Gush Liebaugh - $400 mil., Workers - 0

In case you hadn't heard, Gush Liebaugh (aka, Rush Limbaugh), bloviating liar and hypocrite extraordinaire, just got a new contract worth a reported $400 million. On the same day, the business section carries a story about another 25,000 auto workers getting the axe (that's in addition to the 100,000 or so that have already gotten it in the past two years). For the trifecta, there's the news that payrolls have shrunk for the sixth straight month (but we're not in a recession -- oh no, the "economy is growing" thanks to guys like Liebaugh).

We all know this is SFUIBB (So F-d Up It's Beyond Belief), but the stories are related in ways we may not have considered.

Isn't it interesting that a pioneer in the auto industry, Henry Ford, was the first one to recognize the necessity of decent wages in building a healthy market for products. Auto sales are at their lowest point in 15 years even as the population has grown by about 25 million in that time; 25 million more people, fewer vehicles moving off the lots. How can this be?

I'll tell you how. It's because of guys like Liebaugh stuffing their fat fucking faces with a piece of the economic pie far bigger than the one they deserve. That pie is finite. It's the basic assumption of every school of economics: Scarcity. Every time the bosses figure out a way to screw their workers and customers for a few more bucks, the bosses' piece of the pie gets bigger. Unabashed dipshit laissez faire (sp? too lazy to look it up) capitalists will tell you that the pie gets bigger. It doesn't, really. There's only so much to go around for every so many people because people can only produce so much wealth. Population grows. Sometimes efficiency bumps up production/wealth, but it's always a finite quantity.

In America and the world, we have bought their bullshit lock, stock, and barrel. We let them make every law they needed -- from various hare-brained deregulation schemes to capital gains tax reductions (an absolute outrage to anyone who works for a living!) to NAFTA to the repeal of Glass-Steagall -- to rob us blind. We let them defang our unions and Wal-Martize the wages and benefits of common working folk everywhere. We let them tax and borrow us to national death for an orgy of "National Security" spending that was actually just piggish patronage to corruption itself.

Thus we have a situation where Gush gets obscene bucks for being a revolting spewer of hateful propaganda for a couple of hours each day. Meanwhile, everybody who works keeps getting doinked deeper and deeper up the poop chute. They keep cutting our benefits, our hours, our jobs, and even -- in effect, thanks to inflation -- our pay. Why? So they can take more for themselves. It's all about profits, which really means the Gush Liebaughs of the world take everything for themselves, leaving those who actually produce things of value to twist in the cruel wind of unbridled capitalism, which is nothing more than plutokleptocracy™ (that's mine, and I want my money if anybody uses it).

To put things in perspective, $400 million is enough to pay 5,333 auto workers $75,000 for a year. What do you think produces more wealth, 5,333 factory workers making actual products or one drug-addled fat fucking pig spewing hatred and falsehood into a microphone for two hours a day?

How did the USSR go from being a decimated war-torn land to putting the first man in space within a decade or so? They planned their economy at a macro level and deployed resources where they were needed. That's also what China did when the whole "to grow rich is glorious" thing began under Deng Xiaopeng. Not to say that planned economies are good across the board, but we could use a little more macro-level planning on behalf of the working people. Things are just way out of hand.

Capitalism -- like everything except love -- is only good up to a point, after which it becomes destructive. Today's news tells us that we have passed that point.

Rush Limbaugh's contract proves it.