They All Must Have Fallen Out of the Stupid Tree

We Told You So

The scariest thing about libertarians is that they can vote.   As a general rule they cannot tell the difference between The Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and The Federalist Papers.  They are so gullible they actually believe the income tax is illegal and so ignorant that there is no way to explain it to them.  As Glen Cook puts it, they fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.   Unfortunately for us and the rest of the world, there are no IQ provisions for citizenship. Libertarians can vote. Small wonder the economy is tanking around us.

In Libertarian Land, I think the American Revolution went down something like this.   Little Tommy Jefferson went into their clubhouse (with the no icky girls allowed sign on the door.) and said, “That George III is a real poophead.  I don’t want to play with him anymore.”

And little Al Hamilton replied, “Me too.   Let’s get rid of him.”

Georgie Washington added “I’m tired of playing with this hatchet.   Let’s have a revolution instead. You got book learnin’, Tommy.   Why don’t you write him a letter and tell him to go soak his head?”

In the real world, the founders of America were a very diverse group. Many shared a common tie with the Masons, which only reaffirms the Mason’s mission of bringing different people together.   Jefferson and Washington spoke for the southern agrarian plantation owners.  Alexander Hamilton was the most progressive of the founders, but even he spoke primarily for the northern industrialists.  Then there were other founders such as John Adams and John Jay who were determined to see to it that the wealthy had the same special privileges as they had under England.   All these people were brought together out of a common need to escape British rule.   Jefferson wanted an agrarian utopia while Adams wanted a hereditary Senate in imitation of the British House of Lords, but all put aside their differences to achieve a common goal.

The Declaration of Independence was a legal document telling the British Monarch that the colonies were demanding independence.   It has no standing in American Law.   It was an inspiring piece penned by the inimitable Jefferson.   It had the effect of winning the loyalty of those who were going to die in the upcoming war.  Still, the Declaration of Independence was written in the proper legal language of the time.  When they said “All Men are created equal”, it was not the generic term as it is generally used.   Men was defined as people of substance with money or property.  It did not include women who were still chattel. It did not mean slaves or children.  They were legally chattel as well.   Men meant upper class white males.

By the end of the revolution, African slavery was still an accepted institution.   Children were still sold into apprenticeship and adults could still sell themselves into indentured servitude.   You could still be jailed for your debts and most of the thirteen states limited the vote to people above a certain income level.  In the State of Maryland you had to be both wealthy and Catholic to vote.  In Massachusetts you were only allowed to vote if you were a Congregationalist.   Each state was autonomous and sent representatives to Philadelphia mostly to negotiate trade.   Britain was killing the colonial industries by supplying finished goods at prices local craftsmen would not beat.  The south still sold its cotton to England but at much lower prices. New York and New Jersey went to war over access to New York Harbor.  The Free Market reigned supreme and the only one happy about it was England.

Thirteen independent nations were being eaten to death by England and internal rivalry.   Free Market capitalism was tearing the fledgling US into shreds and leaving the door open to England walking in and taking America back without a shot being fired.  This is why there is a Constitution.   This is why we are not the Confederated States of America.   The wealthiest and most influential men in the new nation joined together to create a more perfect union.  That is why they needed the Federalist Papers.

Keep in mind there was a lot of resistance to a Constitution. On the whole the southern states wanted it. They needed protection from England purchasing their cotton for too little money. On the other hand, the northern states had influential citizens who were making a fortune by buying cheap finished goods from Europe and a tariff would cut into their trade. So Madison, Hamilton, and Jay got together and wrote newspaper articles in favor of the Constitution. Put together, the Federalist Papers are a fascinating document. It outlines the philosophy behind the Constitution. It explains the economic and political conditions of the day. It has little to do with the Constitution itself.

 

You will find nothing inspiring in the Constitution. This is why the libertarian propagandists rarely quote it and libertarians never read it.   It is as bland as oatmeal and as exciting as watching hot grannies knit sweaters. Alexander Hamilton did not conceive it after a night of peyote buttons and cheap tequila.  The Constitution of the United States was written by a committee.  Many people worked on the Constitution, and the finished document had little in common with the hopes of the Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton fought against the Bill of Rights.  Jay must have cursed when the rabble were awarded the vote, but managed to slip in the electoral college anyway.  The south was happy to get a central government which could both ratify and enforce treaties with Europe.  The north was pissed because the new Federal Government could impose and enforce tariffs, ending England’s domination of American trade.   More to the point, the new Federal Government had the right to impose and collect taxes.  How and when the Federal Government can regulate business is written into the Constitution, even though Hamilton and Madison both argued against it.

The most frustrating thing about the Constitution is its vagueness.  It was a document that was designed to change with the times.   You can peruse the constitution all your life but you will not find one word that enshrines capitalism as our only possible economic system.   There is no clause that makes the income tax illegal.  There is nothing that says we have to vote for either Democrats or Republicans.  The people who joined together to create the Constitution understood that conditions change.  They expected their tomorrow to be different than their today, and they left it to us as to how we wanted to interpret the Constitution.  The Constitution shall not fall because we voted for the single payer system.   There is nothing unconstitutional about unions.

The libertarians have forgotten that the American Revolution was more than the hand full of dead statesmen they canonized into their lords and saviors. They forgot that Jefferson had very little influence on the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton created the first American Tax, and that Washington lead troops to put down the Whiskey Tax rebellion. They are like Christianoids and the Bible. They have no idea of what the Constitution says or represents but parrot any damned babble that their leaders tell them. Laws that protect American industries, impose taxes, and impose limits to unacceptable behavior are written in the Constitution. Libertarians can hold their breath and kick their heels all they want, and it will still not change the fact that they are the greatest threat to the Constitution since George III.

And We Are Not Taking You Back

How To Sell A Subprime Mortgage Part Three: Taking The Application.

21st Century Gothic

Writing these blog posts has been difficult. It has forced me to look at 25 years in sales and ask myself If I have been doing the right thing. Working for Aames was not the right thing to do, and I wonder why I never realized that before. The biggest wrong I committed, while working for Aames, was convincing myself that I was helping people. Any help I may have given my customers was purely short term assistance. Many of my customers who were granted lower interest rates were given three years fixed mortgages. After three years, their interest rates went variable. Very few of those loans had ceilings. The logic behind this was it gave them a chance to fix their credit so they could refinance again before their mortgage rates went through the roof. In actual fact we were being too optimistic. Between outsourcing and salary stagnation, chances were that in three years those people’s credit were in worse shape than ever. Then after three years their mortgages went through the roof.

Belief is a very strong factor in any sale. If the salesperson does not believe in the product, neither will the customer. There were just too many reps who did not believe in what they were selling. That should have warned me that something was wrong. I knew one salesperson who sold through intimidation. He specialized in single female home owners, and subtly threatened them into signing. Then he grabbed the commission check and ran to another company before the hammer came down. I knew another salesperson who specialized in single male homeowners. Her usual working clothes was a leather mini split up to the waist at the side, and a very low cut top.

Despite these signs that things were totally wrong, I continued to believe in what I was doing. Conviction is more than half of sales. An effective salesman believes in what he is selling or is a good enough actor to truly make the customer believe in what he is doing. It occurs to me that there are many more actors in sales than I originally thought.

Conviction was the difference between getting the application and credit report or not getting the application and earning the wrath of Aames. Aames had a lot of really idiotic rules, but one of the worst was their insistence on running credit reports for all customers. I had more than one customer offer to fax or email me their most recent credit report. Later, I would work for companies that were fine with customers faxing their credit reports. However to complete an application for Aames you had to run the credit report, and in order to do that you had to get the customer’s social security number.

To this day I am amazed at the amount of people who gave me their social security numbers over the phone. I always left the social security number for last. I would get the customer on the phone and we would talk a little bit and I would talk him into giving a phone application. I specialized in calling people with high interest variable loans, and they were desperate to get out from under. It was easy for me to get them to apply. The biggest objection I had to overcome were the people who had tried over and over again and kept getting turned down. I usually gave them a pep-talk. I encouraged them to take one more chance while mentioning all the people with shaky credit that Aames managed to help.

I always started with the basics. I would ask their names and addresses and get them talking about their homes and their mortgage woes. I would make appropriately sympathetic sounds as they volunteered the information I needed to put on the form. Once in a while I had to give them a little help. Older people had no idea of the market value of their homes. Generally they made me put a too low value on it. By the time I reached the end of the application, I was an old friend. That’s when I asked for the social security number.

About one in three just gave it to me. Not only did they give it to me, but called their spouses at work to get his or her social security number since I needed to pull a joint credit report About two out of three customers gave me a hard time. This is where belief comes in. I promised them that they were in no danger, their credit scores would not go down and their identities were safe. When I realized that too many credit hits would bring down a customer’s credit scores, I stopped promising that. I would estimate a safe time to pull their credit scores and schedule them for a call back at that time. You would not believe the amount of crap I had to live through when I was caught doing it. The Regional or district manager who caught me backing out on an application would lecture me mercilessly. My job was to get the application and not to worry about the state of the customer’s credit. So when I got the occasional person who was just not going to give me his social security number, I made it a point to argue with them when the brass was listening. It made me look good.

I was very careful with personal information. I would shred my notes and make sure that my copies of the applications were put safely away where nobody could get them. I was the only one. Everybody else just put their notes in the trash and old applications and notes were available for anybody to rifle through and pull out and use. These notes not only included the social security number but birthdays and addresses. Everything you needed for full scale identity theft was in that office. It only recently occurred to me that there was an entire room full of filing cabinets which was never locked and anybody could go through and pull out whatever information they wanted.

That was what I did for Aames Home Loan for a forty hour six day week. Most of my applications were rejected for various reasons. The most common was bad credit. Unlike other companies, Aames was very careful of the credit scores of the loans they accepted. That meant that most of Aames’s customers could have gotten a better deal elsewhere So the beginning of my month would see about two dozen loans in my pipeline but on a really good month, only two or three would fund. Somehow that was my fault for finding the wrong customers. In Aames Home Loan, failure was always an underling’s fault.

Pop Goes The World

How Pundits Lie

Not The Grumpy Old Man

I am making myself very unpopular by criticizing Barack Obama.  I have been called a racist for criticizing him.   I have been called an alarmist.   I have even been compared to Sean Hannity, which really hurts.   A neighbor told me that I am not being fair.  After all, Obama has not even been sworn in yet.   He has not even had the chance to screw things up yet.   From my point of view that’s like telling me not to run away from the guy with the open buckets of gasoline and a lit cigarette.

Obama is not only surrounding himself with the worst of the Clinton Administration, he is surrounding himself with the worst of the Bush war criminals as well.   He wants Robert “The Surge” Gates to continue as the Secretary of Defense.   How is this change?   They are popping the champagne in Beijing with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.  That is a pretty good indication that jobs are not going to return to American soil under Obama.   Rahm “NAFTA” Emanuel, Lockheed’s trained monkey, is going to be Obama’s chief of staff.   This does not look like change to me.  This looks like a rerun to the bad old days of the Clinton Administration, when homelessness flourished while public money was invested in junk stocks.  Yet when I point this out, I am accused of being Sean Hannity.

The problem here is that Sean Hannity is telling the absolute truth.  In this age of universal deceit, there is no better way to lie than to tell the truth.   If Hannity lied, he would be lumped in with the Sept. 11^th conspiracy nuts, and the legions of other rumor mongers.  By telling the truth, Hannity is standing out from the rest of the crowd.   He is singling himself out for national attention.   Any imbecile can claim that Obama turned in a false birth certificate, but it establishes credibility to point out that Obama is crewing the ship of state with the same band of cutthroats who brought us the Tech Bubble and the disastrous Financial Reform Bill.   Then, after capturing our attention with the truth, Hannity follows up with a real whopper.   He makes the idiotic claim that the Republicans are better than the Democrats.

Those of you, like myself, who prefer to exist in consensual reality, are probably already aware that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is the difference between AIDS and lung cancer.  Both are an eventual death sentence; the only real difference is the pain you experience as you waste away in misery.  Yet Sean Hannity will tear down the Democrats, and point out every mistake made by the Democrats, while ignoring the fact that the Republicans made the same damned mistakes. Hannity will tear Nancy Pelosi to ribbons, while ignoring the fact that Pelosi voted for everything Baby-Doc Bush ever asked for.  Hannity will accuse the Democrats of spending money on “wasteful” public programs, and will forget that Bill Clinton joined with Newt Gingrich to rip the social safety net to shreds.   Since 1980, the Democrats and the Republicans have been working together for the benefit of the multinational corporations, and it seems that nobody really notices thanks to Sean Hannity.

The Democrats became the party of the poor and the downtrodden back during the early part of the twentieth century.  As the labor movement grew in strength and popularity, the unions sought a political party to represent their interests.  The G.O.P would have nothing to do with either labor or the immigrants who comprised the labor movement.   By the time FDR was elected, unions were strong enough to influence the New Deal and made economic recovery possible.  However, years of prosperity weakened the unions, and labor influence in the Democratic Party waned until Reagan entirely broke union influence in the early Eighties.  Still, people insist on believing that the Democrats support labor and working people, even after Bill Clinton signed the original legislation that send our jobs out of the country and killed labor in the United States.

So there is Sean Hannity telling the truth about the Democratic Party, and Democrats arguing with him despite the evidence of the last 28 years.   The Democrats are arguing that they are different from the Republicans even after Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the table.   Republicans are arguing with Democrats even after Bill Clinton showed his true colors and openly joined with the Republicans.   This is why I say that we can expect the exact same disasters from Obama that we could expect with McCain.

Barack Obama was the perfect Democratic presidential candidate. He is a dark skinned man who was given the kind of upbringing that is usually reserved for very privileged European Americans.   He grew up with middle class values. Despite his books, I cannot see him really identifying with his supporters.   Poverty is too far out of his experience. When he went to school abroad, he was home schooled or went to English language schools.   He grew up in his mother’s white American social class The fact that the Democrats and their corporate sponsors were forced to support a candidate of African descent is a good indication that the power balance is shifting.   The powers that be are on the verge of total economic collapse.  They need us to keep listening to Sean Hannity and pointlessly arguing with each other over two parties which are now exactly the same.   That’s the only thing that is keeping them in power.

Hannity’s purpose is to deflect objective criticism on the Democratic party and to maintain the illusion that there is an actual difference between Democrats and Republicans.   Hannity encourages us to support or oppose a president who has promised us change without outlining what the changes are going to be or how change is going to be implemented.   Hannity prevents us from giving negative feedback on the terrible choices that Obama is making for his staff and his cabinet. The left is being distracted by arguing with Republicans over the non-virtues of Democrats. We cannot afford to wait and hope that Barrack Obama comes riding out of Washington on his white horse to rescue us all.  It is up to us to rescue ourselves and the first thing on our agenda is to tell Obama that Gates, Clinton, and that rabid weasel Emanuel are not acceptable choices.   We, the people, are the bosses here and its damned all time that we acted like it.   Barack Obama works for us.  We need to remind him of that, even if we find ourselves agreeing with Sean Hannity.

Neither of Us are Sean Hannity

Who’s Fault Is It?

Gored By His Own Policies

Congress is looking for a scapegoat for the current financial crisis.  The Democrats are blaming the Republicans.   The Republicans want the voters to think that it’s the Democrats fault.  They want the voters to forget that the Democrats have only been a majority for two years.  The Republicans are also blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.   Both the Democrats and the Republicans are blaming Allen Greenspan for everything.   This is fair.   After all, Greenspan served Bush the Elder, Bill Clinton, and The Shrub.

If Alan Greenspan was police chief on New York City, he would be standing in front of a City Commission explaining why street mugging has reached the point where the muggers are driving Mercedes.   Poor Greenspan would have to hem and haw and explain that he was partially wrong for deregulating the anti-theft laws.  Greenspan would elucidate by explaining that he assumed that self-interest would make the muggers regulate themselves.   He never imagined that the muggers would allow themselves to get out of control the way they had.   Greenspan would have to admit that he should have enforced some of the mugging laws.

Now let’s take a look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.   Neither company actually makes the loans.   A representative from the Mac family doesn’t come to the customer’s house and take the application and the supporting documents.  Somebody who works for a broker does that, or, in the case of a subprime lender, somebody who works for a registered corporation.

People who work in subprime are under constant pressure to sell, sell, sell.   I remember working for Aames Home Loans during the stock market crash of 2000.   The corporate office had every satellite office in California calling Oakland because the property values had risen so high.   Those poor people were getting a call from Aames every ten minutes.  Salespeople would intimidate a customer into signing and then quit as soon as the commission check cleared.   I had one manager who was caught with a complete fraud kit.   She had letterhead from several banks, phony pay stubs; everything needed to send phony documents to the underwriters.  Once the loan went through and the three days passed, it was a legal contract and Aames could not rescind the loan, although they prosecuted the manager.

The same mentality dominates the prime loan industry.   The idea was to get the loan no matter what.  I once got fired from a brokerage for trying to kill a bad loan when the customers were hiding credit cards.  The loan went through anyway.   When no laws are being enforced, how are the Macs supposed to tell a good loan from a bad one?  Tarot cards?   To give them credit, The Macs turned down their share of bad loans.  Yet considering that your average mortgage officer has to submit 15-25 files a week, and needs to fund 3-5 of them, the Macs cannot be blamed if one out of the three to five is a bad loan.

There is also another fact that is not being considered, which is that not all mortgages are bad when they are sold.   A refinance or a second mortgage could be sold with all the honesty and good will on earth and could go bad for any number of reasons.   The first mortgage meltdown occurred in April of 2007 after GM sent one of their plants to Mexico and the laid off American workers could no longer pay their mortgages.   That was the domino that started this whole collapse.   More loans have gone bad from outsourcing and unemployment than any other reason.

Which leaves us with the Democrats and the Republicans pointing the finger of blame at each other.   Who elected these people in the first place.   What does this say about the voters who elected Nancy Pelosi?   These people claim to be liberals, but their favorite girl habitually gives Bush everything he wants and a bag of chips.  What does this say about voters who supported Bill Clinton as he signed NAFTA into law and then tore our social safety net to pieces?   A lot of people who cheered Clinton on are now homeless.

Maybe we, the American voters, are responsible for this mess for listening to ideology rather our own best interests.   Perhaps this is our fault for looking at the surface of the issues rather than the substance.  We, the voters, have consistently confused personal liberty with the corporate license to steal.  We swallowed Greenspan’s idiocy about deregulation hook, line and sinker.  The American voter welcomed Reagan with open arms because he promised us that deregulation would make us all richer.  As Will Rogers once said, “we don’t always get the government we want, but we always get the government we deserve”.

You want to get out of this mess, start voting smarter.  The SEC does not threaten your personal freedoms.   If you paid a little more in taxes, the SEC may have been able to save your retirement account.   The social safety net may have allowed you to save your job.  Speaking of jobs, maybe if the American voter supported the labor unions, the U.S might still have a labor base.  That way our currency would not be exclusively based on petroleum production.

It’s time to start ignoring politicians and demanding what we want.  We want a secure economy.  A single payer health system.  More than anything else, we want a government that listens to us instead of dim-weeds like Allan Greenspan.

It's One Thing When the Peons Lose Their Investments

700 Billion Dollars Down the Toilet

Save Our Struggling Billionaires

I cannot believe that Congress did this.  They took 700 billion dollars and gave it to the same idiots who created the financial crisis in the first place. Congress took 400,000 dollars from everybody over the age of 18 and just handed it Bush’s cronies. A Democratic Congress did this.   Democrats.  They just rolled over and let Bush rub them on the tummy like dogs.   This is just sickening.

The worst of it is that it was the Democrats who did this.  I think this pretty much shows that the Democrats are no better than the Republicans and are just as trustworthy.  That money could have been used for the public good.  Congress could have used it to bring accountability to the financial industry, stabilize the housing market, and create a national health system.  Instead, the money was just handed over to the very people who caused the problem, no strings attached.

What is totally aggravating here is the obvious hypocrisy.   After years of preaching the unregulated market, and preaching against the social safety net, our legislators just hand over 700 billion dollars to a bunch of criminals without a string attached. Then that corporate meat puppet, Pelosi, has the unmitigated nerve to say that accountability is the next step.  Accountability is the first step, Nancy, and we need you to understand that.

But what’s worse, Nancy Pelosi says that accountability will be the next step. What the hell?  This revised bail out decreases federal oversight of the financial industry. She just handed 700 billion to the people who ripped off the American public, and she calls this accountability?  People of San Francisco, will you not rid us of this misbegotten Neocon?   Vote for Cindy Sheehan, Vote for Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Vote for Norton I, please, San Francisco, anything but another two years of Bush’s lapdog as Speaker of the House.   We cannot afford to have the same people in charge of Washington anymore.

It’s time to get a great big can of Raid, and spray it into the Capitol Building.   Then we can watch Congress pouring out of the halls, except for the old and the weak.  They will be lying on the floor with their arms and legs wiggling in the air.  Then we need to go through the chambers of Congress and the Senate with a broom, and sweep out the useless corpses.  When Barack Obama takes the White House in January, let him come with a hostile Congress waiting for him.   Let it be a Congress who knows they have their jobs because we, the people of the United States, put them there.

We need change in Washington, and we need it now.  Not tomorrow, not next week, and not when Barack Obama gets around to it.  We have chickens coming home to roost and the financial meltdown is just the first.   The cost of fighting two useless wars at once is going to hit us hard very soon.  The oil crisis is going to hit while Obama is in office, and let’s not forget global warming.   Life is going to get very interesting very soon.  Do we have the people in Washington who can handle it? I doubt it.

The President is elected through the electoral college.  That is more an indication of which political party is in control than who we want as President.   Screw the Presidency; let’s throw out our Congressmen.   If they are going to hand over public money to thieves, they don’t deserve their jobs.  Let’s put in a few Green candidates, or a few independents; anybody but this current crop of idiots.

We Got Ours, Jack

We Interrupt This Blog

Spare Change?

I am interrupting my series on Libertarianism to publish a letter that I am sending the Democratic National Committee.  I got a letter from them the other day asking me for money.  They think I should give them money simply because Barack Obama promises change.  Personally, I think it is the height of idiocy for millionaires to be asking me for money.  He’s a corporate candidate. Let the corporations pay for his campaign.  Me? I have a family to support, thank you.  I have a wife and kid in very bad health, and I’m still waiting for the National Health the Democrats promised us all the way back in 1996.

So rather than send them money, I used their self addressed stamp envelope to send them a letter.  Here is the text of the letter:

Democratic National Committee

re: Job Performance Review

I regret to inform you that I have been forced to turn down your request for funds due to your poor job performance.  The Democratic Party has totally failed to represent the interests of the People of the United States since Jimmy Carter left office in 1981.  The Democrats have joined in with their Republican colleagues to further the goals of Corporate donors to the detriment of the rest of the country.  The entire United States is suffering from it.

The eight years of the Clinton Administration are the perfect example of how the Democratic Party has failed to represent the interests of the American voters.  Clinton promised us a national health plan. Twelve years later we have not yet received our national health plan.  This is a direct breach of trust.  Since Clinton, a Democrat, has grievously lied to the American public, why should we trust anything any Democrat promises? Clinton is also the president who signed NAFTA into existence and then commenced to join with the Republicans to tear our social safety net to pieces.  Clinton also signed the Financial Reform Act which led to the tech bubble, the stock market crash of 2000, and the recent mortgage meltdown.  Clearly, in his own way, Bill Clinton has been as big a disaster for this country as four years of Bush senior and eight years of Ronald Reagan.  Why should anybody trust Barack Obama simply because he is a Democrat?

The United States of America has illegally invaded and occupied a foreign country and Barack Obama has not yet presented the voters with a withdrawal plan.  I refuse to support any candidate who does not present a comprehensive plan for withdrawal.  Obama’s energy plan is twenty years out of date, and will be an ecological disaster. He is ignoring global warming, and after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, only and idiot would support nuclear energy.  On top of every thing else, Obama’s health plan benefits nobody but the HMO carriers. I see no difference between McCain and Obama.

Furthermore, in 2004, Barack Obama joined with Barbara Boxer and other Democratic Senators to protest the counting of the Ohio votes.  Obama promised the American people an investigation of the voting irregularities.  In 2008, that investigation has not yet happened.  According to the records in Project Vote Smart, Obama has not voted on any of the major issues that he has promised to change.  He has either been absent or he has abstained from voting.  Do you really think that I am going to believe a word Obama says?

Barack Obama represents 28 years of Democratic collusion with the Republican party.  From the Democrats who refused to stand up to Reagan’s insane economic policy, to Nancy Pelosi taking impeachment off the table, the Democratic party has completely failed to represent the people of the United States.  Therefor I have no choice but to terminate you as my political party of choice.  Please remove my name from your membership rolls; please do not send me any more pleas for money that you do not deserve.  I am not voting for Barack Obama any more than I would have voted for Hillary Clinton the WalMart Queen had she won the nomination.  I am not allowing fear mongering to affect my decision.  As I think that Obama will be as big a disaster for this country as McCain, I am voting for a third party to show my displeasure with your poor performance.

Democratic Party, you’re fired!

Please feel free to cut and paste this letter and use it on your own blog or egroup. If you like, you can copy it and mail it to the Democratic National Committee:

Democratic National Committee
430 South Capitol St. SE
PO Box 96585
Washington DC 20077-7242

There is never a good or ideal time to force change.  There is never a safe time to stand up and be heard. The Democrats have not been working for the majority of their members.  It’s time to tell them that we want real change or their jobs are off the table.

There is a wonderful organization out there called Peace Action West, which has forced Congress to listen to the American Public, and engineered the defeat of Bush’s nuclear weapons programs.  Visit their site, take a look at their congressional scorecard, and if you have a few extra bucks in this economy, donate. They perform miracles on a shoe string budget.  Check them out.

A Pair of Struggling Millionaires

Let the Follies Begin

Twin Siblings of Different Parents

Who here actually believes that the next president is going to be any more legitimate than the last president? If the voting machines were rigged to give us 8 full years of the Bush misAdministration, what makes you think that a Democrat is going to be legally elected? Oh, we are going to end up with a Democrat in the White House in 2008. I Have no doubt about that. If McCain was meant to be president, the news services wouldn’t be pushing his divorce so heavily nor would they be emphasizing Obama’s stable relationship. I cannot remember the last time Hillary Clinton had been embarrassed by a Monica joke. I think that the fix is in. We are going to have a Democrat in office in 2008 for all the good it is going to do us.

Yet the Democrats seem to be playing along with this. Take a good look at the 2004 election. The Democrats were playing that one to lose. Who was running? John Kerry and Howard Dean. Neither candidate promised to end the Iraq war. Neither candidate promised to levy fair and just taxes on the corporations. Both candidates were in favor of restoring the draft. John Kerry’s wife is a mover and shaker in the Republican party and John was famous for voting for everything that Bush asked for. Dean, as former governor of Vermont, automatically gets a seat on the board of directors of National Life of Vermont. I used to be an agent for NLV. I remember that when the Iraq war started, one of their top agents made his staff recite the Pledge of Allegiance before meetings. The fact that Dean is now head of the Democratic National Committee shows there is collusion going on between the two parties. Is there any other reason that Pelosi took impeachment off the table?

In the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton promised us a national health plan. We did not get a national health plan. Clinton palled around with Newt Gingrich and screwed us out of our social safety net instead. I bet a lot of people who were cheering about all those welfare mothers having to get jobs see things differently now that they are the welfare mothers. These are the people who are cheering Obama because the want change. I’m sorry to break this to them, but Obama is not going to bring us any change. If Obama was going to bring change, he would not be on the ballot. I hear that Hillary has been acting like the queen of the Democratic Convention. Why not? I think that she had been promised the presidency when Bill left office. That’s why she became the senator of a state she barely stepped foot in before she ran for office. Hillary Clinton is not the Senator from New York. She was never from New York. She never lived in New York before she ran for the Senate. Hillary Clinton is the Senator from Wal-Mart.

Regardless of which one of the Democratic Bobbsey Twins wins the nomination, all we are going to get is more of the same that we got from Clinton. The next president is going into a government which has been bankrupted by the current misAdministration. Clinton or Obama will try to raise taxes on the middle class while continuing to give tax-breaks to the corporations. Can you really expect Chevron to start paying its fair share after not paying any taxes in 8 years? Do you really think that Microsoft and Google are really going to stop outsourcing their tech jobs and pay a living wage to U.S workers? Do you really think that either Obama or Clinton will put their feet down and do what has to be done to save the status quo? Personally I doubt it.

The Bush misAdministration has run America into the ground to the point where they are selling our national highways and bridges just to make payroll. Outsourcing has destroyed our industrial infrastructure so that only oil production is keeping our dollar afloat. Without industrial jobs or a social safety net, only the black market keeps most of our poorest eating. I strongly doubt that either Clinton or Obama is going to end the Iraq war. America needs those oil fields to keep our GNP up and the dollar solvent. Without oil production, corporations might have to lose profit by bringing jobs back to America

The only differences between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats are telling us what we want to hear. This is why I am not voting for either of them. What possible use is it to choose between two corporately approved candidates who are not going to do what is needed to get us out of this mess? I want change but I’m old enough to know that I am not going to get it now. I don’t care if McCain wins because at least McCain is honest enough not to whisper sweet nothings in my ear before he screws me. So I am voting for a third party candidate because it is the only way to vote against corporate domination in American politics.