Corporations Abuse Trust
Every time we have extended an olive branch of trust to corporate America, they have turned around and screwed everyone involved.
Corporate America decides money is more important than safety and the mine blows up, or the oil rig explodes, ruining the livelihood of a whole region of the U.S., or our kids’ toys get painted with lead paint because it’s cheaper. Their profit motive directly hurts regular people on a daily basis, especially in this latest failure of American business in this great recession of ours.
For example, California deregulates electricity. What do you get? Enron happens. NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] gets signed. You hear a large sucking noise of all the jobs going south, just like Ross Perot predicted. Deregulate banks and what happens? 2008 happened, that’s what. Then [right-wingers] continue to bend over and say, “Thank you, sir! May I have another?”
When will we stop getting paddled here? If it wasn’t for progressive safety nets that have been stretched out all over this big top called America over the decades, what would 2008, 2009, and 2010 have looked like? How many more starving, homeless, etc.?
What’s sad is that some or most of these guys used such handouts as public schools (some might have even benefited from the reduced lunch program), or Pell grants for state-funded colleges and universities. Maybe they or their parents dipped into unemployment benefits occasionally over their lifetime. They enjoy a 40-hour work week with vacation time and holidays (thanks to labor rights laws). So they can grow up to look with disdain at the very progressive policies that got them where they are today. It’s sad to see such mass betrayal. They get brainwashed into believing that a pay-to-play society is what they want, but they never stop to think about what that would really mean for the vast majority of our citizens.
There is a saying, “There are no atheists in fox holes.” I have one, too, for the last three years: “There are no Libertarians or Republicans in an unemployment office, a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter.” Come to think of it, I’ve never seen one of my righty friends stand on principle and turn down a dirty socialist check when he needed one.
David Leite
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“We Need to Rally”
Nine point six percent of our country does not have a job right now. College graduates have been on waiting lists for jobs for an entire year, so what does that mean for those graduating this year? For black males it is almost 50 percent.
Huge corporations are killing small businesses. Take Wal-Mart, the biggest employer in the U.S., where most of their employees don’t make more than minimum wage. They [Wal-Mart] get the cheapest things they can find, exploiting small villages and people to do this.
Franklin D. Roosevelt created jobs while improving our country. Women were paid to sew clothing to give to hospitals and charities. Construction was carried on. Artists were paid to paint murals in post offices and other public facilities. Writers were paid to interview those suffering through the Depression to keep archives of our nation’s history. The iconic photographs of the Great Depression were taken by photographers who were paid by the government.
I agree with the idea that green technology is not the best solution, but the point of it isn’t solely to improve our world’s climate or keep your house temperature at 90 degrees—it’s to create jobs. To provide jobs for researchers, for construction workers who will build windmills so we are not so oil-dependent, so we will not continue to kill our own men and other innocent people.
And the foreclosure housing crisis was not just the fault of people who defaulted; it was [also due to] the government’s relaxed lending practices. Lenders encouraged people to take out a loan and buy a house. Prices of houses continued to rise and it seemed like a good investment for many. Lenders stopped doing serious background checks and anyone could get a loan. And it’s not just the people who lost their houses that were affected by this crisis. Investors from all over the world invested their money in mortgage-backed securities. Lastly, we are all taxpayers—not just big corporations.
Nothing is getting better. People’s debts are through the roof. Unemployment has continued to rise. We are in a serious war where people continue to die. There are more black men in jail than in college. Tuition costs are rising, making it difficult for people even to go to college—not that it matters because there are no jobs.
I don’t mean to sound hopeless, but we definitely need a change. We need to rally.
Tarah Llewellyn
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If Sanders Can Do It, Why Can’t the Others?
Abe Lincoln led the nation into Civil War to preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people. So is President Obama now willing to abandon what Lincoln fought for?
If the president allows himself to be blackmailed by Republican threats of obstruction, he will be surrendering the majority stakeholders of middle-and-working-class America to loss of their republic to an economic elite that bankrolled the GOP win in the last election with huge sums of money diverted from the tax base into their manipulatively grasping hands.
The abandonment of democracy makes all other issues of supposed importance nothing more than trinkets soon to be disposed of in the landfill of historic irrelevance.
President Lincoln became known in history as Honest Abe—this reflecting that a forthright public servant tries to tell the public what he thinks; in contrast, an opportunistic politician just tries to get the pubic to think what he tells them.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a forthright public servant standing in clear opposition to the continuance of the scam that stuffs huge sums of diverted tax revenues into the pockets of the hoarders of national wealth. These are the self-appointed elite who sit atop huge piles of wealth that they are not risking for American investment. But Republicans contend they will if greater sums of tax revenues are run off into their pockets (at least they will in lands with low standards of living and enslaved workers).
If armed with no more than New England grit and common sense, an Independent [like] Sen. Sanders can stand against this backroom White House/Republican tax scheme, perchance the majority in the Senate can exercise their constitutionally established responsibility and represent Us the People.
Sam Osborne
West Branch, Iowa
