The Establishment

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REGARDING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF, BY, AND FOR CRONIES:  Of course Americans are becoming more and more distrustful of the Establishment!  Consider who runs our institutions of significance and how they are run.  Banking, media, academia, political funding, corporate control.  Look at the stuff that passes for news and analysis on MSNBC.  Does anyone with the intellect of a goose fail to see how slanted it is?  Consider the political alignment that has pretended for more than 50 years that it is impossible to enforce the border.  Look at how fast American industry and the American middle class have hollowed out.  Look at millions losing jobs while billions in bonuses are funneled to cronies.  Look at cronies playing pay to play, choking domestic energy production after crony corporatists have finished placing their hedges.  Look at crazy, frenzied enrichment of almost every congressperson.  Look at free trade of technology with despotic regimes that cannot be trusted to keep WMD out of hands of pirates and terrorists.  What person of the least intellect who is not corrupt fails to see how corrupt and devoid the Establishment is of any value higher than constricted self interest?  Class warfare?  For what reason, apart from corruption, should any person who holds no value higher than his self interest, leveraged by gang support, ridicule any other for playing for his own self and gang interests ... by accusing him of playing for gang interests?
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CONSERVATION AND WEALTH CREATION: Since before dawn of recorded history, humanity has promoted hierarchies to direct its variously contending tribes. Masses have always been taxed to accord great sacrifice and effort to their chiefs, in order to preserve and redistribute liberty and wealth among tribes. Liberty and wealth were often obtained by imposing enslavement and extracting spoilage. At the end of each contest, the relative liberty and wealth of the combined masses was not likely improved, although the current of power to direct the hierarchy would be diverted. The main agency for promoting liberty and wealth was coordinate with spoilage, enslavement, and death. To considerable extent, the pie was made bigger by squeezing life in ways that banished many from the party.
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Now, instead of face to face military campaigns, we have face to face political campaigns. At the end of each face off, the relative liberty and wealth of the combined masses often seems not much improved, although the current of power to direct the worldwide hierarchy is diverted. (Yes, there is accumulation of access to technological diversions, if same are to be accounted "wealth," but often at price of unmentioned dead and diminished. In material terms, the law of conservation DOES impose a zero-sum environment, although the zero-summing is experienced as directionally accumulative. Thus, we accumulate stuff upon shoulders of the departed and diminished, and we convert earth to stuff at expense of altering previous balances.)
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Nowadays, the main agency for redistributing the conservation of liberty and wealth is less coordinated with the organizing of military expeditions than with the organizing of corporate and taxing expeditions. The pie is temporarily fluxed bigger FOR SOME by harnessing the many and then telling them to toil and wait on hope and change. Despots savvy in newspeak always rule by inspiring, organizing, and forcing masses to wear harnesses in order "to win individual liberty by accepting organized slavery."
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DECENTLY CIVILIZED LIBERTY AND OPPORTUNITY: To enhance liberty and opportunity for the masses, it's no answer to coax or force them into corporate or communal collectives in order to compete against the cheapest serfs for the opportunity to be ruled by elites. The longer the masses fail to apprehend, the more tightly their harnesses will be cinched. The answer is in (1) assimilation of common-sense respect for spiritual, qualitative, non-quantifiable empathies, (2) appropriate decentralization of governance, (3) general protection of borders, infrastructure, and industry of homeland, (4) re-balancing of prerogatives of international corporations, disloyal elites, and callow cannibals, and (5) general apprehension of zero sum conservation of material wealth versus appreciation of qualities of non-quantifiable values.
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SPIRITUALITY ---- OF META WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS: Why do post-analyzed, seemingly crazy dreams, visions, and meditations often seem to have been so real and logical before one wakes? it seems some meta-material aspect of The Axiomatic of which brains or minds are derivatively identified must have imaginative capacity to image all manner of fuzzy relations. In that respect, worlds abide within worlds, expanding, contracting, and conflating. The further one fuzzes away from the humdrum of the manifest, the closer one identifies with the meta Source of axioms. In that state, the usual logic of the materiality of the manifest tends to fall away, leaving one to image and adduce from the Source in respect of all manner of imaginative potentials. The reality that supports the logic of that altered state is not of the same quality of dependence upon assumptions of any particle of matter, as if matter could in itself constitute some kind of independent and unconscious "thing." The more one's waking self remains UNAWARE of one's dreaming self, the less one apprehends that materiality, as a mathematical extension of linearity-in-itself, is an illusion borne of happenstance of identification with imagination, and the less one is open to a non-quantifiable quality of empathy in consciousness, which is NOT constrained to the merely linear. Entropic directionality in the unfolding of an expanding universe of measurable matter is secondary to happenstance of identification with perspective of material linearity. Linear directionality is not predetermined secondary to meta-matter constituting some kind of measurable matter-in-itself. Alternatively stated, happenstance of identification with perspective of material linearity is not derivative of entropic directionality in the unfolding of an expanding universe of measurable matter-in-itself.  Rather, directionality of material unfolding is derivative of identification of conscious imagination with perspective of material linearity.
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To Become Viable, A Middle Class Must Find Its Values

To Become Viable, A Middle Class Must Find Its Values:
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One should oppose aspects of internationalism and nation-building if one proposes to preserve an island-exemplar for human freedom and opportunity.  Inhabitants of many lands have few capacities, inclinations, or traditions that're compatible with freedom and opportunity for citizens.  A viable and relatively free middle-class is a rare thing.  Once such a flower is planted, one does not show care for it by opening it to all weeds that ravage the world.  That is, unless one doesn't prize a free middle-class or expects gain by helping those who're bent on uprooting it.
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As the rest of the world becomes a toilet for despots, why think it small-minded to wish to preserve a vestige of hope for freedom and dignity?  Has our openness to internationalism made other lands better, or has it enriched and empowered despots, who now apply themselves more to corrupt politicians in America than to improve lives for their own peoples?  If we concentrated more on presenting an example than on enriching despots, I suspect not only we, but many peoples abroad, would be better off.  The idea that elites would, by freely trading technological expertise with despots, make better the lives of all little people of the world, smacks of rulers who think to do best by reducing middle-class voices of ordinary Americans to inconsequential pips.
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While leverage availed by power of re-organization CAN raise all boats, it WILL NOT, by itself, raise liberty and economic opportunity among the masses. Qualitatively raising liberty and opportunity for a middle-class requires that respect for humanity be exemplified and inspired, rather than that brawn be harnessed by elites in search of cheapest labor. Considered against pet programs of organizing elites, human freedom and dignity are coming to be qualitatively not valued.  Minds yearning for liberty are lulled asleep by cheap diversions and misleading experts, feigning wisdom enough to quantify non-quantifiables.  The only hope for re-igniting liberty in America is for enough leaders among the masses to recognize deceptions and delusions pandered about in established ways of thinking.
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Managing Helots

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Were America not tied in knots to prevent it from functioning as a representative republic, a number of fundamental solutions would readily appear. Deploy general tax incentives to moderate family sizes. (This would be the most decent and sane way to address environmental concerns.) Move towards a Canadian style single payer health care system. (This would remove the monkey from employers' backs and allow them to become more competitive.) Stop allowing corporations to buy up patents in order to mothball them for years while there's not the least intention to bring them to market, because the profit-making infrastructure for the status quo would be overturned. (This would go far towards freeing the market to incentive fundamental energy independence.)
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Such solutions would readily occur to the middle class, were it not constantly agitated and divided by an allied establishment that rips its immediate gratifications by using the middle class as sheep and cattle. Democrats may finally be learning that the candidates they tend to be offered toss only crumbs to cover promises, while funneling billions to cronies at the back door. Tea Party Republicans may finally be learning much the same thing about establishment candidates from the Republican party. There's little financial motivation to the funding establishment to actually fix things to faciliate representative republicanism. Profit motive can be a good thing, but it's not essence-of-God, nor is it guraranteed to be a good thing --- especially within societies whose workers are ruled by deliberately keeping them as divided and ignorant as helots. Why expect the establishment NOT to reduce Americans to compete as serf laborers? Think of the rush of power and profit for the most imaginative of sociopaths and narcissists! who tend most often to occupy the pool of power brokers.
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Advocates for establishment Dems or Repubs tend either to be ignorant dupes or calculating traitors. Marketplace as a solution?! What marketplace? The alliance of cronies rigs the marketplace! They run the currency exchanges, banks, media, academia, politicians! Why expect them to want to stop the gravy train? There're obvious solutions, but they're poisoned with pejoratives blared by those who benefit by keeping the pot stirred away from solutions. It appears that Mitt or some clone will be the Republican candidate. We can HOPE that Mitt will grow into a representative to foster freedom, opportunity, dignity, and decency for the class that actually wants to work, add value, and earn its way. But the sheer weight of ensconced abusers renders such hope rather childish. So Mitt may be elected. If the middle class can waken --- despite the constant administering of poison to weaken it by every significant institution that's under thumbs of a corrupt and allied establishment --- then a reassimilated middle class may be able to force reform. Meanwhile, notice how Obama fairly chuckles. He knows he can say and do just about anything and then repackage and force-sell it as progress. Get mad. Keep the faith. Get assimilated. Hold hot coals to feet of cronies. Tipping points will come. It's about positioning to counter crisis opportunists and their sociopathic managers.
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POPULATION, ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE

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POPULATION, ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE:

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Anyone with a modicum of common sense soon notices that the accelerating increase in the population of human beings is “out of whack” with any decent regard for harmony with the rest of the biosphere. This is not meant as a paean to paganism, but to respect the most common ground needed for civilization. The obvious way to “recover whack” would generally be to incentive families to exercise moderation in restraint of appropriate sizes for households. This could be accomplished with general, civilized tax incentives for contraception, instead of with inhumane, brute force. However, any such effort conflicts with cronies whose power or financial gains are dependent on replenishing stocks of cheap, ignorant labor. It also conflicts with megalomaniacs whose empires are dependent on replenishing stocks of canon fodder and preserving control over collectives for generating technological superiority. Cronies and dupes are usually motivated more by desire to groom, soothe, and milk aphids than by desire to disseminate intelligent analysis of facts.

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Aside from aesthetics and insults to human freedom and dignity, the burgeoning of organizations of human beings brought under tight harness of an allied establishment of corporatist-collectivists is obviously closely associated with rapid interruptions in harmonies of other species with which we share the planet. Some destructive species of jellyfish and insects, in their patterns of migration, ARE expanding further from the equator, leading to potential decimation of other species of plants and animals. Rates of change are accelerating among patterns for habitats, coastlines, farmlands, and deserts. True, as floating ice melts, the water surface level will not immediately rise. However, as the melting is associated with general warming, all the water will expand and rise in level as it goes from a cold-but-unfrozen state to a warmer state. As larger populations become more and more dependent upon central organizations, any sudden and simple disruption in the central nervous system for an organization can easily bring catastrophe.

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Although the above states obvious truisms, it does not advocate switching back and forth in “sky-is-falling” panics between cronies and megalomaniacs. It does, however, suggest an obvious remedy (if not too long delayed): Simply institute general incentives for moderating sizes of families. As to any need to compete with megalomaniacs intent on building empires founded on military might based on technological advancements discovered by populous nurseries for mad scientists, consider: Computing power is accelerating at such a pace that brute numbers of scientists would seem likely to as soon become as obsolete as human fighter pilots. For middle class Americans to fight the common sense of general incentives for population reduction is to reduce themselves to mere flotsam, to be pushed back and forth for the use and abuse of contending and cynical cronies and corruptocrats and their climate-consensus carbon-crediting calculators. So long as a reasonable, responsible intelligentsia fails to assimilate among the middle class, it will continue to be reduced to cheap fodder for crony corporate collectivists, i.e., open-society free-traders of human beings as commodities to be connived among “those who know best.”

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By itself, motive to profit is not essence of God. Like any other civilizing epiphenomena, it needs for its conservation to be tempered with civilizing empathies, lest it become self-devouring unto a pit. Such tempering is accomplished by processes of cultural identification and assimilation, not by severing loyalties to God, humanity, kin, and country. There’s little need or advantage in debating with cronies and dupes whose status and livelihoods depend upon disagreeing. Simply state the obvious facts and the obvious remedies. That is, if the goal is civilization that avails decent freedom and dignity for all who incline to want it.

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HEALTH CARE

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BACKGROUND: There’s an interesting article on health care at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_gawande. It points out the tension between any idealized health care system and the need to build from factors already extant. For example, the course of events from the Great Depression through WWII made it necessary for the U.S. to go down the path of employment-based health care programs. Now that we're far down that path, many people have invested years of work in order to become vested in their health care coverage. Having paid their dues, they're far less prone to volunteer to pay tax increases to fund health care for those who have not paid such dues. Americans may idealize the perfect health care system, but there's no easy way to transition to it from the path we're already far down. Regardless of whatever ideal might otherwise be agreed upon, the path-dependent factors that already burden our system loom large against any sudden transition.

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IDEAL: Even so, it would seem worthwhile to envision what an ideal system might look like, so we can try to plan ahead and reserve ways here and there to make gradual transitions towards better sense. To do that, we need to look beyond brain-freezing pejoratives. Regarding brain freeze:   Few believe the national government should forego taxing residents in order to finance national defense, interstate highways, national standards for airline traffic, and inoculations of the general public in order to mitigate against epidemics. Similarly, there’s little reason to believe the national government should forego taxing residents in order to finance decent, civilized, national health care. Nor is there reason to believe that would unreasonably pick anyone’s pocket. Private companies still compete to produce weapons, contract to build roads, and provide airline services. Health care providers would still compete to market their services, even were payments for a floor of services to be made by some combination of national, state, and local governmental agencies. Britain, Canada, Australia, and numerous other nations manage to accomplish national health care without unreasonably compromising it. Yes, on behalf of plan users, the government would be in a strong bargaining position. But many people remain wealthy enough to enter into contracts for more exceptional services, so that progress towards increasing excellence in medical techniques would continue.

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REASON: If Rinos and corporatists can reasonably expect skilled factory workers to compete to market their labor to diminishing numbers of manufacturing and even foreign corporations, than Dinos and citizens can reasonably expect domestic health-care providers to compete to market their skills to diminishing numbers of governmental payers. Decent aspects of the market would be retained; indecent aspects would be reduced. Tax funded government would be incentived to control costs; the press would remain incentived to pressure providers not to unreasonably deny coverage; middling insurers would find markets for them to profit in by means other than denying health care to the least powerful. Assuming the U.S. could transition to a more ideal system, it could get the monkey for providing health care off employers’ backs and thereby allow American businessmen to become more competitive with offshore businesses that are not beset by such costs.

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BALANCE OF FACTORS: Regardless of system, there will always remain competing factors: How to attract good students to become good health care providers; how to disincentive illegal residents and malingerers from hijacking the system; how to overcome misleading pejoratives of purely profit-driven cronies. Indeed, it’s intuitive to any realistic thinker that some purely profit-driven cronies will always prefer that middling insurers remain involved precisely so that easy money can continue to be made by finding efficient ways for denying treatments to relatively powerless individuals.

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SLOGANS THAT FREEZE OUT THINKING: The soundbite pejorative (against requiring uncovered citizens to participate in a plan, pay for their own plan, pay a tax assessment to cover a government provided plan, or pay a tax penalty) is nonsense. The people are already mandated to pay assessments to cover public costs of health care!  They're called taxes. Public health care is paid for by public taxes. When you take advantage of emergency public health care, you're taking advantage of other people being required to pay for your coverage. They're called taxes. Unless you're an illegal alien, you pay them too. Just because the tax is called a mandate for individuals not otherwise covered does not make it other than a tax. If government can impose taxes to cover public health care, then it can impose a mandate to members of the public either to pay the tax (or fine), or to directly purchase their own coverage.

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PREPARING THE WAY: Enforce borders. Reform medical malpractice tort law. Make insurance policies for employees portable. Don't require employees with vested coverage plans to participate in taxes designed to cover government financed single payer plans for everyone else. Phase out copays on employer provided coverage. Over time, phase out requirements for employer provided coverage. Meantime, until transition is complete, the phasing and transitioning will unavoidably be fairly complex.

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OBSTACLES PLACED BY DUPLICITOUS CRONIES: Notwithstanding, even if Americans could reach consensus about an ideal system, how can they find a practical way to navigate towards it?   How can the fraud that passes for representation by the Allied Establishment of Dinos and Rinos ever be overcome? After all, health care is just one among numerous concerns for which ordinary, middle-class Americans are under the thumb of a corruptly allied Establishment of crony corporatists and collectivists, which controls most aspects of every such debate. The middle class can only restore good sense to the American system as it shucks off mainstream disinformation and begins educating itself. I wonder where Newt and Mitt REALLY stand on this?

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Default System of History

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But for the example of the U.S., the default economy of history is comprised of rulers and workers, with no influential middle class. This is true under communism as well as under colonizing, state-run corporatism (which is what modern communism amounts to). If the U.S. fails to preserve its borders and identity, then nothing stands in the way of rule-of-all under a fluxing, worldwide cadre of despots, corporatists and fanatics. That Establishment, seeking the default position on behalf of elites and dupes, never stops trying to eat the U.S. middle class, until it expires. Apart from lip-servicing for dupes, the Establishment never has its heart in defending U.S. borders, nor in defending economic freedom and opportunity for America’s own middle class.
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Rather, elite corporatists work with easily-bribed dupes to erase U.S. borders and to ship U.S. industry overseas. This they never cease to “inform” us is because they “know best how to fix things” and “free trade raises all boats.” Plus, don’t you see, they “earn” the right to force U.S. workers to compete with worldwide serf labor, indentured to corporations that operate hand in hand with governments. When they say “land of the free,” they mean freedom to harness American laborers as commodities to buy and sell in the worldwide (crony-manipulated, artificial) “marketplace,” where it’s only “right” that American laborers should be forced to compete with laborers who are already under the harness of foreign despots and corporate wise guys. The siren rationale they sew into the consciousness of dupes is that even though workers will earn less, the prices they pay will also be less. What they don’t mention is that this is at the cost of erasing America as an exemplar for middle-class liberty, opportunity, and voice to demand representation. How again is this “freedom?”

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Everything border-erasing establishment-cronies do is driven by morally-depraved shallowness. They’re fanatically baptized in it, through and through. The only serfs they promote are happy dupes on a stick. Take the callow rationalization for allowing American car manufacturers to be cleansed by bankruptcy. What our cronies really meant was to allow the cleansing of legacy costs for accumulated pensions and health benefits. But think what that would mean: Except for token operations, the work would be shipped to cheap labor markets overseas. Think how Japanese makers would respond. The only reason they make cars in America is because they saw that not as many Americans otherwise would buy their products. But what happens to the patriotic impulse once so called American makers ship their own production to the cheapest shore for serf labor?
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Given the vast sway the Establishment exerts over our media, banking, indeed, our very currency, it will be difficult to awaken the middle class to otherwise simple points. I don’t know that Newt is the man to do this. I do apprehend that he might be the only one with the grit for it. Free enterprise, yes. Crony eating out of America, no.
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Possible border-defending solution: Smart tariff increases on im-ports, smart tax increases on funding out-goes; less taxing on internal business production, less taxing on funding in-comes. If this raises prices, it also preserves American industry and middle-class political influence. Without that, the notion of “representation” in Representative Republic becomes a sad joke. (BTW, if American corporations really want to eliminate legacy costs, as opposed to wanting to reduce American workers to serf laborers, then why not convert to a form of single-payer, safety-net, national health coverage, instead of putting that onus on American businesses in a way that makes them less competitive with foreign corporations?)
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Yes, decentralize non-national concerns. However, competitiveness with foreign, state-run corporatists necessitates some domestically centralizing response. Better to preserve the American middle class as a national holism than to reduce it to competition with serf-harnessed laborers under banana despots.
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If the American middle class is to stop allowing itself to be slapped silly between crony Dino socialists and crony Rino corporatists, it needs to get the old-hickory-grit to think anew. It needs to think grandiose. Centralize where we must, decentralize where we can, and restore middle class influence and decency. How many patents are filed or purchased by internationally operating corporations for the sole purpose of protecting entrenched businesses by not allowing new technologies to come to market? Talk about counter-productive, central-government regulation of rewards for digging and refilling old holes! How much of the "free market" "earns" its money by draining the real economy? Patent protection should end when a new discovery (hydrogen powered engines, ultrasonic washing machines, etc.) is not marketed within 5 years.
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Stop with the childish diversion-and-dividing-fixation on the utter non-priority of replacing Judeo-Christian values with wide-open Lib sex, drugs, and frenzy. Do Lib pushers have anyone's best interests at heart, or do they just want ways to recruit addicts in order to keep them under status-quo thumbs? If the middle class does not wake to real priorities, America will simply blow away, like a bubble floating on nothing but know-it-all blow of impatient, spoiled, easily misled children. Then, how much liberty will Libs have?
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Apart from greater access to trinkets and diversions, in terms of supporting a household, why is the buying power of a modern engineer hardly more, if at all, than that of a milkman in 1955? Apologists point out that America benefited much more from churnings of WWII than any other nation. Ok. But what about increased efficiencies in machines, robotics, and computing --- shouldn't such efficiency-enhancements offset, to keep the general standard of living high? Or are those benefits solely the "earned" domain of elite corporatists? Look around. Those efficiency-enhancements are translated by those with power to translate them to render most of the middle class quite expendable. Given the heady power and advantage of having access to cheap labor and means for conditioning the masses to think most insults to be palatable, why presume corporatists pursuing the bottom-line will or should seek full employment? I give you Obama-Soros, the perfect crony alliance of hyena-socialists and lion-capitalists. Can you imagine anything such alliance could not package as "progress?" Why believe such alliance would ever actually want serfs to come to an even playing field, as opposed to always being kept to need elites to look out for them?
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Newt and Mitt

Of our founders, four were magnificent: Washington, Franklin, Adams and Jefferson. Two were essential: Washington and Franklin. I give you the "no-good" Franklin: occasional attendee of hellfire club, abettor of illegal dissections, likely serial affair artist, part time agnostic, slaveholder cum abolitionist. A complex man who learned and changed over time. What he would advocate for himself in the individual case would often come to be inconsistent with what he would advocate for the country at large. Inasmuch as the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that is the way that unfolds for all of us. Indeed, an innocent, unfamiliar with the ways of the world, would be tragic. For that, I give you Jimmy Carter. Obama scares me in both aspects, as individual and as statesman. While Newt often falls far short as an individual, it's his evolving philosophy for the state with which I am mainly interested. Between Newt and Mitt, which one is most suited to restore opportunity and liberty for the American middle class? Without a free and healthy middle class, there's little that can restrain despotism. I don't necessarily want or need an elite ruler who thinks he knows best or how to fix things top down. I don't want a land swamped with voters who lack sense to apprehend when to close themselves to ravages of foreign despots and illegal derelicts. I want a land of liberty and opportunity, and I want it to defend itself against all despots, elitists, and fanatics of the world. Let them stew in their own nation building.