Bankers Are Ball Players

It is as though Dear Leader is in a race with Republicans to prove who owes the stronger allegiance to our corporate overlords. Dear Leader compared bankers' bonuses to footballers' paychecks to prove that heading up Goldman Sachs is just another form of popular, beer swilling entertainment. Don't get mad at banksters, they're just regular guys like jocks earning tens of millions a year. They're all just like you and me. Well, they aren't actually, they are rich and you and I aren't. That's a big difference.

We told them the wealth would 'trickle down'!

And if Republicans get their way the difference will be even more crystal clear. It has been announced that Medicare and Social Security are collectivist programs (think Communism) and need to be abolished. Jolly good, once they get rid of unions the whole globalization scam will be complete. Factory jobs are long gone to Indonesia and China via Mexico. Union scale can't exist if unions aren't there to maintain a pretense of middle class aspirations and doctors and lawyers and people won't have any clients if we can't afford to hire them. This is definitely going to be a brave new world. And remember how our homes would be our old age economic security blankets? One in five mortgages are underwater and northern cities are turning into ghost towns. So much for wealth trickling down.

Ronald Reagan started this dive to the bottom and it's been gathering speed for years. They sent jobs to Mexico on the grounds shareholders would make larger profits if workers were paid less. Then Mexicans got too greedy and factories went to the Far East where they work cheaper (thanks to the Communist government, our friend) and lo and behold the stock market in which we were all share holders, and were going to be investing our Social Security went south. Bill Clinton started down the path to abolishing welfare so that now when we need it most with millions out of work, there are no programs. They govern us with fear and it's working.

So what's the next step? Well there isn't much left is there. The Supreme Court has opened the doors to full fledged corporate purchase of elections, jobs are evaporating even as the economy "recovers" and now we are told we have to balance state budgets on the backs of workers with union contracts.

I find it odd, not that the rich want to shift the burden of paying for their profligacy on the people, but that the people accept this imposition willingly. There has been talk of Greece getting the big austerity make over and did you see what happened? Greeks massed on the streets, said "No thanks!" quite peacefully and suddenly a bail out package appeared. Here in the US we first paid to save the banksters who thanked us by awarding themselves huge "contractual" bonuses. They rejected wholesale any idea of a return to stringent government oversight and regulation, and when Dear Leader sounded like he might mean it they rapped him over the knuckles to bring him back into line. Hence the equation: banksters equal footballers.

I cannot help but think that were we the people taxed unfairly by the British those hundreds of years ago we'd have doffed our caps, tugged our forelocks and dutifully said "Thankee, sir," and "God Bless King George" and taken our medicine like obedient sheep. But of course nowadays no one remembers their collective past, and without history you can't make a coherent narrative for the present. Form a single line when they come for your union card, your Social Security benefits and your Medicare card. And please, don't embarrass yourself by stepping out of line.