Dirk: So Wrong in So Many Ways

I couldn't resist...

I love it when Teabaggers try to use those elusive fact-y things that they don't really understand.  They're so bad at it...

"Dirk: OC Patch please keep up the good work; sorry for the political intervention from militant unionists. Like the decaying cities they once ran, like Gary, Newark, Detroit ;et al, they will eventually fade away. I understand the romanticism of when unions mattered, but this dinosaur way of thinking is counter-productive to today's society as Greece, Italy, and Portugal further illustrate. The only true change occurred in 2010 and will fortunately continue into next year."

I think the only thing this individual said that is true was "OC Patch please keep up the good work," for indeed, Patch does offer a good service, though their choice of things to cover can skew rightward, it's still an interesting way to deliver local news.  As for the rest of it, oh how wrong can one post be?

1. Militant Unionist:

Notice the thuggish demeanor and the snarling lips poised to shout obscenities at the peace-loving Teabaggers.  Yes, this militant unionist is in desperate need of a serious beat-down and the Teabaggers are just the ones to do it.
2. Cities decaying because businesses decided it was more profitable to ship the jobs to China, Indonesia, India and Pakistan where near-slave labor can work in an environment that someone like Dirk, who's probably never left the shores of America, and, if he has, ventured to Canada or maybe Europe, could not possibly imagine.  I've been there, I've seen the sweatshops and the "factories" in India that "employ" (read: enslave) children, some as young as 8 or 9 to make the shoes Dirk puts on his privileged feet and the shirts he drapes across his broad, patriotic shoulders. So instead of productive American factories with workers paid a living wage, we have a race to the bottom.  And Dirk appears to take twisted and perverted pride in that, as if America's decline, our growing enfeeblement were a badge of Tea Party honor.
3. Romanticizing unions?  If it's romantic to dream of a time when Americans only had to work one job to pay the bills, where being a member of a brotherhood was a cherished right, where the hard work of labor was coupled with the investment of capital to produce a benefit to all, then I'm a romantic.  While most Teabaggers don't let facts get in the way of their ideology, you might like to observe that unionization correlates quite tightly with income.   As unionization rates declined, so did middle-class income.
   

   

   Data from the BLS via ThinkProgress

   Is this the kind of America that Dirk thinks we should have? One where the wealthy grow their fortunes without bounds while the workers and laborers who put the money in the pockets of capital get poorer and poorer? Is that really the "Jeffersonian Democracy" envisioned by our Founding Fathers? Unless Dirk is making a lot more money than I wager he is (like more that $10MM/year), he's simply another "useful idiot" for capital.  Another victim of "Stockholm Syndrom" who identifies so well with his captors, the wealthy.  I know he imagines that one day he'll be one of them if he works hard enough.  It's kind of sad, really.
   
4. Dirk's understanding of the Eurozone situation is as shallow as his understanding of the history of his own nation.  The Eurozone crisis is a crisis of divorcing fiscal policy from monetary policy, of borrowing at rates far below what they should have been for the Greek and Portugese economies and of a huge revenue gap in Greece caused by the inability of the central government to collect taxes on the wealthy (sound familiar?).  If Dirk understood anything about macroeconomics, he would understand that it is not Greece we are in danger of becoming, but Japan.
5. His belief in the national retrograde of 2010 represented anything other than a knee-jerk reaction to economic circumstances combined with the slick marketing of the Teabagger movement by Koch brothers front groups like American's for Prosperity (paid for, no doubt, by illegal proceeds from the Koch criminal empire and the terrorist state of Iran) means he's a bigger fool than I thought posible.  Well done, Dirk, you've earned this...