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

Tune in to my show on The Working Family Radio Network live stream at 3:05 PM when author/blogger, The Reverend Manny joins me for an announcement that could be the beginning of a movement to empower the bottom 98%.  Then, come back to this site around 9:00 PM EDT for further details.

Now that the 2008 Obama campaign's promise of change that became the politics of compromise is on its way to becoming the shame of capitulation, many of us “we told you so” people are still being harangued by the cult known as the O-pologists!  These people hang out on various social media waiting to swoop down and try to stifle the free speech of anyone who expresses anything that differs from their constant droning, unconditional worship of the President.  They take exception to ANYONE who dares to say that Obama has become the President of compromise rather than of change or that he is not acting in the best interests of working people, the retired and the poor.

One of their favorite rants is that “you progressives stayed home in 2010 and let the Republicans win in many places” which gave the Republicans the edge.  Personally, I didn't stay home, I let myself get suckered into the same old lesser of two evils ploy and reluctantly voted along party lines, knowing that Obama and a party made dysfunctional by it's Blue Dogs didn't deliver on many of his and its campaign promises.  Those who decided to stay home, even after I urged them on the air to get out and vote did so because they felt betrayed.  I could understand that because I also felt betrayed!  Many of the reasons why lots of us felt betrayed are found in numerous articles on this website, so I won't go into them here.

O-pologists, let's get one thing straight, the people who didn't vote stayed home because they felt that they had to choose between toxic Republicans and compromising Democrats who are Republican enablers.  They didn't cause the problems we have today, the President's failure to fight for the middle class, working people, seniors and the poor caused the voter apathy.  Let's give All Americans a reason to get out and vote in 2012 by giving them someone worth electing from a party that truly represents working people, a Labor Party.  We must support its candidate with the same zeal that we supported President Obama in 2008!  Hey, I wonder if Bernie Sanders is available?

Many of our electeds love to preach "austerity" and "shared" sacrifice.  They infer that we, the people did something wrong that caused the deficit.  That's like saying that a rape victim caused her rape because she wore "suggestive" clothes.  Make no mistake about it, as members of the bottom 98%, we were the victims of a mass economic rape.  As a matter of fact, we were gang banged by our electeds and the upper 2% who own them.

I'm going to use the family budget analogy to explain how our electeds destroyed our economy and how there is only one way to fix it.  When you sit down at the kitchen table to hash out the family budget, you take out your paycheck, and divvy it up  to cover your bills and expenses.  If you lose that paycheck or have a reduction in income, you have to get it back or practice fiscal triage and sacrifice some expense items.  Maintaining your income will allow you to keep some of life's luxury items like food and shelter.

Now that we're clear that increasing income or revenue is always preferable to making draconian cuts in expenses or in the case of government, infrastructure and safety net spending.  Let's see how that applies to and what is the real cause of the deficit.  Our troubles started when Ronald Reagan decided that it was more important for America's corporations to have a source of cheap labor than for America  to have a manufacturing infrastructure and for American workers to have the kind of manufacturing jobs that made the American dream possible.  He did that by lowering many trade tariffs on imports which started corporate America's outsourcing frenzy.  Ever since then, globalization and job outsourcing continued as a given through every administration and was escalated by Bill Clinton's “free” trade policies that featured job killing NAFTA.

We are now at the point where America has become a country without a product.  Our corporatons have become order takers that have their products manufactured overseas in contracted factories, under questionable working conditions for low wages then have their trademark slapped on the product. This process has not only caused unemployment in many industries, but has destroyed America's manufacturing infrastructure.  The U.S. corporations that comprise the high tech sector, who pride themselves on their design capabilities and, in some cases boast that their products are designed in the U.S.A. are actually giving American technology to China when they have their products made there.  That American technology wouldn't have been possible without all the taxpayer financed research that took place under NASA's space program.

With diminished employment possibilities and stagnant salaries, the Bush administration had a novel approach to the problem of a middle class that was rapidly becoming impoverished, he gave them the illusion of prosperity by encouraging them to borrow.  Heck, they were still part of the middle class as long as they could tap their credit cards and take out secondary mortgages on their homes to make up for wages that didn't cover their expenses.  The next paragraph ties it all together.

By encouraging "free" trade, our government has allowed Americas corporations to use the third world as it's hiring hall.  As our citizens lose their jobs, or take low paying jobs, our government loses tax revenue.  Instead of doing the right and patriotic thing for America and the American people by passing legislation that discourages imports and encourages manufacturing here, our electeds from BOTH parties have let America run up a negative balance of trade tab with China.  That's why China has invested so heavily in U.S. Treasury notes, to protect THEIR interests.  Translation, the American government is borrowing due to a diminishing income, just like the middle class did under Bush.

So now we have the spectre of President Obama endorsing three NAFTA like "free" trade agreements as job creators instead of the job killers they are when the real, honest  solution to unemployment, the deficit and most of our economic problems is exactly the opposite.  To balance America's budget, our electeds must not hack away at America's safety net and infrastructure, they must increase America's tax revenue by passing legislation that undoes the damage that they did to our country over the past thirty years.  Legislation that discourages U.S. corporate offshore manufacturing in the strongest possible way, by reversing every bit of pro "free" trade legislation that was passed since the Reagan regime and by re-instituting each and every tariff on imports.

Let's bring back the American dream and restore America's economy by bringing every bit of manufacturing back to the U.S.A.  That can't be done when the President endorses "free" trade agreements and cuts to Social Security as the solution.   If it takes a third party, a Labor Party to fix America's problems than so be it.