A "Bold Prediction"

According to a headline on the Huffington Post Mitt Romney has made a “bold prediction,” namely that by the end of his first term (should he become President) the unemployment rate would go down from 8% to 6%. I don’t know how bold that really is, given the prediction that the rate will be down to 6% by 2014 anyway. It does, however, raise an interesting possibility. It could be true, for example, no matter what else happens because if Romney becomes President the Republicans would probably not continue to block every attempt to bring it down (as they have done in the case of Obama). Of course if Romney sticks to the course he has so far suggested, including the Ryan budget, it will certainly not come down at all, but as no one knows for sure what Romney will do, as he changes his positions more often than his underwear, anything might happen. My personal bet is that if Romney did somehow become President, things would get much worse than they are even now, for the middle class and the working poor, that is. They would no doubt get much better for the already bloated rich and the corporations already making record profits. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, it would not be too difficult to get out of our depression, but of course Republicans would never agree to it as long as Obama is President.

Interestingly, just now as I am writing this, I received a robo-call that began with the statement that “President Obama’s attempts have failed…” These bastards, I fear, may get away with this completely false claim. It’s not a false claim in the sense that unemployment still remains much too high, but it is certainly false to blame it on Obama as the Republicans who have voted “no” on every attempt to make things better, are truly to blame. This is not merely my opinion but is, in fact, a matter of record. I do not understand why the Obama people do not point this out in every other sentence. The sad thing is, if Republicans had cooperated in governing the country, as the minor party is supposed to do, and has basically always done, the unemployment rate would almost certainly be close to 6% already. They have wasted more than 3 years in their obsessive desire to insure an Obama failure. As I have said before, for one party to simply refuse to participate in governing is unprecedented. It should not go unpunished. If voters have been paying attention this punishment would come at the ballot box in November. Unhappily, American votes don’t pay attention, half don’t even bother to vote, and those that do have been subjected to so much propaganda from the corporate controlled media they might as well not vote at all. The American public, by and large, seems to be fundamentally uninterested in seriously governing themselves, as long as that attitude prevails, we can’t realistically expect anything better than we get.

I read somewhere that some of our Congresspersons display language skills at the 8th grade level. I think that is actually remarkable as their mental ages seem to be much closer to those of 4th graders. There are some real “winners” out there among the Republican right, as for example the Preacher who has announced to his congregation that Gays and Lesbians should be put in concentration camps, fed by food drops, until they eventually all die out (as they do not reproduce). Or the “Bubba” who is proud to have made abortion impossible in his state so that poor women who can’t afford health care can go back to the coat-hanger method. Then there is the remarkable James DeMint who has announced that anti-hate legislation is “Orwellian.”

And we must not forget the marvelous American justice system where an illegally armed adult male shoots and kills an unarmed teen-age boy walking home with tea and skittles and is allowed to go free simply by pleading self-defense, but a mother, threatened by an abusive husband, shoots one warning round into the ceiling, hurts no one, and gets sentenced to 20 years in prison. The police have been handcuffing and tasing seven year-olds and grandmothers, our prisons are filled over capacity with non violent offender s whose only “crime” is having smoked or possessed some marijuana. Shooting unarmed teen-agers, especially Black ones appears to be becoming a national pastime, violence against women is not considered worth bothering about, a man who threatened to shoot Obama had his 70 weapon gun collection returned to him, certain people are no longer allowed to vote (if they might vote democratic), and so it goes. I think all of us who trace our ancestry to immigrants should “self-deport” ourselves and leave the country to the Indians who knew how to manage it. Surely things must be much better back where we all originally came from, hahahahaha (appropriate hysterical laughter please). Never in the history of the world has there ever been a species more inept, short-sighted, greedy, evil, and despicable than homo sapiens. There is a tiny, tiny ray of hope. A 17 year-old boy is suing the United States Government over its failure to protect the environment. I sincerely hope he wins.

We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property.... Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see and nobody calls the cops.

Paul Brooks