Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Winston-Salem Journal LTE's 11/30/11

A nightmare
The American dream is now a nightmare. More than 46 million live in poverty, 50 million have no medical insurance, and 45 million receive food stamps. Millions are unemployed and likely will remain so. Retirement for some is questionable; for many, it will be an impossible dream.
The politics of greed, bigotry, faux Christian values and voodoo economics conspire against tax increases for the wealthy and social welfare for the needy. Wall Street insiders and CEOs pocket more in yearly bonuses than most will amass in a lifetime of labor. Jobs are transferred offshore to lower costs, and workers are laid off to boost profits.
Many government representatives are little more than grotesque shills for powerful entities, working tirelessly to prevent revenue increases, curtail benefits, derail health-care reform and squash workplace and environmental regulations. They sign pledges placing higher allegiance to partisan dogma than to welfare of country. Greed is touted as good; dissent derided as class envy.
And enter, stage far-right, narcissistic ignoramuses running for president, who should be laughed off the public podium yet are favored by a disconcertingly large number that ignorantly vote against their own best interests. The respectable, fiscally responsible conservatives of old have been replaced by mean-spirited ideologues spouting Ayn Rand platitudes while opposing anything that helps the masses. They deliver loaves for the privileged few while dropping crumbs to the many.
Welcome to the new Gilded Age. And try to enjoy the crumbs. If they have their way, crumbs will be all we will get.

JOHN McHAFFIE
Winston-Salem

Undemocratic
The Occupy Wall Street movement shows that many Americans have come to recognize the truth of what Teddy Roosevelt observed when he declared that "we must drive the special interests out of politics." Today the concentration of income and wealth among the top 1 percent of our society makes us a democracy in name only. Big corporations undermine the economic well-being of working people by seeking profits through offshore jobs, destroying unions, paying politicians to slash corporate taxes and placing profits over the protection of our environment as oil, gas and coal companies have done by poisoning our air, water and food as well as ignoring their own contribution to climate change, which is fast creating a bleak future for our children and grandchildren.
Unrestrained capitalism is inherently undemocratic. We Americans have now learned that when big corporations and wealthy individuals give politicians in both the major political parties millions in campaign contributions, the top 1 percent gets what it wants. Even though we concerned Americans speak out, write, advocate, petition, plead, even pray, we have no influence. We go unheard. But the OWS has begun a movement in which we average citizens can reclaim our legitimate democratic power.
We must reestablish the peoples' power at both the state and federal levels by strengthening unions, setting up workers' councils, requiring average investors to have seats on boards of corporations, and establishing a public-financed campaign system. Private sources of campaign finances must be limited with contributors publicly identified.

STANTON TEFFT
Winston-Salem

Common sense
I just wanted to say a huge "Amen!" to the Nov. 27 guest column "What's happened to common sense, South?" by Clint Johnson. I think we could include not only the South but the entire nation. We are, as a nation, dumbing down so fast it makes my head spin.

BRENDA GROSE
Kernersville

No common sense
In his guest column "What's happened to common sense, South?" (Nov. 27), Clint Johnson manages to prove either that he has no common sense or that it isn't as valuable a commodity as he thinks.
His flippant suggestion for the Occupy groups — to volunteer at homeless shelters — which, incidentally, Johnson himself doesn't seem overly eager to do — sure does put those nuts in their place, I guess — the place Johnson would like them to be, that is. But it does nothing to solve the problems they're demonstrating against. It doesn't provide them with jobs with decent salaries, and it solves no inequalities in our financial system. It will only familiarize them with the home that the top 1 percent in the nation would like to provide them.
I guess to Johnson, "common sense" means distracting everybody from the real problems with self-righteous judgments passing for cheap humor.

MACK FERGUSON
Winston-Salem

20 comments:

  1. Lte 1 and 2....you boys are drinking from the same empty bottle of tiresome cliches as the last edition of your mindset a generation ago. And they from the same bottle as the generation before. Our problems are self inflicted and therefore are solvable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lte 3 and 4...sorry I missed the piece on common sense. Maybe someday the works of GK Chesterton- The Apostle of Common Sense- will be republished and help our entire society with the gift of common sense.

    ReplyDelete
  3. On Tuesday, former News of the World deputy features editor Paul McMullan gave evidence to the inquiry into media ethics and practices currently underway in London. Of all the statements, claims and allegations so far in the Leveson Inquiry, this one is the true corker: “Privacy is for paedos.”

    ": “In 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never found anybody doing any good. The only people who need privacy are people doing bad things. Privacy is evil."

    ARGHHHHHHH

    ReplyDelete
  4. ARGHHHHH is right. Chilling too.

    ReplyDelete
  5. That guy just made himself a big fat target for any hacker with half a mind to make him eat his words. He'd best be squeaky clean.

    ReplyDelete
  6. WW - if you have a kindle e-reader, you can buy the complete works of G.K. Chesterton, including over 400 books, stories, essays and poems, for 99 cents.

    The vast majority of his work is also available in book form via Amazon.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A great quote from Chesterton's very funny, yet quite serious short novel The Man Who Was Thursday:

    ""..The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists..."

    ReplyDelete
  8. Good afternoon folks!
    LTE 1: Yes, and millionaire money managers won the latest Powerball lottery. There are a lot of people who are either unemployed or underemployed, but we are far from the Gilded Age where adults and children worked for a nickle an hour under dangerous conditions in factories owned by millionaires. Both parties have hijacked by extremists as a direct result of gerry mandering.
    LTE 2: Power to the people! Money is now speech. Money buys politicians. If you don't have any money, then good luck with the "reestablish the peoples' power" bit. We are in desperate need of campaign reform, but Citizen's United burst that ballon.
    LTE 3 & 4: I've often found "common sense" to be wrong, particularly when it comes to the financial realm or technology/science. Volunteering can provide valuable experience, however, when there's $30k - $40k in student loans outstanding, it ain't going to pay the bills even if you are living in your parents' basement. People who don't have to worry about bills should think 10 times before making remarks regarding those who do have to worry.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Since McMullan worked for the sleaziest newspaper in the English speaking world, we won't need hackers to expose him:

    'In November 2011 he made a notable contribution to the Leveson Inquiry where he not only confessed to a wide range of illegal activities in the pursuit of news but defended them as absolutely necessary.

    McMullan testified to having undertaken a wide range of illegal or unethical activities to get stories besides phone hacking: bribing police officers, stealing documents, going through celebrities' garbage, and at one point posing as a "teenage rent boy" to entrap a paedophile priest. "[I]t was hard to think of any dubious news-gathering technique he had not confessed to," wrote New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall, "short of pistol-whipping sources for information." He defended those techniques as "perfectly acceptable ... if all we're trying to do is get at the truth." '

    A very sick puppy, this boyo is.

    ReplyDelete
  10. OT...thanks for the info. I may be forced to get an e-reader yet. Hell, I may be forced to get into the current tech world all together. That quote from Chesterton was part of the Chesterton Society program a few Sunday nights ago. Thanks for passing along.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Since Lte1 mentioned Rand- and by implication Atlas-- "Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but his opinion was all he was permitted."--Franz Kafka.

    ReplyDelete
  12. And enter, stage far-right, narcissistic ignoramuses running for president...........

    John McHaffie

    And thank God we have the smartest president in history in Obama, who was able to single handily correct all of our economic woes in just three years.

    McHaffie, you're just another liberal idiot. Come join the crowd in this forum. You certainly won't be alone.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Homosexuals to the left of me...homosexuals to the right.........man, it seems like there are homosexual pedophiles in every locker room these days. Hmmmmmmmmmm..............?

    ReplyDelete
  14. Old married White men pedophiles.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Bachmann: "I would close our embassy in Iran"

    Are these people really being televised worldwide? lol

    ReplyDelete
  16. I'd like to see Newt and Mitt go at it. Be like watching two fish floping around on the Emerald Isle Pier.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Huntsman on Cain: "We've got real issues to talk about, not the latest bimbo eruption,"

    ReplyDelete
  18. Hey Bobby, did you hear about the homosexual, former sheriff in Colorado that was arrested for trying to trade methamphetamine for sex with another man?

    It's a daily occurrence with these type of stories. Wonder why?

    ReplyDelete
  19. I wonder about important things. Not Buckthings.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Good evening folks! Many long days at the office lately, and I'm glad for them.

    Bob, you may like the idea of a Romney-Gringrich flopfest, but were I a Dem, I'd worry about a Gringrich-Obama debate. Scumbag he definitely is, but Newtie is quick on his feet. And remember, sad to say, Bill Clinton made being a scumbag irrelevant to holding office.

    LTE1: "Many government representatives are little more than grotesque shills for powerful entities . . ." You bet, entities like the SEIU and AFL-CIO, whose unfettered access to workers' money gives them clout disproportionate to their size.

    LTE2: "Strengthen unions"? Please explain how that will restore the economy, by lowering productivity? And how to strengthen them? Oh, but undemocratically coercing membership. Fine ideals. "Workers' councils"? Now, now, just settle down, smoke a little dope, hum "The Internationale," and relax. Sorry, but Marx, Lenin, and Stalin have largely been discredited, except in union HQ's and on American university campuses.

    LTE4: " It doesn't provide them with jobs with decent salaries, and it solves no inequalities in our financial system." Neither does squatting on public property while "raising consciousness," and spreading crap, crabs, clap, and cannibis. Working in homeless shelters is commendable, but Johnson should have stopped with "work," which is out there to be had. Maybe not in the Sociology grad's field, but it's out there.

    ReplyDelete