The Three G’s

Glenn Beck claims it’s all about the three G’s… God, Gold and Guns.

Let’s take a good look at what is presented in the New Testament.

• Jesus was a poor man so he would never have had access to gold.
• Jesus was a peaceful man so he wouldn’t have been carrying weapons.

Using Beck’s logic,

If Jesus had access to gold, he could have bought off the money hungry Pharisees.

If Jesus had access to weapons, he would have been able to kill his opponents and therefore he would not have been crucified.

Without the crucifixion, Glenn Beck and the Fundamentalists wouldn’t have a religion.

So, is it God, Gold and Guns or is it poverty, peace, pacifist Jesus?

What Republicans Are Really Saying

Republicans hate regulation so they will do anything and everything to dismantle regulations.  According to the Republican philosophy, we don’t need to regulation green house gases.  And Pat Toomey, the “Wall Street Warrior”, while serving on the House Banking Committee, helped write a resolution which lead to the repeal of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act that protected American’s financial investments.

Toomey’s first order of business as a freshman congressman: getting some good committee work. His Wall Street credentials—as well as the Republican majority—helped him score a seat on the House Banking Committee, where he sits on the Capital Markets, Securities and Government Sponsored Enterprises subcommittee as well as the Domestic and International Monetary Policy subcommittee. Toomey has already helped draft House Resolution 10, a proposal to roll back some of the Glass-Steagall legislation of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, Toomey is virulently opposed to unnecessary regulation. “The trend in deregulation, beginning in the early 1980s, is one of the biggest reasons for the sustained economic expansion,” he says. “I would like to see us continue to deregulate on many fronts, including the financial services industry.”

And what of the much-ballyhooed hedge fund regulation talk emanating from Washington lately? “It’s not clear to me that the problem with Long-Term Capital Management requires new regulation,” he says. “I think we need to continue to work on understanding what really happened there and what the magnitude of the threat to the infrastructure of our financial services industry was. Frankly, I think that the outcome was appropriate. The equity investors lost everything—and under the circumstances that had to happen—but the bailout essentially worked. I would be very leery about, and I will resist, any effort to impose inappropriate regulations as a knee-jerk reaction to what was a big problem but was essentially solved.”

Read more about Toomey and his Wall Street connections here.

The bottom line is this:  Republicans are against regulations (Banks, Oil/Gas Industries).  However, when deregulation creates problems (Bank Failures, Oil/Gas accidents, pollution), then Republicans want the taxpayers to bailout the banks and pay for the environmental clean up.

Pat Toomey is just another Republican that supports deregulation and he would have voted “Yea”, in favor of the bank bailouts.  After all, Toomey would not have wanted to place any hardships on his friends in the banking industry or on Wall Street.

On Becoming A Poor Nation

Let’s face the facts.  Our local governments are in a financial crises.   With the loss of jobs, comes a decrease in State income tax revenues.  Smaller State revenues means that there is less money to help struggling cities and towns.  Add to this, the decrease in sales tax revenues that are the result of less purchasing power, and we have a State going bankrupt.  Now, multiple this by the number of States near bankruptcy and we have a nation of the edge of becoming a third world country.

As States become poorer, they need to make cuts to their spending.  One of the many areas where they choose to make cuts is in funding for education.  That means that our children suffer by not receiving a full education.  Poor education will not help these children when they become adults because they won’t be able to find a job that pays a living wage or better.  Ignorance is NOT bliss.  It leads to poverty.  The greater the poverty, the closer we are to becoming a third world country.

Even though only about 10% of Americans are heavily invested in stocks and bonds, our economy is driven by the DOW.  In order to grow, we need an economy based on jobs that produce goods.  Our nation has been slowly losing its goods based economy.  Instead, our economy is based on market gambling.  There is no bartering for goods and services in this country.  We can’t “take a chicken to the doctor” because banks won’t accept chickens as mortgage payments from the doctor.  (I’m curious about this “chicken”.  Is is a live chicken or a dead chicken?)

Do you see the pattern?  It a vicious cycle, one that Republicans claim can only be fixed by cutting taxes which decrease revenues.   Understand, the taxes that get cut are the taxes to the richest 1% of Americans and the services that get cut are the services needed by the other 90%.  The Republicans and Tea Partiers support Reagan economics.  It was during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when the decline in the middle working class started.

The bottom line is this… we need jobs based on goods that pay a living wage or better so that the States and local municipalities can collect the revenue needed to keep our governments functioning.   This includes ample money for police, firefighters, educators, libraries and infrastructure repair and maintenance.  More tax cuts for the rich will not produce jobs and will not bring in more revenue.  Instead, it starves the masses.

One question before I end this thread, how is that “trickle down” economics working for you?

Post Avatar Dispair

The press is reporting a sense of depression that overcomes people after seeing the movie “Avatar”.  Having seen this movie, I have some thoughts as to why this depression occurs.

Without giving away too many details, “Avatar” is another movie about corporate greed.  It joins films such as “500 Nations”, “Food Inc.” and “Michael Clayton”.  The corporate greed in “Avatar”, “Food Inc.” and “Michael Clayton” centers on either something that provides nourishment for humans or energy.  These are items that are needed to sustain life and to keep the “machines” running.  It’s understandable that people would fight and even kill to gain and maintain control of these sources.  As someone once told me, “The most profitable items for sale are those that either go up a chimney or down a toilet.”  Makes a lot of sense.

The documentary “500 Nations” is different because it tells the story of greedy invaders that killed the indigenous people of the Americas for GOLD, something that doesn’t go up a chimney or down a toilet.  Gold is NOT needed to sustain life.  Gold is a mineral that does not provide nourishment nor does it provide energy.  The only thing that gold feeds is vanity.  Yet people committed genocide to obtain gold.  The same can be said about diamonds, a crystal of carbon that is plentiful and market and price controlled by one corporation.

We humans are so very shallow that we value minerals that provide nothing more than we value life.  Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh spend time peddling gold and telling us that gold makes the world go around even though gold has no real value when it comes to sustaining life.  They are selling the corporate messages and the undereducated are allowing themselves to be manipulated.  The Tea Party shouters, filled with racism and hate, will never be happy because their value system is based on “things”.  Americans believe that “things” will make us happy and yet, we are always looking to buy more “things” because we feel a hole inside us that needs to be filled.   Religion doesn’t completely fill the void because religions are always asking for money and more money.  If Catholics stopped sending money to the Vatican, the Pope would have to live his life like Jesus instead of like a king.

The indigenous people in Avatar have lives that are not centered around “things” and yet they appear to be happy.  When we leave the theater, we re-enter our world and we see an environment covered in concrete and asphalt and realize that our lives are centered on “things”.   It’s a very boring and sad picture, both visually and spiritually.  Yeah, that would cause a person to feel depressed.