Where We Are Going Now?

I have no idea what the results will be of the forthcoming election beyond my home state -- NY. The Stewart and Colbert event in DC yesterday was a powerful motivating influence for younger voters and others, but it was barely covered by the main TV networks and one had to watch it on the comedy channel -- not available to many TV watchers. Fragments picked out here and there in news reports did not do it justice. The NY Times report cited below treated it as a joke and not a serious political event with perhaps 150,000 present and deeply moved by it.

Here we have an emblematic instance of the TV news coverage of politics from which most voters draw bits and pieces of info mainly designed to enhance ratings and, thus, profits. The replacement of Rick Sanchez is a joke -- an ex-NY Governor forced to resign when it was disclosed that he was using prostitutes?

The U.S. is in bad shape and things will undoubtedly get worse if the Republicans can block any and all reforms. More banks will fail as those homes from which they are evicting people are trashed. People are not buying now. I just got rid of a two family house in northern Vermont where I had been carrying without rent payments two older women -- one dying and who finally died and the other's husband in jail for unmentionable crimes. We were able to assist the other's move to one of her sisters and will be spending hours figuring the tax loss expenses of about $1000.00 each month for more than a year.

I wonder how many others are either jobless or carrying friends and relatives who are on their backs. Needless to say China and other nations exploiting their workers have taken jobs away from Americans whose benefits make them too expensive to compete in CostCo and Wal-Mart where people hard pressed buy what they can.

Let us not go into the profit makers -- drug manufacturers, profit-making medical insurance, oil companies here. But they symbolize an America being divided between the extremely rich and the rest of us. There is cheating everywhere. The BP oil spill happened because those running that show were out to minimize costs. Our former VP was CEO and an investor in what may be the responsible sub-company for that disaster.

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"Dick Cheney hadn’t had any experience in the oil business when he became Halliburton’s CEO in 1995. But he did have experience in government – as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. And those military ties were invaluable to the company. Under his reign, Halliburton rose from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors, and the money garnered from government-sponsored agencies (such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank) soared from $100 million in the five years prior to Cheney’s arrival to $1.5 billion a few years after."

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich-s-Blog/2010/1029/Vote-Halliburton-and-Goldman-Sachs

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WASHINGTON —Part circus, part satire, part holiday parade, the crowds that flooded the National Mall for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on Saturday made it a political event like no other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/politics/31rally.html?ref=todayspaper
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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Ed Kent [blind copies]