Owe my Soul

Tennessee Ernie Ford had a hit in 1955, 16 Tons. Well I am not a coal miner but I do Owe my soul to the company store. Like many working class people as the economy takes a downward plunge, and my salary does not go up, my debt is increasing at an alarming rate.

As the price of gas has increase, so the price of other products have risen..food, clothing, electricity, water (who wooda thunk it).

I figure at the rate things are going, I'll manage to retire about 20 years after I'm dead.

And the Senate and House go on vacation again.

I can't afford a vacation can you?

The Physical Conditions of Life Are Collapsing

Look at the United States, look what's happened to it, since 1970-71. Look at what has happened to the lower 80% of the family-income brackets of our households, as opposed to earlier, under Roosevelt, in that Roosevelt tradition. Look around the world at systems. What do you see?
The objective physical conditions of life, the conditions necessary for human qualities of life, of our people, the lower 80%, have been collapsing at an accelerating rate since 1977. Collapsing, consistently: There's been no prosperity in the United States! Not for the lower 80% of family income brackets. Anyone who says so is a fool, or a liar. Everything is worse. Look at health care. Look at the cost of housing. Look at the quality of education. For the lower 80% of the family-income brackets in the United States, everything has become consistently worse. And the means by which we had a higher standard of living, was destroyed, as part of the program of the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission. This policy destroyed the United States: destroyed our agriculture, destroyed our industry, destroyed our infrastructure.
It was continued under the Reagan Administration. It accelerated under the Bush I Administration.

Anyway, the problem is, the cultural problem is that our people have come to accept the idea of an oligarchical model in society, even in these United States. We accept the injustice which is heaped upon the lower 80% of our income brackets. We accept the injustice that's done in many other ways, to our own people. We sit in awe about the upper 3% of family-income brackets in the United States. We kiss the butt of some billionaire who's nothing but a thief. That's what we do. We have destroyed the idea of the commonwealth. We destroyed what we prized when we built our Constitution, in terms of Solon of Athens. We tore apart and disregarded every tradition, noble tradition of humanity, particularly of European civilization. And that's what we've done. And we've come to accept that! We've come to accept politicians who think like that. We've come to accept laws that practice that.

And in the case of Franklin Roosevelt: Franklin Roosevelt found us in a low moment. We'd lost 30% of our standard of living, our income, in a short four-year period. And he led in rebuilding our nation, which was shattered. Not only rebuilding our nation, but moving to preserve this, to extend this, to eliminate colonies and similar kinds of oppression throughout the world. To promote a world based on republics, sovereign republics, which are each dedicated to serving their own people, by republican standards, and promoting republican standards of life among people of other nations, knowing that our security, and our well-being, and our purpose in living, depended upon what we did to promote these kinds of ideas, and these kinds of opportunities, among other peoples. The same rights that we desired for ourselves.

We have turned away from that.

So here I am "STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU".