Marion, Indiana is a microcosm for exactly what’s wrong with this country. Outsourcing has gutted the entire town.
Formerly, the biggest employers were General Motors and RCA (Thomson Consumer Electronics), and both places paid a good middle class wage for their manufacturing jobs and made cars and television sets in Marion. (Thomson also had a factory in Bloomington, Indiana).
Thomson Consumer Electronics alone has fired over 12,000 people in Indiana (about half in Marion, and half in Bloomington), and exists only to license “brand names” (which, for the more intelligent among us, means nothing all by itself) and so-called “intellectual property” (see Richard Stallman’s essay about why you should not use the term “intellectual property” - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html -).
Thomson’s main business in the United States now is paying groups of lawyers to disassemble products made by other companies (such as ipads, iphones, Android tablets and cell phones, etc.) to see if they can sue that company and extract money for “patent violations”.
The term for a company that does this is “patent troll“.
They are no good for our economy, and I would say we’d be better off if companies like Thomson went ahead and went out of business completely, if not for the fact that someone else would just buy all their patents at fire sale prices and continue suing innovative companies with them.
When Thomson Consumer Electronics eventually laid everyone in Marion off, and left an empty building that still stands there today, they took advantage of the Republican’s tax cuts for “outsourcing expenses” that were passed during the Bush administration by a Republican Congress. Between 2001 and 2008 (when Bush left office), the United Stated lost over 5.8 million manufacturing jobs. Bush had a Republican Congress to work with from 2001-2007. Now they want us to trust Mitt Romney? Now they want us to put in a new Republican-majority Congress? No thanks. We’ve seen where the Republicans took us last time we handed them the wheel.
Marion, Indiana is now just another Republican horror story. They (and a few DINOs) caused the Marion, Indiana we see today. We need to tell Mittens that we don’t need a professional outsourcer who keeps most of his money in a Swiss bank account in the White House.
The Gary Snyder Show is a local political radio talk show here in northeast Indiana.
Like a lot of talk radio shows, they tend to have a “conservative” bend. They want to call President Obama anything that will stick, and they don’t want anyone mentioning foul language like “George W. Bush”.
Well, I called in yesterday to talk about Bain Capital and Mitt Romney, and I did get a little side tracked. I reminded people of what happened last time we had a majority Republican government, under George W. Bush. Namely, millions of jobs lost, the stock market crash of 2008, millions of people evicted from their homes and foreclosed on, only to be thrown out by their local sheriff.
Bush and his Republicans not only set us up with the subprime loan crisis, but then they also passed tax credit laws that effectively had the US federal government paying companies to export our jobs to countries like India, Mexico, and China. I mentioned on the radio that Bain Capital and Mitt Romney made a fortune in the outsourcing business, and while the big shitpile (I didn’t call it that on the radio, but I can call it that here) was busy falling apart, Bain Capital got millions of dollars in federal tax credits for the expenses they incurred while they were firing American workers and sending the jobs to other countries.
It was about that point where I got the bum’s rush off the line, and he took in other callers who seemed to either have no idea what is really going on, or have a financial incentive (because they are millionaires) in seeing Mitt Romney win the election so that their taxes get cut under Paul Ryan’s euphemistically-named austerity plan “The Path to Prosperity”, which, if Romney gets in, will likely pass, resulting in a huge new tax increase for the middle class and cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars from Social Security, food stamps, and the Medicare program.
The problem isn’t JUST Romney, Romney just personifies the problem very nicely.
The big problem that causes blue collar manufacturing jobs to be lost all over the United States are these largely Republican-backed global free exploitation treaties. They are the reason that if we attempt to put “Buy American” provisions in our own laws, like Obama’s 2009 Stimulus Plan, then other countries will go after us for it in the World Trade Organization.
We should repeal and renegotiate a lot of these trade treaties, because that is what is enabling outsourcing.
With NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO, it becomes economical for American companies, like Bain Capital, to send jobs to China, where there are no worker protection, minimum wage, or environmental protection laws, then load up all the goods onto a cargo ship and burn diesel fuel to get it all back to the United States.
I don’t have a problem with international trade, except when it is being used as a smoke screen so they can simply go poison the water and the air somewhere else, and exploit workers somewhere else. This is what our trade agreements with most of the world are designed to do.
Our trade imbalance with China is mostly because it has become the great American pastime to go buy frivolous impulse crap we don’t need.
When you say that rich business criminals like Romney are partly responsible for the problem, that’s true.
It is also true that the people buying stuff they don’t need that was made under slave labor conditions in China are an even bigger part of the problem,
And remember, the entire world shares its water and air. Americans don’t “live in a bubble” where we are magically shielded from all the bad environmental policies that just happen to be implemented on our behalf.
When something goes into the air or water in China, it will end up here sooner or later. Right now, there are “garbage patches” swirling the oceans caused by all this garbage from China, PCB (Polychlorinated biphenyl, a carcinogenic) being released into the global water supply from China, TONS of carbon dioxide, and a smog cloud from China’s dirty coal that ends up causing smog in California.
Outsourcing is just a really clever way for rich business criminals to promote slavery and massive environmental destruction by moving the “jobs” around to whatever country lets them get away with it.
If you want to know what American companies are doing overseas, just remember what companies like Westinghouse did when they were making things here. Hint: A good portion of Indiana has a PCB pollution problem with no remedial action plan.
It’s clear that corporations can never be trusted to do the ethical thing, because they are only concerned with maximizing profits no matter what the human cost is.
The responsibility falls on us to make sure our government is keeping them from wallowing in their own excesses, but that’s hard to do when they finance all of our elections to keep honest people who would do something about these problems out.
You can say that Barack Obama is hardly better than Mitt Romney, but he *is* better than Mitt Romney. With Romney in charge, we can look forward to a repeal of our environmental protection laws, devastating Republican austerity plans, and the loss of our remaining US-based manufacturing sector. Whether having our middle class quality of life slowly deteriorating under Obama or just going ahead and putting the gun to our head and pulling the trigger with Mitt Romney is a better choice. I’ll leave that to you, it is your vote after all…
I saw a couple articles about this. Talk about telling you what you already know…
Health.com has compiled a list of the top 10 most depressing US states to live in. Indiana is pretty high up on that list, and so is Kentucky. There’s a real gem of a quote from Kentucky’s Governor about the problems in his state.
“When people don’t have good jobs to support families, I think that leads to depression and anxiety, which in turn leads to substance abuse,” Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear told the AP in 2008.
As usual, the state solution to the drug problem is throwing people with a drug addiction problem in prison. Really, since the “Ronald Raygun” administration, the United States has been entangled in a “drug war” whose costs get larger and larger every year, which hasn’t produced any decent results to speak of at all in reducing the number of illegal drug users (politicians tend to call them “offenders”, which I believe is going too far unless they commit an actual crime against person or property while under the influence).
Our nation is being bankrupted by a prohibition on things like Hemp (also known as Marijuana), which are basically harmless outside of the legal consequences of getting caught with some. In the 1930s, these anti-hemp laws came along because it was generally associated behavior of poor people and minorities. In modern times, these radically socially-destructive laws and the anti-hemp propaganda persist mostly because the drug companies don’t want a cheap and effective anti-depressant and painkiller to compete with. They want people who are effectively abusing their expensive prescription drugs with a wink and a nod from a drug dealer in a white coat. The US mental health system and the APA have been totally lobotomized and replaced by the drug industry. Psychiatrists are supposed to provide other therapies than drugs, but many of them (especially the ones that give services to the poor) simply don’t. If you’re poor, you get like five minutes with a psychiatrist that barely speaks any English and it’s literally like “here’s your drugs, now get out”.
And those five minutes will cost you something like $100, plus the cost of whatever drugs this person prescribed…. Even the people who are lucky enough to get on Medicare or Medicaid end up below the poverty line once you factor in the thousands of dollars a year in co-pays, spend downs, and other rip offs. It’s no wonder so many people turn to alcohol and illegal drugs, they’re cheaper.
Access to quality mental health services in Indiana is basically impossible in most areas. You end up with scumbags like the “Bowen Center”, and that’s about it. The psychiatrists in these places aren’t interested in helping people, they’d rather just add to the problem by insulting you, and basically making you feel like a big blubbering baby for asking them for help.
The United States doesn’t lead the world in anything desirable these days. Or as Jeff Daniels put it in the new HBO series “Newsroom”, “We’re seventh in literacy, second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, one hundred and seventy-eighth in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.”
Truth be told, we could bring those numbers up a lot of we expelled the non-competitive states from the union and replaced the government of the rest with some real liberals. I don’t foresee that happening.
I recommend RT America’s video that recently exposed the psychiatry industry in the US for what it really is. In this video, they expose the truth about what happens when you take antidepressant medication. You might lose your sex drive, get fat, and develop a dependency on the pills, but they don’t actually solve the depression. I myself have been dealing with bipolar disorder for many years now, and I can personally vouch for everything this video says. In a way, talking about the criminals who run this country and are trying to rip us all off and turn us into prescription drug addicts helps me deal with my mental disorder better than taking their stupid pills did.
I don’t recommend doing drugs, illegal or prescribed.
The consequences of drugs are always negative even if it’s only because of the laws that we have (the big pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association do more *actual* harm than hemp ever has), but whether you do use them or not, you should familiarize yourself with police misconduct and a surveillance state that is shaking everyone down and treating everyone, law abiding citizens alike, as if they are criminals and guilty until proven innocent.
The ACLU has a TON of information on this subject, there are a series of videos on Youtube called “Flex your rights”, and former Texas police officer turned good guy Barry Cooper has a multi-DVD set titled “Never get busted again” and “Never get raided again” that I think everyone should watch. It should be the law.
Cooper goes over how to keep the police out of your home and other valuable information that everyone should know. You might not think you’re doing anything illegal, and you’re probably a good person. There are over 10,000 crimes defined by federal law alone! This is before we even begin to talk about state and local laws. You can get effectively get busted and thrown in jail in this country for farting wrong. This is not a joke. This goes double for states with private prisons, where it is not uncommon for judges to be paid cash bribes to convict as many people as possible for anything possible and throw the book at them in the sentencing phase, and for politicians to take bribe money in exchange for things like mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
I don’t have a criminal record, not even a parking ticket, but at least one in every three Americans by my age has been arrested for something at some point. The legal system is getting corrupted and totally out of control, and it would do everyone a lot of good to be smart about police encounters, before it is too late.
I’ve ended up telling cops that they could search my car before, because I didn’t have anything illegal in it. I got profiled because that’s what the police do. About ten years ago, the police in Brownsburg, Indiana had absolutely nothing better to do with their day than pull over a car with three teenagers in it. That was my car. One of the occupants of the car was a friend of mine and the other was a friend of his that wanted a ride to Marion and said he’d pay me to drive him up there. I thought that would be a great way to make some extra money, but on the way out of this guy’s house I noticed that he had packed his bong and a large bag of hemp(!), luckily I was smart and told him to get that shit out of his suitcase and I checked to make sure he didn’t have anything else before he got in my car.
On my way out of town, three cop cars lit up and turned their sirens on, pulling me over for going 32 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone. They made us all get out of the car, patted all of us down (it’s called a terry frisk, and yes it’s legal, and all they have to do to start yanking things out of your pockets is claim they thought they felt a weapon while they were doing this), asked to search my car… I told them OK, since I was sure nobody had anything illegal.
They ended up giving me a warning for speeding (bogus, just an excuse to pull us over) and letting us all go. It turned out, they had been watching this guy, and they saw him in my car. If they found his hemp in my car, Indiana law would have said that hemp belonged to me, and there was easily enough on him before we left the house that I would have been charged with a felony and sentenced to a minimum of five years in state prison. That’s a little steep for offering someone a ride for $50, isn’t it? I think it is.
Consider my story a warning. The police aren’t interested in arresting criminals, they’re interested in arresting anyone they think that they can make charges stick to, whether the person committed any wrongdoing or not. And sometimes, the people you associate with can get you into trouble because of the choices they made for their life.
Of course none of this is fair. You don’t have the luxury of assuming that life will be fair. Criminals own this country, they bought and paid for it a long time ago.
That’s just how the system is, folks. Being angry about it doesn’t directly help you. We know that the politicians are corrupt and that the police tend to be violent, racist, homophobic, and brutal. You need to expect that. You hear about it all the time, and it’s true.
If you’re ready for them, they can’t ambush you. Now, anger at bad governance can be useful… It leads to protest, civil disobedience, and in the long term, things might change. Until then, you have to play with the deck you’ve been dealt.
TL:DR | A child’s grandmother stole $97,000 from his college trust, and went and gambled it away in some casinos. The Lake County, Indiana prosecutor’s office refuses to go get her, even though they know where she is, because it would cost them some money to extradite her from Louisiana.
I’m sure that if she had robbed $97,000 from some of the bankster criminals, they would have went after her anywhere on Earth, but since her victim wasn’t rich, they don’t give a shit. If you don’t commit a crime against the rich, Indiana apparently will only bother to enforce its arrest warrants one state away in any direction.
Also, the victim of this crime which Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter refuses to do anything for has resorted to taking up a collection to pay the costs of sending some Indiana police officers to go arrest this woman.
What Bernard Carter is doing is against the Indiana Constitution, Article I, Section 12.
All courts shall be open; and every person, for injury done to him in his person, property, or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law. Justice shall be administered freely, and without purchase; completely, and without denial; speedily, and without delay.
Voters in Lake County should oust Bernard Carter for his unconstitutional behavior.
The problem isn’t JUST Romney, Romney just personifies the problem very nicely.
The big problem that causes blue collar manufacturing jobs to be lost all over the United States are these largely Republican-backed global free exploitation treaties. They are the reason that if we attempt to put “Buy American” provisions in our own laws, like Obama’s 2009 Stimulus Plan, then other countries will go after us for it in the World Trade Organization.
We should repeal and renegotiate a lot of these trade treaties, because that is what is enabling outsourcing.
With NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO, it becomes economical for American companies, like Bain Capital, to send jobs to China, where there are no worker protection, minimum wage, or environmental protection laws, then load up all the goods onto a cargo ship and burn diesel fuel to get it all back to the United States.
I don’t have a problem with international trade, except when it is being used as a smoke screen so they can simply go poison the water and the air somewhere else, and exploit workers somewhere else. This is what our trade agreements with most of the world are designed to do.
Our trade imbalance with China is mostly because it has become the great American pastime to go buy frivolous impulse crap we don’t need.
When you say that rich business criminals like Romney are partly responsible for the problem, that’s true.
It is also true that the people buying stuff they don’t need that was made under slave labor conditions in China are an even bigger part of the problem,
And remember, the entire world shares its water and air. Americans don’t “live in a bubble” where we are magically shielded from all the bad environmental policies that just happen to be implemented on our behalf.
When something goes into the air or water in China, it will end up here sooner or later. Right now, there are “garbage patches” swirling the oceans caused by all this garbage from China, PCB (Polychlorinated biphenyl, a carcinogenic) being released into the global water supply from China, TONS of carbon dioxide, and a smog cloud from China’s dirty coal that ends up causing smog in California.
Outsourcing is just a really clever way for rich business criminals to promote slavery and massive environmental destruction by moving the “jobs” around to whatever country lets them get away with it.
If you want to know what American companies are doing overseas, just remember what companies like Westinghouse did when they were making things here. Hint: A good portion of Indiana has a PCB pollution problem with no remedial action plan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl#United_States
Look under “Indiana”…
It’s clear that corporations can never be trusted to do the ethical thing, because they are only concerned with maximizing profits no matter what the human cost is.
The responsibility falls on us to make sure our government is keeping them from wallowing in their own excesses, but that’s hard to do when they finance all of our elections to keep honest people who would do something about these problems out.
You can say that Barack Obama is hardly better than Mitt Romney, but he *is* better than Mitt Romney. With Romney in charge, we can look forward to a repeal of our environmental protection laws, devastating Republican austerity plans, and the loss of our remaining US-based manufacturing sector. Whether having our middle class quality of life slowly deteriorating under Obama or just going ahead and putting the gun to our head and pulling the trigger with Mitt Romney is a better choice. I’ll leave that to you, it is your vote after all…