I have been reading blogger responses to one of the leading news stories of our day, i.e., the controversy over auto company assistance by the Federal Government....and the responses I read really show why this country is screwed up and it is the American public's apathy, ignorance and insistence on supporting right wing government that has put our country in the mess that it is in.
I am appalled to see that the majority of our citizens don't seem to understand that, unlike the fat-cat banks who have had no accountability asked of them, our car companies are not asking for a bailout but for a LOAN. I guess most do not know the difference between a bailout and a loan. It is not just the fault of our own car companies' management, but the fault of our own national apathy that has been asleep at the wheel while we bought, for the last 30 years NON American products and supported politicians who allowed our own greedy captains of industry and high finance to strip our workers of American jobs.
Granted maybe domestic car companies made some stupid choices about their auto designs and about the quantity of gas guzzlers they produced, in their lack of foresight, but the American public doesn't realize that the these days the old propaganda about American car quality being inferior that was true in the 1980s, is no longer true and that American cars are as good as foreign brands, just as reliable (Nissan just had a huge recall of cars not long ago). They ignore the continual news reports of foreign cars being recalled.
In fact, unlike their fathers, most American men can't even change their own engine oil anymore and don't know or care about regular preventive maintenance of their car. They abuse their cars and then lay the blame at the feet of the manufacturer.
The real problem is that Americans for at least two decades have had zero loyalty not only to the few products still made in our own country, but we've even lost the work ethic to do a decent day's work and a growing number have lost the sense of responsiblity to support our own families. We have become a nation of "me first", sexually promiscuous, selfish, opportunistic freeloaders that would rather scam others than do an honest job.
To make matters worse, we keep electing neocon politicians who care passionately about nothing but support kneejerk 'trickle down' economics of feeding the rich and raping of the American worker and taxpayer. These bad boys shaft the working classes but give huge giveaways to those who are so rich they have more money than they can ever use or spend and want more just to get more.
These reactionary, crooked politicians (and yes even Democrat " Republican-lite" pseudo-liberals who do the same things) are reelected by a stupid public that believes right wing propaganda about tpublic policy. The public accepts the need to "be strong on domestic security" but then lets our country rot and go to blazes in our national living standards here at home. These 'elected' crooks spend their time and our tax money building up foreign puppet dictators and fighting expensive credit-card military adventurist wars that land us in inescapable foreign quagmires and they could care less about our own citizens but passionately defend staying in Iraq or Afghanistan or some other country to 'stabilize' them with endless American blood, sweat, casualties and tears.
Meanwhile the same crooks that keep getting re-elected run our government into the ground with draconian cuts of essential services while they hand over public money and largesse to their corporate cronies and campaign supporters who seek trillion dollar bailouts while they foreclose on our homes, our jobs and they neglect our cities, our infrastructure and our quality of life. There is zero outcry about them handing over more free tax money to fat cats who aren't even held accountable, but then there is a hue and cry raised to the bloody skies over help for the needs of our own poor and middle class. Every penny of public expenditure on our everyday needs and on our people is parsed and griped about and denounced by these politicians as 'wasteful'.We would would rather go to Walmart and buy junk made by laborers in some foreign land who have been employed with outsourced jobs than come to the aid of American jobs at a cost of pennies on the dollar compared to having two million more unemployed during a severe recession.
We have stopped even supporting our own family farmers here in the USA in favor of large agro-business and importers of tainted products from poisoned cesspools overseas. And in our foreign policy, our public's ignorance about other countries has greatly helped anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism overseas to gain a bigger foothold, as our own military is ground into the dirt and our treasury is bankrupted in an endless 'war on terror' which is waged in with stupid policies that are counterproductive and accomplish nothing but the discrediting of nation in the eyes of foreigners.
Our own red state morons here would rather vote for the same political parties who who ripped them off than they would give a candidate from a different party a chance to try his hand at CLEANING UP THE MESS left mainly by their party of choice, the Republican party, which has had the preponderance of power in Congress and the White House for the majority of the last fourteen years.
Red state morons would rather continue the failures that have busted our country down and bankrupted us here at home, than they would learn something new and support new people who might want to to help restore economic fairness to our tax codes, our business practices and who might want to create green jobs here at home instead of continuing dependence on fossil fuels and exporting our national treasure to terrorist oil sheiks overseas.
These same red state morons who see no problem with re-electing the very same people who caused the trouble our country is in, in the first place, still buy, hook, line and sinker, the neocon propaganda, the neocon smoke screens and the neocon lies
It is these same politicians that sell our country down the river, also let other countries sell their goods here, while those same countries do everything they can to prevent our goods from being sold there. They allow foreign car makers to receive billions of dollars from their own home governments' subsidies, while coming here and getting windfall deals on our land and getting to avoid paying our taxes.
As if that weren't bad enough, these same flag-waving fraudulent politicians, re-elected by the apathetic, reactionary and ignorant American public, also then, while they pretend to care about America's national sovereignty, actually go ahead and pass laws that allow millions of illegal aliens to just walk into our homes, our jobs and our cities, and take our jobs just so that greedy business owners can avoid paying a fair wage to our own citizens, and get menial, backbreaking work done on the cheap. The coporations and even our small businesses want to hire cheap slave labor which is not even here legally but then are given free medical care, free home loans, send millions of American dollars back to their mother countries and wave their mother country's flags in our face protesting our 'taking away of their rights'. Their countrymen raise drug crops at home and import them here, invade our forests and raise more drugs there, invade our city streets and attack our police and citizens and teach our children to join gangs, then shoot up our border towns and engage in narco-trafficking on a huge scale across the land. When these foreign criminals are sought by authorities for their murders, thefts and crimes here, they ,just skip back south across the border and take responsibility for their crimes and the money and lives they stole with them and default on their free loans, abandon their American girlfriends made while they were up here messing around on their abandoned famlies back in their own country and ending up sowing the land with destitute single mothers left to pick up the pieces and raise illegitimate children at taxpayer expense.
After all is said and done, it was our own American public which put the people in office who, now that they caused our recession with their lack of oversight and corrupt governance...now ask no questions about who is benefitting from new rules to hand over 800 billion to anyone claiming they are a bank but then a huge majority, some 65 percent at least, cry long and loud about car makers getting a loan, not even a bailout. And they don't ask who will make our military vehicles if we have no domestic car companies. .
To sum it up, most Americans are dumbed down so badly that they can't even see how badly our national culture and our ethics have decayed. It is we the public who have no eduction and fail to understand that while we help foreign and domestic corporations who are out to bust down our way of life. We will let our own national companies go bankrupt just so right wing Republicans can finish destoying the few remaining American labor unions which help protect American jobs and wage standards and so that these same Republicans can feed irresponsible rich owners of outsourcing companies who employ foreign laboers in substandard conditions in countries with lax labor and environmental laws overseas.
The upshot is that we will continue the downward spiral in living standards and wages, while we export American jobs and import cheap sweat-shop-made goods made under unequal trade agreements that undermine our wages and our manufacturing businesses here at home and force us to pay our workers far less than they would have had if our government protected our own citizens and put some limits on these corporate rich owners who do business in Third World countries with lax labor and environmental laws. These policy makers oppose tax and wage fairness and bust down the few of us left with jobs and make us work for slave labor wages.
I hope that with a new Democrat majority in both houses of Congress and with a Democrat president (notice that enough of the public got sick enough of the shaft to vote for Democrats for once..amazing!) ..it is my hope that something will get better.
I cling to the shards of hope that are left until I have reason even to abandon that, if this current attempt at picking up the pieces left by the Republicans fails. The least we can do is quit carping and nit picking Barack Obama before the man has even had a chance to get into office. That is the least we on the left can do. I don't mean we can't question some things...but half a loaf is better than the 'none' that we got under the Republicans.
Let the Limbaugh type shills denigrate the Democrats, as to be sure they will, even though THEY made the mess our country is in. But I don't see why the rest of us have to pull down a man who is brave enough to try to do SOMETHING about our national calamity. He may not be perfect, but he's better than what we had. Anything would be better than what we had.
The car companies deserve a hearing at least, since no questions are being asked of Wall Street about the 800 billion that Hank Palsey is handing out like Santa "Clause" at a Republican Christmas party.
