Friday Clearance on Pics & Links

I have such an archive of photos that I'd like to share and an overcluttered Favorites collection in my web browser that I'm going to post a clearance, hopefully each Friday if I can be disciplined.  Hey, it could happen!

I don't get how people are nostalgic for the Reagan years.  He fulfilled my college economics professor's prediction that he could not both cut spending and reduce taxes, thereby tripling, maybe even quadrupling the national debt.  You call that conservative?  Hmmm.  More like setting us on the road to debt slavery.   And what about the treasonous conspiracy that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair?  Selling weapons to Iran through Israeli intermediaries?  That just shows you that those people are loyal only to money and power and just use patriotism as a mask in public.  They even dealt drugs to fund their adventures while cracking down on Americans with their empty "Just Say No" sloganeering, pushing for drug testing to get a decent job, and putting many more people under government control by jail, parole, and probation.  Such hypocrites!  Such massive corruption!I can't believe those people are still walking around free!  People may not realize that there hasn't always been a middle class.  Labor unions have been an important tool for working people to better their lives, at least until the labor leaders became Fat Cats themselves.  Even though old Ron was big in the union when he was an actor, he struck a blow against working people when he broke the air-traffic controllers strike.  Reagan proved to be a tool of the Fat Cats.  He sold us out in favor of the elite: "Mission Accomplished."

So our power seems to have been handed over to Big Brother and our wealth seems to have been shovelled into the coffers of the elite super-rich.  But they only take good enough care of us to drain us further.  All us peasants have to join up and show our masters that we don't need them.

 "5 Doomsday Scenarios For The U.S. Economy" was posted in early September and already seems a bit out of date as the foreclosure fraud scandal grows, currency wars loom, and jobs are still scarce.

I first started this blog with the tagline saying "That Crashing Sound is the collapse of the middle class, or maybe it's just me" thinking that I was firmly in that group.  As I studied it more, it looked as if the party was over before I got there.  People can't even agree on what "middle class" means, it's such a wide range of income and social indicators.  Here are 6 Signs That You've Made It To Middle Class.  Do you fit in?  Remember, a mortgage is debt, not ownership.  And don't get too comfortable:  here are 22 Statistics That Prove That The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America.  I feel so wonderful at being validated!

There is a new word in our language:  99er, meaning someone who has exhausted all 99 weeks of unemployment benefits with no more extensions.  You may hear news reports of a drop in unemployment, which ignores these people.  Perhaps even worse you may hear the newsreaders say these people have given up looking for a job.  And in related news, here are the 2009 Federal Poverty Guidelines.  How does your income compare?

The super-rich people have been buying gold literally by the ton, abandoning the stock market to computers doing high-frequency trading, as much as 70% of all trading volume, getting price information 30 milliseconds before the rest of us and making profits on the tiniest of changes regardless of the value of the stock, while us peons are told to buy and hold for the long term.  Glitches in this system have also spawned a new term in our language:  Flash Crash.  Savings accounts used to be the way to go until they crippled them to give practically no return on investment.  This was done to force us to take risks in the stock market.  We have no security net for those risks.  The big players get their bailouts.  Socialized loss, privatized gain.  That's the real transfer of wealth that people should be worried about.  Oh yeah, this happened under the Bush regime but Obama seems no different.  Another tool of the elite.