The political party currently in power, as well as the one wreaking havoc upon it - just call them all the Redemopublicrats - are lying to us again. They’re lying by promising us lives of ridiculous misery without telling us that they’re going to make our lives ridiculously miserable. What they do say is that they’ll give us “more jobs.”
We have heard the “morejobs” lie before. A “morejob” is another entry-level, nine or ten buck an hour job without health benefits or pensions, in other words, without “get ahead” power. Call them healthless wealthless headless morejobs.
You’ve got to take them.
Yes, there are alternatives. They’ll tell you that. Yes, you can get really smart and learn to write code for computer programs, or borrow lots of money and go to school and learn something else so you can get hired doing one of the tens of thousands of jobs currently available, a job with few if any benefits at an entry level, a job where you sit all day in front of a computer screen (or in front of some other object), performing physically inactive, high-skill work requiring incredibly long hours of attention to detail. And eventually, they say, you’ll get promoted to another job and “come up the hard way,” like they say you should.
But forget about laboring your way up the “old fashioned way.” There simply aren’t enough factory jobs to go around, and you can’t earn too good a living at them anymore anyhow. So buck up! Go to school, become a child not left behind, and take one of those entry-level sitonyourassallday jobs, because that’s the only star you can hook up to and swing on nowadays, Baby, and that’s the rest of the whole truth, which, of course, the Redemopublicrats don’t tell you. They tell you the parts that sound good, but the real heart of the truth is like a rock they can’t bust up. They’re not talking about the heart of it, and not talking about the heart of it is a lie.
We’ve got millions of unemployed. That's the heart of it; so, like it or not, millions of Americans are going to have to take a healthless wealthless headless morejob anyway, because even if every child didn’t get left behind, and even if every last unemployed worker in the USA spent his or her last solitary cent to get smart and take one of those high-skill mediocre wage sitonyourassallday jobs, there would still be millions of unemployed left over, and the only jobs left would be healthless wealthless headless morejobs.
The Redemopublicrats tell us another lie, that these are desperate times for everyone, and that we of the one-time middle class need to take the healthless wealthless headless morejobs or leave them.
We already know we’re desperate! We don’t need to be told. We know the really rich people are really rich and the rest of us aren’t. We’ve heard the 99% talk it to death, and we’ve seen Occupy Wall Street occupying it, and the Tea Party having their party over it, but they’re all beginning to look a lot alike. They start out expressing brilliant ideas about how they’re going to create wealth for everybody, or not, or pay taxes, or not, or eliminate government, or grow government, or reduce government, except allow lots of Big Bank lobbying, or limited lobbying, or no lobbying, or do a combination of many things, and by the time they’ve finished politicizing their ideas, they’ve sifted out the big stuff that they really don’t want to deal with, and their plans amount to the same original lie: morejobs. And the Redemopublicrats pick up the finely sifted story there and tell us that’s all we’re going to get out of them.
Their lie about us having to “come up the hard way,” just like “they” did, is shameful. Most Redemopublicrats have been “up” for so long that they don’t remember what it means to be poor, and some of them define “hardship” as having to sell something, so they find it necessary to choose from their yacht, their house in Florida, their house in California, their lodge in Colorado, or their little bungalow in Paris. Must be awfully tough.
Back in the 80’s, the last time the Redemopublicrats had it so tough, they got this great idea. The idea was, Eliminate the Middle Class. Steal their wealth. Slash benefits. Cut jobs.
But they didn’t use those terms publicly. They used lies: “Outsource,” yeah, that’s the ticket. “Reduce waste.” That meant reduce wages. “Put America to work.” That meant use the middle class.
So the Redemopublicrats started to “use” the middle class hard:
“Use the middle class! Use their pension funds!” they cried. “Use them to make risky investments. Trim those health benefits. Enhance profit margins. Drive share prices up! Buy low and sell high. Give the rabble a few bucks’ savings in taxes - it’s a paltry savings when they’re not making much money in the first place - but keep telling them, ‘Here’s the advantage we’ve given you. Now you gotta come up the hard way, like me!’ Then aim a mortgage at their heads and say, ‘And here’s an easy mortgage for you. Take it or leave it. Make my day.’”
Nobody aimed a gun to our heads, you say? That’s a lie. If you work at a healthless wealthless headless morejob, and Redemopublicrats start telling you to “come up the hard way,” and they aim a mortgage at you and say, “Here it is. Take it or leave it,” well, that feels cold as a gun barrel. Sounds like you don’t have too much choice. Take it? Leave it? A chance at having your dream? This must be the opportunity. This is it. Take it! This is how you get ahead. This is the way you “come up the hard way.”
So people buy those mortgages, and they surrender more of their wealth. The Redemopublicrats begin to invest what the middle class is forced to sacrifice, arranging it so they're risking as little as possible of their own wealth.
"Now you do the same," they tell the Middle Class. "Invest what you have left of your wealth, if you happen to have any, at tremendous risk. Create new wealth after our example; ride the wave of investment to prosperity and happily-ever-after land."
They tell lots of fairy tales and lots of lies: "You must invest. You're not really having your government entitlements cut; you're getting the opportunity to control all that money and invest it the way you want! Watch your investments carefully, and then maybe you’ll be able to come up the way we did.”
Most of the middle class are far too busy working two or three healthless wealthless headless morejobs, getting kids off to school and figuring out which bills to pay and which not to pay, to watch their investments! They don’t even know yet how thoroughly they’re getting used.
And that is how the Redemopublicrats became extraordinarily rich. And when the bottom fell out of the whole mess, they still saved a very tidy share of the wealth they’d gathered. The rabble middle class didn’t. They lost theirs because they trusted the Big Banks to invest wisely for them. Besides, they were so busy doing their healthless wealthless headless morejobs that they didn’t have time to pay attention to the way they’d been used. And then the Redemopublicrats told the people who were once middle class that they had to pay for the disaster.
And how do we pay?
Why, no doubt the process will involve taking some of those “morejobs.” The Redemopublicrats are reminding us again, these are desperate times, and we don’t have much choice, not now. Same as before, feels like a gun to our heads. No lie.
So we get off unemployment and take any healthless wealthless headless morejob available in order to be doing something. We add another healthless wealthless headless morejob if we can find one and if we have any time left to work. And the Redemopublicrats reassure us that if we can keep working at those healthless wealthless headless morejobs, the economy will improve and we’ll reduce the national deficit and the national debt, and maybe, if we’re willing to scrimp and save for the future, we poor people will be able to invest, and if we are really careful, and if we watch our investments with vigilance this time so that the Big Banks don’t play those risky games with our money, then maybe the rest of us will prosper just a little, maybe. We might even become middle class again, maybe someday.
But for now, we’re not middle class anymore. We’re poor, and we’ve got to “come up the hard way,” like the Redemopublicrats.
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