03.11.11
Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 1:44 pm by George Smith
“We’re broke!” is the GOP blandishment used to justify imposing hardship on the middle class as Republicans go about the work of transferring more and more wealth to the already very well off. A few days ago, in the case of Wisconsin I highlighted Scott Walker’s famous number – $137 million in an immediate shortfall requiring drastic action. In this case, a forked-tongue claim used to usher in union busting and demonization of school teachers.
However, the same day the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was publishing a story on defense contracts in the state.
It read:
The Army was the largest buyer of Wisconsin goods and services, with more than $7.2 billion in purchases.
Oshkosh Corp. has recently geared up to produce 23,000 Army trucks and trailers in a five-year deal valued at $3 billion. It is the largest Wisconsin-based defense contractor.
And Marinette Marine Co. expects to receive billions of dollars to build Navy combat ships. More than 600 people attended a recent vendor fair sponsored by the company in Green Bay.
Paraphrasing the famous filmmaker Michael Moore this week, the United States is not broke. It is awash in cash.
Arms manufacturing (defense spending) is a protected industry in the US. It is an example of socialism for the private sector. It is awash in cash.
And it is not hard to understand why businesses in Wisconsin, and every state, wants a piece of it. Once established, it’s guaranteed business, underwritten by the taxpayers. The workers are protected.
These conditions do not exist for anyone else in the US economy.
You can throw teachers and firefighters and policemen out of work because you want to throttle public services and destroy education for the middle class. Or you ship all the jobs overseas to China if you are in non-military domestic production because labor is an order of magnitude cheaper there.
But arms-manufacturing labor is holy. It competes only with itself.
And it is easy to see by the numbers from it that the US is definitely not broke. There is money to solve even fake crises like the one Scott Walker has brought upon Wisconsin.
“Weinbrenner Shoe Co. of Merrill recently won a $9.8 million contract to make hot-weather boots for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines,” continues the Journal Sentinel piece.
You go to Target or Wal-mart to buy shoes, socks, any garments.
This country used to make such things but that was all thrown away. Where is it made now? What do you get to buy? What is it that you can afford? Rhetorical questions to which everyone knows the answer. Made in China.
Now this does not begrudge the jobs of shoemakers for the US military. It is only to illustrate that when there is a will to preserve jobs and a good living wage, the US government certainly will do it. If it’s the right industry, connected to arms manufacturing and defense.
“If you are struggling like most companies are in this down economy, there is definitely a place for military business,” the vice-president of the Wisconsin shoe company told the newspaper.
And he is certainly right. As far as the argument is taken.
However, the larger picture is one that asks questions about fundamental fairness and rigging of the economic system, rigging in which middle class work has been compressed in the private sector until it won’t support a middle class, with the only parts left being in arms production, essentially subsidized by the taxpayer and government. It is a state of affairs which also reduces labor to a game of musical chairs with very poor odds in which you need to be a lucky person to get a job in manufacturing protected by defense spending.
A graphical breakdown on defense spending in Wisconsin, furnished by the newspaper, is here.
If you click out to it you’ll also notice one of the big recipients of dollars in the Wisconsin economy is General Electric. Overall, GE is a company now substantially into the business of national looting and tax avoidance, like many others.
As far as Wisconsin is concerned, the defense money is for the GE Healthcare subsidiary.
And despite the images in current General Electric commercials of happy workers doing a country line dance to Allen Jackson’s “Good Times,” GE’s jolly mood has nothing to do with the interests of average Americans.
When it’s private sector work is dependent on unprotected labor, GE outsources. Light bulbs? Make them overseas.
On the other hand, defense spending, for anything, is always good to take because that’s guaranteed by the taxpayer.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman put it this way in a column from January:
A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success? …
Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.
By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt’s appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing …
The Wisconsin economy, as it stands now, is shown by a chart at the Bureau of Labor Statistics here.
Mass layoffs increased in January, probably because of the end of sales jobs for the holidays.
The overall employment trends, as will the rest of the country, aren’t great. Employment is increasing in leisure and hospitality, jobs which generally don’t pay very well. Manufacturing also shows a significant rise.
Education also makes up a substantial part of the workforce. And this is the profession that is locally and nationally threatened.
Also worth noting is an article from Minyanville on a real protected part of arms-manufacturing.
It reads:
Right now, federal prison inmates in correctional institutions across America are making parts for Patriot missiles.
They are paid $0.23 an hour to start, and can work their way up to a maximum of $1.15 to manufacture electronics that go into the propulsion, guidance, and targeting systems of Lockheed Martin’s (LMT) PAC-3 guided missile, originally made famous in the first Persian Gulf conflict.
This is arranged by Unicor, a company seemingly precisely for the delivery of prison manufacturing labor. Happily, the workers won’t be attacked for being part of a selfish union needing busting.
One fully understands why Lockheed Martin may like prison labor. It’s guaranteed and protected, so to speak.
Naturally, it smells immoral. The story has a number of national security experts furrowing their brows over the implications and ludicrously speaking about inefficiency.
You don’t need to be an economist to figure out prison labor is inefficient. Or that efficiencies in the US economy exist only to increase inequality.
Prison-delivered arms manufacturing doesn’t look right. It creates a shabby impression. There is also pro and con talk about protecting “maintaining the defense industrial base.”
Break those union parasites, though. Ship everyone else’s jobs off to China.
Why Are Prisoners Building Patriot Missiles? — is here. Highly recommended.
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03.10.11
Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 1:36 pm by George Smith
Teachers get their rights taken away by a GOP ambush in Madison and the President spends the day on the scourge of Facebook bullying.
Democracy Now has an interview with Michael Moore where he states the obvious — the wealthy, through the GOP, are waging open class war. It’s here. He needs to do it a lot more in many more venues.
The Milwaukee newspaper ran a fairly conservative opinion piece. Although it had to admit:
Both parties are playing with fire. A walkout to thwart legislation will be as attractive to Republicans when they are no longer in power as it is to Democrats now. And scorched-earth tactics, such as those practiced by Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald, will seem just as attractive to Democrats when they regain control of the matches and accelerant.
Walker never campaigned on disenfranchising public-employee unions. If he had, he would not have been elected. He got a spare 52% of the vote – hardly a mandate for what he is trying to do.
Later in the day I’ll run a piece cut for the Economic Treason series.
It focuses on defense contracts to Wisconsin.
Here are the figures you need to know:
Contracts for defense manufacturing to Wisconsin, this year: $9 billion.
Wisconsin state budget gap claimed by Scott “We’re Broke” Walker in order to destroy public sector unions: $137 million.
Teachers, no! They’re selfish parasites.
But:
“Oshkosh Corp. has recently geared up to produce 23,000 Army trucks and trailers in a five-year deal valued at $3 billion. It is the largest Wisconsin-based defense contractor.” — a Madison newspaper
The defense industry in the United States is an exercise in socialism for the private sector. It’s jobs are protected and underwritten by the US government and taxpayer.
And while these contracts means manufacturing jobs, the remain virtually the only such jobs protected in the United States. While everyone else gets tossed to the mercies of the wind from Wall Street.
In a related rumination it’s seems fairly obvious the Wisconsin voters put Ted Nugent in a suit in the governor’s seat.
While Nugent is unelectable because of his public unsavory character and views, the current crop of GOP leaders are as extreme as he is. And they kept some of it under a basket for November. Now that they’re in power, it’s a different story.
It unequivocally shows the peril of staying home come voting time because the lame Democratic Party and its disinterested President have depressed you.
In California, it didn’t happen and the Visigoths were turned away at the gate. And it’s because the GOP tried to paint Latinos as arch enemies of the state. They voted.
Whether or not Wisconsin’s voters can recall the GOP extremists remains to be seen since the latter have shown they’re willing to break and bend laws to disenfranchise their opponents.
Paradoxically, it now seems like it was easier to arrive at some kind of result with a people’s revolt in Egypt than here, the so-called biggest democracy in the world.
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03.08.11
Posted in Permanent Fail, Predator State at 7:25 pm by George Smith
It’s a long speech. But Michael Moore delivered the goods on the 5th in front of what looked like a very large crowd in Madison. It was a call to arms — a fiery, inspirational and direct attack on the plutocracy.
At thirty minutes, I won’t embed but it’s worth every minute here on YouTube.
Last week I wondered what it might take to strike fear in the hearts of the wealthy and powerful. More of this and I have the answer.
A Wisconsin newspaper, the Isthmus, sums up the speech in its lede graf:
By now, it’s unlikely that anyone besides Scott Walker would dispute that the protests at the Wisconsin state Capitol have energized the labor movement, as well as citizens throughout the state and nation. What became clear during raconteur Michael Moore’s 30-minute talk this afternoon is that these events have also radicalized the public, in ways no one anticipated and those in power should perhaps fear.
“The rich have overplayed their hand,” Moore shouts to thunderous applause.
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Posted in Permanent Fail, Predator State at 2:07 pm by George Smith
Part, excerpted from the post last Monday where it comes in from the Globalsecurity SITREP mirror.
The nub of it is the statement that arms manufacturing, as a protected and underwritten industry, is socialism for the private sector. And that social programs, like foodstamps, are only for parasites who are leeching off the profits of the more prosperous fit.
When I wrote the piece I knew it would punch the buttons of anyone from the knee-jerk right. They can’t tolerate the idea that others might think a US industry like weapons-making is a rig job. Or even that a mere thought exercise would impose additional taxation on them for the sake of fighting hunger.
Here’s the comment’s heart:
“The tools of war are sold to the feds & they in turn sell them to other governments. Are you going to tax the government for these sales as you suggest? Then giving this tax revenue to all food stamp receipants [sic], so now you want to make government dependent individuals more dependant [sic] & prosperous (with other peoples [sic] money), are you friggin nuts.”
And here’s the pitiless illogic of it.
Subsidized arms building, labor costs magnitudes higher than that which non-military US business employs in emerging markets, which in turn has led to mass unemployment and contributed to the astonishing explosion of people on foodstamps — very good.
Reallocating to prevent hunger at home — very bad. Only for bloodsuckers.
Commie!
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Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 11:02 am by George Smith
The GOP playbook is about the politics of scapegoating. In hard times, it a tool that’s even more potent.
This Associated Press article demonstrates it without spending much time getting at the root of what has gone on. This is surprising since all polls seem to indicate Scott Walker is now viewed as a totally unsympathetic character for attacking teachers in Wisconsin.
And so the AP story goes for the gratuitous and predictable comment furnished by someone of the Tea Party.
It reads:
A USA Today/Gallup poll last month found show that Americans largely side with the employees, though about two in five that want government pay and benefits reined in.
Barbara Davis, a retiree from Cherry Hill, N.J., has been watching public workers in rallies in Madison, Wis., as well as Trenton. She says the protesters are wrong about tightening benefits hurting the middle class.
“I’m sorry, but what they’re doing is telling off the middle class,” said Davis, 76, and a co-chairwoman of the Cherry Hill Area Tea Party. “The middle-class people don’t get all the goodies that they do.”
At its heart, the issue is this: Some public workers get a sweet deal compared to other workers. And it’s taxpayers who pay for it.
That’s set off resentment in a time when economic doldrums have left practically everyone tightening their belts. Many people have found their tax bills rising even if their earnings haven’t.
In Davis’ case, it’s the property tax that smarts. She and her husband pay about $12,000 per year for the house she describes as a three-bedroom “tract home.” That’s a high tax even in New Jersey, where the average property tax bill tops $7,000 and where the Tax Foundation has found homeowners pay three and a half times the national median.
A half century ago, industrial jobs at car and steel plants provided high salaries and rich benefits. But as manufacturing moved overseas, many formerly well-paid workers had to take lower-paying jobs. By the end of the Great Recession, the economic order was undeniably changed.
“It’s the government sector worker who’s the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,” said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law at New York’s St. John’s University.
The previous sentence ought to read:
“It’s the government sector worker person still hanging on to their middle class job who’s the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,” said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law at New York’s St. John’s University.
When everyone is pushed to the bottom by economic failure, collapse and predatory business which has nothing to do with them, there’s a visible clawing and striking at others — often the neighbors who, in the case, might not have had it so bad, because unions — eliminated everywhere else — were able to protect them.
This is what operates. Instead of the question of how did we arrive at this awful place and who really put us there.
So instead of marching on Goldman Sachs and burning the place to the ground, vindictiveness is turned on the people beside you. Because you have had it bad, then so must others you know or see in queues also suffer.
I’ve made the point before that this describes Ted Nugent in a nutshell.
Nugent lost his career as an arena-busting rocker. And he no longer enjoys much respect from other aging rockstar peers.
So he went vindictive. Nugent turned being rancid into a new career as a “celebrity” voice for Tea Party views and sock puppet for the most extreme political positions from the right, those aimed at destroying the lives of those who used to fill the stadiums he played in. He passes it off through a couple of transparent strategies — bigotry as a cultural war social antidote to political correctness and a poor man’s Atlas Shrugged for the rabid outdoorsman shtick.
With Nugent, the subtext is always payback, revenge and getting even with wimps, cowards, weaklings and bloodsuckers, all favorite words.
If you look at any interview from his salad days, the polite younger man in the reels isn’t around anymore.
Books written about the politics of nihilism and getting even are around. I just don’t have one in front of me.
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Posted in Permanent Fail, Phlogiston at 10:21 am by George Smith
Best story of the day from the news wires, easy, is the LA Times piece on the 76-year old Japanese porn star, Shigeo Tokuda.
John Glionna tells the story of how Tokuda stumbled into his new career. Which took off because of the emerging market for elderly porn in Japan, which has an aging population.
A light bulb went off over your host’s head. As it must have with many others in the stricken US economy.
We have lots and lots of old people, too. With more coming everyday. And a lot of them either need work outright or need supplemental income.
Put this together with the unsurprising idea that a constant diet of bionic young porn actors and actresses, whose clips you can steal anyway on the Internet, gets old. As you grow old.
Some choice moments from the LA Times piece:
Tokuda has emerged as a major player in Japan’s emerging adult movie genre known as “elder porn.” He says he has appeared in more than 350 films such as “Prohibited Nursing” and “Maniac Training of Lolitas.” In these scripts, Tokuda always gets the girl.
The films play upon well-documented Japanese male fantasies. In each, Tokuda plays a gray-haired master of sex who teaches his ways to an assortment of young nurses and secretaries. Whips and sex aides often factor in the plotlines.
“I’m a role model for a lot of men,” he says. “I do my best.”
And:
But after a 2005 stroke (not on the set, he says), he was moved to a desk job by his travel agency.
With no opportunity to slip out unnoticed, he retired — not from porn but from the travel industry. The rest, as they say, is Japanese porn history.
Tokuda earns $500/day on a shoot.
The elder porn business “is a burgeoning industry in a nation that features the world’s oldest population and ranks second (behind the U.S.) in the personal consumption of pornography,” the Times informs. It makes up a fifth of the Japanese porn industry, earning $200 million dollars a year.
Undiscovered territory in the US, I tell ya. Ways to make people feel useful again, something this place sorely lacks.
Again, the LA Times piece is here.
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03.07.11
Posted in Permanent Fail at 10:43 am by George Smith
[The] 2008 Farm Bill included a program for new farmers and ranchers. Last year, the department distributed $18 million to educate young growers across the country.
Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, said he hoped some beginning farmers would graduate to midsize and large farms as older farmers retired. “I think there needs to be more work in this area,??? he said. “It’s great to invest $18 million to reach out to several thousand to get them interested, but the need here is pretty significant. We need to be even more creative than we’ve been to create strategies so that young people can access operations of all sizes.???
The problem, the young farmers say, is access to land and money to buy equipment. — from the Sunday New York Times
$18 million.
In 2007, the Defense Department announced the sale of 125 more unassembled tanks to Egypt, at an estimated cost of $890 million. So far, Egypt has more than 800 of the tanks. — from the Sunday Times
$890 million to General Dynamics Land Systems for tanks for the deposed Hosni Mubarak. $1.3 billion/year in arms sales welfare.
[The] domestic arms manufacturer of flying killer (drones, General Atomics) and very little else is now half the size of the FDA, a regulatory agency for food and drugs in allegedly the foremost of western nations. — here
Unintentionally inane comment, worth repeating, from the secretary of argriculture:
“It’s great to invest $18 million to reach out to several thousand to get them interested, but the need here is pretty significant. We need to be even more creative than we’ve been to create strategies … ”
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03.06.11
Posted in Permanent Fail, Predator State at 8:38 am by George Smith
The top story at the NY Times today is a long piece on US arms sales and contracts with the Egyptian military.
They’re abused, no surprise, worked for the benefit of the old Hosni Mubarak-military-oligarchy.
That story is here.
However, it also unequivocally demonstrates my assertion, published most recently in the Economic Treason post at Globalsecurity, that arms manufacturing is a protected industry in the US. (It was published first on Monday of last week.)
It is a rigged form of socialism for a part of the American private sector, an entitlement, corporate welfare-spending exempt from the downsizing, pick-pocketing, austerity and economic punishments meted out to everyone in the middle class not directly connected to it.
Various quotes taken from the Times piece show a clear picture.
American corporations are the recipient of much of the taxpayer money that is sent to Egypt as military aid. And this is because the US government is concerned about diversion and misuse of funds.
For practical purposes, however, that happens anyway because a sale is a sale to US business. It is always a heads-they-win/tails-they-win situation for those involved.
The examples:
In part because of concerns about diversion of funds, only a sliver of the money from the American aid program actually goes to the Egyptian military. Instead, the Pentagon directly pays American companies that it has chosen to manufacture and ship the tanks, planes, guns and ammunition to Egypt.
========
Edward W. Ross, a former official at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees the sales, said he was irked by allegations that Egyptians could have pocketed money. “That money goes to the Federal Reserve,??? he said, “and then it is only released to a U.S. contractor.???
===========
The yearly $1.3 billion, one retired colonel explained, is viewed as “an entitlement.???
============
Over the years, the Gulfstream fleet — which now totals nine jets — has cost American taxpayers $333 million, government officials said. The most recent purchase was in 2002, but the Pentagon continues to pay $10 million a year to service the planes.
(Gulfstream Aerospace is an American firm. It is a part of one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world, General Dynamics. — DD)
============
Last year, the American military awarded two Foreign Military Sales contracts to Chrysler in Detroit. One, for $26 million, was for 750 unassembled Jeeps. The other, announced in November, was for $7 million to ship tools and spare parts for Jeep Wranglers to the Egyptian Ministry of Defense.
=========
Mr. Springborg, the expert on the Egyptian military, said he was skeptical that, in cases like this, the Egyptians could maintain a firewall between production of civilian and military items.
Another area to look at, Mr. Springborg said, is the production of the well-known M1A1 Abrams tank, which the Egyptian military builds under license with American-made parts. The Pentagon pays General Dynamics to ship tank kits to Egypt, where military workers assemble them.
Former American officers consider the tank manufacturing plant a giant jobs program. “It’s as much about providing jobs as it is buying military hardware,??? General Collings said.
In 2007, the Defense Department announced the sale of 125 more unassembled tanks to Egypt, at an estimated cost of $890 million. So far, Egypt has more than 800 of the tanks.
“There are two assembly lines where they make that tank,??? a former senior American military official said. “They are all in the same huge building.???
Next to the tank production line that receives the American aid, he said, workers are assembling an Egyptian construction vehicle for commercial sale.
(General Dynamics Land Systems’ M1 tank business is in Sterling Heights, Michigan, Lima, OH, and Eynon, PA. All the counties these communities are located in have suffered high unemployment during the economic collapse. All are now faced with public sector worker lay-offs. However, arms manufacturing has been exempt from hardship in the same communities, in this case gallingly making and sustaining jobs in Egypt. General Dynamics Land Systems incorporates its various ventures in Delaware, recognized by everyone as a national and community aimed tax-cheating and avoidance strategy. — DD)
While the New York Times article is primarily interested in reporting the news of diversion of military aid to the Egyptian Army aristocracy for civilian projects, it also stands as a striking example of US arms manufacturing welfare. And how the American private sector arms making business is guaranteed and underwritten by the taxpayer, given opportunity and riches not afforded anyone else. Except maybe the oil industry and Wall Street.
The companies involved plead ignorance. They’re totally unconvincing, intelligence-insultingly so.
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03.05.11
Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 9:30 am by George Smith
UPDATED
A long scholarly paper from 2008 by James K. Galbraith took up most of my morning, stumbled across by following Krugman’s pointer to a conference on the causes and consequences of inequality at Princeton.
I’ll jump right to the conclusion of it for an excerpt:
“[Equality] fuels efficiency. A society that systematically reduces the dispersion in its structure of pay forces the pace at which technological change is absorbed by business enterprise, and therefore tends to move up the scale of available productivity levels … [this mechanism] underpinned the rise of Scandinavia where political commitment to egalitarian economic outcomes preceded the advance of the region from the middle to the top of the European (and world) income scales. Similar effects applied to the United States in the New Deal and the Golden Age of economic growth.
“It is intuitively obvious that higher levels of economic inequality make it more difficult to reduce poverty through growth. Where growth is isolated and incomes are concentrated, those who are not directly involved do not benefit. On the contrary, growth necessarily entails environmental degradation and waste, and it is on the poor and the excluded that these burdens necessarily fall. Only when the fruits of growth are distributed, as income or by the provision of infrastructure and other public goods, does the statistical fact of a rising gross domestic product come to be experienced as an improvement in mass living conditions.”
And that describes the United States now where great inequality is the norm. The spoils of growth are concentrated in a few industries — financial, military, technology. Everything else is left to rot which seems to be the very picture of national inefficiency.
It’s also “intuitively obvious” that one political party is ideologically dedicated to increasing inequality — the GOP.
The Democratic Party is less enthusiastically so but still seemingly committed to going along for the ride.
The webpage on “The Politics of the Economic Crisis” at Princeton is here.
The Galbraith paper is a suggested reading on “historical studies of inequality.” A link to it, along with many others, is found therein.
The waning and waxing of inequality in countries like Brazil, Mexico, the Eurozone and China are also analyzed in depth.
Krugman’s slide presentation, “Inequality and Crises: Coincidence or Causation???? — is also worth a quick look.
Much is on the page, to put it mildly. Going for a walk now or I’d read more.
Quote of the day, another “intuitively obvious” observation, from Krugman in the pm:
One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war. Another is how we have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income.
While Krugman attributes this to technological advance in this post, I’d say that some of it also has to do with inefficiency from inequality — even the highly educated, if they’re out of position when they’re downsized by the vulture economy, can’t reconnect with the labor force. “Those who are not directly connected do not benefit,” is the quote of personal interest from a few graphs upstream.
Related: Every time I’ve see Obama at a community college or going on about something have to do with Pell grants, my bullshit detector pegs.
Win The Future! Win The Future! Even as dumb slogan, it’s pretty stinky.
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03.03.11
Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 12:58 pm by George Smith
You can recite what’s real for a comedy show. But no matter how damaging, no change occurs. Instead, you get dozens of upper class media type prescribing medicine they and their masters won’t have to take. Like today’s example number one, Fareed Zakaria.
(Along with Tom Friedman and the president, on top of Muammar Gaddafi’s alleged reading list. It’s quite a recommendation, furnished by WikiLeaks, now virtually neutralized by infame, celebrity misfortune and former collaboration with the New York Times.)
Anyway, yYou can threaten protesters with job loss, or try to rig a situation in which they can be arrested.
But suggest the rich need real threats and the gears don’t move a millimeter. It’s just another reason to deliver another sermon on how austerity and sacrifice must be shared.
The Patriotic Class War Song — remastered.
I was a little bitty baby
I was rocked in the cradle
In an old Middle Class-style home
Now that I’m old and broke
I wanna give the rich a poke
In those big places they call home
We’re gonna invite ourselves to dinner
And shoot ‘em in the kisser
And raze their ritzy mansions to the ground
It won’t be very hard
To piss in the front yards
Of all the shiny houses they called homes
We’re gonna pull ‘em out of cars
And dip ‘em in some tar
Then throw ‘em in a hole and have a laugh
We’re gonna find a big ol’ oak
Hang ‘em all ’til they croak
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call …
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