US Cycle of Poverty - Americans need to stop voting against their own self-interest

I want to apologize as I have been very busy this summer and i didn't get the chance to write at all this summer what with getting married and everything around that, baseball season and home renos. Now that the Fall is upon us, the creative juices are flowing again and it's time to get to work.

And the first topic I choose to tackle; A realization I had recently about how and why the US political system needs a major change and how horrible it is that Corporations and the Rich have as much power in US politics as they do. Hopefully once you read this, you will see the connections I have made and you will see why there needs to be massive change.

The way that the Republicans and particularly Tea Party members have treated him borders on Treasonous and is definitely racist and unpatriotic, no matter what they say. It's fairly obvious

Lets start with 2 of the biggest problems; The Republican Party and the Tea Party in particular. Both of these groups of people are against anything that President Obama has tried to do, especially anything that is intended to help the poorest people in America get free health care (Obama Care). They have been opposed to it mostly because big business has been telling them (through lobbys and attack ads among other things) that by doing this, giving people free health care, the chain reaction is going to result in fewer new jobs (possibly) being created because the money they (could use for that) would instead go to cover increased health care insurance spending they would have to cover. These are the same corporations that have been making massive profits for decades now and have been keeping primarily the crappy low paying jobs in the US as many of these same corporations have moved the bulk of the higher paying ones to 3^rd world, now 2^nd world countries without the US Government saying a word in opposition to their maneuvers.

This political party (and it’s radical, idiotic inbred cousin) are so controlled by big business that they are somehow able to block out the truth to millions of Americans and have been playing the proverbial shell game with their own supporters for years; Big Business has been slowly turning America into a 3^rd world country and the only way to truly stop that from happening is through education. Let me explain.

Out on his own, John Oliver has found his voice and has already shown that his insight was sorely needed on the political scene. With Stephen Colbert about to jump to CBS, his arrival could not have been more perfectly timed

It occurred to me Sunday night as I was watching John Oliver on TMN that big business is much more nefarious than I even realized it. His weekly politically charged show has been making headlilnes since it began because it doesn’t have to cater to big business at all and can point out, in stark reality, the problems facing America and Americans at their core. Last night’s episode was all about the fact that student loans and the debt people are taking on trying to get an education in America is basically a ball and chain that sticks with thee students forever, EVEN THROUGH BANKRUPTCY!!! Think about that for a minute. If you dare try to better yourself through higher education in the US, you are stuck paying off the insane tuition fees (which have risen by at least 23% in the last 10 years alone) regardless of what happens to you.

Say you want to become a doctor. Great. Tuition starts at about $75,000 a year for med-school and then if you do make it through after about 5 years ($375,000 in tuition later), you had better make sure that you get a job quickly in a decent hospital because your bank that gave you the student loan you needed will start coming after you almost right away. But as a doctor, you can afford to pay those loans off rather quickly. What if you didn’t do into medicine?

Type in "Student Loan Debt" In Google and look at the images section and you will see plenty of images like this one to illustrate just how crushed American Students are by it.

What if you wanted to become a journalist and you were an English Major. 4 years of tuition at about $15,000 a year and you have $60K to pay off. How many journalist jobs are out there? A handful mostly every year tops? None of them start you off at a salary that is going to help you start a family AND pay off your student loan debt while most are actually looking to get co-op students in because they don’t have to pay them.

Big business (meaning Big US banks in this case), lobbied for years to ensure that these student loans would not be able to be discharged when (crippled by payments they can’t afford because the job they have is not the career they went to school for) these students file for bankruptcy because they wanted to make sure that people were forced to pay them back, even with their insane interest charges and unfair re-payment plans. When you add in the fact that people also have had to pay for health care in the US, it’s no wonder that so many people are either saying “to hell” with getting a college degree (because of these crazy tuition fees/student loans required to pay for them) or are 100% on board with both Student loan reform AND getting Obamacare passed ASAP. Both of these things are actually GOOD for ALL Americans but don’t tell that to a Republican and if you do, you better hope that they are not a Tea Party member because they might just call you unpatriotic and a “taker” if not worse. Or, they might just shoot you, always a possibility with these crazed people.

The fastest way to get a family out of poverty is education and yet the poorest cities in America (Detroit and Chicago) have closed over 250 schools in the last 10 years, all of them in the poorest ghetto neighbourhoods. This is not a coincidence. Keeping people dumb and placated (watching reality TV which essentially dumbs down anyone who watches it) means that you are going to be able to do pretty much anything you want (big businesses, government officials). All you have to do to get a stupid person to follow you is scare them.

In politics, Talk about how much your opponent wants to “take away” from them. Their money, their rights, their liberty. Sound familiar?

If you can scare enough people by talking down to them about what they should be thinking, should be feeling, should want (to be rich and famous of course, either or really, it doesn’t matter which one anymore), than you can get them to vote for people who are ALREADY rich and powerful and want to stay that way because they are claiming to be on “your” side. It isn’t hard to convince people who like to watch cars go around in circles for hours, occasionally crashing into each other, or who like to see a super rich family dress up like hillbillies to make a fortune and spew ignorance on TV, to vote whichever way you want because they have been brainwashed. At this point in the American political spectrum, that is the only explanation as to how you can get support for people who have only their own best interest at heart and not that of the country.

This woman is the epitome of what is wrong with Republicans. Her idiotic beliefs and thoughts are broadcast day after day on Fox News. Look some of them up and you will see just how insane she is

I mean if you hear the rhetoric that comes out of Fox news (and all of their blowhards from O’Reilly to Ann Coulter and everyone else in between) as well as ALL Tea Party members of the Republican Party and pretty much anyone in the Republican Party lately, their comments towards President Obama have bordered on Treasonous. Right from the start of his first term, there have been Senators and Congressman interrupting him during speeches, pointing in his face showing him no respect at all, people questioning his place of birth (but no one questions John McCain who may well have been born in Panama apparently). And why has all of this been happeneing? Who are the biggest supporters of the Tea Party? The Koch Brothers who are by far the richest 2 men in the US and have a vested interest in keep Americans off balance and pre-occupied with other matters while they twist laws in their favour or get their constituents they supported to do that for them.

So what has this shown me; Big business wants to make sure that poor people in America are being kept out of  higher education institutions through several layers of this new “system” that they have carefully been able to craft since the Reagan era which no one seems to be willing or able to effectively stop. Banks waste money, steal billions and no one goes to jail. A kid walks on the wrong side of the side walk in Missouri, gets harassed by a cop and shot 6 times. Seems a bit unfair doesn’t it.

Let’s looks at all of the points of contention here and see if there are any connections;

The sad part about this picture, besides the fact there are kids living in these conditions, this used to be a picture of something that you would expect in a poor Asian or African nation, Not in American or in Detroit with people living in gated communities a few miles away

• ·       Big business starts doing everything they can to break unions in the 1970’s and 80’s and into the 1990’s·         Good jobs start getting shipped overseas where labour costs are next to nothing and safety of workers not important 
  ·         Huge profits start to pour in making CEO’s of these big companies disproportionately wealthy compared to people who work for them 
  ·         Good paying jobs start to disappear in major cities like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Buffalo (Heavily unionized city – United Auto Workers Union in Detroit crushed) 
  ·         The population bases for those cities starts to drop as more and more “Middle Class” Americans flee looking for better jobs 
  ·         Cities like LA and New York start taking on more and more people 
  ·         Civil services in the larger cities are overused and on the verge of collapse 
  ·         The tax base for the dilapidated cities starts to drop meaning less money for essential services 
  ·         Large cities have tough time as well as most of the new citizens earn barely enough to get by and hardly pay any tax as well (most live on cash only transactions or food stamps) 
  ·         Less money in dwindling cities means some tough decisions start being made with regards to where money is actually going to be allocated by city and state officials 
  ·         The richest of the richest fail to pay their fair share or find loopholes to avoid paying what they should 
  ·         Children of the rich end up going to private schools 
  ·         Rich families start living in communities that have armed guards at each entry point (basically they say to keep out crime, more like the poor) 
  ·         Schools in the inner city with less student enrollment start being closed due to budget concerns and the cost of upkeep increasing past what they can afford to pay 
  ·         Loss of good paying jobs to the lower middle class means many people who are not mobile start to turn on each other (domestic abuse or alcoholism) to ease the pain 
  ·         Children being raised in these homes start to act out based on what they see at home 
  ·         Schools start to become more violent 
  ·         A police presence is now necessary in every high school in the inner city and suggested for grade schools  (armed guards, metal detectors) 
  ·         Teachers start leaving inner city schools for fear of violent behavior and acts against them by their own students 
  ·         Less teachers and students in local inner city schools means fewer and fewer schools need to be open 
  ·         Good teachers refuse to work in bad schools, start getting recruited to private schools making sure the kids of the wealthy are getting the best education money can buy 
  ·         Poor kids drop out, turn to a life of crime, life on the streets or low paying jobs because they are not qualified for anything else 
  ·         Without a proper education, these kids grow up not knowing anything other than poverty and despair 
  ·         These kids end up either having larger than normal families or dying of sexually transmitted diseases as they never learned about sex ed and using protection 
  ·         250 schools closed in 10 years in Detroit and Chicago 
  ·         Inner city sexual disease rates are much higher than the rest of the country.
  
  
         I am sure there will be people who will say that I am over simplifying these connections but you can't deny that when you see all of these points consecutively, one can't help but think that they are connected and/or that if you want to fix America, the biggest key would be to keep the middle class working and educated or else the downward spiral that we have seen in the US will only continue to deepen and worsen over time. 
  
  

  

  The only way to change this from happening all over the US is through education and keeping good paying jobs IN America