More Useless Seat Warming : Tina Dupuy

This article by award-winning writer and managing editor of Crooks and Liars appeared in a local paper this morning. I share this because of the relevance to issues I've blogged about lately and that are so "in-the-face" of Americans today.

Wednesday November 9, 2011 :  Tina Dupuy

I asked an Occupier in D.C. namedRob Wohl, why the movement he’s a part of is resonating with people -- why as over 3,000 Americans have been arrested in demonstrations and even journalists and vets have endured tear gas and rubber bullets, the movement is still growing.

His answer? "Because we are analytically correct."

What does that mean? Apparently, they believe they have the facts on their side. History certainly is. And as author Michael Lewis said when asked about the Occupy Wall Street movement, they also have justice on their side.

New census data released shows we have record high poverty in this country. It’s up to 16 percent or 49.1 million Americans (that’s over five New York Cities). We have the worst wealth inequality in the industrialized world (meaning we’re on par with some third world countries). We have the highest health care costs in the world. And a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute notes, "U.S. productivity grew by 62.5 percent from 1989 to 2010, far more than real hourly wages for both private-sector and state/local government workers, which grew 12 percent in the same period." Basically Americans are working much (much) harder for much (much) less. Pair that with the fact U.S. businesses are making record profits and that’s why Americans have taken to the pothole-laden streets to protest. It’s not just about the bank bailout. It’s not just about Wall Street. It’s about the goal of the wealthy to milk their fellow citizens until they’re completely dry. And while regular Americans are condescended to about their proverbial bootstraps, the U.S.government has helped the wealthy at every turn. So it’s no surprise they’ve won. And now that people are brittle and dusty -- there are encampments all over the country.
The question isn’t, "Why are there so many people sleeping in parks?" The question is, "Why aren’t there more?"

In the wake of this massive protest -- right in the middle of the tenure of the lowest rated House in our nation’s history -- a group of men and women whose approval rating of 9 percent is hovering just above the margin of error -- what do they do? They pass another symbolic (think: busy work) nonbinding resolution to reaffirm "in God we trust" as the national motto.
I could have made that up as satire and I’d get a letter saying I was being too harsh.
Time spent on a bill (of which there are FOUR versions) reaffirming a phrase already on every denomination of money, every courthouse and most public buildings is about as contemptuous as this body of seat-warmers can get.

It’s "let them eat cake" with a little of King George III’s "the colonies will submit" thrown in for flavor.

Yes, the do-less-than-nothing House has passed a whopping 54 bills originating in their chamber in their nearly full year in office. Their counterparts in previous congresses usually author and pass three times that. And if you subtract passing go-no-where bills to defund NPR, Planned Parenthood and other specters like Obama Czars and take into account their days off (next year they’re only set to work 109 days out of the entire year) -- they’ve put in a lot of effort to be ineffective.

Which is what you’d expect from self-hating government workers like the House leadership. They’re illustrating how lazy, stupid and useless government can be -- by example.
To sum up: The American people are paying more for less, working more for less and asking more ... and Congress is doing (wait for it) less.

The Occupiers are right. They are "analytically correct" in their assessment. Their government is failing them. As another Occupier put it, maybe it’s "time to replace Congress with people."

Tina Dupuy’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. She is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars and can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

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The Prophets of Doom : We Are In Far More Than A Depression

I'm just watching a TV program first aired in the spring of 2011 called "The Prophets of Doom" (link to the entire show) on the History Channel. Discussing the current problems facing our world are six experts from several fields -  financial, environment, energy, computers - who are talking about the crisis we are in now as a country and drawing the parallels to past civilizations and their demise.  

It's extremely important that people do wake up before the dam has burst, so to speak. In fact, one of them used a dam bursting as an example. People who live several miles downstream from a dam about to rupture worry, fret and try to do something to rectify it. Those a little closer are not as worried, still are concerned, but don't really react in time. But those who live the closest to it don't believe that anything will happen and don't react at all. Their thinking, a protective reaction of the brain that "it can't happen to me", don't say or do anything because they trust that someone built the dam strong enough to not rupture.

Our society is in a crisis in every form -  financially, politically and environmentally. But the basic thesis of their discussion is that historically, people refuse to believe that anything can or will happen to them because we are the biggest, we are the strongest, we have everything and dominate by buying, taxation, having the biggest military, and even the best technology. 

At some point our country's system, which one of them calls a ponzi scheme, will reach a point of insolvency in which we cannot recover, and by definition, will collapse. This has been shown to be true in every civilization that has risen to the length and breadth that we have. However, due to the level of our technology, our collapse will be different in that it will not be able to recover due to the draining of our natural resources and the fact that they cannot be replaced (oil, water, etc.), the pollution of clean drinking water and food from chemicals and pesticides, the collapse of our financial system, the most obvious one of all at the present that people can relate to. One of the participants proposed an very interesting thought. Dr. Hugo DeGaris thinks that through the vast improvements in the area of Artificial Intelligence, we may be creating the society of the future, which consists of robots and machines that not only can think for themselves, but will do so at the speed of light, a thousand times faster than the fastest human brain operates. His theory postulates that if this point is reached, this new society may consider humans as being inferior and make a logical decision to eliminate us as a species. Of course this is farther down the line than the pressing issues of financial collapse we face now. 

Yet even with all this knowledge, a greater percentage of the people still refuse to believe that this can or will happen to us. 1 in 4 Americans is considered to be at Level 1 in the table of literacy. That means that there are roughly 44 million people in America that cannot read, write or express their thought well enough to communicate. A staggering number at the very least. They are among those that live closest to the dam and believe that the politicians and government know more than they do and will always take care of them.

This is a very interesting and relevant look at our forthcoming political, financial and environmental collapse and the discussion was much more than I could express here. I feel that I live way downstream and I'm worried that those who live next to the dam are not waking up fast enough to be able to get to higher ground before the dam bursts and they drown.


So, once again I say to those who live within a few miles of the dam, get up, get involved, participate, get informed, vote, complain, pursue, and let those who believe they are in charge of us that we are here and we are not going to go down with their ship.

In addition to Dr. DeGaris, here are a few names of those involved in the discussion: Michael Ruppert, Dr. Nathan Hagens, John Cronin, James Howard Kunstler.

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The Republican Party Of Death | Addicting Info

Once again I go off the beaten path and mission to pass along this information to those who are still blindly going about their lives as if nothing was wrong.

I've repeatedly said this over and over, if we as a people do not get out and pay attention to the current politics of the GOP, you, your family, friends, everybody will soon be either reduced to noting more than slaves of the uber rich, the self-appointed kings of domination. We are headed down a dangerous road and evil path that leads to nothing we've ever seen before.

So here, once again, I repeat to everyone...WE ARE IN SERIOUS TROUBLE! The apathetic and those who don't want to get involved need to wake up. Occupy Wall Street is the only movement that has the opportunity to bring these people down short of another American Revolution. Get involved, read, get on the internet...but don't just blindly walk through the near future thinking that all is well.

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Dumbing It Down: The Pursuit of Intellectual Mediocrity in America

Finally, somebody dare say something about the apathy and ignorance so prevalent today, not only in our educational system, but with the adult population - the ones that vote! Having said this so many times before in previous postings, it is becoming so clear that the "Dumbing Down of America" is real and so obvious that, ironically, most people don't even see it.

Just take a look at the slogans of the bunch of idiots running on the GOP ticket - "9-9-9", use of the word "simple" repeatedly - and one that really gets me going..."Their going to...", the blatant misuse of words and contractions. Of course it's easy to make a mistake on the keyboard now and then, but in the constant monitoring of comments about differing issues on the social network it is hard to believe that such a high percentage of Americans can write even the basic of sentences.

The fundamental ability to speak and write concisely is basic to our civilization and also our ability to understand the issues and make informed decisions about them. The best example of this is the continued use of simple slogans and phrases by the current slew of candidates, aimed at the general public as if we were a bunch of morons and couldn't understand complex explanations of a candidates platform. However, we are exactly where they want us to be...stupid, apathetic and too lazy to try to understand. In essence, believe me and what I'm saying ...everything I tell you is the truth. So we believe, we come back with comments on social sites that are way off-track, and we sit back in our chairs and wait for someone else to make it better.

The Republican agenda of education cuts over the years has done its job of making the general public in this country stupid, ignorant, and unable to communicate in an effective manner so as to intelligently discuss the merits of so many of the concepts and platforms of these candidates.

Wake up people! This coming election is possibly the most important election of any since the Great Depression. People who are intending to take the time to vote need to understand what these candidates stand for and how their policies and platforms are going to affect each of us in the future. Now is not the time for cutting education, but the time for investing in it. Something the current roster of idiots running on the GOP hangman's platform know and don't want us to know.

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