MUNCIE, Indiana – We chose to work within the already established “Middletown” theme for Muncie Voice because our small Indiana community is a microcosm of the struggling working class, or a casualty of the post-manufacturing industry consolidation which moved overseas during the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 90’s. Muncie never recovered because we haven’t accepted the truth. Mainly because the American Media was lying to us then, and it’s lying to us now. However, amidst all the lies, the players are relevant and our piece of East Central Indiana is deeply connected to all the rhetoric and propaganda. With the recent announcement of Jeb Bush preparing himself to enter the 2016 presidential race, our connection almost comes across as 100% satire, but let us assure you, it is not. This is one large bitter pill we must swallow together. But realize this, denial is no longer an option.
Trickle-Down Economic Policies Are a Scheme
Former republican president George Bush, Sr. brought us NAFTA along with former democratic president, Bill Clinton. Bill sided with Big Money to move the democrats party to the right of center. Bill was told if it was profitable for Wall Street, then it would be good for America. It was a lie. This sort of “trickle-down” voodoo was scoffed at by Thomas Piketty in his 2014 masterpiece, Capital in the 21st Century.
Professor Piketty points to “trickle-down” economic theory as thee cause for income inequality – or the cause for working class suffering in the United States. As he suggests in his book, trickle-down theories of wealth distribution are magical thinking (voodoo), and has led to the worse inequality in income and wealth our country has ever experienced. Even Pope Francis is blaming greed and economic imbalances brought about extreme materialism as the evils of our day.
In the United States, here is a great article featuring the progressive, Elizabeth Warren, including a video of her speaking on the senate floor. She is leading the progressive wing of the democrat party in denouncing these, and other Wall Street led policies pushing our country in the wrong direction.
While she’s making sense, look how quickly Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are being discussed as front-runners for the presidency in 2016. The American Media is writing about Jeb resigning from his corporate board positions, yet spend little or no time discussing the positions he’s leaving. Check out the New York Times post here, where they write:
Mr. Bush, a Republican, gave up positions at an online education firm, his own education foundation and his post on the board of Michael R. Bloomberg’s philanthropic foundation this week, the latest nonpolitical commitments from which he has detached himself as he looks toward the 2016 race.
Last month, he severed ties with Barclays, the London-based bank where he had made more than $1 million a year as a consultant, and stepped down from the boards of two other corporations, Tenet Healthcare and Rayonier, a timberland and real estate concern.
Now, why would Jeb Bush step down from all these great positions to run for President of the United States? In 2008, the republican party couldn’t run far enough away from the negative Bush brand, but now they are quick to embrace a Jeb Bush presidential run. And, at alarming speed. Why?
As a quick side note, one of the companies Jeb Bush is stepping down as a board member, Rayonier is being investigated by the SEC for violating certain accounting practices, and a class action lawsuit is being filed against the leadership, including board members.
The Hoosier Way is a Fraud Perpetrated by the Media
We’re guessing that the folks holding the entire American scheme together with glue and scrap paper need Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, with the help of the American Media, to stop he progressive movement taking place in the United States, and possibly across the globe, as more people wake up to the ruse being perpetrated on citizens.
Unless you’ve been vacationing on a deserted foreign island, many good people are calling for the arrest of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush for their role in torturing foreigners and lying about weapons of mass destruction. Remember the invasion of Iraq and subsequent assassination of its foreign leader? Yet, George and Dick are free men, and George’s younger brother is being touted by the American Media as a “conservative savior for this country”.
You can almost hear Wall Street’s oligarchs yelling to increase the volume via American Media to drown out the sounds of Maine’s Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, former treasury secretary Robert Reich, and Massachusetts’ Progressive Senator, Elizabeth Warren.
The American Media has a role to play – create a major smoke screen and quick. Americans must be forced to look in another direction and not toward the source of our problems. Anywhere but Wall Street!
Let’s remind ourselves what Middletown, USA looked like before the NAFTA mentality hit the banks of the White River. Muncie and Anderson were both bustling communities supporting a thriving working middle class.
Hoosiers without college degrees could afford nice suburban lifestyles – golf courses with two car garages. Now, even with a college degree, you’ll be lucky to work at Wal-Mart, a restaurant, retail store, or other low wage job that won’t support a family. You can work the same hours per week as before, but instead of making $50-60,000 a year, you’ll be making $25,000, and no way you’ll be paying for a college education for your kids. Instead, you’ll be looking for government help to provide food for your family. Now you’re being told you are “lazy, or a leach”. “You want your government to be a Nanny. Suck it up lazy ass!”
For those listening to Fox News, or a real distorted view, you’re told that “unions and lazy African-American’s are the problem…Damn blacks voted for a black president so they could get free stuff”.
Hoosiers sat by and watched, as co-conspirators, while former governor Mitch Daniels gutted remaining union jobs, and attacked the public sector. Social workers and welfare recipients were the problem. He sold the welfare system to his cronies at IBM for $110 million, but within 3 short years, it was a complete legal fiasco. It was scrapped, but lawyers are still making money off the lawsuits.
Hoosiers Buy the Lies, Hook Line & Sinker
Next on the chopping block were Indiana teachers. We stood by while republican politicians gutted schools across the state. Jeb Bush led the charge from his corporate boardroom orchestrating Mitch Daniels to cut here, and eliminate that. Mitch did exactly what he was told to do, and was awarded a huge fat raise when 80% of the trustees Mitch appointed to Purdue University, hired him to be President. It’s good to be King.
Meanwhile, everybody else is told to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get their shit together. If you want to teach classes at a university, spend 10 years financing yourself through a college education and get a doctorate. If you’re lucky, we’ll hire you, but you’ll owe more in student loans than your salary can handle. Yet, Mitch got his job the old fashion way, and the American Media calls him a “leader”.
Then along comes the Tea Party who told homeowners that liberal politicians were stealing our homes in Indiana, so Hoosier legislators need to cap our property taxes with a constitutional amendment. They obliged. They raised our sales tax from 5 to 7%, and withheld money from schools to build a large cash surplus. Instead of being used by schools, it’s being used to fund tax cuts for wealthy donors.
Hoosiers sit back giving permission to Mitch Daniels, and now Mike Pence, to give tax breaks to their corporate cronies while leaving our communities impoverished. With the help of the American Media, who tells everybody this is the “Hoosier Way”, and if it’s making Indiana a grand place to live, it will be great for all Americans.
What is the crime rate again in Indianapolis? We are the dirtiest state in the union. Our wellness is ranked in the bottom 5 right there with Mississippi and West Virginia. Our quality of life is the worst in the country and we cannot afford to send our kids to school in a yellow bus. We are still dependent on dirty coal causing preventable diseases in our most vulnerable populations – kids and senior citizens.
Is this the Hoosier Way?
New York Times Falsely Blames Korea for Sony Hack
We were lied to by George W. Bush with the help of the New York Times – the première free and independent press – the beacon of American Media. The same sad newspaper is letting Obama’s administration blame North Korea’s government for hacking Sony without any proof whatsoever.
Bush and Cheney authorized unspeakable crimes against innocent foreigners. We allowed Wall Street to steal trillions of dollars from our communities and when their scheme blew up, they asked us to bail them out. We’re still cleaning up their balance sheets. When elected leaders try to hold them accountable, they get ridiculed by the American Media.
Our community has been hollowed out by Wall Street CEO’s and board members like Jeb Bush who abandoned our communities to make cheap parts in other countries. Large corporate interests extracting wealth from countries and then leave behind pollution and sick employees. On to our next victims – Japan, Korea?
Glenn Greenwald pointed out how ludicrous the American media interests have become when the New York Times allowed their paper once again to be used by the Oval office to trumpet false claims against North Korea – accusing the North Korean government for hacking Sony to interfere with The Interview, another lame Hollywood movie being sold to the American public. The claim was made with no proof – none. Yet, now we have high-ranking officials calling it “a foreign terrorist act against our democracy”.
What democracy?
We’re being led by well greased idiots who don’t know what they’re doing and use what’s left of the “American Media” to write fictional stories with pictures to an unsuspecting public who buys into it without using their own God-given brains.
The Felon Tony Bennett, Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush
Like we said Hoosiers – we’re at the epicenter of all this fiction. Tony Bennett was soundly defeated by Glenda Ritz because Hoosiers rejected the corporate education reforms put in place by Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels. In reality, Mitch and Tony was working with Jeb Bush to make this happen. Hoosier voters rejected Tony Bennett, so he was immediately hired by Jeb Bush in Florida. Tony was committing felonies in Indiana, and we have proof, but instead of going to prison, he was paid a six figure salary by Jeb Bush – we mean gullible Florida citizens.
And, who is whitewashing all this for them? The American Media. Who’s believing this bullshit? The American Public.
After decades of Bill Moyers trying to wake us up, he had one of his remaining shows about another round of secretive trade policies getting fast tracked by a democratic president who is suddenly working with right-wing conservative republicans because democrats aren’t willing to sign the secretive corporate trade pact. Are these fellow democrats listening to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?
Some of them are supporting Hillary Clinton which is no different from Bill Clinton or Jeb Bush or George Bush, the first, second, third or fourth.
These people are all pawns, but presentable by the American Media, or maybe it’s Hollywood. We’re not even sure there is a difference anymore since they both represent a fictional world. Nothing like watching the American Dream unravel from the cheap seats in Indiana while we have our Governor in Israel promoting military weaponry to the worlds largest terrorist organization.
Someone please tell us how Jesus, who was born in the Middle East, surrounded by people of brown skin, has white skin with Euro-American features.
And if he did, from what we’ve read about him, he wouldn’t condone using military weapons on brown, white, yellow or black kids. Regardless of where they live on this planet. So, why are we condoning this in the name of Christianity or the Jewish faith?
Talk about fiction.
Lawmakers Want to Change Laws to Help Governor Pence
In case this isn’t enough to make you lose your Sunday brunch, we have Mike Delph in Indianapolis, Indiana, writing a new bill making it legal for Mike Pence to run for reelection as governor and president, because Mike Delph is another brainwashed Hoosier. He actually believes the hype printed in the American Media about Mike Pence. Never mind the stark reality that Indiana has never looked more like the Deep South in our history. We have one in six families eating from food pantries. Pence calls this the Hoosier Way. Since when do we brag about submitting our neighbors to poverty and humiliating them by having them stand in line for food?
Meanwhile, our Governor is in Israel bragging about wanting to do business with a man who kills people in the name of God, or Yahweh. Again, this should be sarcasm or irony, but it’s true.
Education Reform is a Fraud Perpetrated by Rich White Folks
In Muncie, we have 70% of our kids qualifying for free or reduced lunches while Indianapolis tells us that Southside Middle School gets a failing grade because of a score on a standardized test. These kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from and “our government” is forcing teachers to make students take tests so they can tell them they’re failures. Great, and how is this beneficial to the psyche of a hopeless teenager who sees their parents fight over who gets to stand in line to get groceries from a pantry?
Do you wonder why our kids are wanting to use drugs and/or alcohol to escape reality?
And, worse yet, we’re reading this shit in our newspaper just shaking our heads. Our local Gannett owned newspaper actually asked why nobody showed up to yell at the teachers. Really?
Yes. These standardized tests are being used by rich folks, with the help of the American Media, to tell struggling parents that underpaid teachers are failing their kids. Or better yet, that “lazy teachers”, who, “Should be fired, but are protected by unions, are failing their kids, so they insist on receiving credit for their property taxes paid to move their kids to private religious schools where they teach about Jesus, Christianity, and the disenfranchised Jewish populations requiring American made weapons to kill off Arabic neighbors, so they can worship and live in peace surrounded by ancient spiritual rocks.
And now that the public schools are failing us, we should close them down and send the kids to a charter school owned by friends of the Bush family, so they can place our kids in front of Bill Gate’s or Steve Job’s computer for 8 hours a day.
In case you haven’t noticed, the truth begins to look a little cynical or sarcastic, but it’s only because reality is this stupid, or the “reality” we’ve been led to believe because we’re so gullible. We’ve truly lost our ability to differentiate the truth from false. We’ve been snookered or conned by really bad people into believing this shit because it comes from a television or computer. We’ve gone into debt personally so professors can teach us half-baked truths and we’re not smart enough to realize that reality is bullshit, so we delude ourselves with heavy doses of denial. We use denial instead of our critical thinking skills because we don’t really want to wake up from this self-created hell on earth. How do we clean this up? Where do we even start?
Don’t worry, most people have stopped reading this article long ago because the truth is too much to handle all at one sitting. Our fragile egos need to accept reality in small doses. Our neighbors are trained to see Muncie Voice as “liberal garbage” or lunatic leftists who believe we’re all better off with big government protected by the liberal media. We drank the Kool-Aid.
Therefore, it will take many people a full year to read our Middletown Manifesto. They have an election between the Dynastic families of Bush and Clinton to cover. Only a Hollywood script writer could create such nonsense for its movie goers – indeed. We’ll rip each other apart over who will better serve us – Hillary or Jeb.
Racism Will Grow at Alarming Rates
However, one alarming trend we should warn you about. or one more morsel of truth before we move on. Remember in our history books how the Southern white plutocrats told lower class white Americans to fight and kill their cousins from the North – the damn Yankees? Oh wait, you didn’t read that version in your white-washed history book?
Don’t look now, but they’re doing it again. It’s only taken a couple hundred years, but they’re still using the same plan, and Americans across the South and Midwest are falling for it once again. We’ve got all the history books and libraries, but our heads are buried in the sand.
Instead of working hand in hand with their African brothers and sisters, white southerners in the 1860’s fought and killed their white skinned brothers, so the rich white people could keep slaves on their plantations. The rich white people convinced the poor working class whites that they were “a class above” slaves, so they killed each other to keep the slaves in their place. Who are the right-wing conservatives (Tea Partiers backed by the white supremacist Koch brothers) blaming all our problems on again? The people of color – African-Americans and all other minorities. We need to kill off the “liberal government” and replace it with “free market corporations owned by superior white people” because lazy minorities will choose politicians to give them free stuff and make white working class people pay for it.
Yes, neighbors. Let that sink in for a minute. It’s the same lie all over again. Scary, isn’t it?
Don’t worry, the lie is continuing at American Media.com. It’s conservative propaganda at the very core and it’s exactly the same crap told to white crackers in the South during the 1860’s.
Watch it unfold, prime time. They’ll be pushing policies on misinformed voters who continue electing the ultra-conservative right-wing of the republican party because they have been brainwashed that people with colored pigment in their skin are the problem. Sadly, our neighbors prejudice (fear) is more abundant than their critical thinking skills, so the rest of America gets to suffer while this plays out on a global stage. Twenty four states have locked in republican leadership of the worst type.
Hate to say it, but Indiana is the epicenter of ignorance because of Gannett newspapers.
Trans-Pacific Partnership is a Really Bad Deal
While white and black America are fighting, a bipartisan group of cronies in Washington are trying to fast-track the approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP). Our President has worked on this behind the scenes and can’t get support from democrats, so he is reaching “across the aisle” to eager republicans who have already been greased by the US Chamber and Wall Street. The new majority speaker, Senator Mitch McCollum, has offered his support of TPP. With bipartisan support, no less.
The president and publisher of Harper Magazine, John MacArthur knows a lot about these trade agreements. He’s published several pieces about the negative impact on communities like ours when these large CEO’s make decisions to close down communities heading overseas to exploit labor markets and pollute the environment. He also knows who is to blame, and tells Bill Moyers, “I blame the media. They don’t report on it.”
John goes on to tell Bill Moyers:
There are still a few democrats who care about the working lower class. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton see it in their political interest to ally themselves with Wall Street. Wall Street, because they can raise money from Wall Street. Wall Street loves “free trade,” quote-unquote, because it equals cheap labor. All these trade agreements, and NAFTA in particular, are investment agreements that make it safer for American corporations to set up shop in cheap labor locales. Wall Street thinks that’s great. It’s great for the shareholders. And it’s great for the corporations. The profits go up. So as long as the cash keeps coming to both parties from those interested parties, short of a revolution, short of an uprising among the working poor, you’re not going to see any change.
Watch the video:
There you have it…our gift to you for hanging in there with us over the past year. The American Media is a fraud…it’s all propaganda. The entire economy and sociopolitical structures are a fraud. Everyone is playing their part willingly or are completely ignorant of their collusion. Does it matter?
Maybe. It depends on the part you’ll let them play in cleaning up this mess. It will take a lot of effort to fix up our way of life once the layers of denial are permeated. We don’t expect the light upstairs to go on all at once…it will start slowly, but it will gain momentum. We told you to brace yourself for changes in 2015. Hold on tight…this will be one hell of a ride.
