My Dear Barack,
Listen to how they piss and moan! Their wails and lamentations reach Heaven as they beg Congress to bail out the big three automakers. General Motors, once the flagship of American industry, is months away from folding.
One writer estimates that if the big three go under, the unemployment rolls will swell by three million souls.
Those who beg for a bailout fail to grasp the Big Picture. Of the three million thrown out of work, a majority would be union members earning a bloated wage and enjoying outlandish benefits. The savings would be gargantuan.
Then there’s the even bigger picture: Our kleptrocracy decided decades ago that there was more money to be made by gutting America’s manufacturing base than by encouraging it. The Big Three are the last of this breed. Once they fold, our real economy will become a true subset of our faux finance economy.
When this day arrives, there will be no more grimy factories belching their toxic smoke into the atmosphere with their deafening din of production pounding on the ears of the drones who work the assemble line. There will only be broad expanses of monochromatic cubicles, shadowless beneath their florescence lights where all sound is muted and all contact blocked by fabric walls as the threat of job loss keeps the drones bent over their keyboards, afraid of losing a keystroke lest the wrath of a supervisor descend upon them.
Outside, the starving masses will scavenge the piles of trash that only a throw-away society can build, looking for scraps of food that can be eaten or shards of metal that can be sold. Obesity will cease to be a health issue, and Social Security will be saved when life expectancy plunges as the proles learn all about third-world poverty.
So, let the Big Three go, Barack. Out of the suffering will emerge a stronger America
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
About Me
- Case Wagenvoord
- Leonardo, New Jersey, United States
- Case Wagenvoord's articles have been posted at "The Smirking Chimp", "Countercurrents" and "Dissident Voice". When he's not writing or brooding, he is carving hardwood bowls that have been displayed in galleries and shows across the country. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two cats. His book, "Open Letters to George W. Bush" is available at Amazon.com.
2 comments:
Bankruptcy would break the union. People complain that average workers were making $60 an hour and that is why the car companies were in trouble. I calculated that that would be an annual salary of $145,000 (before deductions and who knows who is calculated as average). The CEO makes 10-15 million for approving dinosaur designs. Who is at fault here?
Same as the subprime crap. Those loans made up only 5% of the market but now they tell us the cost will be in the trillions.
In the September 2004 issue of Harpers, Lewis H. Lapham wrote an excellent article about the rise of the Republican machine. One section is a very succinct description of the attitude of Washington, no matter who is in power:
In the glut of paper I could find no unifying or fundamental principle except a certain belief that money was good for rich people and bad for poor people. It was the only point on which all the authorities agreed, and no matter where the words were coming from (a report on federal housing, an essay on the payment of Social Security, articles on the sorrow of the slums or the wonder of the U.S. Navy) the authors invariably found the same abiding lesson in the tale—money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people, making them stupid as well as weak.
The fit who survive can do no wrong, according to the current conventional wisdom.
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