Hold the Teacher Bashing

(Note: My local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constiution, ran a front page article in its Sunday edition blaming the fact our children score poorly on standardized tests entirely on our suckey teachers. In response, I wrote the following letter to the editor of the AJC, but it's well over the 150 word limit for submission, and it didn't get into print. The real reason it didn't get published may have had more to do with the fact there's a new publisher in town who is determined to make the AJC more "balanced" to increase sales amoung the neoconservative free market fundamentalist Neanterthals in the burbs.)

Objectively, how is it possible that the low achievement endemic to Georgia schools is entirely due to bad teachers? In other words, what does Georgia do to effectively select for a preponderance of deadwood in its ranks of educators? The answer is nothing, that although the school system surely must have its share of lackluster performers, there are other forces at work to stymie educational success that are being overlooked in this article.

Georgia has the third highest poverty rate in the nation, meaning there are myriad obstacles to learning for tens of thousands of children in the school system. That's a fact, not a cop out. Beyond that, education has been rocked by quixotic schemes to improve things on the cheap that undermine real education. Even the article's side panels reveal this: one person interviewed said he hadn't met a teacher in twenty years who gave a hoot about literature. Show me a school department in the last thirty that does! It's all teaching to the test now, turning students into answer boxes. There's no room in NCLB or its newer incarnation for either the appreciation of literature, that is, for imparting an understanding of the world and the individual's role in it, or for critical thought. Get out your number two pencils and get ready for the next round of high stakes testing because your life depends on your mastery of this narrow set of skills and nothing else!

Further, the article inherently buys into the idea that any remedy consists solely of dismissing bad teachers and rewarding good ones monetarily, the one-size-fits-all free market approach in vogue for everything these days. I submit that a person does a good job primarily because she or he is able, motivated, and committed to doing so, and is not looking over their shoulder constantly to see whether or not the next person over is coasting. For the superior producer it's inconceivable to do other than one's best. Dedicated people aren't circus chimps performing for treats. Anathema, I know.

In fairness, your article did place some blame on Georgia politicians' cynical on again/off again commitment to teacher training and improvement. However, the basic message of the article was that our teachers stink, and our politicians really don't care to do anything about it.

Finally, the pursuit of excellence can preclude even the attainment of competence if it pretends it's alright to leapfrog the necessary steps along the way.

P.S. (not originally submitted to the newspaper) How do you educate the children of parents who believe Jesus rode a brontosaur bareback?

Prions Anyone? / or Oasama bin Prion / or the Coming Biological Logan's Run?

(Forward note: Prion, pronounced PreE-on for some reason, is a cattywompus contraction of "infectious protein". It refers to a protein complex that closely resembles normal protein in the body, except it's counterfeit in that its geometry is different. When prions are accepted by the body and incorporated in cells they result ultimately in cell death. They are like bad auto-parts, except they have the pernicious effect of warping good cell protein into their own form, which multiplies the damage.)

Some say the world will end in fire, others say in ice. Either way, the end might actually be just an hallucination resulting from dementia caused by Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD).

What the hell is CJD? If you've donated blood at the Red Cross you've seen those hyphenated names in their screening questionnaire. It asks whether you've been diagnosed with CJD or if runs in your family. I've seen the questions and recognized it has something vaguely to do with Mad Cow Disease and/or cannibalism. I've always thought, "Runs in your family? Now there's a family picnic I can skip!" The Red Cross questionnaire also asks how long you have spent in England recently, and how much time cumulatively you've spent in Europe. It's pretty clear that what they're driving at is, "How many steaks have you eaten in London?"

This has all seemed a little silly to me, really. Yes, there was an outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in England and Europe a few years ago which tragically turned a number of previously heathy young people into victims of a form of aggressive Alzheimer's that produced dementia and death in a year or so. Very sad to see this happen to people in their twenties and thirties. Frankly though, the extreme measures taken by the British Government (they have a functioning government over there which they don't all despise and want to eliminate, and which unlike our own is not subjugated to cost-benefit analysis) seems to have eliminated BSE from their beef stock. So the danger has passed and lessons have been learned, which makes all these questions in the Red Cross screening look slightly paranoid.

Several years after the BSE event my wife and I and our adult daughters took our vacation of all family vacations and flew to Ireland for ten days. Had a wonderful time. Over and over in restaurants we saw a blurb on the menu stating the beef served was good Irish beef. The implication was it wasn't that disease-ridden crap from England. Every time I read this blurb I thought it was either a marketing gimmick or a pat answer to tiresome, persistent questions from American tourists pertaining to an outdated crisis.

But the space given to prion-based disease in the Red Cross blood donation screening gives me pause. In the past I've looked at this barrage of questions as a possible lawyer-mandated CYOA measure or else the residual product of some well-meaning government edict (we do hate our government over here!). It seemed out of proportion to the miniscule number of potential infections. When you put CJD into perspective by comparing this minimal danger to the tens of thousands of deaths known to be caused every year by medical errors and hospital-acquired infections, the concern seems overblown. As one well known TV journalist with decided libertarian leanings would say, "Give me a break!"

But perhaps where there is smoke there is fire. If there really is a problem it could be one of of epic magnitude.

CJD, Alzheimer's, and BSE all produce amyloid plaques in the brain, an accumulation of junk prions. These plaques are a telltale indication of massive cell destruction. As noted at the outset, the prions contained in these plaques are composed of not just those ingested, but of once normal proteins that these prions have won over tho their side. Unlike the normal form of the protein complex, the protein in amyloid plaques is insoluble, so this sludge just sticks around. Drugs have been developed to clear away this garbage, but by that point the cell damage has already been done, although there may be some minor benefit to clearing the plaques.

Prions convert normal protein to prion protein at their ends. A linear chain of prions grows as converted protein is added. It's like a stick growing in length, slowly. When the stick gets to a certain length it breaks in halves, which is unfortunate, because now instead of two sites to add protein to, there now are four. The conversion of normal protein to prions now proceeds at double the rate before. (Anybody sense a monster progression coming?)

To appreciate the upshot of this, consider a magic penny on your dresser that reproduces its self once per year. After the first year there are two pennies. At the end of the second, four pennies are sitting atop your dresser. (Please also note that the penny, like the amyloid protein, cannot be removed from the dresser top).

At the end of ten years there is just a little over ten dollars in pennies on the dresser, but at the end of 20 there's over twenty grand in copper sitting there on top of a crushed dresser. At the end of 30 years, over ten million dollars in pennies are present, and at the end of 40 there are ten billion dollars worth of pennies filling the sink hole where your house once stood! Such is the power of successive doubling, even slow doubling.

So too, a solitary prion you might have ingested in the early 90's could be doubling inexorably in your body, on its way to converting brain matter into gooey frappe just in time for your planned retirement! Hopefully, this is science fiction, but my personal feeling is that we, and by "we" I mean our government, should be employing a massive screening of our food supply including beef and any other animal we typically ingest that can bear prions, to see if there's a biological time bomb ticking in the population.

Perhaps the government already has an inkling. Perhaps it's aware and is in a state of paralysis. Who knows?

If we are infected, the best we can do is purge the food supply to protect unborn generations. For us there would really be no reason to even stop eating prion-contaminated food, since it isn't the prion we eat today that'll get us, it's the one we ingested years ago that's doing the damage. Still, we shouldn't, I don't think, just say the hell with it and accept a step decrease in the human life span to 50 years. The government should employ newly devised screening methods to examine the food supply NOW. (Hey, this project meets the criterion of "shovel-ready" in more ways than one!)

I conflate BSE, Alzheimer's Disease, and CDJ because they are all prion diseases. Experts will say "No, they are all distinct and separate", but I say "If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck with prion-caused dementia, don't eat the duck." India has a low incidence of Alzheimer's. Everyone knows Hindus eschew eating meat. Could there be a correlation? Well, unbelievably, researchers in the US have proposed that because Indians use large quantities of curry in preparing food, curry may impart some immunity to Alzheimer's.

Seriously? Reminds me of the scene in the movie "The Jerk" when Steve Martin's character, working in a gas station, is being shot at by a psychopath. The shots are missing and hitting oil cans on a rack. Martin's character declares, "I know, he hates these cans!"

Austerity, reducing the federal budget in order to shrink the federal debt, will mean cutbacks in Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutritional supplements among other things. Down to brass tacks, that means millions of pregnant woman will not receive food supplements during pregnancy, jeopardizing their baby's normal development and increasing the chance of birth defects. After that, because supplements to infant and toddler will be cut, in countless cases the developing child will not only be more vulnerable to disease, but its full mental and physical potential will not be reached. In a real sense, this is a tradeoff of IQ points against debt dollars.

A lot of average working people support the Austerity movement despite the fact it will affect many of their families directly in a profound way. For everyone, the cost of shortchanging mothers and children will also be massive down the road. The diminution and stunting of a generation will require vast future expenditures in special education, ballooning of otherwise preventable medical costs, and in twenty years, skyrocketing increases in crime and incarceration.

Of course, it isn't just WIC, Medicaid's under the budget cutting knife too. Forget about vaccinations then, and childhood diseases could regain some of the power of life and death they had in olden times. In a way, the suffering will have been a tradeoff for the satisfaction of bringing the budget in line. And to the contention it will spare future generations burdensome debt? Perhaps, but it's no bargain for the price they will pay.

Principal, not Principle, drives debt mania

What's all this fuss over the debt about? In my opinion the wealthy see the ship's sinking and they're trying to preclude having to throw out lifesavers to the millions of people who will soon be drowning. I really don't believe that serious people on either side of this issue are driven by sincere concern over the debt, or even by ideology, I think that's a smokescreen.

Still, isn't it good fun for politicians to foam at the mouth and pretend for the crowd that there's some great principle at stake?

"Let the poor die and decrease the surplus population." --Ebenezer Scrooge

"The debt doesn't really matter." --VP Dick Cheney

The Federal Debt and Tax Rates

Any normal person can look at this composite graph and recognize these facts:

Debt:
1. Debt as a % of GNP is now 40% LOWER than it was in 1950
2. Reagan ran that figure UP and Clinton brought it DOWN, while Bush II only raised it slightly.
3. Both Reagan-Bush and Bush II drove the dollar debt WAY UP.

Tax Revenue:
UP under Reagan and Clinton, but Clinton MORE. Large DROP under Bush II.

Top Tax Rate:
Approximately 50% LOWER now than it was under Eisenhower.

Overall:
1. Clinton produced more overall tax revenue than Reagan and saw a higher increase while tax rates were higher, but Bush II lowered taxes and decreased revenue.
2. Reagan-Bush and Bush II each generated orders of magnitude more debt than during the Clinton Administration.

Of course, if you're a Wal-Mart Republican or a Tea Bagger, you'll have to get someone to explain the graph to you, and in the end you will refuse to accept the facts anyway.

If you want to see how the average person is doing relative to the monied elite, check out this wage and wealth distribution graphic.

NOT an Affirmation by Stuart Smalley:

Where do we go from here?

When attempting to change the paradigm, it's helpful to remember how we got where we are, how we as a culture came to embrace the bankrupt philosophy of "greed is good", and how we came to accept this winner-take-all socioeconomic model. We had it too good as baby boomers and we got lazy. Frankly, we forgot who we were, well paid workers, not truly "middle class" in the classic sense. We fell asleep in front of the TV for three decades. We sat by passively as unions were decimated, and so let the fat cats seize complete control.

Now we have awoken. Where do we start? First, we need not waste time and energy trying to persuade the opposition that their paranoid, misogynous, racist, mean spirited tenets constitute a death cult. Don't even give these pernicious clowns the time of day.

Instead, we should state openly our conviction that 1) we are in this together, 2) that no one needs to go without in this wealthy country, and that 3) all workers should be paid enough to live comfortably, meaning having access to medical care, nutritious food, secure and adequate domicile, clothing and transportation. It also means our children have equal access to post secondary education concomitant with their interests and abilities.

To the inevitable affront, "You think the world owes you something", answer, "You're damn right it does, it owes me the freedom from being made a serf in a rigged economic system! It owes me more than being the loser in a real life international monopoly game."

We need to support unions generally, and we need to resurrect the Employee Free Choice Act in its original form. We need to stop redistributing wealth upwards. We need to make the Neutron Jack Welch's of the business world cough up their ill-gotten gains in restitution. Protest is a valid tool, but strategically targeted boycotts are a better one. We need to take back the public airwaves. We need to speak out strongly against this Austerity foolishness, which is solely a cudgel the right uses against the poor and needy.

We need to spend less time in front of the TV. We need to support alternative media. We need to call "Bullshit!" What's at stake is the future of our children and grandchildren.

Is That a WMD in Your Column, or Are You Just Happy to be a Craven Toady?

Journalistic integrity? Independent, honest, objective thinking? Probably not a lot of those during the Roman Empire either. Power and money always drive social entropy. In Rome, the most bankrupt behavior was expressed at the end, when violent spectacle and coercive patriotism were used to bind their crumbling civilization. Sound familiar?

Hey, My Whitey-Tighties Arrived Pre-Stained!

Haynes and Fruit-of-the-Loom produce their underwear in Haiti. Until recently, the pay scale for Haitian workers was $1.75. The workers demanded $5, but that was vehemently opposed, not just by US manufacturers, but by the EU, Brazil, and of course, Hillary and Company. Ultimately, the rate was set at $3.00. It was kept to the lower figure via exclusion of Aristide's party from the recent elections, because it was sure to support the workers' quest for $5.00. Exclusion of Aristide's party ensured the installation of a right-wing government guaranteed to block the outlandish rate increase. Actually, even after acquiescing to the sham election, the US and the rest doubly ensured the right wing's victory by funding their party's commercials on local radio and TV. We were taking no chances.

Haitians are really hard pressed. For them, as for most of the world's poor, the continual spikes in the cost of food is killing them, literally. Speculation in international markets drives up food prices just as it does oil prices. Haiti formerly grew enough rice to be self-sufficient, but after Aristide was ejected in the past CIA coup, the country was commited to obtaining its food on the international market. This made food cheaper in the near term, so much so that rice farmers quickly went our of business and moved to Port au Prince to seek manufacturing jobs there.

This suited the US manufacturers and the Haitian elite, whose aim it is to turn Haiti into an island maquiladora. By the way, it was largely these displaced farmers and their families who occupied the shanties on the hillside, the shacks that were totally wiped out in the earthquake with massive loss of life.

So, despite rising food prices and having been rendered incapeable of feeding themselves by the action, design, and intent of US business, the Haitian workers will be held to $3.00. That's $3 a fucking DAY, not an hour.

Got bleach?

The Mouse is Mightier than the Glock

Occasionally I hear someone posit, "What if every Jew had met the Nazis with a gun?" The short answer is the Nazis would have used flame-throwers. But such is the faith of Americans in their guns that they believe guns to be a talisman against totalitarianism. They think pistols and rifles would stop a determined effort by government to subjugate the population.

First off, our corporate government pretty much dictates our lives already. We are free to do whatever we want as long as it's buying whichever electronic gadgets they proffer using the usurious credit cards they provide. We already do what we're told without even having to be coerced because we take our queues from TV.

If we did get rambunctious, the government could easily cut off our water, electricity, and natural gas. it could stop the trucks from rolling, denying us access to food. they could freeze our money in the bank. they can surveil us and uncover the trouble makers. in fact, they already do that. in short, they can break us quickly and easily without having to resort to actual violence.

if called upon, the government could deploy any of its various paramilitary outfits, the FBI, ATF, and numerous other agencies, against us. they are all armed and could be ordered to subdue us. also, the local police have been connected more closely to the federal government through anti-terrorism programs. beyond that there's the military. then too, many local cops are veterans of Mideast wars that required subduing the civil population. they're damn good at it by now, and i see nothing that would restrain them from using what they have learned in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in a "peacekeeping" role here at home. also, those drones, both surveillance and killer, could be used here just as easily as they are in foreign countries.

nope, prying your gun from your emaciated, dehydrated, cold dead fingers wouldn't be much of a problem if the government wanted to do it. if you fear a government takeover, you would spend your time and money more effectively learning how to hack computers. maybe then you could at least anticipate the knock on the door.

Billions to Chase a Bogeyman, not One Cent for the Destitute

In the decade since the 9-11 attack, approximately 400,000 Americans have died due to lack of medical insurance. On the other hand, the nation has spent well over a trillion dollars and counting on a war in Iraq, which was completely unrelated to 9-11, and in Afghanistan, which had a connection to the attack, but far less than Saudi Arabia, from which the operation was funded and from which most of the hijackers originated. And nobody knows how many hundreds of thousand of civilians have been killed in these wars. The numbers of GI's killed exceeds the death toll on 9-11, and no one is even counting private contractor casualties. Further, the catastrophic wounds suffered by GI's in these wars will affect them and their communities for the rest of their lives.

It just seems that our priorities are out of whack. Trying to do something for the millions of uninsured Americans evoked such visceral opposition that the resulting legislation to increase coverage for the working poor (which will shortly describe almost all of us) is a Frankenstein. Meanwhile, our morbid fear of terrorism has led us to expend a limitless amount of our limited resources in an effort to hunt down every potential terrorist on the planet. Even if that were ultimately possible, it seems extreme.

It's as if our house were being devoured by termites but we are ignoring that fact and instead spending all our time and every dollar we have trying to exterminate the rat living behind the furnace in the basement. By the time we get the rat the house will have collapsed.

Shock and fear have driven us to funnel all our resources to a single purpose for the past decade. This is an understandable reaction to the horror of 9-11. Reconsidering and readjusting our priorities would seem to be appropriate now though.

It'll never happen. Why? Because well positioned, wealthy people are benefiting from the present pattern of government spending. Companies like Haliburton, Blackwater (Xe) and other private defense firms have done and continue to do very, very well as a result of their role in the War on Terror. So well that they would be un-eager to entertain debate about re-prioritization and reallocation of resources. Then too, insurance and pharmaceutical companies benefit through the present system of medical care delivery that keeps prices high while restricting access, so they are also loathe to jeopardize their position in the medical care rationing racket.

Nope, we are fated to run round and round this mulberry bush until there is no longer a middle class, two thirds of the population lives in poverty, and men woman and children die by the hundreds of thousands from preventable diseases. Nothing will change because both major parties cater to those who are currently amassing vast fortunes from the status quo.

As an illustration of the impossibility of national politicians' and popular pundits' even admitting the need for change, there was an exchange between Joe Lieberman (D-Lite) and Dick Cheney at the start of one of the vice presidential debates in the 2000 election. Joe started out with a snide remark that Cheney's company, Haliburton, had done very well in the preceding eight years during a Democratic administration. Dick growled back that yes, it had, but without any government handouts! The crowd appreciated Dick Cheney's rejoinder.

What is significant is that Joe failed to counter-counter punch with: "The reality is that your company made most of its profits from government contracts, and even in the case of its 'free market' based jobs, it benefited from government-backed loans." That would have been bad etiquette, so good for you for just smiling sheepishly in response, Joe. It's fundamentally important to keep the party going, the money flowing, and avoid tipping off the rubes that the game's fixed.

Really, it wasn't always this way.

I try to tell young people, people not much younger than my parents were at the time, how almost anyone in the 1950's and 60's could afford to raise a family, buy a house, and earn a retirement benefit through work. It's not that young people think I'm lying, it's just that they can't imagine things being that way. Hell, I can't even get other 60 year olds to admit that's how things were.

But it's a fact that fifty years ago all boats were rising, whereas now all but one in a hundred are taking on water at an ever increasing rate. This is despite the fact productivity in the intervening years has more than doubled, and that technology has burgeoned. Now we working people make less in adjusted dollars, we have crushing personal debt, can't afford to send our kids to school, have no pensions, and we're facing reductions in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Worst of all, our kids and grandchildren will be less well off than we are. That really stings.

What went wrong? Well, seems that over the years all the gains in productivity went elsewhere other than to the working middle class. T-r-i-c-k-l-e D-o-w-n economics did that for us. What's really incredible is that a majority of the voting public has recently put in office right wing ideologues who are sworn to crush the remnants of the working middle class by undercutting wages, removing whatever is left of the social safety net, and erasing any lingering vestiges of the New Deal. Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty has called his plan to relieve the rich of most tax obligations, privatize all government functions, and eliminate the safety net his "Better Deal". Sure, better for his rich benefactors, but it's the same dealing from the bottom of the deck that has been going on for thirty years and which has spoiled life in this country for its working people.

Wealth has re-conquered the throne. Democracy is dead and economic feudalism is back. And no one seems to care. That's a good thing, perhaps, because the high-ups wouldn't give anything back without rampant bloodshed. They're very one-way in that regard.

When Times get Tough, Weasels look for Somebody to Bash

Thanks for building our houses, thanks for harvesting my family's food, thanks for making the place look like the Imperial Garden. But money is tight now because our rich looted the economy, so we don't need you anymore. We want you to go back home and take your kids who grew up here with you. Scram. (Forget about going back and farming though, because NAFTA has made it uneconomic where you come from.) Do onto others as you would have them do onto you? Naw, not in a recession.

The Great Leap Backward

During the late sixties and early seventies, around the time of the Powell Memo (written by the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell to then Director of the US Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor), the American elite became resolute in their determination to unfetter capitalism from the restraints placed on it by the Roosevelt Administration. The fruition of that effort is evident now in the decimation of this country's middle class, accompanied by the overwhelming shift of wealth toward those at the very top.

Game's over for working people. They are headed back to the lives of drudgery their great grandparents had in the mills, if they're lucky. Still, ideologues obscenely spout the desirability of getting government off the backs of business, hawking their magic elixir to dead plague victims. And believe it or not, sales are good!

Hell-o-ooo...

What part of this do Washington meat puppets and mainstream media monkeys not understand?

* * * Working people's wages are too goddamn low! * * *

For over thirty years wages have been suppressed through the active efforts of the monied elite. The ultra-wealthy have sought, successfully, to bust unions, block increases in the minimum wage, off-shore millions of jobs, and in lieu of wages, press rediculously easy-to-obtain credit on US working people through their vampire credit card companies.

In the political system at present, BOTH PARTIES REPRESENT THE WEALTHY to the exclusion and detriment of the working majority. During the last election one man ran for office under the banner of the "Rent's Too Damn High" party. When you look who's calling the shots and who's capitulating to their demands with alacrity in Washington, this man's stated platform seems less of a joke than an appealing alternative to the indolent Democratic and repugnant Republican parties.

Surely the plenitude of pundits in the media are aware of the three decade long class war the wealthy have waged against working people, and certainly the politicians of both parties are eternally grateful to the media pundits for never, never bringing it up.

(From Harper's Index, June 2011)

Your 2010 federal tax dollars at work:

amount given to National Public Radio____________________ $2,700,000
amount given to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University________ $446,000,000

Astounding how the right cites patriotic concern about the federal deficit as a pretext for slashing NPR funding, but utters not a peep about their political/religious pet project which receives 165 times as much!

Disgusting how the idiot TV news feels no obligation to inform its watchers of this.

Heartbreaking that the modern Democratic Party is so risk-aversive it dares not bring this up. It is an institution that has lost hold of the reason for its existence, which was to defend the little guy from the ruthlessness of the robber barons, the monied elite.

Now both parties serve the wealthy exclusively and the little guy is without representation. The Repubs project open hostility toward working people, while the Dems are in the untenable position of having to portray themselves as still being the champion of the people while doing exactly what they're told to do by their fat cat bosses. They're trying to uphold their brand, but it's a fraud. The election system forces them to turn to the boys with deep pockets, and to think they do not come to heel for their patrons is pathetically naive.

Family Values and Small Government

Let the needy and vulnerable fend for themselves. Insist every fetus inside a woman live through gestation, but refuse paying for prenatal care if the woman can't afford it, refuse nutrition for her during pregnancy, refuse to feed the infant, the toddler. Ignore the child in need, the pre-teen at risk. And if that negatively effects him/her developmentally, the ultimate outcome later is likely to be the gain of fresh grist for the prison-industrial complex. Don't forget to remind any who oppose this course of action that you are a Christian and therefore your motives are unimpeachable.

If and when the children of the ordinary receive any education, be sure that it takes the form of rigid training suited to the intake needs of corporations and not in any way an invitation to gain an understanding of the world. Refuse higher education to any but the scions of the wealthy because of the expense, but also because it undermines the natural order. Repeal child labor laws so children can be put in harness and yoke before they know any other way of existence.

Say you want to balance the budget, which necessitates withdrawing medical care for tens of millions, eventually hundreds. Reduce the tax "burden" to the wealthy (which is actually a small fraction now of what it was during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower) to create a state and federal financial crisis sufficient to justify your Draconian austerity.

Bust unions so that not only will there no longer be an uppity middle/working class, but no voice of opposition to selling off the commons to private corporations, with the result that roads, bridges, and water supplies will be in the hands of private businesses not answerable to public needs. And bye-bye public lands too.

Meanwhile, continue disgorging hundreds of billions for armed conflicts that to varying degrees have been pursued to serve the interests of multinational corporations that regularly pay no taxes in this country. Not only will that fatten their bottom line, but the cost reinforces the justification for Austerity.

changes

prior to Obama's taking office i believed george W. bush, cheney, and their crew of crony capitalists were the problem. i thought when they went away the stench would slowly dissipate. now i think differently. i now recognize that both the major political parties serve the wealthy exclusively, and neither cares about the vast majority of ordinary people. the democrats may sympathize with us, but business is business, and they serve the wealthy who write them big campaign checks and field armies of lobbyists who monopolize every politician's time and attention. the republicans are captives of the same lobbyists, but they seem openly hostile toward ordinary people, which bizarrely, seems to appeal to some of them.

i now believe the game is completely and hopelessly rigged and that other than at election time, we the people are of no significance to our elected officials. i believe this now because even though a smart, highly attuned and eloquent man won the last presidential election, he can apparently do no more than continue to fete the amoral financial barons as his predecessors had, defer to institutional torturers, and kowtow to military brass. meanwhile, he abets the republicans in dismantling social programs essential to the middle class and the poor, sacrificing all of us on the altar of bipartisanship.

surprisingly, the change in perception i've undergone even effects my interpretation of the past. i look back and consider anew that jfk had made it plain he would like to eliminate the cia, then seemingly ironically, was eliminated himself. i have not come to embrace conspiracy theories as a way to make sense of events. no, i have simply lost my innocence and along with it nearly all confidence in our political system.

we the people stand disenfranchised, the wealth of the middle class has been stripped away, and our children are doomed to living a 21st century form of serfdom.

corporations are poised to take over our commons, drinking water included. we are becoming a third world country subject to all the forms of exploitation by multinational corporations attendant to that stature. further, when society ultimately disintegrates, the likely scenario, the only plausible outcome, will be a military coup. like rome, our withered democracy will be replaced with rule by an unaccountable elite. so much for hope.

Sen Bernie Sanders, I-VT

* calls out the war on working families

* has a real problem with Obama's budget (aka, Obams's love sonnet to the repubs)

It's just the rich bolting again

Ok, here's what I think is really going on: we are a consumer-based economy with a middle class that can no longer afford to consume. We bought time, about a decade, by borrowing against our houses but now that the housing bubble's burst the Chinese and Europeans don't have any excuse anymore to keep writing us checks.

The wealthy class knows the shit's about to hit the fan and things are going to become very uncomfortable, dire, even tragic for a great number of people in what we have been calling the middle class. The wealthy have therefore proactively set about to reduce their exposure, that is, they have promoted elimination of the social safety net just before there will be a massive demand for assistance.

They send their operatives and their willing dupes to clamor for debt reduction via elimination of social programs even while they increase the debt through tax reductions. Frankly, they care not at all about the debt, and the tax reductions are merely a tool with a pleasant side effect, but what they really, really want is to ward off having to foot the bill for aiding the many millions who will soon be destitute. Let the poor die in the snow.

Ask not for whom the drone trolls. It trolls for thee.

Four factors driving the death of the American middle class

First, there's the austerity bomb being dropped on us. We are told by our "leaders" that the country is broke and therefore we -the middle class and the poor- must undergo sacrifice in order to salvage the economy. This is absurd because there is plenty of wealth, it's just all at the high end of our population and it's not being taxed. Nonetheless, it seems that the purported drive to balance the budget will be done on the backs of those least to blame for the deficit, less able to pay, and most adversely effected by it.

The government is seriously underfunded, yes, but not because of social programs that benefit the poor and middle class. It's underfunded because of: drastically low tax receipts resulting from Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, so much that they now are taxed at a small fraction of the rate those in their income category were paying while President Dwight D. Eisenhower was president; huge and growing expenditures on medicaid part D, prescriptions, because of the restriction against the program's bargaining over drug prices (this was also passed into law under Bush II, but current Republicans and many Democrats are politically financed by the drug industry, so nothing will change). Additionally, wars and other massive military spending are draining the treasury. We spend at least as much yearly on the military as the rest of the world combined. And of course, the Wall Street Ponzi scheme hollowed out the world economy, so fewer taxes are being paid by under-unemployed workers.

The second contributor to the the destruction of the middle class is the operant economic policy of the last 30 years, "trickle down". Harper's index notes that although worker productivity has gone up 144% since 1972, real wages have gone down by 6%. Somebody's getting rich, but it's not workers. Jobs have gone overseas through treaties destructive to the working class but conducive to lavish corporate profits. Only low paying service jobs remain. We have suffered a dramatic decrease in personal wealth because of low wages and losses due to the housing bubble. All this while record corporate profits have been obtained from laying off throngs of workers and driving the remaining ones like sled dogs in the Iditarod.

Unions are the only voice speaking for working people, but unions have been under massive and relentless attack for decades. Union busting by companies has become an academic discipline as well as an art form. We are on the ropes. We the working class are so broke that higher education is beyond the reach of our children and once again has become the sole privilege of the wealthy.

The third reason the middle class is in peril is that it's being attacked by the ultra conservative right which is using the economic downturn as cover to conclusively undue the New Deal policies that elevated the working class to begin with. Claiming to be concerned about reducing the debt, the right now wants to cut and ultimately eliminate medicare, medicaid, S.S., and all sorts of programs that sustain a working middle class and help the poor, like Pell grants and WIC. What shows that their claiming to be motivated by concern over the debt to be a flimsy lie is their insistence the rich continue to receive the tax breaks that have indebted America. Let's face it, this is a class war, it's been on for three decades, it's personal, and we're losing badly.

The fourth and most pernicious cause of the impending death of the American middle/working class lies within ourselves. We refuse to do anything to defend ourselves and our children from the onslaught of an economy crippled by Wall Street, long standing economic policies antagonistic toward working people, and an overt assault from the wealthy. Why? Because we baby boomers have grown old, tired, and cautious together. We're still the majority, but we just don't have the juice anymore. We led the charge for justice in our youth but now we just block up the halls.

Government's Solution: make the victims pay restitution

For the past thirty years the rich haven't been paying enough taxes, and as a result, they have accumulated vast wealth while states have been left in dire need of funds; wages for working people, the vast majority, have actually gone down and we have reached the point we can no longer even borrow to keep consuming; Wall St. has gorged itself to such an extent the economy had to be transfused with taxpayer money to keep it from crashing.

Now what is a Republican House and a Democratic President and Senate pitching to set things right, new taxes for the wealthy and penalties for Wall St.? Restoration of unions so that working people can live better and resume consumption? Shutting down some of our hundreds of military bases in foreign countries? Hell no, their answer is to cut Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, Social Security, Title X, heating fuel assistance, and freeze wages for government employees! In other words, the victims of swindle and abuse will be forced to make restitution. Welcome back to the Guilded Age.

Battling the Masters of the Universe

I read an article in the lefty press about the need to turn out in the streets to battle anti-enviromental corporate forces. As interesting as the article was, the respondents had even more interesting things to say. Several seemed to really have a handle on what was needed. They pointed out that the left was too fragmented to be effective against a unified and monolithic right, that we need a unified command and control (they didn't put it in those terms, of course, they are liberals.) So true. How could the left ever consolidate to face the enemy with a sizable, unified force? Why,working through the Democratic Party, of course!

Unfortunately, the notion that the Democratic Party serves the people is an anachronism. Since at least Clinton's time in office, and probably since Carter, the Democratic Party has been pro-business, and in this world pro-business means anti-labor. Business' influence is overpowering. Every politician, regardless of whether his or her name is suffixed with a D or an R is dependent on business to fund their campaign, to come up with the money to air commercials for their candidacy.

This universal dependance of politicians on business is more obvious now than ever before. President Obama, despite his campaign rhetoric, turns out to be an inveterate corporatist. How else would he have been allowed to win the office? Despite the grassroots surge in donations, his campaign was in actuality paid for by Wall Street. Now he's dancing with "those who brung him". (Miss you, Molly Ivans.)

So, will getting into the streets suffice to alter the course of the ship of state? Not without muscle to back it up. Nice if you come out and hold up a sign, but will the corporate-owned media even cover it? Not unless you are willing to die for your cause, and even then, as in the case of Wisconsin's Matt Schauenberg's hunger strike, that probably won't be enough.

Remember, we're dealing with the masters of the universe here. They hold the pursestrings, which is effectively the power of life and death over their workers. They own the media, so they provide the narrative and they control the message. And for good measure, they even own the voting machines! How in Hell can the working class triumph over the grubbing elite by merely sitting at the gates of power and being dragged away arrested?

Nope, the vision of Frances Perkins was not allowed to shape the New Deal on the basis of merit alone. It was the perceived threat of a socialist uprising that allowed New Deal programs to be implemented. The New Deal was a sop to working people to keep them from storming the gates.

In this second Gilded Age, will just protesting policies that coddle corporations while harming average working people be enough? Will sincere protest enlighten policy makers? Sure, right after the Easter Bunny takes first place on American Idol. These politicians are bought. They see you and your grassroots opposition to corporate hegemony as quaint, just like they view the Geneva Convention.

In the face this profound corruption that runs through all three branches of government, what can We the People do to wrest the country back from the elite? I honestly don't think the mandarins would cede power to anything less than the guillotine, and face it, we are just not up for that. We're too enervated. We are too busy acquiring apps for our time-sucking digital toys to go out and slay the dragon. We're not so much Good Germans as we are Good Romans, preoccupied by bread and circus.

A Bright Shiney Shutdown

Seems to me that the effects of a government shutdown would be precisely what the far right has wanted on a permanent basis all along. A shutdown would suspend transfer payments to those many Americans who are in need during this jobless recovery. It would halt payments for medical treatment and food supplements for the working poor and their children. It would stop pension and Social Security payments. It would ultimately undermine public education and infrastructure. To the right, that's not a nightmare, it's a dream come true!

That's why the president chose the National Air and Space Museum as the venue for a speech about the pitfalls of a shutdown. He chose that backdrop because weakening the war machine is the one and only contradiction the right wing sees to a shutdown. After all, they need the military to do their bidding in the world.

response to an AP article,
"Analysis: So much for change coming to Washington",
regarding the just ended budget standoff.

You say no one is to blame, but only after tacitly putting the blame on Obama. You only hint that the gridlock was caused by the Tea Party's desire to kill Planned Parenthood. You don't even mention that Boehner's party turned a budget bill into a fight over values. While this article is better than most from the mainstream press, it still has one wheel stuck in The Rut of the Commonly Accepted Narrative. "Gore is a Liar", "Hillary is a Winner", "McCain is a Maverick", and now "Obama can't deliver on Change".

The article might have said: the battle between President Obama-Hoover and those who wanted to destroy Planned Parenthood ended with many draconian cuts to critically needed social programs, but without sacrificing Planned Parenthood to the same people who ate ACORN. Further, not a dime was taken away from the Military Industrial Complex, as expected. Thus the empire slides inexorably into the tar pit, crapping all over itself as it goes.

Eric Canter: Social Security incompatible with the America We want to live in.

The "We" Cantor speaks of consists of the gentry like himself and the wealthy nobility like the Koch-roaches he works for. Their Freedom is our servitude. Their economic security is our destitution.

What he is specifically aiming at here is to drive a wedge between younger wage earners and retirees. He wants to be able to say to the young, "Look, you're paying to buy golf clubs for these old guys, and no one is ever going to do that for you!" That's what's behind his 55 and older "grandfathering" pitch which would deny Social Security to everone younger.

Social Security does NOT add to the deficit. Social Security is fully funded and will be for decades --forever if we move the S.S. tax cutoff higher so as to tax the wealthy on a greater portion of their income.

Besides, Reagan raised S.S. taxes to ensure full funding. (Then with Alan Greenspan's blessing he turned around and handed the money over to his rich friends and benefactors through tax breaks, leaving an IOU for the S.S. funds he stole.)

Increase taxes on the wealthy to the level they were under Eisenhower and 95% of our problems evaporate.

Republicans' Orwellian "Freedom" means Our Domination

Repubs are hard at work sabotaging government for the same reason they are destroying unions: they intend to eliminate any institution that could protect or empower average people. They want to be able to dictate and punish with absolute impunity like the royalty they believe they are. That's what they mean when they say FREEDOM.

Lame Editorials Call for Pension Reform

In editorials with titles like, "Pensions under water: Reform overdue", newspaper editors chime in with the mass media narrative that public employee pensions are too expensive to be honored. The editorial echos the narrative's implication that these pensions rob taxpayers, who themselves enjoy no such benefit. There is a measure of vengeance in this narrative.

Although the are plenty of examples of public employees double dipping or inveigling lavish retirement pay, those abuses are usually confined to individuals at the top, not the average public worker expecting only a modest stipend after age 65. The forces behind the narrative seek to paint all public employees with the same broad brush though.

What seems to be intentionally left out in The Narrative is that a contract exists between government and public employees. In it, employees deferred salary in order to have a pension at the end of their working lives. Jobs in the public sector traditionally pay somewhat less than equivalent jobs in the private sector requiring the same educational level because of this agreement. (The pushers of The Narrative contradict this, but they lie when they do so.)

If you remember, our parent's generation was all about getting a job with a pension and good benefits. It was a tiresome refrain we heard again and again, especially from older relatives. They put so much value on these things because they were scarred by the Great Depression, when elderly people went homeless and hungry. For our generation, this penchant for security based on an ancient calamity seemed quaintly passe.

We were far less fearful. We knew that clinging to these security blankets was a drag on prosperity, so when jobs with bigger salaries without pensions came along, we took them. A job need only have a 401K plan with company contributions, and that would suffice for us. Onward and upward! Problem is though, fewer and fewer jobs even have matching contributions anymore, so no longer are there no pensions, but our ability to sock away money has diminished. Adding to that, our market-battered 401K's have shriveled.

Although it's been touted as a substitute for pensions, a brief look at what the 401K was invented for is instructive: it was dreamed up by friends of the wealthy in government as a means for corporate executives to defer paying taxes on their bonuses until after retirement when the marginal tax rate would be lower. That's how the 401K was born, and it's a travesty to stand and tell any person on a modest salary that this is his or her sole pathway to retirement security.

As to putting public employees on a 401K plan, that's ridiculous and basically cynical. Even presuming they made enough to stow away a sum sufficient to live on in old age --which they don't-- it's a rare individual who has the discipline to amass such a large nest egg. Maybe Japanese are big enough savers, but not Americans! The absolutely overwhelming proportion of Americans are relying heavily on Social Security for their retirement, which public employees do not even have access to.

What it comes down to is this: states and municipalities made a contract with public employees to accept lower salaries in exchange for pensions and other benefits, but Wall Street marauding and government malfeasance have robbed the till. Faced with obligations they cannot honor without pain, politicians are seeking to cast public employees as villains. It's the time honored ploy of the pickpocket yelling, "Thief!"

It's always safe to go along with the crowd, even when the crowd is dead wrong. Editors joining The Narrative that public employees are freeloading bums are wittingly or unwittingly serving the purposes of those who have woven The Narrative, the Grover Norquists of the world. As for us readers, we would do better for ourselves if we asked why it is we no longer have the security of a safe retirement, rather than falling into the trap of echoing resentment toward those who still retain some degree of retirement safety. The plain and simple answer is that is we let ourselves get snookered. Live and learn.

President Obama's appointing former CEO of General Electric Jeffrey Immelt to head the "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness" is like hiring Hannibal Lecter to run a daycare. Government is corrupted beyond redemption. Two poilitical parties, and they both work for the ultra-rich.

Julian Assange is a Bad, Bad Man, isn't he Daddy?

WikiLeaks tells us little that's completely new. Even the establishment has dismissed its output as largely or entirely rehash. Then why all the fuss? On the one hand, WL corroborates things that have been at the edges of public awareness, embarrassing the MSM by bringing focus to what the MSM regularly hides in a fog and then steps quickly away from. On the other hand, WL makes life for the international back room boys very uncomfortable by shining a light on their their game, revealing all its warts, subterfuge, and dirt.

Hilariously, the US Govt insinuates WL has revealed secrets to enemies that weaken and threaten the US, but in fact what's been revealed is known plainly to US adversaries. It's only the American public that is uninformed. This brings up the question of who or what the govt is referring to as the enemy: is it the leaders or even the rank and file of our enemies, or is the actual enemy the potential enlightenment of the American people? Is waking the public up to the unsavory alliances and underhanded deals going on in our foreign affairs and wars the real issue? Most of the "revelations" in WL are certainly well know to our adversaries, so what the back room boys are so exercised about must be the possibility of having to explain and defend their actions to the American populace.

The MSM, especially TV news in recent times, has been an ally of government secrecy. Rather than promote a deeper understanding of world affairs, TV news covers a melange of items quickly and superficially, without context, without history. The effect is to dilute understanding rather than enhance it. It's all razzle-dazzle on the TV news, interspersed with commercials for drugs tailored to the aging. 100 thousand people protest in the streets of a midwestern city day in and day out, decrying the union busting of that state's governor, but rather than explain that situation in depth the TV news chooses to cover extensively the absurd antics of a TV sitcom star. Whether the TV news media are in league with the back room masters of the universe or they are fatuous merely by virtue of their stultifying business model, they provide the invaluable service of dissembling facts and anesthetizing the public.

Secrecy has been the magic ingredient of governance since the Second World War as a result of the Manhattan Project. Secrecy was absolutely necessary in delivering the atom bomb. Secrecy was so successful in that case it because standard operating procedure for all government projects from then until the present. It's so much easier to to get something done without interference/input from all corners, so the paradigm of secrecy has become the norm, not just in defense and foreign affairs, but in everything govt does. Autonomy is a lot more efficient than democracy.

The US Govt is hunting Julian Assange because he's making it look bad. And pathetic TV personalities plead "Is there no way to stop him?" because the longer he continues the more the MSM is revealed to be the collection of preening, overpaid, indolent buffoons they are. Not to worry though, the right wing will have him put away, one way or another. "Nothing to see here... and now a story about a boy, his shaggy dog, and a fluffy white kitten!"

Do You Believe it Now? (The Rich are Waging and Winning the Class War)

Look at the battle lines on a map. Look at the states whose Republican governors are out to bust unions. Listen to what the Republican senate majority leader in Wisconsin said: this is not about debt, it's about winning the 2012 election. It's all a desperate game to these people, and working Americans, you and I that is, we and our families, are just pawns.

By eliminating public sector unions (effectively, the only unions left) the Republicans cut off a large source of funding for Democrats. They are out to win. They are always focused on wining. The ends justify the means to them, always. When they get in, they sell the American working people out as soon as the doors open the morning after elections.

The greedheads are out to conquer and own the world. This has always been the way of things. Only after the Depression was there an interlude of sharing of wealth in American society, because of the New Deal. When WWII was over, New Deal Democrats wrote the constitution of Germany, so democracy lives on there for a while longer, even as it dies here.

There have always been oligarchs and monarchs resting on the backs of peasants and serfs. This has been the case in Europe, Asia, and in South America. Equality of opportunity and civil rights are the exception in history. They were the exception in Athens, they have been the exception in America and Europe, and although perennial, they will always be short lived, after having been born in bloodshed.

Greedheads are never satisfied with just their fair share. They have always wanted complete domination over the population, and they have always achieved it. History is in fact the story of a succession of wars between competing oligarchies. It will continue to be, whether we have iPads or not.

What's happening now in the Midwestern and Northwestern states is the final battle in a class war that began in the 1980's. The oligarchs shrewdly pitted one faction against another (whites v blacks, straights v gays, evangelicals v humanists, etc.) to gain the upper hand once more.

We the people had it too good. We let our guard down, and now we are on the cusp of losing everything. We may wake up this time as the people of Wisconsin have, but we will go back to sleep again. We will hear the siren's song of the TV panderers and be mesmerized by electronic trinkets. Eventually, the oligarchy will win, it's inevitable. The people at the top like the Kochs are relentless. That's why they're where they are.

Civilization doesn't work. It is unfair and exploitative by definition and composition. Let's raise a glass to our dying democracy. They're coming in for the kill now.

(no wonder the Texas School Board is writing Jefferson out of its history books:)

"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind." --Thomas Jefferson

Poised for the Kill

ACORN, Public Broadcasting, Planned Parenthood are all attacked by right wing assassins. Unions are being busted by Tea Party Governors. Don't people see what the right wing is doing, going in for the kill against its enemies? Do people really want to live in a United States run according to extreme right wing ideology? Are people thinking about what that really means to them and their progeny? Apparently they are not. Apparently they are taking this no more seriously than the average German regarded Brown Shirts in the 1930's. Good luck.

Prairie Dog Nation --How Big is your Amyglada?

Ever since the morning of 9-11 the US has become very much more security conscious. This is so much an understatement as to be a misstatement. People and organizations have regressed from merely scared and shocked to full blown paranoid over the past decade. The major reason for this regression has been the posturing of craven political opportunists whose boisterous fear mongering, done merely to gain prominence and hence garner votes, has continuously undermined people's sense of security and thereby thwarted their ability to recover. A result of this fear mongering has been to render the populace easy prey to security "professionals", allowing them to ring every extra dime out of a disoriented and fear stricken public.

I don't have too much ire for the latter group, as they are merely opportunistic capitalists trying to get rich quickly by whatever means are available at the moment. Although I see them as parasites on society, the dictum, "caveat emptor (let the buyer beware)" and the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted both do come into play here, so I don't think anything more than a good spanking and forcing them to give pack the money they've swindled should be in order for them.

On the other hand, the opportunistic politicians who are supposed to lead us forward, not bamboozle us, deserve harsher treatment, especially those who have descended into the dual flimflam of scaring the folks silly AND promoting security nostrums for personal gain. These sewer rats deserve harsher treatment. (Perhaps banishment to Dubai would be appropriate.) A salient example of this latter type is one erstwhile head of Homeland Security who now hawks full body scanners to the TSA, and does so ever more successfully with each terrorist incident.

Doing away with these scoundrels would remove the caustic irritant that has scarred the public's psyche, but next how does we heal? People have come to accept that living in a security straightjacket is necessary and preferable to the worst case scenario of rampant terrorism. They ignore that yielding liberties for security is in itself a capitulation to terrorism. While a degree of prudence (copyright, G.H.W. Bush) is demanded in the name of safety and taking reasonable precautions is warranted, we have to start asking, "How much is too much?" And we have to start asking this before the security apparatus begins deploying drones overhead --if they haven't already. (P.S. We are already there.)

Deep Thoughts

the politicians you vote for in an election do not work for you when they're elected. they work for the big money interests that financed their campaigns. this is true of politicians of both parties.

the average american has little grasp of what's going on in politics or in the world. the evening news is infotainment and designed to steer people away from any deep understanding of the issues or realization of what's really happening and why. that's how george w. can get away with moronic statements like, "They hate us because we can buy houses." eleventh hour attack ads are devastatingly effective in political races only because the voter is so uninformed generally, and therefore inordinately susceptible to the outlandish claims in these ads. now that corporations have been deemed to have all the rights of individuals and can contribute vast sums to campaigns, they can put their favored candidate into office easily by running a few last minute attack ads against the opponent.

our culture is vapid as a result of fifty unrelenting years of consumerism. even while worker's rights are being trampled, the average person is only aware of the contestants on american idol. their only personal concern is with obtaining the latest electronic trinket. pursuit of happiness through acquiring highly touted possessions is fruitless, that's why so many people have turned to religion for meaning. ironically, this makes matters worse because it substitutes bogus promises of immortality --religious bribery appealing narcissism-- for material acquisitiveness.

we're buying into the right wing propaganda that unions are a drag on the economy and therefore an impediment to the general prosperity. when we accept this, we deny the reality that the forty hour work week, paid vacation, workplace safety, sick time, child labor laws, a living wage, and a host of other things we take for granted were obtained through union activism, and that many people were murdered by the powers that be in the fight to gain these concessions from business. when unions are gone, these benefits and protections will evaporate quickly. america's future is one of high-tech feudalism.

because the republican party's real constituency is the "haves and have mores" as g.w. put it, they could never win an election without tricking the proletariat into voting for republicans and against their own interests. this is done by divide and conquer. republican political strategists like karl rove are endlessly thinking up wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage to split the working class vote. if not for people like rove, the republicans could never gain political majority because they are fundamentally the party of a small minority of ultra-rich. even though karl rove disdains the religious right privately, in public he and others have curried favor with them without limit to get their votes.

most people are naive about the cold reality of corporations. people can't bring themselves to believe that america-based multi-national corporations have anything but the best interests of this country in mind, ascribing the same patriotic sentiments to corporations that they hold themselves. sadly, this brand of thinking makes them chumps. corporations' ONLY responsibility is to make money for their stockholders and fortunes for their ceos.

the very rich have gotten that way by flauting the rules, the country's welfare be damned. prescott bush was banker to the nazis. the koch family fortune was founded on doing business with joe stalin. michael dell sells computers to iran. so many of the ultra-rich have benefitted from brazenly doing what others wouldn't, either out of fear of prosecution or ethical restraints. (heck, if you go far enough back into the bush family's irish roots you'll find a traitorous ancestor who invited the normans into ireland so that he would have dominance over his peers by virtue of his collaboration with the successful invaders.) the point is, corporations will unfailingly put profit before country. like joe kennedy said, businessmen are bastards.

reagan began the union busting that would eventually drive working people down to serfdom, but clinton signed nafta. obama wanted to give more people access to healthcare, but felt obliged to fete the health insurers in doing so. the system is corrupt beyond redemption, but people don't seem to notice. they do know who will be on "dancing with the stars" in upcoming weeks, however.

the working class is screwed. the chamber of commerce passes out checks to corporate republicans and democrats to make the political climate more conducive to corporate goals while working families have their houses foreclosed on illegally. the steady rise in productivity (read: squeezing more and more out of the individual worker for the same amount of pay) has quadrupled the income of the wealthy while the worker's income has declined. american corporations ship jobs overseas and get a tax break for doing so. wall street's home mortgage ponzi scheme blows up, and working people have to bail them out. wall street honchos then show their gratitude by giving themselves raises and refusing to re-negotiate the working family's home loan. republican governors are on a rampage of public sector union busting that will obliterate whatever clout working people had in determining their own fate. from here on we are all serfs.

former presidential primary candidate and now secretary of state hilary clinton give a speech admonishing foreign dictators to allow freedom of expression in their countries. that's heady talk but at odds with what our government is practicing: our doj recommended private intelligence contractors to the chamber of commerce and bank of america who go out and plot to bring down bloggers who dare to criticize them! absolutely orwellian.

who will fix this, who will be the champion of equality and reason? well, a popular uprising is unlikely, because even if they weren't gutless and docile, people are too busy watching tv and playing with their iPods to go out and demonstrate. the proletariat isn't attuned to what's happening. elections that aren't bought are stolen, either by the supreme court or by changing the results on servers.

right wing religious-authoritarian misogynists are endeavoring to deny women's right to abortion and denying them access to birth control. at the same time they are cutting back on food supliments to pregnant woman and small children. sadistic devils.

we are losing the commons. roads, bridges, water systems are all up for sale to private corporations. it doesn't really matter that we no longer own our houses, because when we walk out the door we are interlopers on someone else's property anyway.

even if we were to revolt, the government has drones, non-lethal high energy weapons, mercenaries like Xe, and hundreds of thousands of servicemen trained in the suppression of a civilian population. land of the free.

Resentment and Envy --Stoked by the MSM-- Undermines Solidarity

An average worker scraping by may look at teachers and other public employees who make more than he does and react emotionally. His impulse might be to wish to bring the public employees' pay down to his level rather than bringing his up to theirs. He could just as well ask why he can't make a more comfortable living equal to theirs, but he doesn't. He curses the unions for the wage disparity and joins the corporatists in wanting to bring public employeesdown.

Why does he take a perspective of resentment and envy? Partly because he senses that in the current economic climate he has little hope of improving his lot, so he elects to pull even with others by bringing their standard down to his. That's human nature. A person is more attuned to his relative standing with others rather than his absolute wealth. So bringing the other guy down is an easy path to feeling better, certainly easier than working your way out of the hole you're in.

Another reason this guy can't figure out that he should be doing better than he is lies with our culture. Conservative powers have commandeered the narrative, steering people away from any idea they should be paid better than they currently are. The media has scrupulously avoided reporting the fact that over the past thirty years working people have not benefited from the gain in productivity, so the resulting prosperity has all gone to the rich.

By way of example, USA Today's 3/1/2011 front page stated that Wisconsin public employees made more than the average worker in the state. Not only is their analysis of salaries skewed and faulty, failing to compare apples with apples, but their unstated premise was wrong. The assumption that public employees' supposed higher salaries are unfair, wrong, or the cause of other's salaries being low is invalid. It could just as well mean the average worker is making too little!

The facts actually bear out the latter: while the richest have increased their income and wealth in past decades, the working person has not seen a comparative rise in his or her salary, and actually might have experienced a decline in his adjusted wages. Therefore, the average person should be making more, not the teachers less. So the implied argument in USA Today that teacher's salaries are unfair to other workers is as implausible as their income data is.

This is not accidental. It would be anatehema for USA Today to recommennd giving the average worker a pay increase rather than calling for teachers to take a pay cut.

The guy who can't conceive of demanding a bigger slice of the pie is a prisoner of propaganda channeled through corporate media. Popular culture has convinced him he too will be rich some day, or if not, his deprivation is his own fault. The culture also sews in him resentment toward others who are doing well rather than fostering the realization he needs to demand more from his overlords. That's why he's bent on destroying other people's standard of living rather than demanding more for himself and his family.

Just as the right wing's aggressive form of Christianity lacks charity,
so also does its bullying brand of patriotism lack altruism.

"WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in."

The President's budget calls for cutbacks in WIC and heating assistance, and the House is poised to eliminate the one agency, Planned Parenthood, that provides birth control to poor women in need. This is really something. Woman, infants and children will go hungry and freeze, while more and more poor will be created to join in the suffering. The Devil is baying in ecstasy, and the twisted, authoritarian, sadomasochistic conservatives are howling in chorus.

Without unions ordinary working people will be reduced to serfs. It's that simple, it's already happened, it began when Ronald Reagan busted the air traffic controller's union. There is no prospect other than poverty for workers if there are no unions. Their wages will drop so low they will live in Dickensian deprivation and they will suffer under the lash because they will be powerless to defend themselves against even the most Draconian employer.

If you are one of the many self-proclaimed social Darwinists who thinks that's what those people deserve and that a condition of grueling subsistence is just dandy for them, go ahead and say so, up front and out loud. At least then if I see you standing on the side of the road next to your broken down car I'll know to look for a puddle as I speed up.

WWYD?

Imagine you were out on a soccer field somewhere, watching your kid play. From out of nowhere, a rocket slams down on one of the soccer parents as he heads for his car, blasting him into burned chunks of ragged meat, brain, and bone. No one else is even scratched, and as it turns out this guy was wanted for some very bad stuff. Still, would you beam with joy that your government was able to smash him from afar? Wouldn't you feel somewhat fearful and angry over another's unlimited power over you, your family, and everyone else?

Now up the ante: you knew the guy, and although you weren't great friends, you were familiar with him from repeatedly attending the same soccer outings. Also, his son was with him, and the kid was killed too, not by a direct hit, but he was severely wounded and didn't linger for long. Even still, it was too long.

Going a little further, there was a passerby who was badly wounded, and kids sitting on a tailgate putting on their cleats and shin guards took the blast and were hit with debris. One lost an eye.

Ok, so now here's another twist, it isn't your government that has this godlike ability to wreak vengeance and mayhem, it's being done by a foreign power. It's doing to your people what it would never (never?) do to its own under any circumstances, because it obviously considers the people of your country to be inferior beings. Bugs. And it's been doing it for eight years.

Bet you'd be pretty antagonistic toward that foreign country, regardless of whether anyone close to you had ever been a target or collateral carnage.

Relax, it isn't happening here, and it isn't happening to anyone you know. Surveillance drones will be used here soon though. They'll be used just for special events that require very intensive security. At least at first, but before long they will be used extensively in populated areas, border crossings, etc. Of course, these won't be "killer drones". Not right away anyway.

Working People Unable to Fend for Their Young?

Neocons undermined wages, robbed the middle class, and destroyed the economy via idiotic deregulation, unchecked -even celibrated- greed, and their war against labor. Now, as if working class profligacy were to blame for the wrecked economy, right wing Republicans representing the wealthy demand AUSTERITY from the poor and shrunken middle class. The papers, the pundits and politicians are on board with that too. If working people go along with getting screwed again as punishment for having been screwed the first time, if they don't go into the streets and rage against this travesty, this insult, then they bloody well deserve what they get. Or rather, all that will be denied them and their children.

On th Futility of Arguing with Right Wingers

the right wing herd doesn't care about the facts, no matter how cogently they're presented. in all instances, the herd will retaliate against facts using an ad hominem argument, attacking the messenger. there can never be honest debate with a right winger, as no consideration whatsoever is give to opposing facts.

the herd only cares about its own momentum and power. facts are irrelevant, and any harm done by ignoring the facts is collateral damage. the herd is the thing.

Mike Malloy touted Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" a while back. it explains what motivates members of any mass movement. that includes the big ugly ones in the past, the present, and sadly, those of the future.

Wall Street capitalist financiers, wealthy beyond belief, ran the economy onto the rocks, were bailed out, and now want the bill for it all to be paid by scrimping on medical care to children. Priceless. (Also Remorseless, Conscienceless, Heartless, and Dishonorable.)

Identity Jujitsu (How the Rich Vanquished the Working Middle Class by Training them to Screw Themselves)

We working people, and by that I mean the 70 to 80 percent of us who are neither managers nor self employed, have been systematically reduced in wealth, security, and status over the past three decades. And what's astounding is we almost unanimously believe we deserved this fleecing and downgrading. In fact, our rapid descent would be impossible without our full concurrence and cooperation. We have accepted and even abetted the banishment of ourselves, our children and grandchildren from the safety and comfort of the middle class.

It all began going downhill for the middle class in the 80's. Then at the zenith of our economic ascendancy, we allowed ourselves to be persuaded that some "other people" were getting too much in return for what they contributed (often nothing, purportedly) to society and this was holding ourselves and everyone else back. We ourselves were of course deserving of a standard of living unparalleled in history and exceptional for the working class, but the "other" was a drain on society and the flow of largesse toward the other needed to be reduced, unquestionably.

~~~ The politics of envy depend on the dissociation of the individual from the group to prevent identification with others.
~~~ The politics of envy turn on amplifying minniscule differences among individuals to obscure obvious commonalities and shared concerns.
~~~ The politics of envy cultivate hatred of others.

And who then was the "other"? Certainly it included the pushy Negro underclass which had made recent progress undoing some of the systemic discrimination it had always faced. The other was also any union (not ours of course) and its members who were who were pulling down more than they deserved (that is, making more than we made!).

Back in the 1980's, Ronald Reagan told us government was the problem. What was that "problem" he alluded to? Why, civil rights issues, of course. Rather obviously, Reagan began mining our racial intolerance and hatred, directing it toward politicians and the Democratic Party which had backed civil rights. From there, hate was re-focused onto the government programs and protections that actually sustained the middle class.

Oldest trick in the book, divide and conquer. The wealthy aren't dopes! More recently they've pitted evangelicals against secularists, straights against gays, and Anglos against immigrants. On the horizon is the goading of the younger generation to turn against retirees and social security, and the rich puppeters will succeed at this too, because they have the time, money, and media outlets to control the discourse and steer opinion.

Divide and conquer is the premier strategy for undercutting the middle class, but the conversion of an individaul from self-involved, isolated bigot to self-destructive nut job further requires disintegration of personality, which is effected by prolonged and intense hate. Eventually, hate directed outwardly evokes internal pain and anger. It never dawns on us consciously, but when we attack those who are nearly identical to ourselves we are splashed by hate mirrored back onto ourselves. So we become more loathesome to ourselves than to our antagonists. We marinade in hate, feel acute pain, and subsequently engage in fighting on the wrong side of battles. It is not for nothing Orwell included the "Two Minutes Hate" in the novel, "1984". We watch Glen Bleck, froth in anger, indulge in narcissistic rage, and let our kids live with the spoilage.

Dear Doddering Dumb-Bunnies in the Media,

Here's the story that has gone on for the last thirty years but you have been unwilling or unable to write about: the rich are prosecuting a full-on class war against working people (nee the middle class) and the war is almost won.

First, they forcefully and relentlessly carried out a campaign to bust unions, block increases in the minimum wage, and off-shore millions of jobs. Further, to grab back whatever wealth the working class had accumulated, the plutocrats extended working people easy-breezy credit through their cannibalistic credit card companies. This they did coincident with lowering wages, so that personal debt substituted seamlessly for income. Now they're foreclosing on your house --mission accomplished! Give the devil his due, this was very artfully done.

Presently, they're reaching the end of the seam mining the US worker. She or he is tapped out. Even their car title is pawned now. You'd think having no US consumers remaining would diminish the oligarchs' ability to garner wealth. Funny thing though, they are turning toward developing markets oversees, and we here have become their forgotten ex-consumers. They don't need us anymore and they certainly don't need our neediness.

Because we're their Ex-es, they see no reason to even pretend to care for us anymore, so they are vigorously dismantling the social safety net. They have anticipated our demands for help, and have shrewdly concocted their brilliant AUSTERITY campaign just in time to justify leaving us out to die in the snow.

Not all of us though. The oligarchs are going to need some of us garrisoned abroad to fend off China as they grasp for markets overseas. Nice to be needed, if not loved.

Prez. O. has just made another speech about "increasing American competitiveness". Translation: keep kowtowing to corporate bigwigs and continue to undercut wages for the US worker. Let's all sing it, "Everybody's Serfin', Serfin' USA!"

copy-catting neutron jack not for do-it-yourself-ers

the home depot pays its employees around $12-14/hr. that's much better than the minimum wage, which is under $7.50 an hour, but $14 and hour isn't nearly enough to live on comfortably, to buy a house and a reliable car, to buy back-to-school clothes for your your kids or send them to college when they're older. better than minimum and certainly better than nothing, but $14 and hour is not enough to hold any pretense about living a middle class lifestyle.

the people working at home depot are doing a lot better than many others who've been laid off, they're lucky to have any job in these times, and that's just what the home depot's management thinks too. in fact, one of the two guys who founded the company took a very active role recently in opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have gone a long way toward revitalizing unions and ultimately winning bigger paychecks for workers. the home depot employees' pay would most likely have been effected if the bill could have been brought to the senate, but it wasn't.

this bill had the obvious potential of reducing the home depot's profits by increasing labor costs, so its patriarch took a bold and active stand against the Employee Free Choice Act, warning other CEOs in a conference call that if this bill were to pass it would be "the end of the world!" no fooling, that's really what he said. and the corporate oligarchy listened. they in turn went to the people who work for them, the elected politicians of both political parties at all levels whose campaigns they finance, and instructed them to bury the Employee Free Choice Act. and it was done, according to their wishes.

now this seems like a smart thing to do for the patriarch of the home depot, protecting profits by thwarting labor cost increases. in the short term this is undeniably true. but let's think about the long haul. people who spend money at the home depot are largely middle class, and for the past half century middle class consumers have been predominantly working people fortunate enough to earn a decent wage that gave them enough "disposable income" (bucks left over after the mortgage and utility bills were paid) to indulge in pastimes like wandering the isles of the home depot and picking up materials for home renovation.

and herein lies the rub: if neither the home depot, nor Lowes, nor anyone else is paying workers enough to do anything but scrape by with bare necessities, where is the demand for what these store sell supposed to come from in the long term?

for at least a decade, easy credit and home equity loans enabled middle class working people to purchase things they really weren't quite in a position to buy anymore, but that route to purchasing beyond their means has evaporated. the well has gone dry as of the financial crisis and collapse of the housing bubble. where will the home depot's business come from now? is the demand for renovation the very wealthy represent really enough to offset the loss of all those erstwhile middle class consumers? no way!

so it seems that squeezing labor to make a fatter buck may put a smile on shareholder's faces now, but where will the home depot's business come from in the future? certainly, many US corporations have made the same choice to abandon the US worker, but these corporations have planned carefully so their future profits will come from overseas, not the defunct US consumer market. they poisoned their old partner, the working "middle" class, but they had the smarts to start moving into emerging economies before killing this one off completely. even Wal-Mart is investing big time overseas. but the home depot?

the same people who were buying hardwood flooring and fancy tiles yesterday will be primarily interested in tar paper tomorrow. perhaps this is the end of the world for home depot after all.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -US General and President Dwight D. Eisenhawer

The Rapacious and the Heartless (Republicans, that is.)

Republicans in Congress have volunteered virtually nothing practical or substantive in regard to fixing the health care delivery system, primarily because they see absolutely nothing wrong with the system as-is. Meanwhile, they make the factually contradicted claim that the medical care bill passed last year will increase the deficit, as if the budget deficit were their greatest worry. If it were, then why on earth did they further deepen the deficit by demanding continued massive and unaffordable tax breaks to the ultra-rich?

These are the facts: 1.the Republican Party's core creed is to make certain the wealthy pay nothing back to society, and indeed receive even more from it whenever possible; 2. Republicans in congress are actively involved in --and have even admitted to-- working to push government into bankruptcy to assure there is no authoritative body left to force the wealthy to help shoulder any of society's burdens. When Congressional Republicans say they're trying to "protect the greatest healthcare delivery system in the world" and at the same be fiscally responsible, what they're really saying is "We represent only the interests of the rich, and we're trying tirelessly to bring feudalism to 21st century America."

As for the rank and file "conservatives" who parrot the phrase "government takeover of health care", what they are really referencing is the government's morally superior stand to make insurers cover the already sick, that is, to allow the sick to be treated. Using the terminology "government takeover" is an attempt to conceal their craven stand that the poor and the sick be left to die so that they, the fortunate, can go on feasting without restraint.

The Synthetic Balls of the Democratic Party are showing (or "Yes! We Have No Cojones")

"Bills? Civility? If you thought the vitriol these hocky pucks spewed could our would lead to violence, you needed to have jumped on them with both feet the instant this crap rolled out of their mouths. Appeals for civility don't cut it with True Believers (Eric Hoffer, 1951). Authoritarians don't really dialog.

As for any horse-has-left-the-barn bill, how about instead funding public mental health so that it has a better chance of reaching 22 year old kids with incipient psychosis?"

Schmucks on Top

"Anytime you're driving down an undivided two-lane there's always the chance an oncoming car will either drift across the center line or some crazy will actually veer across on purpose. (Think of Christopher Walken's character in "Annie Hall".) The crazies are definitely out there, but we trust to luck that on this trip at least they will hold tightly enough to reality to stay on their side of the road and let us get home unscathed.

But there are people out there, popular TV and radio demagogues, who exhort the crazies to spin the wheel all the way to the left. (Ironic, because they themselves are all the way over safely on the right, literally as well as figuratively.) What does a demagogue get out of telling the nut job "Do it! Do it!"? I suspect just a feeling of power and dominance, the testosterone/adrenaline surge derived from unleashing a powerful, unrecallable force. Kind of like shooting a Glock at a target, it's a rush that beckons.

Then there's the type who will egg psychotics on merely because it pleases a frenzied, teeth-gnashing crowd. Having once by chance received applause for flirting with the suggestion of violence, they continue the shtick non-stop. They are like a child on stage who gets a laugh for something they've done unintentionally but uses it eagerly from then on. Usually, they run it into the ground and will stop only when it finally evokes a negative response. For mayhem's cheerleader, inciting violence is not the real reward. They're in it for the applause, merely doing their macabre Shirley Temple imitation to please and keep a crowd.

We're all in this together. Scary, huh?"

Obama Brand High Fiber Sausage

The momentous tax break extension compromise is a short term solution, but a long term loss for ordinary people. Repubs will want to pay for this by slashing WIC, and they'll be able to do it too, because they are relentless and the Dems are irresolute.

President Obama knows the fundamental problem is working people aren't making enough to sustain a middle class, but he's repeatedly turned his back on unions, so what good is it that he knows?

Change? Yes, but instead of the New Deal we're getting sawdust sausage out of Washington. The system is corrupted by big money to the extent that the vote merely injects a mild democratic flavor into a predetermined corporate recipe.

Abortion Contortion

There are worse things a woman can do than terminate a pregnancy: dragging a kid up in a dangerous, hopeless, neglectful and impoverished environment being chief among them.

Even the PURITANS approved of abortion "before quickening". Why? because then as now common sense and intellectual honesty dictated that conditions be reasonably propitious for a child coming into the world. Otherwise, great individual suffering and negative effects to society at large will ensue.

Of course, nowadays we have gotten beyond that mindset. We make an immutable rule that abortion is evil in all cases. Dogmatism and self-righteousness trump reason and empathy.

Further, for a politician there can be considerable advantage in siding with anti-abortion zealots: single issue voters will come out in droves for an office seeker who condemns abortion, whereas there is not a counterbalancing block of voters on the other side of the abortion issue. So, being staunchly anti-abortion is a political 20% off coupon that many a candidate in a tight race can't pass up. The new Congress would do best to focus on priorities like the economy and jobs, not taking away access to birth control and prenatal care from women. Not likely though, is it, because the lure of the single issue payoff is overpowering.

The vicious irony is that most anti-choice crusaders melt away the moment the child comes into the world, and will thereafter adamantly oppose any and all publicly funded social programs which might ease the painful deprivation the newborn will encounter. Gosh, we've come a long way since the 1620's!

Dear Washington,

There is really only one question that counts, and it's one that's not being asked: How are you planning to restore the middle class? Obviously, it can't be done without people's making a living wage, because that was the whole basis for the expansion of the middle class following WWII. All kinds of ideas are roiling in Washington, like reducing Social Security, Medicare, privatizing government functions, etc, but none of them directly addresses the problem that the next generation is set up to do less well than their parents.

All the VATs, immigration reforms, and deficit reduction schemes in Washington do nothing to address this directly. In fact, if American society were a car, and that car had a faulty transmission, these fixes would be equivalent to putting new tires on the car and giving it a paint job. Car looks better, but it still won't go.

My point, dear Washington, is get real and either start restructuring the economy to direct wealth back to working people, or just stop bloviating about all that has to be done to protect and strengthen the economy, because without fundamental change it's an economy designed to exclude most of us and our progeny anyway. Just tell us we're serfs and we really haven't any large stake in the economy or any real say in how society is shaped any longer. The truth would be better than this charade. Leave the tires on the rack and the paint in the can if you're not going to fix what's broken.

No Pie for You!

Despite their seemingly profligate extension of President Bush's tax cuts to the very wealthy, conservatives really are serious about "shrinking government" to balance the budget, by which they mean eliminating the social safety net. In April of 2011, when it comes time to vote on raising the debt ceiling, they will vote it down in the house and filibuster in the senate. Then they will "take the country hostage" again to extort more concessions from The Compromiser. Look out Medicaid! Look out Social Security! Look out VA! Look out WIC! We're all in this together, right? --just kidding! It's dog-eat-dog, just like in the good old days. Things are back to normal again. Normal blows.

The Trivial Necessity of being Nice

Yep, without a doubt he has to guard against seeming to be the menacing, Angry Negro. That's just something he has to live with and we of skimpy melanin reserves have to make an effort to understand. If he really came out swinging against the right, they'd be howling in a microsecond that he was a Black Panther (not that there's anything wrong with that). So when he's PO-ed he can at best dump on those of us who voted for him, because you can only let it hang out even a little with those you know for a fact aren't out to get you from the get-go.

Further, the man gets it. I have heard no other politician (except Dennis K., Bernie Sanders, and Russ Feingold) remark that people need to be paid a living wage, intimating unions are/were a good thing for working people and the American economy. He understands just how the commoner (ie, 80+ percent of us) is being destroyed by the slow poison of trickle-down economics.

And yet, he plays footsy with the Wall Street fat cats and kissy face with the right wing. So although he knows, and although he deserves some slack because the accident of birth has forced him into the demeanor of Hoover rather than FDR (Hoover was a very decent, intelligent man by the way), he's just rearranging the deck chairs on the you-know-what.

He's still the best man for the job. However, the best isn't good enough. Corporate fascism (Mussolini's definition) is too deep a planter's wart to fight with just band aids anymore. That's what the past two years have obviated.

PS, he's completely out to lunch on education. It isn't the teacher's union's fault, it's the culture that has denigrated hard work and honest effort (the real money's at the Wall Street Casino) and an economy rigged against the majority. Time to roll up Duncan and listen to the academics regarding education, not business pukes. Just because you've made a butt load of money does't make you and education expert --especially if you made it merely by buying/stealing other people's ideas!

The majority of voters concluded during the latter part of the 20th century that it was acceptable to let the poor die in the snow. The majority are white, and they believed all the bodies in the snow bank would be brown. Absurd notion, but fear and loathing preclude rationality as well as empathy.

Austerity Cometh

The austerity movement that's gaining momentum in government and press circles calls for "shared sacrifice" to avert future meltdown of the US economy.

Here's a partial list of programs and services that will be cutback or eliminated as part of that sacrifice:

Teacher payroll, resulting in larger class size/ Remedial Education/ Music, Literature, and Art curriculum/ Student Grants/ Food Assistance to families and meals for schoolchildren, even while the need is growing/ Medicaid/ Medical Coverage for Children and Pregnant Women/ Infant Formula/ Early Childhood Education/ Medicare benefits for the elderly/ Social Security benefit deferral and reduction/ Government Oversight in the areas of Consumer Protection, Food Safety, and Labor Laws/ Fire and Police, with some possible privatization of those services/ Sale of Public Roads and Bridges to private corporations to be be run henceforth for profit via toll collection/ Privatization of Water Works/ Public Transportation funding/ Environmental Standards Enforcement

Why is all this necessary? Simply because we are politically incapable of removing the medical insurance industry from the process of providing health care, and the cost of this alone will simply break the bank. (The costs of a maintaining a mammoth military empire and a vast prison system don't help either, but the biggest cost is privately insured health care.)

Oh, and the "shared" sacrifices really affect only working people. The Wall Street financial pharaohs whose gambling created the present economic crisis are doing splendidly, thank you, and will not in be impacted in the slightest by these austerity measures. Quite to the contrary, they will be further enriched through their implementation, both directly as inheritors of previously public works and indirectly via the enhancement of general profitability through the elimination of protections and standards. It's winner-take-all. Has been for decades and will be forevermore it seems.

So when the "liberal" corporate media tells you to accept these austerity measures because not doing so would be infantile, buy that line. Just sit down and take it when our corrupt, slavish politicians make those "hard" choices (hard for you and me, not for them or their masters). Accept being a serf, that'll be easier for everyone. And be thankful.

the invisible hand of dr. strangelove

according to the great economic wizzard al greenspan, an unfettered marketplace will always generate the most wealth overall, and regulation of any type incurs inefficiency. that is the gospel milton friedman preached at the chicago school of economics, and many people still believe that. most are either academics or fools. still others only profess to believe it because it enables them to get away with whatever they want in pursuit of money. these latter are the rich, and they're not stupid.

large corprations and some smaller businesses have exploited the economic crisis to trim their workforce disproportionately, increasing profit. this has worked very well in that companies have garnered mounds of cash, are buying back their own stock, and investing heavily (creating a new stock bubble with their excess cash!).

unemployment refuses to let up, partially because businesses are squeezing hightened proiductivity out of their remaining workers --it's just good business-- but primarily because demand is low. there isn't any justification for rehiring laid off workers. so while the recent period has been a banner one for corporations, sales are declining since fewer people have jobs and therefore aren't making purchases.

ah, therein lies the rub. although individual companies' bottom line have never been better and ceo's are getting record bonuses, the market is contracting. this is (or was) a consumer society, but now we have forfited our ability to earn or borrow in order to spend. although each of those businesses is doing well now, in future they will have fewer sales because the other guy's laid off his workers too, and they were also customers. companies eventually will decline or go into bankruptcy. this will produce more unemployment, which in turn will further shrink the market.

pretty easy for somebody to see where this is going, even an ayn rand acolyte like greespan. zeal for a quick buck in the now comes at the expense of the future. the invisible hand of the marketplace is agnostic of tomorrows, it only understands money on the table at the moment, which is why the invisible hand of the marketplace is clamping down on its own windpipe.

deregultaion to the point of unregulation may make huge short term profits for the lucky few in a circumscribed area, but inflicts unnecessary human suffering at large and in the long haul always produces boom/bust cycles. just look at history.

Stinging Loss at Wisconsin Polls

Wow, that's staggering. You voted Russ Feingold off the island! Not like he didn't deliver: only one to say "No" to the Iraq slaughterhouse/money pit in the very beginning; one of only eight to refuse to go along with the financial "modernization" that overturned Glass-Steagall and ushered in the present economic miasma; only senator to go against his party on principled grounds and say that Dodd-Frank reform is as useless as a tennis racket without strings. Yep, you sure showed him you weren't impressed by his integrity or intellect.

Evidently the pitch, "I promise to keep wages as low as they'll go and continue to comp the ultra-rich so they can walk all over you working stiffs -but don't worry, 'cause I'm gonna totally stick it to those immigrants!" is just what you wanted to hear. Russ'll get over it. Will you, Wisconsin?

douche bags.

Filthy, Godless Puritans

Here's the deal: when I was an Air Force medic in the late 60's, there were lots of "D&Cs" done on WAFS. That meant they were given abortions in USAF hospitals. Back then no one would have dreamed that the country would return to Puritanical attitudes toward a woman's right to privacy and control over her own body.

Actually, the country has become less Puritanical, because the Puritans themselves believed in abortion up to the time of "quickening". I guess they were just moral imbeciles and religious slackers, right?

On November 2nd, 2010 American working people were given a choice between the New Deal and the Gilded Age, and they chose to position themselves and their progeny on the outside looking in.

Worse still, our democracy was taken off life support. All power was ceded to the ultra-wealthy, who have been handed the king's scepter. Their rule is absolute. And those who have been propelled by an innate fear that life was naturally brutal and unfair will soon see their vision realized. Henceforth, upward mobility will be limited to the unlikely rise of a serf to the rank of peasant.

The City on the Hill is no more. Its rotted timbers have crumbled, the land beneath has subsided, and the waves rolled in to rip its bones from the earth and drag them out to sea. Four hundred years from its inception the City has joined Atlantis.

things to be un-thankfull for    

PRICKS -they will always be there, stinking up the room, skewing the game, engendering mistrust. one variety of prick is the war hawk. war hawks are always predicting the enemy is getting ready to pounce, so their side must therefore strike preemptively. the sad truth is that there are hawks on the other side too, making the same case. one or the other side will reach a climax of paranoia eventually, war will be fought, and the hawk credo will (once again) be self-justifying.

the same applies to cheating, whether in business or in personal relations. convincing yourself that other people will sell you out if you don't sell them out first justifies beating them to the punch. here's where the old fashioned (and mythical?) virtue of honor might help. if honorable men and women refused to stoop to betrayal, acted according to principle, regardless of the calculus of coming out ahead, then cheating would become the exception and trust would be justified more than skepticism.

but alas, game theory rules here where ethics are missing. some have put forth the theory that, sadly, for the individual there is a selective advantage to being a creep. the only way to eliminate pricks, it seems, is to let them chomp on our flesh and bones, knowing that with our demise will come their extinction.

A BLEAK OLD AGE -nothing saved for old age, no pension, nothing. our parents had pensions, so that when they reached the end of their lives they had the means to pay for "assisted living", that is, somebody to feed them, plant them in front of the tv and play music for them. somebody to watch them night and day and wipe their asses, literally.

none of that for us! we have the glorious 401k, which for most is a complete joke as far as replacing a pension. rare is the individual who has the opportunity and discipline to sock enough away into a 401k to actually live on after they stop working. here's a little secret: 401k's were never designed to substitute for workers' pensions. they were originally cooked up as a way for executives to defer paying taxes on their bonuses until they'd retired. it's not quite the same thing as a pension, in the same way that a sweater is not quite the same thing as a kevlar vest.

Fascism is the Fashion

Rand Paul's supporters in Kentucky threw a petite woman to the ground and stomped her because they didn't like her politics. Joe Miller's active duty US Army enforcers detained and handcuffed a journalist at a public appearance in Alaska because Mr. Miller doesn't like the press asking questions. Anybody else smell a right wing putsch coming?

Burnin' Down the House

Nothing could exemplify the philosophical divide in our culture more concisely or poignantly than the two divergent reactions to the house in Kentucky being allowed to burn down while firefighters stood by. While very many are appalled that someone's failure to pay a meager fee should be used as justification for allowing his family residence to incinerate, another large group thinks it not only justifiable, but a good object lesson for those who would try to cheat the system, or at least be lackadaisical about their obligations. How can people see things so differently?

If you believe that the world is filled with dangerous snares and traps, then you prepare for those contingencies. Doing so comes at a cost. It is a burden on your resources, and you sometimes may question whether the degree of preparation is really justified. But when something horrendous does happen, you have the satisfaction that your efforts were not in vain. You feel vindicated.

And when something awful happens to someone else, someone who didn't prepare as you had, then you feel relief as well as a form of gratification. Not only were you lucky, but you had the forethought to prepare, so that even if the calamity had befallen you, you would not have been as devastated as the slacker was. He is the grasshopper to your ant.

For others, myself among them, even if we do see the point of reinforcing personal responsibility, that pales in the face of the tragedy. We are not as adamant on the point and are more empathetic to the family who suffered a devastating and preventable loss.

The episode of the burning house crystallizes this fear v empathy difference, which is why some people can take a grim satisfaction in the event, while the rest of us see it as hard-hearted and a public shame.

By the way, there's nothing new here. When the Irish were starving during the potato famine, a bureaucrat refused to provide them with food from English storehouses, presumably not because he wanted to protract the Irish suffering, but rather because he was afraid that providing relief would be a disincentive to their getting back into the fields and trying to grow their own food again, thus causing them to become dependant.

What it all comes down to is a basic difference in personality. Pictured below empathetic versus selfish is on one axis, and fearful versus adventurous on the other. Where you come down on the issue of the home allowed to burn depends on which quadrant you were born in:

Empathetic
|
|
social C    |        Liberal
fiscal L     |      (put it out)
|
Fearful <----------------------------------> Adventurous
|
|
Conservative  |       social L
(let 'er burn!) |      fiscal C
|
Selfish