After a brief email exchange with a fellow author I thought I would interrupt my regularly scheduled Sunday post to bring in some political realities.
Reality 1: The Republican Tax Reform Bill was nothing but fraud
It’s true. I say this as a Republican. The pin has been pulled on the grenade and it should detonate some time during or shortly after the mid-term elections. If you listen you are starting to hear investment analysts backing away. The general financial consensus is the tax cuts gave the stock market a Krispy Kreme sugar high with stock buy backs and a token few highly publicized fake wage increases. (Read about the Walmart wage increase paid for by closing Sam’s Club stores. Everybody touted the wage increase, few reported the store closings.)
They could have gotten away with this massive tax cut for the wealthy and that multi-million dollar bribe that keeps on bribing with your tax dollars to get the deal through if and only if they would have eliminated every non-profit charitable tax code the PACs and SuperPACs hide under. Most people would have eaten the bull shit to get rid of ever organization people can contribute to which buys ads for, funds or otherwise supports a political candidate.
Unemployment may be at all time lows and the stock market at all time highs, but the stock market is going to crash much sooner than later. This Heroin hit the tax cuts gave it is about to run out and reality is going to be a hard crash. The unemployment number seems to be pure fiction as wage growth is basically non-existent and visa workers are replacing all of the U.S. Citizens at high paying jobs leaving stocking shelves at Walmart just about the only job a U.S. Citizen with an IT degree can get. Yes, there are lots of unfilled IT jobs and they are at companies looking to pay 1/3 or less of market rate all hoping someone imports a terrorist for them to employ.
Reality 2: If the Dems run Hillary it ensures another Trump victory by an Electoral College landslide
It’s true. There is a huge swath of the country which really doesn’t give a shit about the Russians buying ads on Facebook, Google, wherever in an attempt to influence the election. America’s done it in many countries for many years. Both political parties have run fake news ads since fake news ads could be run making wildly false claims about their opponents. Hell, Bruce Rauner ran one in Illinois I thought the FBI should have put him in prison for. It was blatant wire fraud. Not one analyst could find even a shred of truth in it. If you want to put Russians in prison for doing what we do and pulling your shorts down during P.E. in front of all the girls, start by putting our own politicians in prison for it. You can start in Illinois. We have a long history of putting Governors in prison. One more won’t matter to us.
This same huge swath of the country does care a whole bunch about that bribe the Clintons took to clear the way for the Uranium One deal, selling Uranium to Russia. Kind of the critical component for an enriched uranium nuclear weapon. We care even more about any money which found its way out of the Clinton charity by hook or by crook to aid in any way her election campaign.
Buying advertisements is quite simply the free market. A bribe to get uranium which then helps fund an election campaign is a completely different ballgame and Muller should be investigating that.
Make no mistake. This big group of people who think Muller isn’t doing his job because Bill and Hillary haven’t been brought in for interrogation will most likely turn out during the midterms. Media outlets aren’t reporting on these people because they don’t fit the agendas media outlets are attempting to push. Journalism be damned! Advertising dollars speak louder than the truth and Facebook got most of those. It doesn’t take much to see that agenda being pushed.
Reality 3: Bernie can’t be talked into running as a Dem again
It’s true. After the massive corruption during the Democratic primary which should have had many people high up in that party imprisoned for at least a decade, nobody would back Bernie if he tried that again. There is no peace which can be made with such a well greased weasel. All of those emails I get from Bernie asking for money would find their way to the junk folder as they would for the majority of the people on that list.
Here’s the twist which would be both hilarious and successful. (How often do you get both?) Bernie should run as a Republican in the 2020 primary. He would steal back all of those disenfranchised blue collar workers who had no choice but to vote for Trump because Hillary had been part of the group screwing them for may years.
Most of you don’t remember this, but the Republicans used to be the Progressive party. Perhaps some of you read my post on Nixon? In truth the bulk of the party still is. It is only a few rich bitter old white men at the top mandating the party be pro-life and hate mongering. The bulk of the under 40 crowd I meet are actually pro-choice. Yes, they see people paying with food stamps at Aldi and climbing into a shiny new high end vehicle in the parking lot, but, they also see guys like Mitt Romney getting rich off-shoring American jobs and they would like the bigger criminal prosecuted first.
Bernie running as a Republican Presidential candidate would be rather phenom. The Democrats shouldn’t even bother running a candidate against him. We are a nation at a time of great cultural change where once fringe ideas move main stream. It happened during the 60s and it is happening again now.
Reality 4: It doesn’t matter if Trump and Big Oil slash cafe standards people now have proof 60 MPG cars exist
We’re not even impressed with 30 MPG cars anymore because 50 MPG is common. I’m old enough to remember when 30 MPG was considered physically impossible and a lunatic fringe idea. How many of you thinking about a brand new vehicle even bother looking at a vehicle which doesn’t get at least 40 MPG? There are now SUVs which get over 30 MPG. Jeep is even working on a plug-in hybrid. We love our Jeeps, but the mileage sucks which is why you see so many other SUVs on the road. When gas hits $4/gallon at the pump again, dealers won’t be able to give away low MPG SUVs. We’ve seen this happen before.
Reality 5: If the Democratic party would turn pro-gun Republicans would never win another election
It’s true. The bulk of young Republicans are pro-choice and pro-gun. Oddly enough a huge chunk of the Democratic party is also pro-gun. From time to time I manage to catch an episode of “Chicago Tonight” on PBS. I always have to chuckle when I hear prominent Democrats on that show say things like “There are more guns in Naperville, IL that Chicago and they don’t have a shooting problem.”
The Chicago problem stems from a good idea gone bad soooo many years ago. I’m old enough to remember when we had the housing projects. Cabrini Green, the Robert Taylor Homes, etc. The problems were basically isolated in the housing projects and reporters didn’t much cover what happened there. Make no mistake. The housing projects allowed a few animals in and when kept in close quarters with decent people, these animals created more animals. It was a horrific thing.
Community activists hated the buildings and the concept so they lashed out at the symbols and the out-of-sight-out-of-mind policies of every Chicago administration since their creation. They didn’t focus on the real problems of providing jobs and weeding the animals out. Good luck finding a single family home with attached garage anywhere near the Loop.
It’s all high rises. People living in them who make enough money to actually live there don’t generally cause problems other than the occasional fist fight over a parking spot. There wouldn’t have been problems with the general plan if the buildings had been built in a location surrounded by factories and the factories had been incentivised to hire predominantly from the projects. Maybe this was the case when they were first built and some Mitt Romney type person was allowed to off-shore the factory, I’m not old enough to know.
What I do know is that in later years there were not jobs within walking distances for people who didn’t graduate high school. At least no where near enough. This lead to the projects becoming Hell holes. Animals recruited people who would otherwise never have been animals, gangs got strong and people with too much time on their hands thought nothing about trashing places.
Cost of upkeep on the projects helped the activists bring about their demise. The idea wasn’t horrible on paper but the implementation failed like most committee run projects. The idea was to spread these people out to locations where they could be put into single family homes in areas with employment opportunities for them. The filter didn’t work though. It was supposed to not allow the gang bangers. The plan as relied on factory and other jobs which could be done by people with a high school education or less remaining in the area. You’ve all read about off-shoring so you all know what happened there.
Today the gangs are spread around the city and suburbs. Their crimes are happening in places where reporters actually go and it is making news. If the Democrats really want to help these people they need to turn pro-gun so enough of them can get elected to stop the off-shoring of blue collar jobs which actually pay well. We don’t need more Walmart jobs, we need more good paying factory, electrician, plumbing and construction jobs for people who didn’t manage to obtain tech skills in school or even graduate high school.
Reality 6: If the Republicans would turn pro-choice it would be a long time before a Democrat got elected again
Not as long as for the Democrats turning pro-gun, but long enough. The bulk of the country is pro-choice, pro-gun and there is no getting around that. By long time I’m talking about a decade. Continual tax cuts for the wealthy, tax breaks for companies to off-shore factory jobs and the ever sky rocketing national debt that causes will eventually remove the Republican party from America. As the country continues to devolve into a Feudal state, people will stop joining.
Reality 7: Unless the visa program is ended soon neither party will be in power
It’s true. The H1-B through all of the rest are the most exploited employment loop hole the country has ever seen. U.S. citizens are graduating with mountains of student loan debt and they can’t get a good paying job in their field because visa worker salaries are capped at $60K. (Okay, that is technically the minimum, but few if any pay more than that form them.) Most are exploited far worse. This company who promised $8K/month and only paid $800/month is not an outlier, this is common.
This is not just an IT worker problem. The medical profession is being overrun as well. In 2016 the average medical student loan debt was $190K. When they graduate they are being passed over for foreign workers making $60K/year or less.
Visa abuse is going to lead to another financial collapse. Even Market Watch is reporting on this now. Over 40 million Americans are carrying an estimated $1.2 trillion in student loan debt on their backs and are blocked from getting a high paying job which would allow them to pay the debt off due to visa abuse.
We cannot at this point reform the visa program. It must be ended for a period of not less than 10 years to bleed off all of the existing visa workers so the job market can again consume U.S. Citizens who graduated with that training. Without this change our economy will take another trillion plus dollar hit. Such a hit will give rise to at least two, if not three new parties, thus ending the two party system which has been controlled by the wealthy for years.
This is not rabble rousing, this is analysis. We still have not fully recovered from Wall Street’s criminal fraud. Had we recovered wages would be above pre-crash levels. Unlike the Wall Street fraud which went on with the Federal Reserve and government officials looking the other way, this one is already being reported on by the financial press. They are scared. When the Krispy Kreme sugar high of the tax cuts wears off and the market starts to crash it could well light the fuse on this. That is my gut feeling on the matter. When that crash happens so close to the previous crash, people will rally to new parties, not one of the existing parties.
I haven’t personally looked into how student loan debt is packaged up and sold, but, I have to believe the same Wall Street criminals are pulling the exact same shit they did with mortgages. They all expect Hillary to whisper in the ear of the Justice Department and keep them out of prison for the proper amount of bribe money paid to her as a “speaking fee.” When the massive student loan default happens it will be massive and once again be paid for by the working class.
Reality 8: The Ethics in Income Act will cease to be a fringe idea
It’s already started. Everybody who has been displaced by visa workers is talking about capping executive compensation. We already have one for government contractors. It is only a matter of time before that spreads out. There is already a $1 million limit on executive compensation tax deductions. While these two things do little to help Joe Plumber, they are steps towards what actually has to be done. Media outlets everywhere are starting to research and document income inequality. One more stock market crash or other financial catastrophe and this “Trickle Down With a Chainsaw” concept will change from basement seepage to an all out flood. There have also been too may articles about Steve Cooke and others getting around the existing executive pay cap.
Reality 9: Term limits will exist nation wide
There is no way around this. Even in Illinois which has institutionalized corruption in politics it is starting to happen. We are one more financial collapse away from this becoming a reality.
Reality 10: Elected officials sent to Washington will be sequestered in Washington
It’s sad but true. Back when Good Time Charlie was around, politicians were too busy drinking, whoring and snorting to leave town. As a result they actually got something done when they were there. When Washington had nothing but drunks whoring around we actually had good government. Today we have a lot of teatotalers and no government.
Admittedly this one is a bit farther out, but not as far out as most in Washington would like to believe. Prior to the creation of the airline industry and cheap airfare politicians were trapped in Washington until election time. They didn’t know anybody other than their coworkers so they had to spend weekends together.
Today we have them flying home every weekend to get topped off with partisan rhetoric and bigotry returning on Monday unwilling to do their jobs. I’m not the only one who sees this. Even the late Ted Kennedy made public comments about it. On weekends they all had to play golf on the same courses. Their families had to have dinner at each other’s houses so the kids would have someone safe to play with. Remember, the knew nobody other than their coworkers and they knew the Secret Service did some vetting on their coworkers.
Enough people considered important thinkers are starting to do the math on this one that it will happen. Oh, we the people you are supposed to serve can’t stop the vitriol spewing across the Internet. (Now we also know much of it isn’t us.) We the people you are supposed to serve probably can’t even get your cell phone blocked on the weekend, but, we can push through something which stops you from leaving Washington until it is time for your re-election for anything other than a funeral. Not a family emergency, a funeral only. Every weekend would be a family emergency if there was any loophole not requiring a family member being laid to rest.
While today it might sound a bit draconian, it will be less draconian with term limits. You will only have to endure it for two terms. The added benefit of term limits is that far fewer people will become professional politicians.
Now that I’m deep thinking this, being sequestered in Washington might be the only thing which could stem off term limits.
The country is tired of having a handful of bitter old white people laying the planks at both parties and demanding anyone claiming to be in said party vote the party line. We need to isolate you again. Put you in a place where you only know your coworkers, far out of reach of those infamously bitter “party elders” because it is the only time you actually do your job.
