THE ECONOMY, JOBS, THE MEDIA AND OTHER REASONS NO ONE TRUSTS ANYTHING ANYMORE

As shown in a recent Gallup poll, trust in government, big business, and mass media is at record lows and that is not without good reason. We have a government hell bent on searching out every last bit of information they can wring out of us. We have businesses that have zero interest in protecting their workers as they steal every last penny they can and reward it to themselves. Lastly, we have a mass media that is proving to be no better than North Korea, with a plethora of empty headed talking suits desperately trying to make hay out of the most mundane circumstances while simultaneously missing whatever big story is actually happening at the moment.

This is a recipe for disaster, If trust continues to erode, eventually, everything will fall apart. That is inevitable. Obama hit the nail on the head when he said recently, "If you don't trust us, we are in big trouble." Exactly, Mr. President and you and the rest of the elites in this country are in for a big surprise if you keep walking down this path. Just look to Brazil, Greece, Turkey and Egypt as to what happened when a disgusted public gets pushed too far. And unlike those countries, we have guns and lots of them. A civil war looms and unless both sides of the aisle get their heads out of their asses and start accomplishing something, anything at this point that is totally retarded, these rounds of violence will happen here too.

Gallup came out with another poll that should shake this country to the core, if it was actually reported by out crap newsfests. Turns out, seventy percent of American workers hate their job. Think about that number: more than 2/3rds of the people in this country hate what they do and do it as piss poor as possible because of it. This is costing companies $550 billion in lost productivity, not an insignificant number. The main reason most people hate their job is the low pay, long hours and having to deal with middle management straight from hell. No one is allowed to make any decisions without approval from above which can make Congress action look quick in comparison. Older Americans and those with college degrees were the most unhappy and with good reason. Most of these people expected to be making a decent living and instead are stuck in some dead end, low pay career that is sucking the soul from their very existence. I've worked these jobs and it is worse than being in excruciating pain from a rabid weasel nibbling on your testicles. You work forty plus hours in a week, make less than $20,000 a year, and have to deal with an slave driver boss who demands you work hard all day long for pennies on the dollar while he makes a multi-million dollar salary. Fuck that. And that is what many Americans are saying.

The ironic part is that it is because we have destroyed unions, with public support, that has led to this rampant inequality where the executives get all the money while you get whatever they happen to drop on the way to the bank. That is trickle down economics at it's best and the right is still saying it works when it fantastically doesn't.

Here is another truth you won't hear on any newscast: America is falling further and further behind on all almost every level. We used to have the best health care system on Earth. That's long gone. We used to have the best education system. Not anymore. Now comes another study that shows that America's once #1 ranking in the richest middle class has fallen to a dismal 27th. That's right, the middle class of such powerhouses as Qatar, Cyprus and Iceland all fare better than here, with Australia being number one now, with Luxembourg and Japan close behind.

Here's a list of other things that dozens of countries now do better than us from Alternet.com:

• We don't have real universal healthcare. We pay more and still have poorer health outcomes than all other industrialized countries. Should a serious illness strike, we also can become impoverished.

• Weak labor laws undermine unions and give large corporations more power to keep wages and benefits down. Unions now represent less than 7 percent of all private sector workers, the lowest ever recorded.

• Our minimum wage is pathetic, especially in comparison to other developed nations. (We're # 13.) Nobody can live decently on $7.25 an hour. Our poverty-level minimum wage puts downward pressure on the wages of all working people. And while we secure important victories for a few unpaid sick days, most other developed nations provide a month of guaranteed paid vacations as well as many paid sick days.

• Wall Street is out of control. Once deregulation started 30 years ago, money has gushed to the top as Wall Street was free to find more and more unethical ways to fleece us.  

• Higher education puts our kids into debt. In most other countries higher education is practically tuition-free. Indebted students are not likely to accumulate wealth anytime soon.  

• It's hard to improve your station in life if you're in prison, often due to drug-related charges that don't even exist in other developed nations. In fact, we have the largest prison population in the entire world, and we have the highest percentage of minorities imprisoned. “In major cities across the country, 80% of young African Americans now have criminal records” (from Michelle Alexander's 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness).

• Our tax structures favor the rich and their corporations that no longer pay their fair share. They move money to foreign tax havens, they create and use tax loopholes, and they fight to make sure the source of most of their wealth—capital gains—is taxed at low rates. Meanwhile the rest of us are pressed to make up the difference or suffer deteriorating public services.

• The wealthy dominate politics. Nowhere else in the developed world are the rich and their corporations able to buy elections with such impunity.

• Big Money dominates the media. The real story about how we're getting ripped off is hidden in a blizzard of BS that comes from all the major media outlets...brought to you by....

• America encourages globalization of production so that workers here are in constant competition with the lower-wage workers all over the world as well as with highly automated techonologies.

And why have we fallen so far? Because of the rampant deregulation of Wall street that has led to an unsustainable death spiral that may actually end the world as we know it. Here more from Alternet.com as to the exact reason why:

The corporate change during the 1980s to make shareholder value the ultimate goal.

The deregulation of Wall Street that allowed for the creation of a vast array of new financial instruments for gambling.

Allowing private equity firm to buy companies, load them up with debt, extract enormous returns, and then kiss them goodbye.

The growth of hedge funds that suck productive wealth out of the economy.

The myriad of barely regulated world financial markets that finance the globalization of production, combined with so-called "free trade" agreements.

The increased share of all corporate profits that go to the financial sector.

The ever increasing size of too-big-to-fail banks.

The fact that many of our best students rush to Wall Street instead of careers in science, medicine or education.

 

All of this has led to a wealth bubble that will eventually pop and take us all out when it does.

 

 

Check out this graph which shows that the only place where wages are increasing are in the financial sector while the rest of us have been shorted for over forty years. Why are people not more pissed about this? Have we become such sheep that we can be robbed for decades and just shrug and say "meh?"

 

The media is helping to shape people's opinions which is why anyone believing anything that comes out of Fox News, MSNBC or CNN should be committed for stupidity. These corporate shills are terrible are getting beyond the superficial and a recent interview with Russel Brand was hilarious in its' ineptitude. Brand is a lot smarter than he seems and while appearing on Morning Joe, began the interview with this statement, "This is a hotbed of neurosis and psychosis… I’m grateful to be here.” This of course sailed over the heads of the talking heads not accustomed to a discussion that required actually intellect. After going off for far too long on what Brand was wearing and his chest hair, Brand went on to explain his new comedy tour where he will discuss how people like Jesus, Gandhi and other icons have been hijacked by people wanting to prove their points that these figures never would have. A good example would be the GOP who is supposedly Christian but wastes no time in screwing over the poor at every instance. Something tells me Jesus would not approve of that stance.

The media has fallen off as a way of getting news as even casual readers of this site will be far better informed than someone who watches Fox news 24/7. I report the truth wherever that truth may bring me. Corporate media brings you the news that they spin the way they want. And the US public is not as stupid as they make us out to be as polls show we don't believe them at all anymore.

 

We are entering a dangerous period. All civilizations fall and we seem to be entering that period stat. The final three stages are apathy, anger and revolution. We passed apathy a decade ago, are getting well into anger and revolution is looking more and more likely. As long as we have a public determined to keep electing Republicans into office that have no new ideas and no hope of fixing anything, that dark day of revolution is coming quick. If the readers out there do not start demanding more from their jobs, their government and their press, we will deserve whatever hell is headed our way.