Thursday March 28, 2024
SNc Channels:

Search
About Salem-News.com

 

Feb-22-2010 10:45printcomments

Forget the Tea Parties, Set up Coffee Klatches Instead

It’s now long past the time for ordinary Americans to join together, or die economically.

Join on Die
Salem-New.com

(CALGARY, Alberta) - If you are an ordinary American you’re in deep trouble. And if you continue to sit on your hands not only will the trouble not go away, it’s going to get worse.

If you’re a conservative and you’re not rich or well off, you’re a sucker. The U.S. is going to hell in a handbasket and, in the old saying, unless you’re part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

I come to this conclusion not because I am against the U.S. and want to see it fail, but because I read things and gather information that conservatives at the lower levels ignore and deny.

I read the New York Times every day and they’ve got about 90% of it right. I know they are a liberal-leaning paper and thus an enemy of conservatives but if you believe that, you have some explaining to do. Here are just a few comments from the last few days.

Feb 20, Peter S. Goodman wrote an article: “Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs”. The title is self-explanatory, but here are a couple of quotes.

The current recession is leaving more people behind than previous recessions because not enough jobs are being created to both give work to the young people entering the job market, and give replacement work to those who have been laid off.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come”.

Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks”.

In being predominantly anti-union, American workers are the authors of their own misfortune.

Also on Feb 20 Thomas Friedman wrote: “The Fat Lady Has Sung”, where he writes that after 70 fat years, the lean years have now arrived.

His argument is simple: For decades ordinary people have been getting things from the government. Now the table has turned and people are going to have to start paying for (or paying more) for things that have been taken for granted. He uses the example of Tracy, CA., where residents are now going to be charged for 911 calls. They can pay an annual $48 fee for any number of 911 calls or, if they decide to take their chances, they’ll be charged $300 for each call for help.

Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag”.

Feb 21, Nobel economist Paul Krugman wrote “The Bankruptcy Boys”. His argument is simple. Since Reagan, conservatives have been pushing the idea of smaller and smaller government until, in the words of Grover Nordquist, “we can drown it in the bathtub”.

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative solution to big government has been to “starve the beast”. Create a huge deficit so that “spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

The result, writes Krugman is that: “ Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power”.

And if you, as a conservative, vote that way, you’re playing right into their hands and they have exactly zero interest in the welfare of you and your family.

Forget the tea parties. They’re about anger, blaming, 1776, the Constitution and a whole bunch of myths that won’t do anything to fix the country. They are also divisive and if allowed to grow, will rip the country apart. It will be your own doing.

The alternative to a tea party is a coffee-klatch which is a positive, progressive, communal way for Americans to heal the country. I hearken back to Benjamin Franklin on this point (you may have heard of him). In order for the original United States to survive he said the colonies had to band together. He made his point with this editorial cartoon during the French and Indian Wars (displayed at the top of this story).

It’s now long past the time for ordinary Americans to join together, or die economically.


Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class — a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably on a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves — writing and trying to make the world a better place




Comments Leave a comment on this story.
Name:

All comments and messages are approved by people and self promotional links or unacceptable comments are denied.



Anonymous February 23, 2010 5:57 pm (Pacific time)

Canadian Medical Klatches needed? "Gold Medal Mess Health Care: The premier of Newfoundland had heart surgery this month in Florida, bypassing his country's state-run system for American medicine. If Canadian care is so good, shouldn't he have stayed home? 'This is my heart, it's my health, it's my choice," said Danny Williams, who told his province's NTV news that the mitral valve procedure he had at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami "was not offered to me in Canada." The Toronto Globe and Mail reported Tuesday that Canadian cardiologists have "fervently" countered that such surgery "is available in his home country." But Williams, who maintains he has "the utmost confidence in our health care system," has said that "I had to leave the province because it was recommended to me by my own doctors that for this particular type of surgery I should leave the province." It's unlikely we'll know all the factors that led to Williams' decision to be cared for in America. This we do know: Tens of thousands of Canadians buried in their country's sometimes deadly waiting lists seek treatment outside the border each year. One group of patients that regularly travels to the U.S. for care is expectant mothers. In 2007, at least 40 mothers left British Columbia alone to deliver in America because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. That year, a Calgary woman had her quadruplets in the modest-size city of Great Falls, Mont., due to a shortage of neonatal beds in her hometown of 1 million." I guess this will probably be spiked because it disrupts the medical mythmaking. Of course millions of Yanks, and growing numbers, know. (Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...

People reading your post, Mark, are liable to draw the conclusion that America is doing fine and that it is Canada that is in trouble. You're obviously one of the well-off, even rich, conservatives who wants to maintain the divide-and-rule politics in America through misdirection.


Anonymous February 23, 2010 9:45 am (Pacific time)

Unions have served their purpose, but now they have become a serious problem that adversely impacts our economy. Those of you who think "socialism" is a good process to pursue, just remember the endgame boils to:
"Socialism: A Master Class and a Lower Class... nothing in between!"

You know that corporate America has no interest in your welfare. Are you depending on the government to look after your interests? You've been brainwashed into believing that people banding together is a bad thing. Socialism is what people make of it. They choose it themselves and make it work. It's not like capitalism--imposed on a population from above by the business class.


LOL! February 22, 2010 9:00 pm (Pacific time)

The unions are the ones who drove all the unionized jobs offshore. Joining and supporting a union, is a sure-fire means of killing your industry. Union members = lemmings racing for the cliff.

It's a word I am reluctant to use, but your comment shows how stupid Americans are. It's because the U.S. has so few unions, that the jobs went overseas. If the corporations had to deal with a unified, powerful workforce, they couldn't have gone ahead and looked out for their own interests alone. They would have had to consider the workforce.

And you know nothing of history. All the benefits of the workplace that you take for granted came about because of the men and women who were maimed, mutiliated and murdered in the 19th and early 20th centuries for the workplace benefit of all. If you as a single individual think you have any power up against a giant corporation, then you're dreaming in technicolor.


Hank Ruark February 22, 2010 1:23 pm (Pacific time)

Old Ben also warned: "We must hang together or we will assuredly hang separately." It's that "separateness" that allows such as the tea party militia-minded and conspiracy-driven consorts to count on keeping realistic cogitation by competent citizens from civilizing the complex consequences in which we find ourselves caught ever since the Reagan role as actor playing President. Cooperation can continue the transformative hope millions felt in vote/mandate only one year old, demanding Patience, Persistence and People-Power. First step is to force full payment for obstructionism perpetrated in lieu of real political participation by the same posturing GOPster/radical cabal continuing colossally consequential confusions at any cost to commonweal.

[Return to Top]
©2024 Salem-News.com. All opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Salem-News.com.


Articles for February 21, 2010 | Articles for February 22, 2010 | Articles for February 23, 2010

Tribute to Palestine and to the incredible courage, determination and struggle of the Palestinian People. ~Dom Martin

Support
Salem-News.com:



googlec507860f6901db00.html
Sean Flynn was a photojournalist in Vietnam, taken captive in 1970 in Cambodia and never seen again.