The Suburban Implosion and Rat Poisoning

I got tired of complaining about Bush years ago. He and Rove and Cheney never fooled me for a second and I wrote with a fair degree of accuracy about what they were doing when they did it. It required no crystal ball or psychic powers, I had lived through Nixon and Kissinger before and anyone who says they didn't know what this gang was up to wasn't paying attention.

Some of the nearest and dearest people in my life are hardcore conservatives and fine people by any measure. The scorched earth of the Bush administration is unrepresentative of a one of them.

Tonight we learn that rat poison imported through Chinese grain and food additives are responsible for the deaths of pets who've been eating it. And furthermore that same stuff may be in human foods. The race to the global supply-chain bottom looks like this. To save money we sacrifice our pets and health. I'm guessing the stock market approves. I suspect Tom Friedman is revising his flat-earth theory yet again.

But the rat poison isn't working because every night on the news the rats hold their press conferences and remind us that they're still in charge and that they will not be held accountable. The race to the bottom we are told is more important than the race into space that resulted in our lunar landings. Our priorities are different.

Alan Greenspan described the enemy the other day, "Allowing more skilled workers into the country would bring down the salaries of top earners in the United States, easing tensions over the mounting wage gap, Greenspan said.

"Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world," he said. "If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income."

Income inequality has risen in the past three decades."

Yes, you read that right. American middle-class workers are the problem and America must economically subjugate them (myself included) as a national priority. In many ways the rat poison imported from China is for us not our pets.

I spent the last few years watching Greenspan's vision play out in my own life. As a computer scientist I am as often unemployed as employed. I am forced to interview with foreigners who I can barely understand and who ooze the same arrogant contempt for us that Greenspan poisons us with. I am a whipping post in this rotten global game and the poison of the Bush administration is working. The free-market American middle-class is dying.

Yesterday The New York Times reported Foreclosures Force Suburbs to Fight Blight by Erik Eckholm.

“It’s a tragedy and it’s just beginning,” Mayor Judith H. Rawson of Shaker Heights, a mostly affluent suburb, said of the evictions and vacancies, a problem fueled by a rapid increase in high-interest, subprime loans.

“All those shaky loans are out there, and the foreclosures are coming,” Ms. Rawson said. “Managing the damage to our communities will take years.”

Cuyahoga County, including Cleveland and 58 suburbs, has one of the country’s highest foreclosure rates, and officials say the worst is yet to come. In 1995, the county had 2,500 foreclosures; last year there were 15,000. Officials blame the weak economy and housing market and a rash of subprime loans for the high numbers, and the unusual prevalence of vacant houses.

Damage to communities? What are these observers thinking? This isn't damage. This is Greenspan's idea of global social engineering.

We are told to sell our communities the kool-aid that promotes the idea that we need mathematicians and scientists while the government prepares us a hearty helping of imported gluton. We can choose to sit back and let their poison work or we can fight back and say enough.

The rats are at our doors.

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