I have often maintained that if you want to find the "why" of something, you need to look beneath what people say, to their motivations, because these are often the real reasons for their words and actions, as opposed to what they are saying.
In politics, motivation is relatively easy to discover, and I'll talk about that in a moment.
But in the first place, please don't think that this is really an argument for or against a particular political candidate. I'm going to discuss him (Mr. Trump), though, because he represents a sea change in the way the US acts. You will certainly decide what you plan to do by the first part of November, if he's a nominee. Please vote your conscience. Always.
In the first place, let me talk briefly about Mitt Romney. I voted for him in the last election, because I didn't like the other choice. I believed, and history seems to bear me out, that Mr. Obama was not good for the country--not good for citizens' rights, not good for minorities, not good for our nation's business, not good for the military. So I voted for the "less worst thing"--Mr. Romney. I've grown accustomed to voting for what I believe is the lesser of two evils, because the candidates have really not been much different, however they represented themselves, and whatever their press releases said.
However with Mr. Trump (and Mr. Sanders, on the other side of the aisle), there's a huge change coming.
Mr. Trump is avowedly a nationalist. In other words, he plans to act in the best interests of the citizens of the US (assuming this is not just campaign rhetoric). Which would be us. You and me. This really is a first in a long time.
For generations, elections have been bought and sold with lies and bribes. I know this because of multiple sets of facts, but let's use Obamacare as an example. I'm not as much against it as some of the people I know, but imagine a system in which insurers are guaranteed money, in which the pharmaceutical companies can charge what they please, and in which the American taxpayer is required to purchase insurance to pay them. That's Obamacare in a nutshell. There are cost savings, and people can have insurance without reference to their pre-existing conditions, but Obamacare is a system almost wholly made up for the benefit of the people who put in the money to get it passed. Any benefits we get are side benefits. If you doubt my words, look at what happened to insurance company stocks, and pharmaceutical stocks, once it was passed.
This leads me to a conclusion. We will be lied to by the politicians. Most of them, maybe all of them. Mr Sanders is complicit in this, as is Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Sanders because he promises a minimum wage, which is set up to make low paying jobs well paying, and Mrs. Clinton because she is really a creature of the people who pay her, Goldman Sachs being a good example. The Republican candidates are almost all the same.
If you put them all, Republican and Democrat, in a huge basket, and bread them and fry them, you wouldn't be able to taste the difference. They are virtually the same, despite what you hear.
We will be lied to because we don't bother to follow the money, since money is the chief requirement to get elected in these days. The various pundits also seek money, and they want to be "in on the party," so they help elect people they like--or at least dislike less.
So what happens if we follow the money, in say, Mitt Romney's diatribe against Donald Trump?
Very simply, Romney is a creature of the stock market, and of his former company, Bain Capital. What Bain Capital did was to purchase and sell off companies that it deemed "unprofitable;" the jobs in those companies often disappeared, because one of the ways you make a company "more efficient" is to "outsource" your workers (i. e., you have your stuff made in other countries).
Mr. Trump is very much against (at least in his campaign words) against the very things that made Bain Capital and Mr. Romney rich, and indeed made all the moneymakers on Wall Street wealthy beyond their dreams.
Mr. Trump is FOR U. S. citizens getting jobs from American companies. He's FOR removing, if not reducing, the incredible impact of foreign workers on jobs here in the US.
This, whatever else it is, will be a giant shock to the system. "Bring jobs back here? NO WAY!!! Make companies actually pay a living wage to their workers, HERE, rather than outsourcing everything from sweatpants to cell phones? NEVER!" That's what all the stock market folks are screaming, giving money hand over fist to whoever else they can find to keep the status quo going.
I am old enough to have seen the slow erosion of virtually all the moneymaking jobs in this country, except for finance, technology development, energy production, medicine, and government. The companies, by the way, who've been at the forefront of this are just about all against Mr. Trump, if not vocally, at least quietly, and they are donating money like crazy to whomever they think can challenge him.
The thing that terrifies them all is that this person, who has made his money locally (yes, I know he or his contractors employed foreign workers, but real estate is by definition local), actually HAS THE MONEY to fight them. And he's doing it.
So my point is this. We need people, whomever they may be, who are willing to tell the truth in politics--the truth being that it is NOT good to invite people from another country into our country when we don't know who they are; The truth being that we need good jobs here for US citizens, and no amount of welfare, unemployment insurance, or fast food jobs that pay $15 an hour will replace the good jobs lost to outsourcing. After all, who pays for welfare? YOU DO. Wouldn't it be better for the country to restore the jobs that we lost over the decades with good new jobs, and a nationalist policy that puts us first in trade negotiations, etc. than to have a host of fast food or retail jobs paying $15 an hour?
When I was a little guy, my parents bought and paid for two homes on my Dad's salary alone. They owned cars. They provided food. We had lobster sometimes (San Diego had a clean ocean then!), and we always had fresh fruit and vegetables. All this on ONE paycheck until I was about 15, when Mom went to work in real estate. This was the real world back then. The country made its own stuff. We decided who would come into our country.
Please don't tell me it can't be like this again. That's been the mantra for decades, that we "needed to enter the global economy," that we needed to "once again become a nation of immigrants," that we were "going to enter times of change," that America would be OK, and that people would "find new jobs."
Sorry. It was all a smokescreen, beginning about 1964, and it was almost all lies. The same people who told you, "We have to have less expensive foreign products" laughed at us as they cashed their ever-larger paychecks, and got us all to vote for people who systematically destroyed our way of life. And I'm NOT just talking about one political party or the other. It was, unfortunately everybody. That's the sad part.
Perhaps saddest of all, though, with the political guarantees that they have of free speech, is that the various news organizations did not have the courage to stand up against the lying bribery, and to say, "enough!" In fact, with the rise of the internet, and the availability of information, they all railed against anyone who challenged their hegemony, and called them "Bloggers...not real reporters," and the like--but if you followed the money, you'd find the same thing to be true of them as of the politicians. They were not after truth. They wanted the same "in" as the moneymen had. Truth was not just secondary. They created an untrue "reality" in the service of money.
How do we fix this? Is it Donald Trump? I really don't know. I DO know that if we maintain the course we've been on, we'll be a third world country much sooner than we realize. Mr. Trump, for all his faults, represents a genuine change in the way America does business. This, at least, commends him to me. Not one of the other candidates really proposes to do that. Even Mr. Sanders proposes "more of the same," meaning, "tax more people so that folks can get a free lunch;" (I'm for a free education, by the way, but an education that really means something, not an education that focuses on useless information. I'm for reasonably priced medical care, which is something we still don't have now, after years of Obamacare). I'm for a lot of things that probably won't happen for a while--but we have a chance.
What I want is that very elusive person: an HONEST politician--someone who works on behalf of his own constituents, and who has the commonsense to see that what we need to do is institute change that will give our country back to us.
Vote for whomever you think is most likely to do that, and you will give yourself and your children a shot at the future.
In politics, motivation is relatively easy to discover, and I'll talk about that in a moment.
But in the first place, please don't think that this is really an argument for or against a particular political candidate. I'm going to discuss him (Mr. Trump), though, because he represents a sea change in the way the US acts. You will certainly decide what you plan to do by the first part of November, if he's a nominee. Please vote your conscience. Always.
In the first place, let me talk briefly about Mitt Romney. I voted for him in the last election, because I didn't like the other choice. I believed, and history seems to bear me out, that Mr. Obama was not good for the country--not good for citizens' rights, not good for minorities, not good for our nation's business, not good for the military. So I voted for the "less worst thing"--Mr. Romney. I've grown accustomed to voting for what I believe is the lesser of two evils, because the candidates have really not been much different, however they represented themselves, and whatever their press releases said.
However with Mr. Trump (and Mr. Sanders, on the other side of the aisle), there's a huge change coming.
Mr. Trump is avowedly a nationalist. In other words, he plans to act in the best interests of the citizens of the US (assuming this is not just campaign rhetoric). Which would be us. You and me. This really is a first in a long time.
For generations, elections have been bought and sold with lies and bribes. I know this because of multiple sets of facts, but let's use Obamacare as an example. I'm not as much against it as some of the people I know, but imagine a system in which insurers are guaranteed money, in which the pharmaceutical companies can charge what they please, and in which the American taxpayer is required to purchase insurance to pay them. That's Obamacare in a nutshell. There are cost savings, and people can have insurance without reference to their pre-existing conditions, but Obamacare is a system almost wholly made up for the benefit of the people who put in the money to get it passed. Any benefits we get are side benefits. If you doubt my words, look at what happened to insurance company stocks, and pharmaceutical stocks, once it was passed.
This leads me to a conclusion. We will be lied to by the politicians. Most of them, maybe all of them. Mr Sanders is complicit in this, as is Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Sanders because he promises a minimum wage, which is set up to make low paying jobs well paying, and Mrs. Clinton because she is really a creature of the people who pay her, Goldman Sachs being a good example. The Republican candidates are almost all the same.
If you put them all, Republican and Democrat, in a huge basket, and bread them and fry them, you wouldn't be able to taste the difference. They are virtually the same, despite what you hear.
We will be lied to because we don't bother to follow the money, since money is the chief requirement to get elected in these days. The various pundits also seek money, and they want to be "in on the party," so they help elect people they like--or at least dislike less.
So what happens if we follow the money, in say, Mitt Romney's diatribe against Donald Trump?
Very simply, Romney is a creature of the stock market, and of his former company, Bain Capital. What Bain Capital did was to purchase and sell off companies that it deemed "unprofitable;" the jobs in those companies often disappeared, because one of the ways you make a company "more efficient" is to "outsource" your workers (i. e., you have your stuff made in other countries).
Mr. Trump is very much against (at least in his campaign words) against the very things that made Bain Capital and Mr. Romney rich, and indeed made all the moneymakers on Wall Street wealthy beyond their dreams.
Mr. Trump is FOR U. S. citizens getting jobs from American companies. He's FOR removing, if not reducing, the incredible impact of foreign workers on jobs here in the US.
This, whatever else it is, will be a giant shock to the system. "Bring jobs back here? NO WAY!!! Make companies actually pay a living wage to their workers, HERE, rather than outsourcing everything from sweatpants to cell phones? NEVER!" That's what all the stock market folks are screaming, giving money hand over fist to whoever else they can find to keep the status quo going.
I am old enough to have seen the slow erosion of virtually all the moneymaking jobs in this country, except for finance, technology development, energy production, medicine, and government. The companies, by the way, who've been at the forefront of this are just about all against Mr. Trump, if not vocally, at least quietly, and they are donating money like crazy to whomever they think can challenge him.
The thing that terrifies them all is that this person, who has made his money locally (yes, I know he or his contractors employed foreign workers, but real estate is by definition local), actually HAS THE MONEY to fight them. And he's doing it.
So my point is this. We need people, whomever they may be, who are willing to tell the truth in politics--the truth being that it is NOT good to invite people from another country into our country when we don't know who they are; The truth being that we need good jobs here for US citizens, and no amount of welfare, unemployment insurance, or fast food jobs that pay $15 an hour will replace the good jobs lost to outsourcing. After all, who pays for welfare? YOU DO. Wouldn't it be better for the country to restore the jobs that we lost over the decades with good new jobs, and a nationalist policy that puts us first in trade negotiations, etc. than to have a host of fast food or retail jobs paying $15 an hour?
When I was a little guy, my parents bought and paid for two homes on my Dad's salary alone. They owned cars. They provided food. We had lobster sometimes (San Diego had a clean ocean then!), and we always had fresh fruit and vegetables. All this on ONE paycheck until I was about 15, when Mom went to work in real estate. This was the real world back then. The country made its own stuff. We decided who would come into our country.
Please don't tell me it can't be like this again. That's been the mantra for decades, that we "needed to enter the global economy," that we needed to "once again become a nation of immigrants," that we were "going to enter times of change," that America would be OK, and that people would "find new jobs."
Sorry. It was all a smokescreen, beginning about 1964, and it was almost all lies. The same people who told you, "We have to have less expensive foreign products" laughed at us as they cashed their ever-larger paychecks, and got us all to vote for people who systematically destroyed our way of life. And I'm NOT just talking about one political party or the other. It was, unfortunately everybody. That's the sad part.
Perhaps saddest of all, though, with the political guarantees that they have of free speech, is that the various news organizations did not have the courage to stand up against the lying bribery, and to say, "enough!" In fact, with the rise of the internet, and the availability of information, they all railed against anyone who challenged their hegemony, and called them "Bloggers...not real reporters," and the like--but if you followed the money, you'd find the same thing to be true of them as of the politicians. They were not after truth. They wanted the same "in" as the moneymen had. Truth was not just secondary. They created an untrue "reality" in the service of money.
How do we fix this? Is it Donald Trump? I really don't know. I DO know that if we maintain the course we've been on, we'll be a third world country much sooner than we realize. Mr. Trump, for all his faults, represents a genuine change in the way America does business. This, at least, commends him to me. Not one of the other candidates really proposes to do that. Even Mr. Sanders proposes "more of the same," meaning, "tax more people so that folks can get a free lunch;" (I'm for a free education, by the way, but an education that really means something, not an education that focuses on useless information. I'm for reasonably priced medical care, which is something we still don't have now, after years of Obamacare). I'm for a lot of things that probably won't happen for a while--but we have a chance.
What I want is that very elusive person: an HONEST politician--someone who works on behalf of his own constituents, and who has the commonsense to see that what we need to do is institute change that will give our country back to us.
Vote for whomever you think is most likely to do that, and you will give yourself and your children a shot at the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment