Eye of AllOne

Before i get into the meat of this piece i wanted to post this picture for everyone to see.  To me it looks like a large eye with eyelashes.  i thought it was so beautiful i tried getting the whole thing into the view finder but missed one portion.  It was so big and gorgeous that to get that sense yourselves you should double click on it and really give it a look.

i like it so much i'm calling it the
Eye of AllOne.  i imagine this is how ancient religions got their myths started.  One could easily equate this with any God they believed in.  So since i think we are all connected by and through AllOne here it is.

Now for the meat.......So, what could a conservative and a liberal agree on?   How about we start with government spending.  i know you want less, we all want less, liberals and conservatives alike; but how concerned are you about a massive defense establishment which spends $1 trillion of your tax money every year in peacetime?   Please realize this amount does not include counting the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Also remember that our nation maintains over 700 military bases all over the world. 

For everyone out there that is concerned what would the founding fathers say about that?  All those military bases?

That $1 trillion-a-year defense budget didn't prevent the 9/11 attack, we don't like to think about that, but it didn't.  The actual attack for the perpetrators may have cost a mere half million to pull off.  So have we been wasting that $1trillion or is it being spent wisely?  Apparently the libertarian Cato Institute thinks we have been spending too much and recommends cutting the defense budget in half . 

Guess what? 

We liberals agree!

And there's probably a lot more we could agree on.

Jim Hightower recently wrote, "the true political spectrum in our society does not range from right to left, but from top to bottom.  Let's put aside the labels of left and right for a bit and figure out how to wrest power from the tiny minority who have manipulated the law, politics and the media to maintain it.  Get your facts straight and then let's work together to bring back government of the people, by the people and for the people."

The first step to changing how we interact and treat each other as a species starts with each individual deciding there is a better way. i know there are better ways. Only very rarely does something truly need force to create change.

i think we all realize there are no easy solutions.   Historical events are not linear, they don't fit together nicely.  There are many complex narratives concerning how we got here, no one example completely delivers any one pat answer, for there is none.  We shouldn't buy into the simplistic commentaries that blame taxes, welfare, war or even the wealthy.

Vast numbers of decisions that were made over time did get us here today.  We can look at how we want to do things differently in the future but that means taking stock of where we are today.

When we emphasize identity politics we create factions that are manipulated against each other to the detriment of all of us.  So keep that in mind as you read the following.

One interesting conversation of late is the income gap.  For decades we have been told that you don't raise taxes on job creators(wealthy).

Well you do know the wealthy do not spend all their money unlike the lower and middle classes.  The lower and middle classes spend everything; all of it goes back into the system, which churns the economy. The theory is that if we catered to the middle class the middle class will have money to spend and the wealthy will come out of the woodwork to provide something(jobs) to separate them from it.  According to the Congressional Budget Office this churning from 1979 to 2007 gave the top 1% a whopping 281% increase in their after tax incomes.  The bottom fifth of the nation enjoyed a measly 16% increase.

Assuming the wealthy are "job creators" what does it say about the fact that even back in 2004, after the tax cuts, the economy shed over 3 million jobs?  It tells us that in spite of just receiving a massive upper-class welfare package, the rich did NOT create jobs.  If anything, the businesses they own or are shareholders in laid off, outsourced and offshored jobs rather than create them.

When you drive the middle class into penury by giving the wealthy tax breaks that will not create jobs because there is no demand for whatever commodity they want to sell, you have to re-evaluate.

Americans are no longer employable on the global market.  Our basic cost of living is too high and we cannot compete with labor in developing nations.  Henry Ford once said that he wanted to pay his employees enough money to buy his cars. Wal-Mart wants to pay its employees so little that they have to shop at Wal-Mart.  This is where we are today and we need to remember it is today not yesterday.

The wealthy (who own and operate corporations) have a single purpose - that is to increase the size of their portfolio and corporate profits by any means necessary. 

Creating jobs in the USA stands in direct opposition to increasing profits.  The long range goal of any corporation (small business or large) is to eliminate or reduce labor costs as much as possible.   This takes us back to the cause of the civil war.  The reason the south fought was because the north threatened a source of free or low-cost labor. 

There has been no new net job creation in the U.S. since sometime in the 1990s.

The rich are not concerned with unemployment, they are concerned with profits. 

The wealthy do not create jobs in the USA anymore.

Extending the tax cuts for the wealthy is giving more upper-class welfare to people who helped create the mess we are in today.

So if you want to see the deficit reduced think a bit more about where those tax cuts are going and who they are really benefiting.  The wealthy can afford to pay.

Hope you enjoy the pictures...see ya next week.