Let’s Be…Frank By Vi Ransel

Dandelion Salad

Crossposted at Thomas Paine’s Corner thanks, Jason.

By Vi Ransel
June 10, 2009

“This is exactly what Obama’s idol, Ronald Reagan, did with his starter’s pistol in the race to the bottom 30 years ago with the destruction of PATCO, which accelerated the financial warfare against the working class in America.”

Picture this. A man who owns a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, a private plane and a horse farm, a man who profited from investments in Chrysler and GMAC, a private equity manager worth over $600 million, who had a million dollars in shares of both Chrysler and GMAC… That man is telling US auto workers – no, he’s demanding – that they take a permanent, and HUGE, reduction in their living standard, which includes the immediate elimination of dental and optical care for hundreds of thousands of retirees and their dependents. That care was in their contract, and contracts are so, dontcha know, sacrosanct that CEOs of “underwater” financial institutions could not be asked politely to take smaller, multimillion dollar bonuses – because those bonuses were part of their contracts. And these were very same CEOs who had overseen the “drowning” of those financial institutions, but, no, they got to keep their obscene bonuses while retired auto workers must give up their teeth and their eyes. How’s THAT for a classless society? Yep. In America we have ——- no class. You betcha.

Classwar in America, the Ongoing Assault By Vi Ransel

Dandelion Salad

Crossposted at Thomas Paine’s Corner thanks, Jason.

By Vi Ransel
May 21, 2009

From the Gilded Age to Tea Bagger Rage, a Romp through the Recent Episodes of the Class War in America

Image: Capitalism by ~Cubist-Assassin64

Protectionism. Capitalists were all for it before they were against it. When manufacturing took place in America, when they paid workers enough to buy the products they produced, adding a tariff/tax/fee on to the cost of imported goods made by these same manufacturers’ competitors overseas, was fine. It just made sense. It was good business to prevent your domestic market from being flooded with cheaper goods from overseas, because that would lower domestic manufacturing’s ability to make enough money to stay in business. And this is exactly how the British and the Americans built their global empires.

But when “free trade” was elevated to the god of the marketplace, when American manufacturers had the ability to locate manufacturing overseas in order to take advantage (and I do mean take advantage) of “cheap labor platforms” – that is, to stand on the backs of poor people in other countries who had no choice but to work at a rate far below American workers, who, after all, were Americans and had come to expect a “fair” share of the wealth they created with their labor in the form of wages – well then, all bets were off.

Asculum

Dandelion Salad

Crossposted at Thomas Paine’s Corner thanks, Jason.

By Vi Ransel
1/1/09

Part One: The Plot Thickens
(or, Why Am I Not Surprised?)

(A Chicago story… A citizen walks into his alderman’s office looking for a job. “Who sent you?” a staffer asks. “Nobody” he replies. Says the staffer, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” Who sent Obama? In exactly four years he’s risen from an unknown state senator to president. That only happens when somebody sends for you. – Sam Smith)

The nature of his administration was evident
as he introduced his transition team and potential members of his cabinet.

The individuals selected are fixtures of the economic aristocracy
and the Washington Consensus establishment.

His Transitional Economic Advisory Board consists entirely
of members and representatives of the economic stratosphere –
CEOs, investment bankers, former SEC and Federal Reserve Chairs,
Clinton re-treads, DLC members, lobbyists, slumlords and billionaires.