What's the plan for the poor and middle class?
We should stop and ask that once in a while. Right now it looks downright terrifying.
There's a malignant, predatory, deliberately-hidden-from-the-public, wage-and-job-killing "free trade" agreement on the horizon, that will hand unprecedented power to global corporations at the expense of all of us.
There's also likely a new Grand Bargain on the horizon.
The cynical might even predict a new war....but it *could* be they are just having lunch.
Yes, our middle class has been hollowed out, the poor devastated. The gap between rich and poor has never been greater....and the United States is now a corporate surveillance state, with whistleblowers and journalism under attack. Yet THESE are the plans and policies in the news. No outrage, still, no bullhorns, still, for what has been done to millions of us. Just more assaults on the horizon.
It's stunning, what they get away with. Isn't it?
= new reply since forum marked as read
My position was one of the 1st waves of the technology sector during the *Bush Crime Family Reign* to be off shored. And it's gotten worse ever since. I put my self through college, dotted my I's and crossed my T's, worked plenty of overtime with no extra pay. I was taking care of a family and now I scrimp and scrounge for any work. I get mostly contract work with NO benefits and I still don't have a full time job.
I've posted my outrage here and shared it with family and friends , whom are all struggling by the way, and I'm an Obama hater immediately. I just want him to "fail" because I can't stand a day with out posting my "poutrage". Never mind the fact that we haven't seen a steady stream of good paying jobs for the last 16 years. No, it's more important to call me out, call me names, tell me I have no clue, etc.... The End.
No talk about jobs, no talk about how harmful FTA's can be to the American worker, no talk about the TTP that's about to mow us over. No, it's more important to sequestered me and labeled me an Obama hater.
Guess I have no choice but to continue being the squeaky wheel. Maybe someone one some day will listen.
-p
PS. awesome post woo!
That's the part that gives me consternation, we are many.
peace.
-p
And while you're away spreading freedom around the world, your house will be re-possessed, your credit rating destroyed because your bills will go unpaid, your family will need food stamps (which won't exist anymore) and IF you get back, you'll be greeted with months-long waiting lines for medical and mental care.
Yay us!?! 
But I've been around long enough to look at the facts and data of the policies of the last 30 years and understand that there is one Party of our two Party System that has done more for the working folks and middle class than the other.
Suck up to the R's your want to... but don't try to piss down my legs and tell me its raining..
Something happen about 1980 that started this down this economic abyss we find ourselves in
You want to take a guess at what it is??
the unconstitutional takes a little longer. "
-Henry Kissinger
"Trans-Pacific w'erePhucked"
There are just a couple of Finishing Touches left to add:
1)The Ring-to-Bind-Them, or the TPP (NAFTA on Steroids)
which is being forged "in secret" as we speak by the Representatives of the Global 1%.
NO representatives from Organized LABOR, Human Rights, Environmental Protections, Consumer Rights, Worker Protections, or Concerned Citizen Groups are "allowed" at these "secret" meetings.
President Obama is "asking" for Fast Track Authority to have this Treaty passed by an Up or Down vote with NO Amendments and NO debate,
probably after mid-night on a Friday so the betrayers of American's Working Class can slink off and hide before the sun rises.
2)The dismantling and privatizing of Social Security,
and THAT is NOW a Chip-On-the-Table for any future discussion of Budgets.
So, it is almost MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Welcome to the New & Improved Gilded Age 2.0,
brought to you by The Republicans, and their friends and Co-Conspirators, the "Centrist" Democrats.
....because some things, only a "Democrat" can do!
[font color=firebrick][center]"There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans.
I want a party that will STAND UP for Working Americans."
---Paul Wellstone [/font][/center] [center]
[center] [/font]
[font size=1]photo by bvar22
Shortly before Sen Wellstone was killed[/center][/font]
You will know them by their [font size=3]WORKS.[/font]
The plan of the Plutocrats is to keep a comfortable standard of living that gives people time to expand their horizons or pursue interests other than working out of reach for anyone who has to spend more than 1/6 of their income, however great, on "bills and taxes". The idea to promote is a harsh Calvinistic view; if you work for a paycheck, you are obviously lazy or a moron, and the less you make, the less human consideration you should get. God only rewards by prosperity and power. Especially those who cheat, and live off shuffling other people's money around and taking fees off the top.
It's hard work to network and convince people to trust you to manipulate numbers and formulas with their money, you know...obviously much harder to make something appear out of thin air rather than doing something that has a physical, tangible result, because the numbers of decimals on the bottom line of the final column are so much larger than if you're making a tangible object or doing physical work. 
So, the plan is to encourage workers to go into debt if they want even a little bit of modern social interaction or happiness in their lives, to make a home and have children to keep them in debt, and to work until they get sick and die. Wages are loans that need to be worked off, after all.
The cynic in me is convinced that to most of those who play in the monied circles now-a-days, workers are like any other tool - they're disposable and fungible.
Haele
successive administrations since the gipper foisted his voodoo economics upon us: yes, WJC's deregulation of banking et al and BHO's pending "free trade agreement," virtually unchanged tax policies, et al virtually assure full fruition of this plan and, one of these days, our society is likely to pass the tipping point and implode, perhaps never to return to a well-off and productive society. The mounting societal ills caused by this plan are rampant and clearly depicted in every measurement of quality-of-life factors due to virtually everything government should be doing to promote the general welfare is being sacrificed to feed a national security state by gorging the MIC and to enrich large corporations and the uber-wealthy at the expense of virtually all else. Only time will tell if and when our society does indeed implode. Ah, the infinite joys of living in a right-wing soused society perpetuated by a largely willfully ignorant electorate. 
