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Never Forget
Author: BobR    Date: 2013-09-12 11:29:30

Just over a week ago, we celebrated Labor Day with a 3-day weekend, cookouts, and maybe one last trip to the beach or maybe the neighborhood swimming pool. The day before yesterday, the president spoke about Syria. Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of 9/11. What could these things possibly have in common?

If you ventured outside your house and/or watched anything on TV or surfed in the internet yesterday, you were likely bombarded with two words: Never Forget. Once again the photos of the twin towers burning or videos of them collapsing and that horrible white cloud spreading out like the Angel of Death's wings were plastered across our screens. Some call it tragedy porn. It is wallowing in the emotions we felt at the time, picking at the scars just to remember the blood.

What "never forgot" really means to a lot of people is remember the fear and hatred and desire for vengeance. How many people will never forget the lies that were told to send thousands of young Americans to their deaths in Iraq? We Support the Troops, they say, but they never asked for retribution from those who cooked the intelligence into that deadly stew.

It's only when there's talk of military action in another country that the lies from the previous president and his cabal are remembered. Even with that, the mistrust for this president overpowers the very real facts of the previous administrations deliberate lies. We don't want to get into another mess, but let's not dwell on who created the first one and why, and oh by the way - Support the Troops!™ Never Forget!™

America has certainly forgotten the history of Labor Day as well. They've forgotten the struggles the unions went through to improve workplace safety, to secure a reasonable work week, and to ensure that employees were treated fairly by management. A 3 day weekend at the beginning of September is a given, as if it just happened on its own and is a birthright for all Americans. The unions and the laws that sprung up around them due to their labor and steadfast resolve created the middle class in America.

Yet propaganda created by the rich have made union a dirty word. We love our teachers and cops and firemen, but hate their unions. We blame the unions for the loss of jobs, while simultaneously giving tax breaks to the rich because they are the "job creators". Except... well... they really aren't creating many jobs. And all that money just just keeps floating uphill to them:
The gulf between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America is the widest it's been since the Roaring '20s.

The very wealthiest Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country's household income last year — their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market crash. And the top 10 percent captured a record 48.2 percent of total earnings last year.
[...]
The gap between rich and poor narrowed after World War II as unions negotiated better pay and benefits and as the government enacted a minimum wage and other policies to help the poor and middle class.

The top 1 percent's share of income bottomed out at 7.7 percent in 1973 and has risen steadily since the early 1980s, according to the analysis.

What happened in the 1980s? Ronald Reagan was president, and began selling the idea of "supply-side" economics, also known "trickle-down" economics, also known as "voodoo economics". It's the notion that tax breaks for the rich will create jobs - hence the "job creators" idea that's still being sold to the gullible.

America has forgotten the blood, sweat, and tears of those labor union members so many years ago who led us down the path to prosperity, but yet they've let the architects of the Iraq War walk away from their culpability, and instead embraced the marketing of a terrorist attack, and an economic theory that continues to prove itself insane. The trick of the pickpocket is to distract. As America is reminded to relive its pain yet again, and blames "others" for their economic malaise, its pocket gets picked by those who can afford to pull our strings with media.

What we are remembering and forgetting seem to be helping those with the money. Funny, that....
 

76 comments (Latest Comment: 09/13/2013 01:15:27 by TriSec)
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