[jeffkrol]

How many people have pensions anymore? Get rid of the union and get salaries and benefits down to sustainable, real world levels.

Can't race to the bottom fast enough for you huh............

[GeneV]

How many people have pensions anymore? Get rid of the union and get salaries and benefits down to sustainable, real world levels.

Around 90% of government workers and 20% of private employees. 7 Reasons You Don't Have a Pension - US News and World Report But of course, you'd want to take away any benefit to working for the government.

[jogiba]

How many people have pensions anymore? Get rid of the union and get salaries and benefits down to sustainable, real world levels.

That is exactly what the rich ordered the Republicans to do along with eliminating corporate taxes and capital gains taxes so only the middle class will pay taxes and be slaves to the rich until they die without health insurance.

[grhazelton]

How many people have pensions anymore? Get rid of the union and get salaries and benefits down to sustainable, real world levels.

Ah, John! I've been wondering where you were. How is that some folk really get their knickers in a knot at the thought that someone, somewhere might be enjoying a benefit that they personally disapprove of? What's the problem with a decent, middle class salary and (Oh, the Horror!) good health insurance? And what's your problem with pensions?

I imagine that you have no problem with small business owners banding together for mutual benefit. Why shouldn't workers? As our country (it belongs to us liberals, too) circles the drain toward becoming a Banana Republic without the bananas, I wish the TeaBaggers would reflect on the grim truths that Bernie Sanders presents so eloquently in this piece:

Daily Kos: Is Poverty a Death Sentence?

How far must we sink until we all recognize that increasing income, health outcome, and life span disparities might well bring about that wonderful aspect of Banana Republics, the occasional bloody coup as the have-nots attempt to redress the imbalances.

Far better to deal with the horrendous unemployment rate, producing the dismal state Senator Sanders descibes, in a pragmatic way rather than risking national collapse to maintain ideological purity.

If the current mania for tax cuts to cure the recession continues, I'd like to know where are all the jobs that these prior tax cuts benefiting mainly the top few percent are?

Surely our lords and masters, the top few percent, have more than enough money to risk some in starting up companies, companies here in the US, not on foreign shores.

Or could it be that Supply Side Economics is a fraud? Henry Ford, hardly a liberal, let alone a socialist recognized that people needed decent salaries to be able to afford his cars! So he paid them the unprecedented sum of, I think, $5.00 per day to build his Model T Fords. This wage level forced other manufacturers to raise their wages, creating discretionary income. In a word, Demand Side Economics. What a concept! People need wages to have money to jump start the economy! Even a high school student should be able understand this.

[shooz]

To quote mikemike. "Poverty is a lifestyle choice."
Such ignorant drivel.
He missed the part where the choice was made by corporations.

[Ratmagiclady]

To quote mikemike. "Poverty is a lifestyle choice."
Such ignorant drivel.
He missed the part where the choice was made by corporations.

I'm missing the part in this top-down class warfare where it makes sense to tell people like me I should believe this is nothing but a dog-eat-dog-selfish world and that's supposed to be good?

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, if I believed that, I'd have made one Hel of a criminal.


(I always did have something of a rogueish strain, and often delighted in sneaking around, but if nothing else, the idea of living for what you can *take,* if nothing else, bores me. More to the point, that's not what I want. Gods know I've had plenty of 'incentive.' Not to mention insult. (Used to be I'd cheerfully make with the light fingers around anyone who was insulting me. Particularly if they were claiming a superior economic position and a sincere belief in selfishness to do so. I once let an Objectivist huckster berate me over whatever came to mind, being like, "So you believe it's morally-ok, perhaps mandated, to deprive people of things if you have the ability?" Robbed the sonovabitch blind while he was defending that position. With great arrogance and unkindness. He was looking right at me, too, all the while. Gods know what he was seeing. Ah, if not for deeper callings. )

[grhazelton]

"Poverty a lifestyle choice."

Oh, yeah!

As most thinking people know the sad, wandering hulks we see are often mentally ill, the products of the well-intentioned but mishandled deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals of several decades ago.

I'm sure that our citizens living in crumbling dwellings or their crapped out vehicles, without health care, without proper food or clothing, really enjoy their "life style." Many of these folk were blind sided by businesses downsizing and/or off shoring their operations, all in the name of profit, the true god of US capitalism. With health insurance typically tied to one's employer these folk are one serious illness away from disaster.

mikemike and his ilk should have the humility to recognize that, as the saying goes, "sh*t happens" and that they themselves could be reduced to poverty. All too often one's fate is more a matter of luck than of ability, initiative and those other attributes for "bootstrapping."

May I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed. On (Not) Getting by in America? And remember she conducted her experiment when the employment situation was much better than it is now.

[Ratmagiclady]

"Poverty a lifestyle choice."

That's what they say about *anyone* they want to oppress, really. Like they get to say "This is a choice, therefore we can claim it's a *bad* choice, even if it isn't a choice, so it's somehow OK if we try to force people to 'chose' things they neither can nor should have to."


They demand that others lie in order to placate their denial on the points of what they actually do to actual people.

Damn right I chose a few things, though. I chose not to lie, and I chose not to steal. The fact that this made me homeless and what we call *poor* is *not* something I chose, or anyone does. Most poor people don't even *get* that 'choice,' ...they're born to it.

Obviously, they have long claimed that it's a 'choice' if you aren't straight, ....so that would somehow mean it's OK for them to do everything they can to hurt you and take away anything they would like to. Call it 'moral.'


Ie, they think if they can call something a 'choice' they have a right to try and coerce people, even in intimate matters. Never mind economic systems and demands.

But if anything *were* a choice, it wouldn't give them the right to hurt others. I happen to be bi, not that I ever really passed for a straight person, but you couldn't make me 'choose' a man by breaking my heart over losing a female partner.

Any more than you could claim I *chose* to be poor and disabled cause I just wasn't greedy enough for some schemes.

Oh, yeah!

As most thinking people know the sad, wandering hulks we see are often mentally ill, the products of the well-intentioned but mishandled deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals of several decades ago.

I'm sure that our citizens living in crumbling dwellings or their crapped out vehicles, without health care, without proper food or clothing, really enjoy their "life style." Many of these folk were blind sided by businesses downsizing and/or off shoring their operations, all in the name of profit, the true god of US capitalism. With health insurance typically tied to one's employer these folk are one serious illness away from disaster.

mikemike and his ilk should have the humility to recognize that, as the saying goes, "sh*t happens" and that they themselves could be reduced to poverty. All too often one's fate is more a matter of luck than of ability, initiative and those other attributes for "bootstrapping."

May I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed. On (Not) Getting by in America? And remember she conducted her experiment when the employment situation was much better than it is now.

Good book/article. I've been feeling the squeeze for some while, now. I get through another four-month ordeal that didn't have to happen, and I'm already trying to choose between food, bills, the little bit of capital I need to try and sell something, and dealing with a tooth that just cracked open cause when I was homeless my wisdom teeth came in and apparently one had one more behind it. Turn on the radio, and they're cutting health care back further. While srtonewalling about deductions and subsidies for the rich... And saying, 'If you['re poor, it's your fault!" (if you've ever been poor, tooth problems are serious problems: if that gets infected, it's damn close to your brain, for one.) Nickled and dimed, indeed.

Fact is, I'd already be on the drift without external help: just to be in a place I can hope to sustain. This is supposed to be 'capitalism,' but if you're poor and not running on credit cards, they take all your *capital* just in deposits to keep the lights on. I'm thankful just to have a home, but it wasn't supposed to be like this.

[boriscleto]

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