As I watched 'Morning Joe' today, there were only two redeeming features to merit the time, both reasonable commentators: Jack Lessenberry, and Eugene Robinson. They spoke sense and they produced facts and verifiable data. On the other side was the obnoxious, former (Bush Jr) PR hack Ari Fleischer, who once more proved Hitler's famous line: "When you tell a lie often enough people will start to believe it"
He did this by repeating (at least eight times that I counted) the famous new line on the Right: Governments don't create jobs!
Well, tell that to the Wall St. traders and professional economists, say if suddenly ALL government jobs vanished overnight and the unemployment rate (which includes government jobs!) shot up to 11%! (Including all the ancillary contract jobs that depend on the government jobs!)
But because this bullshit has been so often repeated, usually on the FAUX airwaves, many have begun to take it as gospel or some established fact. "Oh yes, it's true! Only businesses create jobs not government!"
What I'd really really like to see here, to wake these lying assholes up, is all across the board defense cuts amounting to $2 trillion done instantly with no gimmicks! No cutting border patrol, or VA benefits, or Homeland Security or foreign aid and calling them "defense cuts".
You see, because if these REAL defense cuts are made where it hurts, say like the Pentagon's pet program to build 2,443 F-35 fighter jets, I guaran-damn tee you NO defense contractors (like Boeing or Lockheed) will get that money, and hence thousands of workers will be out of jobs! And again, let's cut the crap here: those jobs - since they'd use government money to make the fighters - ARE government jobs! I don't care if the actual workers are making them while at Boeing, or Lockheed. They are paid out of the government's purse, hence to all intents - for that time - are government workers!
Hence, ALL defense contracted jobs are government contract jobs, and gazillions of these are what keep many of the Reep puppet's constituents happy - that they're getting paychecks. THIS is a primo reason why these little rats object to any or all mention of cuts to defense. Not because they're genuine patriots, but because they don't want to lose that government money floating in - which in other circumstances (say applied to private workers and their health care) they'd object to on the basis of the "Nanny State".
Well, hell's bells, they have no problems with the "pappy state"!
This paradigm, obviously, also extends to the thousands of NASA workers (mainly on the Shuttle program), who just received pink slips. Even if not all directly worked for NASA, say 1,000 were based in Missouri and made the Shuttle's heat tiles, they were all government workers for the time they received government money - contract workers or other.
At its height, let's recall, NASA had nearly 67,000 workers working in 33 states on all various parts of the Apollo program. I defy anyone with more than air between the ears to tell them their jobs didn't really exist, because "the government doesn't create jobs"!
As a matter of fact, if millions of government jobs hadn't been retrenched (as initiated with the Dumbya Bush reign, and oddly, continued under Obama) we'd have more like 8% unemployment rate, as opposed to 9.1%. And bear in mind all those workers receive money that is just as much legal tender as any private worker's money. They use it to go to movies, to buy HDTVs, to go out to eat, and to buy homes. Take all that money from all those government jobs away and what do you think you'll get? Well, economic bupkiss.
Yes, I also had a government job, working in the Peace Corps for four years. That didn't pay a lot ($125/ month) but did entail thousands of man-hours of real work- teaching seven classes at two remote country schools, while also doing lots of volunteer work on the side. By the same token, my brothers have held government jobs, serving in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
Anyone want to tell any of us that the "government doesn't create jobs"? Then, exactly HOW did those service jobs emerge, whether Peace Corps or in the military? Did they just pop out of existence like Zeus from Mount Olympus? Give me a fucking break! Of course they appeared because the GOVERNMENT provided the money and resources to make them so! No private corporation created them!
Yet why don't we hear more DEMS (as opposed to Socialists like me) defending the government as a bone fide job creator, as opposed to listening to the incessant LIES spread around repeatedly? And by the likes of Ari Fleischer? Do the Dems have such low opinions of the government themselves they must depend on those like me to carry water for them and do their spade work? Is it left now to Socialists to do that too?
If the Dems had more brains, or gumption, they might have made the substantive case that the opportunity for job creation exists right now, in funding several trillion for a massive capital works program on the scale of FDR's WPA. Those 1930s workers built massive projects like the Hoover Dam, and meanwhile, here we are sitting on our asses while our roads, bridges, sewers and water mains collapse all around us!
No vision! No sense even remotely to see a massive government -propelled infrastructure program could put hundreds of thousands to work across this land while saving our decaying support systems. Yes, idiots gaze at the magic numbers with any DOW spike, but those numbers are meaningless if your water mains and sewers cease working and you become little more than a slightly advanced Somalia!
In the meantime, stock watchers who get wet dreams with every DOW spike are little different from a householder who fawns over a windfall and how he'll spend it, even as black mold (Stachybotrys) invades his basement.
Let's hope our people wake the fuck up before it's too late! In the meantime, Ari Fleischer and his crew of lying scum need to put a sock in it.
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