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Capitalist Savagery: Paul Ryan’s Deregulation Epiphany While Seated Upon A Luxurious Toilet In A Koch Mansion
Los Angeles
I’ve been feeling a little under the weather the past few days, and I didn’t have any Goldenseal tea left in my pantry. Goldenseal is the mother of all cures. By brewing her roots in hot water, you get the most potent and pungent tea you’ve ever drunk. She also grants a strange energy unlike a caffeine rush (there is none in Goldenseal), that seems to create an elevated ticking of power and awareness just behind the forehead.
Because of my recent ill-at-ease disposition, I’ve been producing lesser blog postings about nipple slips and MMA fighters found naked on the couches in torn apart churches. I even took it upon myself to applaud Fareed Zakariah’s plagiarism. But who cares? As I write this, Zakariah is probably dead. Rumor has it he’s been placed on suicide watch. Plagiarism is a harsh, embarrassing charge.
I hope to reverse this trivial blog post trend by shedding light on the controversial “gonna put y’all back in chains” statement made by Joe Biden.
Capitalist Savagery: Y’all in chains
Black people have cringed at the chains reference, but conservatives, mostly, have bristled at the phrase, because Biden’s talking about the GOP’s constant push to deregulate the banks, and peel back government’s policies and laws that regulate the private sectors.
Biden’s statement is not at all too extreme, nor is it harsh. It is in response to the GOP’s con game about “unshackling” Wall Street to reinstate a strong economy. With Mitt Romney upping the severity of his campaign message by recruiting Paul Ryan as his VP, this country is facing a real threat from politicians who don’t think capitalists and corporations need rules and regulations to protect workers.
Biden should really have opened one of my favorite books and read this passage, from a time of no labor restrictions, out loud:
William Wood, 9 years old, ‘was 7 years 10 months old when he began to work’. He ‘ran moulds’ (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould) from the very beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off at about 9p.m. ‘I work till 9 o’clock at night six days in the week. I have done so for the last seven or eight weeks.’ Fifteen hours of labour for a child of 7! (354)
The words are from Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume I. Marx is writing about the first report of the Children’s Employment Commission in England. If you think this kind of exploitative labor could never happen in modern America, you might be right, but it’s exactly why our nation has fought so hard to install into our society workers’ rights, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and watchdog groups like the ACLU and Children’s Rights.
Paul Ryan has been bankrolled by insurance firms and the Koch Brothers. In fact, it was while seated upon the high-seated luxury toilet in one of the Koch mansions that Ryan read the first eleven pages of Atlas Shrugged and had his worldview epiphany. Ryan wants total deregulation of Wall Street and the markets because he claims that will put America back to work. Will make the economy flourish. But what kind of work would that be? And for whom would it flourish?
Deregulation is exactly what any good capitalist or corporation wants. The fewer restrictions concerning the health of the environment or the workers or the safety of the workplace, the greater the profit created for the company. Illegal immigrants are also good for the capitalist. It’s why our borders are still open. Child laborers are also good. The more workers in the system, the more wages are driven down. The more desperation in unemployed workers makes fewer and lesser standards they will be griping about.
Mega businessmen like Mitt Romney have been happy to ship American jobs overseas. Our corporations are sitting on billions of dollars of zero-interest loans from the Federal Reserve. They are not hiring with the extra money. Would an even greater tax break, or eliminating corporate taxes all together, make the difference in hiring more Americans?
General Electric doesn’t even pay taxes some years, yet they were one of the biggest corporations to make the push in shipping jobs to China. Their CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was then given a position in the White House, by Barack Obama, to help create jobs. After he, Immelt, had been pushing his managers to outsource to China. Of course, GE has taken plenty of taxpayer money, but not from China. They get it from us. These kinds of stories couldn’t be made up or written as satire. It would be too heavy handed. Yet, it’s real.
Let’s get back to Marx’s Capital:
J.Murray, 12 years of age, says: ‘I turn jigger and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o’clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night. I worked two nights last week.’ Fernyhough, a boy of 10: ‘I have not always an hour (for dinner). I have only half an hour sometimes: on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday’ (354).
Is this what Newt Gingrich has in mind when he says he would, as president, repeal child labor laws? Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about Newt. He’s out of money, he’s out of luck. He dines and dashes from McDonald’s. He’s been spotted shuffling along Old US route 50 like an overweight drifter.
But we do have people like Paul Ryan to worry about. We have men and women who think markets correct themselves, that corporations shouldn’t have restraints, and that the world is one giant ball of infinite resources that cannot be exhausted, and the land they come from cannot be polluted. And worst of all, these people don’t mind exploiting the world’s less fortunate men and women and children to do all the back-breaking heavy lifting.
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Nothing can be won from beggars
2012-08-18 03:22:15
Source: http://www.deardirtyamerica.com/2012/08/capitalist-savagery-paul-ryans.html
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