Borrowing to Prosperity

Obama sternly rebuked the Republicans for holding up his "Jobs" Bill. According to Obama, this bill will loan money and give tax breaks to small businesses, which will then magically create enough jobs for the 14.6 million people who are officially unemployed.

Are there really people out there just itching to start new businesses so they can get tax breaks? Who yearn to go into deeper debt to start a business which will probably go bankrupt within a few years?

Americans are more in debt than their government. To pretend that offering more credit is the way to economic health is astonishingly irresponsible.

Especially because while small businesses are encouraged to borrow, large corporations are subsidized by tax money. They get grants, not loans. They get land giveaways, infrastructure building, tax holidays and other "incentives", which workers and small businessmen pay for. They get welfare mothers forced to work for them for minimum wage.

We need to quit talking about stimulating the economy, saving the economy, or helping the economy.

The economy, which now seems to be a code word for the FIRE section of the economy, the part that lends money, is not working for actual people..

The government should help people, not the "economy".

Screw the banks. Let them fail.

The government has the power to issue money. The Constitution gives them to power to mint coins, i.e., money. The Powers That Be twist this into saying that the mints make coins, and the Federal Reserve prints the paper money. This is absurd. Clearly, minting coins means issuing money.

The US government has the power to mint coins, i.e. money.

Let the US government print money and pay people to do useful work, like teaching, firefighting, planting trees, refurbishing housing, laying lightrail track, building solar panels and windmills, taking care of children, providing clean water, and other socially necessary things.

The workers can then take that money and spend it on what they see fit, keeping farmers in business, local businesses going, etc.

Bring home all the troops and stop spending so much money on killing, corporate welfare, agribusiness welfare, Homeland Security, prisons, and other oppressive functions.

There. Take care of the people and the "economy" takes care of itself.

Interesting Juxtaposition

My co-worker's husband had a kidney stone, and he cried and whined and writhed. When a kind woman tried to empathize with him by saying that she had heard that kidney stones were as painful as childbirth, he reacted with outrage. "No woman has EVER felt the kind of pain that I am feeling!"

While Americans are busily venting their outrage that some Muslims want to build a community center right next (kind of) to Holy Ground, the site of the WTC buildings blown away nearly 9 years ago, some Muslims in Afghanistan killed 9 Christians from a missionary group.

Hmmm. Let's see.

There was a tragic loss of life in the WTC buildings. Imagine the horror of choosing to jump from the window, rather than be burned alive. We don't have to imagine the horror, actually, it has been pumped into us for nine years now. TV shows, movies, books, politician speeches, we still get daily doses of The Day That Changed Everything.

Three weeks after The Day That Changed Everything, the US invaded Afghanistan, and has been occupying it ever since, killing civilians daily. How many? We don't know. We don't bother to count. We don't care. But for them, everyday since Oct. 2001 has been a Day That Changes Everything.

While each person killed in the WTC got a picture and a bio for us to memorialize them, the deaths of the people of Afghanistan are part of a daily synopsis of deaths, sometimes one, sometimes 130. Whatever. We know that some of them were brides, on their way to their weddings, some were children, executed after US troops kicked down their doors, but their names and faces are unknown to us.

We do know that Bush called the attack on Afghanistan a Crusade, and that some of the generals make explicit references to killing Muslims, and that most of the Americans attacking Afghanistan and Iraq are Christians, and that most of the people attacked are Muslims.

So while it is the very height of insensitivity for Muslims to build a community center in downtown New York City, it is heart warming and beautiful to have Christian missionaries working in Afghanistan.

Right? Cause there's no pain like our pain.

Accountability

In May, Obama announced that he and Gen. McCrystal were accountable for Afghan civilian deaths. Wow, what a man, standing up and taking responsibility for the devastation his policies are causing to innocent civilians being attacked by heavily armed and armored young Americans.

So why is Bradley Manning in prison? Why is Julian Assange being attacked and hunted?

Why are the two of them being accused of causing civilian deaths?

Where is the accountability? When two men with no blood on their hands are being verbally assassinated, and physically imprisoned, what kind of bizarre twisting of reality are we being subjected to?

The Red Queen rules our country and Humpty Dumpty our media. War criminals go free, while information givers are hunted and jailed. Words mean what the ruling class chooses them to mean, no more and no less.