Some Assembly Required and some comments

Here are some tid-bits from "Some Assembly Required" - as always follow link to original. In addition, i've made my comments.


Angel Tree: Next time you pass the kettle, remember that Obama and the GOP are wrapping up bundles of $100 bills for the nation's billionaires while one in seven Americans is trying to stretch his food stamps to the end of the month.

In the Old Country: Ireland is massively in debt to the IMF/EU because it (stupidly) bailed out its banks. Now AIB, one of the bailed out banks, is paying the people who ruined both the bank and the country €40m in bonuses because – you've heard this before – if they don't the clever boys and girls who sank an entire country will go to work elsewhere. Where?

Coal in their Stockings: Millions of private sector workers in the UK are losing up to 25% of their retirement income as part of the government's program to save the investors. They had been expecting a 4.5% hike in their pensions.

A Christmas Story: Officially there are over 15 million people in the US and another 9 million are “part time for economic reasons”. The real numbers are anyone's guess. Over 6 million have not had a job in over 6 months. Soon over 2 million will lose their unemployment benefits, having been idled for over 99 weeks. Nearly all recent "job growth" has come from the part-time economy – jobs that average $20,000 a year. For Christmas, and every month thereafter for the next six years the economy needs to create 235,120 new full-time jobs a month to get the unemployment rate down to pre-recession levels.

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Now, does ANYONE out there think our governments even think about the welfare of the mass of people - all the workers who attained middle class status because of (shudder) UNIONS.

Now, "the working poor" has become "the non-working poor", and many formerly "middle class" folks are the new "sorta' working poor".

Welcome to this Brave New World -- except, our leaders seem to prefer a more 1984 type of life for us all.

I really wonder why our corporate leaders want to turn us all into proles and lumpen proles? Don't they know the proletariat can become very troublesome? As our quality of life erodes, as we see our children doing worse than we did -- don't they think the anger will grow?

Do they really believe they can control this with Rush and Glenn Beck? If they gin it up enough, don't they think it will explode?

If insurrection starts, it can easily become revolution. When a revolution starts, no one really knows its direction -- there is no way it can be directed -- especially when there are so many unresolved grievances out there. The USA treats its workers like replaceable machines -- with little paid vacation, no sick leave, no maternity leave, NO RIGHTS, for the bulk of workers. Even those who have some measure of protection, see that under attack. The rich pit one group of workers against another. Instead of RISING up, it seems we want to bring EVERYONE down to the absolute lowest level.

By the way, I wouldn't worry too much about customer service and tech support jobs that have migrated offshore -- not to worry, soon our pay scales will be such that it will pay to bring them BACK -- if we have any folks educated enough to do them.

Did I mention EDUCATION? That's another story. Not now.