The Wrong Kind of Suffering

"If you're low income you get lots...you can qualify for...in many states you can qualify for medicaid you can qualify for food stamps you can qualify for housing assistance, and that's not if you're in poverty, that's if you're above the poverty line and so you have all of these (sic) children growing up in an environment where government is paying you. And then we wonder why do these kids feel they're entitled to so much. (...) and that is not a healthy thing for children, its not a healthy thing for society, so that's how I square it, I square it that, you know, suffering, if you're a Christian, you know, suffering is part of life. And its not a bad thing. It is an essential thing, in life. And that...we suffer, there are all different ways to suffer, one way to suffer is through lack of food and shelter and there's another way to suffer which is lack of dignity and hope and (...) its not just tangible, its also intangible."



Senator/Mistress Rick Santorum (sadly) of Pennsylvania, at an Iowa town hall meeting, explaining why if you work but your income is insufficient to pay for housing, food, and or medical care having the government help you is a form of suffering worse than starving, being homeless or being chronically ill/dead from lack of health care. Because you know, now your children feel entitled. Obviously many full time jobs don't entitle you to earning anything like a living wage, so you should stop suckling at the government teat and maybe pay for trade school or an associate's degree with suffering (real, tangible suffering) Do it quick though. Suffering is an important part of life, but your kids can't eat it.

Idiot Son of an Asshole

Dear Concerned American,

They snickered when I said I came to the U.S. Senate to change Congress. But their laughter stopped when I sponsored the National Right to Work Act to free U.S. workers from forced unionization and break Big Labor's multi-billion dollar political machine forever. 

Rand Paul... (less rich than most of the jerks quoted so far, but still a real jerk) in an email soliciting support for his Federal Right to Work Act. No, this wouldn't be like the "right to work" they claimed to have in the Soviet Union, where everyone was supposed to be guaranteed a job. This is the right to work (for less, with less benefits if any and no collective bargaining rights). Of course, if you want it you already have this right, just take any of the 93% of jobs in the private sector in the U.S. where, like all non-union employees in America, you will be an "at will" employee who can be fired at any time for any (or no) reason and can't bargain collectively for benefits, a safer work environment, or anything else. This is really more a law to ensure that the bosses have the "right" to (desperate) "work"(ers) with no rights.

You might remember that Rand Paul stated that he wouldn't have supported the Civil Rights Act, because (like all libertarians) he feels that the right of bosses to make decisions about the use of their property based on their deeply held, individual racist beliefs is much more important than, say African Americans having the right to feed their families. He claims he would have marched with Dr. King, though (maybe for the exercise) so here is a non-rich-jerk quote in the interest of furthering his education...

 

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped."   

 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rooting For the (outsourcing of...) Jobs Czar...

"I want you to root for me, you know, everyone in Germany roots for Siemens. Everybody in Japan roots for Toshiba. Everybody in China roots for China South Rail. I want you to say, "Win, GE."

Jeffrey Immelt, who since being appointed by President Obama as "Jobs Czar" has presided over an unemployment rate that has not dipped below 9% and who, as CEO of GE eliminated or outsourced more than 30,000 U.S. jobs, ten thousand of them union jobs. Surely not "everybody" working for those foreign companies would be rooting for their respective CEO's if they has similar track records. But after all, as he told his CBS interviewer when asked if he had any "civic responsibility" in the United States,

"My name's not above the door, I work for investors. Investors want to see us grow earnings and cash flow, they want to see us be competitive, they want to see us prosper."

And in that department, Immelt has surely done his job. Under his expert management GE gutted its pension and health insurance benefits in spite of the fact that the pension was in such good shape that the company hadn't contributed to it since 1987.  In 2010, when the company made $14.2 bn in profits, not only did they pay no corporate tax, they received a $3.2 bn tax credit. This was due to the fact that all those laid off American workers weren't consuming much, and thus most of GE's profits now come from foreign markets and aren't subject to U.S. corporate taxes. During this year Immelt's compensation package was $21 million. The company also spent $15 million for a movie and TV PR campaign celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan, who was a GE spokesman in the 1950s.

Bankster Parable...

    "If you're a restaurant and you can't charge for the soda, you're going to charge more for the burger."

     Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, explaining why regulations like the Dodd-Frank financial regulation won't work. After all, no one would dare ask the board of directors to give up any of the $4.8 bn in profits they made in the second quarter, that would be class warfare. The only choice the banks have will be to screw the consumers with increased fees.

Hard to Find a Job These Days...

"I'm Also Unemployed"

Mitt Romney, Republican Presidential Candidate with a net worth of approx. $200 million, to a group of unemployed Floridians. True, he doesn't have a job at the moment (well, for the past four years) but he spends a lot of time and money on his hobby, being a really boring presidential candidate. 

With God on Our Side...

 "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be cared for -not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."

 George F. Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Rail Road, in response to a letter during the Anthacite Coal Strike of 1902, urging him as a Christian to make concessions to the workers. The Philadelphia and Reading owned huge tracts of coal lands in eastern Pennsylvania, which it acquired by charging such exorbitant shipping rates to the independent coal operators that they were forced to sell to the rail road. In a statement to the Anthracite Coal Commission, convened by Theodore Roosevelt as arbiter of the strike, he stated in regard to working conditions in the mines...

"These men don't suffer, why hell, half of them don't even speak English"

 and more recently...

"I'm just a banker, doing God's work."

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO Goldman Sachs

The More Things Change...

"I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half." Jay Gould 1836-1892, Railroad Baron and Financier on his strike-breaking methods in the Great Southwestern Railroad Strike of 1886.


"Use live ammunition." Jeff Cox, Deputy Attorney General for the State of Indiana on how to deal with those in Madison, Wisconsin protesting Gov. Scott Walker's "budget repair" bill, which stripped public employees of their right to collective bargaining.