Storm into the MoosePoop!

Another Fine Speech (but It Doesn't Change that We're Screwed)

This country "cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it". That's for sure, but with low paying jobs and burdensome mortgage and credit card debt, what way out of these doldrums is there for young Americans? One estimate is that 35-40 cents of every dollar spent goes toward payment of interest. This is a huge drag on the general economy and deeply effects people's lives, although it's a bonanza for banks.

It's a rentier society and there is no hint of a proposal for changing that in this inaugural speech or elsewhere. After the housing bubble burst, Iceland reduced individual mortgage principle to a max of 110% of assessment, whereas our government just showered money on the criminal banks! Past and present trade agreements send jobs overseas for the benefit of corporations, and unions have been destroyed, with the result wages have stagnated. The coup de grace to the middle class was offering debt in lieu of raises. Now we are serfs. We are owned by the banks.

Nice speech, though.

Common Interest

The banks own us. As raises became obsolete and were replaced with credit cards, the banks increasingly took control of everything. At present, over a third of every dollar spent goes toward payment of interest. The banks just sit back and collect fees for doing nothing other than passively processing transactions, while producers of goods get surprisingly little and consumers get skinned. It must be exhausting, collecting all that easy money.

When the TBTFs brought the world to its knees in '08, a legitimate government would have nationalized the banks, but instead our "leaders" tossed money to them with both hands, first in the form of a TARP appetizer, then with another seven trillion in secret low-interest loans.

The banks have recovered, they're back on top. Their executives are reaping outlandish bonuses again. Meanwhile, more ordinary people have been foreclosed on, and young mothers pay 23% revolving interest on baby formula from the grocery. What a country.

"Entrepreneur-ed" into Serfdom

We bandy the word entrepreneur as if it were directly linked to lower taxes, saying European tax rates are antithetical to creation of businesses by individuals.

Fact: there are more self-employed in Europe, i.e. entrepreneurs, per capita than in the United States.

Fact: upward mobility is higher in most of Europe than in the US. It's even slightly higher in England, which is the template for the US.

We have been led to romanticize the word and accept that it is synonymous with lower taxes, which in turn is purportedly the only path to shared prosperity. This is a fallacy promoted -very succesfully- by the ultra-wealthy since the early 80's for the sole purpose of hoarding money and power. The greatest period of growth in the US occurred during the Eisenhower Administration when top marginal tax rates were astronomical compared to today's.

Bottom line: we have been bludgeoned with the code word "entrepreneur" as subterfuge for a campaign of class warfare against working people that is reaching its final stage of victory. Wealth is unshared, and we see no real growth because when the rich invest their superfluous cash they only create market bubbles. Financial capitalism has replaced industrial capitalism, and there is no longer real wealth creation through manufacturing. Wall St. is just a betting parlor for the rich, with the vast majority left out of the game.

The consumer-oriented merry-go-round is at a halting point because most can't afford to spend and individual indebtedness -which was a transitional substitute for sufficient wages- has hit the wall. If you open a small business today, it needs to cater solely to the wealthy because no one else has money to spend.

Misapplication of the totem "Entrepreneur" has brought the US to a state of neo-feudalism. And the ultra-rich are very satisfied with that result. Go ahead and blame Obama. It doesn't matter anymore, because Austerity cometh, hell or high water.

Banks too big to Prosecute

HSBC, a venerable international bank, admitted to violating the Trading with the Enemy Act. It laundered $9B for al Qaeda, Hamas, and drug cartels. For this, the bank was fined $2B, which amounts to seven weeks of its profits. Some bank officials were dismissed, and the bonuses of others deferred for up to five years.

The US Justice Department declined to pursue any criminal charges. Why? Because doing so might destabilize the banking system. So, not only are banks too big to fail, they are also too big to prosecute! There you have it, the rule of law is ready for burial.

Rome reached a point when the Senate was disbanded, democracy was abandoned, and the very wealthy, along with the bribed-off generals, took complete charge of government. Our present situation is similar, except elected politicians remain in place while being managed by lobbyists. That difference will probably disappear in time.

The Monopoly game is at an end. We live in subjugation to the banks, and there's no going back --because apparently, there's no waking up.

FCC's Big Daddy Rupert

Once again the FCC seems to be pushing to grant Rupert Murdock exemptions regarding concentration of media ownership. Ironically, he is the worst person to whom such exemptions should be granted. Consider the following:

1) The scandals of his news organization in England, which include wiretapping, payoffs to police and other public officials, and interference with private communications in a murder case for the purpose of stringing out a story.

2) His Fox News in Florida was revealed in a civil suit to be shading the news and outright lying to the public, but excused for doing so in court on the grounds Fox bore no legal responsibility to tell the truth to the public.

3) Reliable data show watchers of his Fox News are LESS correct about objective facts than those who watch no news at all. This is because he distorts or makes up the news to fit his ideologically driven narrative.

And yet, the FCC is still trying to give this ogre more control of the media.

Checkmate in One Move, Young Workers Lose

What they have failed to take out of the hides of the wealthy during the fiscal cliff charade they will take out of the hides of the working poor during the next round, come the vote on the debt ceiling. This was a capitulation on the part of Obama and his Goldman-Sachs (nee Democratic) party. Shrewd too, because they have placated the upper middle class in order to avoid any forceful political reaction. The Democrats keep their jobs at the price of young working people being buried deeper. There is no hope here, just audacity.

I Heart Austerity

Sweating a layoff? Working just to pay the interest on your credit card bills? Unemployed? Facing foreclosure, bankruptcy? Well, never fear, AUSTERITY is here!

Lack of medical care, unemployment checks, and food assistance is going to make life better starting right away! (If you're currently well off that is.)

By simple math, fiscal austerity deepens a recession, as it has already done in Europe. We're about to see how running government like a household works out for a lot of households.

Daily Kos, 9/18/12: Inside the Hostess Bankery ...what really happened to Twinkies

Is that an Austerity Bomb in your pocket, or are you just happy to bamboozle me?

There is no debt crisis. Period. There is a mounting debt, but it in no way threatens the economy at present. T-Bill rates are ridiculously low, meaning the government has no trouble borrowing. If rates were 15%, that would constitute a crisis, but they aren't. Ergo, no debt crisis.

The "fiscal cliff" is a contrived emergency with the sole purpose of forcing austerity on a population that has already suffered. It's a power play intended to spare the obscenely wealthy having to pay any taxes toward educating, housing, feeding, or healing people they have already ripped off and continue to devour through usurious interest rates.

A third of the debt comes from Bush's "temporary" tax cut to the wealthy, and another third from war profiteering combined with the collapse of the Wall Street housing bubble. Those who benefited from all of the above are insisting that everyone else bear the burden for balancing the books through austerity. The truth is though that they don't really care about the deficit and are whipping up debt hysteria merely as a diversion for setting off their Austerity Bomb.

"Fix The Debt" is a ploy advanced by very wealthy CEOs who pay little taxes themselves and whose corporations pay none at all.

A less corrupt society would begin to repair itself by taking care of its citizens, providing jobs, and investing in infrastructure. Not ours though, ours only thinks of putting up a firewall between the many and the few so that the few can secure their power. That's what the fiscal cliff is designed to do.

If you're on board with this, then you're a fiend. If you don't see this scam for what it is, you're a fool.

when we're not "all in this together" anymore

hearing of the latest school massacre, my first thought was this is another example of a narcissistic psychopath with all too easy access to assault weapons. the prevalence of guns with such killing power attracts and encourages individuals who have a combination of inflated ego and no empathy for others. it spurs them to act out in incredibly vicious ways.

after reflecting a while though, i began to suspect there's something more to the causation of these continual mass homicides that plague the US. although i still think the availability of super-killer guns enhances the chance of these episodes occurring, i believe the perpetrators may not be such rare monsters and utter maniacs after all. perhaps they are more ordinary than i'd like to admit.

gradually, i have come to think that they represent extreme cases of a malady that infects us all currently, and that is a loss of regard for others as well as respect for ourselves. yes, those who commit these acts exhibit narcissism, but perhaps it is the diminution of empathy rather than a burgeoning of narcissism that enables them to commit these crimes. in short, they do it because life has become cheap in the US over the years.

to support this hypothesis, i point to everyday examples which are unrelated to the killings. for instance, recently a presidential candidate publicly wrote off almost half of the population as being abject losers for whom nothing could or should be done. if that doesn't betray an "every man for himself" zeitgeist, nothing does.

of course, that's just a recent example. lack of regard for others has been accreting for years. there has been a decades-long public exaltation of the wealthy, regardless of how they garnered their wealth. the drumbeat has been relentless. but to elevate one group is to demote the rest, so that ordinary working people, who are the vast majority, have experienced a great drop in social standing in our country. stunningly, working people themselves have bought into the idea that they are inferior and undeserving. the propaganda has been relentless, artful, and ultimately effective.

the rich certainly believe in their general superiority and the righteousness of their elevated position. they need to in order to justify the growing disparity between themselves and ordinary people. the deceptive salesman justifies ripping off people by telling himself they deserve it. the slave owner needed to believe that those he enslaved were sub-human. in both these cases self-deception provides avoidance of a moral reckoning. funny thing is, when you denigrate others, it rebounds on yourself. every time you knock somebody else you damage your self image ever so slightly. some of the mud you sling always sticks to you.

we have engineered a culture of disregard and disrespect to accommodate our embrace of social Darwinism. as a result, nihilism eventually overtakes us. we begin fearing those we disparage, and at some point go out and buy as many guns as we can and hunker down as if under siege. then we're a little closer to the frame of mind of... guess who?

welcome to the land of fear and loathing.

Love to Shop on the Internet!

If you buy a large item through the internet, unless your state is one of the few that's tapped in, you will avoid paying sales tax. You save that way yourself, but your state doesn't get the revenue from your purchase, or from any of the tens of thousands of other purchases made by your state's residents. The general anti-tax attitude is such that few give a sweet petunia whether state and local governments are missing out. That is a short-sighted view, but it's the one that exists. So be it.

Besides loss of tax revenue, local business sales are reduced by the exact amount of internet sales in this zero-sum game, so the local economy takes a hit each time a tax-free exchange occurs. That means small retailers are driven closer to the brink of extinction, and even local brick and mortar, big-box outlets in your area are impacted. Chain stores are shutting down almost everywhere, and mom-and-pop retailers are now practically non-existent. Bye-bye local jobs, bye-bye local revenue. Hello empty store fronts, hello belongings on the curb placed there by the sheriff.

Now, you might think state legislators would plug this revenue leak by tapping into internet sales and collecting sales tax on those exchanges, as some states have done. Not so here though. Perhaps this is because there is an ernest ideological belief among state legislators that a free market, and here this means tax-obligation free, is the correct course. Alternatively, it could simply be that these legislators accept campaign donations from lobbyists representing internet retailers, and they go along with the game without seriously considering what the effects may be. Which do you think it is?

The Fiscal Cliff is a man-made berm built on a double-dare. Bond rates are down in the grass, so there is no debt crisis. Period. It's all just a ruse to hand Social Security to Wall St. and further rend the social safety net.

Really?

As an aging boomer, I have noticed a large and qualitative shift in the attitude of ordinary people toward "the Poor" over time. Where once there had been sympathy, concern, and even empathy, there is now dislike, scorn, and even rage against the unfortunate. And this change isn't confined to the wealthy. No, middle class working people's attitude has taken this mean and uncharitable turn, including among those who are flirting with becoming poor themselves --especially among those.

Fact is, because life is getting worse for working people they fear falling out of the middle class, which makes them take a bellicose view toward others they're in direct competition with. There are two paths to choose from in adverse circumstances like these: form a coalition with others in the same boat, or pursue an "every man for himself" approach. The latter leads to a dog-eat-dog scenario such as we're witnessing.

Like a master who reduces the amount he feeds to his two dogs, from a full bowl for each to three quarters for one and a half bowl for the other, the super-rich have pitted one worker against the other by the uneven infliction of dearth.

It's working too. Fear is displacing empathy. Suffering among the working middle class from self-inflicted wounds is rampant. Fascism is increasingly resonant.

Fix the Debt Thinking

First off, interest rates are low and so is inflation. Government overspending such that too many dollars are chasing too few goods is not, repeat not, the problem at present. Rather, the problem is weak demand due to too many being unemployed, underemployed, and universally underpaid. Belt tightening now would be the equivalent of withholding water from a dehydration patient.

Still, there seems to be a real craving for austerity in Washington and in the mainstream media. The fallback justification cited is that our grandchildren will be saddled with enormous national debt if something isn't done right now to curb spending. Well, the long term solution to this long term problem is to employ their parents now and in the interim, pay a living wage, protect families from decimation by vulture capitalists, assure health and well being, and leave subsequent generations with a world class infrastructure. Austerity is the antithesis of all these things.

Now a group of CEOs is the vanguard of selling Austerity through "Fix the Debt", and they are being hailed by the media. Their corporations are scofflaws that pay little or no taxes, but their propaganda nevertheless touts bringing government spending back into balance with taxation. What the lazy, corrupt press fails to point out is that things were in balance until President Bush temporarily cut taxes to the wealthy, purportedly to stimulate job grow, which it failed to do. Those cuts unbalanced the budget just as a kid's jumping off his end of a see-saw does. Now these vaunted corporate sages are calling for a rebalance by moving the fulcrum closer to the other end. They have every expectation of selling this scam because they know the mainstream press is just too tickled to be jotting down whatever comes out of their mouths than to think critically about what's really being said.

imposing austerity during a recession is like refusing to bandage today's wounds because of the remote possibility of running out of bandages tomorrow. it's anal, it's illogical, pointless, and ultimately, it's sadistic.

All hail the entrepreneur and all celebrate American workers' state of debt peonage. All thank Leo Strauss and the Chicago School for reducing life's worth to a market transaction. All praise Ayn Rand for the fetish of the Individual. All witness the Devil in his mirth.

The debt crisis is totally manufactured, a red herring put out to let the 1% slither away from their obligation to society, to preclude their having to aid the millions they have harmed through their rapacious behavior. The current Washington fetish about the national deficit is pure b.s., a smokescreen intended to shield the ultra-wealthy.

"The debt doesn't matter, Reagan proved that." -Dick Cheney.

war is peace. ignorance is strength. feudalism is freedom.

unlike the United States of forty years ago, this is now a winner-take-all society. this needn't have been because there is enough to go around, but that's not how financial capitalism works. greed drives progress, even though that progress is sterile, sociopathic, and disregards human dignity. it produces mass decline while elevating the few to godlike status. observe the denouncement of 47% of the US citizenry by candidate Romney. having personally reduced those working people to debt peons he arrogantly dismisses their very right to exist.

of course, neo-liberalism does not stop at US borders, we have actively spread it around the world. the monopoly game has gone global, and we must accept that a small percentage of the world's population is now the universal oligarchy. the rest of us are chattel.

if there is a revolution against neo-feudalism it will not begin here nor will it take root here. working people in the US have accepted loss of the commons and domination by the 1% to such a degree that they pathetically call that freedom.

Will the average white working male cast his vote for the vulture capitalist who typifies the oligarch, who's plundered the wealth of the nation for 30 years, draining the life out of the middle class by cutting it off from its share in the profits and dooming subsequent generations to the lower cast in a a two class system? Bet your ass he will! He's so dis-functionally racist he can't manage the basic task of protecting his own young.

The troglodytes will get the government they deserve. Unfortunately, that will be their legacy to their children as well. Piss ants better hope enough black people are allowed to vote in November to rescue their, the piss ants', grandchildren from the consequences of their progenitors' impenetrable stupidity.

[Post script: the progeny of the trogs have been spared; however, the trogs will not go away. Having lost at the ballot booth they may now resort to fascist violence. Time will tell.]

A working man voting for R&R may as well fold his grandchildren in butcher paper and delivery them to the one percent marked "veal". Use the side door.

Given the choice (and an un-rigged voting machine), I'm choosing the Sophist over the Sociopath.

The debt crisis is a red herring put out by Wall St. to sleaze out of paying for the mess it's made.

the financial capitalists have looted the country. from their exalted position they can see the catastrophe they have inflicted on the population and they are able to anticipate the growing need of the many who have lost their jobs, their homes, their savings, retirement, and even the ability to feed and shelter themselves and their families. the wealthy see in this a looming danger, the danger of being asked to help. they want very badly to nip that in the bud.

to ward off the possibility of being held to account, the rentiers have invented the federal deficit crisis. they have directed the compliant and submissive mainstream media to tout the deficit constantly and meanwhile avoid mentioning the plight of working people as much as possible. the message they want to get across is that we can't afford to help people in need now because the country is bankrupt. arrogant Mitt Romney goes a step further and says they don't even deserve help because they're detestable parasites. with the exception of OWS raising consciousness for a brief time, this debt propaganda has been a great success.

politicians in Washington DC are in accord with the financiers that the number one problem facing the country is the federal deficit. they even think it's number two through ten. this shouldn't surprise, since the banks own Congress, only allowing men and women who are cooperative and obedient to get elected, and removing any who dare oppose them. that's why Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, and Alan Grayson, among others, don't work there anymore.

thus, the official Wall St./US Government answer to the beleaguered working family is this, "Fend for yourself, because even though I caused your sorrows, you're on your own." formally, that answer has a name: Austerity.

certainly, the federal deficit must be considered, but it is not either as serious or as immediate a threat as it is being propagandized to be. getting medical care costs under control would go a long way toward alleviating the deficit in the future, where the real debt concern is. combine that with a tax on high frequency trading and the balance sheet would improve markedly. but unfortunately, the sociopathic one percent is in control, hyping the deficit, using it as a smokescreen to shirk its responsibility to society.

Hey, heard the news? Life expectancy for poor whites in the US is falling! That'd be you, Bubba. Still going to vote Republican? Of course you are.

Your Parents Love You, just Not All That Much

I'm turning 61 in a couple of months. That means I'm old enough to remember when average people were able to see their wages steadily rise and their standard of living constantly improve. In fact, in the 1960's working people were doing so well that they started calling themselves Middle Class. That was not really accurate, but they were making enough to hold onto that pretension.

Now of course, if you are younger than 35 you know your road ahead is far less promising. In the past 30 years working people's wages have actually shrunk. Inflation-adjusted household income has stayed about the same, but that's only because everyone in the house is working.

During the past 30 years worker productivity more than doubled, but the rewards from that didn't go to the worker. Instead it went to corporations, their managers, and stockholders. What working people got was credit cards in lieu of pay, and now almost everyone is saddled with debt they will never be free of.

This screwing of the working class didn't just happen. My generation and our parents actually voted for it. Ronald Reagan came into office promising to restore the "Ownership Society", and that's what we have presently: everyone is owned by the credit card companies and the banks. That's how the world worked a hundred years ago and we're back to that now. There's a very old popular song from my grandparent's era with the lyrics "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer!". Well, that song is back in style.

Why the fuck did we vote to put the rich back in control to our own detriment? Because we're racist assholes. President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Great Society, which through a constellation of laws sought to provide opportunity to all Americans, even black Americans. Oh-oh, that was too scary for us white working class males, so we cut or noses off to spite our own faces and started handing the reigns to the wealth oligarchy.

The first thing Reagan did was to start busting unions. Unions had been the wellspring of the rise of working class wages and power, which we and our parents had been the direct beneficiaries of. You'd think we would have woken up at that point, seen the handwriting on the wall and yelled "Stop!". But we didn't. In fact, we cheered Reagan on. To be fair, I think we were too fucking stupid to realize how thoroughly and irrevocably we were screwing ourselves --and dooming you and our grandchildren to a life of debt peonage. We just thought we were putting those negroes back in their place. Really, we're that caliber of fuck-tard.

People my age remember a past that was much kinder to working people than the present is. It was a past in which anybody (assuming they were white) could work and raise a family on one income, even buy a house. But we never let on now that we remember that. We never tell you that things weren't always this difficult for young people starting out in life. I wonder whether that's because most of us still haven't come to the realization that we gave away your future, or that we know what we did and don't want to suffer your condemnation and possible retribution. Probably the former, because we are more stupid than we are cowardly, and we're really, really cowardly (and selfish).

Most appalling though, we white working class, baby boom males are poised to cast our vote for a vulture capitalist, one of the oligarchy that bleeds you and your children through interest payments and will continue to do so in perpetuity. We want to get rid of that socialist Kenyan in the White House so badly that we won't hesitate to sell you down the river, now or anytime. Again.

That's Ok, you don't need to thank us.

By the way, the next time some Limbaugh ditto-head tries telling you this is the land of opportunity, don't say a word, just kick him in his weazened balls. The fact is that upward mobility in the US is lower than anywhere in Europe. The Brits have it almost as bad though. They're our allies and closest friends, that is to say, they're pricks too. Their older generation voted for Thatcher when we voted for Reagan, so they have as little regard for their children as we have for ours. In fact, they now have a conservative government that is torturing its common people with Austerity, that wonderful poison the vulture capitalist will inflict on the US if given the chance. Anything to avoid taxing the rich.

Bending over for the "job-creators" --nonsensical and unnecessary.

The canard soared again during the first presidential debate: "Raising taxes (on the rich) is a job-killer!" Why would that be? Is a business going to lay off workers because the boss is forced to pay a nickel more in taxes? Is he going to go "John Galt" in disgust and go live in a cave? If he does, there's plenty who'll step up to take his place.

When demand for a product requires it, a business hires workers. When the demand is down, the business lays off workers. It has nothing to do with the marginal tax rate of the boss.

President G. W. Bush cut taxes for the wealthy and subsequently job growth was miserable. This was well before the housing crash. If increasing taxes on the rich were a job-killer, then you'd expect decreasing taxes to be a job-enhancer. Not the case.

What nobody addressed last night was this: the average person's wages are too low to even allow them to pay off their inflated credit card bill. They can't afford to buy anything new, so demand cannot increase. If demand doesn't increase, people won't get hired, and the economy will not recover. That is, this country will never be restored to what it was prior to the advent of Trickle-Down Economics.

Debt Peonage

The average person can't earn enough to get by. He or she charges groceries at the supermarket because there's nothing left in their account after paying the credit card bill. Down and down they go into the pit of debt, paying 23% interest on a loaf of bread. The lending bank gets that money from the Fed at 1% and pockets the difference.

Things were not always this way, but beginning in the '80's, wages were stunted. Simultaneously, credit cards were foisted on people. Debt was substituted for wages and the result is working people are now abject slaves to the financial industry. This isn't temporary, it's for keeps.

We are on a arc toward 2/3 of Americans becoming poor, just like in the good old days. Washington won't alter that arc because pols of both parties work for Wall St. and the banks. Makes sense because they pick up the the campaign tab.

Look around. Most wealth is extracted from the population through debt rather than being created through manufacturing. People are relentlessly squeezed by the financial industry.

The political response to this situation is predictably cynical. The call for austerity is like ordering those you systematically starve to give blood.

Welcome to debt peonage in the era of neo-feudalism. If we cared about our grandchildren we'd do something about it, but we're too complacent, too afraid, too atomized, and too selfish.

Bring out your dead.

A Romney-Ryan victory in November will confirm and solidify America's acceptance of a societal division into haves and have-nots. For thirty years the US has been on course to erode the power of the working class majority. This occurred not by chance, but through the well-funded, organized, and determined effort of the far right. Mainly via the destruction of labor unions and outsourcing of industry, distribution of wealth has been tilted upward so that it now resembles that of a century ago.

Look for the commons to disappear, not just parks, but publicly owned water supplies. Roads will be purchased by privateers and tolls levied for their use. Public schools will be replaced with a voucher system that ultimately will prove to have been a swindle, leaving the children of two thirds of the country, the have-nots, under-educated or uneducated.

Absolutely forget about remedial help in schools, as the resources will have evaporated. If a child doesn't get it on the first try at any and every stage, that will effectively doom his or her education. The consequence will be that many more school "failures" will drift into the saw blade of crime and punishment, so that the already staggering prison population will burgeon further.

How was the American working person enticed to vote against his and his progeny's best interests? An indolent media complicit with the machinations of the far right contributed. Racism and nascent fascism helped, having been propelled in many areas by pro-fascist religious structures.

Hysteria about the Moslem, socialist, "Kenyan-in-the-White House" will have won the day. The true-believers will have succeeded in immolating themselves and their class, and the wealthy will at last be freed from the burden of having to return anything back to the society that provided their wealth.

It'll be feudalism with iPods, at least at the start. The iPods will eventually break.

Democracy had a Judas. It was the mainstream media. Its Roman executioner was the corporate state.

Beginner's Guide to Genesis

I am not religious, but I have to admit that the story of Adam and Eve, while it should not be taken literally, might embody the story of the genesis of civilization. Further, even the misogynistic blaming of the female character could have some foundation in fact. In a poetic sense mankind might have been cast out of a Garden of Eden because a woman made a fateful discovery about manipulating the environment. The discovery could even have involved the apple.

Prior to the advent of agriculture our ancestors were hunter-gatherers living in small tribes. Modern studies of the dwindling pockets of such primitive people reveal that they actually spend eighteen hours or less per week obtaining food. Presumably, the rest of their time is spent goofing off, kicking back. Even the French work a thirty-five hour week.

The author Daniel Quinn wrote a series of books ("Ishmael", "My Ishmael") describing the fateful turn of mankind toward agriculture. He uses the term "totalitarian agriculture" because once the trees were felled and burned, there was no opportunity to revert to hunting and gathering. The only way forward was to grow crops.

In his series of novels, Daniel Quinn asserts that agriculture gave rise to inequality, classes, and exploitation. Those at the top of the hierarchy "locked up the food" to control those beneath and force them to do the bidding of the upper classes. And so it is that we now work a minimum forty hour week, barely make ends meet, and live in a constant state of insecurity. Some at the tip of the hierarchy live fabulously well, while very many live in deprivation at the bottom. This inequality is accelerating at present, but it has been prevalent throughout all of history, with the brief and limited exception of the mid twentieth century in the US.

There is archeological evidence to support Quinn's assertion. Remains show that humans were much taller just prior to the advent of agriculture, after which people grew to several inches less in height on average, and even now are just beginning to reach the previous stature. So it seems that while agriculture allowed greater population density, it reduced nutrition to the individual, along with introducing the myriad maladies of modern society. As the biblical parable maintains, there really was a paradise lost.

Now, since women probably did most of the gathering, it is likely to have been a woman who surmised for the first time that cultivating food by planting seeds could produce a reliable source of plant food close to home and without the necessity of having to scour the woods for wild specimens. This initial advantage led to abandonment of a nomadic culture, the domesticating of animals, and ownership of land. The latter eventually would be fought over so that wars, the military class, and power structures ensued. This because an ancient woman had a bright idea.

All in the world that sucks might have sprung from an apple seed. Hey, but now we have Viagra, Wellbutrin, and iPads, so it's a fair trade.

The point is that the biblical story might be rooted in truth, as most verbal histories are. It's just that the whole point of the story has been missed, which is typical. The lesson should be that we evolved in relative harmoney with nature and eachother, that there was once a paradise, but we took a wrong turn. The lesson we choose to take instead is that we are to be suspicious of women and therefore ordained to live in a paranoid, murderous patriarchal culture run by sociopaths. What do you expect from a species of over-acheiving chimpanzees?

traditional values: hate, paranoia, ignorance, passive aggression, racism, violence against minorities, authoritarianism.

conserva-sadism

All women should have access to contraceptive coverage regardless of where they work. Birth control is basic health care for women: 99 percent of women of all backgrounds and religious faiths use birth control at some point in their lives. Millions of women and families will benefit from this coverage.

Those who think birth control is a sin needn't use it, but their seeking to deny anyone from having unimpeded access are assaulting the health and privacy rights of others.

Finally,

in this time of zestfully pursued reductions and elimination of aid of all types to poor woman and their families, denying them access to birth control guarantees increased suffering and deprivation. People who want to take birth control, food stamps, medicaid, and housing away from low income mothers and their children are sadists.

neither is even close to having the answer

there are real stakes in this presidential election, but arguing over the economy is political theater of the absurd. there is so much credit card debt and so few jobs paying a living wage that whatever either says he'll do to improve things (by tinkering around the periphery) is like pumping air into a tire with a hole in it. a substantial and bold fix is needed, but all barack and willard have to offer is competing brands of bicycle pumps.

voting for Obama-Hoover in 2012!

I have pretty much given up hope that any real change is in the offing.

The banks do and will continue to own the country, and the working class ("middle" class is a long standing misnomer) will continue to slide toward poverty and our children into indenture. Perhaps when the last of my generation, the baby boomers, the pig in the python, exits its southern end things will improve, but not now.

My personal tale of woe is as follows: my adult daughters work at menial jobs with no benefits. I pay private health insurance premiums (BCBS) for them and my 20 month old granddaughter, which adds up to about $850/mo. On top of that, because they actually needed treatment, I have another $7500+ in medical bills not covered because of high deductibles.

Fortunately for us, I am just able to get by, but the credit card bills are metastasising. I'm 60 and I'm getting a little tired of all this. I don't think much about retiring because I have too many pressing obligations, but it had been nice to muse that retirement was a distant possibility. Until, that is, the Democratic leadership started making noises about how reasonable it would be to slash Social Security, even though it is solvent for decades to come and could be made to continue so in perpetuity by raising the ceiling.

So in a nutshell, I feel I've been fooled again (lots of pop music references coming up here). I voted for Obama-Hoover in the primaries on the off chance that he wasn't a corporatist, certain that Hillary was, based on past performance of her hubby, Wild Bill.

But now I am reminded of the lyrics to that Stevie Wonder song: "If you really want to hear my view, you ain't done nothin'." Don't get me wrong, I'm not crazy, I'll be voting for O-H in November, rest assured. As Noam Chomsky says, the lesser of two evils is less evil. Nobody with any sense wants another Fat Tony on the Supreme Court. But the game is rotten. Everybody knows.