POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY
Americans are among the West's hardest-working people.
Those with good quality jobs - analysts, managers,
specialists of every kind - often put in 12-hour days.
And America's great corporations expect this as a matter of
course.
This class of Americans almost always have both husband and
wife working to even be able to keep up a good, middle-class lifestyle.
It is a fact that per-capita, real earnings for America's
middle class have fallen for decades.
Those without good jobs - and there are tens of millions -
work 2 or 3 part-time jobs to make a living, and because their work is all
part-time, they have no benefits at all.
In some companies who pay quite poorly - notably Wal-Mart or
McDonald’s – workers are sometimes directed to social assistance agencies for a
scrap of help.
The actual number of unemployed is tremendously understated
in unemployment stats because those who have given up actively looking are not
counted.
In general, workers' benefits - family leave, child care,
holidays, sick days, vacation, and others - are pretty much the stingiest in
the West.
In addition, in most poor areas of the country, the public
schools are unbelievably poor in quality so that the young are not
well-equipped for the future.
These words out of Bush's mouth show what a hopeless,
uninformed clown he is. Remember, his rich daddy had never seen the inside of
supermarket until he went to one on a campaign stop, and he just blubbered over
the way groceries were checked out by bar code, something ordinary Americans
had known for years.
What a pathetic group of candidates is running for this
dumb-show election.
Rude loudmouths, crooks, ignorant, and privileged jerks –
but all of them dedicated to a stronger America, endless mountains of spending
on the military.
And all any of them will do to help their own people at home
is preach to them.
America today is all about its gigantic military and
intelligence apparatus and trying to undermine every state in the world who disagrees
with its intentions. The only beneficiaries are those institutions and
monstrously-greedy corporations they serve and protect.
Oligarchs in America? You bet, and probably more so than in
any other country other than Israel, America’s miniature replica colony in the
Middle East.
Working Americans get nothing, no government attention, no
real help, no policies to improve things - just dumb, almost-mocking words like
those of Jeb Bush.
It is a brutal place to live in many ways, a fact often under-appreciated
by observers abroad.
___________________________________________
Response to a comment:
You are not thinking or have a very odd sense of humor.
Americans should make use of their guns? How?
Against the best-equipped armed forces on the planet?
Against a well-equipped secondary army called the National
Guard based in every state?
Against a huge, belligerent and heavily-militarized police
in every city? Police with an international reputation for violence who kill
somewhere on the order of 1,000 to 1,500 citizens each year as it is?
Even the most cuckoo American must understand in private that
all talk of "resistance” or “rebellion" or “demanding their rights” is
stupidly naive.
The real, unspoken reason for America's high ownership of
guns is fear of its black population, a group greater in size then the entire
population of California. Just as slaveholders in 1850s went to bed each night
with a gun and/or a dagger under the pillow, Americans today still do.
And vehicles like SUVs and massive pick-up trucks - fuel
wasters all - owned in suburbia are psychologically about suburbanites having
to drive through poor areas in something resembling an armored car.
