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While I was out and about trying to deal with the US ‘health care system’ without murdering anyone [it wouldn’t, of course, be murder if I remember to shoot them, because this is Florida :evil:] and then installing a new gas stove, other people were paying attention to the world.
Lambert at Corrente noticed that in addition to cutting Social Security benefits, Zero’s new budget also creates automatic IRAs for people who aren’t currently enrolled in one of the existing con games that Congress set up. Apparently, if you don’t check the appropriate box and/or submit the proper form, the government is going to start deducing money from your pay check and giving it to a manager to ‘invest’ for you. While past performance doesn’t predict future returns, given that the professional financial sector managed to smash the global economy about four years ago, why would any sane person trust them? They will earn management fees from these accounts whether the accounts grow or decline, so why would they care?
Now I have Nancy Pelosi joining Debbie Wasserman Schultz trying to convince me that the Republicans are a threat. Ladies, the biggest threat I face is the current President. If you want to be taken seriously, you had better start publicly complaining about what the White House is doing. If you want to take back the House in 2014, you had better part company with the ideas contained in the Obama Budget.
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Ever notice that these “haircuts” are always on us little people? It isn’t the rich who are being threatened with having 10% of their retirement income seized by the government. It’s us little people who are told we’re only going to get 90% back of what we put in because of a “Social Security haircut”. It isn’t the rich who are being threatened with having 10% of their stocks and bonds seized by the government. It’s us little people who are threatened with having 10% of our bank balances seized because of a “bankrupt banking system haircut”.
Nancy Pelosi is filthy fscking rich. She likes the notion of giving us 99%’ers a haircut just fine and expecting her to object to the Obama “haircut” ideas is like expecting a crack whore in the ghetto to object to getting free crack rocks. Just don’t propose giving the 1% a haircut too by seizing the same percentage of their stocks, bonds, and numbered bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. They’d scream bloody murder. Because haircuts are for the little people, not for them, the masters of the universe.
– Badtux the “It’s class war, and we’re the targets” Penguin
It is past time to make the Estate Tax meaningful again. Capital and corporations don’t die so they have plenty of time to make up any losses, it is people who run out of time and resources. Those of us on the leading edge of the Boomers saw our retirements go bust in the housing bubble. The 401Ks became worthless and the equity in our houses evaporated. Too many of my contemporaries are down to Social Security and nothing else. They did everything they were told to do, but it didn’t matter because it was all a con game.
If they want to help out the 99%, bring back something like the Series E savings bonds and the payroll savings plan. You wouldn’t get instant wealth, but what you got was certainty that the money would be there because Wall Street didn’t get a cut.
Why would they want to help out the 99%? They have theirs, after all, so why think about the plight of the “littles”? Noblesse oblige went out with FDR’s generation. Just sayin’.
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin
I’m at the point of believing that the only way of getting their attention is by starting to erect guillotines in public squares staffed by older women knitting… 👿
Unfortunately I think it will come to that. But not for a while yet. Our rulers are excellent at deflecting public anger upon other people. That said, no amount of deflection will work once mass starvation starts taking place. The first food riots will be the marker that says, “our elites are about to get their necks stretched.” We aren’t there yet. But if it keeps going the way things are going, we will be.
And one more thing. Our elites pretty much covered up the food riots that occurred prior to the election of FDR. They controlled the newspapers and the radio stations, after all. But this is the Internet age. I don’t think it can be covered up today like it was back then…
I did a major research paper on The Grapes of Wrath in college, and it wasn’t just the food riots. For years many people weren’t aware of the breadth of the Great Depression because it was being reported as a local story in most newspapers. That was the reason for many of the major population movements during the era – people assumed that there were jobs in other areas. Steinbeck got a reputation as a Communist sympathizer because he kept reporting on what he saw. The only place you will see that reporting is in every other chapter of the novel because it was refused by the newspapers he primarily wrote for. People who survived the era noted that Steinbeck actually softened the reality of the situation in his reporting, probably because he knew no one would publish the truth.
When starvation appears on almost all death certificates as ‘Natural Causes’ people tend to get suspicious of government and the media.
I agree that things are falling into place to have a repeat of the ‘French Revolution’, and Americans don’t need to storm a ‘Bastille’ to get weapons.
The thing that worries me is that these violent revolution things never work out well. Never. The old bastards get thrown under the bus, and replaced by new ones who are even worse much of the time. Was Cambodia really better off under Pol Pot than under Lon Nol? Was Russia really better off under Stalin than under Tsar Nicholas? And of course the result in France was eventual demographic collapse as a quarter of the military age men in France ended up dead from Napoleon’s campaigns…
The founders of this nation built a better way of conducting revolutions, one they envisioned happening every four years. The problem is that with all the voter suppression activities and ballot access restrictions, this has really ceased to work, giving people a choice of Republican R or Republican Lite O. Our elites are sowing the seeds of their own demise with this nonsense, but seem to be oblivious. Perhaps your grannies doing needlework beside guillotines would wake them up. More likely, they’d just call the cops to suppress an illegal demonstration and smugly assume it has nothing to do with them…
Violent revolutions create chaos followed by dictatorships, but the pressure is building and no outlet is being provided to drain it off.
People know they are being ripped off and the anger is building. Just today Howard Dean published a tweet suggesting that he would leave the Democratic Party over the Obama budget proposal. It is starting, and no one in the Village sees it.
Screwing with the elections was a big mistake in Florida. People had a lot of time to build anger waiting in line to vote. There were some changes made, but people are still PO’ed about it.