posted January 24, 2014 10:30 AM            

It's clear now to middle class citizens that O'Bomber and his Socialist Progressive comrades in Congress are waging war on them.

These Socialist morons have driven millions of middle class citizens onto food stamps, reduced their economic status to poverty levels and attempted to make middle class citizens wards of the federal government.

Socialist morons have dried up the job market, raised energy prices, food prices, reduced the purchasing power of the dollar, gotten them thrown off their health insurance plans and have driven up health care insurance costs.

In spite of the blithering, blathering, bloviating and outright lying about how much Socialist Progressives love the middle class, the Marxist Messiah and his Socialist comrades in Congress have been waging war against them...on every possible front; including attacks on middle class values.

Problem for the Marxist Messiah and his Socialist comrades is the middle class are now paying attention and have it figured out.

That accounts for the Marxist Messiah's sinking poll numbers across the spectrum of polling questions.

It also accounts for the Marxist Messiah and his Socialist comrades running scared and abandoning talk about righting the economy and job creation to concentrate on the phony issue of..."income inequality".

That issue doesn't register on middle class radar screens but it polls well with O'Bomber's lazy, shiftless, hard core leftist supporters who want more money stolen from productive Americans to fund their indolent, no work lifestyles.

Obama's polls fall as middle class gets his number
Noemie Emery
JANUARY 21, 2014

Are you dazed and confused by Barack Obama, the nominal Democrat, whose conduct as president since 2009 has seen him sink from nearly 70 percent to 40 percent or less in the national polling, from which he has seemed to learn nothing, but still marches on?

Fear not, the doctor is in: Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose latest book, The Revolt Against The Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, explains all you wanted to know about Obama, and much else. It explains why he never became the new Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson at his best, as he and they belong to quite different wings of their party.

They wished to see the middle class thrive and enjoy their prosperity, but Obama comes from a dissident strain that finds this unnerving. Most conservative critiques of the Left blame the big government-drift, from the progressives to the New Deal to the Great Society, for most of our problems, but Siegel points to an alternative point of dissension: a contempt for the middle class, for commerce, and thus for most of the American culture, that predated the New Deal by more than a decade, and poisons our waters today.

From this angle, the road to perdition (and/or Obama) was paved around 1920, when the best and the brightest, depressed by the Great War and the funk that came after, decided all was not well in the world and the nation, and the great middle class was to blame. In rant after rant, book after book, play after play, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, and the editors of The Nation and The New Republic heaped scorn on the bourgeoisie and on business as peasants unworthy of those who would lead them and who always knew better than they.

"In the 1920s ... what looked like freedom and progress to most white Americans was an affront to liberals and intellectuals," as Siegel tells us. He quotes Malcolm Cowley as saying much later, "It wasn’t the depression that got me. It was the boom."

The role of the leader was not to lead and/or shape public opinion but to govern against it, fighting the crassness that governs the herd. They loved Roosevelt and Kennedy for their glamor and privilege, but those with the middle-class taint — such as the failed merchant from Independence, Mo., named Harry Truman — came in for a roasting. Their prototype candidate was Adlai Stevenson, who explained his two losses to Dwight Eisenhower by saying the voters were too dim to get him. Until Obama came by.

Your more normal pol, like FDR, Ike and JFK, struggled to win the middle class over, but once one looks at Obama in this liberal context, the reasons behind his more curious choices seem clear.

Of course he ignored the clamor for jobs to waste billions of dollars on green energy hoaxes. Of course he nixed the Keystone pipeline to please Hollywood backers. Of course he tries to hype "climate change" to change the subject from the havoc Obamacare is wreaking on middle-class households and businesses -- the predictable havoc that was written into the plan.

posted January 24, 2014 01:25 PM            

You reward your top men at the expense of your workers. Many companies complaining about the high cost of wages and benefits killing them are giving their CEOs salaries and bonuses that would cover those costs several times over. What is socialist about that?

I agree government is too big. Bush and Reagan talked about small govt and grew it at the same time.

The main problem is HOW AND WHERE we shrink. We need to fix the EPA not cripple it. Foodstamps cost a pittance when set up against other Big budget items. Social Security is not a budget item at all...

posted January 24, 2014 02:40 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Catalina:
Yes unfortunately the middle class is anathema to big business, too. How do you drive down the wages of a prosperous group? You send their jobs overseas, strip them of collective bargaining powers and pretend that paying a living wage is bad for business.

You reward your top men at the expense of your workers. Many companies complaining about the high cost of wages and benefits killing them are giving their CEOs salaries and bonuses that would cover those costs several times over. What is socialist about that?

---

I'll take an atypical big business: Apple. Surely you wouldn't accuse it as being the last bastion of right wing conservatism.

AAPL has a current market value of $495B. For simplicity, let's call it $500B. Over the course of 2013, AAPL's stock price increased from $450/share to $550/share. The represents a 18% improvement in shareholder value. Based on $500B market value, that translates to about a $90B capital return to shareholders.

Despite a lot of discussion of renewed US manufacturing, most of AAPL's products are manufactured by EMS companies such as Flextronics and FoxConn in China. Some products are not even designed in the US.

What should Tim Cook's appropriate salary be? Remember that I am not endeared to Tim Cook, or for that matter, the late Steve Jobs. Outside of Marc Zuckerberg whose paycheck is not that of a hired gun, Tim Cook is the highest paid CEO in Silicon Valley. He isn't even a substantial investor in AAPL: just an employee. His 2011 paycheck was $378MM. His 2013 paycheck moderated to $144MM.

How much should Tim Cook be paid? $1MM? Half a million? $100,000? Just trying to understand.

posted January 24, 2014 03:03 PM            

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23486638
Technology giant Apple is facing fresh allegations of worker rights violations at Chinese factories of one of its suppliers, the Pegatron Group.

China Labor Watch, has alleged that three factories of Pegatron violate a "great number of international and Chinese laws and standards".

These include underage labour, contract violations and excessive working hours

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-apple-is-suddenly-laying -off-employees-from-its-retail-stores-2012-8
Several publications, including this one, have reported that Apple has mysteriously been laying off retail employees and cutting hours in recent weeks. Now, we may finally have an explanation as to why.
ifoAppleStore reports that Browett has ordered Apple's retail stores to take several steps towards this goal, including laying off employees who can't work part-time, reducing or eliminating overtime and putting a stop to promotions.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leesheppard/2013/05/28/how-does-apple-avoid-taxes/
Apple’s brand halo is slipping. Silicon Valley’s well-known vanity and contempt for government are amply displayed in Apple’s tax figures. Apple, a consumer products company that sells beautifully designed gadgets, pays very little tax anywhere in the world, including the United States.

posted January 24, 2014 04:26 PM            

Surely you wouldn't want me to compare AAPL with companies like Kinder Morgan or Occidental Petroleum. Or the evil XOMs, JPMs and WMTs of this world.

posted January 24, 2014 11:21 PM            

It's clear the Marxist Messiah O'Bomber never cleared that up for Immelt.

What's less clear is whether O'Bomber thinks Immelt and GE are paying their fair share of US corporation taxes when they pay 0, zero, zilch, nothing.

posted January 25, 2014 10:07 AM            

As much as he can but I'm eternally tired of the Marxist Messiah and other Socialist morons bleating about people/corporations "paying their fair share" then appointing those who pay nothing to positions within the administration.

posted January 25, 2014 10:31 AM            

quote:

---

Surely you wouldn't want me to compare AAPL with companies like Kinder Morgan or Occidental Petroleum. Or the evil XOMs, JPMs and WMTs of this world.

---

Knock yourself out. Then we can play the degrees of evil/who is the biggest badasss on the nasdaq block game? Tim votes demo and hitches rides on Air Force One? And? Jack fire 20% every year Welch was all but shacked up with Rove. You will see the same whether our next pres is repub or demo.

posted January 25, 2014 11:18 AM            

I agree w/ shura and others, like myself, who have posted reams full of proof that this has been going on for well over a decade.

Destroying the middle class is no laughing matter, and will destroy our society as we know it. Wonder when the corps will figure out that the poor can't buy that much product from the ever increasing ghetto.

Net neutrally is ready to fall, net providers don't make enough...

Social programs are to be eradicated. Too costly

posted January 25, 2014 12:25 PM            

quote:

---

Wonder when the corps will figure out that the poor can't buy that much product from the ever increasing ghetto.

---

posted January 26, 2014 04:04 AM            

I confess to live in a very affluent area, and no, most of our very rich don't create a lot of local jobs, but there's a high percentage of thriving entrepreneurs who do, and stubborn small bizzers too.

posted January 26, 2014 01:34 PM            

so not only have we come full circle (approaching the country's Pluto return) but so has the need for a new breakdown to clear the way for the evolution of the general worldview...

Interestingly, love him or hate him, Obama's Saturn conjuncts the US Pluto, so he is the man who will help this process along... as he has Saturn in 12h, he is probably not consciously doing so, one of the reasons I think those who accuse him of trying to destroy the country are mistaken.

However it is also a time when trying to preserve life as we remember/know it is like trying to hold back the ocean by shouting at it! Evolution will occur whether we like it or not and resistance really only makes it more painful and or violent..far better to focus on how to get rid of the dead wood and ring in the fresh start.

But humans being what they are are of course of many minds how to do that so the pressure gets more intense till breaking point for most of us.

The actual return is in 2020, so that should be the culmination point where the dust starts to settle and the way forward becomes crystal clear.