plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” Apparently an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Source.

Both the heading and the sub-heading to today’s post reflect strong connections to Chris Snuggs.  Chris has featured previously several times on Learning from Dogs and, I’m sure, my association with Chris has been mentioned.  An association going back too many years to the time when Chris invited me to run a course on sales and marketing for the students at the French Institute ISUGA in Quimper, France.  It became a regular event and Chris and I got to know each other well.

Chris has his own blogsite Nemo Insula Est from where one learns this about him:

A retired teacher, I am very worried about the state and future of the world. One thing may help, a determination to communicate and state the truth as one sees it, which is what I seek to do. I try to see things objectively; my horror of being brainwashed or motivated by some dogma or partisan viewpoint is absolute.

I salute the free press which has a good record of unearthing nepotism, corruption, dishonest and lunacy. However, the nepotists, the despots, the corrupt, the dishonest and the lunatics often have a lot of power, money and therefore influence. This allied to the fact that the lumpenmass is too busy toiling away to survive and often shrugs its shoulders in hopelessness means that the aforementioned get away with it.

Anyway, enough of me waffling on!  In my email in-box earlier today was an email from Chris offering me a couple of links to his posts on Nemo Insula Est.  One was very funny and one was decidedly less so.  The latter is being republished here today, with Chris’s permission.  It is called The State of America.

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The State of America

A Blog post from the “Daily Telegraph” on October 3rd, 2013 by:

Ghislane400

I haven’t got time to verify all of these statistics, but I assume they are accurate. I have added some from Nicholas Kristoff at the end.

As far as I understand, the only reason the USA is not totally bankrupt right now is because the rest of the world keeps lending to it, believing that it is “too big to fail.” Many countries and Empires in history have believed they are too big and important to fail, France being yet another one ………. On that point, see:  “The Life Cycle of a Democracy”, which is rather sobering!

After DECADES of bad decisions, America is now dangerously in debt!  Obama has crippled America since he was re-elected, and his ineptitude is highlighted by the facts below: 

• 30 years ago the US national debt stood at about one trillion dollars.  Today it stands at almost 17 TRILLION DOLLARS!
• About 40 years ago the TOTAL debt stood at about 2 trillion dollars, today it is more than 56 TRILLION DOLLARS!  
• At the same time as they have run up all of this debt, their economic infrastructure and their ability to create wealth has been completely gutted.  Since 2001, America has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been moved overseas. 
• Their share of the global GDP declined from 31.8% in 2001 to 21.6% in 2011.
• The percentage of self-employed Americans is at an all time low whilst the amount of them on benefits is at a record high.
• During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
• If they started to pay off the new debt accumulated under Obama at the rate of $1 per second, it would take them 184,000 years to pay it off.
• Every hour of every day, the federal government steals more than 100 MILLION DOLLARS from their children and your grandchildren.
• America has dropped in global economic competitiveness for the past 4 years running. 
• According to “The Economist”, America was the best place to be born in 1988; now they tie for 16th place.
• There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than in 1950, despite the fact that their population has doubled since then.
• In Detroit alone, there are over 70,000 abandoned buildings.
• When NAFTA was pushed through American Congress in 1933, they had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  They had a trade DEFICIT with them of 61.6 billion dollars come 2010.
• Their trade deficit with China was 6 MILLION DOLLARS in 1985 for the entire year.  In 2012 their trade deficit with China was 315 BILLION DOLLARS.  This is the largest trade deficit between nations in the history of the world.  
• America also loses half a million jobs to China annually. Fewer than 65% of all men in America have jobs. 53% of American male workers make less than $30,000 a year! Only 7% of all non-farm workers in the States are self-employed.  This is an all time low.
• 146 million Americans are either ‘poor’ or ‘low income’.  49% of them live in a home that receives benefits from the federal government, according to the U.S Census Bureau. One in every 6 Americans is on Medicaid and Obamacare will add another 16 million to the Medicaid rolls; this will be a total of 73.2 million come 2025. This will increase liabilities of 38 trillion dollars to Medicare over the next 75 years, which equates to $328,404.00 for every single household in the United States.
• Of the 56 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits now, by 2035 that will soar to an astounding 91 MILLION!  That is a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
• Americans on Social Security Disability exceed the population of Greece, and those on food stamps exceed the population of Spain.
• 45% of all children in Miami now live in poverty, more than 50% of all children in Cleveland live in poverty, 60% of all children in Detroit live in poverty.  
• More than 1 million public school students in America are HOMELESS.  This is the first time in American history this has ever happened.
• Since Obama got back in, those Americans on food stamps have risen from 32 million to 47 million.  That number exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Colombia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming!

What a spiffing good job Obama is doing of bankrupting America!  Anyone would think he hates the States!  Seriously, anyone who voted for him owes an apology to the children of America, for whom a terrible country full of debt has been created by the biggest clown one could imagine.

AND, from Nicholas Kristoff in “The New York Times”:

• The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
• C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

POSTSCRIPT:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on on-going financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

Want to know who said that, and when? ……

Senator Barack Obama on March 20, 2006.

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Just a footnote on that level of US inequality reported by Nicholas Kristoff using an extract from a recent post on Learning from Dogs: Our broken ways:

OK, that’s enough ‘copying’ from me so please go and read more about the plight of those poor billionaires.  But if the NYT and Paul Krugman will forgive me, here’s the paragraph towards the end of the Krugman essay that makes me sick [my emboldening]:

The thing is, by and large, the wealthy have gotten their wish. Wall Street was bailed out, while workers and homeowners weren’t. Our so-called recovery has done nothing much for ordinary workers, but incomes at the top have soared, with almost all the gains from 2009 to 2012 going to the top 1 percent, and almost a third going to the top 0.01 percent — that is, people with incomes over $10 million.

(Patrice Ayme has a parallel essay on this topic.)

There will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who share my view that this dimming of America’s historic beacon of truth and justice is a failure not just for the United States of America but for the rest of the world.

It seems appropriate to remind all you dear readers as to why I write this Blog.  Most easily encapsulated in what appears on my Welcome page:

Dogs live in the present – they just are!  Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value.  Yet they have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time, at least 30,000 years.  That makes the domesticated dog the longest animal companion to man, by far!

As man’s companion, protector and helper, history suggests that dogs were critically important in man achieving success as a hunter-gatherer.  Dogs ‘teaching’ man to be so successful a hunter enabled evolution, some 20,000 years later, to farming,  thence the long journey to modern man.  But in the last, say 100 years, that farming spirit has become corrupted to the point where we see the planet’s plant and mineral resources as infinite.  Mankind is close to the edge of extinction, literally and spiritually.

Dogs know better, much better!  Time again for man to learn from dogs!

Each and every one of us must fight for truth, justice, sanity and brotherhood!

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