When John Boehner rejected President Obama's request to address a joint session of Congress on September 7 on jobs, he opened up a can of worms.  Visit my Listen Here! page to hear why.

Got too much time on your hands?  How about spending a few minutes listening to a radio quiz show?  Could it be worse that the reality shows on the mainstream media?  Why postpone the inevitable? You know you want to visit my Listen Here! page.

One of my favorite old sayings is “Anything worth having is worth fighting for.”  In my book, that goes double when it comes to things like America's manufacturing infrastructure, decent paying jobs, America's social safety nets and most of all, fair representation of the bottom 98% in Washington!  When we elected President Obama in 2008, I was under the impression that he would fight for OUR interests, guess I was wrong.  Apparently, politics being what it is, he has other priorities like looking out for the interests of wealthy campaign supporters, something he has in common with his Republican compatriots.

Within weeks of the President's taking office, many of us began to see disturbing signs that he used us to get into office and was starting to turn his back on us.  One disturbing sign was when he stated that “he's everyone's President, not just the President of those who voted for him.”  Well everyone encompasses people like teabaggers and Republicans who hold views that are irreconcilable with Obama's campaign promises and his Madison Avenue slogan of “Change We Can Believe In.”  While it is true that any president is “everyone's President”, that doesn't mean that he has to embrace or even consider things that are repugnant to the very working people who put him in office or differ from his own stated campaign platform.  In this case, being “everyone's President" says “thanks for your vote, I owe you nothing, now get lost” to working people and Progressives. 

As the months passed, the President made it clear that he was NOT going to fight for the things that we consider important:

• He abandoned the healthcare public option. 
  
• He caved on tax breaks for the rich.
  
• He abandoned the Employee Free Choice Act.
  
• He appointed a job offshoring GE CEO to chair a council that was supposed to generate jobs.
  
•  The majority of his advisors and appointees come from corporate and Wall Street circles.
  
•  He has the audacity to support three job killing free trade agreements.
  
•  He is willing to compromise Americas social safety net to appease the Republicans.
  

I could go on for pages but I won't. What I will say is that this kind of compromise is almost as toxic to working people as the Republican/Tea Party agenda. As a matter of fact it's downright insideous because supporting the President in 2012 keeps us from electing someone who can and will actually help working people. Many of the President's current die hard supporters are on various social media acting as the unofficial Democratic truth police by scaring people with the old “lesser of two evils” baloney. If you run into one of those clowns, please tell them that they will only be able to see the truth if the stop burying their heads in the President's rear end.

We need to elect a truly worthy candidate in 2012, someone like Bernie Sanders.
Congratulations, you can now consider yourself aware and awakened!

By now, it's probably become obvious to all but the most brainwashed from both political parties that our electeds support economic policies which put the full burden of recovery from this recession squarely on the backs of the bottom 98%.   They want us to forget that most of the top 2% and their speculative ways, with the help of Wall St. and the banks, created the bubbles that always trigger downturns when they burst.  They want us to forget that the top 2% reaped the rewards of each bubble they created while our income remained stagnant or dropped.  To add insult to injury, they keep babbling about “shared sacrifice” even though almost ALL of their proposals actually protect the interests of the top 2% in various ways and give us the sacrifice by cutting our safety nets and cutting America's infrastructure!


One particularly perverse manifestation of our electeds' intentionally twisted perception of America's plight is a national policy that purposely ignores the true cause of our country’s economic woes. America's shaky economic situation sits on a crumbling foundation of thirty years of corporate shortcuts that boosted their quarterly bottom lines at our country's expense!  Much of it started when Ronald Reagan lowered trade tariffs on many imports which made it tempting for corps to send manufacturing overseas.  His firing of union air traffic controllers sent a wink and nod signal to America's corporations that it's OK to bust unions.  Sadly, subsequent Presidents from BOTH parties have, at best treated the above situations as givens or, at worst promoted “free” trade agreements that exacerbated the situation.

Because of the above, America has lost its manufacturing infrastructure and is essentially a country without a product!  As more and more jobs flew overseas, more of us became unemployed.   These good people, through NO fault of their own, both lost their purchasing power and became former taxpayers.  Offshoring jobs actually costs our country precious tax revenue!  That self-induced case of the shorts caused our bloodsucking electeds to whine about “shared sacrifice” instead of taxing the rich.  They are the ones who caused the problem in the first place, by giving corporations and the rich carte blanche.  They would rather try to get blood from a stone than upset wealthy and corporate contributors.


At this point in time, we are stuck with electeds who would rather come up with bogus economic solutions than address any of the real underlying problems.  The reason is obvious, corporations pay the freight for their campaigns and promise them cushy soft landing jobs after they complete their terms in office.  As I mentioned before, we can level the playing field by forming a voting bloc organization that uses our ballots to offset corporate bucks.  The choice is yours, sit on the sidelines and vote for “the lesser of two evils” in 2012 or actively seek change we can really believe in. If you choose the latter and want to take part, email me.  

If you were in the right frame of mind last weekend, this year's Republican Iowa Straw  Poll made for great entertainment until you realized that they were politicians, not comedians.  Visit my Listen Here! page to hear Reverend Manny join me for a spirited and sarcastic analysis of The Iowa Straw Poll.

Listen to Ray Sherven's pro labor/middle class music video and it's message.  Please pass this strong song of solidarity along to your friends!

Tune in to The Working Family Radio Network to hear my interview with New York Attorney and Twitter guru, Ray Beckerman.  It's all happening Thursday, Aug. 11 at 3:05 PM EDT.

Most of our electeds, including the President are climbing onto the exporting = jobs bandwagon.  The main reason being that they need a few convenient token gestures such as exporting and “green” jobs to show that they are actually doing something about the unemployment problem that they caused years ago by setting up a favorable climate for job offshoring.   The President is currently pushing three NAFTA style job killing “free” trade agreements, ostensibly to create exporting jobs.   Though these agreements couldn't get passed under the Bush administration, in the current, “let's give away the store” atmosphere of the current administration, they become “job creators.”  While exports may create a few jobs for American workers, they will not offset the vast job loss caused by the above and earlier “free” trade agreements.

The insidious thing about making exporting the almighty cure for unemployment is that it does the opposite, in the long run, it creates unemployment.   When a corporation gets into the habit of finding its customers overseas, instead of here, it no longer has ANY use for Americans.   The corporations will eventually succumb to the urge to move those “exporting” jobs overseas to save foreign customers any product shipping costs and to take advantage of lower local labor prices.   At that point, the few American workers who got those exporting jobs will join their fellow workers who are already unemployed due to the job loss caused by those “free” trade agreements on the unemployment line.

Once a corporation realizes that virtually ALL of its income comes from exporting, it has no further use for Americans.  That corporation isn't going to worry about upsetting people who are now unemployed and are no longer potential customers.  Translation we won't be their customers, nor employees, we'll  just live here.   The only thing that we will be exporting under those circumstances will be our jobs.

This is a lose/lose proposition, American workers lose jobs and America loses precious tax revenue. Hey, you can't tax people who aren't drawing a paycheck.   The only winners are the unpatriotic corporations that only care about their bottom lines, no matter who it hurts and the corrupt politicians who are owned by said corporations.   The only way we can restore prosperity to America and Americans is to contact our electeds and insist that they pass legislation that restores each and every one of the pre Reagan tariffs on imports!

Let's bring back the American dream by Building It Here and Buying It Here!

On Monday afternoon, I interviewed Maria Allison, publisher of the Nuts And Dolts blog about the artificially generated debt ceiling crisis.  You can hear an hour long interview by going to The Working Family Radio Network on Thursday, Aug. 4 at 3:05 PM EDT.  Can't wait until Thursday?  Visit my  Listen Here! page for a special mini interview.

Have you noticed that your elected representatives in government say the things you want to hear while they are campaigning, but once they get elected, they forget about your issues and seem to do whatever they want?  That's because they only need you once every campaign cycle, at voting time but they need their corporate backers, who pay most of the freight for their campaign ads on national and local TV 365 days a year.   The logic your elected uses is, “Why worry about and please one voter at a time which would be getting the votes retail when I can please a corporate lobbyist who will get his corp. to buy campaign advertising for me and get lots of votes wholesale?”  Using that logic, we have no say because bucks mean more than ballots.

How can our votes compete with corporate cash and bogus campaign ads from equally bogus public service “organizations” that are fronts for and financed by self-serving corporations?  How can we get our elected public servants to realize that they are public servants, not corporate servants?  How can we get our ballots to shout louder than corporate bucks?  In other words, how do we get the bastards to listen to us?   The answer is that as voters, we follow the same model as organized labor.

Workers formed unions to create a level playing field when negotiating working conditions and wages.  If an individual employee, doing the same job as many other employees felt that he or she did a great job and deserved a raise wasn't represented by a union, he or she had to go to the boss, beg for a raise and pray.   The boss, representing the raw power of the entire corporate organization had the employee at a severe disadvantage.  Unions spoke for large blocks of employees and negotiated from a position of strength.

Similarly, we have to create what is, in essence a union of voters.  Not a labor union, but a giant national voting bloc organization that represents the bottom 98% of Americans who, while in the majority, have lost control of our country due to the unethical methods used by many of the top 2% to gain total control of our electeds.   An organization that doesn't represent corporations and the rich, but does represent the struggling and hard-working American Voting Families also known as the rest of us.  An organization that represents America's workers, small business owners who are being squeezed out of business by the corporate big box stores, the retired and the poor who, despite the best efforts of the rich, still have a vote.  Imagine the power of your vote when it is combined with the rest of the bottom 98%.  If the present two parties do not represent us, we can spawn and support a new party and its candidates.  No more corporate divide and conquer!

Want to do something about disproportionate corporate influence in Washington?   U N I T E!
Let's start an organization that leverages the power of our votes!  Let's form a national voting bloc that represents the bottom 98%!  Let's show corporations and their lobbyists that we STILL own America!
Let's do this!  Let's form an organization right here, right NOW!  When it is formed, we'll need volunteers from every area of expertise.

If you want to take back America and restore it to it's rightful owners, “We The People” send an email to jwadeshow@gmail.com