Who votes for the Republican Party any more? Basically, religious rich white elderly people and no one else. This is not a formula for long term success. Whites continue to shrink as a proportion of the population, people are becoming ever less religious, the eternal recession is making wealth a thing of dreams, and the elderly are all on death's door to begin with. It's good that the Republican Party will eventually just die off, because all of their policy ideas are awful, but they still have the power to obstruct and prevent any progress in politics for many decades to come. The death of the Republican Party isn't going to happen tomorrow, but people are suffering today and need help now. Which means we need to expose and shame the Republicans now, not just wait them out, so that the country rallies together against them and puts a stake in this zombie monstrosity.
First off, religion has no place in the 21st century. It is absolutely ludicrous to ascribe creation to supernatural phenomena when everything has been made perfectly clear by science and there is a natural explanation for matter (the Big Bang) and life (Evolution.) Why are we still listening to nonsense from two thousand years ago written by people who endorsed slavery and genocide in God's name and call it a Holy Book? It just boggles the mind that these religions were able to survive the advent of science. What has prayer ever gotten us but the Dark Ages? Meanwhile, science immediately cured diseases, fed the hungry, let people fly, made infertile women fertile, and accomplished every single miracle all those holy books claimed they could do but never accomplished even once on tape so there's zero proof of any of their lies. In a few generations people will be ashamed that humanity ever listened to these ridiculous stories like all life on Earth fitting inside a boat, including apparently Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex. Anyone who mentions God or Jesus when talking about policy decisions needs to be dragged away to an insane asylum because they're clearly hallucinating non-existent things. Madmen have no place determining policy for the rest of the rational, sane world.
Recently, some stupid pastor went on a news show to condemn violent video games. He started rambling on about how Jesus wouldn't have approved of video games, even though there's no way in Hell said pastor could ever know that, since Jesus died 2,000 years before the first video game was invented, and therefore had no opinion whatsoever about the entertainment medium. When the news anchor inquired why the pastor felt violent video games led to violent crime when Japan is the heart of gaming culture and has the lowest crime rate on Earth, the man just sputtered and started talking about prayer and God's love. He was not a sane person. This was not a rational conversation. We were seriously trying to have a debate with a God damn madman as he attempted to steal away the happiness of one billion people across the world who enjoy playing video games while harming no one on Earth by doing so.
Similarly, religious people randomly attack perfectly innocent things like gays, abortion, birth control, premarital sex, border control, stem cells, evolution, eugenics, and science in general. Their Holy Books are hopelessly out of date and yet they want to make the whole country obey their mad whims, on the basis of no evidence and with no rational justification for why things should be the way they want. They don't even try to ensure the well-being of people here on Earth, all they care about is ascending to their fairy tale Heavens and everyone on Earth can burn. Do we really want people like that setting the priorities for our country's political programs? I've even heard religious people say there's no point funding a space program because Revelations promises that Judgment Day will come before we ever leave Earth. Great! Thanks, Bible!
Second off, every single God damned Republican has their own heroic tale of lifting themselves up by their boot straps. They all start with "I was poor once, but I worked hard, got a college degree, and spent frugally and now I'm rich so screw all of you losers I've got mine and I don't give a fig about you." Yes, and if you grew up in the God damned 1950's, or 1960's, or 1970's, yes that would work just fine. But you're talking to people who grew up in the new economy, the one that hasn't produced a new job since 2000 and whose median wage is lower than 1999's! How dare you associate your life history with ours? How dare you try to preach to us? No one has ever lived in a worse period since the Great Depression in terms of getting jobs than we are living right now. And at least the Great Depression ended with World War II where everyone received a free, high paying government job. The Great Recession has no end. It just goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
News flash, it's not possible to work hard anymore. To avoid providing health care to employees, employers are making sure that everyone hired is considered a temporary worker, not a full time worker, so they reduce your hours to as little as possible. Since there are tens of millions of poor Hispanics willing to work at any price for these jobs, there's no way to hold out for better pay or more hours. The minimum wage is at historic lows compared to inflation so even if you did work hard you'd make practically nothing to speak of. Working hard no longer has any payoff, it's just a treadmill to nowhere. In the United States of America, unlike every other civilized nation on Earth, it isn't even enough to ensure that you and your family has health insurance. And with an amnesty set to allow 50 million more low-wage immigrants into the country, any hope of working hard at a low paying job is banished for eternity. Not that there are any jobs left to work hard at -- they were all shipped to China where workers work even harder, for a dime an hour and without any bathroom breaks. Those workers get to leave their factories and visit their parents once a year, isn't that nice? Do Republicans advise we simply out compete them by never visiting our families even once? That's the can do spirit, eh?
The only people who can work hard are the professionals who are in high demand, like engineers, doctors and lawyers. It's not unusual for these types of jobs to be working 70 hour weeks while making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's well and good for those folks, but employers have no use for the rest of us working 70 hours a week, because there's far more of us to go around than there is work to be done at the low skilled level. So let's assume this advice means 'work hard by studying in school and college.' Unfortunately, it was just shown that no amount of hard work matters in school or college. You are born intelligent or stupid and no one can do anything about it, so even if you work hard you'll still fail, or even if you're lazy you'll still succeed. Telling a stupid person to keep working hard at understanding calculus is just torture, all you will do is drive the boy or girl to tears as he laments over and over that he can't understand, he can't understand, he can't understand no matter how many times he reads over the problem. 'Work hard' is such an arrogant thing to say. Do you think if you worked hard you could beat Michael Phelps at swimming? So why the hell do you think stupid people can beat smart people in law school?
The saddest part of this story is a lot of mediocre people who were told to work hard and go to college by all these 'well meaning Republicans' with their stupid bootstrap success stories actually believed them and followed this advice. We are now the most educated generation in American history, with the highest proportion of people with college degrees ever. (Though it's still well under 50%, Republicans under Romney already showed quite clearly that they spit on the 50% beneath them and have no advice but for them to crawl into a ditch and die somewhere so I guess pointing this out doesn't mean much to them.) What did it gain us? Nothing. 60% of college graduates don't have a college level job. They are flipping burgers alongside everyone else, or just straight out unemployed. But in addition, they have a student debt so high it'll take their entire lives to repay. Isn't that so nice? They worked hard, went to college, got a degree, just like the previous generations did -- but college is now 10 times as expensive as it was in the past, and 1/10 as valuable, so, too bad, you guys can all just live as debt slaves for life. What did listening to Republican advice get us? A bunch of college degrees, a huge debt, and no jobs. None for dropouts, none for high school graduates, and none for college graduates. I suppose the next step of advice Republicans will give is "So just stay in graduate school and become a CEO." Yeah, sure, because every single American is in the top .1 percentile of intelligence and can easily handle graduate school level courses just like Stephen Hawking. This is about as useful advice to poor people (most of whom can't even afford college much less graduate school, because yet again America uniquely doesn't provide for college free like Europe does and therefore denies any poor person any chance at any opportunity in life to rise up the class structure) as Marie Antoinette's.
We are in an unprecedented era. In the modern age, neither working hard nor receiving an education is of any use whatsoever. This is because human muscle power has been rendered obsolete by fossil fuels. A single barrel of oil is worth 1200 man-hours of work or some other horrid number, while costing only $100 dollars or so. To accomplish the same thing with a strapping buck of a man who lifts everything onto his broad tanned shoulders, at minimum wage, he would have to be paid $8,700 dollars plus another $3,000 in social security taxes and health benefit expenses. So the man to oil competitive ratio is 1:117. Which employer, exactly, is going to be stupid enough to hire the man?
And if you thought brain power was any better, think again. Computers can already out think humans in most tasks. They have better memory, they never make any mistakes, they never get sleepy, they never get sick, they never take drugs, they never cause drama by getting into fights with other employees, so on and so forth. The mental strength of computers far outweighs humans in anything but unscripted scenarios, emotional bonding, fine motor control, and sensory organs. If your job doesn't fall into one of those fields you are sunk. No one would ever hire you when they could get a cheap, uncomplaining computer to do it instead 24 hours a day in an unlit, un-air-conditioned room with no health care costs. To make matters worse, fine motor control and sensory organs are just around the corner. In a few years cars will drive themselves and robots will be performing all our surgeries. All of this stuff is being solved as we speak. Daycare, teaching, nursing and the like is something women will always outperform men at, so there's no hope for men to search for jobs there just because robots can't do them. So all that's left is 'unscripted thinking.' In other words, return to the paragraph above. Are you part of the .1% of intelligence in America, such that you can think of innovative, creative, bold solutions to your company's problems, such that no one can outsource you, replace you with an H1-B visa immigrant, or build a robot to do your job? Congratulations! You've won the lottery of life. But since you were simply born that way, don't you dare get cocky and preach to the rest of us who weren't born with such innate features. It would be nice if we could all be born supermodels and make a living just posing for cameras too but somehow it just doesn't work out that way either.
Work hard? Get a college degree? Give me a break. A woman can still find employment as a nurturer in this service economy (though robots will eventually be able to so perfectly emulate emotions that humans won't be able to tell the difference and then even these jobs will disappear), but men are simply sunk. They can either be a billionaire CEO or a nobody. That's all the economy has left for half of mankind.
Republicans think life is so easy because their lives were incredibly easy. They got a job at a time when there was no outsourcing, there was no immigration, and there were no computers or robots. Anyone could get a job in a situation like that. If we were to compete evenly, we would trounce them at every job they ever received. We are more intelligent (as shown by the Flynn effect), more educated, and more flexible than they ever were (non-unionized, asking for lower wages, delaying marriage and children well beyond what they ever did for the sake of pleasing employers, etc, etc.). But it isn't an even competition, because we have to compete with their 40 years of work experience (the baby boomers are the largest portion of the population and have sucked all the hiring oxygen out of the room by simply keeping what their seniority has already earned), fifty million low-wage immigrants, billions of Indians and Chinese overseas, and Intel Inside. I wish I could take all their success stories, shove it down their throats all the way back in time to their mother's wombs, have them be born again in this age, and then tell me all about how great they are when they try to pull their same shit now that they succeeded with before. It's a lot easier to become an auto worker when the rest of the world has been pulverized by strategic bombing campaigns and therefore can't build any Toyotas or Volkswagons to compete with you over. These Republicans never earned or deserved a single thing they say they worked so hard for or learned so much to receive. In the competitive world of today, not a single employer would have even picked up their resumes, they would've all been dumped into a garbage can by an automatic computer code that screens for higher qualifications than anyone in their entire generation ever received. All their success is just due to dumb luck, a series of historical coincidences, and they dare to lecture us about how we should be more like them.
People say the Great Recession started in 2007, but really it started in the 1970's under Carter. Ever since then, real wages haven't increased for real people. Employment as a percentage of population has gone down. The economy lives entirely off debt and money printing. We surge from bubble to bubble, one false source of wealth after another, decade after decade, all the while printing ever more trillions of dollars to pay our bills and levying the taxes for all this spending on the young. Isn't it nice? The baby boomers get all the benefits of public spending, and we get all the costs. I've never seen a fairer deal! The economy will continue to sputter and grind mercilessly through the younger generations because the trends that started in 1970 (mass immigration, mass automation, public debt and free trade) continue to accelerate and worsen every year. So what looked like a mild recession in the 1970's has been steadily becoming a worse and worse recession all the way until 2007 when we finally noticed yes, we are in a recession, and now with yet more debt and more money printing we've managed to hide this fact a little longer, until a few years down the road we realize that somehow we're in an even deeper recession than ever before. Aside from a few zigs and zags, the entire history of America post-1970 is recession, recession, recession, debt, debt, debt, inflation, inflation, inflation, bubble, bubble, bubble, unemployment, unemployment, unemployment. Under Obama it's only gotten worse. And under the next president it will continue to get worse. And the one after him too. It will just get worse and worse for eternity, because we never, ever address the root causes that are spinning this wheel of misfortune.
The elderly are strangulating us to death. They've put in place policies that are so bad we can't even replace our birth rates any more. This has happened once before in history -- when the English lords decided to drive all the peasants off their land and replace them with grazing sheep because the price of wool was higher than corn on the world markets. They eradicated the entire poor from the land, partially via starvation, partially via the pestilential hellholes of their unsanitary cities people flocked to in order to find work, but mostly by just denying men job opportunities so they couldn't attract mates and died childless. It was the Holodomor all over again, except this time aimed precisely and perfectly at the poor and the poor alone. Our public policies are ridiculous. The elderly get free medicare and social security, which costs us over half the government budget, but they vote to cut food stamps for mothers with infant children? Can their policies get any more nakedly apparent? Why don't they just eat us while they're at it?
Why must we pay the interest on the debt they accrued? If interest rates ever went up even a little, the debt payments would exceed the total taxes the government received. Then what? We cut all social services so greedy rich bondholders can collect rent from people who never did anything to create the debt in the first place and never benefited one penny from it?
Republicans are the party of the elderly, by the elderly, and for the elderly. They want us as their tax slaves, their personal servants (which is what the 'service economy' is all about, getting maids and gardeners to take care of your enormous mansions for you because it's too much work to take care of your own shit), or dead, and they have the voting bloc to enforce their every mad desire. Republicans want to keep social security for themselves, the elderly, while eliminating it for everyone under 50. Isn't that grand? So we get to pay social security taxes, but we don't get any benefits. Sounds fair to me! Republicans want high social security taxes, which affects workers, but 0% capital gains taxes, which taxes their rent money. Sounds fair to me! Of course people who actually work for their money should have to pay all the taxes while the lazy rich who just sit around and collect checks should get all their government benefits for free! Republicans want free health care for themselves, via Medicare, but they don't want to give medicaid to poor mothers with children, that would just be a waste. State Republican governers will go so far as to deny free federal money just so they can avoid expanding Medicaid rolls to the poor who live in their states under Obamacare. They are so spiteful, so vicious, that even when someone else pays for the benefit they still refuse to give it to their poor.
And to justify their limitless cruelty and rapacity, they turn to 2,000 year old books or working conditions that only existed right after World War II. They live in a time warp and refuse to believe anyone who tells them the world has changed since Jesus walked the Earth or Hiroshima went up in a fireball. It's so ridiculous. The level of debate is like trying to reason with a child who's covering his ears and shouting "nyaah nyaah nyaah" in order to avoid hearing your side of the argument. And these people have a stranglehold on political power. They are the majority of voters, and the majority of campaign donors. There is nothing any of us can do against them. The baby boomers are the dictators of America. Everything goes to them, everything goes their way, and when we raise the slightest voice of protest over the situation they've put us in, they just tell us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps like this is some God damn cowboy western and there's still a frontier of free soil for all to go ranch or farm on. Their ignorance, stupidity and selfishness are out of this world.
Republicans ought to be ashamed of themselves. And once they're done feeling ashamed for everything they've done to us these past 40 years, they ought to vote Democrat. Maybe then some real hope and change can begin.
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