OT- What's Wrong With America

Okay- thanks for telling us what we should think about first thing every day. This pathetically specious article, written by a pompous low life economist unqualified to analyze the subject matter, was discounted weeks ago. Journalism in this country is a sorry-assed joke and it is this way because most people are the same way.

The quality of the article can be gauged from the fact that the author never mentions that most of the manufacturing jobs he values so highly have been shipped overseas - mostly to China. In due course the Chinese will have educated their work-force to the point that they won't be cheap labour any more, and manufacturers around the world will get back to improving the productivity per worker by further automating the processes of production.

So far, it has proved easier to automate manufacturing that the processes handled by governments, but isolated branches of government

- like tax collection and defence - have made some progress.

A senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal who doesn't have a clue about this aspect of the way the economy has been developing for the past century ago presumably owes his seniority to a capacity to articulate economic delusions that sound attractive to the kind of rich nitwits who read the Wall Street Journal.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Almost time to shoot every goddamned one of them and start over. As it stands they have managed to ruin yet another democracy with the same greed and deceit that has killed all of them throughout time.

In the next set, lobbyism will be absent. If it gets used, the parties get to go be guards at the new devil's island, never to return to free soil.

Yeah, but you're an admitted communist, and therefore either brain-damaged or terminally stupid by definition.

Thanks, Rich

So, how's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?

Do you really _like_ having the lion's share of your income confiscated to pay the bills of the lazy, negligent, and stupid?

Thanks, Rich

s it

Fat chance of that. It might be kept within some kind of bounds if there were real limits on electoral expenditure, but at present fat cats can spend what they like to get their favourite candidate elected, eliminating less amenable candidates in the process.

Ultimate Patriot does go in for these appealing but impracticable fantasies.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I'm an "admitted communist"? Rich Grise will be busy for some time trying to find any such admission on my part. I certainly never joined any communist party anywhere - not that there's been a communist party around anywhere that I've lived that I might have joined if I'd abandoned the principles of a life-time, and allied myself with such an undemocratic organisation.

Rich is probably doing his usual brain-damaged substitute for reasoning and confusing democratic socialism - which I do support, albeit in its less florid manifestations - with communism. It's understandable enough - the US mass-media have been peddling the same moronic line since the 1920's - but it is still the kind of total nonsense that only somebody as terminally ignorant and ill-informed as Rich would fall for.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

..

=A0As it

The fat cat Obama just raised $35,000 a plate at a fund raiser in LA a few days ago. Obama has no business in LA other than to collect campaign funds from Jewish supporters. He already has California in the bag, why waste taxpayers money here? Why not go to Texas instead?

-Bill

=A0As it

He wouldn't keep California in the bag if he didn't pay at least some attention to his supporters there. Obama is an American politician, and he got elected by playing the political game according to American rules. One suspects that he'd quite like to change the rules, but he's much too good a politician to waste energy on campaigns that he wouldn't have much chance of winning.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Cite?

Mark L. Fergerson