Wasted vote

I just watched an electoral landslide victory of a lesser of two evils. Obama was not the man of hope and change that people believed him to be. He has been a failure as president. It should have been impossible for him to win with nearly 8% unemployment, yet he did.

A lot of people are sitting around wondering what went wrong. The wrong is the two parties. We are forced into positions where we must elect someone that will either expand federal power a lot, or a little.

I think we can reduce this to gay marriage. No, this is not about the Republican Party’s stand against gay marriage. It doesn’t matter if we have a republican or democratic president, those laws never change. The mistake is that people think they vote for someone who will help them legalize their relationships.

1892 Homestead Strike

While watching the History Channel’s Men Who Built America, I became intrigued with the Homestead strike of 1892, where 10 men were killed, three of which were Pinkerton agents. History sometimes portrays this as some kind of atrocity. In a sense it was, but who was really at fault? We could blame Carnegie Steel’s, Frick, but that is too easy.

Working conditions were hard, but that was life in America in those days. Those people worked twelve hours a day in torturous heat. Those men were steel workers who were known for their toughness.

Enter the union, who told the men they needed more money, which was fair. The unions took things too far. They convinced those workers that the steel mill belonged to them. They were the ones who built it. Unions and the left are telling people the same things today. They tell people that those who built the industry couldn’t have done it without the worker, which is true, in some sense. It’s this kind of thinking that leads many of us to say that unions and the Democratic Party are communistic. They overlook the fact they were given much needed jobs in which to feed their families.

Corporate taxes at the Debate

In the debate Obama said that the USA was paying corporations to move out of the country. Romney responded correctly that he had never heard of such a thing. The truth is Obama and the Democratic tax policies are in part running corporations out of the country.

We all know this is a global market. Any successful major corporation is doing business out of the country. In all except the USA a corporation pays corporate taxes only on the money earned in that country. If a Japanese corporation operating in the USA moves those earnings after US taxes into a Japanese bank, there are no additional taxes.

The Not So New Deal

I recently came across this image and text on Facebook. I found the image to be over the top and the accompanying text interesting. I decided to take each bullet point and add my commentary.

(name removed) did a little research and came up with the following about Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

1. Brought the country back from financial collapse.

2. Established and protected Social Security.

3. Worked toward ending a war.

4. FDR was completely opposed to everything Hitler stood for - the biggest threat to national security. Hitler died on April 30, 1945 by taking poison and then shootin

g himself with a pistol. (corrected)

5. Wife was an advocate of the disadvantaged

6. Invested in jobs and the nation's infrastructure.

7. Spoke to the people not at them.

8. Strong advocate of the military and its soldiers and sailors.

9. Strong foreign policy record in the presence of tyrants.

10. Established and sustained regulation of Wall Street.

11. A champion of minority groups.

12. Ended discrimination in the military.

Sound familiar?

FDR is consistently considered one of the top three Presidents in history but the Tea Party consider him a dangerous Progressive much as they have maligned Obama.

Obama: ”We built this country together.”

In the beginning there were the 13 original colonies. It was those intrepid people who were the foundations of this country. They came to this country for many reasons. Some came to escape religious persecution, while others came to be free of oppressive governments. For whatever their reason they sometimes formed small communities and worked together to build their small portion of the country. These people later formed local governments which have become the foundations of this country.

In time these colonies decided it would be in their best interested if they formed a partnership to provide for a common defense and create free trade agreements. Many knew that tariffs among the young colonies could be their downfall. For these and other reasons the United States of American was formed.

Obama's Economy

 

While looking through barackobama.com I found the below chart that he uses to show how all his stimulus and jobs programs have been successful. I added the unemployment rates for those years. The graph can only point out that the landslide of job loss slowed and began to maintain. We must always remember that while looking at unemployment rates it only reflects the number of people who are signed with the unemployment office or receiving unemployment benefits.

Some of those people who returned to the workforce did so by taking lower paying jobs, these are called the underemployed. Some people, like me, are attempting to earn a living for themselves through self employment. Some are living off IRAs.  For any number of reasons, people have dropped out of the workforce.

Life of Julia Without Government

Obama released his slide show of Life of Julia and all the things government has done for her. I tried to show how her life might be better without government.

View the Tea Party Tempest slide show of Julia

This is a graphic is now included in the slide show.