Image via WikipediaI've been watching the failed NBC Lost/Prisoner ripoff hybrid Persons Unknown on and off over the past week, and it finally seems to be catching up with me. Spent most of last night dreaming about some bizarre scenario in which I was trapped in a bizarre abandoned city with a group of people who kept disappearing and showing up later drugged and paralyzed.*
I know things are getting bad when I actually find myself siding with the people whining about Facebook changes. Did the most popular waste of time in the world REALLY need a complete makeover? Imagine the hours of office productivity on a national level alone being lost to massive Friend Poke retraining. This is the biggest drain on the economy since the massive Myspace migration of '05.
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Caught a few minutes of Morning Joe, never a good way to start the day. Scarborough holding up the latest news on soaring healthcare and lamenting on the blow to "small businesses." Never mind the millions of people now even further away from anything even remotely resembling affordable healthcare, what about the poor business owner saddled with insuring these deadbeat workers who keep demanding outrageous things like living wages and reasonable compensation for aiding their employers in increasing profit margins?
The big joke is that business owners already know how to handle the rising health insurance costs - they just do the same thing my last two employers did, stop offering healthcare to employees. See? Problem solved. What are they going to do, quit and get a job that offers health benefits? Good luck trying to find a job in this economy. No, the employees will take nothing and like it.
Bonus annoyance points to Scarborough to trying to lay the rising healthcare costs at Obama's feet for daring to try and overhaul a corrupt system hellbent on profiting at the cost of human lives. Health care costs have doubled in the past decade, while the average worker income has risen slower than the cost of food and fuel, and the wealth disparity between the rich and the poor in this country now rivals many third world dictatorships.
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The hardest part of sitting through the two hour version of Supergirl is watching Peter O'Toole act his heart out, despite being trapped in a supporting role for such a crappy movie. You can almost imagine him interrupting every third take with "You do realize I was in Lawrence of Arabia, right?" It is painful to watch him emoting just as much as he did in Beckett or The Ruling Class while Helen Slater wanders around him trying to figure out what to do.
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Speaking of wealth disparity, there's been a lot of complaining from certain circles about Obama's assertion that America's wealthiest citizens should be paying higher taxes. Suddenly there were cries of class warfare from the politicians that spend most of their time defending the rich and powerful, complaining that Obama and those devious Lefties keep demonizing the rich, implying that they don't deserve their vast wealth and are somehow lesser people because they have more.While I would argue that they are lesser people not because they have more, but because they are increasingly unwilling to use the stockpiled wealth they will never spend to help those in need (Gerry Spence explains his issues with this mentality by using the example of people stockpiling cans of beans during a famine), this isn't me complaint.
I take issue with the Republican politicians and talking heads who complain about their rich and uber-wealthy brethren being demonized, while at the same time they go out and claim that those forced to turn to the government for help due to the rise in unemployment and poverty levels are lesser people undeserving of charity. They have come out and accused the unemployment "safety net" of becoming a "safety hammock," have implied that old people on medicare are greedy moochers expecting others to take care of them, and observed that people on unemployment are simply to lazy to look for real work, and should just work sixty or seventy hour work weeks at multiple minimum-wage part-time jobs instead of holding out for a job that pays what they are worth, or at least what they need to survive.
These politicians "of the people" have even gone so far as to make up their own facts to support these claims, stating that 90% of welfare recipients are drug users, or that more than half of job applicants are being turned away from companies for failing drug tests. Both claims were proven to be overwhelmingly false, but the reality was only met with claims of receiving faulty data, and not apologies for pulling facts out of their asses to affirm their own self-aggrandizing world view.
My point? If the mouthpieces of the rich and powerful feel free calling poor people lazy, greedy drug addicts with no potential or real purpose in society, then I see no problem with calling the richest among us greedy, manipulative leeches that amass their exorbitant wealth by exploiting the lower classes and bleeding the very soul of America's working class, and won't be content until they have managed to pry the last of the gold fillings from this nation's rotting skull.
But that's me. I'm an optimist.
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