74 replies to this topic

[diogenes227]

Why The Screwed Generation Is Turning To Paul Ryan

Boomers don’t want to give up their sweet deal, but the rest of us have reason to embrace Ryan’s “radical” plans

We’ve finally been vindicated: Members of Generation X have a representative who is anything but a slacker.


http://www.thedailyb...-paul-ryan.html

This post is pure politics of course.

But since you brought it up, the most notable American member of Generation X (as Strauss and Howe define the generations in "The Fourth Turning") currently lives in the White House. And, in case you've overlooked it, he too is no slacker, having gotten to the Presidency without family privilege or wealth to back him up.

His opponent, by the way, is a boomer. If you've read "The Fourth Turning," you know it's the authors' contention that it would be best for the country (for the world for for that matter) if the boomers would just get out of the way and let the next generation get on with fixing the boomer mess. No easy task as we all can see. If all the boomers out there throwing their tons of money into this election on behalf of their fellow boomer (the last stand of the boomer generation?) manage to succeed in winning this election then no doubt the big boomer mess will be compounded and likely a disaster beyond imagination. It'll be worse than Massachusetts where the current Gen X governor of that state is having to spend his entire terms cleaning up his predecessor's mismanagement of the infrastructure there. Strauss and Howe label the boomers a "Prophet" generation; the last businessman elected President from the last "Prophet" generation before the boomer generation was Herbert Hoover.

Enough said.

[stocks]

Washington Versus America

new census data revealed that 7 of the 10 richest American counties in 2011 were in the Washington, D.C., region. Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington Counties, all in Northern Virginia, have higher median incomes than every other county in the United States.

Whence comes this wealth? Mostly from Washington’s one major industry: the federal government. Not from direct federal employment, which has risen only modestly of late, but from the growing armies of lobbyists and lawyers, contractors and consultants, who make their living advising and influencing and facilitating the public sector’s work.

The state of life inside the Beltway also points to the broader story of our spending problem, which has less to do with how much we spend on the poor than how much we lavish on subsidies for highly inefficient economic sectors, from health care to higher education, and on entitlements for people who aren’t supposed to need a safety net — affluent retirees, well-heeled homeowners, agribusiness owners, and so on.

In reality, our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.

When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.


http://www.nytimes.c...erica.html?_r=0

[salsabob]

Washington Versus America

new census data revealed that 7 of the 10 richest American counties in 2011 were in the Washington, D.C., region. Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington Counties, all in Northern Virginia, have higher median incomes than every other county in the United States.

Whence comes this wealth? Mostly from Washington’s one major industry: the federal government. Not from direct federal employment, which has risen only modestly of late, but from the growing armies of lobbyists and lawyers, contractors and consultants, who make their living advising and influencing and facilitating the public sector’s work.

The state of life inside the Beltway also points to the broader story of our spending problem, which has less to do with how much we spend on the poor than how much we lavish on subsidies for highly inefficient economic sectors, from health care to higher education, and on entitlements for people who aren’t supposed to need a safety net — affluent retirees, well-heeled homeowners, agribusiness owners, and so on.

In reality, our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.

When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.


http://www.nytimes.c...erica.html?_r=0

From a money standpoint (is there any other standpoint??? ), the US federal govt is essentially a huge insurance program (SS and Medicare) with a very large army. Since the DC area has only about 1% of the nation's population, nearly all the insurance part leaves the DC Beltway and very lttle can get skimmed. However a big part of the large army expenditures can get skimmed and it stays in DC - it's call "defense spending."

Right now, there are a lot of pols doing a lot of hand wringing over the 1/2 trillion in defense spending cuts associated with the upcoming "fiscal cliff" - they not only talk about how that will bring us to having only 4 or 5 times the defense spending as the rest of the world combined, but they also get all Keynesian on you about how that reduced govt spending will kill the economy.

Then some more of those pols are running on the notion that the Pentagon needs about $2 trillion more than it asked for to develop and build weapon systems that the generals say they don't want but the defense contractors and their lobbyist say they must have. Most of those defense contractors and all of their lobbyists live around the beltway of DC - easy to spot in Great Falls and Potomac with their huge McMansions and Ferraris in the driveway.

What's really funny is that people, like you, that rail against how rich the DC area has become are the very same folks that vote for the pols that are in the pockets of the defense lobbyists and contractors! Imagine that.

Is that weird or what?

Edited by salsabob, 24 September 2012 - 10:44 AM.

[stocks]

Occupy Wall St. Vs. the Tea Party - Failure vs. Success

1. The Democratic party is bad soil for grassroots movements. The Dems are a patchwork coalition of victim groups with an uber rich and academic elite at the top. What do these wildly different groups have in common: single women, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Jews, the uber rich, unions, academia and Big Biz? They vote Democrat. Nothing else. This is why Obama won California in 2008 with 62% of the vote but prop 8 opponents only got 47% of the vote. Blacks and Hispanics dont care about gay rights. No ideology holds all groups together like GOP's 'lower taxes, lesser govt'. This is why the Tea Party had broad GOP and some independent support. Simple message of thought, which the Dems don't have as a glue. How could you get a message to stretch across the wildly different groups I listed above that vote them? You can't.

2. Campaign funding. Big Biz owns both the GOP and the Dems, but that's not the major source of campaign cash for the Dems. Jewish donors donate 60% of all them money and unions provide a lot of the rest. Big biz, Jewish money, union funds are resistant to changing the status quo, which is what OWS was all about. Because the GOP has that lower middle class to under $10 mil rich as a base for donations, TP had base of money outside of establishment that went to insurgent candidates. Overcoming a 30-1 spending ratio is nearly impossible, but overcoming 3-1 is doable when you have the fired up segment on your side. Because the GOP has that married middle class support, they can counter Big Biz money. Just look at the recent win by Cruz over Dewhurst in Texas for the open US Senate seat. A Hispanic Tea Party candidate beat the establishment white guy in Texas with Tea Party money and support. This would've been considered unheard of 5 years ago.

8. Protesting the Wall St bankers needed to be snuffed out before citizens connected the dots that Obama and Dems currently in power have not convicted a single Wall St banker or mortgage fraudster 5 years after the financial shock. This was a problem as people started to say publicly 'yeah why arent the bankers and fraudsters in jail? where's my change?'. If a single them with no Wall St ties and lib bona fides had taken the OWS message to power, you could have had a primary challenger to Obama. Looking at some of his primary results, it migth have worked. I spent a couple of months hoping Howard Dean would do this.


http://28sherman.blo...failure-vs.html

[stocks]

Hiroshima vs Detroit

What has caused more long term destruction – the A-bomb, or U. S. Government welfare programs created to buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?

For 15 years, from the mid 1970′s to 1990, I worked in Detroit, Michigan .

I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs, and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses, and school yards. Trash everywhere! Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it, and ignored it. Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands today exist on federal welfare, free housing, and food stamps!

With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to 10, and in one case, one woman birthed 24 children as reported by the Detroit Free Press, all on American taxpayer dollars.

A new child meant a new car payment, new TV, and whatever mom wanted. I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ flourish in Detroit . If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out taking money for doing nothing.


http://truebluenz.co...ima-comparison/

Should Illiterates Be Allowed To Vote?

The Zimmerman Trial

Nothing of importance is noticed, and everything lacking it is. The crucial fact to come out of the whole adventure—crucial, and therefore utterly overlooked--was that Rachel Jeantel, a prosecution witness and black girl aged nineteen years, can´t read. The grim implication of this fact is confirmed by the illiteracy of tweets from blacks regarding the case. “Ima kill dat dumass cracker be racis.” Here we see as neatly displayed as if in a jewelry box why so many young blacks will go nowhere in the remaining fifty years of their lives. They can´t read, or barely can. In a fading techno-industrial civilization—I use the latter word frivolously—this consigns them to a life on charity. Is this not of more note than who started what?

No. The educational disaster that will leave Rachel and millions of her confreres in meaningless lives on welfare pales in importance compared to the question: Did Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman have the proper racial attitudes? This is what exercises the vast endocrine boobitry howling with empty-headed rage and self-righteousness.



http://www.fredoneve...g.net/Zim.shtml

[diogenes227]

Hiroshima vs Detroit

What has caused more long term destruction – the A-bomb, or U. S. Government welfare programs created to buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?

For 15 years, from the mid 1970′s to 1990, I worked in Detroit, Michigan .

I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs, and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses, and school yards. Trash everywhere! Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it, and ignored it. Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands today exist on federal welfare, free housing, and food stamps!

With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to 10, and in one case, one woman birthed 24 children as reported by the Detroit Free Press, all on American taxpayer dollars.

A new child meant a new car payment, new TV, and whatever mom wanted. I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ flourish in Detroit . If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out taking money for doing nothing.


http://truebluenz.co...ima-comparison/

Should Illiterates Be Allowed To Vote?

The Zimmerman Trial

Nothing of importance is noticed, and everything lacking it is. The crucial fact to come out of the whole adventure—crucial, and therefore utterly overlooked--was that Rachel Jeantel, a prosecution witness and black girl aged nineteen years, can´t read. The grim implication of this fact is confirmed by the illiteracy of tweets from blacks regarding the case. “Ima kill dat dumass cracker be racis.” Here we see as neatly displayed as if in a jewelry box why so many young blacks will go nowhere in the remaining fifty years of their lives. They can´t read, or barely can. In a fading techno-industrial civilization—I use the latter word frivolously—this consigns them to a life on charity. Is this not of more note than who started what?

No. The educational disaster that will leave Rachel and millions of her confreres in meaningless lives on welfare pales in importance compared to the question: Did Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman have the proper racial attitudes? This is what exercises the vast endocrine boobitry howling with empty-headed rage and self-righteousness.



http://www.fredoneve...g.net/Zim.shtml

DETROIT AND NEW ORLEANS - symbols of what's gone wrong with America

I think the collapse of Detroit makes us look the way we looked after the national humiliation of Katrina: like a bitter, miserly and dying empire where the deluded rich cling to their McMansions and mock the suffering of the poor while everyone else fights over the scraps, and where the slow-acting poison of racism continues to work its bad magic.

[stocks]

New York spends $168,000 a year on each inmate

New York City spent nearly $168,000 per inmate in its jails last year, according to a report by an independent watchdog.

An average of 12,287 people a day were incarcerated in the city in 2012, more than three quarters of whom were awaiting trial, the report by the city's Independent Budget Office said.

Blacks accounted for 57 percent of the city's jail population and Hispanics 33 percent; barely seven percent were white, the report said.

In determining that the city spent nearly $168,000 per inmate last year, the report's authors factored in prison operating costs, the salaries and benefits of prison system employees, and the cost of servicing the debt for building and maintaining the prisons.

http://news.yahoo.co...-171026189.html

Edited by stocks, 08 September 2013 - 01:36 PM.

[stocks]

Black Politicians Loot Detroit, Media Could Care Less

Detroit may let abandoned buildings burn

47% Of Detroit Residents Are Functionally Illiterate

The report notes that half of the illiterate population has either a high school diploma or a GED.
Per pupil spending in Detroit as of 2008 was $13,000, which is higher than some people pay for private schooling in other parts of the country.

Some of the Detroit suburbs also have high numbers of functionally illiterate: 34 percent in Pontiac and 24 percent in Southfield.

“For other major urban areas, we are a little bit on the high side… We compare, slightly higher, to Washington D.C.’s urban population, in certain ZIP codes in Washington D.C. and in Cleveland,” she said.


http://www.outsideth...lly-illiterate/

Prosecutors: Give Kwame Kilpatrick 28 years in prison for 'astonishing ... devastating' corruption

When it comes to public corruption, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is the worst of the worst.

In pushing for a tough sentence, prosecutors argued that Kilpatrick abused the public’s trust for years, put his own needs before those of the impoverished city he was supposed to serve, and ran a racket out of his office so that he, his family and his longtime contractor friend, Bobby Ferguson, could get rich.

“And worst of all, he did it a city where poverty, crime and a lack of basic services made it one of the most vulnerable metropolitan areas in the nation,” prosecutors wrote. “The scale of his corruption was astonishing. The impact on the region was devastating.”


http://www.freep.com...ing-prosecutor#

[stocks]

New York spends $168,000 a year on each inmate

New York City spent nearly $168,000 per inmate in its jails last year, according to a report by an independent watchdog.

An average of 12,287 people a day were incarcerated in the city in 2012, more than three quarters of whom were awaiting trial, the report by the city's Independent Budget Office said.

Blacks accounted for 57 percent of the city's jail population and Hispanics 33 percent; barely seven percent were white, the report said.

In determining that the city spent nearly $168,000 per inmate last year, the report's authors factored in prison operating costs, the salaries and benefits of prison system employees, and the cost of servicing the debt for building and maintaining the prisons.

http://news.yahoo.co...-171026189.html

The Rise and Fall of New York

Gotham is starting to look more like California with large Asian and Latino populations and small wealthy white elites, trendy industries and a real estate bubble temporarily funding welfare programs and union sweetheart deals that carry with them an unsustainable debt.

Twenty years ago, New York’s long nightmare ended with a Giuliani victory over Mayor Dinkins. Now the nightmare returns as former Dinkins staffer and terrorist supporter Bill de Blasio will begin wrecking the city where Dinkins and his Democratic predecessors left off.


http://frontpagemag....ll-of-new-york/

[diogenes227]

SHOCKER: even_right_wingers_become_liberals_when_they_turn_off_fox_news

America's center is to the left, and even Tea Partyers are liberals when they turn off Rush and learn real facts

Some reality to ignore for the weekend. As Stephen Colbert once quipped to President Bush: "We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... "