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

Hannity Has Done His Job Well

Change? Surely You Jest?

When is criticizing a politician racism?   When the politician is Barrack Obama, of course.  Obama can back away every one of his promises regarding taxation, and anyone who points it out is accused of bigotry.  Obama can turn all his promises regarding the economy into a lie by appointing Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, and I am called a horrible person for mentioning Geithner’s part in NAFTA and outsourcing.   Obama can also appoint that war criminal Gates to continue the job he has mishandled for Bush, but Barrack Obama can do no wrong. Apparently I am wrong for pointing out that appointing Gates is a sign that the war is going to continue.  The right wing pundits have done their job. Obama can continue the same failed policies of his predecessors, but nobody dares to point this out without being accused of racism.

As a marketing and sales professional, I have to admire the right wing pundits as well as the people who write their scripts.  They are brilliant.   By carefully mixing truth and psychotic racism, they have made Obama invincible.  When one mentions the incestuous relationship between Hillary Clinton and Wal-Mart, one automatically becomes a KKK member.  Obama can ask John Yoo to be a member of his national security staff, and I allegedly become Sean Hannity for pointing out that Yoo was the person who advocated the torture of Guantanamo inmates. John Brenner is the CIA executive who oversees torture, and Obama wanted him to head the CIA.  Ask how this means change, and cries of racism echo from the hills.

This does not mean that racism does not exist.   On the contrary.  Hannity’s script writers depend on racism.   When Buster Beer-Belly redneck hears Hannity’s rants, all he is going to hear is that the Black President’s middle name is Hussein, and that the good white Republicans are protecting his interests by continuing Bush’s policies.   All Mr. Cardboard Liberal is going to hear is the racism, and will associate any criticism of Obama with the racism. Thus, when Obama continues the failed economic policies of his predecessors, it’s all going to be somebody else’s fault.  The rednecks will blame the Muslim-loving liberals and the liberals will blame the redneck Republicans.

The amazing thing is that anybody even listens to Hannity, Limbaugh, or the rest of the troupe of right-wing howler monkeys.  It’s not as if they have anything worth listening to.   I spent my entire life not even knowing what Sean Hannity looked like until I lifted his picture off Google.   I could pass him on the street without even recognizing him.  I watched some of his stuff from YouTube when I was accused of being him.  What person in his right mind would even listen to his shit?   Maybe I have been in the business too long, but Hannity is the worst salesman I ever experienced.  Yet people on both sides of the political spectrum listen to him as if he even matters.

All Hannity has to do is pick on Nancy Pelosi, and that godless neocon becomes Ms. Super Liberal.  Pelosi, who continues to vote in favor of the Iraq war and illegal wiretapping, is a champion of the downtrodden because Hannity says something bad about her. Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!  The woman is a bald-faced liar.  Check our her voting record.  Project Vote Smart records the voting record of every politician in Washington DC.   There is no excuse for anybody to fall for Hannity’s tactics.   The truth is out there for anybody with enough brains to look for themselves.

Hannity and the rest of the right wing pundits have successfully applied a peer pressure element into American politics.  You are now either for Hannity or against him.  If Hannity labels somebody a bleeding heart liberal, you have to either condemn him or support him as a bleeding heart liberal.   It’s an us or them attitude where truth does not matter a whit.  The fact that Pelosi has been an ardent behind-the-scenes Bush supporter seems to be irrelevant in the light of Hannity’s mighty rhetoric.

Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt, so I should not be too terribly surprised that people are falling for the Hannity smoke and mirrors show.  How many people in California lost their homes because some stranger called them up during dinner time and offered them a “free, no obligation, assessment of their present mortgage”?  Sounds pretty dumb, doesn’t it?   There are just some things that people have become conditioned to respond to.   The words “free” and “no obligation” are guaranteed to catch one out of every five prospects.   This holds true in politics as well. Say the right words and you get people’s money.  Say other right words and you get people’s votes. Say other magic words and a politician becomes god or the devil depending on the audience you are aiming for.   Sometimes you can accomplish both with the same sentence.

The liberal who has the nerve to criticize Obama becomes the eternal outsider.  Even though Obama has already gone back on many of his promises, and made frightening choices for his cabinet, I am called a bigot for daring to mention it. That’s cool. I can live with it. I have received some really nasty email, I have been called a pig on my own blog, and even my wife has been slighted over this.   I do not take any of this personally. The unconditional Obama supporters have a hard lesson coming to them.  Many of them can see it coming.   Really, how smart do you have to be, to know that Rahm Emmanuel is bad news for any sort of positive change?   They pick on me for pointing out the obvious.

What bothers me is the opportunity that is being lost.  Why is everybody dropping the ball?  Why is putting a Likkudnik in as chief-of-staff acceptable? Why is Gates acceptable?   Why is pointing out that they are not acceptable labeled racist?  Because Sean Hannity opened his mouth?  Cut me a break.   If Obama’s supporters want actual change, they are going to have to react to what Obama does and not what Sean Hannity says.   Hannity is just hot air. Geithner is a danger to our homes, our jobs, and our savings.   Don’t fall for the Hannity con game.  Get on the web, get on Obama’s site, and remind him that you voted him in for change.

Do You See Any Change?

Conclusion: the Libertarian Appeal: Part Two

Dear Lord, Save my Nation From Libertarians

The Libertarian appeal is that it is based on fairy stories.  It is a direct appeal to the propaganda we were exposed to as children.  We were raised on stories about the American Revolution and the brave heroes that established American freedoms.  Libertarians deliberately confuse human freedom with corporate freedom.  They exist to prevent laws that will sacrifice corporate profits in favor of human rights. Eliminating clean air laws is good for the corporations, but most of the kids in Richmond, California suffer from asthma due to air pollution from the oil refineries.  Are these kids free?  Eliminating school taxes may increase corporate profits, but it raises a generation who never heard of the Holocaust.  Is ignorance freedom?  Outsourcing may increase corporate dividends, but it leaves the black market as the sole means of survival for many poor people. Are these people free?

Libertarians exist as a fifth column in American society.  Fascist movements can come out of the left as easily as out of the right.  Mussolini’s Corporationism was a left wing movement back in the day, while Hitler’s Nazis were a right wing movement away from socialism.  Libertarians have spread across the political spectrum, and act as a divisive force in American politics.  Libertarians on both sides of the spectrum constantly confuse individual liberty with corporate rights. Laws that limit corporate crime do not threaten your freedom.  Yet Libertarians will tell you that they do.  Laws that watch online transactions only prevent corporations from laundering dirty money.  Yet Libertarians would have those laws appealed so that corporations can steal more easily.

Libertarians constantly identify with the employers rather than with the employees.  They resist unions, work place safety regulations, and the minimum wage with the same fervor as a Christianoid keeping Harry Potter out of the school library.  Libertarians jump up and down and hold their breaths over laws that limit hate speech, but they resist any attempt to make Fox News and CNN accountable for their lies.  Back in the 1920s, William Randolph Hearst instituted a huge lie campaign to outlaw hemp.  Thanks to deregulation as advocated by the Libertarians, corporations can once again lie and get away with it.

Another part of the Libertarian appeal is that they promise to bring us back to a simpler time.  Karl Hess painted a picture of a simpler America that never existed.  It was an America that never needed foreign trade.  It was a magical land where there were no class distinctions because the Free Market treated everybody the same.  According to Hess, all America needed to do was get rid of those pesky federal regulations, and the economy would take care of itself.  The Blue Meanies would run away and all would be right in Pepperland.

Welcome to reality.  Some of you may be reading this from a library, because you can no longer afford an Internet connection.  More of you may be reading this in the library because you no longer have a home in which to install an Internet connection.  Some of you may be waiting for the foreclosure notice to come in the mail or the sheriff to come to the door.  You have watched your retirement accounts disappear and waved goodbye to your jobs as they flew away to the mysterious east.  We can all thank the Free Market and Federal deregulation for the loss of our homes and our jobs.

Stop and think.  Banks from Socialist Europe are coming in to save our economy.  The Euro is now holding up the dollar.  Europe enforces its anti-monopoly laws and has stricter financial regulations than the United States.  Libertarians claim that such regulations should have restrained trade and choked the European economy.  Europe has strong unions.  Libertarians claim that unions choke commerce through red tape and inefficiency.  Europe has national health.  Libertarians claim that should have killed investment through over-taxation.  Yet Europe bailed us out to the tune of half a trillion dollars.  Banks in Socialist Europe had the capital to save us from our free market economy.

Libertarian philosophy brought us into this mess.  We have ignored our own best interests and listened to free market fairy tales.  We have gained nothing but pain from deregulating the economy.  We have gained nothing from the lowering corporate taxes.  We have been so hoodwinked into thinking that deregulation is our friend, that we have been cheering on the corporations as they ripped us off.  It is time to ignore Libertarian madness.  If we don’t wise up, our children and grandchildren are going to face the exact same disasters we are facing today.  What’s worse is that these are the same disasters our grandparents faced in 1929.  How many times are we going to fall for the same lies before we wake up?

Change That European Bankers are Demanding

What Are We Hoping For?

No Hope Here

Alright, I was wrong. Hillary Clinton will not be the next POTUS. I guess the memory of her husband’s misAdministration is too vivid in the national memory for a Clinton rerun. Maybe the American people are regaining the brains they lost during the Reagan campaign. They are not voting for the wife of the crook who signed NAFTA into existence. Maybe the people who just lost their homes remember how Bill Clinton destroyed the social safety net . I most certainly remember that Bill Clinton signed the Financial Reform Act of 1998, which was a major factor in the stock market crash of 2000 and the mortgage meltdown of last year. Whatever the reason, the wife of the crook who pulled the great National Health boondoggle will not be president.

So now we are going to have Barack Obama as our next POTUS. I know that he is going to be the POTUS because McCain’s divorce has been all over FOX McNews and CNN. If McCain was supposed to be POTUS, his divorce would be sat on like they sat on Poppa-Doc Bush’s connection with the Moonies or Baby-Doc Bush’s coke habit. The morally hypocritical American voter would never vote for a divorced president. Look at how the Democrats have been whoring themselves to the religious right. So we are going to have a Black candidate for POTUS and his slogan is “Dare to Hope”. Okay, what is it that we can dare to hope for?

Presidential Administrations follow a certain pattern. The Republicans come into office and rape and ruin the economy and then the Democrats come in and are forced to make some very unpopular decisions in order to repair the economy. Sometimes these are long term decisions. For instance, Jimmy Carter ascended to the Oval Office after 6 years of Nixon and two of Ford. The economy was being strangled from the results of the Vietnam War and the job market was being choked by returning vets. Carter had to raise the interest rates to slow inflation, raise taxes to restore the treasury, and give tax breaks and special low interest business loans to encourage new industry and new jobs. Four years later, the Reagan team took over and took credit for all of Jimmy Carter’s unpopular work.

Barack Obama is going to take over the Oval Office at the end of the Bush misAdministration. Need I say more? Bush has led the crookedest administration since U.S. Grant. Obama will take charge of a treasury that has been utterly raped through corporate welfare, faith based initiatives, irrational taxation, and the Iraq war. The treasury has been so badly depleted that the U.S government has been forced to sell our interstate highways and bridges to multinationals just to make payroll. Oil consumption has passed critical mass years ago. Obama’s energy policy made perfect sense 20 years ago, but today it’s too little too late. Since our GNP is held together entirely by oil production, Obama is looking forward to massive inflation as the dollar devalues. Only an idiot would want to be president after Bush.

Jesus Christ and all Twelve Apostles could not repair the mess that Bush will leave behind. It may appear that Obama can walk on water, but the truth is that he is only another politician. I do not expect him to do what needs to be done to clean up the mess. I do not expect Obama to stand up to the multinationals that have sucked the wealth out of this nation. I do not expect Obama to stop corporate welfare or to even force corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. The president does not possess a magic wand to make there be more oil. Oil prices will continue to rise as extraction and refinement become more and more difficult. As oil production drops, so will the value of the dollar. Since we cannot expect big business to return industry to American soil, the economy will go totally to hell.

So while Obama tries to repair the damage, he is going to have a Greek Chorus of Republicans telling us how things were better under Bush. Obama gets to take the blame for eight years of corporate welfare and subsidizing Christianoid megachurches. He will take the blame for the coming oil shortage, even though there is enough blame for that to go all the way back to the FDR Administration. The U.S. will undoubtedly attack Iran in order to maintain the dollar, and Obama will get the blame for that as well.

Then come 2012, and the Republicans will strut around like peacocks, telling us what a hero G.W Bush was. They will tell us that we should never have elected a Democrat. Bush will have done all the damage, but Obama will get all the blame.

The Republican's Fall Guys

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.