The Rich get Richer The Poor . . .well you know

Summer of 2008 Exxon Mobile reported a record breaking 11.68 billion 2nd quarter profits. Today Exxon Mobile shattered that record when they reported 14.83 billion in 3rd quarter profits. Nice to see that some industries aren't affected by this financial meltdown and impending deep recession, huh. Remind me again why we need to offer tax incentives and government subsidies to these people?

I have a problem with the republican slogan, "Country First". Palin tells us that if she and McCain are elected, these words will be printed on every page of the Federal employee hand book. It seems to me that a lot of bad things can be done to free thinking people under the umbrella of "Country First". In the past, slogans like this that remind government employees that the individual citizen is far less important that the country and the party that rules it. I'm reminded of John Lennon's "Imagine". My choice of a slogan printed in the handbook would be "We the people First".

Here's a Jefferson quote the Left often uses: "A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference."


Here's one the Right is fond of: "A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."

Here's the one I like: "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. "

Our fore fathers, like the Romans before them feared the 51% and didn't think it was a good idea to give the unwashed, uneducated masses too much power or "say" in their own governing so, they devised something called a representative democracy. The unwashed and uneducated could vote for someone they felt best looked after their interests. Just in case that individual didn't stay true to his constituency, we have the three separate branches as a sort of check and balance. Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. No one branch has controls the power.

No one branch nor one party, however it may not be that way anymore. Over the past 6 years the Judicial (the Supreme Court) had two new appointees, both staunch conservatives, giving the deciding vote to Head Justice Roberts. Justice Roberts, according to a 16-page financial disclosure form Roberts submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee prior to his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, his net worth was more than $6 million, including $1.6 million in stock holdings. I don't have a problem with Roberts earning a 6 million his 50th birthday, but I do have a problem with the fact that he held positions in Republican administrations in the U.S. Department of Justice and Office of the White House Counsel. He's a wealthy Republican insider that has defended big business on several occasions when he was a practicing attorney. And most recently upheld Exxon's right to gouge billions in profits from the very people whose tax dollars subsidize that company.

Let me just wrap this one up with one more Jefferson quote: "Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor. "



DaG Out