Bob Ackley loves to complain about the increase in the cost of
 living, what does he think of this? Not only did he not get any
 real COLA, but probably won't again, maybe never. If the right
 wing has their way.

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  America's Shameful Leadership

 Wednesday 27 July 2011
 by: Jim Hightower

 OK, Barack Obama has not exactly turned out to be Mount Rushmore
 material, but -- good God! -- the petulant pettiness of
 right-wing Republican congressional leaders has turned them
 into a national embarrassment.

 America has big needs right now. But those needs are not even
 being addressed, because little whiney ideologues like Eric
 Cantor, the GOP's House majority leader, keep throwing hissy
 fits, demanding that they get their way, or there'll be no way.

 Of course, their way -- on everything from tax policy to Wall
 Street regulation -- is always the corporate way. Their
 plutocratic theories were exactly what was tried throughout
 George W's eight-year reign, and they failed spectacularly. Yet
 Cantor & Crew are now pushing the same nonsense -- the very
 policies that caused America's economic crash, which continues
 to crush grassroots people. "But it's ideologically correct,"
 cries Little Eric, "so we and the Koch brothers won't stop
 screaming until you give us more of it."

 They are so insanely obsessed with extremist anti-government
 dogma that they have even hitched their star to the reviled
 Lords of Wall Street -- the only group in America with a lower
 public approval rating than that of Congress itself!

 Bankers are furious that Democrats created a new regulatory
 agency last year with real clout to protect consumers from the
 assorted rip-offs and frauds that banks keep inventing. So, in a
 perverse political reflex, Republicans have rushed to protect
 Wall Street's gougers from us gougees, locking arms (as well as
 their minds) in a ridiculous "Save-the-Poor-Bankers" stand.

 Stamping their tiny feet, they say they'll block Obama's
 nominee to head the agency until Democrats let them rewrite the
 law to make the agency toothless. In fact, they've declared that
 they'll block anyone that Obama nominates, no matter how
 qualified.

 Great -- a government of dogmatists, by temper tantrum, for
 corporate elites. How pathetic.

 Meanwhile, both the GOP Congress and the Obama White House
 continue to ignore America's greatest economic need: good jobs.
 Beaucoup of them. Now.

 As Bob Dylan famously wrote, "You don't need a weatherman to
 know which way the wind blows." Especially when the wind is
 right in your face, howling at gale force. While Washington
 fiddles with the knobs and levers of budget reduction, America's
 great working class is being blown down by harsh economic winds.
 Our country's political and financial elites, sitting in the
 comfort of their power centers, however, don't seem to see, hear
 or care. If the elites just looked around, here are just a few
 of the real-life indicators that would hit them right in the
 face:

  * In Central Texas, a surge in poverty is now severely straining the
    area food bank, which is struggling with more than a 50 percent
    increase in demand in the past three years.

  * Arizona, which has added only 4,000 jobs in the past year, has 10
    unemployed job seekers for every opening -- and 45,000 Arizonans are
    set to lose their jobless benefits in the next few months.

  * By the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the median white
    household in America had lost $36,000 in net worth. Worse, the
    median African-American household had lost 83 percent of its net
    worth, which is now down to the financially perilous level of less
    than $2,200.

  * While CEOs of major corporations have jacked up their pay by a
    fourth since the recession technically ended in 2009, average wages
    for workers have stagnated. Meanwhile, the price of such basics as
    food and gasoline have risen relentlessly. Real wages today are 1.6
    percent lower than a year ago.

 So, who is Washington working to help? Not the hard-hit workaday
 majority, but those pampered CEOs, who're now averaging more
 than $9 million a year in pay, and the Wall Street hedge-fund
 barons who are hauling in as much as $5 billion each!

 Suffering from what appears to be incurable ethicalitis, these
 moneyed narcissists are demanding that officials of both parties
 make devastating budget cuts in programs that help working
 families, while also insisting that their own lavish fortunes be
 spared from even the slightest dings.

 What a shameful time in our history! Can't America do better
 than this?

 Copyright 2011 Creators.com


BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

... Solve America's economic problems, get rid of free trade and republicans.
--- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]
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