April 16, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

ABOUT THAT "BASKET OF CONSUMER GOODS"

Right-wing think tanks, which are really just propaganda merchants, tell us we're living better than ever. We of the working class own DVD players (made in China), televisions (made in China), stereos (made in China), and, by golly, we can probably even go to McDonald's every now and then. They don't mention how our standard of living has been steadily declining since the early 1970's while they pursue globalization and free trade and privatization. In the meantime, the very wealthiest among us are enjoying even greater bounty at our expense. This article by Nicholas von Hoffman is at www.thenation.com:

In his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times writes, "Since 1979, hourly earnings for 80 percent of American workers (those in private-sector, non-supervisory jobs) have risen by just 1, after inflation. For male workers, the average hourly wage actually slid by 5 percent since 1979.... the nation's economic pie is growing, but corporations by and large have not given their workers a bigger piece." A 1 percent raise in almost thirty years? Still not bitter?

And who is getting ever larger chunks of pie? The Wall Street Journal has isolated some of the most energetic pie pigs: "the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19 percent in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8 percent set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks. The bottom 50 percent earned 12.8 percent of all income, down from 13.4 percent in 2004 and a bit less than their 13 percent share in 2000." You can be sure that a substantial portion of the bottom half of the population is living in small towns similar to the ones in which Obama sniffed out a degree of bitterness.

DEGREES OF OPPRESSION

As the Olympic Torch made its way around the world, protestors turned out to highlight China's horrific human rights record in Tibet. But we shouldn't forget that the United States has dropped several notches on the morality meter during the Bush years. We have practiced "preemptive" war. We have tortured. We have abandoned our commitment to the Bill of Rights. The "war on terror" justifies anything and everything. We aren't as bad as China--yet. But we shouldn't even be talking about the United States in the same breath as China when it comes to human rights. This commentary by Mark Morford is at www.sfgate.com:

Overall, even under the deformed and wretched Bush regime and despite how much Dick Cheney's dead raisin of a heart leaps with excitement when he sees the videos of those bloodied and dead Tibetan protesters ("Damn hippies had it coming"), America is still far from the brutality and inhumanity happening right now in Lhasa and beyond.

Or maybe not. For here is what we do have: We have torture . We have a frighteningly simpleminded cowboy-wannabe president who supports and endorses the most inhumane treatment of prisoners imaginable despite its utter failure as a tactic, and this violent belief, this dark energy infects the national bloodstream like prehistoric malaria.