FedUpUSA

Archive for June 3rd, 2011

General Motors comes into the public schools in order to sell Chevy Volts to children.  No, I’m not kidding you.   This very thing occurred in the Troy School District in Troy, Michigan.

Today, imagine my surprise when my 3rd grader came home with his usual pile of school work for me to look at, when just beneath the A on his most recent spelling test, I found this:

Wait.  What?  They gave him a pamphlet complete with leasing information and MSRP?!  A pamphlet that appears to have been read from cover to cover with child-applied highlighting?!

“Son, exactly what is this?”

“Oh, that was our presentation on the Chevy Volt.  Look, how awesome it is, we have to get one…..”

“What the…..??  I said, cutting him off.  ”You mean they passed these pamphlets out to you and they told you to take them home to your parents? Who was it that passed these out to you.”

“No, mom.  Jimmy’s {not his real name} mom brought them in.  All the third grade teachers passed them out and we had a big discussion about how great the cars are and they even had one at the school!  A brand new one!  One of the teachers got to drive it and everything! It’s going to save the planet and we have to get one and….”  My son said in one big excited stream of dialogue.

“WHAT?  You mean they wasted a substantial amount of time in class convincing you to sell a vehicle to your parents from a company that is wholly owned by the government?  They want you to tell your parents to buy one, when in fact, any child with working parents has probably contributed enough taxpayer money to GM to have earned a free one at this point?  This being the same General Motors that lobbied Congress to force the entire country to bail them out and save them from bankruptcy?!”

“Huh?  I don’t get it mom.”

“Well, son, let me explain.”

So, the first thing I did was direct him to my most recent article on General Motors, posted on June  2nd.  Obama Administration Knew GM Lied About Paying Back Taxpayers .  It’s a short article, so I had him read it. 

So, he clearly saw they lied.  “Why did they lie?” He asked me. 

I told him that it was because they haven’t paid back anything to the American taxpayers.  As of today, GM is indebted to the taxpayer to the tune of roughly $27 billion.  Last year they made a big deal out of proclaiming that they had paid back the taxpayer by giving the US government stock and “returning” some of the borrowed money.  It’s the last bit that his the biggest lie.

What they did was take money from their TARP bailout funds and apply it to the primary bailout fund.  “Yes, son, they paid off their Visa card with their MasterCard, but both cards are owned by the US taxpayer.”

Here, I’ll just let this nice man explain it in terms even a third-grader can understand:

Apparently, General Motors, a de facto part of our government, now views our public schools as their private,  captive audience and they plan to exploit it.  If third-graders got a half-hour presentation enticing them to get their parents to purchase a Chevy Volt, imagine what they are doing in the upper grades where the kids can actually DRIVE!

What was my son’s reaction to all this?  Well, he asked for a piece of construction paper. Specifically, he wanted it in pink.  (Strange for a small boy who hates pink.)   So, I gave it to him and he busily drew, colored and wrote, after which he handed me what turned out to be a pink card.  It was for his grandmother.  “Dear Grandma, congratulations!  I’m so glad you work for a car company that does not lie and does not force people to give them money or trick little kids to sell cars for them.”  Inside was a picture of a Ford Edge.  Grandma has worked for Ford for more than 20 years. 

I think he gets it.  I probably shouldn’t tell him about how GM dealerships have been caught pocketing the tax credit meant for consumers when they purchase a Volt.  Best not to make his little head explode.

Full report (PDF).

The important bit:

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+54,000) in May, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains continued in professional and business services, health care, and mining. Employment levels in other major private-sector industries were little changed, and local government employment continued to decline.

A bit more commentary from The Market-Ticker about the actual report:

The household data showed a small increase in employment, most of it coming from “not in labor force” decrease, and accounting for seasonal variation it was immaterial:

The problem with the “not in labor force” numbers is that they’re highly seasonal; monthly they improved, but annually they’re flat.  In other words, that’s seasonal delta and not a reason to cheer; on an annualized basis there has been no material change since the beginning of 2010 and the number of “not in labor force” folks continue to rise every month.

The employment rate of the population, the key number for tax revenues, is showing the same bounce we saw last year – and if it’s playing out the same way then this should be the peak month in that bounce.  That’s bad.

If you’re looking for a piece of good news in the numbers, there was one tiny bit of it: six cents of hourly wage increase and U-6 ticked down one tenth.  But that’s all.  The diffusion indices collapsed, down more than 11 points to 53.6 with the manufacturing diffusion index off a near-even 10 points.

$1.7 trillion in deficit spending, $600 billion in QE2, over $4.5 trillion in deficit spending in aggregate over three years and we not only haven’t fixed the employment problem we’re still doing QE2 and now the heroin is doing nothing at the current dose as the addict has once again built tolerance and the negative effects continue to accumulate.

The real problem that has been going on, but only just now are people beginning to understand, is that real wages have been declining all the while prices have been going up.  Prices have been going up for ONE REASON:  the Federal Reserve has been devaluing the dollar by printing more of them and giving them to the banks in order to hide their insolvency.  You see, these mechanisms are perpetual bailouts for Wall Street, and it is DESTROYING the real economy – i.e. your production, your income, your wages. Don’t believe me?  See below:

Most of us know how horrific things were for people during the Great Depression.  Now consider the fact that things are much WORSE and much harder for people RIGHT NOW!  What we have been experiencing since 2008 is far worse than the Great Depression, despite what the government and the mainstream media have tried to force you to believe through their manipulation of the data and their outright lies in their commentary thereto.  In actuality, over the past DECADE, real private-sector wage-growth has scraped the bottom at 4%, just below the 5% increase from 1929 to 1939, during the Great Depression!  So, your reality and what the government wants you to think are two entirely different things.

Simply put, during the Great Depression the government did not interfere with prices of goods by printing money.  They allowed prices to fall in response to real demand, thereby allowing the majority of people to at least afford essential items for daily living.  If you had a job during the Great Depression, your standard of living actually increased because of falling prices.  If you didn’t have a job, most likely you had some savings that would tide you over.  Now, unless you have a government job, like these 77,000 federal workers who are paid more than state governors, your standard of living is not only falling, you are now having difficulty paying for daily essentials like food, heating your home, and gasoline for your car to actually get to and from work.

This is what happens when the government (through the Federal Reserve) tries to manipulate the free market.  In this case, all of the manipulation is due to Wall Street and our insolvent banking sector.  We truly have a government by the few and for a very elite few.  If you’re working for the government or Wall Street, you’re doing fine.  The rest of us are living in something far worse than the Great Depression – we’ll call it the Greater Depression, or better yet, call it what it is:  the largest looting operation in the history of humanity.  We no longer have capitalism; we have fascism.  This is precisely how the middle class is being destroyed.  Soon, there will only be the 1% at the very top and 99% of us at the very bottom, with nothing in between.  Welcome to reality.