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Jeff Koopersmith provides an answer – and insight into just what it is that the McCain Scam-paign is up to.
October 22, 2008 – Geneva (apj.us) – I love my country and would fight to the death for any threatened American, but I have to wonder just where these red state morons were when they were handing out diplomas. I can see it now…
A small auditorium in the “Heartland”. Mothers and fathers proudly sitting in folding chairs, or leaning against the greenish painted concrete brick walls. Everyone waits for Principal Smith to start the 6th grade graduation ceremony. And, then he looks down on the young polished faces of Middle America, smiles and speaks.
“Joe the Plumber-To-Be! Come up and get your elementary school diploma. Joe passed almost all his classes and had only a bit of trouble with English,” says the Principle of Wankette Elementary in Oklahoma as he hands little Joe his fake parchment reward.
The parchment, the school, the teachers, and the land they teach on were all provided by “the people” through their taxes paid to the government so Joe could finish elementary school.
And that’s how it begins. Joe grows up to be an actual plumber – well a plumber without a license, and listens to his father wax eloquent on the “Ruskies”, “Chinks”, and the “Kong’ as he grows up. He hears his dad’s war stories from Korea where Joe senior single-handedly shot a dozen “Slopes” to protect his platoon against the “red menace”. Joe buys the American dream even though he’s living in a tear-down rented house on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. On that same block lives little Tim McVeigh.
Joe goes on to high school, majors in shop– and does very well. He goes to other classes of course and even enjoys his history classes where he is taught about the “red menace”, the “yellow hordes”, the “evil empire” and the “spicks” threatening our borders.
His dad isn’t always on the job. Sometimes lay-offs force him to take unemployment checks. Joe doesn’t see that this is, at least, a form of “socialism” – the people, through their government, helping others who are unemployed for a time but need to feed their families and pay their rent.
A safety net.
While Joe the Plumber-to-Be is growing up, he gets sick only a few times. His family can’t afford health insurance, and Joe’s dad takes jobs when he can get them – with or without benefits. He’s a good father.
Meanwhile Joe goes to the community hospital where all his inoculations, physicals, and antibiotics are supplied, again – by “the people” through their governments and the taxes they pay to make sure that everyone gets at least basic medical attention. Joe’s grandmother goes to a bigger hospital for an operation on her heart – she is covered under
Medicare, a ‘socialist’ program and the operation cost her almost nothing. Thank God, for Americans who pay their taxes on time and help governments to provide medical care for the aged and the poor. Americans don’t want people to suffer – not anyone, not anywhere.
Joe is happy. He’s found a good trade and he enjoys his job fitting pipe at a local construction site. He meets Jane, a lovely young escritoire and they marry. Joe and Jane would like to start a family. The government, using taxes paid by the people, helps Joe and Jane to get an affordable mortgage, but later – after 1985, the banks and other lenders are de-regulated and Joe’s son will get a loan that drives him into bankruptcy because the people forgot about caring for each other and instead began to worship money and power.
Some worshipped like their parents – hoping to catch sight of a movie star or rock star. Others began to worship the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the term billionairre. Many of Joes’ children’s friends say they want to grow up to be billionaires because they are made anxious by the world around them and watch their own parents struggle to put food on the table and toys under the Christmas tree. They know, by the time they’re four years old; that the things they see on television are “expensive” and unattainable right now – or maybe forever.
Meanwhile everyone in Oklahoma City travels on roads, drinks water, and has access to utilities because the government makes investments in what they call “infrastructure.” This is a kind of socialism as well.
The government could make taxes lower and just ignore building roads and water treatment plants. The government could lower taxes more and stop picking up garbage, or regulating where people are buried. We could have bodies buried in front yards pretty soon if that happened. If we only got rid of “socialism”
Then there’s the other kind of socialism – the kind that helps companies grow bigger, or even huge. This socialism comes from things like “bond issues” where the taxpayers guarantee the money needed by Ford Motor Company to build a new plant. The government might also give Ford ten years grace so they don’t have to pay any income tax. Why? Because Ford will give good jobs to Joe and his friends – building cars and trucks. This is called by some “corporate socialism”. Is Ford building its plant to provide jobs or to provide more money for its executives and stockholders?
Soon, Joe the Plumber will find out he is very sick and that he has cancer. Yet, thank God, the government has taken some tax money and supported university and national laboratories to study ways to defeat cancer. The kind of cancer Joe has is now curable. It wasn’t curable before the government invested billions in cancer research. Joe will be fine thanks to the “socialism” he hates but doesn’t understand. It’s not his fault that Joe doesn’t get it. It’s the fault of a system controlled by idiots who don’t want children growing up to question even out-of-control capitalism.
Joe doesn’t study the ways that “socialism” impacts his life for the better. Socialism which seems to just another word for the Judeo-Christian ethic, or maybe just “smart thinking” has become a dirty word – made so by corporate America’s control over the media and politicians, whom they own – lock, stock and barrel.
This continues. Now it’s 2008, and capitalism has gone so insane that it has nearly destroyed itself. The good things about capitalism have been obliterated by the $50 trillion dollars stolen from the people – all over the world.
The government steps in and provides more “socialist” help – this time to the biggest banks on earth. Meanwhile Joe can’t get a $500 increase on his VISA card credit line because banks don’t even trust each other! It’s like the Al Capone not trusting Sam Giancana in hell.
Now it becomes clear that America and “the West” has set off a time bomb with its own greed, and that shell is now exploding all over the earth. Europe, Asia, Russia, and most of the rest of the world begin pouring money – which they simply print – into their failed banks. Government leaders who allowed all this – now scream for REGULATION before they are hung. They also tell their police to find ‘the culprits’ and their courts to criminally try them.
You might think Joe would re-think his hatred of government and especially anything that smacks of “socialism.”
Not a chance. Little Joe, now Big Joe, has been brainwashed – first by the Disney company and now by John McCain. He can’t think straight. He sees John McCain as a “hero” because McCain napalmed women, children, and farmers to stop the “reds” from ruining the world like a mountain of falling dominos.
He weeps when McCain talks of his years in “Slant” captivity. He doesn’t know that McCain destroyed four airplanes worth tens of millions because he wasn’t a very good pilot. Joe helped pay for those planes, and he doesn’t even know where Vietnam is.
McCain, who is a whore for big business – including his own wife’s beer business which kills hundreds of kids in Arizona every year coming home from “keggers”. McCain tells Joe that Democrats and especially Barack Obama want to take all his money and give it away – waste it on government programs. McCain talks about “redistributing wealth” and how Senator Obama wants to destroy the rich who provide ALL the jobs by increasing their taxes somewhat.
This scares Joe, because he is still looking for a job after a year with no work. People like John McCain have convinced him that the rich have to be even richer to get him a job. McCain tells Joe that “small business” provides most of the jobs in America. He does not tell Joe that he and his Congress have defined small business as businesses that earn between $750 thousand and $18 million a year with from 500 to 1,500 employees! I think if Joe knew that he wouldn’t think those businesses were so “small”. [See this link.]
McCain is a bald faced liar of course, McCain himself has been redistributing America’s wealth for most of his political life. His entire family lived on your tax money – it seems forever. He now lives on tax money, and whatever his wife doles out to him.
McCain, for all his adult years he has lived on the public dole, while he has been redistributing wealth – to the rich – to people like his wife’s family who are coincidently convicted felons and former bootleggers for the mob in Arizona. Organized crime appears to have more of a conscious than Wall Street.
Then there is McCain’s silly looking move to run to Washington during his losing campaign to ‘fix’ the credit crisis. Of course, he just sat there looking dumb – He doesn’t know anything about economics.
He does know a lot about economic crime though – he learned it from Cindy and her father. I can just see them seated around the lush Thanksgiving dinner table and telling tales – of the “salad days” when the FBI didn’t know what was going on.
McCain tells his own tales about how he aided his felon and close friend Mr. Keating, and then let Keating go to jail while McCain relaxed in the U.S. Senate, not because he earned it, but because his Daddy was an Admiral in the United States Navy, and McCain therefore was allowed to play soldier and kill lots of innocent people, and watch a lot of innocent American boys get killed as well – all 58,000 of them so he could stop the Vietnamese from Invading San Francisco.
McCain is a creature of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the two Bush bamboozlers. He loves war. He has no problem spending trillions on killing. This is another kind of socialism, the kind that made our evil Vice President Dick Cheney worth a few hundred million dollars for doing the bidding of giant war industries that he helped while he was in still the government.
Ask yourself – why would Dick Cheney be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to big business when he never earned more than a hundred grand or so sucking on the public teat? I think your answer will be clearer than mine.
Yet the nation seems now in love with corruption and the big money it brings.
Joe is as well, He thinks that there’s still a chance he will build his one-man plumbing business into an industrial giant. That’s what McCain and his ilk want him to think, although the chances of that are 6 billion to one – like lotto.
There are scads of working men like Joe.
Most of them though are not dimwits. Many of them are uneducated, but they are not stupid like Joe. They join unions to protect themselves against corporate executives who try to beat them down at every turn so Board Member bonuses grow even larger.
The working men and women read the New York Post and know that its pap. They listen. They see their friends out of work. They see their buddies commit suicide because they can’t support their families. They see minority families in Texas living in sewers that Bush laughingly calls ‘Colonias’.
They know.
They know it’s “the man” but they also know “the man” controls the police, the courts, the legislature, the country council, and city hall. They know to keep their mouths shut – to support what and who “the man” supports. Why? Because maybe one day, they’ll let all the Joes into the club? Just Maybe.
That’s my sad story about Joe the plumber – a nice, but dim-witted man.
The Joes of America and their clone Janes now make up almost half the American population. Perhaps while we do a little redistribution of wealth, we might do a little redistribution of brains.
Joe: Capitalism works just fine – to a point. Like everything else, it can get out of control. Try to learn to recognize this when you see it. You’ll be far better off. Just ask yourself, every day, “How much is too much?”
Jeff Koopersmith is an internationally renowned political consultant, opinion research authority and policy analyst. He has lobbied for causes including the alternative fuel sector and women's health, and is an expert on the international real estate market. He lives in Philadelphia, Washington and Geneva.