Originally Posted by jones
I don't think people fully grasp the seriousness of the situation our country is in right now. We don't have the luxury of voting a partisan ticket because of one or two issues that we've held dearly for a long time. We have to stop being simple minded partisan hate mongers. Lets focus on foreign policy issues and corporate welfare programs that are allowing a situation for corporate America to dismantle environmental protections, workplace health and safety, labor wages to provide a comfortable standard of living, health care, pension plans, these things that have taken decades to accumulate. These things are all experiencing attrition while at the same time the cost for a college education has experienced astronomical inflation over the past few years making it harder for a middle or lower class person to make a move upward. Home prices are outrageous, especially if a family wants to try and move their children out of the slums into a decent middle class neighborhood. Oil prices are obvious, and something that most of us can still tolerate, but how about the senior citizen who just had the pension that they worked their entire life for yanked from under their feet, were put on the bare minimum health care plan that Medicare can provide, and now face a bill to simply heat their home that’s double what it was last year.
We watched what happened at Enron, where peoples livelihoods disintegrated overnight, we've watched what happened at the major airlines where people took drastic cuts in security, wages, health care, and pensions. Just look at the steel industry. Oh wait you can't, because it doesn't exist anymore. It was recently attacked by corporate vultures and dismantled to the point where it virtually doesn't exist in this country, where it was once a thriving industry here. Delphi Corporation is currently in bankruptcy proceedings, the largest corporate bankruptcy in the history of our country. As soon as they filed, smaller auto parts makers were lined up with their filings. Some were simply closing their doors because they couldn’t meet the demands that Delphi and the big 3 auto companies were placing on them. How about the workers at Detroit Diesel who were recently told that after working 30 plus years they will have to pay upwards of fifty percent of their pension just to keep health care after retirement.
These are things that most of us are guilty of looking at and saying, "man, that sucks, hope it doesn't happen to me," or we are naive enough to believe that we are somehow immune to the effects of these economical situations. People tend to not wake up until they are actually hurting. These are not isolated circumstances, they are not simply signs of a new way of business. They are the direct result of a great country that is being poorly managed by lax selfishness and greed straight from the top. The business world has changed and we need to change with it. But putting the focus on simply lowering our standard of living across the country to be more competitive with the rest of the world is simply not the proper, ethical, angle to take, although it may be the easiest when no one at the top wants to take responsibility. How is it that we have a president who was the first in history to go an entire term without vetoing a single thing that crossed his desk. You mean to tell me that of the thousands upon thousands of pages that his conservative buddies placed on his desk, he never found one thing where he thought "nah, this isn't a good idea"? Come on, think about that for a minute.
How dare anyone hint that the current administration is allowing corporate America to reap the benefits and profits off of the backs of the poor struggling working class. Because it's not really true, they are reaping the benefits off of the back of the entire American economy, and they've got too many people blinded by non-issues, and fear tactics to realize that it's even happening. But how dare Hillary say the word "plantation".
What you are complaining about it capitalism for the most part. What you apparently want is socialism. This has been tried in many countries. It doesn't work. It has failed time and time again. Countries that have a system in place with a mixture of both also have a much higher unemployment rate than our own country. Greater Europe has an unemployment rate in the double digits.
You complain Bush hasn't vetoed a bill yet.....Which one should he have vetoed....I am curious.
I agree there is coruption in congress, but that is the case in EVERY government around the world. Why should we be any different?
