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Feckless Boomers, Karl Rove, and Corporate Domination of America 3/4/5 It just now dawned on me that lately I‘ve been tilting with Karl Rove’s windmills. I’ve been preoccupied with how right wing religious values aren’t values at all but a catalogue of targets for free-floating hatred, then it occurred to me all that was just a second front. Sure, Rove used the ‘values’ thing to get his boy over with the full-bore hater block, but the real theater of war is the nearly completed corporate domination of society. The obliteration of working class clout in America didn’t start with Rove & Company, and it isn’t just a Repugnican thing either. It’s been going on for decades and national Dems are just as eager to shill for their corporate donors as are Repubs. Of course, Dems are at a disadvantage in that they must appear to keep faith with the old Democratic Party philosophy. This forces New Democrats to try keeping some degree of street-cred with their avowed constituents while in reality whoring out to corporations, doing their bidding to the detriment of the little guy. It’s a much tougher act than just admitting you’re a Republican and wearing the corporation T-shirt. Over time the labor, consumer, and environmental protections once in place have been rolled back to stop their interfering with corporate profits. As an example, just recently the ability of consumers to hold corporations responsible for bad and immoral decisions was curtailed or perhaps even eliminated. Karl must have played a hand in this, because there was much political shelling of enemy positions before the actual assault took place. We were reeducated well before the legislation was enacted about the parasitic nature of trial lawyers and their cost to the marketplace. Karl does not go in unprepared. I believe Ford could now reintroduce the Pinto without fear of serious court losses. And this was done in a bi-partisan way too. Bravo, Karl! The fact is that most middleclass consumers who file for bankruptcy do so because of debt incurred due to medical bills. This hasn’t slowed down the effort to weaken bankruptcy protection though. Nor has there been much opposition from either political party to predatory credit company practices that can easily put financially struggling consumers into a tailspin. Hell, recently I watched a Democratic Senator fight like a daemon for the credit card companies’ side! Bottom line: the little guy has been disenfranchised. America belongs wholly to the rich and powerful; they have all the say, and the little guy better keep his mouth shut and do as he’s told or he won’t eat. Even then, he still may not get medical coverage. The working person has been put back in his place. The groundwork for this was laid by Reagan, who praised the "entrepreneur" at every turn. He never spoke a word about the worth or contribution of the working person. The message was clear. Government, business’s handmaiden, denigrated the value of work and maligned the worker. It busted unions, beginning with the air traffic controllers. As a result, nobody takes Labor Day seriously anymore. With labor trounced, government next "got out of the business of business". This meant consumer, worker, and environmental protection was forsaken by government and left up to the marketplace. They became the sole concern and responsibility of corporations, which is absurd. The only responsibility of a corporation is to its stockholders. Period. Under the new paradigm, environmental protections were weakened, then lifted. Wal-Mart felt free to tell its workers to punch out, then come back and work some more –off the clock. Businesses learned to inveigle employees’ schedules so they don’t qualify for medical benefits. Financial institutions concocted new ways to fine and otherwise bilk their customers. Unregulated utilities gouged the public they previously served. America’s manufacturing base eroded. High tech jobs, once vaunted as the replacement for manufacturing, are being outsourced. Meanwhile, corporate CEO’s pay ballooned to 42,000 percent that of an average worker –and continues rising. Oh yea, we’re also sending young men and woman who can’t find a job in the new American corporatized economy overseas where they serve to secure the corporate empire’s oil supply. Trying to maintain their standard of living, working Americans go further in debt with credit cards every day. Credit card corporations are convinced this will lead to an avalanche of bankruptcies; hence the successful effort in Congress to reduce bankruptcy protection for individuals. Remember, bankruptcy protects the individual at the expense of creditors. The federal deficit is burgeoning also, and the only way for the economy to go forward from day to day is to continue borrowing from Japan and China. America is kiting checks to cover its debts and keep consuming. The present Chief Liaison to Corporate Boardrooms occupying the White House has just submitted a budget that shortchanges education, Medicare, feeding the hungry, veterans (including the newly minted ones), training for workers displaced by globalization, and a host of things that once were considered to matter. Can Karl Rove be blamed for all this? Hell no! He’s just the facilitator. We are to blame. Somewhere along the way we just forgot who we were and rolled over for the corporate piggies. If you have kids who are young adults, you probably already know theirs is a world of diminished expectations. That’s what we’re leaving them. Can’t blame our parents anymore, we did it. We let ourselves be seduced by 401K’s, and half believed we’d all wind up hob-knobbing with investment bankers at the country club someday. Yea, right. We boomers let ourselves be bought on the promise of being catapulted into the upper economic tier. We knew in our gut it was a con, but we let them dupe us on the off chance that it was all on the level. Every good con depends on the greed of the mark. They used our greed and credulity to install themselves as a permanent class of corporate mandarins, kick us in the butt, and count our children as their serfs. The strong should protect the weak??? Today President Bush said "the strong should protect the weak" in a "culture of life". Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of American children living in poverty will loose their Medicaid coverage under the new budget. It is reasonable to assume some of them will die as a result. They are weak, while the rich whose tax breaks drove the budget cuts are strong. Bush submitted the cuts and pushed for the tax breaks. I’m confused. (Not really.)Bush a Double (Secret) Success El Presidente came into office in 2000 with a clear domestic objective and a predetermined foreign objective, neither of which did he reveal during any campaign speech: Domestically, the goal was to dismantle all government programs and strip government down to just its military function. This he has accomplished by busting the bank, the only way left to do it, since Regan’s and his father’s administrations both were unable to reduce government spending. By creating a plethora of new programs, then under-funding them, he has doomed those as well as all existing programs. A heinous job well done. Corporations now run the country, even the military, insofar as they dictate the military’s mission. Internationally, the idea was to take Iraq and tell the rest of the world to go to hell. Iraq was needed as a security base among the oilfields in the region, because Israel is too independent and preoccupied, and the Saudi’s are destined for overthrow. We (our oil companies) need a place to stand once we’re tossed out of Saudi Arabia, and Iraq was the cheapest real estate available; nobody loved Saddam, so the resistance to overthrowing him would be far less than it would be to our invading any other Middle Eastern country. It was a bargain, and fortuitously for The Big Plan, 9/11 gave sufficient, if imperfect, cover to the operation. The fact that no major power’s leader other than our lapdog in Britain would go along was advantageous, since we don’t have to share the spoils with anyone else. The administration has tried from the outset to limit reconstruction contracts to the US and British companies, and the awarding of oil contracts will surely go the same way. No administration in US history has been so successful in accomplishing its (unstated) goals. The next few years should allow the corporations to function unfettered by civil and environment constraints. The only fly-in-the-ointment for them may come when the military finally has had enough of being used as a tool of empire (as opposed to it’s original purpose, home defense) and they stage a coup. Note: It would have been easier just to drive smaller cars, but what the heck.Composition of the Neo-Con Juggernaut Corporate interests agnostic of social responsibility have allied with pseudo-religious, inveterate haters to form a coalition. They have bought off the Religious Right with draconian legislation and faith-based bribery in order to be allowed to run the country like their personal playground.What
will happen when the American people catch on to the game? They have been
pretty slow so far, but ever since S.S. "reform", they're a
little bit less gullible. Maybe they will see through it now, or maybe
they won't, but when they do, you'll be staring at a political prairie
fire. The
mayor of New Orleans may or may not have been flat-footed at the
beginning, but that's irrelevant to the fact your appointee, The Big
Brownie, left all those unfortunate people out to dry. Now you’re
straining to make the mayor the goat. Good luck, but at some point, waving
a shiny object in front of the American people isn't going to do the trick
anymore. Then "Hello Waterloo!" "You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Where do you recon you're at in that dynamic right now? (PS, you might try memorizing this quote from Lincoln, it sounds better than "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... We won't get fooled again!") John Kerry, an honored veteran, fell victim to the Karl Rove Magical Traveling Hate Machine. The hatred rained upon Kerry was brilliantly directed. The way Karl Rove steered the debate toward the issue of whether Kerry threw a ribbon or a medal at a Vietnam protest was pure Machiavellian hate-poetry. Millions of former draft-dogging, angry white males who resented Kerry for his courage both in serving with valor and protesting (rightly and rightfully) afterward, were happy to have some apparent justification to stone him. However, I don’t believe too many ex-military saw much distinction between a ribbon or a medal because they understood the honor and the import of the citation, and didn’t fixate on the handicraft of the bauble. Bush's Abuse of Veterans Bush’s budget proposal cuts veterans’ benefits at a time when their needs are escalating. Meanwhile, we are subjecting troops to the psychological hell of redeployment –two or three times through the Iraq-Afghanistan ringer! We continue to do this because the Most Moral One lacks the political courage and conviction to revive the draft to feed his pre-emptive, totally elective, war and restore his squandered war machine. Wounded veterans are being separated from the military before their wounds are fully healed and the damage done has been resolved. They are being dropped like a hot potato(e). “So long, good luck, and thanks for the sacrifice!” Yellow ribbons don’t get it in this case. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Marriage- For all the Right's sanctity of marriage folderol, marriage fares much better overall in blue states than in red ones. In fact, Massachusetts has the lowest (heterosexual) divorce rate of all. Because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts supports families in need financially, strain and stress is reduced and more marriages survive. And it's all done without moralizing! Teen pregnancy- the magnitude of red states' teenage pregnancy rates overwhelms that of blue states. But the vengeance voters don't really care about results or reality so long as they can indulge in shaming. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was hounded by the Right from the outset and finally deposed because she had been wildly successful in reducing teen pregnancy rates in Arkansas communities. She accomplished this through non-abstinence based sex education; thus, she inadvertently and unforgivably proved that factual information and birth control were superior to hatred of promiscuity and shaming. For that, she had to be brought down, and was. Entitlement- The tide of federal tax dollars flows preponderantly from blue states to red, although “It’s my money!” is a red-state battle cry. The facts don't prevent red-staters from howling as if they were the injured party or hating the people whose money they're draining away. The war on drugs relies on punishment rather than treatment. It is driven by vengeance and hatred; it eschews empathy and understanding. It has been waged for forty years, with the result that at least two countries (ours and Columbia) have been decimated but drugs are a bigger business now than ever. As it turns out, giving away consumers’ financial and private data isn’t the worst thing ChoicePoint has ever done. Its subsidiary, DBT, gave Florida’s Commissioner Harris the names of 60,000 Texan ex-felons so that Florida would strike those persons from the 2000 voting roles. Problem is, few of the names were actually felons, so over 50,000 black –and therefore mostly Democratic- votes were disenfranchised illegally. In short, ChoicePoint/DBT saddled us with Dubya and friends. President Bush said in Russia that he comes from “a country where government is transparent”. That's great to hear! That means they’ll finally reveal who sat around the table with Dick Cheney when he drew up the energy policy. ‘Cousin Eddie’ went to Canada and pitched this deal: we’ll start accepting your beef again, if you stop selling prescription drugs in the US over the Internet. That’s good news for you and me. Now when we get mad cow disease, we’ll be paying full price for sedative drugs while we’re wasting away. That’s my Bush! (Response to a letter to the Atlanta Journal Constitution opposing tightening Georgia’s usury laws.) Your reader
equates protecting the poor by limiting interest rates to 60 percent
APR with a government handout.
The only people government bails out are airlines, car companies, hedge
funds, and military contractors. On occasion, it tries to protect
the weak. You may call that liberalism, but if you do, are you defining
conservatism as the opposite, a creed of leaving them prey to monetary
predators? Liberalism
didn’t create generations of poor people. They existed long before
liberals appeared on the scene. Generational poor were created by
generations of affluent people who derived their wealth stealing from the
poor.
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No Potential Soldier Left Behind The "No Child Left Behind" Act mandates that schools receiving public funds turn over students' records to the military for recruitment. The un-funded act has been a fiasco for education, but the title does make sense: the object is to leave no child behind when the troop ships sail for Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. Why
waste time and money on a probe into the Katrina-FEMA performance fiasco
when a simple comparison with post-war Iraq explains everything? In both
cases titanic destruction was followed by chaos and misery because
leadership was disinterested, detached, and indifferent to the plight of
ordinary people. This
indifference arose not merely from leadership’s lack of empathy, but
from the ideology that it’s acceptable to smash things, then step back
to allow the free market to swoop in to make it all new. Unlike
beleaguered Collin Powel’s “You break it, you own it”, the attitude
is, “It’s broken, but I have no obligation to do anything about it, so
let the invisible hand of the market place fix it.” There,
I just saved the Congress six months and 40 million dollars. Because
Bill Frist and his horde can't abide not having their recycled clutch of
second-stringers installed on the federal bench, they are contemplating the
"nuclear (nuke-u-ler) option". They will not be denied, just as
Rumsfeld would not be denied when he wanted a magic bomb that would destroy a
bunker no matter how deep it was, and we wound up with a tactical nuclear weapon
that we can -and will- use preemptively. You just don't say "no" to
these boys. They want it, they want it now, and they don't want to consider the
consequences.
Oh well, a
tyranny bent on immediate gratification to the detriment of its own future
cannot last very long; it can, however, make a monumental mess in the meantime. A man looks out his window to see neighborhood vandals kicking down his picket fence, trashing his lawn, and snapping off his car antenna. The man runs outside and chases the vandals down the block and through yards, trying to catch them. Attacks on Public Welfare Ignored 2/19/5 This week corporations were released from accountability to consumers by the banning of state class action law suits. In addition, it was revealed that hundreds of thousands children will have their food stamps taken away under George Bush's proposed budget. Also this week, the heads of PBS and CNN were forced to step down by the thought police. None of these stories received much, if any, attention on the nightly news because the corporate media prefers distracting viewers with factoid confetti rather than covering stories of import. The press has ceased to be the watchdog of government. Straining to be judged “unbiased”, the media present obvious government lies without comment and with impartiality as if they were truths. Unbelievably, networks ran away from stories of great significance to the country before the November 2004 election because they might influence the outcome of the election. This week's under-reported news stories reveal the price of media ownership by the few. The evening news has become a journalistic poison pill that actually prevents people finding out what’s going on. Americans are left uninformed, cheated, and worst of all, defenseless. Separating Wheat from Chaff in Social Security "Reform" Welfare Reform was brought about to “end welfare as we know it”, and rest assured, for better or for worse, Social Security Reform is meant to “end Social Security as we know it.” The present Social Security plan is a sixty year-old holdover from the New Deal that takes money away from working people today and hands it over on the spot to the elder generation. The economics term for this is “transfer payment”. It is justified on the basis of a “social contract” between generations in society; it’s the flip side of putting the elderly out on a patch of Arctic ice and waving goodbye. Social Security reformers want to replace this system with another in which each individual is compelled to place money into a private account in the stocks and bonds market. The idea is that this account will compound and accumulate a nest egg large enough to sustain that individual in their retirement years. It is effectively a giant compulsory national 401K Investment Plan. The advantage of reform implied by its proponents is that it will afford a future retiree significantly more money than the present system could. In order to switch now from a system based on transfer payment to one of long term investment, the flow of money from current workers to those in retirement would be cut off and diverted to stock portfolios. Thus would end the 70 year long practice of transferring money from the working to the elderly that we know as the Social Security Program. This will leave no money coming in to pay Social Security benefits to current recipients, so massive borrowing will be required to maintain Social Security payments to current and near-term retirees, incurring significant additional federal debt. This transitional expense would be unavoidable, and is exactly analogous to borrowing money to pay your utility bills so that you can afford to put that amount of money into a 401K program at work. Whether this is a prudent strategy or not is an open question. The answer depends on whether the cost of borrowing is offset by the dividends received. In the case of privatization, one big question is what dampening effect on the economy would this massive borrowing have, and what effect would that have on stock values? The risk involved may be under-appreciated because it has been 70 long years since the Roaring 20’s. Then, investors large and small who speculated on stock prices lost everything in the crash. This in turn led to the formation of Social Security to cushion the poverty of those people in old age. Ironically, we are looking now at replacing a transfer system with and investment strategy that originally led to formation of the transfer system! The question is: “Do you feel lucky?” Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Because there is a wide philosophical (and economic) divide between the proponents of either, objective comparison and honest public discussion leading to a reasoned conclusion are unlikely. There has already been an attempt to provoke hysteria regarding the long-term stability of the present transfer system, which happened to backfire. It backfired because it drew out these facts: the current system isn’t imminently and dangerously weak, as asserted; the same tweaks that would be necessary to repair the present system also would be required anyway under the reforms. In other words, the initial claim that private accounts were necessary to “save” the system has been refuted. Therefore, it is incumbent on the proponents of reform to PROVE the superiority of privatized accounts (OVER TRANSFER PAYMENTS) strictly on the basis of A demonstrably greater payoff WITH negligible INCREASED risk. FURTHERMORE, THE ANALYSIS MUST TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE COST OF ATTENDANT MASSIVE BORROWING. The outcome of this battle will directly effect working people and indirectly effect the whole economy for generations. Regrettably, it will be decided on the basis of who has the best public relations campaign, which goes back to who has the most money to spread around. Just like our elections. P.S. It has occurred to me since writing the above that a government's collecting thirteen percent of someone's income, then allowing that money to be placed in stocks and bonds is a strange undertaking. Is it a tax? If it is, then is it legal for the government to put tax money into the stock market? If it is not a tax, what right does the government have to take it in the first place? If privatization were to pass, it might quickly be challenged as unconstitutional. Further, if the true intent of reformers is to end Social Security in any form, the selfsame groups now pressing for privatization might try for a clean break and be the first to challenge privatization's constitutionality!If the Bush Administration is really sincere about wanting to preserve marriage, it would make sense to look at what’s being done correctly in the state with the lowest divorce rate: Massachusetts (19%). Yes, that Liberal blue state, defender of gay marriage and friend of Sponge Bob is the place where (heterosexual) marriage fares best. Why? Well, I’d like to point out that a values system based on empathy and a commitment to fairness will naturally lead to greater harmony and stability than one based on elitism, avarice, and loathing, but that’s not the whole story. It is probably Massachusetts’ liberalism in practice rather than in pure philosophy that should be credited for this superior statistic. The relatively high level of assistance given to families at risk in Massachusetts simply preserves more marriages. Being taken better care of financially by the state during hard times or transient difficulties removes some of the stress from families, so more marriages survive. It’s simple economics. That’s not what the Right wants to hear though; to the Right, everything must be placed in moral terms, which is fine until they insist that morality and not economics is the prime mover for all social phenomena. If that were true, then the Right has a problem here in the matter of Massachusetts’ low divorce rate: it must argue that it is not Massachusetts’ liberal assistance policies, but instead it’s liberal values that are superior, a tough position for any raging bible beater to take. Do you think the administration will gain from Massachusetts’ experience? Of course not. It’s not the ‘sanctity of marriage’, but rather the ‘sanctimony’ surrounding the issue that gives Bushies political mileage. As part of the Bread and Circus, they are merely providing their constituency, angry, self-righteous moralists, a conduit for their vehemence. It’s fun to throw stones! It has just come to light that what the administration has really done is to grease a marriage counselor/ journalist (who is, in fact, really neither) with thousands in payola to surreptitiously push their morality-oriented “Get Married, Stay Married” program. The premise of the program is as dishonest as its methods and it can’t work because it uses blame and shame where real help is needed.High in the Saddle/High on the Food Chain Driving
a high-priced, behemoth SUV or a Hummer around town while young "Look, I'm so high up on the food chain I can afford
to squander what is costing the average person and the country dearly." About 27 thousand people die per day of starvation on this planet; at least half of them are sure to be children. In addition, forty-five hundred children die of malaria. That makes 18 thousand child deaths a day, world-wide. If 40 percent of the roughly 150 thousand killed by the recent tsunami were children, that’s 60 thousand dead. That means that every three days or so, as many children die from starvation and malaria as died in the tsunami. That’s like two tsunami’s worth of child deaths a week, every week. No film at eleven.Just Say "No" to Privatization When Young Republicans escorting Senator Rick Santorum to a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania chanted, “Social Security’s got to go”, the party’s fangs really showed. There is too much inveterate hatred of this last of the New Deal programs in play below the surface. Prudence says that this Republican regime cannot be trusted to change social security in a benign way. Chances are just too good that they have hidden agenda. Democrats and working people in general should listen to their “O-oh” feeling. Just say "No" to privatization. We have been misled before on matters of great import by this administration. Specifically, we were misled on the existence of WMDs in Iraq. As the president himself put it: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… [embarrassingly long pause] …We won’t get fooled again!”2/28/5 Bankruptcy Protection "Reform" Senator Joe Biden of Delaware
is a Democrat from a state that hosts headquarters for around 300 of the
top Fortune 500 Corporations. Joe Biden is an eloquent, sharp-witted man,
probably a pretty good Democrat, overall. However, he must protect his
constituency to remain in office. Senator Biden was interrogating
a Harvard professor who sat before the Senate speaking against proposed
bankruptcy reform. The new “reforms” will favor the interests of
credit card companies at the expense of consumers. The professor described
the experience of a woman who started with a credit card bill of around
two thousand dollars. The woman had difficulty paying
her bill, and was slapped with fines and interest rate increases. After
approximately two years, she had paid an amount equal to what was
originally owed, but because of fines and rate increases, she then owed
more than when she started! To any reasonable person, this
is unfair. Most bankruptcies are the result of medical bills accumulated
during serious illness. It becomes practically impossible for people to
pay back a total of twenty or thirty thousand dollars when the credit card
companies rig the rates against them. The main outrage is that credit card
companies are free to raise the interest rate on items already purchased! When the Harvard professor, a
woman, finished, Biden pounced. With all the exuberance of a TV courtroom
lawyer making a crucial point in summary he shouted, “Then your problem
is with usury laws, not with bankruptcy!” An argument any lawyer would
love, a good sounding one, with an unspoken “QED” at the end. But the witness wasn’t
backing down, she responded, “bankruptcy is the only protection these
people have [against this form of usury].” Biden thought he’s just been
robbed of a put-away, overhead slam. He had. Her return, simple and
straightforward, had not been expected. It was remarkable she was able to
muster any response to his intended coup de grace. The professor’s logic was
perfect. They call it bankruptcy PROTECTION. The senator’s gambit was
that the problem was with a separate issue, usury rates. But the
professor’s point was the need for protection existed nonetheless, and
this alone is the necessary condition for leaving the existing laws as
they stand. Biden’s logic was wrong: ‘kneeprotectors aren’t necessary
because it’s the baseball bat the loan shark weilds that does the damage: your
problem's with baseball bats!’. I doubt this was
his proudest moment. Biden responded with both
admiration and sarcasm in his voice, “You’re good, professor.” The last time I heard somebody
grilling a senate witness like this on behalf of corporate interests, it
was Orin Hatch going after an FDA whistleblower. This was on a day he was
carrying water for the drug industry. I expect shameless pandering to
corporations from a business-friendly Republican, but when the Dems are
doing it, I wonder: who is speaking for the people? [Note: it did go through, naturally.]
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