"If at age 20 you are a conservative then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are a liberal then you have no brains."
Sir Winston Churchill
ADVOCATE FOR TERM LIMITS

Obama obviously knows very little about economics, specifically that "Society stagnates when independent productive achievers begin to be socially demonized and even punished for their accomplishments." This dilemma fogs Obama's reality. To him, accepting this truth is a "false choice", his answer to things he doesn't understand. And by the way... where is John Galt?

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

FAUST IN AMERICA ?

I was born the son of a working man and I shall die the son of a working man.  I can't help it.  It is not only in my genes but seared deep into my soul.
 
My father was an immigrant and my mothers people were here since the early seventeenth century.  Throughout my life I have straddled the great American class divide with a foot in both American stories that have made up our history.
 
I grew up in a typical American factory small town of the past.  This was a place where the rich, the poor, the working poor and the middle class lived cheek to jowl with one another.  We went to school together, worshiped together and essentially grew up together.  Our lives however different because of wealth and position, were not foreign or alien to one another.  Any resentment we might have had regarding those with more would be settled academically or on the sports field where we were all equal.  The only members of the Jewish faith in my small town were my neighbors.  My scoutmaster was a black man, his son was the first person I ever wrestled competitively and my Aunt integrated our First Baptist Church when the Black Baptist Church  burnt down. 
 
My parents taught my brothers and I that we were neither better nor worse than any one else and that in America our future would be what we determined and not what anyone else determined it to be.   I didn't know it at the time but I was a very lucky fellow to have had the upbringing I had.
 
When I was 20,  I went off to New York City to finish my education and find my destiny.  The NYC of the early sixties was still the old New York of tribes, enclaves and neighborhoods which had epitomised the city for years like a long running Broadway play.  This was the New York that reinvented itself every 20 years in order to accommodate the latest group of refugees from the rest of the world and yet retained the basic values that served as the glue to keep everything from flying apart.  The artists also came here to paint, compose, write, act, sing, perform and change the culture with the passionate verve that only the talented driven by the addiction to create can understand.  The edge of the envelope was NYC and it was glorious.

I did not know when I first arrived here 50 years ago that I was witnessing the death of one NY and the birth of another.  Today the NY where I first learned to love Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Puerto Rican and Soul food (plus every other kind known to man) , Jazz, Opera, great art and literature, theatre, film, Major League Baseball, politics and the 24/7/365 beat of  city life in rhythm to the hip and the cool is  gone, replaced with the scream of a city on speed that is less diverse class wise and race wise than it was when I first came.
 
The egalitarianism is largely gone...the Public School system  where I briefly taught is in decrepitude laid low by a union at war with the children it is supposed to teach and their parents.  Tax payers are fleeing because housing and everything else has become unaffordable to the majority.  The newcomers must live by necessity in the so called "Outer Boroughs" because they earn at a fraction of what those who left made.
 
This last Sunday the Daily News in a two page opinion piece by Richard Florida, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto entitled "Rich Man, Poor Man, ANGRY MAN" chronicled the new NYC which is threatened with losing its last greatest asset ...being the safest big city in the world due to politicians who are "progressive" racial arsonists and  who over time have spent us into perdition.
 
The city has become what Mayoral Candidate Bill deBlasio calls "A Tale of Two Cities" with those who can make it in finance, law, media, advertising, publishing, entertainment and info tech are doing well and virtually everyone else is relegated  to areas such as food prep,health care support and personal care which account for " almost half of all new jobs added in the tri-state region since 2009".  In most of the five boroughs including parts of Manhattan, 75% "toil in service jobs with salaries averaging $25,000 or less".  The high paying jobs are concentrated in Manhattan with "80% in lower Manhattan and ajacent parts of Brooklyn". " "25% of all adult workers in Brooklyn and 20% of those in the Bronx have jobs that pay less than $10 an hour". 
 
Welfare here with all its major programs added up is at present  worth $38,004 for a single mother of two.  This is after tax income and it makes working or even striving to work unattractive to someone who consciously knows that they will be financially less well off with a job than on the dole.   They are like a rabbit caught in a trap baited with food and the other "stuff" that Government now gives away.  
 
Manufacturing and  maritime/dock work now is barely visible, and even small business, the engine of any economic growth, is under continuous assault by a rapacious government bent on sucking every last penny out of them until they too disappear into a mist called the good old days.
 
All of this is occurring while NYC is experiencing a boom that has attracted  360,000 new jobs since the recession and "high tech start ups " worth $2 billion.  The worst part of this new NYC is that the so called "rich" are concentrating in certain areas and the so called "non rich"  live every where else. 
 
No longer are the neighborhoods or the civic culture integrating the economic classes.  We are becoming ghettoized according to our economic station in life... our zip codes are becoming the predictors of our futures as class stratification, hardens and ossifies.  "Upstairs, Downstairs" has come to America. 
 
NYC is also reflecting this dynamic as it spreads through out  the rest of the country as documented in "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" by Charles Murray.   Niall Ferguson in his review of the book described it  as such "Murray meticulously chronicles and measures the emergence of two wholly distinct classes: a new upper class, first identified in The Bell Curve as "the cognitive elite," and a new "lower class," which he is too polite to give a name. And he vividly localizes his argument by imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one college degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any."
 
 All of this is grist for the mill of class warfare as practiced with elan by this President and his acolytes.  By keeping the economy from growing while real worth declines, we are now in a perfect storm of "haves and have nots" where class and race resentment will drive people to the party of government which will continue to delude them with demagoguery,  bread and circuses and not real, tangible opportunity.  None of this is by accident.
 
All of this is by design. It is "Hobbsian" in origin, but where the state will guarantee that  while life may be nasty and brutish in comparison with the educated elites, it will not be short unless of course you become too expensive or too old to save if you become ill.
 
The record of this Progressive President is dismal at best and intentionally destructive at worst..to wit:
 
"Four of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty, or reliance on Government for at least part of their lives...
 
Median household income was 8.1 percent lower than in 2007...
 
More than half of the 46 million Americans living in poverty in 2011  were black or Hispanic...
 
From 2009 to 2011, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent while those in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent...
 
There were 46.2 million Americans living in poverty in the United States in 2011, the largest number of persons counted as poor in the 53 years of poverty measurements...further, 6.6 percent of the population, or 20.4 million people, lived in deep poverty, defined as living 50 percent below the poverty line...
 
19 million whites fell below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for 41 percent of the nation’s poor, nearly twice the number of poor African-Americans.
 
76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60 will face economic insecurity, as defined by a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps, or income below 150 percent of the poverty line...
 
 
 Those who have dropped out of the labor force increased from an annual total of 462,000 in 2008 to 909,000 in 2012.
 
The number of workers “not in the labor force” has increased to 88.3 million in 2012,..
 
 Seven out of eight jobs, created under President Obama have been part-time jobs.
Under Obama, 1,882,000 part-time jobs have been created, compared to only 270,000 full-time jobs created between January 2009 and July 2013.
The U.S. home-ownership rate is back to where it was 18 years ago in 1995, at 65 percent in the second quarter of 2013...
Student debt totaled $994 billion as of June 30, up from $440 billion in 2008,
On Jan. 19, 2009,  the price of regular retail gasoline in the U.S. averaged $1.847 a gallon... on Aug. 12, 2013, the price of regular retail gas averaged $3.561 a gallon.
Obama’s continued series of annual federal budget deficits in the range of $1 trillion has increased the national debt more than 50 percent since he has been office, from a total of $11.9 trillion in fiscal 2009 to a current estimated total of $18.2 trillion in fiscal 2014."*
*SOURCES   Jerome Corsi, AP Report, US Census Bureau, Kennedy School of Government. at Harvard, PEW Research Center, Food Research and Action Center, Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, house Ways and Means Committee, Federal Reserve Bank, Energy Information Agency,
 
These  have become the real results of the real agenda of today's Democratic Party which is a "Faustian bargain" between power brokers and special interests who evangelize the outwardly "noble" sentiments of the "Progressive religion" while exempting themselves from its rules and consequences.  In the end these architects of the end of equality in America really only represent themselves as they attempt to control our lives and our destinies.  We have been divided...we have not divided ourselves!
 
I was born the son of a working man and I shall die the son of a working man.  I will not die however separated from my fellow man  as a "ward" of an infantilism driven "nanny state" disguised as a benevolent guardian of everything it thinks I require in my pursuit of my happiness. 
 
Our closing music for today is "Fanfare for the Common Man" which use to be an anthem for the Progressives of the Henry Wallace era.  As a common man I am appropriating it in the name of all common men and women because the progressives do not, have not or will not ever speak for us...To paraphrase Patrick Henry "if this be politically incorrect treason...then make the most of it."
 
  ERLANSSON
THIS COMMENTARY CAN BE HEARD IN AN ABRIDGED FORM ON THE VERNUCCIO/ALLISON REPORT ON WVOX 1460 AM/http://www.wvox.com ON SATURDAY AUGUST 24, 2013  

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