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Friday, March 27, 2015

Stein to Obama: Don’t Deny Half America Sinking Into Poverty (4-6-12)


Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein calls out the Obama administration that the transfer of wealth to the 1 percenters is still happening despite statistical spin over minimal incremental number shifts in jobs reports. Growing citizen impoverishment continues despite election pr-hype from both of the legacy parties.
Stein is offering a serious Green New Deal to loosen and eliminate the merciless grip of greed of the 1% dooming the balance of the 99% not there already, to a life of poverty. Stein accuses both Democrat and Republican leaderships of coaxing the citizenry to ignore the unignorable at its own peril.
Stein warns citizens to be especially wary of Obama spin today on the 2012 first quarter federal jobs report. After all, she points out, we are facing down three decades of “flatlined wages and purchasing power” for American workers as CEO incomes continued to obscenely shoot upwards. The “Stolen Decades” began in the 1980s and they are in no way ending under the present administration Stein declares.
We need to look for more than downticks in unemployment that are not significant when compared to the enormous economic losses that Americans have suffered in recent times. We are years away from getting back to the 5% unemployment rate we had before the recession, and even at that rate, things were falling apart for tens of millions Americans. The economy before the recession was transfering wealth from working people to the super rich. Now almost half of Americans are living in poverty or near poverty.?
snip
Whatever job numbers are released tomorrow, there is no cause for celebration of this administration’s policies. If elected, I will show Obama’s Wall Street advisors the door, and we'll bring in the kind of progressive economic team that advised Roosevelt with his original New Deal. We’ll return the wealth that was stolen from working people and invest in America’s future.
Stein chides the Obama administration for spinning so-called “signs of recovery” when they offer little hope to vast segments of the population such as the urban poor, especially people of color, facing mass unemployment and profound poverty. Election mode Obama is focused on "impression management" rather than implementing serious policy changes to support all of the desperate "non-elite" classes of America.
When you're dealing with the harsh reality of youth employment rates above 50% and major segments of the community trapped in a lifetime of crushing poverty, you don't want to hear your government officials brag about how well their economic policies are working. You want to hear about plans for decisive action. That's why I'm advocating for a Green New Deal that will provide all the jobs we need - full employment - in the hard-hit communities where we most need them.
We need major policy changes to bring economic security to the working people of America. The fundamental flaws of an economic policy dictated by Wall Street are apparent, even if they have sometimes been masked by periods of apparent growth that were actually financed by unsustainable credit card and housing debt. Wealth that should be invested in our local economy to create jobs is being put in the hands of the super rich who build factories abroad instead. Families disintegrate while the income of the richest few surges upward. This is changing America in a way that we must not accept.
With the loss of a generation’s worth of pension savings and home equity, middle class Americans who once though they had achieved security are staring into the abyss. And for years we told our children that a college education was the key to economic security. Today, an education is often is not enough. Students are coerced into accepting massive student loans they may never be able to repay given the poor job market they face upon graduation. And we're forcing young people to go to work for wages that are often half of those that their parents earned for the same job.
snip
Unemployment is a serious concern. Equally devastating has been the fact that stagnant wages are not letting people get ahead. Workers are dropping out of the middle class. Workers are not able to save for retirement. After adjusting for inflation, the federal minimum wage is $2.75 lower than it was 40 years ago. These have been the stolen decades for working people.
Green Party Jill Stein promises to put an end to the vast and enmeshed continuing theft of the 99% by the 1% in THIS decade! It is high time.

[cross-posted at correntewire and sacramento for democracy] 
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What else lies hidden in the "unemployment" numbers are two phenomena: 1.) The number of middle class job seekers who are reluctantly taking jobs that pay lower wages and fewer or no benefits just to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads... and,
2.) The burgeoning number of middle aged employees who now work as underemployed "consultants" with no benefits... I've been off the unemployment rolls for most of the last thirty years because as a consultant I charge between $75 to $100 an hour which sounds great until you add up the hours worked and end up with $25-30,000 a year and no health insurance or retirement benefits... in fact you pay a self-employment tax into SSI at a rate of 13%... Since I live in California I should be able to safely vote Green this election cycle... looking forward to it.
thanks, jmac, for commenting. I appreciate your story. thanks for bringing out both points. It is a prime time for the slashing of wages and of worker rights and humane conditions in the workplace.

I am clinging to the most abusive corporate job I have ever held out of fear of not finding another one soon enough and going without health care. I am doing the work of 4 or 5 people, imagine Lucy and the chocolate factory ramp on steroids. I watch the management become more and more non-empathetically and incompetently militarized.

Upper middle managers stripping any power from lower middle management, making drastic changes to a system that wasn't broken, and thus breaking it, but when stuff falls through the cracks there is no accountability but wrongful scapegoating from catch-22 insane remote leadership. If I do get a similar job it sure will be for lower wages and less benefits than the sweat shop I am at right now.

Anyway, the gist of what Stein is saying is that neither legacy party gives a serious g*d d*mn about the plight of the citizenry. They want to appear to give a g*d d*mn, but actually giving the d*mn, no, not if it interferes with servicing 100% their corporate pimps. And those greedy bastards want every last drop of exploitation and extortion they can get.

I am grateful for the people who even read a blog about Jill Stein and especially grateful for those willing to comment. Better to stuff the ol' ostrich head into the sand when not watching progressive television pushing on the denying bullsh*t from Obama. Why would those people want to have to be exposed to the serious facts Stein is willing to present. As the Green Party asserts, it is not an alternative, it is an imperative. But citizens hate real change that anyone can seriously believe in, apparently. And if the corrupt media hasn't anointed her why would they take her seriously.

Some say if Obama lost there would be more opposition and resistance to the 1%. With the confusion of the mendacious Obama administration, the 1 percent are getting away with literally murder and more pillaging of taxpayer treasury. Look at the bogus jobs bill with more deregulation perks for the oligarchs.

Obama or a Republican. Either way we are screwed. I say equally screwed but something more stinging with Obama and the Dems since i compare his (and the Dems) screwing of America as a kind of date rape. Exploiting the past reputation of the Dems as being for the people and the every election game of rhetorical Lucy and the football obama likes to play with all that pac money going for advertising the American sheeple, the American Good Germans. I see Obama is going to give an intro to the To Kill A Mockingbird anniversary tv showing. There goes Obama, pandering for votes while selling out the people he is pandering to grotesquely.

best, libby
toritto, so grateful to you and jmac. thank you for acknowledging the bullshit going on and commenting on a Stein blog. Obama has never offered a clean and moral choice to the Democrats. Never gone near there. No moral center. 80 million people held hope in their heart he would go there, and he never has. The faux-pragmatism of selling out. Obama throws stones at the Republicans campaigning, but what a glass house of moral vacuum-ness Obama is throwing from.

Decrying Romney as a flip-flopper which he is. But no greater than Obama. Denial is so ferocious, toritto, I wonder even when people are super-screwed even more than now if they will still defend Obama and blame everyone else. Of course, never themselves!!! As Glenn Greenwald writes, there are rotating villians in both parties, and they are recruits for the pirate sociopathic corporatists. Big media is such a seductive tool.

People bow their heads this Easter and posture their morality, and they are accessories to genocide globally without a second thought and have doomed so many of their fellow Americans to death or illness with their indifference to crap and extorting health care (a generous term) in America, yes I am talking Obamacare! War on women by the Republicans? How quickly citizens forget, bobbleheaded citizens, how the Dems threw women's rights under the bus.

best, libby

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