Death of the Middle Class

I feel like-wise.

Daily Kos: The Words I Never Thought I'd Write Here (UPDATED):

"What I do know is that it has all added up. Not prosecuting torture. Not protecting privacy rights. Trading away any negotiating room on health care by refusing to acknowledge single-payer. Less-than-fierce advocacy for LGBT rights. Demonizing the left. Drill baby drill.

All of those things tarnished the dream. Those things, and many others.

But there were two things that finally did it in for me. Two small things, really, compared to the big picture and compared to some of the core issues listed above.

One, understandably, was education. Understandably, because I am a teacher. My horror at the Obama education policy has only been growing stronger since the beginning of this adminstration. Recent articles and comments have pushed me to the tipping point on that issue.

But the final straw, the one that broke the camel's back, was his response to the Simpson outrage, in combination with his own remarks in the weekly address. What I realized in reading about this issue and about Obama's history is that in the guise of 'saving Social Security,' protecting us against it being dismantled, he is going to allow a reduction in SS benefits, in service to the ideal of 'cutting the deficit.' Maybe I'm reading the signs wrong, but I doubt it."

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Nothing 'free' about the 'free market'.

I doubt theirs a Neo to save us, though.

Free market has turned us into 'Matrix' drones - Business News, Business - The Independent:

"A leading economist has likened the nation's acceptance of free-market capitalism to that of the brainwashed characters in the film The Matrix, unwitting pawns in a fake reality. In a controversial new book, the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang debunks received wisdom on everything from the importance of the internet to the idea that people in the United States enjoy the highest standard of living in the world; an iconoclastic attitude that has won him fans such as Bob Geldof and Noam Chomsky."

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We don't do 'accountable' and it will be our down-fall.

'Inside Job' A Must See Film for Every American:

"The Economy Won’t Recover Until We Prosecute

So there was a little fraud, no big deal, right? Wouldn’t looking backwards at fraudulent conduct be distracting for the people, the government, and the economy? Shouldn’t we look forward so we can recover? No. Specifically, the Wharton School of Business has written an essay stating that restoring trust is the key to recovery, and that trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable. The Wharton paper states:

The public will need to 'hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again.' In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again. For more on the importance of trust in the economy, see this. The stakes are high. As Pam Martens, who worked on Wall Street for 21 years, writes:"

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What Tiabbi says... pretty much always.

Wall Street's Big Win | Rolling Stone Politics:

"But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America's financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn't have the stones to wipe out our country's one �dependably thriving profit center: theft."

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Arianna Huffington: Memo to America's Middle Class: Obama Is Just Not That Into You:

"Those in the 'disappointed' camp maintain that Obama presented himself one way to gain their support during the campaign and then, once he had it, ended up governing another way, turning his energies to winning over Republicans instead of changing the game in Washington. As Paul Krugman puts it, 'Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?'"

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Capitalism, not 'job-ism'.

Wash Post business writer hits on the biggest problem in American economy:

"It is only in the world of Chamber of Commerce propaganda that businesses exist to create jobs. In the real world, businesses exist to create profits for shareholders, not jobs for workers. That's why they call it capitalism, not job-ism. There's no reason to beat up on business owners and executives simply because they're doing what the system encourages them to do."

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Death of the Middle Class:

And then he kicked the chair out from underneath his feet.:

"For all the faceless statistics we read every day - I wanted to add a face. A man who loved his sons. A man who got up and went to work everyday. A man society kicked to the curb. And, in turn, a man who felt his best option was to kick the chair out from underneath his feet."

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