Congratulations Republican Pricks
Congratulations on your imminent defeat of President Obama regarding his healthcare reform initiative. The ability to mobilize legions of gun-toting thugs, Armey's Army, to sabotage town hall meetings was an impressive use of power. More impressive is the fact mainstream media never really cared or dared to call it what it was, an open assault on democracy. While at peaceful protests by liberals laptops are confiscated and people are arrested, the bullying Brownshirts go unfettered and unimpeded. The irony of their drawing swastikas on Democratic representatives' offices is not lost.
Personally, the lack of available medical coverage has affected me in the following way: I have two daughters, both in their twenties, who work at low-paying service jobs that offer no benefits. On a modest but comfortable income, I have been able to pay private policy premiums so that they might at least able to obtain treatment in the event of a medical catastrophe. The coverage has high deductibles and everything they have sought treatment for so far has been either uncovered or deemed a preexisting condition. The monthly out-of-pocket expense to me has been a large portion of my after tax income.
Due to a change in financial circumstances, I will soon be unable to pay their premiums and medical costs. Since they have meager salaries, they may qualify for Medicaid, so perhaps they will have some security regarding emergency medical care. However, if your side of the isle reaps the expected political benefits of handing Obama his Waterloo, even that might disappear.
Your side has won. Democratic Party dominance in Congress is a chimera, the real power of money reigns supreme, and democracy is relegated to an archaic concept of political science. We now accept the fact that except as cannon fodder and cheap service labor we have no importance. After all, it's the natural order: "The powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." Again, congratulations on a game magnificently played.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism
because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
-Benito Musollini
Republicons keep attacking healtcare reform on the grounds it's governemt controlled, which they say is worse than death. To give them a chance to put their money where there mouths are, Congressman Anthony Weiner proposed an amendment to eliminate Medicare, a government run health plan, double-daring them to vote "Yes". Not surprisngly, few of them did:
Another Republican, Martinez of FL, resigns mid-term. Obviously, the real power has moved somewhere other than elected government. Same thing happened to the Roman senate, it became irrelevant. It eventually devolved into a club and governance passed to tyrants and generals. Sound familiar? All empires outgrow democracy.
EFCA Dead, Healthcare Reform Dying
The EFCA bill has been eviscerated in the Senate. Now as before, companies will have ample time to marshal their defenses against the formation of unions, free to brow-beat and intimidate workers, fire union organizers in the lead up to a secret ballot, and practically guarantee unions can't get in. Working people can forget about wage increases or gaining back a fairer share of the economy, as they once enjoyed in the pre-Reagan era. And business's addiction to cheap labor can go on uninterrupted.
The US Chamber of Commerce, Home Depot's founder, Starbuck's corporate management, Costco, Citi-corp and others can celebrate. They couldn't have done it without those senators who sided against working people and with corporations. With Democrats like them, who needs Republicans? Of course, these Corpora-crats couldn't have succeeded without the benign indifference of Majority Leader Harry Willow-Reed and President Obama-Hoover.
Next, healthcare reform will likely be attenuated to the point of farce with the help of those same senators, foremost of which is Lord Nelson of Nevada. And the change we voted for will have amounted to just this: chump change.
Forget the Rhetoric, Look at Cheney's Record
Dick Cheney is portraying himself and being touted as the only man who loved his country enough to do the dirty work to defend it. He and others make a fervent argument, but the record shows something very different.
VP Cheney was given the task of overseeing anti-terrorism at the outset of the Bush-Cheney administration. They had been told emphatically by the outgoing Clinton Administration that al Qaeda would be their number one challenge. Was Cheney taking terrorism seriously then? Not too seriously apparently. The fact is that prior to 9-11, Cheney held exactly zero formal meetings in regard to his task.
What he did instead was meet for months on end with Enron, Exxon, BP and executives from other oil and energy companies (he's still keeping the actual list secret) to formulate an Energy (read Empire) Policy. We also know that an energy committee stocked with oil company executives and headed by Jim Baker had concluded toward the end of the Clinton Presidency that regime change in Iraq was essential. Saddam, according to them, was de-stabilizing world oil prices by jumping in and out of the market. Certainly, this report was the centerpiece of those meetings (Cheney still isn't telling though).
So, Cheney's initial response to the looming terror threat was to meet with oil executives to concoct a plan to invade Iraq to get at its sweet crude and expand the empire.
We also know that the Project for a New American Century, in which most Bush-Cheney Administration big shots except Bush himself were involved, had written in the late 90's that preemptive war in the Mideast was necessary, but would be difficult to sell to the American people unless there were another Perl Harbor. This is no secret, it's on their website and has been for years. They even wrote to Clinton of the eve of his State of the Union Address demanding he attack Saddam. Dick added his signature on the letter.
Well, as Richard Clark said during the first half of the 9-11 hearings (the second half was never convened), our government let us down. The Perl Harbor requisite to invading Iraq happened. And within hours one prominent member of the Bush-Cheney Administration was talking openly about attacking Iraq. And thereafter, President Bush and VP Cheney strongly pressured intelligence agencies to come up with reasons for doing so.
So, the man who is reputed to be the only one with the guts to defend his country against its enemies by all means necessary obviously had a broader agenda. Personally, I don't think the Bush-Cheney Administration played an active roll in causing 9-11 (I could be wrong), but they were certainly quick to make lemonade.
Next, consider that the CIA had Osama bin Laden in a box in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Rather than going in for the kill however, the Bush-Cheney Administration dithered and dawdled until finally bin Laden was able to make an escape. Some time after that, President Bush repeated over and over in a press conference that he no longer worried about bin Laden, that he wasn't important anymore.
Again, the man who alone cares enough to turn our country into a torture state in order to save it accepted a redefinition of who our enemy was in the middle of pursuing the enemy. Is that consistent with a single-minded resolve to protect us?
Funny thing about Tora Bora. If the administration had followed through there and captured or killed bin Laden, wouldn't the American people have said "Ok, we got him, so what are we doing in Iraq still?" Yes they certainly would have said that, but as things turned out, the question never came up. Convenient.
By the way, according to Bush and Cheney, bin Laden is back to being a big deal. Cheney especially has stressed this in his condemnation of the Obama Administration's weak (?) response to terrorism. Weak because it has renounced torture, which Cheney maintains is our best defense against the enemy whose leader he and his boss let out of a trap.
For all those inconsistencies and suspect motives though, even Cheney's premiss that torture is a necessity is fraught with contradictions. Firstly, a person being tortured tells you whatever he or she thinks you want to hear in order to end the agony. Torture is a much better tool for cowing a population than it is for obtaining reliable information. That is to say, it is a tool of control employed only by totalitarian regimes. It is, by definition, terrorism. For example, Torquemada wasn't trying to get useful information from his victims, just terrorize the Secret Jews in his midst.
Even the blueprint for Cheney's "enhanced interrogation" techniques was reverse-engineered from a program based on torture used in the past by totalitarian governments to extract false confessions. Thus, these techniques were derived from practices never meant to obtain anything other than false confessions for propaganda purposes. But in Cheney's hands, they supposedly became effective tools for stopping terrorists. That's Cheney's alchemy, if you believe it.
Secondly, our use of torture puts our own troops in jeopardy because it exposes them to retaliatory mistreatment. Cheney isn't bothered by this potential blow-back, but the Army sure as hell is.
Thirdly, stooping to torture undermines our society. It won't be long before the practice seeps into our culture. They will be water-boarding down at the county jail soon, if they haven't begun already.
Finally, let's consider what's really been going on in windowless rooms in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in torture states around the world where targets of extraordinary rendition are sent. Water-boarding has been the focus of most discussion, but it was stopped early on. It is a distraction. The things done to people by our military, our intelligences agencies, and most of all, by our contractors, foreign and American, go far beyond the practice of water-boarding. The latter is in a sense a red herring used to distract us from the more disgusting and unmerciful things that have been done in our name. These will come out in time.
Dick Cheney hasn't saved the country, he's severely damaged it. He is an authoritarian who goes by his own rules. He is supported by authoritarian followers who are attracted to and reassured by a strongman persona. They would probably be delighted to put their boot on someone's neck themselves. He or his acolytes could be back in power someday soon, so let's view him through his record, not his self-promoting myth.
Soylent Green is (working) people!
Striving for mastery, status, respect? Searching for a soul mate? All chimeras. Pure foolishness. But make a child feel secure and loved, and the very gods will envy you. -Mickey Mouse on acid
Your state is broke, your job is shakey, your kid's facing jail for smoking pot, your retirement has largely evaporated, and you owe more than your house and all your other assets are worth. This comes at the conclusion of three decades of pro-business, low tax (for the wealthy), anti-worker, draconian law-and-order, racist-friendly Republican hegemoney. We're now serfs in Neo-Feudalistic America. Grover Norquist couldn't be happier.
Testifyin'
When politicians in the Bible Belt get caught with their pants down, they go into hyper-holy mode, and incredibly, start sermonizing to the public audience about sin and responsibility. To me, this seems bizarre, although I understand what they are doing: turning the tables to deflect blame. What really bothers me is how people seem to lap it up. Why they don't just say, "You philandering fool, can the corn, say what you did, and then just go hide in shame. Don't be so presumptuous as to lecture ME about the evils of what YOU did."
But Bible Belters seem to have a built in bias for putting up with this inanity. The cycle of preach-sin-confess-preach again is elevated to high art. It's like opera. The morality is so stringent and the invective against sin so strident that it seems to set people up for a fall. Then, because the fall is so common and inevitable, there has to be a patent way of sidestepping the consequences and coming out of it clean. Problem is, the script for obtaining forgiveness is so facile that it actually promotes transgression rather than preventing it. It's like saying "Don't ever, ever let yourself think about pink elephants, NEVER!", which can only lead to suppression and eventual drifting back to irrepressible thoughts of pink elephants. Because almost everyone is bound to have pink elephant fantasies, a stylized confession evolves in which forgiveness is automatically obtained, as long as there's the proper epilogue of sermonizing against ever thinking about pink elephants. And always, the next stampede of pink elephants is just around the corner. By contrast, let's consider a hypothetical place where pink elephants just aren't talked about, where pink elephants are generally considered bad form, but not obsessed over. In this place, pink elephants are occasionally observed, but it is considered a private matter, an unfortunate failing, and the last thing one would do is to go into an embarrassing public rant about the evils of pink elephants on the heels of his or her own personal pink elephant encounter. What if, surprisingly, this hypothetical place suffered far fewer pink elephants per-capita, and the divorce rate due to to pink elephant episodes was much lower than in the Bible Belt? (Of course, this isn't real, it's just hypothetical.) This despite the fact this permissive place not only failed to inveigh relentlessly against pink elephants, but actually allowed magenta giraffes to marry! Certainly, any such place that neither defended traditional marriage to the hilt nor kept vigilance against pink elephants could not last a day. Let's give this immoral, hypothetical place a name anyway though, let's call it, Mass-a-two-sits. Ridiculous name.
"it's the pie, stupid"
the pie has been shrinking for some time, beginning in the '80's. for those at the top, this hasn't been a problem because their share increased even as the pie got smaller. overall, they are getting more pie now than ever. for the rest of us though, it's a problem. not only is the pie smaller, but we're getting a diminished share of it.
this shrinking pie is the real problem affecting the economy. shenanigans in the financial sector precipitated a crisis that would have eventually surface somewhere else if not there. china was pouring money into our economy and the financial people funneled it to us through relentless, reckless lending. this had the effect of ladling whipped cream on our paltry slice of pie, so we didn't appreciate how little we were actually getting.
putting the pie analogy aside for a moment, the problem evolved because working people lost their power when unions were busted, busted by those same people who are now getting a bigger share of the wealth. then these good folks also offered easy credit in lieu of wage increases. that was the plan, it worked like a charm, and the game is over now. nest egg's gone. kids have no future. that's how it was done. easy as pie.
picking on the powerless -what a man!
people (mostly men) who listen to thrush limbaugh et al are deficient in both brains and balls. namby-pamby middle managers, authoritarian followers who just want a strong bully to hide behind. years of fagging themselves out to corporations have left them fit for little else other than listening to hate-filled diatribe against women, children, immigrants, and minorities, ie, picking on the powerless.
Do you get it?
The wealth of people who work has be strip-mined, and the operation didn't begin and end with the current banking crisis. Thirty years ago Uncle Ron killed off the unions and his benefactors simultaneously began extending credit to everyone and his dog. No more pay raises, but you could maintain your standard of living and glom up all the junk they enticed you to buy on the consumption-flogging tube with easy credit and cash-out home refinancing.
Now you owe more than your house and all your other stuff is worth. You toil just to pay your debts. Congratulations, you've made it, you're a serf now! (Phone's ringing, it's probably a collection agency.) Do you get it?
Shameful Tales of the Darkside
the photos obama is talking about are a red herring. the real stuff, as reported here, will blow the lid off.
beyond what's listed, i've also heard (on the mike malloy show) that there is at least one video of a kid shreiking while being sodomized in front of his mother (nothing like making a mother watch her kid having his asshole ripped apart to to get her to talk).
prick chainknee wants to blab on and on about water-boarding, but the true depravation of his "enhanced interrogation" bag of tricks will put him and his buddies in maximum security prison for the rest of their satanic lives. hopefully, they will share cells with the newly relocated detaniees from guantanamo. that'll make his ass feel safer.
(Psst, Your Corruption is Showing)
Electrocutions of service personnel in showers because of KB&R's stupidity and greed are merely the most sensational manifestation of war profiteering by Cheeney-Bush corporate cronies. Obvious evidence that profiteering continues unabated is the $80 million in bonuses just paid by the US Government to KB&R for their fine work.
Rampant and unchecked war profiteering results from the cult of profitization/privatization that has flowed from the Greed Is Good paradigm of the past three decades. Every week this corruption continues underscores the verity of Gen. Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" declaration. As economic times worsen -and let's not kid ourselves, they will get worse- the aberration of feting war profiteers will become more contentious.
Things might get so dire that the diversion of professional sports and TV reality shows will no longer be sufficient to hold the full attention of the Perpetually Entertained. It could get very dicey if the bread and circus stops working. Janet J. better polish up her nipple rings, Britney S. better practice getting out of a limo with legs akimbo, and Charlie G. better stock up on human interest stories if the corrupt corporatocracy is to go on bamboozling the public in a cost effective manor.
Substitute the name Nancy Pelosi for "Lynndie England" and you get a solid idea of what the Republicans are now trying to do with the torture issue.
The Day Voodoo Economics lost its Mojo
Initially, all commentary regarding the economic crisis was about the magnitude of the problem and its foci like Bear Sterns and AIG. It was all very technical, and you got the feeling while listening to the pundits that they were overstating their own comprehension of what had really happened, i.e., they were faking it.
Now we're into our collective anger phase, and the effort has shifted from what might have gone wrong to pointing fingers at whoever was the most greedy leading up to the fall and whoever has subsequently been the most piggish in the aftermath. Having given up on understanding, we're indulging in outrage and indignation now.
I have been frustrated that everything has been pinned on either bad luck or bad behavior. Porcine greed was certainly in evidence when the sky fell, but truly, what's happened to our economy was a unavoidable consequence of "voodoo economics" aka "trickle-down", which had been the paradigm of US economics for the past 28 years.
At the beginning of the 80's, the power of labor was undercut. Avuncular Ronald Reagan smote unions while concomitantly, financial companies sent credit cards to people's dogs. Easy credit substituted for wage increases. What you couldn't actually afford, you could still buy with a credit card or via a cash-out refinance of your house. This couldn't go on forever, and it didn't.
All efforts now are geared toward saving the economy from collapsing by plugging up gaping financial holes with public funds. If however, we don't address the systemic problem of substituting debt for a living wage, another bubble will --must-- follow, and it will almost certainly be our last.
State of the Post-Reagan Two Class System
The elite have sold working people down the river. They have touted free trade and dismissed the suffering of working people with a facile reference to "creative destruction". Meanwhile, they have hypocritically maneuvered to protect their own hides from the devastating effects of the race to the bottom.
Now, at least in the auto industry, the rules are being applied equally to everyone. In finance on the other hand, the elite are still managing to stave off equal treatment. For now.
The point is that it's become a two class system, with one class an oligarchy and the other serfs. A few of the oligarchy have just been busted in rank, but others seem secure, at least until foreign interests buy up everything, at which point the best the current oligarchy can hope for is to become their vassals.
Outsource economists!
It's still about Oil
Hypothesis: at the heart of almost everything that's drastically wrong is oil. Cheney, the duke of oil, went into Iraq for the oil under the dirt there. Afghanistan's wars started over oil: the West wanted to build a pipeline through it, and the flow through that pipeline would have undercut the value of Russian oil and gas exports, so they invaded it. The West responded by putting rocket launchers in the hands of religious extremists to fight our proxy war with Russia over oil. Unfortunately, it turned out that bin Laden wanted to be the king of oil, just as bush wanted to be. (bin Laden's not a religious zealot, just another vicious, spoiled rich kid like bush.)
Furthermore, Cheney, once he controlled enough of the oil, may have been planning to do to China with oil what the British did to China with opium: use it to reverse the drain of currency and buy back our country's debt. (Remember all the anti-Chinese saber rattling Rummy was doing prior to the 2004 elections? well, seems he was tipping Cheney's hand with that invective.) I'm sure that Cheney, paranoid authoritarian that he is, thinks he was doing the right thing for his country.
So the quagmire we're in the Mideast is about oil. Fighting terrorism is just a red herring. I have some hope that Obama will try to veer away from this, but there's no certainty.
Corollary: the only way to stop the madness and the mayhem perpetrated by our government and others is for the US to conserve, to get our per capita consumption down so that it is in line with the rest of the world. That won't cure all our ills, but our prodigious energy use is the single biggest impediment to peace and rationality.
I think it's important to keep oil's overwhelming importance in mind because the US is just one terrorist attack and an election away from being back in the clutches of the fascist war mongers.
Republicans take another Principled Stand
Six weeks ago, Republican congressmen spiked a provision in the stimulus package that earmarked $100M for precautionary preparations for a world-wide pandemic, calling it "pork".
Now Republican Governor Rick Perry, a week after threatening Texas' succession, is demanding/begging for 27,000 doses of Tamiflu from the federal government. Turns out that "pork" would have been the ideal defense against swine flu. Capital D-Douche-bags, aren't they?
Somebody Please put Cheney back on his Chain
I have to recant. I said that there was never a ticking time bomb-type scenario during the last decade that warranted torture. Turns out there was: the impending political trouble in store for the Cheney Administration if no confessions could be obtained linking Saddam Hussein to 9-11. Until sometime in 2002, the FBI had been "debriefing" captives, using legal and effective techniques. When the desperate Cheney Administration told them to "take off the gloves" to get prisoners to sing the tune they wanted to hear, the FBI, under Director Mueller, said in so many words, "No, that's not what we do." So the CIA, under Tenet, stood up and chirped "But I will!". Hats off to the FBI. (Never thought I'd write that.)
Now, when Dick Cheney rears his ugly head on the boob tube demanding "formally" that classified memos be released showing how effective torture was in getting information, remember that: 1) he's really arguing the point "the ends justify the means"; 2) torture is rarely, perhaps never necessary; 3) legal techniques would have served just as well or better; 4) he's paradoxically arguing for open government while he's still averse to revealing which corporations helped formulate (wrote) his energy policy; 5) he is truely evil, in that he tortured purely for political reasons; 6) in the future, those serving the US and captured will be that much more in jeapordy of being given "a taste of their own medecine".And the prick still gets airtime on the networks. Mind boggling
Me thinks he doth protest too much
In my experience, the staunchest, most ardent, anti-social welfare people I've met have been the slackest producers. Seems counterintuitive at first that these proponents of personal responsibility should be so inept yet so uncharitable towards the down-and-out, but when you reflect it makes perfect sense. First, we hate in others what we fear most in ourselves. Second, these followers of authority feel that if they parrot the opinions of their overlords, they will be spared during hard times. It's a personal welfare issue for them. Of course they are right that in a crisis the rich and powerful would attack their outspoken opponents first. Only after that would they get around to terminating their parasitic toadies.
PROGRESSIVE TO-DO LIST: institute universal healthcare, including dental, in the US; pay a living wage, especially to young workers starting out in life; bring back unions to give working people a better advantage; make post-secondary education free and available to all; develop public transportation in US cities and suburbs, thereby reducing traffic, pollution, and improving health; address terrorism more effectively than at present through an international law enforcement effort; ban torture and punish those who injected torture into our national policy; educate women in developing countries, thereby undercutting worldwide, misogyny-fueled stupidity and suffering; make available clean water throughout the world; reengineer work location placement to reduce commuting distance, traffic, and time; finance federal and state elections with public funds to reduce the influence of special interests; curtail or get rid of the Senate filibuster; invest in the rail system, eliminating the lack of interoperability between regions, and ship the bulk of freight more efficiently by rail; instantly end corporate tax havens; stop jailing so incredibly many of our young for non-violent, marginal crimes such as marijuana possession; emphasize treatment over criminal punishment in dealing with addiction.
Where has all the Credit Gone?
There was a Grand Switcheroo in the 80's. Credit, especially through credit cards, was expanded. Ordinary people were extended credit as never before, and they used it. They used it because the culture encouraged it and because they needed to in order to offset a freeze on wage increases.
Beginning in the 80's, there was a massive, coordinated, and above all, successful campaign to roll back the power labor had obtained after WWII. Powerful business interests devised and executed a plan to put wage earners back in their place by busting their unions while simultaneously proffering easy credit to working people. Thus, the sting was taken out of this economic demotion. It worked for three decades, but now we've hit the wall. Where do we go from here?
Def. Libertarian - political Peter Pan
RE: Torture
It's said that it has saved lives: if for the sake of argument, you allow this is true, torture is just one means of obtaining information, and not necessarily the best. And it's very, very costly.
As to the old chestnut of the "ticking time bomb scenario" when there isn't time to use other methods of obtaining information, I respond in this way: first, the scenario is a red herring in that while it is a possibility, is highly improbable. Saying that, if the scenario ever did arise, I would volunteer to apply the thumbscrews myself. And then I would hang for it, willingly. Why? because torture is an abomination and cannot be excused or condoned, EVER. It destroys the fabric of civilization and undermines the law.
I'd swing for it before I let it become accepted, because it is a cancer on humanity. Today it applies to "enemy combatants" but tomorrow it will be standard practice in the county jail and the next day a tool of domestic discipline.
Employee Free Choice Act or Die!
Home Depot, Citi-Corp, Starbucks. They don't want the next generation to enjoy a living wage. Conservatives have systematically broken the back of unions. They're mighty pleased about it, and raise shrines to their patron saint, Ronald Reagan. Well, despite a 20% rise in productivity, workers haven't seen a dime of it in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Obviously, that's no concern to the Ayn Rand acolytes, but what goes around comes around. Because their wages stagnated, working people borrowed against their houses to maintain their standard of living. Now the houses aren't worth what's owed on them, people can barely make the minimum payment on their credit cards, and guess what that means? Pop! goes the economy.
Call me a class warrior, but it is conservatives who have waged war against working people for almost thirty years. The result is a corpse of and economy.
It's dirt simple: pay people a living wage and the economy will thrive and grow. Conversely, welch on working people and it will shrivel and die. The cure for the economy is UNIONs. What the cure for elitism is... who knows?
George Will's professed concern for the sanctity of unions' secret ballot is pure sophism. Conservatives just want to keep all the marbles. Too bad for them all the marbles are gone.
"Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both."
-M.L. King
AIG, You Rock!
Keep up the good work. Continue funneling money from hard-pressed taxpayers to your buddies to make them whole again after they gambled their fortunes away. And put a few bucks in your own pocket too while you're at it. You're better than the rest of us, cut from a different cloth, so the rules don't apply to you. Yours is a charmed life, live it up!
By the way, soon even the densest WalMart Republican will understand how badly he's being rear-ended. Have fun with that, assholes.
Citi Corp Campaigning Against Employee Free Choic Act
Money taken out of my children's paychecks is given to a bank that uses it to prevent my children's paychecks from ever getting any bigger. Priceless.
Reflections on the 9 to 5 (at 57)
On the way into work one morning, during the stop and go at the myriad un-sequenced traffic lights between home and there, it occurred to me that everywhere I've worked has been a place of drudgery. I freely admit I'm not an innate nine to fiver, and this might have a lot to do with it. But beyond that though, there's something about every workplace that seems to spoil whatever promise it might seem to offer.
Within the last year I have worked for a "weapons training system" company and a medical diagnostics equipment company. I loathe anything that has to do with defense because as a medic I saw first-hand what weapons of war can do to a human body. On the other hand, I am attracted to things medical out of natural interest and because of my previous medical experience. Ironically, management at the shooting gallery shop gave me much greater warm and fuzzies than management at the clinical equipment shop. There's stark contrast between genuine and accessible people in the former case, and petulant, detached, conniving people in the supposedly more humanitarian venture. In other words, these two adjacent extremes exemplify the fact that, on balance, all places of employment suck about the same.
In engineering school, we encountered a parallel to this which is called "gain-bandwidth product". That meant that an amplifier could output twice the gain at half a given frequency, four times the gain at a quarter of the frequency, etc, such that the product of the amplifier's gain x frequency was always the same. For jobs, it seems like: inherent value of the product x decency of the people = C, a constant which stands for "Crap".
You can try to lay this off on profit motive's corrupting people's higher ideals like pride in work, desire to do good, etc. But I have a gnawing suspicion that the most back-biting, politically charged environment is probably a pure research facility, where unsullied intellectual pursuit and rationality --maybe even altruism-- are supposed to reign.
I think the problem might be this: large size and hierarchy screw up the workplace. In a small group, there is an esprit de corps that's a natural reflection of our cooperative nature. For millennia before the rise of civilization and written history, hunter-gatherer groups consisted of a dozen men or fewer who worked in a coordinated way under one leader and perhaps several elders. If you wanted to challenge the leader, you could, although be prepared to suffer the consequences if you failed.
Now, by contrast, we work in anthills of activity that are supposedly cooperative efforts, but are really booby-trapped political houses of cards. We are not ants, but we pretend to be in the corporate setting. The truth oozes out in the internecine ploys, the back-stabbing, and the control fetishes that permeate our work environment.
When I look back, the best work situations have been in small groups consisting of a few people led by an engaged, reasonable, accessible boss who thought less about making personal points with upper management than doing the job well and considering the group's smooth functioning. Thus, the hunter-gatherer scenario was effectively mimicked for the workers, with the group following an undisputed leader in the attainment of a common goal. It hinged hugely on the leader's ability and willingness to insulate his/her people from the scattershot BS churned out by upper management. It's a dying art.
The Chamber of Commerce is Dead Wrong
Beginning in the Reagan era, employers began attacking unions in order to supress wages. This was in business' best interest, at least in the short term, because labor is one of it's biggest costs. Reduce the cost of labor and increase profit. It's simple. They have been very successful in diminishing the unions' power and became very profitable in the intervening decades.
But if you squeeze a baloon in one spot, it will expand somewhere else. Nothing occurs in complete isolation. Prices rose, while pay didn't. So the average worker ran up his or here credit card balance and took out equity loans on his or her house to buy things and maintain a high standard of living. Business was happy because profits were good, and the worker was ok with running up a tab and tapping into the equity in his or her house.
This all went along fine for a while because of the housing bubble. Every house was a money tree. Then the bubble burst, as it had to, and now business as well as workers are in for hard times.
The point is that lowering wages was great on the front end, but in the long term it led to economic colapse because workers didn't actually earn enough to consume at a sustainable rate and keep the economy going. In the end, business' successful war on unions backfired.
I think business understands this, but is still opposing the Employee Free Choice Act which would bolster union membership. Why? Partly because of old habits, but also because they are forced to maximize short term profits for their investors and stockholders. They are bound to follow the "welch now, pay later" plan, even when it leads over a cliff. Even when they've just fallen off another cliff.
Over the last three decades, the republican party has made insanity fashionable. Now it's going out of style; however, like wide ties, it will be back, I fear.
The Voter ID Bill is presented as a cure for voter fraud. Curiously, there has been very little or no demonstrable fraud. Therefore, it is a cure in search of a disease. The real purpose of any and all voter ID bills is to supress voting by poor and minority people. Period. Let's cut the subterfuge, it's tiresome and it's smarmy.
The US locks up more people than any other country in the world. And guess which state locks up the most? (Here's a hint, it begins with "G".)
Gee, who would have thought that a world economy based on underpaid American workers' borrowing against their houses to buy stuff made everywhere else couldn't go on forever? I can't imagine what went wrong.
When my daughter was 8, we were in a store and she picked up item after item, turning each over and looking at the base. After a while she announced with disapproval, "Everything's made in China!" Now she goes to a local area college and schleps pizzas to make ends meet. You can't blame economists for missing what she saw then, because they're so burdened with making their computer models come out right.
as a society, screwed we are.
ok, they're snatching kids and salting them away in for-profit prisons. the kids' transgressions have been on a par with spitting on the sidewalk, but they get put away for up to a year and a half. taxes pay for it, private prisons profit, and judges get a kickback.
this is about as low as a society can go before imploding. still, nobody seems to care. instead of taking to the streets, we sit on our arses and zone out on hdtv pap.
works fine if you don't have a fiddle.
plantation nation
the gop is not the party of eisenhower any longer, or of nixon, or even of george herbert walker bush. in fact, HW was the last in the line of moderate republicans, who was overthrown by the palace guard of neocon ideologues. apart from the ascendency of newt gingrich, tom delay, grover niquist, and rush limbaugh, what does that signify?
obviously, it meant the end of civility in public discourse. macho assertiveness accompanied a take-no-prosoners stance to politics. karl rove, by his own declaration, carried out a campaign to obliterate the opposition and establish permanent rule by the republican party. he shamelessly used wedge issues and hysteria to garner power for his team. the ends justified the means, and he used every trick in his mentor's book to achieve his goal. (remember, lee atwater carried a copy of Machiavelli's "the prince" with him at all times.)
so, the existing republican party is a scorpion rather than an elephant, but that just describes the hateful rage of the party that has won elections impressively, even though they have not governed worth a damn. but where would the republican party take us if allowed to continue the march begun with reagan?
in short, it would lead back to the society of the old south, in which an aristocracy of wealth called the tune to which the poor and powerless had no choice but to dance. it was neither a fair nor an egalitarian society. it was patterned on what was even then an extinct model, the british ruling class of a pre-industrial era.
in this model, there is an aggregation of wealth at the top and the common people exist merely to fill the coffers of their overlords. it is not a model that entertains the concept of a living wage or a social safety net. it does not allow for consumer protection, education available to everyone, or any of that mush-minded foolishness. there are the select few at the apex, placed there at the will of god as a reward for their innate superiority.
don't think so? look at the map of where republicans actually gained in the 2008 elections. it's in the old slave states. for those of you who think the civil war ended at appomatox, recall that it was followed by reconstruction, a conflict neither side won decisively. the south has pressed on unflinchingly ever since, and has recently come very close to prevailing against the war of northen aggression. and it isn't over yet. wake up and smell the cotton.
all this is not to say that the soul of the republican party has wandered far from wall street, but that the party is now an amalgam of super-rich and atavists. it is a coalition that commits us and our children to serfdom so that the powerful can have their way unhindered and the brutal can crush those of us cut out of the deal.
On Track for real
Ironically, the metaphor "get the economy back on track" is never connected with doing it literally. Moving freight by train is grossly more efficient in energy use than trucking it is, but we've let the rail infrastructure deteriorate over many decades. The reasons for this are, among other things, pressure from the petroleum, truck manufacturing, and road building industries.
Now would be a logical time to sink some of that stimulus money into rail repair and upgrading inter-railway connections because doing so would lead to decreased oil consumption, economic savings, cleaner air overall, and provide immediate, "shovel-ready" employment. It's never going to happen, is it? Oh, and pardon my bad language, but "public transportation" has it all over commuting by car too, especially if public investment is made to make the system convenient. That's another pie in the sky.
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Some Wall Street hot-shot just called the 500K cap on compensation "Draconian". Really? Putting a family's belongings on the curb outside their foreclosed house seems to fit the definition, but checking the greed of these Pharos of Finance doesn't. These guys are tone deaf.
Republican Gall
Bush's bigwig buddies are trashing Obama's administration? That takes gall. It's like a captured felon criticizing the arresting officer over his shoeshine.
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It's being said that the American people aren't spending because they've "lost confidence". That's an understatement of gargantuan proportions! Since the US converted to a supposed service economy, we haven't seen a rise in real wages. To keep up our standard of living, we willingly complied with exhortations from our leaders to borrow and spend. (Remember when the invasion of Iraq started, el presidente told us all to go out and shop?)
Our houses were deemed to be gold mines, so we took out home equity loans. And we spent the money. We ran up enormous credit card bills. And we continued to shop.
Now we owe more on our houses than they're worth, and many of us are staring at our big screen TV siting on the sidewalk with the rest of our belongings outside our foreclosed houses. (They actually do that to people here in the American South!) Our credit card rates have doubled and tripled on the very purchases we made earlier at lower rates, thanks to unprincipled people like then Senator Joe Biden.
Yes, you could say we've lost confidence, in the same way that someone who's been robbed and beaten can be said to have "lost confidence" in the mugger. (And we can't even get medical treatment for our injuries.) It's our own fault though, because we have been very naive and ignorant, and our past leaders have been corrupt and cynical.
Sorry for the mess, world.
Recipe for a broken economy:
1. Start with a consumer society.
2. Don't get a raise for thirty years.
3. Spend more than you make to keep consuming.
4. Make up the difference by borrowing against your major asset, your house.
5. Run up credit card bills.
6. Stop making stuff, let China do that for you.
7. Get China to lend you lots of money so that you can continue to spend.
8. Wait for the bubble/lie/illusion that your house is made out of gold to suddenly became obvious.
9. Call the result a "financial crisis" rather than a systemic problem of
A) the failure to produce goods and
B) wages being too low to support consumption
bon appetit
meanderings of a middle aged mashugana (or, the impoverished philosophy of a weak minded iconoclast)
here's my philosophy up front, stolen straight from Eliot Rosewater*: "God damn it, you've got to be kind!"
it's a bullshit life in a bullshit world. we stink with hubris and we scream with pain. we're doomed, but that shouldn't cause us to lash out. our pain comes not from out predicament, but from our longings and the misbegotten belief that there should something more.
ayn rand remonstrated: "the most dangerous thing in the world is a man without a purpose." really? how about Hitler? he certainly had a purpose, and he was a wee bit of a thorn in humanity's side. the Puritans had purpose too, and the result was the genocide of the Native American people.
as individuals, we are constantly driven to make our mark. this is the biggest reason for the world's suffering. narcissist-sociopaths make a mess that far outweighs whatever overall benefit they produce. they're like gourmet cooks who create a splendid meal, but at the cost of a huge pile of dirty dishes, pots and pans that someone else must deal with. habitually, we praise the cook and forget about the dishwasher.
we all seem to believe that we have to have a purpose. this is an unfortunate result of the evolution of our brains, where the limbic is unreconciled with the cerebrum. we have no reason for being that is greater than that of the penicillin mould that grows on that neglected brick of cheddar cheese in the back of the refrigerator.
living things are distinct from the inert only because they have happened upon the trick of replication. there are beautiful, complex, and self-organzing physical formations that are not alive because they haven't tripped onto the one thing a virus has stumbled upon, self-replication. we're not such a big deal.
well then, is this life just a test for entry into a better world? i don't believe in an afterlife. i don't claim there isn't one, i just have no expertise in that area. i can barely process what pours into my eyes and ears in the here and now. what the majority call faith, i attribute to a desire for a supreme daddy, which is occasionally corroborated by and witnessed to by inspired epileptics who sincerely experience and report divine contacts. these are the saints.
beware of faith. organized religion, by definition, must be hierarchical, so authoritarians will naturally rise to the top. they become the keepers of the faith, who feel justified in driving the flock via half-truths and intellectual shortcuts, because they determine those whom they come to view as simple followers require simplified direction and will loose their way otherwise. the longer a religion exists, the more corrupt it becomes through authoritarian expediency. thus, eventually the lemmings are lead over the cliff, every time.
protestantism was a clear reaction to the brutal centralized authoritarianism of the (constantinian) roman catholic church. martin luther may have been an honest man, but i've been to a funeral service in a southern baptist church, and i can attest that authoritarianism is alive and well there, just redistributed to the local sociopaths.
is there a god? who knows? i have always suspected there isn't, at least not a personal god in whose image we are made. the aged, misogynous male keepers of the faith have promulgated the idea that he is an angry, vengeful, authoritarian, supreme father who created man in his own image. this makes me suspicious that the keepers of the faith have drawn a picture of god that is remarkably like themselves. the obvious advantage to this would be to make it far easier for them to keep the flock from questioning their authority.
my father is catholic, my mother was episcopalian. being a child of the 50's i was subjected to the patriarchal religion. the absurdity that struck me first was the catholic dogma of original sin, referring to adam and eve's chomping down on the fruit of knowledge. that was a great impetus to my laughing off every other scrap of dogma they subsequently threw at me. again, looking back, this dogma is traceable to the authoritarians' penchant for dumbing it down for the masses. ironically, since then i have come to think of the dogma of original sin as the truest aspect of catholic religion: hokey parables aside, we are all doomed to commit sin. how? everything we do: i like chocolate; as it turns out, the chocolate trade stands on the pillar of the exploitation of child labor, young kids toiling in the fields of africa in unrelieved, under-remunerated, mind-numbing labor. their lives are stoled from them. the same is true for coffee. it's all built on exploitation. even the produce grown and sold in the US depends on near-to-actual slave labor. and the meat we eat comes from corporate agribusiness which practices animal torture in the pursuit of efficiency. we are all guilty of vicious exploitation. "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa".
can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. or hearts. or spirits.
most of the word's children live in deprivation and don't even have clean water to drink, let alone enough nourishment. meanwhile, in the richest and most powerful country in the world, a million children don't get enough to eat, and 40 million people don't have a doctor.
will we ever perfect ourselves and stop being the biggest assholes in the known universe? doubtful. once upon a time a rich man in india set forth on a quest to find an answer to the question: why is there so much suffering in the world? the answer he found was this: the individual's desires are the source of all his misery. now this man has been made into a god to whom people pay homage by spinning prayer wheels. one yard forward, two yards back.
human animals are no better than any other lifeform. we have overstated our superiority to the other animals. if anything, our advantages are an indictment of our heinous behavior. we should know better. if there is a heaven, and i doubt it, but if there is, dogs get in before people.
so, do we have a purpose? well, our achievements so far include: greek fire, torture, gun powder, nuclear weapons, killer drones, war, and slavery. but these are merely our talents. man is a wolf to man. we have no apparent purpose.
is there a better world waiting at the end of this life? wishful thinking. if there's a god who is cognizant of our every pain and joy, that supreme being is as likely to be a transsexual, banjo playing hippopotamus as a patriarch with a beard. but that's a moot point.
what it comes down to is: we're hopeless, but that's no excuse to act like an asshole. God damn it, you've got to be kind!
p.s. our species does have one real achievement, antibiotics. but the credit for that goes more to the mould and the cheese than it does to mankind.
(* from Go Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
free market fundamentalism/predatory capitalism/trickle-down economics -feel the warmth
We're bailing out financial institutions on the premiss that doing so will keep the economy greased, but the banks are refusing to lend the money they're being handed. Instead, the fat cats are using it to buy up other banks in a typical manifestation of their shameless greed and to pay themselves billions in bonuses.
Where's the money coming from? Well, right now the gov is just printing it, but it's the worker who'll ultimately suffer. People like my daughter who schleps pizzas to tables for virtually no pay other than crummy tips will pay the price.
Also Sprach Mittens
Mitt Romney gave a speech the other day in which he urged Congress to do nothing to bail out the auto industry. The thrust of his argument was that the woes of the American auto industry are due entirely to unions, so just let Detroit automakers file for bankruptcy, which would allow their management to finally scrape off the parasitic unions and thereby become viable again. To bolster his argument, he pointed out that Japanese automakers succeed in producing cars here while paying their American workers around $40/hour in wages and benefits, whereas Detroit is forced to pay on average $75 per hour. According to Mittens, the unions are the whole problem.
Mittens, $75 is a bogus figure. The real wage, medical benefits included, is less than $45/hour, resulting in a pre-tax wage averaging $28/hour, or around 56K per year. That's a living wage, although a whole lot less than Mitt Romney would care to live on.
Guys like Mittens think it's fine for their sort to make millions, but feel revulsion when the little people make a decent living. And the MSM, being in thrall to corporations, doesn't feel obliged to point out that hypocrisy. In fact they'll skip blithely along repeating bullshit figures like $75/hour because they're not only complicit, they're too lazy to fact-check. God forbid they should point out that US automakers have been pounding out abominations like the Hummer while Japanese companies have been mass-producing hybrids, or the fact the biggest chain around automakers' necks is the lack of single payer universal healthcare. I don't know who sucks more, Mittens or the MSM.
Elites are the Backbone?
I recently heard a commercial on the radio in which a dramatic baritone voice announced that the businessman and the entrepreneur are the backbone of this country. This is the mantra I've heard most of my adult life, beginning during Ronald Reagan's presidency. It infuriates me because it implies that those who actually do the work are at best second class citizens, at worst parasites.
This mantra has been almost universally accepted, but it has had a pernicious effect: in denigrating working people, it has denigrated work itself. To do your job well, to take pride in your work, became the province of fools. The savvy view became that you do as little as you can for the most you can get. Forget dignity in work or satisfaction in a job well done, don't be a sap!
And that is why we have transitioned, since the 1980's, from the world's largest lender to the world's largest debtor (under the 41st president) and its largest exporter of manufactured goods to its largest importer. Our infrastructure is crumbling, we have a military budget that would choke a Trojan horse, and the concentration of wealth is top-heavy to a degree not seen since before the Depression. To boot, 40 million people lack medical insurance, and young people starting out have less opportunity than their parents did.
The trucker, the emergency room nurse, the grower, the engineer, the plumber, the carpenter, the guy who ensures clean water flows from your tap, the fireman, the teacher, the cop, the worker who builds your car, and yes, even the politician are all just second class citizens in a two class system. The irony is that the business owner referred to in the commercial is about to shut his doors permanently because no one is able to buy from him anymore. Time for an adjustment.
Question: why did John McCain pick Sarah Palin to be his running mate?
Answer: Anna Nichole Smith didn't answer his calls.
Dumped at the Dance
The US brought Iraq to the dance, but Iran will be driving her home. There's nothing we can do about that. We can call Iran out to the parking lot, but the fight will not be won easily, and the girl won't leave with us, whatever the outcome.
We have been dumped. It was a foregone conclusion. We freed the Shiite majority from Sunni minority rule in Iraq, and they have now turned to their natural ally, Shiite Iran.
The present relative peace in Iraq is largely due to intervention by Iran, which persuaded Moqtada al-Sadr to call a ceasefire. Another reason for the downturn in killing is that the two sects are now segregated and walled off from each other. Yet another significant reason for improvement in security is the simple fact we are now paying one hundred thousand former Sunni insurgents who once killed US servicemen and woman on a daily basis three hundred dollars per month each to be nice. Think of this as "The Splurge in the Surge", and it's money well spent.
Iran is in the driver's seat. It would like to play a large role in further quelling the violence in Iraq and contributing to political stability, because that would give them greater prestige in the Middle East (over an above what we've handed them so far). It would also be good for their own security.
So, are we going to accept reality and get over the fact we lost the girl, or are we going to beat our chest and insist on a pointless fight? Truly, if we have a right to be mad at anyone, it should be that myopic matchmaker, Wolfowitz, who conned us into thinking we had a chance with Iraq to begin with.
Brittany, Where are You now? We need you.
The TV media business requires a big show to sell advertising. Right now it's hell bent on whipping up a frenzy over the presidential race. It wants to sell political spots, which make up its quadrennial Christmas season. But our democracy doesn't really need this extravaganza at all. The choice isn't between two personalities, McCain and Obama, or hinge on their performance in debates. It's between two philosophies, and and that isn't news.
The individual voter either believes in free market fundamentalism and puts his or her faith in continued trickle-down economics, or else believes in regulation, redistribution of wealth downward, and the principles of the New Deal. End of story.
Brittany, we the people need a break. Can't you go on a rampage or something, just to shift the circus to another ring? Don't worry this will hurt the TV provocateurs. If you give them a good show, they can still peddle tons of pharmaceuticals during commercials.
Brother, can you spare 700 billion?
It's been entertaining listening to gurus of globalization and free market fundamentalism explaining the arcane technical details of how our financial system came to slam into the wall. It's like having the used car salesman who sold you a lemon explaining precisely how you came to get such a bad deal. Comical in its brazen disingenuousness.
For all their erudition, these gurus are talking in circles, and none will speak the whole truth: the string of bubbles culminating in the housing crash is not accidental. Rather, bubbles are essential to our out-of-whack economy.
A quarter century ago, the money boys decided this country didn't need to make goods anymore. Too messy and too much trouble. Instead, others could do the manufacturing and we'd just buy goods produced overseas. How were we to pay for the things we bought? By an accounting magic trick. We would make speculative bubbles, and the money created thereby would pay for everything. It was free lunch for all!
The movers and shakers could decide that something was becoming more valuable by the minute. Most recently, that something was houses. Those of us with a house were living in a gold mine! They offered us cash-out refinancing, equity loans, and rollovers to free our finances up to buy those consumer goods made elsewhere, say, China.
But that's just half the magic trick. The other necessary half was to entice the makers of consumer goods to lend us money so we could buy, buy, and buy some more. Countries like China were willing to go along because we had so much apparent wealth. They wanted some, so they pinned dollars on our money tree.
It worked until the bubble burst, but now our houses may not be worth even what we owe. It will be years before we have equity again. Our money tree has become a stump. Some people, lots of them in fact, will not be making payments anymore on their dead money trees. Banks are increasingly receiving "jingle mail", house keys in envelopes.
The gurus spouting economic techno-babble are confining their discussion to outrageous shenanigans in the financial sector, but the bigger problem is this: when you don't create wealth through manufacturing, the only way to get money is through borrowing and bubbles.
China may have made a big mistake lending us money. Why should we care about them? Because we have to get on to the next bubble (green technology looks good) right away and we'll need China to hang money on the next money tree when it sprouts. They're not going to do it if they suffer losses now, so our government has stepped in, declaring some financial institutions "too big to fail".
While we're making mortgage payments on our devalued houses in coming years, we'll also be paying extra taxes to pay for this bailout. The tax burden will be mitigated by reductions in other spending, such as Medicare, Social security, education, etc. All will be cut. And the failing infrastructure will have to fend for itself for at least another couple of decades. That won't bother the movers and shakers who pumped up the bubble and gouged the financial market much at all.
Here's the Scoop, Poopers
Repub's and the press are turning this election into another personality contest, each for their own reasons. But beyond that circus, the real issue is this: working people have been rear-ended for the past three decades by a political and economic policy that pampers the rich and justifies the pampering on the premise that the crumbs from their table will make us all fat. Unsurprisingly, this hasn't delivered for working people, and the damage is so far advanced that now most young people can't even make their rent, let alone settle down, buy a house, and start a family. They don't even have health insurance, and if they become pregnant they and their children are fated to be poor for the rest of their lives.
That's the real issue, not whether someone has charisma or character, not whether one's a woman or one's a minority, or another was a POW. That's all hooey. What matters is that we demand, NOW, that the next generation be given a slice of the pie, that they have the same opportunities we had starting out. Otherwise, they're doomed to live out their lives as modern day serfs.
Too many boomers like to think of themselves as middle class when in reality they are merely the beneficiary of New Deal policies that empowered working people economically. If that's you, then it's time to think about who you really are and where your parents came from. If you can bring that into focus, you'll see why this is the time to stand up for your kids.
And to all those 401K worshiping swine who've sold their own progeny down the river for the sake of their precious retirement, guess what? The poop is hitting the fan now, right now, so you are about to be reintroduced to where you came from anyway. Your stocks are about to become scratchy toilet paper, and you'd better figure out fast which side your bread's buttered on, if only to save your own ass. If the Dem's offered up a sock puppet as their candidate, you'd better vote for the goddamn sock puppet rather than put another Repub in the presidency to further fete the rich at working peoples' expense.
Rationality is the ultimate family value.
"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them."
Hunter S. Thompon
...when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
MR. MAGOO AND POVERTY TOO!
I'm apoplectic that this presidential race is turning out to be just another popularity contest. For me the overriding issue of the times is the well being of my children, which has been sabotaged by 28 years of trickle down economics. No pay, no security, no medical benefits, no rights, nothing but serfdom ahead.
Reagan the union buster started it off. He stacked the deck against working people (the term "middle class" is a pretension) and it's been getting worse ever since. Now Mr. Magoo says he'll make tax cuts for the profanely rich permanent. That's his remedy. Still, when I talked to a twenty-something last night who doesn't make enough after seven years at her job to move out of her parents' house, she said, "I don't like any of the candidates."
So there it is, despite the enormity of the emerging two class system, all that matters is whether the person you vote for is a guy you'd like to have a bowl of gruel with. I. give. up.
Voting Against Their Self-Interest, Again
For twenty-eight years the American worker has lived under the paradigm of Trickle Down Economics, with the result that even though productivity has increased by at least 25%, the average wage earner makes about the same as he or she did thirty years ago, in inflation adjusted dollars.
Worse, most young people cannot get a start in life because entry wages are so low they can barely make the rent, let alone start a family. Today it takes a college degree just do do as well as the ordinary working person did before, and for those with only a high school degree, there's nowhere to go but the military.
In the current situation, along with crumbling infrastructure and a failing healthcare system, you'd expect there to be a groundswell of protest and grassroots drive to gain back the wealth of the middle class. You'd be mistaken. This year's election will come down again to Values and ill-will toward immigrants, who are merely the instrument of business for depressing wages, not the culprits.
People do not really vote their pocketbooks, they vote their prejudices and fears, and guys like Carl Rove understand this very well.
Speaking of Turd Blossom
Downplayed in the US news was the fact that Russia's invasion of Georgia was an over response to Georgia's invasion of a break-away state that had ties to Russia. You have to wonder, at least a little, why the Georgian leader thought he'd get away with tweaking Russia's nose this way, and who put him up to it. Well, US Ambassador Carl Rove had the guy's ear a couple of weeks prior to his incursion, and one of Rove's top lieutenants met with him in Georgia the day before he kicked it off. That Rove inspired him to do it is mere conjecture, wild conspiracy. However, wherever Ambassador Rove goes, turds do blossom, so you have to wonder.
