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  • Reply to: Sneaky Manufacturers Shrink Packaging, While Keeping Prices the Same   13 years 11 months ago

    Like the industries who say they "have to" slash wages and benefits to stay competitive, or who say they "have to" relocate to some banana republic where the local tyranny doesn't care what a multi-national does with their waste products or workers lives, the idea that businesses "have to" pass on to the consumer every expense or go broke....is bull**it. They no more "have to" pass on every cost than they are likewise forced to lower prices when that particular manufacturing cost increase can no longer be justified by high sugar-cane (for example) prices.

    That's a myth, just like the others the Kochs or USCofC have their Walkers out selling to the gullible. It's merely one of another like the supposed inability to observe US environmental/safety regs while paying workers what they always have; or how the "invisible hand" of capitalism ensures businesses do the right thing - even in the absence of laws requiring them to do....something they insist makes the need to monitor tindustry, or have such laws on the books, unneccesary of course; or the one about low/no taxes on industry being the best way to increase their hiring capacity....that and government subsidies covering plant construction costs, resource mining costs, etc., also being a "great" job stimulus too!!
    These are such blatant, obvious, self-serrving myths that it seems incredible they would even dare to pass them off. But they know their target audience only too well. A half-century of Cold War rhetoric has Americans, alone of the world's developed economies, refusing more and cheaper health-care for themselves and their own children. A literal display of the bumper-sticker logic that has it we are "better dead than Red"..or apprently even /slightly/ socialist. Fools.

  • Reply to: Lone Star State "Reform" a Texas-Sized Distortion   13 years 11 months ago
    Could you possibly forward this article to my gov. & Lt. Gov Ron Ramsey? If I could figure out how I would! The are going to ruin Tennessee & finish off what is left of the middle class.
  • Reply to: Court Race Throws a Spanner in the Works of Wisconsin Wingnuts   13 years 11 months ago
    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/07/wisconsin-court-race-jolted-by-uncounted-ballot-find/ Many think such a large find -- more than 7,000 appearing so suddenly -- strongly suggests monkey business. It's gonna take a while to sort out.
  • Reply to: Group Called "Citizens for a Strong America" Operates out of a UPS Mail Drop but Runs Expensive Ads in Supreme Court Race?   13 years 11 months ago
    I see you've bought the whole menu of corporate anti-union garbage. Here's some simple facts. During the Guilded Age in America, children worked in sweatshops where they were killed on a regular basis. Why? Their parents didn't make enough laboring 12-14 hrs a day to feed the whole family and so the child's few pennies were needed to keep them from starvation. This was a policy the industrialists deliberately had in place so they could force more hands to go to work in factories where volume, not workmanship, was the new goal. Automation, volume, low pay, safety shortcuts.....that was what every first generation immigrant to America could expect from industry. When did the abuse stop? When collective bargaining first began to make headway against the skewed market then in place. One the Rockefellers, DuPonts, Dodges, had created back then just as the Cheney's and Bush's, Scaifes and Kochs have managed to do again today. It was only when America saw a transfer of wealth away from the robber-barons and into the hands of the workers that a large, buying middle-class became the engine that made the American Dream for all a possibility. The Third World remained poor because the ruling elite in those countries managed to stop collective bargaining from doing there what it had done here. But now, technology has made a prosperous American middle-class redundant. It is no longer essential for Americans to consume as they had in the recent past. Instead, Americans would better serve their purpose if they became a large, readily accessed cheap labor pool. All that's needed to achive that is to completely break the workers ability to collectively bargain thereby finally driving down wages through mass unemployment and conservatuve betrayal into workers having the same Third World status that provided us with affordable goods at someone elses expense. Now the industrialists can resell what we make to the middle-class of nations that took care of their own middle-class (most EU eg.) or have rapidly emerging middle-classes with their own money to spend (India, China,etc); nations whom the US middle-class allowed to have it's jobs, wages, and benefits, while importing their poverty as a result of having believed the corporate media and punditry claims they "needed" to seek eased regulations and a lower overhead in order to stay alive. BS! Once again, conservative gullibility in the face of wealth and power has them giving industry everything they want. Likewise, conservative fears and redfusal to self-reflect has them buying into a leader who blames their woes on some outside evil, a diaboloical force the leader must promise to punish, to weaken, and domionate. He will promise to keep them safe from any other "radicals" trying to make even more changes to a way of life they are certain was once "great", a vision of past empire that is so imaginatively transfigured vision that it certainly never existed, yet will be promised by the leader "if the people just trust his decisions implicitely by giving him the power he needs to restore them all to their past glory. Hence Hitler's "Third" Reich. This oft-repeated social phenomenon is one sociologists call the "dominance-submissive authoritarian embrace".. This unspoken "pact" is seen almost always among the right-wing and socially conservative - both leaders and followers. And it is this relationship that allows one single person to somehow influence enough regular people that they are capable of destroying nations and races. All simply because the trust given to in-group leaders is more powerful than the empathy that keeps others from acting on clearly immoral directives. But empathy, being particularly low among conservatives, allows them to do these things with little difficulty, lwhich is also the reason why, even in a democracy, those having social or politically conservative views are overwhelmingly also the ones who migrate toward militarism, who become police officers, and take jobs in prisons.
  • Reply to: Court Race Throws a Spanner in the Works of Wisconsin Wingnuts   13 years 11 months ago
    Let's see here.... Two far-right wingers engaged in privatizing every social policy or advocacy group they can get their hands on, you seem to think is unfair to say as much. Yet at the very same time you think it's unfair to unite them in a common cause, you conflate everyone else ("you people") as being delusional for merely stating the obvious. Bizarre. The only way to make sense of it would be to assume you're projecting your own cognitive deficiencies onto others. Remember..... "Conservatism is not the doctrine of the intellectual elite or of the more intelligent segments of the population, but the reverse. By every measure available to us, conservative beliefs are found most frequently among the uniformed, the poorly educated, and the less intelligent". McClosky, H. Conservatism and Personality. American Political Science Review, 52, 27-45

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