The Greedy Fucks of the Chamber of Commerce

Those douchebags are paying a bunch of bespoke-suited thugs to run a disinformation campaign to discredit everyone who disagrees with them.

Really, how much more despicable can they be?

Of course, you won't see shit about this in the press. Certainly not the Washington Post, which has been transformed into little more than a house organ for the for-profit diploma mills. This won't be on the Comcast Nightly News, either.

We had better get a clue here. The corporations have pretty much stolen our government. There is less and less a sense of public service on the part of elected officials and upper levels of the executive branch, more a sense of grabbiness and loyalty to their own. That's why you will never see any serious investigation of the mortgage meltdown, other than a few sacrificial goats who were dishonest mortgage brokers and bankers at jerkwater rural banks.

The corporate media, especially the Wingnut bloviators, have been pounding and pounding into the heads of the sheeple that "government is evil." That thirty year line of propaganda ignores these facts:

- It wasn't government that sells adulterated and contaminated food.
- It wasn't government that pumped raw sewage from industrial plants into the rivers and lakes, contaminating water supplies.
- It wasn't government that poured billions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, devastating the forests of the Northeast.
- It wasn't government that put children to work in factories.
- It wasn't government that created the "killer smogs" that used to kill thousands of people each year.
- It wasn't government that has slowly been turning the Appalachian mountains into a lunar landscape.
- It wasn't government which put men into factories and mines without any safety equipment.
- It wasn't government that put lead into paint and gasoline.
- It wasn't government who denied women and minorities decent employment.
- It wasn't government that covered up toxic side effects of medications.

No, it wasn't. It was corporations that did all that and, to some degree, continue to do that. It was government, our government that made corporations stop doing most of that. It was government that required companies to issue safety equipment. It was government which made companies and utilities clean up their emissions. It was government that made employers stop the preferential hiring of white men.

Hell, it was government that mandated safer cars. If you have been in a bad car crash in the last couple of decades and walked away, you can be reasonably certain that if you had been in such a crash in the 1950s or 1960s, you would have gone right to the morgue. Every safety improvement since tempered glass was bitterly fought by the auto lobby. The most egregious example was Ford, of course, which could have done something about the exploding Pintos.

(Of course, government has had its own levels of fuckery, from above-ground nuclear testing to the Tuskegee Experiments.)

The corporations have never forgotten that they were once free to discriminate, to put workers in dangerous jobs and then throw them away when they were hurt. They haven't forgotten that they were once free to make dangerous products without fear of regulation. It didn't bother General Electric that they were once able to use the Hudson River as a PCB dumping ground. It didn't bother the auto companies that people could once tell what color they were painting the cars and trucks from the color of the river downstream of the auto plants. The companies have never forgotten that there was a day when they could treat their workers like shit. They want to maximize their short-term profits and they care not a whit who they hurt in the process.

And so, for the last thirty years, with the help of the hateful fucks in the GOP (and, to an increasing degree, Democrats), the companies have been on a campaign to roll back everything in their quest to destroy the middle class, to destroy the unions and to go back to the days of wage slavery. Republicans want to kill the Environmental Protection Agency because clean air and water are over-rated. They want to gut the Food & Drug Administration. Republicans want to take insurance regulation away from the states in the same way that they took banking regulation away from the banks (and we saw how well that has worked).

Thanks to Johnny Roberts and the Supremes, the corporations are now free to pour unlimited amounts of cash into elections to overwhelm any opposition to their agenda. Those justices were either ideologically bankrupt, they ere corrupt or they were idiots who could not foresee the fallout of their rulings (or a combination thereof).

The Republican party hates you, unless you happen to either have inherited wealth or you make your money from passive investments. If you work for a paycheck, they hate you and they want to make certain that your paycheck continues to shrink, as middle class pay has for the last few decades. The unsung reason why women entered the workforce in large numbers was that it took two paychecks to provide a reasonable standard of living, the kind of standard of living that one person could once provide.

Once a president said "ask not what your country can do you for, ask what you can do for your country." But that was in an era where government service was respected, when having a job that helped people was not regarded as a hateful occupation. Thanks to unrelenting propaganda from the Right, we got to the point where, when people asked what they could do for their country after a terrorist attack, a president actually said "go shopping." We got to the point that Republican lawmakers have begun to look upon disabled veterans as parasites, not as honorable men and women who have had their bodies and minds broken in service to their nation.

Republicans want to make certain that you will not be able to retire, ever, that you will have no choice to work at some soul-grinding job until you die. That is why they want to kill off Social Security and have "privatized" retirement accounts, which is code for letting the same greedy fucks who ripped off homeowners (and crashed our economy) rip off workers' retirement savings. The push to balance the federal budget plays into this, which is why all of the pain and suffering will be borne by the poor, the working class and what is left of the middle class. Perish the thought that the rich might also be made to bleed a little, no, it will be ground solely out of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

I have no hope that things will change anytime soon. Too many people have been brainwashed by corporate shills from Ronald Reagan in the 1970s to most of the current crop of thugs and tools running for the GOP `12 nomination.

The Republican party, the corporations and the uber-rich are turning this nation into a banana republic with a very large stratum of people who are either poor or just above the poverty level and a relatively tiny handful of really rich people who own most that there is to own. Because it's not enough for them to have ten or twenty million when they can have ten or a hundred times more.

There is a class war going on, all right. The rich are winning. And too many people on the losing side don't even realize that they are being beaten down.