little more closely at alternative choices, and reject the media’s narrative and guidance towards more of the status quo.

I talk with many people on a regular business who feel passionate about the state of our society, our laws, our economy, our politics, but who feel utterly hopeless or cynical that any solution is possible politically.  There is good reason for this, as what our government does is not reflective of what the majority of our country wants, no matter how we vote.  Polls show most Americans think that our political system serves a very small group of wealthy, special interests, and they are absolutely right.  But what we must not forget is that the corporate interests that have currently hijacked our democracy, still do so with our votes, for the most part (although the Supreme Court has been known to install a president who did not win the popular vote or the Florida recount).

We know how they do this.  The mega corporations, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, banks, weapons of war manufacturers, insurance companies, tele-communications companies, and their incestuous lot of billionaires holding multiple positions of power within these industries, throw hundreds of millions of dollars towards the candidates’ campaigns and then their lobbyists to shape government policy to enrich  themselves even further.   All this money is spent to buy our votes.

Let’s stop giving it to them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’ve experienced the frustration before of supporting a third party candidate for president, from Ross Perot to Ralph Nader.  I’ve now twice experienced the letdown of having voted for a winning mainstream candidate – Barack Obama – and watching him not come close to living up to his rhetoric.  I voted for Obama because it seemed to me at the time that the American people were never going to support anyone other than either the republican nominee or the democratic nominee.  Despite American’s cynicism towards the corrupt two party system, American voters seem paralyzed to vote for a third choice.  Having been made so afraid of the other side winning, most voters have become conditioned that voting for anyone other than the two parties is wasting their vote.  I was blamed by many democrat voters for getting George W. Dipshit elected over Al Gore by voting for Nader.  The undemocratic electoral college that allowed the popular vote candidate to lose, the Supreme Court who stopped the Florida recount that Gore was later shown by independent analysis to have won, were not blamed.  Voting for someone like Nader, outside of the two corrupt parties, was to blame, according to the mainstream media propagandists, and accepted by the majority of voters.

It would now seem that after the disappointment of Obama’s performance vs. the expectations, and the already shaping up contest between the  two old political dynasties of Clinton and Bush, and with the Supreme Court now affirming that cash is equal to free speech, that now is the time for voters to say enough is enough, and soundly reject anymore business appointed puppets like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.  I’m not saying we have to have a third party candidate to win the presidency, but we do have to have the courage and good sense to elect someone who is not completely bought out by the big money interests that rule our country.  This will mean seeing through the propaganda and cosmetic political talk, and not accepting that if Hillary wants the nominee, it’s “her turn.”  It’s been the super rich’s turn for a long time, that’s why we have the least egalitarian society since before the Great Depression.

There are good democrats in the wing that I think would make a fantastic president, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren.  But it is unlikely she or anyone else will challenge Hillary if she choses to run, as the big money is already behind her and it would be an uphill battle.  It is understood that the candidate with the most money usually wins, and Elizabeth Warren threatens the financial industry’s monopoly over our economic policy.  Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is considering a run and would make an excellent choice, but cosmetically the media will tell people how he is not electable, he isn’t cookie sheet cutout enough looking.  Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio would be a good choice, but cosmetically speaking, he sounds as if he’s gargling glass when he speaks, so he will deemed un-electable too by the media.  The media, and the massively deceptive marketers of the campaigns will instead shape meaningless images for us to vote on, based on phony personality and dynasty infatuation.

Please, America, let’s vote issues and the people behind them, and not live out a self-fulfilling prophecy of electing an appointed oligarch like the war mongering, power hungry, corporate queen Hillary Clinton, or the chosen heir of Big Oil and war, Jeb Bush.  I can’t take it anymore.