My Ass Too

I'm going to answer your post of today before I forget, and I might make another post later if I think of something. Have a nice trip.

For the purposes of today's discussion, "they" means the Establishment, whatever their ilk.

What you said about the two ilks makes a lot of sense. The main reason I voted for third parties all those years is that it seemed to me the two major parties were working together while just pretending to oppose each other's agendas. When Richard Nixon betrayed Taiwan and kissed up to Red China I thought that they had him do it because a Democrat would have never gotten away with it. Before that, we had that escalation of the Vietnam War by Johnson. If a Republican had tried that, he probably would have gotten more opposition from Congress, so they had a Democrat do it. After all these years, I'm not so sure anymore that they are all in it together, but I'm still convinced that they are all in it.

I've got nothing against poor people. I used to oppose giving them all that assistance back in the day when there were plenty of good paying jobs to be had. So what did they do? First they took away all the good jobs, and then they started cutting back on the welfare. I don't know whether or not they want to make us all poor, but I'm pretty sure they want to keep us all dependent on them. What we need is another way to make money that isn't dependent on any of those ilk bastards, but I don't know what that is. If we ever discover a way, we'll have to also figure a way to roll it out to the public without drawing too much attention to ourselves, or they'll take us out before we ever get it off the ground.

I agree that anybody carrying a gun for Uncle Sam should be directly employed by Uncle Sam. It's hard enough trying to hold those guys accountable without adding another layer of bureaucracy between them and us. I don't know what they're paying the military these days, but I would be surprised if they weren't paying the contractors more than that. It's not about saving money, it's about maintaining control and being able to pass the buck when something goes wrong. The very word "privatization" doesn't mean what it used to anyway. All it means now is contracting with somebody else to do their dirty work for them. When they took away my job on the State Street Bridge, they said they were going to privatize it, but what they really did was contract with the Cheboygan County Road Commission to do the work previously done by employees of the Michigan Department of Transportation. The job was still being done by government employees, just different government employees, and they called it "privatization".

It seems that you Chicagoans can't tolerate the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history being credited to a Michigan city, so you're trying to beat Detroit out of that well deserved distinction. Poor Detroit! They once had the title of "Murder Capitol of the World", but somebody beat them out of that one too. I don't remember what city that was. Was it also Chicago?