Building dreams

Hopefully, We The People can Rebuild the American Dream. We cannot wait for a hero to do the hard work for us. Inequality in America hasn't been this bad since the great depression and Brzezinski warns us of the consequences. Inequality is a fertile ground for corruption and crime and civil discontent.

At least Murdoch is facing some heat and maybe loosing some revenue for unethical behavior by his media monster in the UK. Media Matters is who Fox is gunning for which is why we should support them.

Once again I realize how corrupted corporate media has become. MSNBC may be the most liberal of the corporate infotainers, but when I tuned in to Morning Joe I heard the same old revenue vs spending cuts debate. It may be a vast improvement from six months or a year prior when the whole issue was solely framed as a spending problem. Some of us realized that we should be speaking of the revenue problem and I'm glad to see that Jeffery Sachs is speaking the liberal truth, but very, very few understand that we have a tariff problem. Yeah, tariffs are part of revenues, but more importantly they are the part of trade policy that affects where manufacturing is employed.

We really shouldn't vilify corporations for shipping our jobs overseas because they are just responding to trade policies. Before Reagan took office tariffs were about 20% and now they are about 2%. A picture is worth a thousand words so just check out this chart. It might have been posted by a liberal but he didn't make it. Here's another chart from a different source. They look about the same and allude to a story linked below.

So I thought that I should do a little more homework on the matter and found Hartmann's Rebooting the American Dream, chapter one. He claimed that Alexander Hamilton's 11 point plan could easily be found on the web and it was.

This caught my attention, "Had the Founders, like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, or Ulysses S. Grant, applied for loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), they would have been denied: all of them believed in high tariffs and a heavy control of foreign investment and considered “free trade” absurd." - Hartmann's Rebooting....
What I found so interesting was mention of the IMF and the role of that institution in promoting the interests of big money and not the common man.

Absurd is the republican assertion that they're concerned about American jobs. They're more concerned about the wallets of billionaires and keeping loopholes open so the top 1% can maintain and build more wealth than the bottom 90% of Americans. The American Journal of Public Health just released an article about the ill effects of inequity.

And then there's TAPI....security and insecurity

America, home of the con, is it worth working for? I just love a good chart so here's one depicting the Bush tax cuts.