Poor, poor, poor people

As I recall my Czech grandparents told me that their parents came to America because the Kaiser wanted to make them speak German, something no self-respecting Czech would want to do, even before the unpleasantness that was to come. When I was there in 2000, Mercedes, or maybe it was Volkswagen, were launching a campaign to sell their cars in Czechoslovakia, I’m sorry, the Czech Republic, those damned ungrateful hillbilly Slovaks, and as part of their campaign they had an ad which showed all these arrows coming from Germany into the Czech Republic which they meant to represent car sales, but the Czechs saw it differently and took great offense.

I’m really not up on the difference between banks and savings and loans. I’m aware that Talmans was a savings and loan, but we always called it a bank. Sadly Talmans is now defunct. Maybe twenty years ago in one of those bank crises they had to swallow some banks that had made bad loans, and they could never make up for that, and eventually somebody bought them out, and then somebody bought the buyers out, and now they are just some minor branch of some megabank, and that beautiful structure on the corner with all the coins embedded in the windows is abandoned and broken and covered with graffiti, while some little office in the south end of the bank by that once vast parking lot, does whatever business remains. There was a photo of it on a fb page called Forgotten Chicago. I can’t find it right now, but I will look later.

I think all that talk, and it seems to crop up every election time like it is some brand new idea, of a third party, is a bunch of bunk. Anybody with enough prestige to be a credible candidate is not going to throw it all away by running at the head of a third party ticket. I pretty much agree with you about the tea party. I think they have lost their invincibility and some republicans dare to speak against them now, but not too loud and not too long. We may see a small split in them between the more pragmatic and the more idealistic, but really no big deal. Liberals like me have long been looking at the Republican party and looking for a rupture, but I really think nothing like that is going to happen, and the dems are scared shitless of the reps and they will all hang together lest they all hang separately.

I am always a bit puzzled at fans of gridlock. To truly believe in gridlock I think you would have to believe that any change would be bad, and if any change would be bad, then we must currently have the best possible government at this very moment, yet most gridlockers don’t seem to feel that way either.

What I have been reading lately agrees with what that Irish lady was saying. Before the protestant revolution in England, it was sort of feudal with lords owning manors and the peasants living there were more or less his property, but it also meant that he was responsible for their welfare, and he would build up points towards heaven by being nice to them. I think that was mostly lip service and I don’t think anybody was very nice to them in practice, but at least they got that lip service, and some food. After the revolution they were seen as lazy bums, and not really God’s elite, otherwise why would they be poor, so they were shoved into workhouses.

Later on with the industrial revolution they were needed to stoke the factory fires, so they were fed a bit, and actually were able to gather some power and form unions and get better wages and claw their way into the middle class. Lately though the middle class is fading and they are falling back into poverty and anymore nobody needs them to stoke the factory fires or do chores around the manse, nobody needs them for anything, so nobody even wants to feed them anymore.

Wasn’t Ayn Rand’s answer to who will feed the poor, to say that you can if you want to, implying that the questioner was a soft collectivist and a bleeding heart. But what happens when the questioner sees the light, indeed when everybody does? Who feeds the poor then?