In the spirit of full disclosure, let me admit again that I have a dog in this fight. Actually, I have several. I have family members in the auto industry; I think that allowing the south to offer lower wages, benefits and taxes to industries, not just foreign ones, to lure them south was a large part of the class war waged against those of us who have to get up in the morning and do something as opposed to the obscenely wealthy and their lapdogs; I find the idea that we import far more than we make while we're in the business of exporting raw materials to be frightening. We're on the wrong end a lot of ways...
In other words, I'm an American and not terribly proud of the people running this goddamn country. I'm not expecting manna, loaves, fishes and energy from him bouncing a basketball off inner-city asphalt, but things either will improve with a course correction, or we're all fucking doomed, and need to start learning French so we can move to Nova Scotia or Alberta as this fucking place implodes. (Oh, Canada , Canada is imploding, what with the invasion of the Robots and the Governor General locking Parliament. Never mind. Innuit --we need to learn Innuit. Except that area is melting...)
So I look at the various bailouts, and I get angrier and angrier. At myself, I admit, in large part, because these clowns the result of all of our indifference to economic and political reality. The fact is that the 14th Amendment didn't do a goddamn thing for economic justice, just for voting rights, and it still took 80 years to really make that happen. The blathering idiots in Wyoming, Alabama, South Carolina and other places are still tools of the moneyed interests. Most of the money is in the hands of the banks, and so the industrial sector that enabled us to be more than the fucking Cayman Islands with bigger lawns is behind the bankers in getting to the trough. Now, the foreign challengers to our own internal industry are further ahead than our own industry. So, I think what we see is a combination of sucking up to the truly rich and economic treason.
Treason. Odd word. But, the same damn thing is going on around the world, and the bankers are on top of the heap. The Mercedes, BMWs, Honda, Toyotas and Hyundais are slightly better off in their own countries than here, but not much. The Senators from Stuttgart, Munich, Seoul and Tokyo (DeMint, Shelby, McConnell, et al) and their statehouse cronies are bailing out those bastards by giving them sweetheart deals to entice them here, and then licking their balls to get them to stay. Granted, it's still cheaper to build a car in Korea than here, but not by much. As for the rest of them, we're a brown field in the terms of economic development. And the brownest of the fields are in Alabama...it costs a fuckofalot more to build a car in Stuttgart than in Boogaloosa, Alabama; or in Nagasaki than in California. Think about that last one, by the way. Even with the expenses of building stuff in California, it's cheaper to build and sell the car here than it is to build there and sell here. See, the bastards don't have to pay the freight to move the cars across all that ocean. Or the social security costs in Japan. Or the exhorbitant costs of real estate. They can just pass that all on to us. If the property taxes in California don't bother Toyota and Honda, who make a lot of cars here, California is a goddamn third world location to these people. If it was cheaper to make the shit in Kuala Lampur than here, that's where they'd make 'em. It probably is cheaper tp make a car sold in Kuala Lampur there than here, but...not cheaper to make one there and sell it here.
So, Gail Collins made a lot of sense to me today. We need to get beyond local interests and consider the common good. For the common good of the world, America needs to be strong, prosperous and principled. We have historically had high and low points in the principled regard, but that needs to be the goal. The American dream needs to be an attainable dream. I dream of replacing Keith Richard in the Stones, but it's attainable that I can learn to play in Drop G tuning.
The Right-Wing, Sell-out-to-the-Rich Germans and Japanese movement in the south is economic treason. Collins points out that when Jim DeMint babbles about riots in the streets over folks laid off in his state, they need to be prepared for some, oh, pushback...
It’s just too easy for lawmakers to dodge the tough vote by reminding their constituents that somebody else is getting more breaks than they are...Which somebody always is. If Senator DeMint’s constituents are going to riot over a bailout for the auto industry, they’ll wind up being met by tool-and-die makers waving torches and yelling about soybean subsidies. If the lawmakers from Alabama say their constituents do not want their tax money going to bail out Michigan, the people in Michigan are going to say that they never really enjoyed paying more taxes to the federal government than their state received in aid, while Alabama got a return of $1.61 on the dollar. And anytime a representative from the Great Plains opens his mouth, the people from New York are going to point out that while every state gets the same number of senators, there are more people waiting for a subway in Brooklyn in rush hour than inhabit all of Wyoming...Any mammal can obsess about fairness...The real human trick is to get past the quid pro quo and try to focus on the common good. Set a better example, guys. It’s two years until the next election.(AXE emphasis, but no snark.)
So there we are. Shelby, DeMint, McConnell et. al are goddamn lapdogs of the rich, ignorant assholes,and, of yeah, traitors. They were the Hallaleujah chorus to Bush's assualt on the constitution, and now they are selling out their countries to the economic and geo-political advantage of other countries. They are failing to represent the best interests of the nation and of their own constituents. Sounds like Treason to Me...so, stealing a piece of lyric from their own, albeit limited,intellectual quiver...
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason"
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