Adam Jones Journal

At this moment, some right-wing politician is accusing Obama and the Democrats of being socialists. Obama and his administration are not even good Democrats - and they are  being attacked and slandered for things they aren't doing and apparently do not want to do.

If you look at a couple of hundred years of United States history, any movement that had any chance of opposing capitalism was met with relentless opposition. Movement leaders were ostracized and jailed - if they were lucky.

And it really doesn't matter. The people who founded the United States labor movement didn't start out to create a movement. They just wanted to solve some problems.

They wanted a living wage. They wanted food on the table. They wanted to be compensated if they were hurt on the job. They wanted to be treated fairly. The labor movement was a way of getting the things that they wanted and needed.

A new political system is not going to put food on your table. You may have a certain amount of distaste for today's capitalism.

Get over it. In colonial times, the Quakers were discriminated against and prevented from studying for any of the professions - law, medicine etc.

They started their own companies and ran their competition out of business using a few simple principles: they told the truth and they gave honest deals.

Marx's theory of capitalism  is based on the distinction between those who own the means of production (capitalists), and those who have nothing to sell but their own labor-power (proletarians).

You could take this theory apart in a number of ways and a lot of people have done so. Despite that, there are still people who believe that Marx was correct.

Somehow they all seem to miss the most critical item: the capitalist has enough money to live without immediate income. The laborer needs a steady paycheck in order to put food on the table.

There are people that you would not consider to be laborers who are caught by similar constraints. The typical building contractor operates on borrowed money. If the building gets built on time, and if the sales or rentals occur on schedule, the contractor can make a whole lot of money. If anything goes wrong, the financial system will take everything he owns.

The smart capitalist makes sure that he never gets into a position where his investments tie up all of his resources. Unfortunately, some of the time, it takes some risk in order to get the most return from a situation. Sure things do not pay as well as investments with some risk.

As screwed up as the current economy is, many people have a great opportunity that they don't recognize.

Losing your house may be inevitable, but right now the lender that holds your mortgage is not in a big hurry to foreclose. If they foreclose, they have to write off the value of the loan.

If their books wind up looking bad enough, they guys running the lender find themselves unemployed. They have been stalling like crazy, hoping for a miracle.

You might have as much as a year before you actually have to move.

Unemployment won't pay your house payment.  But if you are not making a house payment, unemployment will feed you for a while.

If you do something useful with that time, you might survive and prosper. If you waste time worrying about who is going to be elected, you may be throwing away a great opportunity.