Slog into the MoosePoop!

(My attachement to a Petition to the US House Ways and Means Committee)

"Austerity measures such as chained CPI do not restore the middle class or the economy. They shrink the pie overall for the purpose of balancing the books in a plantation model society.

Choosing chained CPI or Medicare cuts would place you squarely in the heart of the winner-take-all camp. Frankly, I don't know if there's any point in my even bringing this up, since if you're in that camp it's by choice and with pride and conviction. We're wasting each other's time, aren't we?."

Plantation America

Many people I have worked with, most of whom live in suburbia, display an indifference to the condition of others. It doesn't bother them that very many people, especially young people, work for low pay without medical benefits, vacation time, or paid sick leave. Indeed, workers are expected to show up even when they or their small children are ill, forget about being paid for staying home when sick.

The people I'm speaking of seem to have no empathy for others, or even an awareness of the struggles of others. They have mastered the ability to compartmentalize so that they can quarantine fledgling empathy whenever it arises, keeping a sunny disposition all the while. These people are very often self-proclaimed Christians. They also have an unshakable conviction of their own superiority.

Surprisingly, they actually don't have much real antipathy toward the poor, other than when they're black, of course. Even then though, beyond a knee-jerk condemnation, they don't truly hate poor people of any race. Their real ire is attached to having to fork over some portion of their hard-earned dollars to assist those in need.

In that regard, they truly, gutturally hate liberals because liberals have been able to coerce these good burghers to provide assistance to others in the past. The poor on their own have no power to cause the affluent to help them. It is those secular-humanist, atheistic, do-gooder, bleeding heart liberals who have forced unwanted tithing to the poor. This is why libertarians and conservatives despise liberals, it's simply a matter of money wrenched from them. To their relief, liberals' ability to interfere has been greatly diminished during the post-Reagan era, and is now at a very low ebb.

But what will be the effect of abandoning the common well being, what sort of society will come out of vast numbers of people living without hope or security? When people are unable to feed healthful food to their children, unable to provide them preventive medical care, when they are perpetually concerned about eviction, what will that do to society? With the vast majority locked in a daily struggle for survival, that admits for little in the way of kindness toward each other, so the world will become a meaner, angrier, more violent, less humane place. (It's going to be very nasty, a la "Mother Courage".) The morality and sensibilities of the plantation are upon us.

In the near term, the "I've got mine" crowd will continue to live well. However, over time even their ranks, both as a proportion of the whole and in absolute terms, will dwindle. They and their children and grandchildren will slide off into the ditch as the social Darwinist, winner-take-all paradigm progresses toward its end game. There is no perch at the tip of a pyramid.

Thus we bury the last vestiges of the New Deal to arrive here at Plantation America. This was inevitable. Any democracy has a finite life span. Statistically, a time will occur when the plebes momentarily become inattentive and lazy, and at that instant the lurking oligarchy will leap up and strangle the democracy. It's happened here now.

We missed our chance. We were very close to a prosperous, egalitarian society, but the urge to have more -and especially more than the other guy- got the better of us. Like every mark, we were conned via our own greed by the real Owners. We were artfully led to equate exploitation with opportunity and swap empathy for avidity.

What's happens next is anyone's guess. Perhaps nothing, and our descendants will know only a grim but stable form of feudalism. Alternatively, a revolution might occur which could either restore democratic society or else usher in a fascist state. Democracy is a statistical anomaly. Fear and fury always favor fascism.

Austerity is in no way meant to restore fair pay for working people, bring back general prosperity, or rebuild a middle class; austerity's only goal is to balance the Plantation's books.

The banks control everything and own us through inescapable debt. Our sons and daughters are fated to live as landless peasants. Hunger is on the rise in this land of austounding wealth. Worker protections from exploitative employers are all but gone. Medical care is a luxury that can instantly bankrupt you. Your every communication and move in the last decade have been captured and cataloged by federal contractors so that your thoughts can be surmised and your actions predicted. These are the fruits of the Ownership Society put in place 33 years ago. Thanks, Ron, this feels great.

Members of Congress, now in the summer of 2013, are acting in the same manner, with the same spirit and the same motives as Southern politicians following Reconstruction. That is, they resent and despise the workings of elected government and seek only to bring it to a dead stop. Congratulations fellas, you win, finally. Now we can all revert to the Middle Ages together.

man, did my generation ever fail yours!

they extract wealth from you every minute of your life and it began the day you were born. this wasn't true when i came into the world back in the 50's, but it's wholly true for anyone born now. if you're under forty, you probably have little idea how badly the rich and the corporations are cheating you and how ravenously they are devouring your life.

sick? pay to get treatment. hungry? pay to be fed, regardless of your situation. want to sleep out of the rain? pay your landlord. want to get an education? pay an exorbitant amount for something that is of decreasing value. if you can't pay, then borrow and thereafter pay every day on the interest for the rest of your life. can't afford to borrow? die, they have no need of you.

very soon, as the commons are finally completely sold off to corporations and Saudi Arabian investment companies, if you want to walk out of doors or ride on a street, you'll have to pay them because it all will be privately owned and nothing will be "ours" anymore. that's what ronald reagan meant when he touted an ownership society.

there was nothing inevitable about the way things turned out. this country could still have been a place of shared wealth and continuous advancement for all, but the ultra-rich chafed at having to forego snapping up every available cent for themselves (because they're sociopaths). so, they gradually but surely changed the rules such that ordinary people here and throughout the world lost their power. their wages, by design, declined, and their wealth, stored in their homes and pensions, was ripped off.

this is the era of neo-feudalism and you are a 21st century serf living in it. you were born to pay the lords of the planet every day of your life, for everything you need, for everything you touch. you won't ever own anything of value, won't have security, and will always be strapped for rent money. that's the way they want it: otherwise, they're not extracting wealth from you at an optimum rate, and that would make them sad. this is your present and your future. my apologies, we let this happen to you.

Woody Guthrie wrote the lyric, "this land is your land, this land is my land". not any fucking more it isn't.

happy fourth of july, kids.

The Answer's still Blowin' in the Wind (on the occasion of the Zimmerman verdict)

What a victory for A.L.E.C. and the NRA! Gun sales will rocket now as all sides arm up. The free market solution to (induced) disintegration of society will be to equip everyone on the street with the power to deal instant death. An armed society is a more polite society, although a much less advanced and a meaner one. Hail Chaos! Hello to the further cheapening of life and the pitting of one against the other. Above all, congratulations to you, Profit from Mayhem, sit down here and savor the paranoia you've wrought and contemplate the carnage to come.

Gunz R Goofy

If it makes you happy, keep your guns. But don't tell me you're protecting me, or that your gun ownership shows you care about or are even aware of the first, fourth, or any amendments other than the second. That's a charade that I'm tired of listening to. Fact is, we are being wiped out by the bankers and the one percent, we are being spied on, catalogued, and controlled by a global oligarchy, and you ain't done nothing about it with your little metal totems -and you never will, because small arms have no effect on Wall Street, London banks, or drones. Guns are a joke and so are gun nuts.

Want to take a stand? Don't sit there on your arse polishing your gun, get out in the street and make some noise. Otherwise, go play in traffic. Bring your gun along too.

Conservatives of Modest Means: Traitors to their Class

it befuddles me when i hear people who are far from rich themselves defending the status and privileges of the rich. "they earned it, it's their money." of course, that's largely untrue, the rich just happened to be at the right spot at they right time with their hand out, while others work hard but are denied the secure and stable life they deserve. why though do these "walmart republicans" advocate for the rich taking it all?

sometimes i try taking them literally and accept that they really think it's morally right the rich should be allowed to win all and take the whole pot. for them it's a big card game and losers shouldn't gripe. the logical extension of this is to hold a national round of Russian roulette, littering the landscape with corpses, leaving a single winner intact. (that would save a lot of time versus slowly bankrupting people and driving them to suicide.)

another possible way to explain their embrace of wholesale economic disparity is a misguided impulse toward enlightened self interest. they believe the line that the rich are "job creators" who would employ vastly greater numbers of workers if not taxed and if wages were kept low.

this viewpoint is so fucked up it makes me want to scream at them like a drill instructor, "look, idiot, businesses are in it for the money. they would prefer to have ZERO employees because that would avoid labor costs altogether. they hire people only when the HAVE TO, and that is only when DEMAND for their product increases. and guess what? if you pay people shit wages (or offshore their job) and charge them interest out-the-ass for crap they've already bought, fucking demand will NEVER increase! even henry fucking-ford had that figured out, shit-for-brains!"

let's assume that some of these assholes on some level actually grasp that American working people, a.k.a. the middle class, are being crushed in order to shift wealth to the zero point one percent. why then do they still stand up for the rich against their own class?

Answer: daddy issues.

the authoritarian way is to reflexively defer to those in power. kiss the asses of your betters and step on whoever is below you. strive to please the strong daddy figure so you'll be deemed a good boy or girl. he'll make you feel safe when you're scared, as long as you obey him.

that, in the end, is why these traitors to their own class carry water for the rentiers. they are suck-up, toady, authoritarian followers. they're human waste. fuck 'em, they suck.

Whatever it takes, don't force the Rich to leave a Tip

I am heartened to learn that my representative to the US Congress supports NIH funding because not doing so would be socially nihilistic. He asks what should be cut to free up the money to spend on NIH, but I think it's probably unnecessary to cut at all. Whatever we cut, the result is certain to be unfair, cause undue hardship, and even damage the economy further.

Performing economic triage so that the few can continue to keep all their winnings in a winner-take-all paradigm is folly and in the end will prove to have been futile. The money is there. We are not broke. Effective corporate tax rates and marginal taxes for the rich have never been lower. The result is that for the past three decades wealth has been migrating out of the middle class and up to the top tier. The wealthy are doing splendidly while the middle class is dying. We present this as crisis caused by too much government spending on the needy instead of the massive ongoing shakedown by the elite that it is.

If we insist on cuts, may I suggest we rethink garrisoning the entire planet with our legions. Only don't do it without finding a landing place in our economy for all those servicemen and women who would be made redundant.

Finally, and I'm positive my tea party, libertarian representative will disagree with this, if there's no social contract, if the lives and well being of all citizens are not taken into account, there's no society, and therefore no country in the end. The dear departed Margaret Thatcher, who resonated so much with Ronald Reagan, held there was no such thing as society, only individauls.

Do you think she was correct? Is it really just every one for himself? I think she will be shown to have been correct, only because tossing away the social contract makes it a self-fulfilling prophesy.

it's really not a big deal that the government, through private contractors, gathers information about all our individual communications. the number one reason for this is that it's used exclusively for discovering potential terrorists through analysis and discovery of patterns present in those communications.

of course, until there was a public reaction, government manuals did openly classify all protest as a form of "low grade terrorism". that's why government surveilled (actually, paid contractors to surveil) OWS participants and shared the info with banks and corporations, and why privateers get paid to snoop on anti-war activists and environmentalists.

certainly, a reasonable person will conclude there's no real existing or potential downside to blanket collection of meta-data, because it's the only way to keep us all safe. really, especially since the dirt-digging is done by private corporations, for profit. forever seeking to expand their business. wining, dining, and eventually hiring politicians.

no worries. go back to sleep. pay your taxes first though. contractors need that money right away. to keep you safe. (patsy.)

Once again the wisdom and magnanimity of the US Supreme Court has been brought to bear on 21st century society through its effective suspension of the Voter Rights Act. In its opinion, the sight of the eye of justice is not presently required anywhere in the land. After all, it's not as though in the last ten or fifteen years any state has vilely and capriciously disenfranchised thousands of African-American voters so as to skew their state's voting outcome in a presidential election, leaving the decision of who would be President of the United States to fiat by the selfsame Supreme Court.

This present Supreme Court decision, like the latter and the Citizens United decision in between, is a revolting spectacle put on by reactionary, racist, elitist jurors, a mortifying display of our national underbelly on view for the entire world. The forces these twisted, reprehensible men represent will eventually lose, but they seem determined nonetheless to leave an ugly stain on our history before they are banished and their vicious creed expunged.

Occasionally, I spot a bumper sticker that says "Who is John Galt?". Wish I had one that also contained the answer: "A fictional psychopath".

Neoliberal Democrats Killing us Softley but Surely

That sly cock hound from Arkansas signed NAFTA, dooming working people. He went on to push for and sign welfare reform, really putting it to poor people. Now, the articulate bullshitter from Chicago is cleaning up, screwing the elderly out of social security. It's all over now. Thank gawd the working class has the Democratic Party looking out for them, huh?

Change in the Land of the Lotus Eaters

As details of Obama-care come bleeding out, it seems that it mostly consists of a web-based clearing house for insurance policies along with a mandate to get insurance. It comes with some tax breaks for low income people and -very unfairly- no health care at all for others. (Not directly Obama's doing; however, the plan's weakness is that it allows calculating, inhumane Republican governors to screw the poorest of the working poor in their states out of any health care at all.) It will do some good, that can be said of it, and to hell with those who want to undo it but offer nothing in its place.

But looking back on the political situation in 2008 when the Republican conservative cause was reeling in the wake of the disastrous Bush-Cheney Administration, it seems that a much better deal on behalf of working people could have and should have been obtained. Damn it, every other first world nation has universal healthcare, with better outcomes, and it's done at half the cost or less. Any Democrat elected in 2008 could have gotten a better deal than what we wound up with. The moment was ripe, and we blew it.

Which brings me to this musing: was Barach Obama allowed by the powerful to become president exactly because he was the most likely to do the least with regard to real change, either in healthcare, finance reform, or accountability for Wall Street? Did the big money get the guy they wanted, one who would look forward and not backward at all their larceny, the one who would be least apt to rock the boat?

There was no way a Republican was going to win in 2008, Bush-Cheney having been ultimately such a failure and a disgrace. Even the American electorate wasn't going to be that stupid. Wall Street knew this, so was a corporatist Democrat their fallback? When they realized he was even more corporate-friendly than Hilary, they started writing checks to his campaign. Was an Obama presidency a strategic gambit on the part of Wall Street, getting them the least offensive alternative until they could fully take the reigns again?

Giving credence to this is the fact they dumped Obama during the next election cycle for the lukewarm Republican candidate. They did this even after all Obama had done for them, or rather, all he had refrained from doing to them, like holding them accountable for crashing the economy. Doesn't this suggest he was their interim choice, a caretaker to serve until one of their own could resume the throne?

This seems likely. Who was more favorably treated by the Obama Administration than Wall Street and the health insurance industry? Isn't Obama-care/Romney-care really the invention of the right wing Heritage Foundation, something concocted to save the health insurance industry from its existing death spiral of a shrinking pool of increasingly sicker buyers and ever higher premiums?

Obama was Wall Street's ringer. He was the best of a bad situation for them. He was their choice, not ours. They got what they wanted, and as always, we got no more than they were willing to give us. They run the show, not us. Bet your ass.

Incredibly, laughingly, Obama still thinks he can earn Wall Street's respect. He's even going to slow poison Social Security to attempt to get their approval!

Calling Dr. Freud! (Dr. Freud does not come, but his nephew, Edward Bernays, father of public relations, is in attendance.)

Parallels

over the past three decades in the US, working people have lost ground, and the way things are they will continue to do so. the top tier has engineered our system such that they are the rentiers and the rest of us the cottiers. democracy is a puny relic of its old self in that when the masses are permitted to vote, the candidates presented are pre-selected by the 1%, who will win whether a Repub or a Dem is elected, and the interests of we the people will not be pursued in either case.

i happened to look at this Wikipedia entry about the potato famine in Ireland, and i saw strong parallels between the plight of the Irish people in the nineteenth century and US working people now. Ireland's absentee landlords then were like today's financial corporations. they were indifferent to the suffering they caused through their interference in Irish agriculture and economic structure, just as todays corporations disdain the average person as they strip him of his wealth. the English government of that time was like our present neo-conservatives, unbending in their fealty to the free market principle, to the degree they actually increased export of food out of Ireland during the worst period of starvation. (By contrast, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire humanely sent ships bearing food into Irish ports at night, defying British edict.)

this is not to say that the average person in the US is suffering as those in Ireland did, not yet. a million people have not starved to death so far. but the way average people are being pushed down and run over, the parallels are there, definitely, and there's really nothing to stop today's economic oligarchy from driving our condition to any limit. after all, at his very moment they're looking to eliminate food stamps that so many working poor rely on to feed themselves and their children.

O's public response to DOJ's crackdown on leaks a real crack up

President Obama stated his concern the Justice Department's eavesdropping on AP could have a chilling effect on investigative reporting, as if this were never the desired effect. What would the president have to say about the vehement pursuing of Aaron Swartz, who was instrumental in quashing SOPA, the bill so horrendously antagonistic to free speech and privacy? that he was afraid hounding to death resisters to pervasive government/corporate control might reduce the activity of resistors to pervasive government/corporate control?

Dear Senator,

I strongly urge you to vote against any Farm Bill, and any bill of any name or ilk, which will cut funds from Food Stamps (SNAP).

Since 1980, productivity has gone up by a factor of more than 2.5. What have working people gained from that? LESS THAN ZERO, while those at the top have seen their wealth and income explode.

Working people have been screwed. Period.

Your rich friends already have it all. Do they not know when to stop?

if the first, fourth, and fifth amendments are held in open disregard, what exactly is it you're protecting with the second?

fun names of some right wing, 401c4 dark money "social welfare charities" buying all our elections, post "Citizens United":

Buried at the Crossroads GPS -Karl Rove proprietor

Americans for Koch Brothers' Prosperity -(guess who) proprietors

US Chamber of Horrors and Rigged Commerce -US Corp Mafia

Hollowed Out American Future Fund -Koch Brothers proprietors

Americans for Nonexistent Job Security -US Chamber of Horrors (see above)

(these are the gods on Olympus steering your children's future into a dead end, so there's reason to take note.)

Kill the Left and Foster Fanaticism

After generations of rule by US-backed strongmen, Middle Eastern countries have trended toward religious extremism in direct response. The US has long supported authoritarian, right wing regimes in the Middle East, Central and South America to assure stability in those areas. It has done so not out of concern for the safety or advancement of the citizenry, but for the purpose of maintaining a lucrative business environment for US and multinational corporations. The long term effect of this policy has contributed naturally to the rise of extremist religious groups in the Mideast.

Decadent regimes systematically destroy all opposition. Leftists are among the first to go because they are antithetical to rule by any elite, military or civilian. Along with them, journalists with the temerity to disseminate truth about the regime's methods and corruption are eliminated. The tactics strongmen employ to deal with these dissenters are well known, despicable, and have often been taught to their henchmen by the US military, in the United States.

Corporations have become powerful enough to leapfrog the US government in propping up dictatorships and thereby contribute to the growth of extremism. They pay local para-militaries to clear away obstacles like unionists, environmental protectors, protesters, and intrusive journalists through intimidation, torture, and murder. The US government need not become directly involved unless and until large scale military operations are required to deal with whatever group will ultimately be labeled as terrorist.

Eventually, no opposition survives in repressed countries but one: extreme fundamentalist religion, because it is further to the right and more authoritarian than even the regime is, and it is unyielding. Radical religion is flourishing because under existing circumstances it is the only surviving alternative. There is no room for democratic change because the left has been destroyed. Religious extremism does battle with the only weapon at hand, it fights authoritarianism with authoritarianism, and it is adept in its use.

Things won't change. A US president can't overturn the paradigm because he or she would be denounced as weak. Much of the clatter in this regard would be fueled by the business elite who resist anything that could cause interruption of profits, even if the existing paradigm might someday lead to explosive annihilation. (Too many quarters done the road to worry about.) Kill a radical funamentalist with a drone today and two will arise. Do you expect repressed people, victims of corrupt regimes, to simply acquiesce to corporate wishes?

There is a third way, democracy, but that is merely a hypothetical. The actual arena is limited to US power, versus authoritarian strongmen, versus radical extremists. The left is missing, having been too long at the spear point of paranoid regimes' vendetta, corporate ire, and the religious right's hatred. Fascism begets fundamentalism.

Wonder what's in store for this hemisphere? Wonder what's in store here?

Consider the juxtaposition of these:

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." -Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Have you spent more than three weeks in a Juvenile Detention facility?" -Red Cross blood donor screening question.

Get it?

Open Position for Strong Man in US

clearly, our system has been captured by the oligarchs. they pay little or no taxes, while the irs vengefully wrings a tiny fraction of their rightful obligation from the rest of us. all republicans and nearly all democrats are pre-selected by and elected with funds from the monied elite, so why in the world would government work for the majority?

psychologically, it's much easier to pretend government is still working for all, as portrayed in out-of-date junior high textbooks, than it is to take a sober look at the true condition of this erstwhile democracy. wave the flag and support the troops, never asking what they are being made to do under that flag in the interests of the oligarchs. patriotism is a prerequisite for any dying empire.

the people of this country will not fight back. they are atomized and lobotomized. there will be no general strike to take power back from the corporatocracy. there will be no revolution. people will merely buy more guns as talisman against annihilation. this fetish with small arms won't save them anymore than it has saved citizens of other failed states. sitting cross-legged with your gun in your lap isn't going to redeem you or restore civilization.

what will happen in the future is this: because the citizens of the US have no will to control their own fate and will not fend for their children, the oligarchy will continue to steal from and impoverish them. when the deprivation reaches a breaking point, the gutless sheep will reach out for a strong leader to restore normalcy. think of Saddam Hussein, only a more occidental version (Dick Cheney would do, except he'll be cryogenically frozen by then). an authoritarian, fascist regime is all we can look forward to in the US. the sheep will have their shepherd, and democracy will be more associated with ancient Greece than with the US, as it is now already.

Four years of the Obama Administration have taught me this: the problem wasn't just Bush.

poll assessed various religious groups' tolerance to the killing of civilians

percent who agree: It is NEVER right for individuals or small groups to target and kill civilians.

Muslim         89
Mormon       79
Athiest/Ag   76
Jewish         75
Protestant     72
Catholic       71

percent who agree: It is NEVER right for the military to target and kill civilians.

Muslim         78
Athiest/Ag   56
Jewish         43
Catholic       39
Protestant     38
Mormon       33

percent overall, derived: It is NEVER right for anyone to target and kill civilians.

Muslim         83
Athiest/Ag   66
Jewish         59
Catholic       55
Protestant     55
Mormon       52

observations:
1) An American Muslim is the least likely to avow approval of killing civilians.
2) All Americans are more tolerant of military authority killing civilians than they are of individuals doing so; however, Mormons are far more so than all the others.
3) American Atheists, Agnostics, and other non-religious are the second most opposed to killing civilians under any circumstances.
4) American Christians clearly appear to be the least opposed to killing civilians.

Thatcher and Reagan were Demented Doomsters who led the gutting of their countries' manufacturing base, thus ushering in this present era of casino capitalism. Beyond that, they together introduced what has accurately been called "The Age of Cruelty" in which rather than helping people who've fallen through the cracks, we think only to widen the cracks. They inveigled this by convincing the gullible and greedy public in their respective countries that the cost of maintaining a safety net was too high, was holding them back, that social Darwinism was Ok and even good for them individually.

Now the grandchildren of these stupid people are denied medical care and food security. There is no chance of improvement in their lives either, because the systems of both countries have changed permanently, such that now all wealth is drawn upward and life at the bottom is increasingly deprived. Damn Ron and Maggie, and damn the stupid assholes who fell for their transparent con. Ron and Maggie by the way, demented as they were, bought into the con themselves.

{listening to the pleasant, middle-aged, middle manager describe the variable control heater in the seat of his bawana bike and thinking how my daughters don't have medical insurance benefits. fucken wanna scream.}

democracy dying

corporations control government through their funding of elections. the people have no voice now that there are few unions, which at one time vied with corporations in election funding so as to buy the people a place at the table. no more.

the banks do whatever they please in this rentier society --where those on the bottom pay in perpetuity to the few at the top. even conservatives now decry pervasive "crony capitalism", but the truth is the phrase is a redundancy because capitalism was formed to assure the survival of aristocratic wealth through the transition to industrialization. when New Deal restraints on capitalist power were stripped away, we were cast into neo-feudalism.

the Dems must stroke Wall St to receive cash gifts. the Repubs are ideologically committed to the winner-take-all, two caste system. and the people, especially in the South but spreading up the geographic center, are responding to "values" side issues to the exclusion of their basic self interest. here Big Money media adroitly steers The People away from glimpsing their true position.

meantime, a Dem president is selling Social Security down the river.

times are scary. fear is in the air. i gotta buy a gun.
money's short. debt is huge. i gotta buy a gun.
jobs are scarce. bills flooding in. i gotta buy a gun.

we shake the world. we plant your fears. let us sell you this gun.
we take all the money. we skip out on taxes. let us sell you this gun.
we send jobs overseas. we charge 23% on a loaf of bread. let us sell you this gun.

remember: use it on your neighbor, not on us.
good boy.

Bradley Manning does not belong in prison another day. He revealed vicious homicide carried out in our name, he shed light on much falsely classified information that the public has a right to know about -and needs to know if we are to have a democracy. On the other hand, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Col. James Steele, Ret., Paul Wolfowitz, and Bush the Lesser are a collection of torturers and mass murderers who should be brought before the International Court of Justice at the Hague. But there has been little justice so far in the 21st century, and no reason to think that will change soon.

Flash: "I've got mine" is not a political philosophy. Pretending it's one is what's drawing the Vandals to the gates.

the mandatory card game, everyone's in it for this hand and then the next one. paychecks get lost. people don't go home. kids don't get fed. there's all the money in the world in the kitty, but it'll all go to one or two players and everyone else will walk away empty handed. it's a desperate, lonely, thrilling, draining, stupefying, game. and it's fatal. Fran Lebowitz calls this the "High Stakes Poker Society". it seems beyond changing or redemption.

Sequestration - def: 1) panicking over the unlikely possiblity of becoming "the next Greece" in such a way as to needlessly and immediately become another Bolivia. 2) something ass-hats do.

Sequestration is a blunt instrument supposedly meant to reduce the federal debt. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, a third of that debt is due to Bush's tax cuts for the rich, with another third due to the Wall Street Casino crash and the Iraq war. Without these, the debt would be a third of what it now is --and SHRINKING. So, rather than tapping obscenely wealthy individauls, banks, or war profiteers, we're taking it out of the hides of babies, kids, the elderly, the desperate, and from general safety. Sounds fair... to a Tea-bagger, anyway:

(from the Office of Management and Budget, in millions)

928 from FEMA's disaster relief money
633 from the Department of Education's Special Education programs
604 from National Nuclear Security Administration
512 from Customs and Border Protection
394 from Defense Environmental Cleanup
232 from the Federal Aviation Administration
199 from public housing
184 from Rehabilitation Services and Disability Research
175 from Low Income Home Energy Assistance
168 from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
125 from the Wildland Fire Management
116 from Higher Education
96 from Homeless Assistance Grants
86 from Student Financial Assistance
75 from Aging and Disability Services Programs
79 from Embassy Security, Construction, and Maintenance
71 from administration at the Office of Federal Student Aid
70 from the Agricultural Disaster Relief Fund at USDA
61 from the Hazardous Substance Superfund at EPA
57 from the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control
53 from Salaries and Expenses at the Food Safety and Inspection Service
51 from Prevention and Public Health
44 from healthcare Affordable Insurance Exchange Grants program
27 from healthcare State Grants and Demonstrations
20 from Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Programs
20 from Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure, and Technology
19 from Housing for the Elderly
17 from Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS
17 from Automation Modernization, Customs and Border Protection
13 from healthcare Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan Program (Co-ops)
10 from the World Trade Center Health Program Fund
6 from Emergency Food and Shelter

... or to a demented neanderthal with a penchant for S&M (but i repeat myself).

(Not to worry: banks will in no way be adversely affected.)

Divided We're Plunging

Once in this country, thirty years ago or longer, the saying "We're all in this together" held weight. In the present era, the phrase is alien. We've gone from a nation in which progress meant everyone moving forward together to one in which it means sorting and separating, with the ascendency of a few and the down sliding of all others.

The phrase has been supplanted by the term, "personal responsibility", which although it is portrayed as spurring the individual toward self-sufficiency, is really meant to spurn those less fortunate. Its honest translation is "I've got mine, and don't ask me to care a whit about the welfare of anyone else."

With this shift of society's focus from our general well being toward individual aggrandizement, there has be a proportionate disintegration of interpersonal relations. We care far less about one another now, hostility and fear replacing sympathy and empathy. The upshot is that when we are not acting with indifference toward others we're arming ourselves against them. And increasingly, actually shooting them.

Greed is good and the individual is supreme. Caring about others is socialism. Meanness is the new national character. A few more years of this and the commons will be gone, we'll live in a landscape of guarded compounds surrounded by slums and grim poverty, and life will be even cheaper than it has become now. The United States of America will dissolve into seperate regional territories, and will resemble Afghanistan more than the country of President Eisenhower. Go Tea Party.

School Privatization and the Two Class Society

High stakes testing is overused, relentless, stressful, and grim. It is assembly line education as Deming would have it. It produces little answer-boxes who ultimately burn out, become dull and incurious, and have no appetite for the pursuit of knowledge. In another ten years, once the devastation of a generation is complete, it will be unmasked for the mad scheme it is.

Beyond these immediate effects, high stakes testing is being used as a Trojan horse to undermine teachers' unions because they are the last piece on the chessboard protecting public schools from privatization. Once privatization is in place, the education a child gets will depend entirely on the salary his/her parents make. At that point the dictum of President Woodrow Wilson will have been met:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

Good old Mr. Wilson.

How Effed Up are we? Pretty Effin' Effed Up, as it turns out.

Ah, the free and unfettered marketplace, arbiter of all life! Released from the stranglehold of regulation (or at least the enforcement of it), the marketplace will resolve all conflict in the most efficient way.

Take as an example the use of antibiotics in the poultry and cattle raising industry. By lacing feed with antibiotics, animals are made to grow to a size suitable for slaughter more quickly and in greater numbers than if they were not plied with drugs. This means more profit for the cattlemen, or the slaughter houses, or Wall St., whichever is at the top of the totem pole in the meat-producing arena.

Somebody who doesn't spike their cattle feed with antibiotics is at a competitive disadvantage. His cattle will cost more per pound to produce, and unless he can come up with some marketing gimmick to justify an increase in price to the consumer to recoup the difference, he's doomed to fold as a meat producer.

Believe it or not however, there is a downside to spiking cattle feed with tons of antibiotics. Through various biological avenues it results in loss of efficacy of those antibiotics. The irony of antibiotics is that the more you use them the sooner the bacteria they're meant to combat will develop a resistance to them.

That's one of the reasons people, a lot of them children, die in a flu epidemic. Rarely do they die of the flu itself, but of secondary bacterial pneumonia infections. Now that the punch of many antibiotics has been softened by overuse in cattle farming, more kids will die, in fact, more have already died in the recent flu outbreak.

Now, a liberal or socialist would decry the promiscuous use of antibiotics for things like cattle raising because he doesn't understand the wisdom of the free market. He or she will propose that we ban the practice in order to avoid continued degradation of our arsenal of antibiotics. Shortsighted fool! The marketplace will resolve the problem in the long run to the greatest benefit of all.

Yes, a few children will die now, a few hundred will die in the next round of flu, and ultimately hundreds of thousands of all ages will die from even small cuts because our antibiotics won't work anymore. But think of the cumulative profits that would otherwise be forgone! You see, the market takes everything into account. It's rational. It's like Jesus, only not so sappy.

Rest assured that battalions of lobbyists for the meat producing industry will prevail in Washington, DC, so that these weak-kneed, soft-headed do-gooders are denied their bid to restrain the free market. After all, banning antibiotics in cattle feed is a JOB-KILLER!

Yep, we're stone effed alright.