Earth To The Village
It is amazing how difficult it is to get through to the people who go to Washington. They insulate themselves from the world as soon as they enter the Twilight Zone of the “Very Serious People”. Actually this is a function of their staffs who are on loan from lobbyists.
Following the lead from the VSPs, the media only covers or discusses the list of approved topics, like the deficit and taxes. Where is the discussion of the lack of jobs in this country?
Duncan Black noted it in his post, Out Of Touch, but he has been hammering the point about jobs for months.
CBS conducted a poll on Veterans Day, and it shows the same thing that Duncan and other members of the reality-based community have been saying all along.
The most important issues for Americans are the economy and/or jobs 56% and health care 14%. Only 4% think the deficit is important, and 2% are concerned with taxes. With a margin of error of plus or minus 3%, the main topics in DC aren’t important enough to be any list until something is done about jobs.
Why did we have the money to create a commission on the deficit, which only concerns 4% of the country, and there is no one doing any serious work on jobs?
8 comments
I think we know why.
Our boy Obama, who is in the pockets of those lobbyists, knows that when jobs return (without any specific jobs program, which his bosses are violently against), they will be paid at the level of workers in India and China.
Although they may be making higher salaries than we at that time.
And, thus, why make any efforts at all?
Other than propaganda noises, of course.
After all, he’s already signaled that he’s more than satisfied to be a one-term President. And he did pass the Romney Health Care bill for them, didn’t he?
Love ya,
S
Suzan, I’m not part of the “Our”. I have never cast a vote for Obama because I don’t vote for Republicans, no matter what they call themselves.
He and his crew are going to push us into a deflationary spiral, just as has happened to Ireland, even though there is no need to do it. Following the low tax / no regulation path of the Republicans is how we got into this mess, so it damn sure isn’t going to get us out.
If his people could read they would understand that the deficit belongs to Reagan, and the two Bushes, and avoid their policies like the plague they were.
A massive U.S. budget deficit is what got us out of the Great Depression (granted, a deficit that was used to hire people to build stuff that would then be promptly blown up or to hire people to ship said stuff all around the world to be blown up, but still, a deficit), so those who live in alternate universes of “Very Serious People” where this isn’t true are still baffling to me. They’re like the people who talk about business creating jobs, when business doesn’t create jobs — demand does. And with the Silly Cone Valley Murky News noting that even the rich have cut back their buying (saving their money in below-0% Treasuries because they’re busy rubbing their hands in glee on how much of the remaining assets of the nation they can swoop up and buy once deflation results in a 100% default rate on mortgages, car loans, and every other debt), clearly demand is not going to come from the private world — we’re all too worried about our jobs to spend, in “Paradox of Thrift” land big-time.
Oh wait, here I go with that reality stuff again… must mean I’m not a Very Serious Person. Well… err… yes. I’m a penguin, duh!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Condo Vultures LLC in Miami makes no effort to conceal what they do. That’s the name of firm that specializes in “picking the bones of the South Florida real estate market” as many people have noted.
It’s all about stealing any and all assets that the “lower classes” own, to turn them into share croppers, which is much better than slavery, because you don’t have your money tied up in the worthless lives of the workers.
Yeppers, it’s all about the new ownership society… where the lords and duchesses own everything, and the rest of us live on whatever crumbs they throw our way in exchange for being their sharecroppers and servants.
This, BTW, is more how medieval serfdom worked than anything. The serfs weren’t “really” the property of their lords. But it didn’t matter, because all the land was owned by the lords, and the only way to grow food for survival was to sharecrop the lords’ lands. When the former Confederates re-invented this system for the American South after the American Civil War (a system that lasted until WW2 destroyed it), they were simply re-implementing a strategy that the thugs who were European “royalty” had invented centuries before — just seize all the assets at gunpoint from “bankrupt” peasants, and voila, instant serfs.
– Badtux the Serfing USA Penguin
In Russia the serfs were part of the real estate until they were “emancipated” by imperial decree and were free to starve. That’s why they didn’t care much when the rulers started calling themselves Communists instead of royalty.
It is in the interest of the wealthy to have the economy fail so they can pick over the bones.
I seem to recall, however, that serfs being part of the real estate was a relatively late thing in Russian history, maybe 17th century, and a response to the serfs skipping out on their lords and heading off in search of others not so onerous, which was possible because *other* serfs simply headed out for the eastern frontier when things got tough for them and resulted in a widespread labor shortage. The royalty in general agreed that this was bad form, and put a stop to it both by tying the serfs to the estates and by expanding the borders eastward in pursuit of their fleeing serfs. Interesting that Siberia became part of Imperial Russia in part because the Russian peasantry was so intrepid in fleeing their masters :).
Note that I’m not a Russia scholar nor claim to be, just recalling some things I read while investigating why Russia was the first country in the world to ever have a Communist revolution and why it turned out to be such an abysmal failure at achieving the fundamental goals set out by Marx and Lenin… and yes, the “freeing” of the serfs in the late 19th century to replace it with a sharecropping-type system (similar to what happened in the American South at that exact same time) certainly had a lot to do with it, since it freed the serfs’ masters from the necessity of caring for their chattel and resulted in horrific conditions for many of the serfs, who were willing to embrace anybody or anything that offered relief…
– Badtux the History Penguin
The basic system is much older than that, but it is just a slight variation on the European feudal peasant system. Instead of share-cropping the serfs provided labor in the estate’s fields and received a portion of the common serf land to grow their own crops. The common land was very similar in organization to the Soviet collective farm, which is why there was no great peasant revolt in Russia. The village elder was know called commissar and nothing much changed. It was in the Ukraine and Belarus which didn’t have the serf system that all of the problems developed for the Soviets. They actually had family farms in that area of the Empire.
The big change under the Romanovs, the 17th century and later, was the shift in power to the land owner from the original agreements with the founding boyars. The serfs had guaranteed rights, and the landowners had obligations to the serfs, under the original system, but the Romanovs kept shifting power the landowners. The most important right was the St. George’s Day buy out. If a serf cleared all of their debts, and paid a set price to the landowner on St. George’s Day, the serf advanced in society and was freed from the estate. Inflation made the price of the buy out rather cheap as time went on, and the serfs were free to make as much as they wanted on their own time. All they owed was their labor.
In the end, the St George’s Day buy out was eliminated, and unrest grew, that eventually led to the emancipation as a hope that it would put a damper on 19th century unrest. But that too, was tilted heavily in favor of the landowners, so it did not help prevent the problems from growing, with the bonus of beggering the landowners as they couldn’t get the workers needed to work their fields. It apparently didn’t occur to anyone that by reducing the amount of land available for the former serfs, you reduce the number of former serfs who could remain in the area to work.
The Romanov line wasn’t known for its intellectual capacity. In fairness, their “agricultural reform” wasn’t quite as bad as Khrushchev’s, but it was a close thing.