Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Hasn’t anyone told you that communism and Marxism are virtually extinct on this planet? Their power to frighten has faded significantly since the end of the Cold War. Time for y’all to move into the 21st century.

Here’s a good summary of some recent research by the Minneapolis Fed.

http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2008/10/the-myth-of-the-stagnate-middle-class.html

Personal income has risen 80% over three decades. Household income, otoh, has risen sluggishly, but only because household formation has been so feeble … for better or for worse, we’re more a nation of singles now, and less a nation of families. Income inequality is greater after thirty years (though unchanged since the Clinton years) because the top quintile has gotten richer faster, not because lower quintiles have gotten poorer. This is typical of a growing economy. And if you want to get all blue collar about it, here are the BLS figures that union howlers like to cite, “average hours and earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers”

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb2.txt

You’ll need your inflation calculator to make sense of this one (have someone show you how to use Google). Average (real) weekly earnings have indeed remained nearly unchanged since 1981, but 1) we’re working fewer hours at a higher hourly rate, and 2) real earnings actually declined in the years prior to 1981. The trend improves with Reagan and his mythical war on wage-earners! Also, note that workers in the construction trades have been doing OK. It’s miners and factory workers whose weekly earnings haven’t kept up with the general improvement. How is personal income so much higher under the circumstances? Blue collar employment is a smaller fraction of the total all the time. More and more, we’re white collar and we’re self-employed. Good thing or bad thing? Well, most of us are richer and very few of us are poorer. If your grandfather spent his workday bolting part A to part B 34 times an hour, until he hurt from his shoulders on down (Ever done factory work?), I suspect he’d approve of the way things have been going.

Anyhow, when you claim “real wages permanently down over that period with losses by workers absorbed into the bloated gains of the top two percent,” you’re up your anonymous. The people who cling to their religion and guns have a very clear idea of their own interests. Watch them over the next couple years.

For example, in September 1999, the Times noted that, “Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stockholders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.”

The 1999 piece went even further:

“In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times,” the Times noted presciently. “But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.”

Likewise, the Times made no mention over the weekend of President Clinton’s aggressive deregulation of the financial services industry, which empowered banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies to engage in some of the very practices — such as credit default swaps — that contributed most to the current fiscal crisis.

While the Times mentioned that mortgage bankers and brokers donated almost $850,000 to President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, the newspaper omitted the fact that the top three recipients of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and its sister organization Freddie Mac over the last two decades were all Democrats.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, head of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; President-elect Barack Obama; and Bush’s 2004 opponent John Kerry all benefited from Fannie and Freddie.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/12/22/white-house-fires-times-housing-meltdown-story/

Obama …. I am still wondering how he got it.

goodtimepolitics: Reagan was not tied to the socialist Party. Obama has used the race card during this campaign more than any of the republicans. Back when the democrats took charge of congress the unemployment was at an all time low, prices was still down and affordable. The first thing the democrats did was raise fed min wages (not even as high as companies was already paying) and by doing so it cause the companies to raise their prices on their products plus on food. The democrats forced the banks to give loans to people that they knew could never make the payments. This crisis that we’re in is a democrat made crisis. And its funny that it all came down one month before election day! McCain was leading the race at the time.