North Truro Sand
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Monday morning, the twenty eighth day of February, 2011, here in Osterville, as we anticipate another soaking rain a little later on this morning. The Oscars were last night, as we all know, and the big winner was the film, “The King’s Speech”, along with it’s star leading man, Colin Firth, winning Best Picture and Best Actor respectively. Also winning the rather lackluster show was Natalie Portman for her performance in “The Black Swan”, winning for Best Actress, along with two winners for best supporting actor and actress, both starring in the film “The Fighter”. As was mentioned on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” yesterday, most of the films these days are made for men, with plenty of special effects and explosions, hence the lack of any real cinematic genius that may, God Forbid, involve a little human emotion. Look to the 2012 Oscars nominating “Transformers V–the rise of the idiots”, as the super elite movie delegation is pressured to offer more for the average American idiot who is far more interested in the upcoming film, “Flintstones III, Fred’s bout with bed bugs”, than he is about some old dead king who overcame a speech impediment during a period in our history where real evil was about to overtake the gentle country of England, along with the rest of the world. A perfect segway into yesterday’s “Sunday morning talk shows”, where I was, as always, blown away by Christiane Amanpour’s, of “This Week”, on ABC, LIVE reporting from Tripoli, Libya, where she sat down and talked face to face with Moammar Ghaddafi’s sons regarding the soon to be civil war in the newest country to be swept away in the unrest, a word that is now synonymous, more than ever, with the Middle East. One son was defiant, in denial about what was happening, while the other was in search of a lawyer, as he shocked me by saying, and I am paraphrasing here, “this is not an isolated event, what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa, this is akin to an earthquake, a wave or a wind that will not stop, it is an epidemic, a fever, as the old is ushered out and the new, youthful educated, tech savvy connected, common poor people will continue to rise up and make their voices heard.” Can someone say Wisconsin? Can someone give it up for the bravery of those 14 state senators who fled in protest from their state, as a bully puppet named Walker continues to jam through the immoral stripping of average worker’s, who work for the good of the public, RIGHTS to a VOICE in the way of collective bargaining, a right that was fought over 125 years ago and has remained intact for all of these years because it represents the last line of defense between the greed and corruption of multinational corporations who are angling themselves to take over this great country, so that they can TAKE every last morsel of what is still left before China does, leaving the middle class to dry up and blow away with the rest of the poor, the disenfranchised and the meek. On “Meet the Press, with David Gregory”, yesterday, my friend and yours, Lawrence O’Donnell, of “The Last Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell”, airing every week night at 8 p.m. and 1 a.m., EST, for all you night owls out there, only on MSNBC, appeared on the ’round table’ and spoke to his shock that only a few moments before, (Governor Scott Walker was being interviewed LIVE on the same show, and Walker DID actually consider sending in ‘trouble makers’, as the fake ‘David Koch’ suggested in the now infamous fake phone call to ‘Mr. Edward Rooney’, I’m sorry, I just can’t get enough of that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off movie reference, no, from the fake ‘Koch dealer’ to the venerable, not to mention honorable, Scott Walker) yes, spoke to the shock that only moments before was stated, quite clearly, that he, Walker, had rejected that notion. Translation, it was considered by the Governor, perhaps by sending in some mercenaries from Blackwater, no, I’m sorry, the kinder gentler new Blackwater called Xe, something akin to what Ghaddafi did to his own people in Tripoli, something like that Governor? The question of state and local governments being “broke” may be true, but let us look at the REASON why they are broke. It could not have anything to do with the corrupt banking system in this country, an industry that has these puppet politicians wrapped around their little finger, does it? Where many in this country would attest to the fact that their pension funds and 401(K) plans have lost 40 percent of their value since the crash of 2008, while the big banks continue to hand out massive bonuses, in the form, I assume, of a ’shared sacrifice’ in bizzaro world. Lawrence pointed out, regarding our national debt and the budget shortfalls across the board in the state and local coffers around the country, he pointed out that it is the outrageous tax code policies that are to blame and they are destroying this nation, as there is no new revenue coming into to federal, state and local treasuries due to the countless loopholes that exist in favor of corporations like Exxon Mobile, GE and the like, who paid nothing in the way of Federal taxes last year, while shark like politicians (my apologies to real sharks everywhere in the world) like Walker cry poor mouth while they simultaneously give huge tax breaks to companies like KOCH INDUSTRIES and offer them no bid contracts on power plants that they are now buying up in bulk. “Can you say monopoly, can you say breaking anti-trust laws, can you say CORRUPTION?” Sure, I knew that you could… Think about it for a moment, is it fair that a teacher, who makes say 35k a year takes an 8 percent cut in her wages, has her voice cut out from under her, along with the rest of the public union employees, who use that collective bargaining chip to ensure that they all don’t work in third world conditions, all while hedge fund managers living in Fairfield, Connecticut, with some making 300 million dollars in one deal, pay the same rate as someone making 250,000 dollars a year? This is not a fair playing field and is certainly not “shared sacrifice”, and represents the core problem in our nation, as billionaires get away with paying little to nothing in the way of taxes, per the corrupt U.S. tax code, unfair to the extreme, in favor of the top two percent, while the average working man’s salary has remained stagnant since the days of Donald Regan, former Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, as we all know this was the beginning of the end of the middle class in this great country, ‘Of the People, By the People and For the People.’ What a scam. How is it FAIR and how is it a shared sacrifice when you have say, a UCLA couple, married and both professors, who make a combined income of 250,000. dollars a year, how is that comparable to that same hedge fund manager who is making one hundred million dollars a year, really, how does that square with the words ’shared’ and ’sacrifice’. Further, how does it square that that same teacher take a huge cut in her relative salary, while also being asked to check her voice and her dignity at the window by giving up her RIGHT to speak her mind regarding her working conditions, her pay, her 40 hour work week, her week ends, and most importantly, her ability to see a real politician of the PEOPLE get elected with the help of those same unions that elected our first black president? Do you really believe President Barrack Obama would have been elected if Walker’s plan to strip collective bargaining rights from union employees, and moreover, their ability to organize, collect money and campaign for someone who is not in bed with big banks, big oil, big coal, big gas, big insurance, big retail, big pharma, and the like, had already been stripped, had already stripped those rights away, leaving the big corporations wide open, thanks to Citizens United, to monopolize the airwaves and brainwash even more people than they already do…do you?!! Some may say, that is exactly the plan and I would have to agree, that IS their plan, yet no one seems to see it, or say anything about it, other than the Huffington Post, The Nation Magazine or seacapecod.net. So, let us, by all means, continue down the path of slashing ‘discretionary spending’, the 12 percent of the budget that is up for grabs, let us continue to cut spending for education, as we have seen, recently, hundreds of teachers getting the pink slips in New Jersey, let us cut spending on affordable heating oil for seniors and the poor, let us cut our spending on infrastructure, badly needed, as we see more bridges to decay and roads fall into disrepair, let us cut spending on Pell Grants for students who seek a better life through higher education, let us slash funding for green technology, for God knows we can count on that oil from the stable middle east to continue to flow unabated with no increase in cost whatsoever, while we watch our planet melt before our very eyes, you know, leaving that spoiled land and sea to our ‘kids and grand kids’, let us cut spending on social programs such as Michelle Obama’s efforts to help our nation’s youth eat better, as we have seen a dramatic and disturbing rise in obesity, adding to our nation’s health care crisis, in our youth, making them more lethargic and lazy, unable to learn what they need to learn in order to compete in an ever competitive world, doing no favor to our own youngest and most vulnerable citizens, which is ironic, for most of the republican puppet politicians out there are so PRO LIFE, when the baby is in the womb, but have the attitude “you’re on your own” when you reach the ‘real world’, for we, the two percent, did not want you or your poor parents on the planet to begin with. All of this is done in the name of ‘austerity’, or shared sacrifice, when we all know that is just a bunch of horsh%it. Be a man about it Walker, tell the truth of who your are, what you stand for and most importantly WHO you really work for, we would have so much more respect for you. You are a bully and not fit to be the Governor of such a fine state as Wisconsin. Where is the shared sacrifice with Exxon Mobile when they paid 0 in Federal corporate income taxes in 2009? Where is that ’sacrifice’ when they made 26 billion dollars in PROFIT that year alone? Not to mention the annual government subsidies, better known as corporate welfare, afforded companies like Exxon, KOCH Industries and Halliburton, just to name a few. No, the only people doing the sacrifice are the real “American people”, whom the republican puppet politicians speak of so often, as if they are close and personal friends with each and every one of them, who work for a living, especially those public employees all across America–people who are your friends and neighbors, people like teachers, policemen, firemen, EMT’s, garbage men, water treatment officials, nurses, among countless others, while the top two percent, along with the corporations, rig the system even more, as they continue to march towards their ultimate goal of a real PLUTOCRACY, frozen in ‘time’. Again, the real reason for the budget crisis in state and local governments, the initial ‘reason’ for this bill in Wisconsin, cleverly disguised as it was, is simple, Wall Street banks–who stole their money by committing highly unethical white collar crimes that cannot be detected because we took the teeth out of the SEC, the securities exchange commission, along with the EPA, soon to be a real joke, thus, allowing monsters like Goldman Sachs to commit the most heinous of all crimes, betting against their own clients, all while getting the royal treatment from the puppet politicians, recently elected to office thanks to Citizens United, who are in way over their hill billy heads. Through the sub-prime mortgage predatory lending fiasco, that led to world wide panic and the financial collapse of many markets around the globe, ‘financed’ by the shady credit default swap market, all 600 trillion of them out there, those toxic derivatives that only a few MIT professors can decipher, all done in the dark caves of Wall Street by evil executives like Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, the world’s largest and most powerful investment banking firm, big banks have gained ultimate power in Washington D.C., with no end in sight. Although they should lose the word ‘investment’ for they don’t really do that sort of thing anymore, as they are more comfortable taking money from the FED at 0 percent and turning around and lending it a 20. Do you want a picture of the historically correct culprit in this crisis now called the United States of America? A country at a literal crossroads? Look no further than the corporate dictated agenda of the Reagan administration, and Mr. Donald Regan, former Merrill Lynch Chair and CEO, who single handily helped the top 1 percent go from earning 10 percent of the nation’s GDP, or gross domestic product, their salary if you will, to 25 percent and rising of said GDP, while the average working man or woman’s wages have remained stagnant, or have declined in many sectors, which has created what I call the GRAND CANYON between the haves and the have nots, a giant chasm that is almost impossible to get across, for as education, the key to getting oneself out of poverty, decreases as an option for so many of our young people, as it goes by way of the good people at the Texas Board of Education, busy re-writing American history for sick, political and ideological reasons, this country will most assuredly slip to fifth or maybe even sixth on the world stage of economic and political world power, as 98 percent of the American people try and live on that 0 percent increase in pay, with the threat of stagflation’ ever looming, while the top two percent continues to see an increase in their already whopping 278 percent increase in overall compensation. Congratulations Republicans, your legacy will be duly noted for all time and presented for all the world to see, hear and JUDGE. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, you recalcitrant child! Have a nice day folks and GOD’s continued SPEED to those brave and honorable Wisconsin 14! Don’t listen to talking heads with a hangover like Joe Scarborough, for his ignorance is not bliss. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
