The New Gilded Age Is Better Than the Old Gilded Age Because Now We Have Homeland and Other Quality Premium Cable TV Offerings

If I have this right:

We needed to quadruple the number of H2B visas because we needed far more nonagricultural, low-skill, low-wage workers coming into the country. H2B visas are granted for jobs like "amusement park worker."

As you know, amusement park workers, at, for example, large corporations like Disney, have been absolutely Raping their poor corporate paymasters with their insolent insistence that they be paid a dollar fifty more than minimum wage.

We need to import foreign workers to get that number down to a more acceptable dollar over minimum wage.

This makes our corporations More Globally Competitive (TM).

Now, the various American workers displaced by the foreign ones will go, of course, on welfare (after their unemployment insurance runs out, of course). Those costs will be borne by you, the American taxpayer.

Not only will those costs be borne by you, but so will all the knock-on costs. People stripped of their work are also stripped of their dignity. Work is a tangible connection, reinforced every hour of every day of every week, between present labor and good habits and future gain.

When you take away a man's job, you also take away his daily reminder that good habits, industriousness, virtue, self-restraint, etc. in the current moment will make him wealthier in future moments.

When you take away a man's job, then, you turn him on a path of social pathology. No longer does he have tangible unmissable daily lesson in the direct connection between actions taken in the moment and results which are born in the future. Now he lives his life day by day, welfare check to welfare check, morally adrift, the vital connective tissue of today to tomorrow severed and cauterized.

Thus, taking a man or woman who is gainfully employed and putting him or her on welfare not only imposes direct costs on society -- we now all have to pay to put bread in this person's mouth, when, previously, this person was putting the bread in his or her own mouth -- but we now see that person descend into a spiral of anti-social and criminal tendencies.

Drug use, unprotected sex resulting in either little-cared-for children or abortions, petty crime, major crime.

We pay, as a society, for all those fresh costs too.

However, we must always keep firmly in mind the only thing that matters: The Disney Corporation will get to pay foreign replacement workers fifty cents an hour less than the previous American worker holding that job, and that pays dividends down the road.

And when I say "dividends," I do not mean that metaphorically. I mean Disney will be able to pay its stockholders a trivial amount of excess dividends for having replaced an American worker with a foreign one.

And remember, we all share in those profits -- metaphorically. I do not mean we share in those profits literally, as Disney and its stockholders will capture all the tiny amount of surplus profit from the displacement of the American worker.

But I mean we will metaphorically share in Disney's bounty, somehow.

See, it makes us More Globally Competitive (TM), somehow.

True, we are reducing Disney's costs, which makes them More Globally Competitive (TM) only by shifting those costs to ourselves, as well as additional avoidable costs such as the social costs of criminality and anti-social behavior by people who have been deprived of the dignifying habit of gainful work, but Disney corporate officers donate to Republican office-holders.

They vote against them like their moral lives depended on it, and they attack then in their movies and thus move the culture ever further to the left, but they donate to Republican office-holders.

And that makes us More Globally Competitive (TM) as well.

See, it's not a question of whether people will be hurt by this. They will. We know that.

It's a question of who will be hurt by this, or, more accurately, whether such Insignificant Persons even matter at all.

The people hurt by this will be, firstly, The Poors, who, as you know, apparently all Republicans despise and wish to punish for the offense of their mere existence.

I mean, that's why I signed up for this party -- didn't you?

We despise the working class, especially those of us who came out of it-- after all, those who know these shabby degenerates the best know how vital it is to put them out of our collective misery.

The other people hurt by this will be taxpaying everyday Middle Class people, who, while not to be despised and hounded from their tumbledown shacks like The Poors, are also without any real use for society beyond their endless capacity to be farmed for their tax dollars.

The benefit accrued to Disney will have a cost attached to it, but that cost will not fall upon Disney; no, that cost will fall upon the unfashionable and square Middle Class.

They are good sheep, with thick flocky wool, and they can be endlessly shorn for it, right down to their skin until they bleed from all the nicking of the knives.

And in this way, the GOP endears itself to the public, and makes itself More Politically Competitive (TM). After all, if you're waging war against The Poors, which is apparently some kind of sport in some quarters, and then ravishing the Middle Class for the costs incurred when you turned The Poors out from their jobs and on to the welfare rolls, you are also increasing your popularity with two key groups:

1. H2B foreign visa holders who can't vote, at least not legally, and if they could vote, would vote for Democrats, and

2. Disney executives who would rather give themselves papercuts on their eyes than vote Republicans. See, voting Democrat, in favor of The Common Man, is the penance they perform to extirpate the sin of having gulled Republicans into letting them put The Common Man out of work in the first place.

So you see, this is just a wonderful party, and the GOP Consultant Class (TM) is first rate, really. A real crew of genuine big thinkers.

Take your Founding Fathers, your Ancient philosophers, your Princeton physics department -- take all those and piss on them, because the real geniuses are the GOP Consultant Class and the GOP Establishment, which are doing their level best to turn America into the hellish dystopia of the ultrarich and animal-existence poor which is so frequently used as a propaganda device against the GOP in futuristic fantasies made by, get this, movie studios like Disney.

We'll make our poor people poorer, and our Middle Class poorer, all to give Disney a 25 cent boost on the stock market, and import more non-Americans to replace American workers. (And eventually, when those non-Americans get comfortable and begin demanding American-style wages - we'll have to import fresh non-Americans to replace them.)

This is the Republican Way of Doing Business, and if you have a problem with any of this, you're a goddamned extremist and racist who should be shat upon.

And somehow, somehow, after fucking over every working class and Middle Class voter in America, the GOP predicts... it will somehow pick up a Senate seat here or there, and then we'll get Supreme Court justices.

And we'll need them -- because at this pace, we'd be lucky to win a political contest for dog catcher. Apparently our gameplan is to alienate every single American worker so that our only hope is an extralegal court of unelected, lifetime tenure superlegislators.

So drink up! This is the Golden Age of Republican Incompetency and Corruption.

There have been previous high points of Republican incompetency and corruption -- but this age is truly one of miracles and wonders.

Oh: To be fair, the GOP sold out everyone to get the one big thing we desperately needed: the right of oil companies to sell their oil for slightly higher prices on the foreign spot market.

So, as you can see, it was all totally worth it.

We're More Globally Competitive (TM) now.

Once we're all receiving our gruel rations in government welfare camps, we'll be even More Globally Competitive (TM).

posted by Ace at 02:58 PM

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