As usual, what the government approves for media release bears little to no resemblance to facts out here in the real world, where real people go to real grocery stores and buy real clothes and what passes for real but altered gasoline, real electricity and real medicines.
It hasn’t been but four to six weeks since I bought a pound of butter. Margarine is axle grease by any name in my opinion, I don’t like it, and I use butter but not a lot. Generally I trade at a California-based store, small, specializing in organics and things like Basmati rice and meats/dairy without harmones and all that “stuff” that’s added to our food now. Those of you who have this market in your area know who I mean, and if you are guessing, the initials are TJ.
A pound of butter jumped from $2.49 to over $4.00 a pound sometime during the weeks I wasn’t buying butter. Since I wanted an item that isn’t carried by TJ, I visited a new store in the other direction from where I live, only to find that butter there was well over $5.00 a pound. And here I thought TJ had broken its pattern of lower prices but no, they’re still lower than the average supermarket or even specialty market. Something is wrong.
To my knowledge, butter still comes from cows and isn’t regulated by OPEC. It isn’t imported from the Middle East and isn’t pumped from the ground. Is this the effect of mad-cow disease? Or just the non-inflation where everything costs more but the government won’t admit it? I’ll opt for the latter since that has been the pattern of inflation in an election year … an embarrassing time to have to deal with <gasp> facts down here where we, the useless feeders live. Perhaps there is some agency that is trying to break us of the habit of eating.
Eating may indeed be hazardous to our health the way the USA gunks up its food with strange “stuff” to make it bigger, fatter, insect-proof and fatal to gray aliens, but not eating is even more hazardous. I try to minimize the dangers by buying at TJ, buying organic, and eating very little meat. Further, I won’t cook for just myself, and I like no-preservative-added frozen things I can get from TJ. Include in that some ice cream.
A medication I take for my lumbar muscle spasms due to my spinal injury jumped in the last year from $58 to over $81 for the same quantity of the same mg. tablets. What was that about seniors not having to decide between food or medicine? Hell, we can’t afford either one now. We seniors just didn’t think that was what the various parties and candidates meant by not having to choose, but then, who believes politicians anyway?
But look at the financial page of the newspapers or listen to the radio financial reporters. All is well, the Dow shot up on news that one of the OPEC members sneezed and that’s an omen of more production. More likely it’s the result of being exposed to hot air and inclement weather, but not to hear the American media translation.
Things are supposed to look good, rosy and healthy in an election year, right? They do for the candidates because win or lose, they’re billionaires. I guess they can afford butter at $5 a lb and furthermore, they probably don’t see why seniors need butter, we can skip toast and eat rice and bananas for breakfast. Or oats. All this aid to seniors is a great boon to illegal aliens who have utterly no assets from producing utterly nothing in the USA, but they can get food stamps and medical care. The largest category of American seniors, whose FICA deductions should have been locked up in trust and wisely invested, and the category to which yours truly belongs, receives enough Social Security to barely survive but too much to qualify for any assistance. Frankly I don’t want government assistance. As nearly as I can tell, the American public has elected people who create bureaus to make living in the new Occupied Amerika a hassle if you don’t ask the government for the time of day. Heaven help those who are Americans and want government financial assistance. The government robbed us by our paycheck FICA/Medicare deductions, then stole what should have gone in our “lockbox” (a nonexistent trust in which many American still believe, along with the tooth fairy and free lunches). And we need something? Then move.
Friends of mine did just that. To get even with Mexico and away from Occupied Amerika they moved there and still are eligible to collect their American Social Security, which goes about twice as far as it would here. Being fluent in Spanish, they have no problem communicating, and find the climate in a high, colonial city exhilarating. But they are highly mobile folks, that is they can walk long distances unassisted. Seems the streets of Old Mexico aren’t exactly suited to golf carts. It isn’t disabled-friendly.
So here we are, with no inflation and higher prices everywhere from the gas pump to the pharmacy to the grocery store to the utility companies. More companies are laying off, but there’s no recession, that ended like the Iraq war ended in May 2003. The stock market is pumped up again, not so much on what the reports say, but on money being shifted around by the power brokers to keep it alive and breathing and appearing healthy. Let it go on its own and …. oh no, the candidates can’t have that to deal with!
A further benefit to the government of the “there’s no inflation this year” ditty is that they calculate Social Security cost-of-living increases by their own statistics instead of reality, omitting the cost of food, clothing, energy and medicine. Interest rates are on their way back up again, but that’s being done very, very quietly.
To our leadership, there just are no problems here in America, they’re all overseas where people simply do not understand how to become westernized and we must send the military to teach them. So we send them in to one of the most “westernized” of the Arab League nations and bomb the existing structures so we can let out hundreds of billions of dollars for reconstruction (that will somehow get back to American contractors operating with Iraqi names). Our government just cannot afford the senior citizens who helped build the nation they are now destroying at taxpayer expense.
The elephant is a carnivore, the jackass is just what it’s name says, so with an election year coming up, I hope all the undecideds, dissatisfieds and unsures will vote for a third party and throw this set of bums out on their ears. I don’t need billionaires telling me there’s no inflation when they’re either too stupid to know it, or lying through their teeth while seniors struggle to survive.
Guess what candidates? We have inflation in spades and you zillionaires better do something about it, very soon. Oh yeah, you feel our pain. Seems I heard that one twelve years ago.
It’s time to grab the third party ring. How about a few million third-party ring grabbers? People have power, they just don’t use it. It’s time to use it. Long past time, but we still can vote, even in Occupied Amerika.
Then all we have to watch is the vote counters.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”