Despair is a ugly word. The dictionary says it means: to lose all hope or confidence.
It rolls off the tongue easily, and yet I don’t hear people openly admitting to it…they talk about political overload, talking head talking points, whatever.
But the end result on my psyche is despair. Because I have lost all confidence in our government….city, county, state and national, they all are failing to redistribute the wealth that they plan to steal from each of us.
The news is constantly negative…high unemployment, government seems to hate business, or at least they don’t get it, about how a free economy works. I talk to my coworkers about this stuff, and many of they want to talk about issues they feel important…about being green, about fixing immigration, about health care costs, about screw the other people let em get laid off and keep me. Things I understand, yet most often disagree with.
And there is the rub as they say…because we all have our pet peeves and favorite desires, we need to listen to each other, and then as a group prioritize the list of stuff to do. We need to do this as individuals, and communities and a nation.
I don’t mean to prioritize the obvious, the emergencies…the oil spill, the potential disasters like tornado and flood, we know people impacted there need help, let’s give it to them.
I’m talking about what people are talking about, what impact them. No job, or if you have a job, you make less than before, due to wage cuts, higher taxes, higher health care costs.
I mean as a country we need to make things, substantial things, and not just buy everything from China…I remember not that long ago that almost everyone had a American car, appliances made here, clothes and shoes made here, furniture made here, in the USA by Americans for an American company.
If you have an iPod, iPhone or other innovative consumer items from Apple, did you know they are assembled in China under drearily dreadful conditions?
So our desire of inexpensive goods is more important than having low unemployment, and hence lower taxes? I mean if there are 12% less people working, then doesn’t that mean there is a greater need for government to take my money in higher taxes!
But does it make sense to do this in a severe economic crisis? How alone am I in saying this? I mean I should accept we are in a global economy, right? Not so fast.
“America's strength was not in what it could make but in what it could invent, and the structure of our economy was changing from real factories to idea factories. After having struggled with this vision of the U.S. economy for a generation, a lot of people are now saying, it ain't necessarily so. The current deep recession has provoked new demands that America revive its manufacturing sector. The critics say the U.S. must start making things again, especially in a world where other nations are using the notion of a global economy exclusively for their own advantage.”
Peter Navarro, Professor of Economics, University of California at Irvine
“I mean, let's try to first understand why it's important to have manufacturing jobs in America. It's really for two reasons. One is that they have what we call in Economics a bigger multiplier effect, which is to say that one manufacturing job creates more jobs down the line than a service sector job. And then, more importantly, manufacturing jobs on average pay more. So if you basically want a vibrant, healthy economy over the long term in America, you need manufacturing kind of as your core to generate the jobs, generate the income for people to consume and perpetuate economic growth. So that's basically why we need that. It's basically why China, for example, right now is the only country in the world that's experiencing robust economic growth. It's basically taken over the manufacturing factory floor of the world. Now the other thing I think that's important to understand about the argument is that there's a big misconception that the reason why America had to give away its manufacturing base to the rest of the world was because of cheap labor elsewhere. And, in fact, the research I've done over the last ten years indicates that while cheap labor plays a role in this globalization phenomenon, certainly, a lot of what's going on, particularly in China, is driven by simply unfair trade practices designed to beggar the American economy.”
Where I grew up in California, beside farming, there was aerospace companies that built the rockets for the moon program, aircraft factories, automobile plants (Ford and GM), shipyards that built and maintained ships, as well as countless other industrial…steel mills, lumber mills, etc. They are all, except one, gone now.
If we don’t focus on taking care of ourselves, who will??
55% of Americans think socialist fits Obama...Bank and Financial Regulation Reform, Immigration Reform, allowing voter intimidation...whats next? 
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