i don't believe in ghosts or a consciousness that exists outside the functioning brain.

there are a few choices i think we have:
love or hate
empathy or narcissism
kindness or cruelty
courage or capitulation
charity or greed.

and then there are things we are bound to feel:
pleasure/pain
belonging/isolation
acceptance/rejection
companionship/loneliness
comfort/deprivation
contentment/fear.
anger/joy

to some degree, the choices we make lead to the things we feel, and vice versa. but a lot is down to dumb luck.

Big Beautiful Paychecks?

President Trump has begun flogging his plan to cut taxes for corporations and the rich, promising it will lead to prosperity in the form of "big beautiful paychecks!" Well, history has shown this doesn't work. In fact, we are in the midst of a 35 year long experiment in what was originally dubbed "trickle-down" economics, and here is the irrefutable result: despite a doubling of worker productivity, wages have stagnated overall; all gain in wealth has gone to the top ten percent; our children's generation will do less well than ours. The end.

Cutting taxes to the rich has had the predictable effect that the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer (and there are more of the latter every day as the working middle class evaporates). When Reagan campaigned on his platform of cutting taxes his opponent, George Herbert Walker Bush called it "voodoo economics". Bush nailed it.

That any working person would buy Trump's line now confounds. To paraphrase P.T. Barnum, there's a big beautiful sucker born every minute.

The papers don't seem to see it and TV news is as anesthetized as it usually is, but something momentous is happening right now: democracy is being placed into an induced coma. The vast majority of people are opposed to "Trumpcare" but it seems we're getting it anyway. Why? Because the elite want it. But that isn't all they desire, and with the help of a somnambulant press and the feckless party in opposition they are likely to get everything they want soon.

Firstly, "Trump-wealth-care" jettisons over 22,000,000 working poor, children, and elderly people from the healthcare system, leaving them to not only suffer needlessly from illness, but to have to worry constantly about the possibility of falling ill with no safety net, no recourse. Nearly thirty thousand people per year will die as a result of receiving delayed treatment or none at all. It's a big deal.

What is the purpose of this, that is, what is supposed to be achieved by causing all this suffering. Who gains? Is the purpose to balance the budget, or is it merely to leave more money in the pockets of the rich? Is all this suffering justified merely because it enables those who already have a massive wealth advantage to invest even more money in stocks?

Well, those with the most certainly do want more, and they are definitely flouting democracy to get it right now. However, what they want doesn't end there. Wish it did, but it goes far beyond just grabbing money which would otherwise go toward healing.

Here's their Holy Grail: kill democracy once and for all. That sounds outlandish but it's real. What's happening now in Congress, ramming through Trumpcare against the will of the majority, is merely a prelude. It is an introduction to a new paradigm. In the near future this blatant disregard for the will of the people will be the norm. In fact, the Kochs et al. are preparing for a constitutional convention through which they hope to effectively undo most rights other than property rights for themselves.

Ironclad property rights for the very wealthy and democracy are mutually exclusive. Guess which one is going to go? Comatose now, democracy will be taken off life support in the near future. The press is not covering its pending demise. To quote a popular twitterer: "Sad".

by believing

what can i do with your keepsakes,
mementos of people and times
i didn't know and didn't share?
how can i throw these away?

small decorations throughout the house
which i always looked at without seeing
now seem magical
something i could never conjure.

i reduce things
but you'd start with a premiss
that something more was there,
ready to be revealed,
and you'd bring it into the light.
you did it by not questioning.
you did it by believing.

you pulled it off.
you grew a world.
you made a home.

and then you died.

i thought i had escaped the Void
but i am the Void.

Failure to Tax the Rich Means Unconditional Surrender (Tax the Rich or Be Their Bitch)

Trump's healthcare plan has accurately been dubbed "Wealth-Care" because it takes money away from health services for working people and hands it directly to the rich. This is exactly what House Speaker Paul Ryan and his party have had in mind all along while going after the A.C.A. This part of a long-running, one-sided class war waged by the rich against the working poor, which includes more and more young people every day.

Wealth and political power have accumulated in the hands of the few precisely because they have escaped paying taxes. The more wealth they accumulate, the more leverage they have to extend their control. The only antidote to this is to tax the rich at a rate high enough to eliminate this concentration of wealth, a rate similar to that in place after WWII under Eisenhower and until the Reagan presidency.

Continued failure to stem and reverse wealth inequality will result in the extinction of democracy. This is the case not just in the US, but throughout the developed world. Today the battle is over healthcare and public education, but tomorrow it will be over drinking water. That might sound far-fetched, but that's only because normal people can't bring themselves to admit there is a class war, that the rich are the aggressors, and that the rich really do feel free to act like the unmitigated assholes they are.

Ignoring the existence of wolves doesn't make the sheep any safer, just less jumpy.

Money Only Flows Up and That's why We'll Never Be Great Again

Even in its finest hour, which was in the decades following WWII, the US was never fully a democracy. But at least then the welfare of common people was considered on a nearly equal basis with the wants of business. That period ended long ago with the election of Ronald Reagan, who broke unions, undid the last remnants of the New Deal, and effectively restored politics, economics, and society to its much more usual state wherein the elite do very well and the masses live in precarity.

Reagan's signal achievement was this: he lowered taxes on the rich.

In the board game Monopoly, originally named "The Landlord's Game", when play ends there is a lone winner and everyone else is wiped out. Similarly, in a capitalist system, all wealth and power eventually accrues to the 0.1%. That this would happen is obvious: the money you have beyond what you need to merely survive can be put into investments; these grow and eventually you get your entire income from stocks and other assets. As this continues you create a dynasty.

This ongoing acquisition comes at everyone else's expense. As the ultra-wealthy garner more money they look around for things to buy. The list includes highways and real estate. The road built with our taxes now belongs to them and we must pay a toll to use it. The house we live in is owned by a hedge fund and we will be paying rent as long as we can afford to live there. We will never own the house because the wealthy owners, with their excess cash, have driven rents and mortgages so high they're out of reach. Of course, whenever we're short and we need to use a credit card to buy groceries or when there is an emergency like a car repair, the revolving interest paid goes to the ultra-wealthy, who are the lenders.

Even the water that runs from the tap isn't provided by a public utility anymore, the water works having been sold off to a private consortium, and that's why our water bill has quadrupled. Schools are privatized, and as it turns out the vouchers the government hands out (through a private contractor) barely cover tuition at the most basic schools, so our kids aren't getting as good an education as we or our parents did. If we can swing it, we might reallocate some of our own money to get them into a slightly better school, but it's a stretch.

This is pretty much the way societies have run since we ceased being hunter-gatherers. The lucky, the strong, and the ruthless were the feudal lords who sat on their behinds while peasants worked their lord's lands and paid them taxes in grain. The lords only went out occasionally to decapitate or torture somebody suspected of keeping some of the grain he'd grown for his own family. They didn't have terms like capitalism or leverage, but it was the same game then as it is now.

The critical thing to note is that the peasants were the ones paying the taxes. That is the essential aspect of the hierarchy in place then, as it is now. The money only goes in one direction, UP.

Ronald Reagan slashed taxes for the rich. That left them with more money to invest, which not only helped them to build dynasties, but put further and further distance between themselves and the average person. Unless you've really been ignoring all economic news for the past 20 years, you know that the wealth inequality gap between the rich and the average citizen has skyrocketed.

By contrast, under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate for the rich was in the 90th percentile. That is, once you brought in a stupid amount of income in a year everything after that went toward building roads, schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. No more, now you get to keep it all while bridges collapse into rivers and children drink lead slurry from their faucets.

If a civilization doesn't actively prevent inequality through taxation it will snowball and that does real harm to individuals and to society. Inequality is not self-limiting and it is not self-correcting.

As a footnote, we have a newly elected president who claims he will "Make America Great Again". When he says the word "great" I'm not sure if I'm hearing the word "white", but even if I take him at face value his formula for economic revival is, yep, CUT TAXES FOR THE RICH. He said in a debate that he is Smart for not paying taxes. That's something people who are not smart or not rich do. That's just for peasants, like in the olden days, right? He's not helping, he's just making it worse. If we stay on this course we'll never be great again, not even close.

Let's face it, if we can't manage to tax away the capacity of the rich to gobble up everything then we have to admit defeat. Let the vampires run the blood bank.

Morality, Migraines, and the Marketplace

TV network evening news had a story on 2/23/17 about a new drug that promises to eliminate migraines. I was excited to hear about its apparent efficacy because both my daughters suffer from migraines, as did my late father, and when I use the word "suffer" I mean they experience agony on a recurring basis.

One of my daughter's symptoms matches the severity my father's in that there is mental confusion, lack of motor coordination, nausea and intense pain that lasts for hours and doesn't disappear entirely for a day or more. The experience is savage and debilitating.

Furthermore, migraines have been correlated with dementia later in life and with Alzheimer's disease. Cause and effect hasn't been proven, but it seems that migraines themselves can scar the brain and produce plaques. My father died from Alzheimer's.

So, I watched the news segment with keen interest and hope. That is, until they revealed the price: yearly, doses will cost around $10,000.00 Unless you have really good insurance or are wealthy (the only case in which you are guaranteed to have good insurance) then this miracle migraine cure is beyond you means.

Don't be mad and don't complain, the marketplace has decided it's perfectly acceptable that the mass of people with crippling migraines continue to suffer in agony in darkened rooms, waiting for the demonic pain to leave on its own. A price point has been established for maximum profit, there's no use in arguing.

The superficial, corporate happy-talk news did not explore the moral aspect of pricing a drug so high that it damns the majority to unrelenting pain. Not at all, because this is the age of commodification of all things and it's each according to his means. Period.

I see flagrant immorality in this. In fact, I would think someone who hijacked a shipment of this miracle cure, once it became available, and sold it on the black market at a fraction of the price would be more moral than the medical profiteers who unabashedly ransom relief for 10K per year. A medical Robin Hood.

Well-heeled authoritarians will come up with a rationale for this medical extortion that will fit with their internal blend of privilege, fear, and disdain for others, which upon being heard by the rest of us will merely give us a migraine.

Inequality is Forever

Recently there was a Zero Hour podcast, hosted by Richard Eskow, that featured Professor Walter Scheidel. The professor has examined inequality throughout history and uncovered this fact: inequality persists until it's ended by either war, revolution, famine, or pestilence. It does not end on its own due to economic factors or when the majority of the people decide it's detrimental to society and unfair. Further, the assumption that a society cannot long survive gross inequality is unsupported by history. Unless and until there is a revolution or a lost war, societies have survived for hundreds of years under conditions of massive inequality. The Roman Empire comes to mind.

This shouldn't surprise. With all power in the hands of a few at the top, what can force them to give their wealth away? Nothing, so long as they control the majority, and this they can do easily by economic means or by coercion.

In our post 80's society, people are controlled primarily through debt. They get up and go to work every day for lower and lower wages because they owe money and must keep up payments to preserve their credit. Otherwise, they will not be able to borrow the next time there is an emergency and they will be evicted and dispossessed.

Lending them money when they are desperate rather than paying them sufficiently in the first place is the financiers' primary means of extracting wealth from and controlling people. Worker vulnerability is the underpinning of our capitalist system. If this fact weren't obvious enough it was made explicit by longtime Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan when he spoke openly of creating "worker insecurity" to achieve his economic goals.

If constant bloodletting via debt collection proves insufficient in controlling people and they then turn to protest, they can be dealt with by other means. The NSA intercepts, records, and saves all communication of every kind. Protestors have no secrects from the security apparatus, which catagorizes them as low grade terrorists.

There are drones watching overhead. There are sound cannon, kettle fences, tasers and rubber bullets. There are police departments throughout the US that have been militarized and will not hesitate to crack down ruthlessly on dissenters. They will not stop at torture because we have used it on others and in a declared emergency they will justify it here too. And in any system that's controlled by a few, when that system is under seige, right wing miltias will be formed, and they and hired thugs will be used to carry out the dirty work. This is the formula used in Argentina, Chili, and Centeral America under the guidance and tutaledge of the CIA. What goes around comes around, surely.

As the financier Jay Gould said over a century ago, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." Resistance is futile. Inequality will be preserved.

Behind all this and driving everything is the fact that those who have so much cannot conceive of relinquishing anything at all. That's human nature. As Confucius said, "The full mouth wants to keep on eating." Certainly, the rich feel they are entitled to all they have and are shocked by any suggestion they part with any of it.

The rest of us who are not rich by normal standards are no different. We buy cheap and available consumer goods made by low wage foreign labor, and we buy produce at the grocery that is picked in this country by farm workers living under de facto slavery, whose children go without education and live in squalor. We give no thought to these people and we would balk at the suggestion we pay more and get less so that others would be treated more equitably. Don't ask us to pay a few pennies more at the grocery, and certainly don't ask us to settle for an inferior smart phone! (The latter being the bread and circus of our time.)

Inequality has increased globally over the last thirty five years. Donald Trump is tripling the advantage and power of the Kelptocracy, so that inequality will really skyrocket from now on. It has been clear for some time that the Democratic Party could not reverse or even stop inequality (their hands are tied because they take money from the fianciers). That allowed Trump to get elected by promising the impossible to the desperate.

The Roman Empire outlawed Jubilee, the periodic forgiveness of debt. It's time now for a Jubilee.

Wall St. and corporate America pay Republican Party politicians to be uncompromising, partisan, and ideologically far right. Wall St. and corporate America pay Democratic Party politicians to be accommodating, reasonable, and centrist. Any questions?

This Rentier System

The woman who invented Monopoly (and from whom it was stolen) originally called it "The Landlord's Game". The owners advance their wealth through extraction from others until one player has it all. This perfectly mimics financial capitalism, where those at the top continuously take rents and interest from all the rest, in perpetuity.

Keep on praising and defending capitalism. Why? Because those at the top of the pyramid of exploitation tell you to, and they hire others to intimidate you and break you if you don't enthusiastically embrace this rentier system.

An incomplete list of things that if we don't get soon we are not ever going to get:

1) Universal Health Care, including medical, dental, eye, and mental health care.
2) Steep increase in the Marginal Tax Rates for the rich (back to what they were under Republican President Eisenhower).
3) Protect the Commons and an immediately reverse privatization of public resources.
4) Return the Housing Stock to the people and out of the portfolios of banks and hedge funds.
5) Free Daycare for children of working parents.
6) Low cost, high speed Internet for everyone (treat cable companies like the monopolies they are or toss them aside and let government run it).
7) Transaction Tax on Trading.
8) Fund Public Schools on the Federal Level, not the local level as now, so that all kids get fair access to an education.
9) Free post-secondary Education at public institutions.
10) Enforce Anti-Trust Laws.
11) DOJ Prosecution of Banksters.
12) Return Glass-Stegal to banking regulation.
13) Shrink the Military Industrial Complex so small it can be drowned in a mil spec bathtub.
14) End Discretionary Wars for Oil and other corporate "interests".
15) Reduce the size of the standing military.
16) Demilitarize Local Police.
17) End the War on Drugs.
18) Drasticly Reduce Funding for Surveilance of US Citizens and Restore Fourth Amendment protections.
19) Massive Investment in Public Infrastructure.
20) Conversion to Alternative Energy.
21) End tax breaks and rebates for the Oil and Gas Industry.
22) Full Government Support and Protection of Workers' Right to Unionize.
23) A Guaranteed Living Wage. That's for everybody, and if you can't find work you get paid anyway. Who is going to pay for it? Richie Rich, that's who. He's got money galore. He knows he's been getting away with stiffing the country (see item #2), and he's holding his breath hoping that you don't find that out.

Obviously, to achieve any of these, neo-liberalism (i.e., capitalism as now practiced) has to go. And don't wait for the post-Clinton Democratic Party to take up that cause because they are backed by and therefore bow down to Wall ST.

Been a week

By a VP led Senate tiebreaker, an heiress who despises public education has been appointed to head the country's educational system. She's one of those who speaks disparagingly of "government schools", spitting out the word "government" as though it were excrement. Under her control, the public school system will be dumped and replaced by Christian madrasas (preferably Catholic). She was given this post as a plumb because she is heiress to the Amway fortune and a heavy, heavy Republican political donor. She bought her place in the cabinet, and since no one in the upper elite of the Republican Party (or even the Democratic for that matter) ever attended public schools and certainly neither will their children, the decision to give her the post was not overburdened by excessive thought or exercise of conscience.

Then there's our new Attorney General who had been rejected previously for a federal judgeship because of his onetime role in thwarting equal rights in his home state of Alabama. His main accomplishment was to prosecute civil rights workers who helped register elderly black voters, hence the rejection. But these are changed times and this stalwart great, great grandson of the Confederacy fits right in with the means and motives of an administration that's comfortable with white supremacists.

Of course, we also have a lightweight ex-governor of Texas appointed to head a department that he once vowed to eliminate, although he couldn't remember the name of it at the time. It's the Department of Energy, Rick. Enjoy the gig.

We have an EPA head who has spent his career fighting EPA regulation, and coming up a candidate for Secretary of Labor who as a CEO of a fast food empire wants to eliminate the minimum wage in order to further exploit his workers. Glossing over an ex-surgeon, idiot-savant in charge HUD we have a Surgeon General who, despite being a second generation orthopedist has sworn to sink the Affordable Care Act and thereby take medical care away from tens of millions of people.

But the biggest in-your-face candidate is a crooked banker (redundant) who continues to swindle thousands of homeowners out of their property through fraud and forgery. His appointment, naturally, is to Secretary of the Treasury.

Have I left anyone out? Well there are a couple of retired generals in the cabinet, which on the face of it is worrying, but if there are others it isn't really necessary to cite them. The camel's back is already broken.

Republicans in Congress simply do not believe that everyone is entitled to healthcare. Promising to replace the ACA/Obamacare with something better is an outright lie and a ruse. Millions will lose coverage, and because for-profit medical care is a dying business model, our already patchy and ineffective healthcare system will worsen for everyone*.

Behind wealthy Republican's aversion to providing "healthcare for all" is the simple fact they don't want to pay the taxes necessary to make it happen. Presumably, they don't begrudge others access to care, they're just not going to pay for it.

There are many other Republicans who might not be as rich but who object to universal healthcare on ideological grounds. This faction consists of authoritarian sadomasochists. They are useful idiots to the ultra wealthy, who rightly denigrated them by calling them "Walmart Republicans".

*Here is a list of maladies and treatments a Minnesota state Republican proposed insurance companies not be required to cover in order to reduce the cost of healthcare. Among things we can apparently do without are prenatal, maternity, and child care...

Maternity benefits
In patient care
Family coverage requiring babies to be covered from birth
Dental and podiatric
Child health and prenatal
Addiction services
Services for emotionally disabled
Ambulatory mental health services
Outpatient medical/surgical services
DES related conditions
Services for those that are ventilator dependent
Lyme's disease
Diagnostic procedures for cancer
Fibrocytic condition
Cancer treatment
Hospitalization/anesthesia for dental procedures
Diabetes
Family therapy
2nd opinion for mental health and chemical dependency diagnosos
Chemical dependency/alchoholism
Suicide attempt exclusion
Prostate cancer screening
Direct access to an OBGYN
"off label" drug use
Anti-psychotic drugs
Mental Health
Court-ordered mental health services
Home care nursing
Emergency services
Continuity of care
Speciality care
Durable medical equipment
Requirements for durable medical equipment
Hearing aids for persons 18 or younger

No prenatal, maternity, or child care? What do you want to bet this politician is rabidly "pro-life"?

He's Swamping the Drain in order to Make America Grate Again!

Half of all children in the US live in low income households. That percentage is going up, not down. Capitalism is failing all but those at the top. The Democratic Party elite have long ignored this fact, and that is why we now have a mentally unstable, tax evading, immoral demagogue as president.

Ask Not What Your Country can do for You, But What You can do for Wall Street

They will pay you something that isn't quite enough to live on. Then they will grant you credit cards to allow you to obtain the things you still need but don't make enough to pay for. They will charge you interest on the money owed. Your shortfall will continue and you will become increasingly indebted. No matter how much or how long you work, you will never have enough for yourself, and you will hand right back to them more and more of the little they pay you. They own you, and there's seemingly nothing you can do about it.

A political solution within our system isn't likely because neither party represents you or even cares about you. Trump is a Mussolini wannabe. Obama was a corporate Democrat. HRC is a Wall St. vassal. The People are forgotten and enslaved. Without a cataclysmic change, a broad repudiation of capitalism, nothing can improve.

Buckle Up, You're Headed for a Rough Ride

heads up average person, and this includes my children and grandchildren. you are going for a ride. you are already in motion. technology, trade deals, and the determination of the rich to take more of every dollar you earn will do you in. technology steals work away from humans, and that process is accelerating. trade deals will continue to ship jobs overseas. the owners of the world will avidly push to compound their wealth and increase their control. more and more, the landscape you inhabit will one of degradation and despair, interspersed with fortified playgrounds for the ultra-rich.

it's coming. and surprise, it's nothing new. in Ireland, after the famine, there was another even greater insult to the population. having been used for generations to grow crops for export, the people were suddenly rendered useless, made redundant. this came about because landlords switched from farming to wool production. growth of the textile industry made it more profitable to graze sheep on the land than to grow crops, so the tenants had to go!

they largely came to the US of A. they were the other great influx of Irish immigrants. this group had withstood the famine, but could do nothing against being pushed off the land when their labor was no longer needed. they had sunk to a rock-bottom position in their homeland.

they were below even being exploitable.

and that's where you are headed in the next couple of decades. only for you, there is no "America" to offer refuge, no boat to embark on to escape desperation. you will have nowhere to flee, no alternative, no hope. you will be in the same position as the medieval serf, nowhere turn, just the brutal and unalterable present. a few will prosper, but only if they are very gifted, well born, or remarkably vicious.

capitalism won't save you. in fact, capitalism really has been medievalism all along, just coupled with exploitation of natural resources through technology. for a while it lifted all boats, but that wave has crashed on the beach now.

i can't imagine what life will be like in forty years. i can only apologize to your generation for going along with a system that we always knew in our bones would eventually devour us, and to my progeny for bringing them into a world controlled by sociopaths.

Prescient Movie

There is a German comedy on Netflix that was completed before our Republican and Democratic political parties' 2016 nomination races even began. The movie is about the fantastical reappearance of none other than A.H. He reincarnates one day behind some bushes in a Berlin garden, once the location of his bunker.

Nobody believes he's the actual A.H. but instead people think he's a bizarre comedian intensely committed to his role. We know he's the real McCoy, but the German people think he's something akin to an elaborate Andy Kaufman goof. Even the person closest to him chides him for never being out of character.

The character is not 100% despicable. Like any nutty old uncle, he has his moments of sympathy and humor. He isn't stupid either. He has an unusual penchant for connecting with the little people and mining their discontents. On an extended road trip in a borrowed maid service van, he works small crowds, beginning with two or three people at a time, talking to them about their anger over immigrants and whatever else is bugging them.

When he is put on a comedy TV show he's a hit. People don't know what to make of him. He's corny and offbeat, but they eventually come to a see a seeming grain of truth in the outrageous things he says with hilarious seriousness.

At some point toward the conclusion of the movie, his words in the English subtitles are displayed: he promises to "Make Germany Great Again".

The name of the movie is "Look Who's Back".

Bashing China for Fun and Political Profit

Please keep in mind that nobody held a gun to the head of anyone in the US forcing them to choose China as sole manufacturer of all our trinkets and beads. Companies turned to China because it reduced labor costs and thereby increased their profit. Even US consumers benefited to some degree insofar as Walmart lowered its prices in proportion. (Of course, that turns out to be offset by the loss of US jobs, which in turn lowered wages, which then makes shopping at Walmart for Chinese-made goods a necessity, not an advantage any longer.)

But now that China has in hand trillions in US Treasury notes, essentially its paycheck for doing hard work, demagogues choose to portray that as nefarious. We are not the first to do this with China. A couple of centuries ago England tried to claw back its sterling from China, which it had spent on tea that it had become addicted to. England's answer was to sell China opium from Afghanistan to get back its silver. It worked. Later, Cheney tried doing the same with oil, with disastrous results. Now it seems it's president elect Trump's turn. He is goading China to get even, somehow. (Sad.)

If we should be mad at anyone it's ourselves, greedy US companies and greedy us, the consumers. If we were really serious about the loss of jobs we would just start buying stuff made here again. But the truth is we are too greedy and too undisciplined to do that. So we'll start a war of words that could escalate into the real thing. (Low energy. Losers.)

The Latest Trickle Drivel

Ronald Reagan deeply cut taxes to the rich in the 1980's. His contention then was that this would stimulate the economy from the top and eventually trickle prosperity down to everyone. Using the same rationale, every subsequent Republican administration has cut taxes to the rich. Even Democrat Barack Obama made the last temporary tax cut to the rich permanent.

The most cursory look at the shift in the distribution of wealth since the 80's shows the obvious: the rich have gotten richer, the poor have remained poor, and the middle class is slowly melting away into the poorer classes. Despite this, president elect Trump is readying another tax cut for the rich, promising once again it will boost the economy for all. Tax cuts have favored the rich at the expense of everyone else for three and a half decades, but the press, the pundits, and even most people seem willing to accept that laughable snake oil pitch one more time.

Despicably Smart /or Why People In Glass Houses Lose Elections

There was a moment in the presidential debates that explains why HRC lost the election (at least in the Electoral College) and why we now have a discount Mussolini as president elect. That moment came when Hillary made reference to Trump's not paying his taxes and he in his usual way interrupted her by interjecting, "Smart." His not paying his taxes was what a smart person does. That was his message, delivered with his patented smirk.

At this point, HRC should have let into him, but because she is a vassal of Wall Street she couldn't. What she should have said with increasing volume -and viciously snarled at him when he tried to interrupt her- was this:

"Smart, huh? So, it's smart to skip out on your taxes? To shortchange veterans care? To leave schools in disrepair because of a lack of funds? To let infrastructure crumble, bridges fall into rivers because rich guys like you are too smart to pony up their fair share? Is it smart to leave the bill in the laps of working people? Is it smart to swell the deficit because you're a deadbeat?

"By extension, would it be smart to bolt on the check and leave the waitress holding the bag for your meal, the waitress with two kids at home, one of whom is sick? By your logic it is.

"And by the way, she's PAYING her taxes, because if she doesn't the IRS will come down on her with both feet. Is that the kind of smart you're talking about here?

"NO! IT ISN'T SMART. IT'S CHEAP, IT'S SELFISH, IT'S DECEITFUL, IT'S DESPICABLE, AND IT'S DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!"

But she didn't. She couldn't. It's not that she was tongue tied or that she can't think on her feet. No, she couldn't say it because her real constituency, corporations and banks, is fully in accord with Trump that only dumb, stupid little people pay their taxes.

Elizabeth Warren could have said it. Bernie would have said it. But Hillary couldn't, and given a choice between a Republican Light and a real, repugnant Republican, not quite half the voters chose the Republican.

Brother Can You Spare a Ten?

There are more left-leaning organizations than sand flees on a beach. They fill my email inbox every day with dozens of appeals. Each group has its particular area of concentration, its own cause. Each cause is valid and each group is admirable.

But there are so many and they are fighting the right like atomized Lilliputians, not an organized army. If I were conspiracy minded I'd wonder if the right had designed the left this way so that it would never get anywhere. The left certainly is fragmented and in disarray.

I read the emails and contribute a twenty here and a sawbuck there to hold the separate lines against different right wing attacks and outrages. They fight in turn against: over-policing, brutalizing, and systematically destroying the lives of people of color; slave wages for nearly 40% of workers; parasitic lending to the ever-expanding poor; a diabolical medical care system based on profit that results in worse outcomes and higher mortality rates than in any other advanced country; an economic and taxation system that has funneled ALL wealth to the top 10% over the last three decades; abandonment of infrastructure with the express intent of forcing the selloff of the commons at fire sale prices to private entities; slowly dismantling public education by blaming it for problems that are rooted wholly in economic and social issues in order to replace it with private charter schools that will do worse while bilking the taxpayer.

This list hardly begins to cover the outrages of the right that the left has tried to oppose by forming action groups and organizations. All these groups are noble but overall they are doomed to be ineffectual. What would be required to actually stop the multi-veined flow of poison coming from the right would be to seize the engine that drives it: neo-liberal capitalism.

We had our champion in this regard, an honest-to-god hero who spoke the truth simply and whom perhaps a quarter of us followed. He went for the throat of the beast. He did not advance in the Democratic Party because that party began groveling at the altar of neo-liberalism long ago.

Capitalism, throughout its provenance and now in its present, imposes a system of wealth aristocracy. In the 21st century, neo-liberal capitalism went global. This is the age of International iPhone Medievalism.

It isn't going away anytime soon, and when it is finally driven down, it will have been done so through the efforts of people other than Americans. Something close to a majority of Americans believes in creationism and rejects evolution. This is not a failure of education, it's a rejection of rationalism. Popular culture, driven by mass media, has made Americans into Pavlovian simpletons. They voted for Trump, believing this scion of real estate wealth actually will better their lot. He won't. He will however deal brutally and viciously with the boogymen that haunt them, which probably will be enough to placate them. Meanwhile, we're still screwed, all of us except the 1%.

Another Round of Hope and Change. Hang on Tight.

One candidate blamed everything that's wrong on brown people and immigrants while the other said, wearing a smile mask, "Whatever is wrong?"

So now we have a bizarre ex TV reality persona at the wheel, or at least we will soon. People voted for him for many reasons, but the common one is that they are sorely aware the system is rigged against them and they naturally want to put a stop to it. They have figured this out despite the campaign of obfuscation relentlessly carried out by corporate media to prevent their ever coming to this realization.

We have a corrupt, pay-to-play political system that has resulted in sham democracy. The top 10% always gets what it wants, regardless of what the majority needs. The reason for this: the bottom 90% are merely The Voters, whereas the top are The Donors.

Some of us have contented that the way to deal with this is by publicly funding elections. Our thinking has been that by taking money out of politics we could sidestep corruption. Perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps the normal and unalterable course of any empire is to devolve into a plutocracy, and there isn't enough political energy in the universe to steer that life cycle in any other direction. Perhaps there is only one possible script and it reads exactly like a game of Monopoly.

What we seem to be trying now though is this: blowing everything sky-high with the hope and expectation that when the parts land they will self-organize into a life-sized replica of the Taj Mahal. We are banking on the existence of a creative force within nihilism. Gotta try something, I guess.

Everybody thought the Republican Party was the Titanic. They might still be right about that, but guess what the Democratic Party has turned out to be? The Thresher.

The two items on the menu were: Nativist Stew and Neoliberal Leftovers. Half (almost) of the people chose the former. Big shock

"Doctor, it hurts when you do this!"

Trade agreements first decimated the lower middle class by shipping manufacturing jobs across our southern border and overseas. That was back under Presidents Reagan/Clinton. My coworkers at the time, all engineers, didn't care much because it didn't effect them directly, although the loss of jobs in manufacturing would eventually contribute to the overall softening of wages, theirs included. Since that original assault on labor, trade agreements have infringed on even STEM workers because there are technically able people in India and China that will do the job of a native engineer for pennies on the dollar. Work that isn't sent overseas can be done here by professionals on H1B visas. So, what goes around finally came around for my fellow engineers. Since then, even lawyers have been effected because much of the legal research is now done elsewhere. Unless you're a trial lawyer, your job is also insecure.

There is one professional group that Free Trade hasn't touched, and according to rules in the TPP, will remain protected. That group is doctors. The TPP contains provisions to protect US doctors from hordes of foreign practitioners invading and undercutting their fees. So, doctors in the US who make twice as much as doctors anywhere else in the world will continue to make big money, even while the rest of us succumb to TPP's further ravaging our wages. Effectively, their earnings will continue to rise relative to everyone else's.

Now, if US doctors are garnering such a large, protected income, wouldn't the rules in free trade agreements allow Mexico and/or Canada to set up clinics just over their border that allowed credentialed foreign doctors to treat US medical tourists at a fraction of the price of care in the US, thereby letting the free market lower costs for beleaguered US patients? Wonder why that doesn't happen?

Our mild mannered Wall Street Vassal in Chief will start pushing for approval of TPP during the lame duck session of Congress the day after the election. This will be good news for anyone making over $250K per year. Bad news for everyone else, as usual.

Democracy -> Plutocracy/Meritocracy -> Fascism

news flash: for a large part of the population (think of Romney's 47%), there is little expectation of a secure and pleasant existence. jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared for all those who do not have specialized skills or a knack for high finance. if you are an ordinary person, you cannot do as well as your parents did. outsourcing and automation have left you less able support yourself and a family.

those at the top of the ladder are pulling away from you. in the mid twentieth century, heads of companies made twenty times the average pay of their workers, but now it's more than that squared. and the winners pay much less in taxes now than they did then, so they have pulled ahead of you by orders of magnitude.

what is the remedy for this impoverishment of half the population? well, from the standpoint of the top 10%, the question is more like: what problem? if they are conservatives they think, "I worked for what I have and I don't owe anyone anything." in the viewpoint of wealthy liberals, "This is a meritocracy and I excel at what I do, so it's only fair I have so much more."

astoundingly, everyone, even ordinary people buy into this way of thinking. if you have been steaming along and doing just fine your whole life and something bad suddenly happens and you lose everything, the conservative ethos demands that you to blame yourself, to see everything that is happening to you as the result of your own personal failure and shortcomings. your shame will be crushing. you will almost certainly consider suicide at some point. at the very least you might start drinking to excess or using opiates, which will reinforce your guilt and lack of self-worth.

if you step back, you have to ask, "If vast swaths are struggling because they've become redundant due to forces beyond their control, shouldn't there be a income transfer from those at the top to those at the bottom?" ha, just the opposite has been done. the rich have made sure they will not be required to share their wealth. they paid politicians and pundits to denigrate taxes. they did such a good PR job that a lot of ordinary people voted to allow the rich to avoid the necessity of ever having to help rescue their, the poor's, own impoverished children.

so if you are not already a member of the top 10% and not gifted in some way that will earn you a substantial income, you can crawl off and die. of course a few have to stick around just to cook and clean for the rich, but the rest can lay down in the snow and freeze to death. as quickly as possible, please.

will the people rise up and force the rich to share their wealth? perhaps the younger generation would have the fortitude to try, but the older ones who were once middle class are simply rolling over. that's their way. they have been so indoctrinated and have bought into the system so thoroughly that they could never rise up even to protect their young. and if the young were to take a stand, there are enough policemen with enough armament in their hands, enough soldiers, enough electronic survailence, and enough drones to quash any attempt by the masses to to level the field.

more than likely, we will slide into a repressive right wing government that will employ forces raised from the impoverished classes to brutalize the massive population of the ever-more-poor whenever they have the temerity to wail too loudly in their misery.

Farewell to a Sweet Dog

Chloe was between 15 and 16 years old. We've had her for almost 14 years. I'm sixty-four, so I was 50 when we took her in. My older daughter was 20, my younger about 18.

She was a very sweet and docile dog. She weighed under 30 pounds and had fur like cotton. She was never aggressive but she was very stubborn. She was a living, breathing Teddy bear. She melted everyone's heart. She was deathly afraid of thunder, like my grandmother was.

Whenever I let go the F-bomb or got angry she bolted, even when it obviously had nothing to do with her. When she was very young someone must have kicked her to accompanying curses. Hard to fathom. Most of my life I've had a hot temper, but I can't imagine taking it out on something as innocuous as Chloe.

For more than a year Chloe has been slipping seriously. She has done little else lately other than spin in tight circles and make abstract floor paintings with feces. It became too much finally, so that's why we rode to the vet this morning for the last time. She was still sweet, but we just didn't have the energy anymore. My wife had gone way above and beyond the call of duty already. She'd come home from work every afternoon and spend an hour cleaning up the dog and the kitchen floor and walls. When I got home the house still stank.

There was remorse and grief in the room with Chloe and me while we waited for the veternarian to come through the inner door. It had to be done, but it was awful to have to do. I owed Chloe more, but I couldn't manage to give her any more.

Here's the thing though. Putting and end to Chloe was drawing down a blind on the past, a past that had been hopeful. There are things to be hopeful for now, but the old hopes have withered, and in so doing point an accusing finger at the validity of all to follow. Like Chloe, I'm getting old. Unlike her, I've come to the uncomfortable realization that we're all just turning in circles.

Chloe left with the vet to get an injection of sedative. An aid brought her back shortly. Chloe pranced in but when she reached me she faltered an I laid her down on her side and stroked her. They brought a blanket for her to lay on. She was stoned. I rubbed her belly, and indulgence I haven't allowed her for a long time.

The vet, the aid, and I talked while the vet drew blood for a DNA test. My wife and everyone else in my family has always wondered what breed Chloe was in addition to Wheaton Terrier. They want to know what the recipe is/was for the ultimate lovable dog. After the DNA was drawn, the fatal injection was made through the same butterfly needle. I wasn't even paying attention and missed it. Chloe suddenly sank. I stopped rubbing her belly. She converted to inert flesh and bone in an instant. The vet listened for a heartbeat. Did I want a few moments with Chloe alone? No. Thanks.

I don't know how loyal Chloe was. I don't even know how attached she really was to us. It didn't matter. She was the embodiment of that line from The Wizard of Oz, "A heart is not measured by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others."

Which Party Stands for Working People? (ANS: neither)

TPP, if passed in the lame duck session, will give much greater power and control to international corporations than they have even now. In effect, it will go a long way toward coronating the global .01% as the unassailable monarchs of the planet. This comes, of course, at the expense of ordinary people everywhere. It's unsurprising that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are strongly supportive of the TPP, since they're henchmen for the traditional Party of the Rich, but we must ask why President Obama, the leader of the Party of Working People, is enthusiastically executing this coup-de-grace against the precariat. (Hint: the Democratic Party is now the party of business, the Republican Party is the lost party of White Nationalism, and working people have no representation anywhere.)

"See My Daddy"

I was drowsily drinking my morning coffee outside on the patio of my condo when I heard a small voice saying something over and over. It sounded plaintive. Through the slats in the fence I could see two woman hovering around a gold colored car thirty yards away, putting things in its trunk and preparing to leave. After peering I finally saw the small child who was making the sound. Her lament became louder and more distinguishable: "See my daddy".

Her pain was obvious. Apparently she had spent most of the Labor Day weekend with her father and now was returning to her mother on the Monday morning at the end of the holiday. I watched the little girl as she lamented, all the while moving to directions from her mother that I could not hear at this distance. The little girl did not wail, cling, or throw a tantrum but instead climbed into the car obediently while still expressing her heartfelt and overpowering "See my daddy" that grew stronger but contained neither anger or defiance, just grief.

I wished her father had come out to see her off or that the mother had left the child with him until the car had first been packed up. It seemed as if the delay in getting the car rolling gave the opportunity for the little girl's grief to resonate and build.

Bill Clinton's "Welfare Reform" was nothing less than a war on single mothers, particularly black single mothers, but it affected all poor women and does so to this day.

If you are high enough on the totem pole, you need never fear accountability.

If you are far enough up, you can say things like "I applied increased worker insecurity to create a climate favorable for business" and never have to face retribution at the hand of any worker whose family and life were destroyed by your manipulations.

After cornering the market on a drug that has the power of life or death for patients and then grossly raising its price out of naked greed, an amoral profiteer can later come out publicly in defense of another manufacturer who more recently profiteered on an emergency injectable. And yet both pirates walk among us without fear of confrontation in the street.

You can fantastically jack up the price of a drug that if used widely might wipe out a serious chronic viral disease. You can cry poverty when challenged by the press, although you have made multiple billions off the drug. You sell it in the US for 8400% of what you get for it anywhere else, where, incidentally, you still make a decent profit. You can do this, and people will still nod and smile at you when you walk by.

You can preside over a war that cost over two million lives and incalculable suffering by soldiers and civilians on either side, protract it for years, then much later admit you knew at the outset it was pointless but were too polite to say anything. You can do this and never have to worry that one day some artist will recognize you, charge like a bull, and make a very strong, nearly successful attempt to throw you off a ferry into the Atlantic Ocean. Oh wait, that did happen.

OK, maybe there's hope. But Dick Cheney is still rolling around like the head Dalek, so maybe not.

Politician's Absurd Solutions aren't meant to Work, just meant to Avoid Spending Money

Politicians are not being honest when they propose better police training as a remedy for the shocking and documented brutality we have all seen. More training won't do the job. The fact is our political system uses police as a stopgap against this country's longest running, most serious and intransigent problems. As the police chief whose men had been assassinated said simply, "The police are being asked to do too much."

And they sure are. Sometime in the 80's the decision was made to close down mental hospitals and dissolve mental health networks and deal instead with mental illness solely by passing out pills. Problem solved. Billions saved. Just walk a half a mile through the streets of any city and see how well that nostrum has played out. The homeless are legion, and they are very often suffering from serious mental illness. Further, the mental institutions might have closed, but now the mentally ill constitute the majority of our prison population. So, it seems that the idea of decimating the mental health system to save a buck was a bit shortsighted if not downright cynical.

But never fear, when someone is off their meds and carrying on a rant, send in the cops! The whole mess created by cost-cutting politicians has fallen into the lap of the police. The police are not therapists, so let's not pretend. They have guns and they have tasers. That's the extent of their therapeutic arsenal. They are not equipped to deal with the complex problems of the armies of mentally ill lost in our streets, armies that wouldn't even be there except for savage choices made by our fiscally responsible politicians.

And then there's the small problem of huge portions of the population having been made redundant by globalization and the shipping of manufacturing jobs overseas. Politicians have completely ignored them, or at least tried to. They have cut welfare aid drastically over several decades, but somehow that hasn't made the poor go away. The political class tells people for whom there are no good jobs to be self-reliant, but the only industry left in their sad and depleted world is the drug trade. So once again, send in the cops!

The police are sent out day after day to clamp down on poor minorities where they live. In practice, the police are like an occupying force. Is it any wonder then that they succumb to the practices of a military force in a foreign country? That's not an excuse, just an explanation. They are sent out day after day to effectively suppress people, and politicians pretend to believe the problem of brutality is solvable by merely giving police a little extra sensitivity training! Once again, rather than addressing the real problem, which would be too expensive, our political class chooses to stand the police up in a maelstrom which is fueled by gaping inequality. That's called "Doing more with less!"

Somewhere along the line the political class in this country substituted hardline Law and Order for really trying to do anything substantive about the systemic problems we face. The Law and Order pitch got the votes of frightened constituents and more importantly, it was far, far cheaper than actually doing anything. Calling for additional police training at this point follows that tradition of creating the appearance of doing something while ignoring the underlying issues. Much cheaper.

Letter From Donald to Mitt

Hello Mitt,

You self-riteous vampire fraud. Just a note to serve notice I'm moving in on your long-running con. You and your pals closed American factories and sent jobs overseas. That put people out of work and lowered their pay scale. Then you and Ryan went on to call them deadbeats and takers. Dumb.

Mitt, I never said you were low energy, just low intellect. There's a lot of angry, scared white men out there that aren't content just blaming black people for all their problems anymore. They are getting desperate. They and their kids are being forced to take government handouts because they can't earn a living.

You tell them they're garbage, but I'm smarter than you. I tell them it's OK. They can keep their Social Security and Medicare. Sure, I still blame brown and black skinned people for all our problems, heck, I've even expanded my range to include religious scapegoats, but unlike you I have the common sense to throw working white people a fish, a fish they can eat.

It's what they're doing in Europe now. If you stopped playing with you car elevator long enough and got out more, you'd know that.

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell them it was you and your pasty-faced pluto-pirate buddies that destroyed their lives: I don't want to wake up dead, strangled with somebody's magic underwear. But unlike you, I'm not stupid enough to tell them they can't go to the doctor anymore or feed their kids because they're too inferior to make it in this wonderful, winner-take-all economy that our dear sainted Ron Reagan put into place.

From one (smarter) con artist to another,
Donald

Back when there was a Future

I was born in the early fifties. My parents were blue collar, my father was a fireman and my mother worked in several places, ultimately retiring from the phone company. My father usually had a second job. They worked too much, but while we lived an unglamorous life in a "three-decker", there was always plenty of food, gas in the car to go to the beach, and new clothes at the start of the school year. There were toys at Christmas.

Things were pretty good. Neither of my parents had an education, but it seemed that there was paying work aplenty, and if you hustled you could live well, far beyond precarity. Of course, we were white and lived outside thriving Boston, so we were in an advantageous position.

If you were to have transported our family forward in time to the present, things would have been very different. Each of the three jobs my parents held between them would have payed less in real terms, and the work is less plentiful now too, so they would have brought in much less. They would have worked themselves mercilessly just to have enough to buy food and clothes and then still they would have struggled. It is unlikely they ever would have owned the multi-family house we lived in.

That's the difference between then and now in a nutshell. After WWII people willing to work (and that really is almost everyone, now as then) could carve out a stable and comfortable life for themselves and their family. Not so anymore. My hardworking parents might very well in today's world have wound up in that category of "takers" denigrated and detested by icons of politics, business, and finance.

US Exceptionalism is Real

In other countries, the cost of an antiviral drug that cures hepatitis C is less than $1,000 for the full course of treatment. It's estimated that the drug regime could be sold for as low as $100 and the maker would still make a 50% profit. In the US the same drug costs a little more: the sticker price is $84,000. Of course, if you have insurance the actual cost comes down to around $40,000. The people of the US put up with this sort of outrageous fleecing and gouging at every turn, and all the while we staunchly defend the "free market". We really are exceptional. Exceptionally tractable. Exceptionally dumb.

NOT MUCH OF ANY RELEVANCE EXPECTED IN EITHER PARTY'S PLATFORM

below are some of the worst problems in the US:

with about three percent of the world's population, US whites constitute ten percent of the world's prison population. therefore, they are jailed at roughly 3x the world average. US blacks constitute another matching ten percent of the imprisoned, even though they make up only six tenths percent of the world population and therefore have an incarcerration rate about 15 times the world average.

the murder rate in the US outstrips all others and is expecially high among black citizens. no other country except Yemen has such lax gun laws, and Yemen is considering changing its laws to be more restrictive.

although the US in total represents only about 4.6% of the world's population it consumes 80% of all opiates, which makes our usage about 17x the world average. this correlates with a 1500% increased death rate from drug overdose among whites in the last decade. Oxycontin use and overdose is so predominant that the life expectancy of non-college educated whites in the US is actually dropping.

the US alone lacks some form of universal healthcare. it has a rate of infant mortality that parallels third world countries. this again falls most heavily on the black portion of the population, but also on the poor in general.

our individual median wealth is amoung the lowest, and those few in Europe that are lower compensate by having much higher public welfare spending, which the US lacks almost entirely by comparison.

income inequality is higer in the US, which has the lowest upward mobility in comparison with European countries. Even though they are generally more socialistic, European countries have a higher rate of self-employment/entrepreneurship.

European countries protect their workers by supporting unions, whereas US business is so adept at quashing them that only a handful remain. the US government tacitly approves.

citizens of the US use more antidepressants than people anywhere else in the world.

none of these things are apt to come up in the current election season. instead, we will likely be arguing about how much to bomb ISIS and who uses which public bathroom. you know, the really essential stuff.

Brexit There/ Trump Here

The Brexit vote was an expression of people's anger and angst over being steadily marginalized politically and economically since the days of Reagan/Thatcher. Those who voted to leave the EU probably understood it wouldn't do them much good and might even make things marginally worse for themselves, but it was a strike against the elites who are running a system that has laid them low over the past four decades. As in any fight, there's the chance of getting a bloody nose, but when you've reached a breaking point you have to stand up to whoever is bullying you, consequences be damned. The vote to leave wasn't a repudiation of EU membership as much as it was a cry, "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!"

Here in the US we have an analog to Brexit and it's called Trump. People know at heart he's a clown, but they are so tired of being left out of the equation by elites of both parties that they are sorely tempted to flip the apple cart in frustration and anger.

Will our political elite learn anything from Brexit and acknowledge the growing dissatisfaction among a large portion of working people in Britain, here, and everywhere else in the Western world?

Not bloody likely.

Given it was the elite's indifference to the plight of working people that created such fertile soil for demagogues, their continued disinterest is predictable. The Republican Party is completely agnostic to working people's pain, and the Democratic Party is lazily discounting it. Just look at the Democratic platform: thumbs up to TPP and therefore thumbs down to jobs, environmental protection, and general welfare; thumbs down to $15 minimum wage and therefore thumbs up to forcing the working poor to continue to eek out a meager existence and live miserable, hopeless lives; thumbs down to universal health care and therefore thumbs up to millions still uninsured, bankruptcies caused by medical expenses, and more expensive care than anywhere else and with worse outcomes.

It's unlikely Trump will win this time (although the same was said about Brexit), but as long as a large portion of the working class remains neglected and abandoned, demagogues will continue to surface. One will be victorious eventually. The political elite will continue to serve only the very wealthy and themselves, the anger will build, and we will ultimately have our Hitler.

Whoops there's another Putsch!

Beginning in the 80's, all newly created wealth started floating to the top, bypassing workers. Since then, what wealth the working class did have, which was mostly in the value of their houses, has been erased by the market and stripped via home equity loans. The upshot is this: the mortality rate for non-college educated white working people is on the rise. Desperate, defeated people are committing suicide with drugs and guns.

No one is or has been speaking for this sizable part of the population. They have been studiously ignored by both political parties. Referring to the Democratic Party as the "party of working people" is now a sardonic joke. The DLC long ago deserted them for Wall St. cash and a romance with the professional class. So when a demagogue takes up the working people's cause and there is no counterbalance, many of the disaffected will follow that pied piper, no matter how grotesque he might be or how odious his ideas.

This is how you get a Hitler, ignoring the needs of the many in a once prosperous society until, in a spasm of anger and desperation, the worst alternative is allowed to take center stage.

Go DNC! Seriously, just go. Go away.

While the maniacal circus that produced candidate Trump is all the fault of the repubs, if he gets elected that will be on the dems: the Democratic Party has willingly scraped off the working class to re-orient itself with the professional class, and HRC is the personification of this realignment. That is what will allow Trump to to get to her left, posing as a progressive, undermining her in the general election. Further, the democratic leadership's picking such a warmed-over, passe, unappealing and irrelevant candidate as HRC -one already rejected previously by the base- displays their utter disregard for working people. When these people fail to come out for HRC in November, it should be no surprise. These are the reasons the DNC will share responsibility for a Trump presidency, should it happen.

I truly appreciate the voice of reason saying we have to vote for the Lesser Of Two Evils. I plan to choke back vomit in November and vote for HRC, but I also admit to myself that a VOTE for the L.O.T.E., cycle after cycle, is leading to the slow, continuing downslide of working people. Every day the ultra-rich take more from the rest of us and further rig the system so that will continue at an ever increasing pace. There is a class war raging, the one percent are the aggressors, they are winning handily, and the war is going on worldwide.

The Democratic Party is not capable of producing a counteroffensive because it is in the enemy camp, catering to Wall St. and corporations. Progressives think this can be changed. They look at the takeover of the Republican Party by its base and think it can be reproduced on our side within the Democratic Party.

It can't. Ultra conservative Big Money was behind that takeover from the start and every step of the way. Big Money never sleeps, never gives up, never loses. It coddles its propagandists in think tank jobs during lean times. It underwrites conservative programs in colleges. It carries talk show mouthpieces for years until they become established. This is a capitalist, neoliberal society where money talks, and Big Money has nothing to say on behalf of working people.

If HRC wins, the DNC will hold thumbs up and congratulate itself on a winning strategy. In all likelihood, Hillary will rapidly rescind every progressive thing she was forced to say by the presence of Bernie Sanders. She will promote "trade" agreements that screw the general public. She will chip away at Social Security and Medicare as surely as her morally and ethically derelict husband attacks them on stage in tandem with Paul Ryan at Pete Peterson's annual gathering. She might leave A.C.A. alone, if only because it's so ridiculously rickety it could collapse on its own.

If there is a President Trump in November, the DNC will lament how stupid its base is. Win or lose, it will never change its Wall St. stripes and working people will continue to be crushed.

Quick Breakdown of our Pernicious Political System

We tolerate an election system in which politicians must beg wealthy individuals and corporations for political donations to get into office. Once installed, politicians will give exclusive access to (do the bidding of) those who bankrolled their successful campaigns. And what do corporations and wealthy people want for their money? First, low-to-no taxes on the money they make largely by fleecing the American people through financial manipulation. Second, they want the government to buy their extravagantly expensive weapons, surveillance systems, and security services.

When uncollected taxes and overspending on "defense" leads to deficits, the politicians, on command from their donors, demand austerity from the general public. That is, they cut back on support for the little people who have been paying their share of taxes all along and need help now because they are sick, elderly, or can no longer find a job that pays enough to sustain them and their families.

That's not just our system, infestation by defense contractors is a disease peculiar to us, but dominance by the financial industry has spread worldwide, and it can't go on forever.

Haven't You Heard? Takers are the Saviors of the World

Take. That is the first commandment of capitalism. If you want to succeed in life, take whatever you can from whomever, wherever, and whenever. If you don't take, you will be taken from. Don't be sentimental, take. Further, don't let it bother you. The precept of US neoliberalism, which has reigned here unchallenged since the 70's and has since conquered the planet, is that a better world results for all when each looks out for Number One. That is an inarguable tenet given to us by Adam Smith (supposedly). So, take, take, take, and be merry in doing so because the more ruthless you are the more good you are doing.

It isn't only Adam Smith from whom we've received this wisdom, but also the august philosopher Ayn Rand. Her acolyte, Alan Greenspan, installed neoliberalism as our working paradigm during the two decades he served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The fact that almost all wealth was stripped from the majority and placed in the hands of the few during that period cannot be used to overturn the axiom that greed is good. The Tabernacle of Finance contains the eternal truths that selfishness is holier than charity, indifference is superior to empathy, and it is more blessed to grab than to give. Any attempt to argue otherwise is acting as a class warrior and a servant of the devil.

Sound crazy? Of course, but it is the universal philosphical prison we live in nonetheless. Stealing labor is fine. Polluting is fine. Financial recklessness is fine too. As long as you make a profit you are doing "God's work". Financiers making fortunes stealing from the public literally say that's what they're doing, God's work.

Taking the labor of someone, giving them a dime then selling their output for a dollar and keeping the difference for yourself is God's work. Digging up minerals and allowing poison from the tailings to pollute water people must drink is God's work. Even more so if you can circumvent or eliminate regulations that attempt to restrain the poisoning. Robbing poor people through usury, keeping them on a treadwheel of debt is God's work.

Let's call capitalism what it is, obviously, a system of codified theft and bullying. Feudalism 2.0. Neoliberalism is the most extreme and unrestrained sect of capitalism. Intellectualizing capitalism is merely an attempt to give moral cover for bullies and thieves. Capitalism is a game in which Takers win and Winners take all.

Neither Hillary or Donald will do Anything that's Necessary

If it comes down to Hillary Clinton v Donald Trump, there is little to celibrate. With Hillary you get an authoritarian corporatist and acolyte of Henry Kissinger, whereas with Trump you get a free-form, narcissistic fascist.

Neither will do anything to stop government agencies, supposed stewards of the commons, from acting as saboteurs of the commons. The agencies allow school buildings to cave in on themselves, bridges to crash into rivers, roads to crumble, and water systems to deliver filth and poison to people at the tap. The people manning these agencies are incentivized to do this by a corrupt revolving door system, guiding them to neglect the commons so severely that wholesale privatization can ultimately be presented as the only practical solution to a broken infrastructure. Eventually the rich and powerful few will come to own everything on the face of the earth, bought at fire sale prices. Neither Clinton nor Trump will ever oppose this.

Neither Clinton or Trump will address the soulless juggernaut of hyper-captalism designed and on-track to produce a two class system, with 20% living in comfort at the top, while the rest live in poverty and precarity. Most are experiencing increasing insecurity right now, and the young are coming to realize that they will not be able to provide for their children what their parents were able to provide. The reason for this is not a failed educational system, sloth on the part of the young, or automation. It is the direct result of a concerted -and very successful plan by the powerful to undo the New Deal and restore a winner-take-all paradigm in the USA. Mission accomplished. We all know what it feels like now to live in Reagan's "Ownership Society": we have nothing and we are the ones owned.

Neither will ever address this directly. What they will do instead is parrot what current political charlatans have done, which is to cynically call for better higher education (even while they undermine primary education). In the end this will accomplish only one thing: customer service counters everywhere will be staffed exclusively with persons having college degrees. Better education will not help, only better wages and fairer distribution of wealth will, and neither of these potential presidents will face up to that. What they will do is continue selling the snake oil of a Meritocracy.

Neither will EVER dare to attack the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Security Complex. On the contrary, either one will wholeheartedly continue using 1984 as the operative playbook, scaring The People with terrorist boogymen to deflect attention from the fact that one in five children lives in severe poverty, and 50% are from households that strain under serious insecurity. Neither will address the fact people without a college education are dying sooner than before. In desperation, these people are turning to drugs and alcohol and committing suicide. Neither of them will bring that up, they will talk endlessly instead about ISIS.

Both would have salubrious relations with banks and corporations and Wall St., and that's fine with my Boomer generation, because we don't want anything to mess up our retirement plans. So near now. Ik-snay on the "your ewd-scray" in front of the ids-skay! Let us pray to our 401K, to hell with the kids.

clintonian pillow talk

there's a video clip that's several years old in which bill clinton is talking off stage to paul ryan. they were at a yearly event hosted by pete peterson, that multi-billionaire who was richard nixon's Commerce Secretary. pete hates Medicare. he hates Social Security too. he wants to get rid of it or at least privatize it.

presumably, clinton was there as a paid speaker. as such, he was unlikely to be disagreeing with mr. peterson on these issues. it was clear from the exchange between ryan and clinton that they were in accord with peterson and each other. Medicare had to go.

clinton did not attend the annual meeting this year. the potential for his getting caught again selling out average people was too great and it could devastate hillary's campaign. billy couldn't go this year because hillary wouldn't let him.

i have heard it said that it's unfair to judge hillary by bill's words or actions, but is it really unfair? they work hand-in-glove on the Clinton Foundation. they have professed to be a team for decades, and hillary has recently announced bill will lead her economics group when she's elected. are we to believe that hillary and bill are some kind of top tier odd couple like matalin and carville? not a chance.

it is reasonable to expect hillary will attack Medicare and Social Security despite what she's been averring recently. that's just been in response to bernie sanders' challenge. once in office she will finally unveil her agenda and it will have little in it for working people. she will push for TPP and it's european counterparts to favor her true constituents, the corporate rich, just as bill did with NAFTA. to hell with the fact it will cost ordinary people their jobs, drive up pharmaceutical prices, universally take power away from people, and sacrifice the environment. she will dismantle as many social programs as she can, just as bill clinton destroyed welfare, and she will curry favor with Wall St. as he did by undoing regulations.

the fact is that hillary has little understanding of or empathy with the schlubs who make up the working class. she was never one of them and has no interest in them. to her the average person is no more than a gnat.

but it isn't just the clintons. head of the DNC, debbie wasserman schultz, exhibits a mammoth lack of caring for common people. she is a champion for the payday loan industry which preys on the poor with greater efficiency than old time loan sharks could ever muster. another prominent democrat, rahm emanuel, has immolated public schools in Chicago and led an orgy of privatization. uber-democrat obama attempted to make a Grand Bargain with the GOP that would have decimated Social Security. his justice department is still allowing banks to foreclose houses illegally and not one banker has been prosecuted since 2008.

so, this abandonment of the working class is consistent throughout the Democratic Party. at this point it is standard procedure. the party stopped being the defender of the working class more than four decades ago and gets the working class vote solely by appearing to be the lesser of two evils.

but is it? could George Herbert Walker Bush have succeeded in pushing NAFTA through? during the Savings and Loan Scandal, a republican administration, unlike obama's, felt compelled to prosecute and jail hundreds of felonious bankers. by being wolves in sheep's clothing democrats have been able to deliver more to the .01 percent than republicans could ever have gotten away with.

in one area only, supreme court appointments, it would seem rational for working people to vote for a democratic administration to avoid appointing any more right wing extremists, but that's all. otherwise, the democratic party has and will continue to sell working people down the river for less than the standard rate.

if you ever got something that favored working people past the GOP congress, democrats would stab you in the back to prevent it if it were against the interest of the one percent. that's reality.

though it's a shopworn comparison, working people's relationship with the democratic party is like an abusive marriage. the situation is horrid, but we are afraid to leave because we have no other recourse. one thing is for sure: things will only get worse as long is we keep letting them take our vote for granted.

The Great American Middle Class is going down for the third time. Trump is exploiting this, using it to win over working class people who have the sense they're being destroyed by trade agreements and financial policies that overwhelmingly favor the rich and simultaneously doom their progeny. While Clinton relates she's been approached by people with sob stories, she refuses to believe there's a systemic problem. She feels their pain but she isn't going to inconvenience the big banks or Wall St. in any way to lessen the burden of the dispossessed or to give them justice.

If only there were someone on the political scene who genuinely understood the import and the ignominy of what's happening to ordinary people in this post New Deal era, and had the clarity to propose solutions! Oh, that's right, there is someone, but the Democratic Party has squelched him. Once the party of ordinary people, the Big D has shifted its axis to align with professionals so that working class people now have ZERO voice in how we are governed, that is to say, how the pie is divided.

The New Democratic Party rationalizes gross and expanding income inequality on the grounds it came about through individual achievement in a meritocracy, so it is therefore fair. The GOP reflexively defends inequality of wealth because it is historically and fundamentally aligned with the oligarchy. This leaves the working class with an empty glass and no prospects. Then along comes an outlier like Trump who hijacks the degenerated and deranged GOP with his brand of nationalistic populism and it's off to the races!

No one went to jail over the 2008 crash. The banks are bigger and more in control than ever. We are living under a rentier system in which increasing numbers live precariously and are drained continuously by financial bloodsuckers. Healthcare is still in the hands of the insurance companies. The rich are creating asset bubbles rather than reinvesting capital and hiding away their fortunes in tax havens. Meanwhile our infrastructure crumbles because it's unfunded. We have a permanent warrior class that is spent cavalierly in low grade conflicts in the Middle East and Africa that have no clear objective, create enemies, and swell the federal debt. The prospects of the current generation are far less rosy than that of their parents and grandparents, and their children will fare even less well. In short, we are a nation in decline.

In the face of this, one of the presumptive candidates for President tells us he's "Going to make America great again" by building walls to keep out people who are already leaving anyway, and the other just keeps reiterating how terrifically qualified she is for the position without offering any hint of a diagnosis, let alone suggesting a remedy for our obvious ills. This is what it must have felt like in Munich in the early thirties.

Poison Fruit of the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council)

Whether the system is a monarchy, oligarchy, or meritocracy, if 80% of the people live in depravation, that system is unstable and immoral. Over a thirty year period, the Democratic party has abandoned the masses in favor of the professional/entrepreneurial class. Ordinary people now have no representation, no one to stand up against a winner-take-all system that disregards the many. It can't go on, especially now that Trump has seized upon and is capitalizing on the anger and betrayal ordinary people feel. The Democratic Party's continued betrayal of working people has opened the door for a fascist strongman.

in an apocalypse of the sheep, conservatives would refuse to help one single sheep until all the goats had been separated from them, even if it meant death for all the sheep. conservatism is a disease marked by a profound deficit in empathy.

Clinton's Rarefied Reality

There's been a class war raging in the US for four decades. Two politicians address this, Trump and Sanders. Whereas Sanders talks about it directly, Trump acknowledges it by saying trade deals like the TPP are catastrophic for working people.

Clinton cannot even see the class war. To her, what has happened is the result of a triumph of meritocracy rather than a U.S. Chamber of Commerce led dismantling of not just the New Deal, but the erasing of the mark of Teddy Roosevelt on society as well. If she is the Democratic nominee, working people are likely to either stay away from the polls on election day, or else go with Trump, who at least has given recognition to their plight.

Clinton reflects the direction the Democratic Party itself has taken. Once the party of working people, it has sought to become the party of professionals and relies primarily on being the lesser of two evils to get the worker vote: "You'll get nothing from us, but you know you'd be worse off with those other guys."

The abdication of its role as the defender of working people is what has made the election of Donald Trump a real possibility. If it becomes reality, Democratic Party elites are certain to blame voter irrationality rather than blame itself. That's the worldview of the people in charge of the party, Clinton included. Clinton especially.

the formula:

low taxes, especially on the rich; deregulation of industry and finance; removal of the social safety net. result: third world economy and degenerate society. hurray, we made it!

know how Kadafi was killed? they ran swords into his rectum. knowing this, Hillary chuckled: "We came, we saw, he died." astonishingly creepy.

Observing a clip of Hillary Clinton addressing a rally, it occurred to me that there hasn't been a public speaker with such obvious warmth and apparent sincerity since Richard Milhous Nixon. We are so lucky.

how the rich waltz off with it all

to increase profits, corporate dons send 9 out of 10 jobs overseas, then give the remaining job to a black guy so they can tell the unemployed whites their job was taken by a black -and it works, they buy it.

rich overlords don't pay their share of taxes. when deficits ensue, they tell the white majority that Democrats gave everything away to the blacks, ignoring the fact that the pot was never filled to begin with. of course the whites buy it, but even more, they take up the cause of the overlords in arguing against taxes and against welfare, because, you know, it all goes to blacks anyway. their own kids live in precarity and without medical care as a result.

people are just too easy to fool. all it takes is to marinade their prejudice and fear in a little propaganda, and the rich have the means to waltz off with it all.

Home Ownership - American Dream, American Nightmare, American Scam

Unless you're a member of the select few young people who makes a predictable, decent wage (about one in five), your hopes of owning a house are meager. For one thing, you don't make enough money to qualify to buy a house at the present (ever climbing) prices, and for another, nowadays banks require a down payment so large that you could never amass the sum.

That considerable down payment and more rigid financial requirements came about because of the 2008 housing crash. They are imposed based on the "fact" that the crash was caused by people's buying houses they couldn't afford with little or nothing down. That is a cynical contention that doesn't hold water. Individuals wanting to buy a house were not the cause of the crash.

The problem was that realtors and assessors were jacking up house prices to make bigger commissions, and bankers were delighted to make bigger and bigger fees on inflated loans because they could quickly pass shaky mortgages on, rather than hold on to them for the full 30 year term. They turned around and sold them to pension funds (which they referred to as "the dumb money"). And of course, the bubble eventually burst.

Thieves are always ready to blame the victim, but the fact is ordinary people just wanted to get into a house before the prices went so high they could never qualify to buy. They were like desperate people running for a train that was pulling out of a station, a train that if missed meant death -the death of the American Dream of owning a house.

So, even though ordinary house buyers were not to blame for the 2008 crash, they must now bear the burden of bigger down payments as punishment. This is the "justice" and "morality" inherent in our economic system. Mo slaps Larry, Larry slaps Curly. The big shots in finance know blaming the buyers is bullshit but they get their boys in congress to go along (after all, they pay for the elections, so they get "access") and the corporate mainstream media works for them too, so the sheeple don't know the score and just acquiesce.

As an aside, chasing rising housing prices is nothing new. Housing bubbles are periodic. I'm 64 and I remember being in my early thirties and lamenting not having bought a house sooner because prices were escalating. Housing has always been speculative, which is unfortunate and wrong.

Since young people can't buy houses today, what is renting like for them? Well, it costs about 30-40% more to rent a dwelling than it would to own that dwelling. You're crazy not to buy, but you can't buy because of the barriers. The result is you pay through the nose and you have no recourse. This constitutes what's called a "rentier society". It's one in which a class of owners relentlessly extracts wealth from the underclass at a rate precisely determined to prohibit the underclass from ever ceasing to be at a disadvantage. It's a lot like feudalism used to be, except now there are smart phones.

Because there are fewer qualifying buyers for existing housing stock, shouldn't the price of houses go down, thereby allowing more people to buy a house? You'd think, but when the banks foreclosed on millions of houses after the crash, those houses were sold at bargain prices to hedge fund companies, which in turn bundled them into large stocks of houses that were then sold to investors. Those faceless investors are the new landlords. They will never see the individual house that you're renting, but they own stock in a company that holds deeds to many houses, one of which you pay rent (at 40% more than a mortgage payment) to live in.

Isn't that nice? At the end of the month when you have to make a choice between paying the rent or getting your brakes fixed, remember that if it were not for the Rentier Class gouging you, you could afford to do both. Don't complain, this is the "greatest country in the world!", which is certainly true if you happen to be a member of the Rentier Class.

Whenever you hear the words Freedom or Liberty these days, there's heavy irony to it because it always means putting the screws to somebody. Georgia legislators just pushed through their latest paean to Intolerance, the "Religious Freedom" bill. It's basic purpose is to make it safe for hardline evangelicals to discriminate against gays. These legislators are the same ones who refused to extend Medicaid to poor working people. They make a big show of their religiosity, but they have all the Charity of a great white shark.

ISIS is way down on the list

we still don't have universal healthcare. many working Americans do not get sick pay or any paid vacation. 20 percent of children come from families living below the (abysmal) poverty line, and that percentage is climbing. 50 percent of children are from families that are living in precarity, struggling just to get by.

the cost of childcare is crushing for working parents. wages are so low that most young adults can't imagine ever owning a house and are even reluctant to start families. many have incurred student debt that can't ever be paid off under the present wage structure.

crumbling bridges are dropping into rivers. water systems are aging perilously. roads are deteriorating. the electric grid is in shambles.

people are dying younger because for an increasing number of them life is harder now than it's ever been before.

so in short, aside from the astoundingly isolated and irrelevant ass-clowns on Sunday morning talk shows, who gives a flying FUCK about ISIS? it's the least of our problems, by a factor of at least ten to the fifth power.

and while we're on the subject, who made ISIS? the C I A, working through the Saudis et al, fostered ISIS to overthrow Assad. why? the usual, oil/gas. Assad blocked a gas pipeline through Syria that would have brought cheap natural gas to Europe. the pipeline would start in Qatar and terminate in Turkey. from there it would be distributed throughout Europe.

that would have been hell on Russia, which makes all its money selling marked-up gas to Europe, which it delivers via a northern route. Assad, loyal to Russia, stopped the pipeline. hence, the C I A stepping up to use "Al Queda in Iraq" to eliminate Assad.

Nothing is ever what it seems, and there will always be a reason why the American people can't be allowed a decent existence. the system is corrupt beyond redemption and only evades retribution by tossing out red herring like ISIS.

Another Success for Conservatism

The gap in longevity between the rich and the poor in this country is getting wider. If you chose to be poor, you will die much sooner, up to 14 years sooner than your wealthiest counterpart. Bad decision you've made, being poor.

Wealthier people are living longer because of advances in medicine, while whites with less than a college education are dying even earlier now than they used to as a group. Lack of healthcare and a general deterioration of their economic situation have caused that, the latter having led to increased drug and alcohol use.

Given these statistics, do you think guys like William F. Buckley, dead intellectuals who fostered the return to hardcore conservatism and the rejection of New Deal principles, would be happy now with the triumph of their philosophy? Certainly Milton Friedman would. His arrogance and cocksureness left no room whatsoever for doubt, let alone humanity.

My Non-Economic Argument Against Privatization

I have always appreciated the commons. I've liked that there is a water system that belongs to ALL of us. I've liked that there are public roads and parks, and I could bring my family to them on those roads. Further, I've always felt that we belonged there when we arrived. Things in the commons are everyone's birthright. We are each of us richer because of them. Every child born has a share in the commons and therefore no child, regardless of the economic status of his or her parents, is born indigent.

Things in the commons seem eternal. They can't be snatched away.

Those who want to privatize everything usually have extensive wealth and power. They do not depend so much as the rest of us on the commons for reassurance or identity. They want only to increase their holdings by seizing the commons. (I'm not sure of what their motives for this are.)

Using the arguments of dead academics, they try to persuade us that their way is better for everyone in the economic sense. I find this claim highly dubious and can point to data to contradict it, but that's not my central argument here. I don't care about another dollar in my pocket, more or less. I'm simply saying that losing the commons makes me feel like a serf. Am I the only one?

What do you do with a Government that Works Only for the Rich?

I am not a "birther" or a Tea Party Patriot. I do not hate Big Government. On the contrary, I wholeheartedly believe in the commons and realize that only government can protect the commons. I further understand that there are many good, desirable things that protect and provide for people which only a functioning government can do. Having said that, I declare that I no longer believe the US Government serves the interests of The People, but instead solely operates to further the financial and other interests of a very few at the top. Our government has been drastically and irretrievably corrupted so as to serve the rich exclusively. We have a plutocracy. Democracy is long gone.

Jobs have been sent overseas and wages have been suppressed through trade agreements which increase the take of the wealthy while decimating US cities and destroying the lives of working families. NAFTA and WTO have proved to be job killers, but despite that Democratic politicians, whose party is purportedly concerned with the welfare of the working person, go prattling on about how many jobs are dependent on trade, saying we should support TPP. They neglect to mention that orders of magnitude more jobs have been lost to outsourcing.

Forget the Democratic Party, they are Republicans in sheep's clothing. And at their lead is that toadying servant of Wall St, President Obama, hard-selling the people of the US on the idea that this monstrous package of of perks for corps will be good for us. Yah, right. He and Bill (NAFTA/Welfare "Reform") Clinton are made from the same mold. A pox on both of them and that proto-neoliberal Jimmy Carter too.

Unfortunately, in our two party system, there is no other working people can turn to. Despite whatever inherently self-contradictory inanities Republicans might regurgitate about wanting to boost prosperity, their nostrums can only help the rich at the expense of everyone else, as they have been doing steadily since Reagan gave use Trickle Down Economics, which George H.W. Bush rightly dismissed as Voodoo Economics.

Young adults are victims of this system that mines their aspirations for profit, then leaves them hopeless and broken. Look no further for an example than the Corinthian private college students who had a sham education foisted on them, and when the pyramid scheme came crashing down, were forced into debt bondage by the US Department of Education. Rather than having their debt for a bogus education forgiven, as the law prescribes, the DOE set the collection jackals on them.

And look at how banks, having crashed the economy, have been treated since 2008. No one has gone to jail for fraud. No banks were broken up. Worse, funds set aside for homeowners to spare them from foreclosure were never spent. Worse still, rampant, fraudulent robo-signing to illegally foreclose on hapless homeowners went unpunished, compounding the lack of justice in the system! If you can look at that and still believe the US Government gives a good goddamn about working people, you are delusional.

Under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate for the very wealthy was over 90%. Now it is effectively 15%, the amount paid on capital gains -when it is paid, that is. Wages have been held down so that they have actually fallen even while worker productivity has more than doubled. Poverty is on the rise. Life expectancy is dropping. The present generation has been fated to live in precarity.

The playing field isn't just tilted, it's vertical. As a result of the Citizens United and subsequent horrendous SCOTUS decisions, the wealthy own the US Congress completely. A US Senator on the floor of the Senate said with finality, "The banks own this place." There is great wealth in this country, but is has all shifted to the top. This has not been an accident, or the fault of the educational system, or automation. It has been engineered by a movement of wealthy conservatives that has systematically undone the New Deal.

To sum up: the vast majority of us are doomed to live in precarity; this situation is the result of the rich rigging the system against us; the government -all three branches- works for the wealthy now, so it actually assists in our fleecing. So, what are we going to do about it? If the answer is to just look out for ourselves and hope for the best, that's exactly the answer the %1 wanted to hear.

Why do people still buy into this?

Low taxes for the rich, deregulation of business and industry, declining wages and no social safety net for working people: that defines trickle-down economics, currently referred to as neo-liberalism. It's been touted as the road to riches for all. It has been in place now for four decades. Is it working for you and you kids yet? Well, no, things have actually gone steadily downhill for working people for forty years. But be patient, don't give up, give it more time, it will surely start to work as advertised sometime during the next forty years. Meanwhile, the One Percent is doing fabulously well, really fantastic!

Can I get a Hillary-Rubio!

Despite corporate media's habitual razzle dazzle and despite the endless red herring tossed around on the yak shows every Sunday morning, average people have finally begun to figure out they are being had. It took a while, but they at last realize the one percent has been waging a class war against them for the last forty years, and now it has them on the ropes.

The right's reaction is to propel a strongman, Donald Trump, forward who they hope will save the day. The left's response is to challenge and attempt to break the stranglehold the one-percent-of-the-one-percent has on our political and economic system. The left's candidate is Bernie Sanders.

All remaining candidates are in sympathy and synchrony with the one percent. While they appeal to different parts of the electorate based on their various stated "values", all are acceptable to the wealthy class warriors who are kneeling on the necks of ordinary people.

The one percent don't worry themselves about the "values" part because they are above whatever values-driven Draconian measures might be imposed on the plebes: their daughters will always have access to whatever medical procedures they need. What matters is that the wealthy remain in the driver's seat. And with the grace of their evangelist God and the help of the establishment media, that's where they will remain. Can I get a Hillary-Rubio!

enough devolution, we need revolution

Democratic Administrations have fought a rearguard action to preserve the standard of living of working people since Ronald Reagan left office. The effort has not been very successful, primarily because the Democratic Party, about the time of George McGovern, began to distance itself from unions, and hence, from ordinary working people.

Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have managed to temper the gradual decline, but their efforts have never come close to reversing the fall. They were merely able to thwart or tone down the most Draconian efforts of politicians who while in service to the monied elite have been stripping working people of everything they ever had.

Bernie Sanders' approach is different in that it seeks to redefine what is possible, reasonable, and necessary by taking back power for working people. If you are content with Third Way Democratic incrementalism or are convinced that's the only realistic approach, then select a candidate who will continue working with (appeasing) the one-percent-of-the-one-percent that has thus far taken our homes, indentured our kids, and diminished their prospects. It's a slow death, but at least the pain is gradual.

Keep in mind however, that on the other side of the political spectrum people are also aware of the rot in our system. Their response is not to realign the system though, it's to pick a strongman. So, next November consider what might happen if the choice is between a strongman promising a "fantastic!" new world and an incrementalist who only promises to pull the band aid off slowly.

Think "Mussolini". Think "Mourning in America".

Politically Impossible

The vast majority of the people want universal healthcare -have wanted it for years, but we're told it's politically impossible. The majority want big banks broken up, but we're told it's politically impossible. Further, we are told by serious people that it's self-indulgent and naive to want what's politically impossible. Therefore, the mature citizen should accept that democracy is politically impossible.

the littlest clown in the clown car, Markey Rubio, said "Bernie Sanders would be a great candidate for president --in Sweden!"

think about that for a bit. he's making fun of a country where the people are happier, healthier, and live longer. still, he gets big applause. we're just not going to improve ourselves any time soon, are we?

Aim for the Bullseye, Bernie

Bernie Sanders is right to highlight Hillary Clinton's numerous speaking fees earned in the halls of Wall St. because it connects her to the 21st century robber barons. Where he misses the mark though is when he seems to imply the money influences her vote. While it is generally true that politicians on the rise can be bent, including all Repugs and most Dims, it can't be said of Hillary. She is not corruptible in this regard. She takes money from the 1% because SHE IS ONE OF THEM. She isn't enticed by Wall St. money because she is naturally on their team.

Bernie can't show very many cases where money changed Hillary's vote. Of course, she changed her mind about protecting the little guy in bankruptcy law, but when she was first on the side of the little guy she was merely the First Lady, not a Senator. So strictly speaking, she didn't switch her vote to side with financial consumer-consumers while she was in office.

Hillary gets the big corporate bucks because they like her, not because they want to influence her vote. They already have her fealty.

Neoliberalism's Gift to Working Class Whites: Early Death and No Retirement

Politicians from both the R and D (Repugnant and Docile) parties have in the past several years pushed the idea of raising the retirement age. Repugs are universally in favor of this, but even "moderate Dims" like Obama and Clinton have been amenable. Their justification has been that people are living longer. One imbecile in congress spouted that people would soon be living to 110!

Reality exposes the perfidy of these politicians: longevity of whites with only a high school education or less is actually decreasing. People in this group, which is still a majority, are dying younger. The reason? Life has become harder, more people live in precarity, and they self-medicate their depression with alcohol and abuse prescription drugs. As a result, they are dying at an increasing rate in all age brackets.

Anybody could have seen this coming. Politicians certainly did, but they were intent on using the supposed increase in longevity as an excuse to screw working people out of social security benefits. They parrot their wealthy benefactors' claim that we can't afford to pay those benefits, which we can't if the wealthy continue to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Keep in mind, non-college educated whites are those who need social security most, firstly because they have no other income in old age, but also because they have the types of physical jobs that are too grueling to be done by someone in their advanced years. Despite this, lower working class whites continue to vote overwhelmingly for the same politicians who plot ceaselessly to make their lives harder, shorter, and more brutal on the way out.

Me say day O, Opus Dei O

A loyal servant of the plutocracy, Antonin Scalia, left the earth this past weekend while lolling in the lap of luxury. He gave us the presidency by fiat of George W. Bush. He chipped in to give us the Citizens United decision that sells politicians and elections to the highest bidder. He adjudicated healthcare in such a way as to deny medical coverage to millions of poor working people. A real prince. Let the corporate media hagiography begin!

[audio]

The Empire Hustle!

Un-bullshit regarding Gulf oil spill cleanup: booming school

Zombie Repubicans

Last night I was unable to avoid seeing part of the televised GOP presidential debate. One of the contestants, Cruz I think, was shouting that he would save the country by getting rid of regulations and regulatory agencies. I'm pretty sure he named the EPA as a specific target.

He says this while the furor in the news over the poisoning of Flint's drinking water with lead is still building! Is he that big an idiot, that tone-deaf, or is it just that his moronic constituency is so programmed to reflexively roar approval whenever deregulation is mentioned that cogent, obvious contradictions are irrelevant?

I think it's the latter. The zombies in the audience have been so completely propagandized that low taxes for the rich and no regulation are a magical sacred combo that facts don't affect them. Facts like Flint and the precarity of working people resulting from 30 plus years of the no-tax/no-reg con are as insubstantial as smoke rings to these unthinking undead.

Reap What You Sew

There was a scruffy looking older guy at the far end of the bar the other night who was carrying on a tirade against everyone in the place. Due to the noise of the crowd, he was hard to hear and easy to ignore. But since I have a personal stake in the safety of someone behind the bar, I felt the need to go over to him and suss out whether he was dangerous.

What I found was a lonely man whom life had passed by. He was actually thoughtful and well read. Despite that -or perhaps because of it- he had become isolated. He was a pre-smart phone anachronism.

He gestured to the young people lining the bar and said "These people aren't real Americans!" and of course, by the measure of the world both he and I grew up in, they weren't.

But it isn't their fault they're not "real Americans". They have grown up in a world the generation he and I belong to made for them, one of competition rather than cooperation, one of personal greed rather than a belief that "We're all in this together."

Margaret Thatcher famously said "There is no such thing as society, only individuals." In other words, it's every man for himself and the world will be better for the fierce competition and general indifference toward others. Well, if there's no such thing as society anymore, how the fuck can such a thing as "country" exist? One naturally wonders who would have shown up for the Battle of Britain if this had been the prevailing philosophy in 1941.

Our generation made the world that these young people have had to adapt to and live in. They might not fit the old man's definition of "American", but that's because we changed what it was to be American while they were babies. I'll bet this guy voted for Reagan.

musical chairs

someone loses on every round of musical chairs.
what can we say about the losers?

maybe they're slow. maybe unmotivated. or stupid. or lazy.
maybe they're uneducated. or have poor work habits.
maybe their speech is too rural.
maybe they speak in a thick dialect and have dark skin.
maybe they're unemployable.
maybe they're addicts. or mentally ill.

but the fact remains that someone loses every round at musical chairs.
it's the game itself that dictates the outcome,
so why focus on the players?

what has that pitiable man done, what are his shortcomings, what is his great failing
that he must be made to sleep out on the sidewalk?
doesn't matter, it's irrelevant.
it's sufficient to say he's a veteran of the game of musical chairs.

The "Freedom" right wingers bellow about is not what they want us to think it is. It is antithetical to democracy and at base refers only to their unchallenged ability to hold onto all that is theirs without ever giving anything up. Their cry "Freedom" amounts to: "I've got mine and I'm keeping every single bit of it. If you ask me to share even a little you can go to hell." Freedom.

Flint River: Drinks Like Crony Capitalism

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager to run Flint several years ago. This man, Darnell Earley, decided to decouple Flint from its long time water sharing with Detroit and instead draw water from the Flint River, universally known to be corrosive and contaminated. Simultaneously, Flint's level of water treatment was curtailed. The predictable result was a spike in lead in the water that the population of Flint drinks.

The State of Michigan under Governor Snyder denied and concealed the problem. They did everything they could to squelch people's concern and deny public accusations. They even went so far as to hush up an EPA employee who had called attention to the problem. They did that with the help and consent of his EPA boss, Susan Headman.

Snyder, Earley, and Headman. These people caused and perpetuated ongoing lead poisoning to the population of Flint. This of course includes children, who will not only suffer long term health effects, but whose cognitive abilities have been reduced due to the damage done to their developing brains. This curse lasts forever. The lifetime earning potential of these children has been reduced. So has their learning potential, which I dare say even in this rabidly pro-capitalist society, is worse.

Snyder, Earley, and Headman have assaulted hundreds of thousands by forcing them to drink lead contaminated water. Doesn't that warrant criminal prosecution, or is this another case of the existence of two sets of laws, one for the general population and another for the big players? This much is certain: if these people were nabbed in China in this rotten affair, they would be treated to an entirely different sort of lead poisoning. The acute variety.

But might Snyder and his gang be just bumbling incompetents, which would make criminal prosecution inappropriate? Follow the money. Detroit's emergency manager, also a Snyder appointee, needed to scrape Flint off the Detroit water system so that the intended sale of Detroit's system to private investors could go through. Contrary to the contention of Snyder and his underlings, not only was money not saved by decoupling Flint from the Detroit system, it actually cost Flint much more --in both the near an long term. Nothing to see here.

The system is rotten and people are clueless because they only watch the sham network news. Sleep. Sleep... Drink!

Neoliberalism, the belief in an unregulated free market, is the child of the Chicago School of Economics. It's most famous proponent in the US was Milton Freidman, who was awarded a nobel Peace prize for economics in 1976. The practice of this theory has over the past three or four decades replaced the Keyensian model, which argued for a broad government role in the economy and allowed for a social safety net.

These theories are mutually exclusive, and the switch to free market fundamentalism has had stark effects and severe consequences for the working majority.

Regrettably, there is no obvious path back. It's "winner take all" and "every man for himself" into the foreseeable future.

Hard Selling the Meritocracy

US pols of all stripes will say we want to have a system in which, regardless of the circumstances of your birth, if you're smart, work hard, and stick with it, you should do well in life. This is the Creed of the Meritocracy. It presupposes that a political system can ignore the welfare of the whole as long as it allows upward mobility for a talented few.

First of all, there is less upward mobility in the US than almost anywhere in Europe, so we don't even do that well. But beyond that fact, why should it be accepted as a given that if you're just an average person you have no right to thrive? Between the monarchists and the capitalists hammering away with this ridiculous proposition for centuries, people have come to internalize this horrid and false idea. There is no reason why life needs to be a high stakes poker game won or lost at the moment of conception.

Mitt Romney, that ludicrous elitist prick, said 47% of the US population were takers, contributed nothing, and he had therefore written them off. To be fair, his position is not incompatible with those in the Democratic party who extoll the virtue of a meritocracy. Either way, the poor are still left to die in the snow.

Even Bernie Sanders, our only hope for resurrecting democracy, offers a plan for free college tuition, which is laudable, but he does not push the idea of post secondary education for those who are not "college material". Don't take me wrong, college should be free and this would benefit society as a whole just as the GI Bill did after WWII, but who is speaking for the average young person? Hillary? Ted Cruz? D.T.?

The analogy is with lifeboats. Repubs and New Dems would provide only enough for the few. From the Repub perspective, they should be for the plutocrats. From the New Dems prospective, they should go to the most talented. From their shared prospective, the masses can drown. That's the way it is.

If you run a passenger line and you only provide lifeboats for a select few of your passengers, you are a negligent murderer. If you run a country on the same basis, then your country is doomed. It is the Titanic, and morally, it deserves to tank.

Be Very Afraid and Sacrifice all to Security

In her role as moderator at the recent Democratic debate, Martha Raddatz, queen of the terror heebie-jeebies, whacked Hillary Clinton with a kendo stick over encryption policy. H.C. had apparently either stated agreement with Apple's allowing real encryption of private messages sent between individuals, or else she had committed the capital crime of nuance by saying privacy rights must be considered along with security. In either case, it did not sit well with Empress Freak Out.

From the point of view of M.R., there is only one issue, and that is security. Whether because of sincere conviction or because it's simply in line with her job, M.R. will not abide with the idea that there is any contradiction to enforcing absolute security.

M.R. has a right to her world view, but she has the exclusive attention of tens of million of pharmaceceutical-scarfing middle-aged-to-elderly people every night on the network news, where there is no voice to counterbalance hers. And hers, in harmony with the right's, is one of monolithic concern with terrorism that implicitly demands military action, wholly accepts domestic surveillance, and affords no tolerance of dissent. It's striking how well the right wing has "played the ref" to force "liberal" media to present the right's side of the story. The needle has shifted incrementally over the years from demand for equal time -> false equivalency -> conservative positions only.

The tragedy for the US is that this ceaseless demand for security and the unrelenting reinforcement of fear has put those who govern into a box: they are politically unable to dial back any part of the excessive security apparatus that has grown out of 9/11. If they tried and something terrible were to happen subsequently, they would be accused of treason and murder for failing to protect the lives of American citizens absolutely. That is why we have ratcheted up to a level of surveillance and punishment that would have been the envy of the East German Stasi security apparatus, or for that matter, one that would have delivered more dirt to J.Edgar Hoover than he ever dreamed of.

But why would we ever desire to be less secure? Well, here's what Martha and the right wing that subsidizes her are completely missing: when upper class colonists rebelled against King George's policy of raiding homes and businesses at will and without warrant, they were presumably thinking past the actions of the then King of England. Everything I've heard so far, all the propaganda, has told me they realized that unfettered power by the governing to intrude into the privacy of individuals was a formula for tyranny, not just that of the monarch at that moment, but throughout future self rule.

Any person who is not too stupefied by fear to think clearly can imagine how all the personal data being collected and stored in perpetuity could be used by future tyrants to intimidate or imprison individuals. (And don't forget torture, we're officially into that now!) What is legal now might not be in times to come.

There is a subtle yet powerful advantage to an authoritarian regime possessing all this information. Any individual will become self-censoring when he/she considers that everything expressed in emails, text, or telephone conversations, every return address on every envelope sent, every website visited is being stored away in a vast memory complex in Utah for instant retrieval at any time in the future. This was the power of the Stasi. It made people afraid to utter a word against any policy of the regime.

So, in the name of security we have surrendered our liberty. And be certain, a tyrant will never relinquish his/her power on the basis of a cogent argument for restoring individual rights. There is no going back, not peacefully. To understand what tyrants will always do to preserve their reign read "The Prince", a universally employed handbook written for those who either want to gain power or who have it and want to keep it.

We are living in interesting times. Our "liberal" administration uses the Espionage Act to prosecute reporters as spies, while the Republican Party lambastes the "secret Muslim" in the White House for being too soft on terrorists. We have millions upon millions who rabidly defend their skewed interpretation of the Second Amendment, but all the rest of the Bill of Rights has been abrogated, so what exactly is there left now to protect with all these guns? Martha Raddatz paralyzes us with fear of random attacks while it's a dead certainty that lack of medical care will kill tens of thousands every year and cause incalculable suffering.

To the Young of the US: TPP has you by the nose.

"Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level. This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don't see how American workers are going to cope."

This monsterous thing (the Trans-Pacific trade Partnership) is going through. Your young lives and those of the next generation will be worse because of it. My boomer generation doesn't care because it thinks "I won't be around."

Your generation won't act because it can't bring itself to believe the elder generation would allow such evil. Furthermore, your generation is far too involved with phone apps and faze book to pay serious attention to TPP right now. It will later though, for decades to come, I assure you.

Anyway, everything will be privatized and most will struggle to afford even the basics of life. This is my generation's gift to yours.

Forget democracy. That's already dead. TPP even being pitched is proof of that. President Obama and the Republican leadership are all on the same team, and it isn't yours.

Free Market Medicine in the Twilight Zone

Here is a fictional story reminiscent of the old Twilight Zone series. Mr N. Corazon is a financier who corners the market on a pharmaceutical used to treat a nasty parasitic disease. It isn't a hard thing to corner the market because the developer of the drug is the only entity producing it. It had been content to take a reasonable profit on its sales and felt satisfaction in the fact it was helping those who suffered from an awful affliction.

N. Corazon, cunning financial entrepreneur that he is, buys the company and recalculates a new, much higher price that will result in the maximization of profit. The fact that this is naked profiteering does not impede him. It does not even occur to him that this places a greater burden on those afflicted and even means some will suffer horribly as a result of not being able to afford the newly demanded, much higher price. He feels justified because he has acted in a neoliberally prescribed manner, in accordance with the rules of the Chicago School of Economics and as sanctioned by Ayn Rand.

Here is the T.Z.-like twist though: Mr N. Corazon contracts the very disease that his golden pill is meant to cure. He is at first flabbergasted when the diagnosis is made, but when he recovers enough to go to a pharmacy and fill his prescription, he encounters an unpleasant surprise. When he attempts to pay and leave with his medicine, the person at the register says Mr Corazon can only purchase one pill per day, and that pill will cost him half of his net worth each time.

Furious at this attempted shakedown, Mr Corazon takes his business to another pharmacy. Then another, then another, but the situation is always the same. He reaches out to his many contacts in the regulatory sphere and even to politicians to whom he's contributed, but maddeningly, no one seems to be able to understand or appreciate this ignominy.

For a short time he forgoes treatment and attempts to live with the parasitic disease, but the symptoms are so ghastly that he ultimately acquiesces. Each day his fortune is halved, and within a month his net worth is reduced to the equivalent of that of an average Walmount worker.

At this point Mr N. Corazon, hard-nosed and resilient bird that he is, is actually able to take some satisfaction in the fact that the cost of his imperative pill is now next to nothing.

To his surprise, however, the next time he goes to the pharmacy he's told that the pricing structure has changed. Now the price is fixed at exactly the price he had originally set when he increased it for everyone. Unfortunately for him, that's more than he can afford in his reduced circumstances. He was very near to being cured, but instead, he dies.

I miss the Twilight Zone.

divided and conquer with racism

when surveyed, more americans say they trust the republicans to bring about a prosperous economy. this despite the fact r. reagan instituted trickle-down economics, which has continuously undermined and eroded the position of working people for over three decades. we are far worse off now than when his voodoo economics was first put in place. we will all be serfs in the very near future.

we are either the stupidest people on earth, the most misinformed, or something else. that something else might be this: we as group believe that democrats will transfer money to the blacks, and everything they get will come directly out of our white hides. that's an ugly way to view things, but it's also wrong: the one percent is stealing it all, and the republicans are merely pulling the old trick of playing one group against another. it seems hopeless, because people should have figured this out by now. it looks like they never will.

"If you can convince the lowest white man that he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice that you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll even empty his pockets for you." -Lyndon Johnson

Updated American Dream: a Fair Chance in the Hunger Games

Let's dedicate a minute or two to discussing that 600 pound gorilla sitting there at the end of the table. Let's say outright that for 60-70% of America's young adults, the future is anything but bright. They will do less well in life than their parents and grandparents. Their lives will resemble more closely their progenitors who lived through the Gilded Age and the Great Depression.

That's a tough pill to swallow for most of us, but it's the naked truth. Most young people won't own a house, the American Dream, and they will always live precariously. They will be parasitized by money lenders and beset by bill collectors. They will be chronically underpaid, and their lives will be so much harder than their parents' they will die at a younger age. They will likely encounter more violence, more alcoholism, more mental illness, and more chronic disease. They will be (already are) exploited and abused by sociopathic employers. Worst of all, they will feel the heartache of not being able to provide the things to their children that they had in their own childhood.

That's just the way it is. The economy will not provide a decent life for 2/3 of the population. Mitt Romney was understating the case when he said he couldn't do anything for 47% of the population. In reality, 70% will be written off, but Mitt wasn't able to say that. After all, if he tipped off all the people who will be thrown under the bus, he'd never be able to get 51% of the vote.

In the decades before Reagan (BR), unions ensured workers got their slice of the pie. Ordinary people made enough to buy a house and a car. They could afford to take a yearly vacation. They even could send their kids to college, if the kids had the smarts. But now fewer and fewer people can afford any of that because wages haven't gone up since the early 80's. The reason for that is simple: the powerful regained the upper hand and they now treat workers with the disrespect and disregard they did prior to the New Deal.

And the hell of it is, nobody says anything about it. Bernie Sanders, the Last Great Hope for America, gets press when he talks about tuition free college, but when he talks about a boost in the minimum wage the press doesn't pay any attention at all. Unless Bernie wins the presidency, the glaringly awful fate of the majority of our younger generation will be buried in national denial again.

Hillary, like most politicians (Obama included), will go on about "equality of opportunity". The implication is that everyone should have an equal chance to prevail in a highly competitive arena. What that means is: if you have the inborn advantage of talent and superiority, society should reward that and not hold you back. It's like saying everyone should get an equal shot in the Hunger Games. On the other hand, if you're just run of the mill, you can go outside, lay down in the snow, and die.

Screw the meritocracy of the DLC!

It wasn't this way when I grew up. In the country I grew up in, the thought was, "We're all in this together". It's a different world now, and it really sucks.

Our Kids are Reliving the Lives of our Grandparents

In the 60's and 70's we we ready for a new world. We realized we lived in plentitude, that there wasn't a need any longer to toil away just to stay alive, that life in this country had gone beyond the struggle for survival, and we were contemplating how to map our future based on that fact.

My, how things have changed, reverted really, to the days when survival was the best we could hope for. For young people starting out now the horizon looks much as it did to those during the Great Depression. Life is hard, there is uncertainty about housing, jobs, and healthcare. Wages are punishingly low. The general affluence of the 60's has been replaced by precarity, and for many it is a stressful and unkind life.

Whereas once there was still the New Deal ethic of "We're all in this together", now it's everyone for themselves. There isn't any support, it's all on you the individual. It starts in grammar school with relentless testing and then prepping to get into a "good" high school, and it never stops. You either win big or you fail completely, and if the latter, your fault, no mercy. As Fran Lebowitz puts it, we're living in a high stakes poker society.

This is progress? Hardly. Let's admit the world has become a much grimmer place for the majority, a place where there are a few winners and an accumulating mass of losers. All the vaunted technology hasn't done a fucking thing to make life better overall. In fact, life has become considerably worse, despite the promise of technology.

But it wasn't technology that switched our lives back into survival mode. It was the ruling class, who looked upon the 60's, recoiled, and then set about to change things back to the good old days, their good old days, before the New Deal.

They were loosing their grip. They were still at the top, but being up there wasn't the glorious advantage relative to the masses it once was. They wanted their lofty throne back. They have gotten it back. First they went after the commies, because the communists and socialists had backed unions. Then they decimated the unions. Now they steal wages from their underpaid workers, and no state, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, has any agency to protect the forlorn wage earner from this abuse. He or she stands alone, naked, and defenseless before the all powerful ruling class. In short, the game is won.

It's a great world if you're a winner, at least it's better to be a winner. But either way really, it's a decrepit and degenerate world that's hardly worth living in. I've got mine. Greed is good. Adapt or die.

I think of it as a plantation.

at your service, my lord

we have reached a point in our history when your survival depends on your willingness to allow your self to be exploited and abused by your employer. where once unions protected the individual worker from the whims of his/her employer, now each worker stands alone and powerless.

this is what the US Chamber of Commerce pushed for. this is what Ronald Reagan promised to restore. this is what they mean by freedom: the ability of the ruling class to treat workers any way they like without fear of censure or retribution. your place, as a worker, is to be obsequious, alacritous, and compliant. freedom.

the turnover formula:

it would be reasonable to think employers must pay their workers at least enough to live on, because otherwise the workers would leave. actually though, employees have no choice, they can't leave. there is a surplus of labor so they must take what they're given even if it isn't enough to pay the household bills. for a concrete example of this, look at Walmart: its workers are paid less than enough to survive on and are actively directed by Walmart to state agencies for assistance. (the outrageous thing about this is that the walton family politically promotes reducing assistance programs. they pay poorly, forcing their workers to supplicate for food, then withdraw the food!)

so, workers are forced to accept wages that aren't enough. they can exist for a while, but it's a process of attrition. eventually, they stumble and fall. their car breaks down or their kid get sick. whatever the particulars, they will eventually founder. they will disappear and another new employee will find him/herself in the lucky position of having a job. out with the old and in with the new.

aren't employers screwing themselves by causing this turnover of workers? no, because the work is semiskilled and training isn't too costly, so the point at which training costs just equal the cost of an increase in salary by a penny, that sets the wage.

what about the forlorn worker who couldn't make it into work and therefore is cast into the abyss? who cares? nobody. not Jeb Bush and not Hillary Clinton, because they are of and for the ruling class. Alan Greyson cares, Elizabeth Warren cares, and Bernie Sanders cares, but the public is bombarded with the message that politicians like them threaten our way of life: the US Chamber of Commerce American Way of Exploitation and Precarity for the Vast Majority, that is.

shit, let's all just get down have another war. it'll make us feel better without having to think.

Ruling Class Strip Mines the Working Class

The ruling class has suppressed the paychecks of working people by exporting jobs, busting unions, and taking control of government. In lieu of living wages the ruling class extends credit to working people, so that when a mother buys bread at the grocery store with a credit card, she will be paying interest charges on that loaf for a very long time, perhaps forever. When enough of her shriveling income becomes shunted into merely paying interest she will unavoidably fall short. Then, having caused all of her suffering and desperation thus far, the ruling class will profit once again by extending her a payday loan at explosively usurious rates that she can never repay. Eventually she will be broken, rejected, evicted, discarded, and perhaps even jailed. The power of the courts is on the side of the ruling class, as are the politicians they purchase.

Post-Reagan neoliberal capitalism, the Ownership Society, only works for the few and is devouring 70% of the population. This is a worldwide phenomenon, playing out in individual households and happening to whole countries. We are living under a global rentier system that hasn't been matched since the middle ages. It was brought to us by the Chicago School of Economics, the US Chamber of Commerce, the International Monetary Fund, the Dulles brothers, and Ronald Reagan.

If you disagree that the working class is being rammed through a meat grinder, you are likely a member of the "I've got mine" crew, a sociopath and complete asshole. If you are not among the privileged but still can't bring yourself to see what's happening, you are a pathetic wimp and horse's ass.

Eat the rich.

Abortions account for around 3% of the services Planned Parenthood provides, leaving ninety-seven percent of the care women recieve from Planned Parenthood related to things like birth control and detection of cervical cancer. Nonetheless, Republicans want to defund it completely, kill it, disregarding women's need for care. Undeveloped fetuses they supposedly agonize over, but cancer isn't a big issue for them.

This shows that the Republican base is an amagmation of two elements: the plutocrats and the American Taliban. The former lets the latter have its way because A) it has to form a coalition with religious zealots to get elected, and B) whatever madness the crazies bring down on the general public will not in any way affect the plutocrats or their families.

Low Wages in Perpetuity? Sounds Great!

Neo-liberal capitalism demands two things: cheap labor and low taxes. Scott Walker and other Republican governors in the Midwest and South have done their level best to undermine unions and they've cut taxes to appeal to business. Further, they have persuaded many working people that this is the path to prosperity, so that those people then go out and vote for Walker and his ilk.

But wait, how can this be a good deal? You are the one they plan to pay the low wage to, in perpetuity. They will have you working harder for less, and when you come up short, there will be no help for you or your family to fill the Need Gap because lowering taxes necessitates cutting social programs.

Your kids will go without because the money that might have been used to help them has gone into the pockets of the One Percent. How does any of this work for you? The precarity you're experiencing now is the result of over thirty years of trickle-down economics. Life was better for working people BEFORE the neo-liberals took over.

What part of this "prosperity through deprivation" scam appeals to people? Walker and his contemporaries (some of theme Democrats) are terrific salesman. They have have been able to persuade working people that toiling on the plantation is a great lifestyle.

Neo-liberal capitalism craves cheap labor. Slave labor would be ideal. So please make this possible by continuing to vote for Scott Walker and his cohorts.

deregulation nation

picture a store with a teenager at the register. he does his job normally, except that when his friends come through his checkout line he moves their expensive items to the bagging area without passing them over the scanner. in this way his friends can pay for only socks and underwear but leave with an X-Box in their bag as well.

this is a common form of theft and retailers are very aware of it. they have cameras and other means to prevent these insider giveaways. some even put checkers at the door to compare the customer's sales slip with the contents of their bags. (very insulting, i think, and probably not legal.) the point is, retailers aren't going to allow themselves to be stolen from, so they watch their area closely.

contrast that to the US government, which has come to so worship the free market that it will hear no evil and see no evil in the world of industry and commerce. here the checkout clerks are our government regulators, and when their friends from industry come through the line they pay for the equivalent of a pack of gum and walk out with a big-screen TV.

this is how California came to be bilked out of billions during its phony energy crisis a decade and a half ago. energy producers arbitrarily shut down generating plants to spike electricity prices during periods when it was the worst time for consumers and the "best" time for the generators' profits. US gov regulators were willfully and determinedly ignorant of what was going on because they were friends of the generator companies. had it not been for the implosion of Enron, which was really a minor player in it all, we would never have known any of the facts about the grand California electricity rip off.

in the energy regulatory area, like every area of our corrupt system, the people charged with protecting the public interest come from the industry they are supposedly regulating, and they will return there at the end of their regulatory career. it's called the "revolving door", and it is rampant. even recent US Attorney General Eric Holder, who oversaw the NON-prosecution of Wall St for the 2008 Crash, returns now to his Wall St law firm that represents Wall St financiers. "Would you like a complimentary big-screen TV with that, sir?"

our system is corrupt to the hilt, only we don't ever say that because the "liberal media", which is owned by a handful of conservative corporations, passes it off as normal and usual and we take our queue from the media. we don't get mad as hell about the colossal rip off because it doesn't even register with us. the networks are doing their job well, don't you think?

in large part, things came to be this way because Ronald Reagan, patron saint of deregulation, declared we must "get government out of the way of business." and that we have, and we the people pay for it every day when we buy any commodity, the price for which has been brazenly pumped up for shameless profit under the blind (or missing) eye of regulators. we pay when we drive on crumbling roads and bridges, or use a credit card, or when we struggle to get medical care for our kids and grandkids because all the money has been siphoned off for absurdly useless and unnecessary defense contracts, and because parasitic insurance executives and wealthy shareholders need to get their 30 cent cut of every dollar spent on care. we also pay for it with wages too low to survive on.

nobody is watching the store and we are paying for it with our lives.

People Still Being Neo-Conned

Scott Walker and all the rest of the neo-cons will tell you they have the only surefire formula for prosperity: reduce taxes for the rich, eliminate environmental and occupational regulations, get rid of consumer protections, dismantle the social safety net, destroy unions, and end the minimum wage. this formula isn't new, it's the backbone of the Trickle Down theory of economics we've operated under since Reagan came into office, and in that time working people have not seen a raise, while the rich have increased their income and wealth stupendously. if neo-con ideas were going to work for ordinary people, they'd have done so long before now.

what we actually have as a result of Reaganomics are very low wages, job insecurity, precarity, and massive wealth inequality. and there is no hope of improvement under the current system. everything goes to those at the top, and while the rest of us slide deeper into deprivation the neo-cons tell us our only way out is to let them take away more, to snatch away what little there is left in the way of assistance and worker protections. they claim the rest of us will be better off if we let them continue to put us through unrelenting austerity. according to them, the only way out of the misery caused by Reaganomics is more Reaganomics.

this is a transparent con that has been running for decades, but many working people still haven't figured that out. if you want to be a serf and are happy that your children will be even worse off than you are, if you want all wealth to continue to go to the top, then keep backing the neo-cons. it's a tired old con by now, and people should know better.

(by the way, all Republicans are neo-cons, but half of all Democrats -including Hillary- are neo-liberals, and both tribes serve only the rich.)

The Dubious Virtue of [Dog-Eat-Dog] Selfishnesss

"DOG-EAT-DOG." That was my father's pronouncement on society back in the sixties. He was no socialist, he was a full-on blue-collar conservative, so much so that other firemen would later kid him by calling him Archie Bunker. But he did have an aversion to avidity.

The world has changed since then, but only in the degree to which competition has become central to out lives. Once disparaged as cutthroat, it is now celebrated. It is the holiest tenet of neoliberalism, which rules our economy and shapes our society down to the smallest detail. No exceptions.

Everyone acting in his own self interest brings about the greatest prosperity for all. That was the observation of Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations". (He was a lot more nuanced, but that's the only thing people remember about him now.) Everyone's looking out for Number One produces the most wealth at the end of the day. Conversely, saddling the market with social responsibilities will create inefficiency that diminishes the general good.

Smith's obervation was expanded upon by the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman espoused everything has a price and that price will be determined in the free market. If the market places little monetary value on something, it is worth little. Period. It cannot compete and it therefore should be allowed to disappear. Life in its entirety can be and has been commoditized.

So, we have arrived at a point when "Dog-Eat-Dog" is a commandment, not a condemnation. The virtuousness of Homo Economicus is fully acknowledged: get the most you can for yourself, and get it at the lowest cost. Add in the corollary that this applies everywhere, to all things and at all times, and you have the neoliberal paradigm. As Ayn Rand clearly expressed through her fiction, anything other than unrelenting selfishness is stupid and detestable.

This view nullifies compassion, empathy, even caring, and IT IS MAINSTREAM DOGMA IN THE U.S. AND THROUGHOUT EUROPE. When Margaret Thatcher declared that there was "no such thing as society, only individuals", she was extolling Homo Economicus. She further drove this home when she proclaimed it was necessary to change people's very nature, the way they THINK. That is, they had to be made to accept the view that we are each an atomic unit that cannot be concerned with anyone other than ourselves and act accordingly in the marketplace.

The neoliberal world view has conquered our society. There is no decision made in government, on the job, or even at home that gives weight to anything other than monetary value or cost. For example, when we talk publicly about ceasing putting more people in jail than any other country on Earth, we cannot justify stopping on the basis of the unfairness of the system or the misery caused by over-policing. We can only justify reducing incarceration on the basis of reducing costs. Think about that. It's true not just in this case, but in everything. Our decisions are rooted in monetary terms alone, nothing else is considered valid. The neoliberal mindset has taken over completely.

If at this point your reaction isn't that the neoliberal viewpoint is so blinkered and monolithic as to be effectively demented, I don't think there is an argument I can make that would win you over. I'll only say that the neoliberalism is fallacious from the start in maintaining that if something doesn't have a market price it doesn't have value, that the only measure is money. It seems to me that such concept could only have been concocted by privileged males from the upper class, precocious mama's boys who had been pampered by their mothers and were subsequently feted by the wealthy for giving pseudo-intellectual, false legitimacy to the rapacity of the ruling rich.

In the early 21st century we have accepted DOG-EAT-DOG absolutely. In practice, it's not working out well for the vast majority. In fact, it has led society (there truly is such a thing, oh Iron Maiden) to the brink of paroxysm and upheaval. But it's been fun, because Al Greenspan was so darned entertaining, wasn't he?

TPP equals Rot

TPP and similar trade agreements are more side door treaties than trade pacts, and what they codify is increased power for international corporations to use in controlling and exploiting populations everywhere. That the majority of both political parties is behind TPP shows that our government is thoroughly corrupt, serving only the powerful few while forsaking the many, and therefore illegitimate.

The game is over. US democracy has been lost. It will only get worse until even the most conformist, apathetic, and complacent realize we do not have a government anymore, just a bought bureaucracy that carries out the orders of financiers and corporate chiefs.

Eventually there will be social upheaval, but because neo-liberals like Clinton, Gore, and Obama have sold out so completely, discrediting liberalism by association, fascism could prevail by default. The future is not bright.

The Home of the Future v the Homelessness of the Present

When I was a kid in the fifties, I remember seeing repeatedly a newsreel about "The Home of the Future" which predicted a life of comfort and ease ahead for the ordinary family. Manufacturing would produce appliances that would revolutionize homemaking, and technology and engineering would relieve the worker of all mundane activities. This would result in less toil for all and make way for a more fulfilling life. Heck, if there would be any negative at all in the future it would be trying to figure out what to do with all the leisure time we'd have.

Obviously, things haven't turn out that way. The Cleavers (Google it if you're under 50) were the paragon of the family at the time, and what was being pitched in that newsreel was the Cleaver Family 2.0 : June and Ward become the Jetsons.

I don't think the pitch was cynical. There wasn't (then) a diabolical clique at the top plotting to assure technological marvels like microwave ovens, cell phones, the internet, and flat screen TVs would coexist with joblessness, declining wages, insecurity, and diminished expectations for all but a few. People then at all economic levels felt that progress would bring everyone (caucasians at least) forward together, arms interlocked, in a broad front. That was the fifties vision.

Our thinking was so much different then because of WWII and the New Deal. You couldn't tell a vet returning from war in Europe or the Pacific that now he had to accept a life of precarity at home. (That was tried after the first World War, and it didn't go over well. There actually was talk of an armed uprising.) The ascendancy of unions meant the fruits of technology and manufacturing were more equally shared than ever before --and certainly much more than they are now. Hence, in the fifties the natural, universally accepted view was "We're all in this together."

That's why it was assumed that technological advances would be applied to make life better for everyone, including ordinary working people. Would anyone in the 50's entertain the notion that new technology and increases in worker productivity would benefit only the few at the top, leaving working people further and further behind? Ridiculous! This is (was) America!

But that, of course, is exactly what happened. It happened because our sense of community was replaced by the cult of individuality. "Me" replaced "We". "I've got mine" replaced "We're all in this together." And behind it all was a diabolical clique at the top, goading people to act against their own long term best interests by thinking only of themselves and forsaking the group. Screw everyone else. Like fools, we obliged. Now the herd has broken up and the wolves are feasting.

Because I get outside the suburban bubble regularly, I often see people who have discovered the real Home of the Future. They move between nowhere and nowhere else with bags in tow. The number of bags ranges from one to a half dozen. They contain neatly folded, tightly packed personal items. These people are not always drunks or drug addicts, although in their circumstances I wouldn't deny them a respite. They are not necessarily crazy, although how could you hold on to your sanity under those conditions? They're appearing in the suburbs now too.

In the old days we'd look at these people and say, "There but for the grace of God go I." Now we're much more savvy. We look at them and mutter, "Loser."

What goes around comes around.

TPP is less of a trade agreement as it is favor-filled pinata for special interests and a Christmas list for corporations. Ordinary people will pick up the tab for it, as they have for NAFTA and every other free trade Trojan horse neoliberals have foisted on them.

kiss my work ethic

working in engineering, i am always amused when the money men come down from corporate to update us on how much our output is expected to contribute to the company's bottom line in upcoming months. it feels a little like the high school jocks telling the nerds how much they're expecting to get laid this season. "gosh, i'm just glad to be able to contribute to your success, mr. b.m.o.c.!"

seriously though, businesses' sole interest is to make money. that is accepted without question. by contrast, within companies there is the implicit expectation that workers will act out of loyalty to the corporation, to a degree bordering on altruism. in response however, any company will dismiss its workers as soon as their contribution is no longer absolutely necessary.

companies and CEOs act out of self interest, but employees are supposed to be driven by values like commitment and pride in their work. it is not a two way street, and if it were, most companies would collapse in an instant. business -capitalism- depends on the existence of this dichotomy.

the theory of homo economicus states that he should seek the most return for the least expenditure of effort. businessmen are allowed to act on that principle, but workers are expected to give it their all and accept whatever they're given in return, unquestioningly. for the employee, money isn't supposed to be his or her prime motivation (probably because they're not thought to be smart enough, but really because they are at such an obvious disadvantage in the employer-employee relationship).

there are givers and there are takers. funny thing is that the takers have sworn a secret oath to never give any credit whatsoever to the workers and they claim all the glory -and money- for themselves, even anointing themselves "job creators" as they screw their workers.

thank gawd there are no unions anymore in the private sector.

Crumbling Infrastructure is Old News... and No Accident

The covert intention all along has been to allow infrastructure to deteriorate to the point that fixing it would be beyond the means of the public sector. (The willingness and ability to spend having been whittled down by political agents.) At some point, private buyers will swoop in and grab the separate parts in a fire sale. The selling off of the commons has been planned for decades. This is Disaster Capitalism in slow motion. The Pennsylvania Turnpike has been offered for sale. Parking in US Cities is now a government-protected business owned by sovereign wealth funds. Soon you won't be able to leave your front door without paying some financial lord for the privilege of riding on his street. Welcome to the new feudalism, the dream of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman, and good old Ayn Rand.

The very wealthy have been stealing from the middle class relentlessly for the past 35 years, to the point there is almost no middle class left. They have reduced the taxes they pay drastically. They have kept the profits from increased worker productivity for themsleves and not give workers a real raise in decades. The class war is over. The Working Class lost.

A gentle missive to my fellow Boomers:

The rich have been ducking taxes while simultaneously suppressing wages for years. Thus, they have successfully rigged the economic system their way and against the rest of us. It's that simple. Don't let the paid-off media bamboozle you anymore. Stop lying to yourself.

The result is we are now living permanently in precarious financial circumstances and our kids are even worse off than we are. They have no future.

By the way, you never were really "middle class" because you didn't truly meet the actual criteria or definition. You were part of a well-paid working class, and as Fran Lebowitz put it, if you had been calling yourself "working class" you might have noticed it when the work went away!

But you had your head in the clouds, and you thought because you were doing so well financially that you'd sublimated to the middle class. You therefore didn't need to depend on things like real work or unions anymore.

Here's the thing: the only reason you were doing so well in the first place was that unions had prised higher wages out of the rich for you; at the same time unions purchased influence in the capitol to prevent the rich from being able to rig the economy back the way it was before the New Deal.

And then you voted for Reagan. Congratulations.

Well, it's all over now for the "middle class". Do you finally understand the inherent joke in calling it "trickle-down" economics? Just wake the fuck up. Or better yet, go back to sleep. Sit on the couch, turn on Fox News, fondle your gun, ogle your (inadequate) 401k, hate effective government, and misdirect your rage toward the poor and minorities.

Stay the fuck out of the arena, because so far you've been a curse, a miserable steward of the commonwealth, an impossible failure at protecting your progeny, and a turncoat to civilization.

We now have the opportunity, having elected the first black president (who has never wanted to be reminded of the decimation of the working class), to elect the first woman president (who has never even given a thought to the decimation of the working class). These are the beacons of the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, the working class is very prominent in the minds of Republican Party luminaries, who sincerely want to expedite its annihilation.

Gee, it's a great time to be a plebeian in the US!

School Privatization: a Fairy Tale ( based on No Child's Behing Left + Race at the Top)

We have been sold on the idea that US schools are in deep decline, that they are failing our students, and that this constitutes a severe crisis. We are informed that bold innovators have a solution: privatization. We are further told that entrenched teacher's unions are resisting needed changes out of self interest, and this is especially galling because lazy, inept teachers are the root cause of our failed educational system.

It is all lies, and I will enumerate here the falsehoods, misinformation, and subterfuge being employed to take over public education for the main purpose of enriching the privatizers.

"Our schools are failing the childred" -the Big Lie

This has become common wisdom through repetition, but it completely lacks accuracy. In affluent areas scholastic achievement remains impressive, while in poor areas it is lackluster or miserable. The education a child receives, now as ever, depends on the zip code she or he lives in. The obvious reason for this has been known so well for so long that we forget to mention it: we fund our schools locally through property taxes, so that schools in affluent areas have ample resources, while those in poor areas typically have much larger class sizes and endure a degraded physical environment.

The difficulties of schools in poor districts have been exacerbated by "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top". Because these corporate-inspired programs peg teachers' salaries to students' achievement, the effect can be to drive teachers away from schools plagued by inadequate resources. Teachers might avoid them because they will not only be paid less but might eventually be sacked when their school is closed in favor of a private charter school. Who need's that hanging over their head? In actuality, these "reform" programs have served to soften up public schools for takeover by privatization. Whether this was cynically intended or not from the beginning isn't clear, but this has been their effect.

Where there are Problems, the Root Cause is Poverty.

On top of the problems schools in poor districts have themselves, there are things that frustrate a child's learning which arise just from being poor. To start with, the homes of the poor are more stressed and less stable compared to those of the more affluent, so a poor child is apt to come to school every day less prepared to learn. Also, nutrition is a factor in learning, and there are no supermarkets with produce sections in very poor neighborhoods. Whole Foods is for rich kids.

Further, a poor child experiences a deficit in exposure to language during early development. This child is spoken to less and hears a more limited vocabulary. Conversation tends to be more perfunctory than that in more affluent surroundings, with the upshot that the vocabulary of a poor child entering school is thousands of words smaller than that of his or her affluent counterpart. Here is where Head Start, a public program, can help mitigate the gap, by the way.

Next: smaller brain. Yes, the stress that accompanies poverty attacks the poor child even in the womb. The mother's stress affects her physiology with the result her baby's brian will be smaller. Sadly, this is a deficit that will affect not just performance in school, interacting with and compounding the problems listed above, but also limit the individual's horizons throughout life.

Now, doesn't all that just make your blood boil about those lazy teachers and their horrible unions! Oh, ah, well, gee...

The Scam

Creating the narrative that inept teachers are causing bad educational outcomes provides the privatizers with their main selling point: "If we dump all the bad teachers and replace them, that will solve all our educational problems." Of course, the selling point is bogus. Where problems exist, they arise from poverty. Replacing teachers with cheaper substitutes won't solve any problem other than the one of making the privatizers richer.

It's obvious why proponents of privatization go after teachers' unions. The unions stand between them and mountains of the taxpayer's money, and it is all about the money.

The privatizes are bringing in hoards of lobbyists to make sure they get their hands on those education billions. Politicians like New York's Governor Cuomo and Chicago's Mayor Rham Emanual are feted relentlessly. It goes without saying that the same is true throughout the red states. That is why politicians are disposed to prop up the dubious claims of the privatizers and aid them in there quest to displace public schools. Even the President, an inveterate Wall Street courtier, has promoted privatization and appointed a fan of same, Arne Duncan, as his longtime head of education.

As it stands, private schools have an inherent advantage over public schools: they can cherry-pick students and don't need to provide remedial or special education. Furthermore, they answer to no one, whereas the public schools they compete with are subjected to high stakes testing, intense scrutiny, and must still attempt to educate all children.

Fallout: the End of Universal Education

In addition to their other unfair advantages, the privatizers, in league with politicians, will use another trick to devour the educational system, and here's what that will be: they presently receive tax dollars, diverted from public schools, from local government, but eventually parents will receive vouchers to pay the private schools directly themselves. This will be touted as "more choice" (and the dumb bastards will buy it). The costs of private schools will then rise, but the vouchers won't be increased. The poor and working classes will not be able to afford an adequate education anywhere, certainly not one as good as is available in public schools today.

Meanwhile the rich, who have been sending their kids to private schools all along, will benefit by getting a voucher to partially offset their costs. Ultimately, only the wealthy will be able to buy a real education for their children. The privatizers will have made many billions by then, and education will be beyond the means of families of the lower classes. Their children will not be educated. If allowed to continue its march toward victory, school privatization will not just supplant public education, it will bring about the end of universal education.

This probably will happen, because we as a people have become such unquestioning acolytes of the free market that we can't conceive of something done in pursuit of money resulting in anything other than unmitigated all-around success. Because of this misplaced trust, the dissolution of universal education might not be the worst our future holds.

P.S. There is another segment that will be absolutely delighted with the end of public schools and universal education: fundamentalist Christians who despise public schools for their secularism and want to replace them with Christian madrasas. That's why fundamentalists have made common cause with Wall St. hedge fund managers to undermine and destroy public education.

Rx for Suppressing Revolution: Sunday Shivers with Martha Raddatz

Every week the Sunday morning Washington inside-the-beltway talk shows go on and on about insider politics and terrorism, terrorism, and more terrorism, with a little bit of Putin's latest nastiness thrown in to fill the gaps. No one watching would ever suspect there is in this country a generation unable to earn enough to buy a house or a car, and living hand-to-mouth. Getting married and raising a family is not something they can reasonably aspire to. It is in fact reduced to some antiquated pipe dream from 60's TV shows. They have been fogotton by their parents watching the Sunday talk shows, and they are being pointedly ignored by those shows.

Obviously, Corporate TV is using "1984" as a playbook. Fear and hate keeps the proles bamboozled and justified rebellion at bay.

Income Inequality Producing Social Security Shortfall

In the post-Reagan years, if wages had tracked the increase in worker productivity, not only would there be far less income inequality, but much more money would have been collected for Social Security. In fact, the accumulated difference over time would have been an extra 750 billion dollars, enough to make Social Security solvent practically forever. This includes benefits for the disabled, which are now under austerity-attack by Congress.

So, suppression of wages has not only produced precarity now, it has undermined Social Security.

The Republican Party has served its masters faithfully over the years by sabotaging government's role in protecting workers, thus abetting the suppression of wages. That is what the Republican Party does naturally. It is the party of business, and business always strives to reduce labor costs in order to maximize profit for stockholders and increase management salaries.

Now Republicans are professing to have newfound concern over wealth inequality, although they have labored purposefully to create it! Further, they are cutting back Social Security. They purport to be doing this "in order to save it", which is nonsensical on its face, but the fact is that whatever shortfall Social Security might face in coming decades is a direct result of lower receipts due to lower than expected wages.

Republicans are triply full of shit: they suppressed wages, which shortchanged Social Security, and now they want to kill Social Security a piece at a time while claiming to be preserving it! They are reprehensible, and if voters in the US continue to allow themselves to be bamboozled by these upper-class warriors, then they deserve to be screwed.

Common Wisdom of the Virtue of Selfishness

"the best outcome for all will be achieved when everyone looks out for himself. empathy is a mental aberration. compassion is the road to insanity. charity is a waste of resources. more harm is done by helping others than than by being indifferent to their suffering. if you know what you want, take it, and obliterate anyone who gets in your way or says otherwise."

this is the shared philosophy of Ayn Rand, Milton Freidman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, the entire Republican Party, two thirds of the Democratic party, Wall Street, and even modern religions to an amazingly large extent. it is at the heart (if you can use that term) of our current political and economic system and has overwhelmingly influenced our social values. it is the cause of our misery and the loss of any expectation of a decent future for our grandchildren.

so, if you wonder why everything is so fucked up and how profoundly shitty things will be in the near future, reflect on the dog shit anti-values expressed above.

of course, we the masses could just say STOP! and refuse to participate any further, but we're too afraid, too confused, too isolated, too self-centered, and too fucking stupid to change anything. we would rather offer ourselves and our progeny up as lamb on a platter for the sociopathic elite. why? because they tell us to. Baa.

Follow the Red Herring

Congress passed a law this week to reduce Social Security Disability Benefits by 20 percent beginning in 2016. There was no mention of this today (Sunday, Jan 18) on Face the Nation. It was "Charlie Hebdo" all the way. A search on the website of the local paper for "social security" yielded "Police release 3 suspects arrested in French terror probe".

News that affects people in a very real way has been eclipsed throughout the media by terrorism. Makes me think that if al Qaeda didn't exist, the wealthy conservative elite running everything would have to invent it.

Margaret Thatcher, Goddess of Oblivion

Maggie said that there was no such thing as society, only individuals. It follows then that there is no such thing as nationhood, no such thing as government, no such thing as even a village. We stand alone, we are each an island.

That's a fertile field for a despot. He or she can violate, exploit, and repress any and all over whom they have dominion, without restriction. No society, no social contract. The field is open for psychopathic bullies to exert their will over others to whom they owe nothing, and human history is free to become a replay of the dark ages, wherein brute contested brute for the position of top dog, and all between them, atomized and powerless as individuals, were routinely trampled upon. Of course, with today's technology the potential for suffering and wholesale annihilation is orders of magnitude greater than what it was in the olden days.

Maggie was a prophet of pure evil. I wonder whether her incipient dementia contributed to her nihilistic attach on the collective instict in people and the commons we shared. Funny thing is that people revere her as the "Iron Maiden" because she temporarily gave Britain its balls back. Now all the world is immolating itself in a "Greed is Good", dog-eat-dog frenzy. Maggie gets the final laugh, demented though it is.

A conservative cannot enjoy his food fully unless he's assured someone else is hungry.

For Basic Necessities We Need Assurance, not Opportunity

Loaded words have meaning on more than one level, and they often state something trite on the surface while beneath they convey a scolding or repressive message.

The word "opportunity" is one of those. It's easy to imagine a polititician, any politician, of high or low office, Democrat or Republican, mouthing some platitude about America offering "OPPORTUNITY to all". This is spoken ostensibly to encourage and bolster the audience.

But implicit in the message is that because this is a land of roiling, effervescent opportunity, if we can't succeed here it must be due to our own shortcomings. If we lack healthcare, food, or shelter, we must be too lazy and stupid to avail ourselves of all that lays about, nearly free for the taking. All that's required of the individual is that he/she be able and motivated enough to seize the abundance, to be willing to earn his/her way. If you don't have that much going for you, you'd best shut up and go hide, because you're a loser.

This message is wickedly manipulative. It presupposes that we have no right to anything whatsoever until we've paid for it somehow. That's not true. It denies there is any such thing as an inalienable birthright to anything. That's wrong. Opportunity is only relevant to acquiring things beyond the margin of subsistence. For the absolute necessities, we need assurance, not opportunity.

If we don't have that assurance, it's because somebody stole it. In the natural world in which we evolved there was enough of the basics for everyone. News flash: the "haves" took away that assurance, and have hamstrung us with the opportunity myth to cover their theft.

Screw opportunity. I don't need opportunity to breathe clear air, drink clean water, or ingest food uncontaminated by chemicals. I don't need to be given an opportunity to be treated when I'm sick. I don't need an opportunity to have open access to knowledge and facts. Your opportunity is standing between me and my birthright. Get it and yourself out of my damn way!

Donating amid Futility

I receive emails and letters every day from progressive groups asking for donations to keep up the battle on myriad fronts against right wing corporate interests bent on dominating our culture, economy, and politics. This is a fight to thwart the right's effort to institute authoritarian rule and bring about a system based on plantation values and economic feudalism.

I give money when I can, but it is obvious there are too many groups needing my support, so many that I cannot possibly help them all. This is unfortunate because they all do work that is essential, holding back the onslaught of corporate intrusion fueled by greed, hatred, fear, willful ignorance, and inverted religious values.

This makes me ask whether the Left can even succeed at merely holding back the tide, let alone reverse the process of regression that's financed by vast right wing wealth. The honest, unavoidable conclusion is: No.

The US Left is a thousand small, distinct entities battling against a unified Goliath. We pester it on different fronts formed around distinct issues, occasionally holding the line here or there, but ultimately we're outflanked. We can never deliver a knockout punch, and the ferocious Goliath continues to force the US to the right, taking the news media and the government with it. This is despite the true preferences and desires of the majority of the population, which cannot make itself heard because it has no real influence in the press or on government.

It is fact that we now have government exclusively by and for the wealthy. We have arrived at this state because private sector unions were slain: whereas the unions once financed politicians' campaigns, and hence had influence in government on behalf of their union members, those erstwhile union members are now atomized working people with no influence in federal or state government but instead are at the unrestricted disposal of business.

People are just now beginning to wake up to the fact they never were truly "middle class", that they needed continuing protection from corporations and the US Chamber of Commerce, and that as isolated individuals they are helpless prey. Actually, there is no indication they they will awake fully. They are more likely to remain lulled by electronic trinkets into stupor and continue to be as meek as the cattle the elite regard them to be. They will continue to have their position in society eroded by businessmen directly, and indirectly by the politicians who work for the rich and the rich alone, politicians Democratic as well as Republican. The People are disposable and their only value is their transient utility to their bosses. They are fated to become serfs in a high tech dystopia.

So, about all those emails. I will continue to give when I can, but I have no illusion Good will prevail in the end. There is a unified enemy, the plutocracy. It is held in place by unbridled capitalism. It's grip will not be broken. It will succeed in completely enslaving the vast majority. It already controls government at all levels. It's lobbyists write the laws. It's lobbyists are hired to run departments within government, which is now privatized. Democracy in the USA is a forgotten dream, never actually having attained full flower, but a complete impossibility now.

The People could rise up and take away power from the plutocrats at any time, but they lack the will or the courage, and most of all, they stand alone, fragmented and weak as individuals. What will happen instead is that the Ayn Rand-ian, Milton Friedman-ite capitalists will gorge themselves until they go bust in a massive economic supernova. Then and only then will there be change.

This is what happened after rich capitalists caused the Great Depression. The result, because of the powerful influence of unions and the US communist and the socialist parties, was the New Deal, which for decades made capitalism less odious for average people. It worked so well in fact that The People lost their fear and distrust of capitalism. And that was their downfall.

Of course, without the influence of a strong Left, the next capitalist-caused cataclysm will more likely result in something very different than the New Deal: military dictatorship.

curse of the anti-Dickensonians (Rand, Friedman, Reagan, and Greenspan)

in line with their cold an brutal world view,
we have now declared virtue a defect.

we have traded compassion for indifference,
love for loathing,
fairness for exploiting,
empathy for narcissism,
sharing for insatiability,
reasonability for one sidedness,
caring for disdain,
kindness for brutallity.

how we find our way back from this despoiled landscape is unknownable.

As I was walkin' that ribbon of highway/ I saw a sign there, said 'private property'/ but on the other side, it didn't say nothin'/ This land was made for you and me!

Dialoging with Cossacks

i have been wondering if the African-American "responsible spokespeople" i see on tv are really as out-of-it as they appear to be, or if instead they are playing a realistic, shrewd hand to damp down police brutality by maneuvering the cops in front of the tv camera where they are compelled to make noises like they give a shit. in this way, though it's all a sham, the cops might lighten up just a little just for PR consideration.

the people whose ancestors were kidnapped and brought to this continent to build a nation are pretty familiar with reality's constraints and limitations, so maybe that really is why they just don't come out and say it: the cops are doing the job they are paid to do, which is to put their boot on the necks of black males, literally as well as figuratively. the cops are the hammer, the judicial system is the contractor, and the white elite (echos of white, property-owning males) are the client. just like in the old days.

funny thing is, as the free market fundamentalist, social-darwinwinistic juggernaut rumbles forward and the ranks of the poor metastasize, the grandchildren of most of the white population will become as irksome to the elite as the black population is now, leading to their being brutalized in the same ways and to the same degree. remember, the Irish were the target of repression and violence when they came here, so mistreatment has never been afflicted solely on the basis of skin color.

who knows, someday feared legions of black cops might be used by the elite to bludgeon a hapless poor white underclass. wouldn't be the first time, even the brutalized Irish eventually became cops. that's what's called "upward mobility"!

then at some point, representatives from the poor white community could be calling for a dialog with the Black Cossacks to incrementally and fleetingly tamp down the head-cracking. and the Black Cossacks will have to make noises like they give a shit. for a while. for PR purposes.

Don't F#*k with a (clergy)Man's Job

for ages i've been wondering why rabid Christians have been so down on secular humanists, by which they mean anyone who isn't a Republican of the far right wing. further, i wondered how Christians could make common cause with those whose philosophy and very existence is a repudiation of the Sermon on the Mount?

after all, secular humanists are driven by empathy to assist the underprivileged, the poor, the weak, the downtrodden, which is exactly what the Bible says should and must be done. so the only reason rabid Christians could have for despising secular humanists seemed to be that their charity didn't have the right pedigree. seemed crazy.

but then one day a hyper-Christian spontaneously confided to me that the churches wanted to be the ones passing out charity and that secular humanists (Democrats) had usurped that role. bingo! the rabid Christian clergy loathed Democrats for having made government the dispenser of alms and thereby cutting them out of the action. they were willing to throw in with the wealthy bandit class in order to get that function back into their portfolio.

so, to regain and preserve their role in administering to the poor, the hyper-Christians joined with those perpetually making people poor. note the complete lack of actual charity here. all that mattered to the hyper-Christians is that they be the ones slinging hash down at the shelter, and nobody else. the welfare of the poor is incidental, this is business.

hyper-Christian clergy hate Democrats because they fucked with their jobs. Now, with their help, the wealthy vampires are running the blood bank and the number of the poor multiplies.

Please Sir, may I have another: After being decimated several times over since the 80's by Trickle Down Economics, middle class America (or what remains of it) has voted overwhelmingly for the party that invented it. Priceless.

"There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals."

So spoke Margaret Thatcher, sounding deeply philosophical. But it really was more of a practical position, a necessity for someone touting Free Market Fundamentalism. FMF holds that the best possible outcome will occur when everyone is looking out for #1, and conversely, any concern for others will paradoxically cause them and everyone else hardship by introducing inefficiencies into the market if acted upon. So, in MT's perfect world there could only be individuals, each looking our for #1.

Since she and her US counterpart, Ron Reagan, reshaped the world together, FMF has become the dominant economic paradigm. The result is illustrated strikingly by this fact: before RR came into office, of every dollar of new wealth created, 50 cents went to the top ten percent and the remaining 50 cents went to the other ninety percent. Today 100 cents, everything, goes to the top ten percent. What George Herbert Walker Bush derided as "voodoo economics" has had the very predictable effect of enriching the few and decimating the wage earning class. The idea that the path to becoming an angel is by acting like a devil is obviously absurd.

Still, FMF is rolling along unchallenged, at least by the corporate media and in government. There are many reasons why the plutocracy can get ways with this, but an essential one is that people have become so atomized they can no longer think of or care about anyone but themselves. So, even though their fortunes have been gutted under FMF, they can no longer come together and demand a better deal for themselves and their children. They can only go on trying to look out for #1, even though individually they are powerless.

The flimflam artists who sold us Free Market Fundamentalism knew that when the scam was exposed we could be prevented from fighting back only if we were isolated individuals rather than a collective entity. That's why RR and MT dismanteled the unions. Now there really is no such thing as society, only profoundly screwed individuals.

The funny thing is how the American people were persuaded to swallow free market horse crap when conservatives offered it to them. It was made possible by serving the unpalatable with a heavy dose of racism. Working people have consistently voted against their own interests since Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

KXL Passage a Cinch

Dear Senator,

I write to you today (11-15-14) to urge you to oppose S. 2280.

Forget that, who are we kidding?

KXL is good for select business interests, extremely bad for everyone and everything else. The overwhelming majority of people don't want it because it's a horrible deal overall.

Having stated that, it's a cinch the pipeline will go forward because this is a plutocracy, a particularly demented one that can't see past immediate profit to the destruction and devastation it causes. And even if it could, it wouldn't care. Further, government won't protect the people or the planet because it is owned by and is a rubber stamp for the profit-crazed plutocracy.

Enjoy your cut from the plundering. If you don't do it, somebody else will!

Sincerely,
[Mr. Moosepoop]

Happier when We're All in This Together

Patrick Flavin of Baylor University released a paper based on a survey of 50,000 people in 21 countries, "Assessing the Impact of the Size and Scope of Government on Human Well-Being", that demonstrates leftist policies make people happier. That's everyone, the rich as well as the poor. And it turns out a functional welfare state has a bigger positive infulunce on happiness than marriage or employment.

Not surprising. An atmosphere of "We are all in this together" under all circumstances is going to make people feel safer and more at ease. Contrast this with the "every man for himself/ dog eat dog" hyper-competitiveness that presently dominates our culture in the US, and it's obvious why people feel uneasy and unhappy. After all, we evolved living in small groups that depended upon cooperation and revolved around communal well being, not winner-take-all rugged individualism.

International 'No Bullshit Day' is Coming!

What if we declared one day a year International No Bullshit Day, and on that day we just told it like it was? We'd have to admit that the whole of written history spanning the past ten thousand years can be summed up in one word: enslavement. From the pharaohs on the Nile to the US Chamber of Commerce, the overarching aim of all human endeavor has been to impress one group to toil for the benefit of another. It has taken the form of abduction and imprisonment, treating the enslaved like captive animals. It has taken the alternate form of control through scarcity, allowing "free" people to avoid starvation by working for their superiors under circumstances contrived to assure the boss-worker relationship will remain forever the same, just as the dog will never own its master.

In the past it has taken the form of colonialism, where imperial nations subjugated whole countries through force, extracting mineral and agricultural wealth without fair compensation. In the present this type of exploitation is practiced by international corporations which plunder the wealth of countries. The enslavement process has outgrown state empire and now belongs to an international oligarchy of corporate slavers who only rely on nations (read: the US) to enforce their will in the rare instances when economic strong-arming would take too long.

There have been many cases of this in South America during recent decades. Leaders there who stubbornly resisted spreading their country's legs for American and international corporations pissed off the Dulles brothers, who responded by sending the CIA in to destabilize their democracies and install thugs like Pinochet. He and those like him in other countries would then invite in Chicago School economists -even Milton Friedman himself- to implement "free market" economics. Despite the rhetoric, this system was designed merely to open those countries up to penetration by international corporations while shifting all wealth within the country to the few at the top -which it did, after leaving tens of thousands of resistors dead and hundreds of thousands tortured using CIA "Kubark" techniques.

Domestically, in the US and Europe after the second world war, the enslavement of the majority was less stark and brutal than it had been in ten thousand years. The threat of socialist/communist ideas forced the modern mechanism of slavery, capitalism, to temporarily retract its claws. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, the weak power of those competing ideologies no longer threatened capitalism, and reversion to pre New Deal methods and practices resumed. Hence, everywhere throughout the world, wealth, once distributed somewhat broadly, has reverted to the tiny minority of the ultra-rich. The Chicago School economic regimen has been applied in the North without torture (so far) using only exploitation of race animus (in the US), bursting economic bubbles, and capitalizing on the pandemonium caused by 9/11.

How do the few control the many? Well, as author Daniel Quinn put it, they began in antiquity by "locking up the food". In this complex technological age, they lock up the fuel, the medicine, the education, the water, and the electricity. And of course, they still lock up the food too. And they keep things that way, as they always have, by paying security forces drawn from the enslaved class to enforce order. As Jay Gould said at the turn of the twentieth century, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." You have to appreciate that kind of honesty, even if born of cruelty and arrogance, on any day other than International No Bullshit Day.

The thing is, enslavement has now gone local. It is not only acceptable to cheat one another, it's expected. Anyone who is reluctant to take advantage of another, who says, "I couldn't do that, it wouldn't be fair" is adjudged a fool in our present society. The Chicago School of economics is in our society's DNA now. Life is commoditized. It's pay-to-play and drop dead if you can't afford the prices. Empathy has been declared a mental disorder that all too frequently causes inefficiencs in the free market.

Charles Dickens is dead. Milton Friedman shot him in the head. According to the Chicago School and Adam Smith (but not really him so much), the best way to be an angel is to act like a devil.

Merry Christmas and goodwill to men. (Come to think of it, maybe International No Bullshit Day should fall on the 25th of December. Wouldn't that be a hoot!)

POTUS Brings Nerf Bat to Knife Fight Again

Ok, he nominates a woman to be Attorney General, but rather than pushing for confirmation now while the Demoflats have a majority in the Senate, he's holding off until the Republidicks take control.
Astounding, but characteristic.

Ronald Reagan unfettered business from restrictions of the New Deal, which among other things were meant to protect workers. Now your adult children are moving back in with you because they can't survive in the world. See any connection?

Feudalism with iPhones

Unrestrained free market capitalism is devouring the world. Its practitioners have established themselves as an international plutocracy. The immediate result is the decrease in living standard, wealth, security, and stability that common people everywhere are experiencing. The intermediate result will be a global two class system with 20% living very well and the remaining 80% living a harsh and precarious existence. We clearly see that evolving now, especially in the lives of young adults, whose future is so much less promising than it was for their boomer parents. It's happening here and throughout the world.

The ultimate result will be cataclysm. First, brutal repression will be required to keep the miserable 80% under control. Nineteenth century one-percenter Jay Gould said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half" and that portends what this new world will be like. You can see the start of it now with our militarized police and our extremely high rate of incarceration.

Eventually there will be upheaval as the wealthy 20% begin coveting the wealth of others in their class. That will lead to sporadic outbreaks of violent conflict which will become the norm. Essentially, we will collapse back into feudalism, only this time with iPhones in hand rather than magic amulets.

We good people have done nothing and will continue to do nothing to stop this coming about. We hide our heads in the sand. We put politicians into office who openly state they will hamstring and destroy the government's ability to defend the people against being ravaged by the plutocracy. They insanely call this "freedom" and we scream "FREEDOM!" in chorus even as we are being driven into serfdom.

People are funny.

Essential elements of the middle aged white guy creed:
government is bad; it's the victim's fault; screw you, I've got mine.

Nice Work Again, Barry O!

Good job approving new liquid natural gas shipping facilities in US ports. This will permit selling LNG abroad, and that will drive more fracking, more poisoning of drinking water, and thereby cause disease for decades to come. And the ultimate affect will be to hasten global catastrophe! In addition, it's wonderfully safe to load and unload liquid natural gas in a populated area, because when it leaks it will roll across the water until it finds a source of ignition, at which point it will produce a nuclear-free Hiroshima! That's really swell. Preserving corporate profits is so, so much more important than anything else on earth. In fact, it's more important than the earth itself and all the people in it!

So glad I voted for you and have always leaned heavily toward the Democratic Party. Democrats are without doubt still the "party of the People" that counteracts the influence of Big Money, the group those reprehensible Republicans kowtow to all the time.

And finally, thank you so much for avoiding saying anything about conservation. We can go on forever using twice as much energy per capita as any other advanced country as long as we are willing to engage in wars to protect oil sources and keep them out of the hands of the Chinese. With so many young people unable to make a living wage in America, the military can provide them with jobs. It's a win-win!

P.S. Can't wait until the know-nothings take over the Senate in November because of your fecklessness. Then you can start capitulating right away to them on their Koch-backed agenda. You can screw the people over big time with a second shot at your coveted Grand Bargain. (The only thing that can stop this, as it did once before, is their being too bat-shit crazy to grab victory when you hand it to them.) Just check with Jamie Dimon on a case by case basis to be sure you're doing the right thing.

P.P.S. Hillary is a corporatist, war-mongering authoritarian who will fuck the people over in whatever areas might be left after you finish with them.

the lesser of two evils has become almost indestinguisable from the greater of the two.

Capitalism! Bully, Bully!

what is capitalism if not a codification of bullying? the strong or otherwise favored get to keep the lion's share once having seized it, winner take all, not each according to his need. along with that, the poor can and should be allowed to, as an indiana republican recently put it, be allowed to "wither and die".

argue the morality of it all day long, but in the end the capitalist system protects the property rights of those who have taken the spoils, whether via oligarchy or meritocracy. it is a system wherein a few dominate and the forlorn many live a precarious and sometimes sad existence.

our present brand of extreme free-market-fundamentalist, deregulated capitalism is particularly murderous toward the losers. it continuously makes the poor poorer, and breaks down the lives of others who yesterday were not poor.

this situation is not acidental. this is the vile creation of the wealthy right elite who have methodically dismantled the New Deal and undermined democracy for at least the past three decades. its affects are so widespread and pronounced that the question arises as to how much longer before there is rebellion? at some point the underpaid, under-employed, uninsured, debt-ridden, exploited and indentured (i.e., BULLIED) young will cease to be mesmerized by sports, entertainment, and electronic trinkets, and then they will explode.

the bullies are preparing for this. their corporate media and their think tanks are running at top speed, working on ways to turn the impending revolt to their advantage. they will use propaganda and divide-and-conquer, as they always have, to deflect blame and emerge from the chaos with their own position enhanced. after all, what's the point of having all the wealth if you can't use it to steer and control the masses?

let's be clear, capitalism is not the culprit, the true villain is the bully within us, which preceeded and produced capitalism. capitalism simply evolved to give a veneer of respectability and even a cast of morality to the societal practice of bullying. Adam Smith did not invent capitalism, he merely observed it in operation. (and by the way, he had some VERY nasty things to say about corporations!)

the bully had been at work inside us for 200,000 years before being unleashed in the last 10,000. that's when agriculture made possible large population centers, which contrasted with our remotest ancestors' living in groups of only a couple of dozen adults. since then our innate urge to dominate others has run wild and capitalism has been contrived to both sanctify and excuse it.

i was once forced to sit through opening remarks given by someone from uber-managment at a company-wide meeting. this oily ex-marine told with relish the tired joke about two guys running from a tiger in the jungle: one stops to tie his shoe and the other says "it's hopeless, you can't outrun a tiger." to which the first replies "i don't have to , i just have to outrun YOU!".

this corporate prince was immensely proud of himself for telling a joke about competition that summed it up so succinctly. and there i was, an engineer in a sub-sub unit of his corporation, where i was the one cobbling his shoes, metaphorically speaking. i had no doubt he would grab the shoes from me and without hesitation leave me to the tiger. my thought was: fuck you, mr. tough-nuts capitalist.

capitalism cloaks and enables bullying. it is a manifestation of our worst angels. it will leave the planet a cinder. it is a natural system in that it is in line with the bullying we first are afflicted with and inflict upon others in the schoolyard, and that rises to a crescendo in high school before becoming more subtle and culturally ingrained in adulthood. defend capitalism if you want, but it is to me a cesspool founded on heartless brutality that i cannot abide.

oh, and as a post-script, i've found that some of the most adamant defenders of capitalism are those Ayn Rand acolytes who, although they have not particularly benefited from the capitalist system themselves, were severely bullied as children. draw your own conclusions and/or make up your own joke about that.

Bringing a Nerf bat to a knife fight since 2009: President Barach Obama, Democrat.

Fun Facts about the Shift in Wealth Distribution Over Time!

In the 1950s-70s, 2/3 thirds of the increase in wealth went to 90% of the population, while fully one third went to the upper 10%.

From the 1980s to now, the vast majority has actually lost wealth, because ALL of it has gone to the top 10%.

Here's a short list of people who will not be saying this publicly: Barrack Obama; Paul Ryan; Mitch McConnell; Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; Charles Koch; David Koch; Pete Peterson; Brian Williams; Rush Limbaugh; Larry Summers.

And here's another list consisting of those who would have no problem saying it: Bernie Sanders; Robert Reich; Joseph Stiglitz; Alan Greenspan. (The last in the list would say it with glee rather than remorse.)

November Folly

Americans seem poised to deliver one more branch of the federal government to a party serving Big Money and run by cruel, hard-hearted men whose overriding personality trait is a puerile, low-wattage machismo almost certainly derived from having been bullied in adolescence.

Voting for these stomping, frothing nihilists will come a cropper for the American people, but this fatal mistake is understandable given the timidness and indolence of the opposing party, a party that in the 80's abandoned its role as the people's champion and quietly became another vassal of the rich.

Nothing to do now but concern ourselves with the newest eyePone, and to hell with our grandchildren's doom. Fat cats win/grandkids lose.

Situation: most young workers in the US are paid wages that are too low to live on.

Democratic response: "Too low to live on? We can live with that!"

Tea Party response: "Too low to live on? That's FREEDOM!"

Wealthy Republicans: "Too low to... Oh God, oh God, Aaaaaaaaah!"

The Economy is Great Again. What's Your Problem?

High unemployment. Wages too low to live on. Education out of reach. By contrast, corporate profits are at record levels, the stock market is in the stratosphere, and the 0.1% is giddy with cash! So, everything is humming along as intended. It's just that average people have a very low place in the freshly restored Rentier Society.

What words could you use to characterize a culture that: reduces food assistance
while hunger is rising and food pantries are running out; cuts funding for mental
health services when the suicide rate for some groups has risen by 20%; strives
to deep six Social Security right after the retiring generation had its savings
decimated; refuses to help homeowners stay in their houses but uses their
taxes to make the unrestrained financial-mortage industry whole; forces
its youth to accept indenture for the privilege of obtaining a supposedly
indispensable education, then denies them a livable wage to ever pay
that debt off; withholds Medicaid from kids rather than tax the
profanely wealthy just a bit more? ...

Vicious, first and foremost, then degenerate, demented, and ultimately doomed.

Match Game

A man drives his mammoth SUV down the wrong side of a busy highway, causing mayhem. The destruction goes beyond on-scene injuries, as a conflagration that ensues cuts off utilities and there is a ripple effect in vast outlying areas. When after many hours the scene is finally being cleared, the man points to a tow truck driver removing wreckage and says, "It's all his fault. He did it." Amazingly, people on the scene latch on to this and begin assailing the tow truck operator.

In the above, can you match real life people to the man, the tow truck driver, and the crowd? It isn't difficult. The place is Iraq and the people are: Dick Cheney; Barrack Obama; the mainstream press. Oh, and by the way, the mayhem isn't over yet. It's really just getting started and it will spread everywhere.

Free market fundamentalism generates a few big winners and mountains of abject losers. Thank the US Chamber of Commerce and Ronald Reagan for the way things have turned out. The first came up with the plan and the second got the ball rolling. Come to think of it, every US President since Carter has sold working people down the river, no exceptions. Now you're kids are serfs.

Let's give ourselves some credit too for going along to get along and not saying anything.

Free Higher Education at no Additional Cost

If all school grants and educational tax breaks were discontinued, enough money would be recovered to provided public higher education to everyone who wanted to attend -not just covering tuition, but books would be paid for as well. There would be no need for anyone to have a student loan. True, those who prefer to attend a private institution would have a harder time financing their education, but they could take out loans or use the public colleges instead. This makes so much sense and would be so good for the young people of this country -and the country as a whole- that I'm sure we'll be doing it within the next decade. (Just kidding.)

News Flash: Odious Oligarch Koch Up His Own Ass

In an editorial in USA Today, Koch posits that food stamps are proof Americans don't know how to work. There are tens or even hundreds of thousands of Walmart workers who must depend on food stamps to feed themselves and their families, so that assertion is patently absurd.

Today's workers are systematically cheated and denied basic security, let alone hope for a better future. There is nothing they can do to please the Koch brothers, apart from suffering silently, providing them with profits, then withering and dying in isolation.

A generation has been cheated of its birthright, yet this odious oligarch denigrates them from the pages of a national paper. Seems like something out of a Dickens novel. Here's proof that the progress of civilization is illusory.

By the way, the Koch fortune was founded on service to Joe Stalin, then increased by gypping Native Americans out of oil revenues. His words are pure baloney, purple prose that merely cheers for a return to feudalism.

That doesn't stop the media from presenting them though. Methinks the game is rotten.

the Legacy of Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman determined that the free market sets the price of everything and money is the only true measure of value. Since his ideas have taken hold, everything has been commoditized and life has become much, much cheaper!

A Bible Story for the Christian Soldiers Defending our Border

I know jack about the Bible. That's because I was raised Catholic, and we didn't read it directly. Instead, it was pre-digested and presented to us in Sunday school in the pages of the Baltimore Catechism, from which I garnered an apparently completely erroneous impression of Jesus. I misunderstood so badly that I actually equated Him with tolerance, forgiveness, empathy, selflessness, and inclusion. I have since been informed by REAL Christians that He stood for authority, vengeance, hatred of fags and foreigners, and above all, he was a staunch believer in the free market. Wow, what a misinterpretation I made! In my defense, I guess I was just thrown off by that whole "Prince of Peace" thing. I was young and lacked sophistication, obviously.

Despite my lack of credentials I will go straight ahead anyway and ponder the parable (or literal story) of Sodom and Gomorrah. It will become immediately obvious that my ideas suffer from my lack of Biblical training, but I won't let that stop me.

First, whenever we hear an allusion to S & G, it is always in reference to homosexuality. Everybody knows the two cities (or were they just large subdivisions?) were razed because the citizenry engaged in buggery.

And of course, that is completely wrong. I don't think the Old Testament was a big proponent of hosting brunch for gays, but that's not what the cities were destroyed over. The inhabitants were slain because they were selfish assholes, not for being gay.

S & G were upscale, gated communities. They were proud to have achieved so much and enjoyed their grand lifestyle. Further, they wished to maintain their way of life. However, there were cultural problems with that.

Back in those days people were expected to extend hospitality to travelers and strangers. People in that part of the world (whom we have recently bombed extensively) still abide by those rules. Well, the wealthy of S & G were concerned about freeloaders. After all, they had attained their high economic standing through their own talent and hard work. They weren't about to be taken advantage of by low-lifes, so they put out the word not to expect any handouts. They believed they had a right to hold on to what they'd earned.

Gawd disagreed, evidently. Went all shock-and-awe on their asses.

So where did the homosexuality part come in? Well, apparently in an attempt to dissuade hobos from turning up at their door, the people of Sodom advertized the threat to rape them anally if they dared to show up. Did they make good on it? Don't know, that wasn't in the Baltimore Catechism. None of it was. (If you wanted to learn about anal rape, you had to become an altar boy.)

Does this have a point?

Yes.

Do affluent people in California line the streets to intimidate children fleeing from violence in Central America, rather than taking them in?

Want salt to-go with that?

Recipe for Education Reform

-Push for the trickle-down ownership society.
-Get general support for it by subtly insinuating this will reverse the civil rights gains of the black minority, thereby (supposedly) making things vastly better for whites.
-Let that socio-economic paradigm work its magic, producing poverty and inequality, favoring the rich and decimating the wealth of everyone else, black and white.
-Decreased general welfare and increased poverty will inevitably impact educational outcomes. When this becomes apparent, boldly blame "bad teachers".
-Implement destructive high stakes testing to further destabilize the public educational system.
-Villainize teachers' unions to remove them and clear the path to privatization.
-Once the public school system has been privatized, charge exorbitantly for the service, so that only the wealthy can afford to give their kids anything other than the most rudimentary education.
-Lastly, make huge profits and celebrate the return of feudalism.

Seriously, kill your TV

Where is money spent during political campaigns? On TV ads, primarily. Who pockets the cash? TV networks and their local affiliates. Why does money have so much influence in politics? Because those TV ads are so expensive.

Under what circumstances will the most ads be purchased? When neither candidate has so large a lead that the race is a runaway. What's the best way to assure a close race? Control the news so that nobody scores an early knockout. Who controls the news? The TV networks.

TV's interests don't change when elections are over. Networks protect their business model by keeping the Republican/Democrat battle heated and more or less even at all times. Thus, the same inane and tired pundits are trotted out on TV every Sunday morning to argue red herrings like "big government" vs small, rather than for government that works for ordinary people instead of just the 1%. Facts are avoided so that nothing is resolved and those making huge profits can go on doing so.

the free market life ahead

it will be a good one for those who embrace it, who have a knack for it and don't mind subjugating all to pursuit of money. for the rest of us it will be a comedown. life will be much more grim, less secure, less happy, and very likely involve real deprivation. we are already seeing young people unable to begin a family of their own because the opportunities for a secure and prosperous future just aren't there for them. their expectations are below that of their parents, who grew up in the post WWII period when nearly anyone could live a comfortable life and raise a family because income and wealth were much more equally distributed than now.

it turns out that period was not the norm, but rather, a fleeting exception. the norm is represented by Dicken's England where the commons were privatized, the people thrown off the land and either exported to the New World or driven into the cities to be the hapless workers of the industrial revolution. the story repeats: today pastoral people are being thrown off common land in Africa to make way for foreign corporate farms or just land speculation. this is the norm of capitalism, the constant churning and the making of winners and losers.

in the free market life that lies ahead everything will be privatized. the commons will disappear. there will be nothing left with the term "public" in front of it, not schools, parks, water supplies, roads, or bridges. everything will be in private hands. and of course, nothing will be free.

government will be shrunk. public education, public health, public services will all be relics of the past. these things will still exist, but they will be privately available to those who can afford to pay. everything will cost money, and if you don't have it, you will go without.

this is the "ownership society" promised by Ronald Reagan. this is the government "small enough to drown in the bathtub" sought by Grover Norquist. we can't say it's been a conspiracy because the protagonists of unrestrained free market capitalism have been very open about their goals and their neocon creed. to them, the marketplace can accurately put a price on everything and that alone should determine what is to be, without any external intervention, without compassion. the latter only introduces inefficiencies, hindering the functioning of a perfect system from which everyone, supposedly, will benefit.

in the free market life ahead there will be no social safety net. if you have the means and are willing to pay, the market will establish a fair price for your needs and wants. on the other hand, if you go without food or medicine because you can't afford it, then according to the market, your suffering is of no value or consequence. you, in fact, are of no value. this is the commoditization of life brought to us by that great sage, nay, patron saint of the Chicago School of Economics, Milton Friedman.

observation: neo-conservativism is to economics as Skinnerism is to psychology. they both deny or discount the existence of anything that can't be measured. in the case of the neocons, the only measure is money.

neoconservative free market economics is above all a capitalist justification for ruthless exploitation in the pursuit of money and power.

capitalism creates winners and losers. people thrown off the land in England came to the colonies, exterminated the native inhabitants and took their land. the promise of the New World was that those displaced in England could become the abusers and slave holders in the colonies. that was the great opportunity.

now that the land has filled up it's time to begin the cycle of destruction again. the wealth of distressed cities will be sacked by capitalists, Detroit being only the first of many. having had their homes foreclosed on, people will be returned to the same houses as renters. nothing has been created, the dice have merely been shaken in the cup and spilled to extract from the many and deliver to the few.

it's a wonderful game of crisis and exploitation, and if you lose it's because you deserve it. you were too inferior to play the game well, so don't complain. the system is flawless. the system is perfect. and man's rapacious nature is in ascendency once again.

the worst might be this: every child born has a birthright, a stake in the commons. when the commons has been devoured by privatization, then a child will be born into the world with nothing. this is new to us, but it is a very old condition, called serfdom.

As I was walkin' that ribbon of highway/ I saw a sign there, said 'private property'/ but on the other side, it didn't say nothin'/ This land was made for you and me!

?

do nothing. watch tv. follow sports. get the new iPone. download plenty of apps. open the door for the Devil when he comes.

a conservative can only appreciate what he has when he knows that someone else has less.

to people in the North who don't know crap about the South: southern Republicans are neo-confederate plantationists. throw you lot in with them and you'll be reversing the terms set at Appomattox.

Thomas Piketty's research proves that an unregulated economy leads to gross inequality, and that the latter is ultimately destructive to the economy and society. Gee, hasn't that always been obvious from the game Monopoly, where there's a sole winner who ends up with everything and everyone else is wiped out when the game is over? Why does it take a thick, erudite tome, Capitalism in the 21st Century, to convince people of something so obvious?

NOT an Affirmation by Stuart Smalley:

(refers to the bygone "Super Committee" but still holds up.)

The Tea Party has an abuse problem: they're Koch Fiends"

It's over. The age of forward progress, of every boat rising, is dead. The new way is the old way, haves and have-nots. Democracy is dead. Many are celebrating. I remember that just prior to 911, right wing pundits were shitting all over democracy and equating it to communism. They had to snatch that talking point off the front burner very quickly when the the twin towers fell, but they didn't toss it out. Now it's being served up again, only re-branded as "freedom".

For most people, the sad specter of their children and grand children being less well off than themselves is unavoidable. We brought children into a world of promise, but that promise has been shattered. The US Chamber of Commerce, which does the corporations' wet work, has destroyed the power of the working class and installed a judiciary that can't say no to a corporation and can't hear or see an individual who is not in the 1%. Both political parties serve the 1% exclusively.

We are rapidly becoming a two class society. This came about because the 1% was uncomfortable with a well paid workings class calling itself "middle", and the 1% pulled out all the stops to destroy this class. The job is almost complete now. The biggest weapon the monied class used was propaganda, which allowed them to bamboozle working people into voting against their own interests and each other. It has been a masterful display of cunning deceit and appeals to prejudice.

Middle class intellectuals have nowhere to go. They can see the strategy being used to defeat the lower classes, but can't match the 1%'s arsenal of propaganda and political power. If things get really ugly as the dismantling of social institutions proceeds, the 1% might be able to inveigle the biggest losers, their most desperate victims, to attack the middle class intellectuals. Otherwise, we will be left to watch helplessly as civilization devolves.

I can't see average people having children now. The legacy rich and the very talented certainly have a bright future, but ordinary people are not needed, and that extends to their progeny. Very poor people will keep on reproducing as they always have. Thus, back to the historically normal state in which 25% live as gentry, and the rest live as serfs in brutal deprivation.

winner take all and damn the rest -the condemnation of average people

increasingly, there is no room for average. in the 21st century we have embraced completely the idea of a meritocracy. those with demonstrable talents are entitled to reward for those talents, and in a winner-take-all society that means they take the lion's share. meanwhile, ordinary persons must be satisfied with the crumbs fallen from the table of the meritocratic elite. those are the rules, and that outcome is fair. at least, that's what we are told to accept as fair.

if the consequence of being average is to be redundant and superfluous, why should the system tolerate the existence of the average? also, wouldn't it be more humane to spare the untalented the pain and depravation that results from being unexceptional in a winner-take-all society?

if a meritocracy is the kind of world you are committed to living in, the corollary is that there's no room for the average, and thus, the average needs to be eliminated. you must find some way to prevent average people from existing and thus bogging down progress. this might be done via eugenics, or perhaps disposing of untalented people in early life. you could either breed for superiority, or else you could test children and subject those who don't make the cut to euthanasia. if you choose a meritocratic, winner-take-all society these are the logical extensions of that choice. however, if you find these disturbing, you must reject the meritocracy and accept the dictum, "each according to his need". what's your final answer then?

but wait, there's a third way! you can continue to embrace the meritocracy and inoculate yourself from any distress over the sad plight of the woeful masses, the throngs of the average, by blaming them for not being better than they are. not in those terms of course, because it fails to mask the absurdity and unfairness of placing the blame on them. you can, however, cultivate the conviction that they are somehow morally culpable for their own predicament. put Calvinism to work for you here.

shucks, there are plenty of historical and contemporary examples of privileged people putting the onus onto their victims by stigmatizing them. that'll be your strategy then, won't it? after all, in the end you are their "better" and that makes it Ok.

What do you call someone who thinks it's good politics to let people die needlessly just to spite Obama? A Republican.

Paul Ryan's budget is so extreme and heartless that it echos the handling of aid to Ireland during the Potato Famine by Sir Charles Trevelyan, who referred to the famine as an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population." Ryan's followers shouldn't be wearing tricorne hats, they should be dressed like the Mad Hatter. Different tea party entirely.

what are "The Commons"?

nothing, if you listen the the right wingers, but in truth they are all the things owned by everyone in common. this includes roads, parks, water works and other infrastructure. when these things are sold off to private companies and individuals -which is the stated goal of the right- something more than real estate and property will be turned over. as it stands now, even a child born to the poorest of families has a birthright, the commons. in the future, that child will have nothing. since eventually everything will be concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer ultra rich people, the number and proportion of these hapless children will skyrocket.

so, unless you have some ironclad guarantee that your children someday will be among the lucky few that own everything, losing the commons means they're likely to come to be pitiable landless peasants, serfs, owning nothing but the clothes on their backs, if that.

go tea party. (mad hatter's waiting.)

hey, kid,

you work but you can't save, can't really afford anything, but you buy small things on credit cards or via monthly payments that soak up every dollar you make. how will you every be able to afford buying a house? it will never happen. never.

not many, but some your age are doing well. new cars and big houses. but not you. what's wrong? it's you, of course. you are just a jerk off, a shit-for-brains. you don't deserve any of that stuff. you are getting what you deserve now, which is practically nothing.

DON'T YOU FUCKING BELIEVE IT. a half century ago in the US anyone* who worked could afford a house, a car, and an education for his kids. what's changed is the way wealth is distributed. you're no dumber or smarter than your parents or grandparents, you just aren't getting the same deal they got. the deal they had was called the New Deal, which established the right of everyone to benefit from his own labor and live well.

the rich put an end to that. they slew unions and shipped jobs overseas. they de-funded public education. crucially, they bought both political parties. they've turned things around, sent society back to where it was before the New Deal, even as far back as the days of the Robber Barons. that was over one hundred years ago. what was old is new again.

so, know that your situation isn't new. four generations back people lived as you do. they didn't have a pot to piss in either. however, i don't think they blamed themselves like you do. nobody had fucked with their heads the way they have with yours.

*almost anyone. it helped a lot to be a white male.

Paul Ryan: "The children have no lunch? Let them eat Dignity!"

Everyone knows millions died during the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. Obscenely, there was ample food available, grain and oats, but while peasants starved for lack of potatoes, these crops were continuously shipped to England for profit by landlords. Their profit took precedence. And the government in England did not want to help starving Irish peasants too much, because from the English point of view, doing so would create dependency and ultimately make the Irish lazy. Better that they should starve.

Under these circumstances, Congressman Paul Ryan's great-great grandfather left Ireland and came to the United States circa the 1840's. Ryan touts that fact, supposedly to show how far his family has come from their humble beginnings.

In the present, Paul Ryan promotes the idea that any social safety net is dangerously close to a "hammock". Further, he has recently been telling an apocryphal (and muddled) story about a little boy who would prefer to forgo free lunch at school because it was standing in the way of his parents' expressing their love for him by packing him a lunch (that they can't afford?).

Now, Ryan is obviously a stupid prick, but the irony of his cold hearted politics being so close a reflection of the harsh English stance that forced his progenitor to flee Ireland is so overwhelming that you'd think even a dense fuck like him could see it. But no, conservatives have no sense of irony. Or hypocrisy.

A Jolly Sleigh Ride to Hell

The Motley Fool has recently been heralding the death of the Internet in its advertisements. Always upbeat, never judgmental, dispassionate to the point of being amoral, TMF does not dwell on the downside. Rather, it touts this as being a wonderful investment opportunity for you to place your bet on technology companies like Cisco (mentioned by name). These are the technology companies that deal with tiering of services, giving the green light to some (those that pay the carrier a fat fee or content providers that are company-linked to the carrier), the yellow light to run-of-the-mill of content providers, and the red to those the carrier is in competition with, or just doesn't like, or is blackballing as a favor to the authorities.

Gosh, isn't capitalism a jolly sleigh ride to hell! All rejoice in the death of the open Internet!

Tornado Economics

Same-sex marriage seems unstoppable now. It is the one progressive success that we can point to at present. That people are finally accorded dignity and that their basic rights are no longer denied them is a triumph for everyone because the rights of every individual are inherently bound to the the rights of all. Marriage equality, now a juggernaut, stands alone as a successful issue in 2014.

Alas, everywhere else the general condition of most people is deteriorating. This is true in the US and throughout the western world. So rapid and widespread is the downgrading that we are too stunned to react.

The decimation of the the wealth and political power of the middle (really, working) class over the past thirty years has not been accidental, not by a long shot. It is the fruition of an intently pursued conservative strategy to revert society back to the way it was prior to the New Deal. We now live in Ronald Reagan's Ownership Society, which is supposedly based on the principle of "trickle down" economics. Trickle down held that if you allow the rich to run free and unfettered there would be so much new wealth generated that everyone's "boat would rise".

Objectively, this has not been the case, not by a dam-site. Of course things couldn't have turned out otherwise, since trickle down was merely a confidence scheme sold to the general populace by an avuncular former Hollywood B actor shilling for the greedy rich.

As a result, we ordinary people now stand by powerlessly as our low wages are snatched up with ruthless efficiency by debt collectors. Our adult children move back home because their paltry wages won't allow them to live independantly. This works well enough until the family home is foreclosed on. Meanwhile, the 1% are garnering more and more wealth every day, so much so that they can hardly devise ways to spend it.

We exist in a paradigm in which all wealth is funneled upward with F5 velocity. Ordinary people have their wages sucked up into the clouds where the hovering 1%, snatch every dime. On the ground the earth has been scoured. This is not trickle down economics, this tornado economics.

The rentier society is not new. It has been the case throughout history that those at the top abuse, exploit, and vampirize the masses below them. The New Deal was the brief exception to this. The New Deal was put into place to preserve capitalism. It was a response to the existential threat of socialism to the capitalist system at the time. Communism was extinguished under Ronald Reagan's watch, an there is no longer any need for the 1% to play nice. Hence, adios, New Deal.

Against this backdrop we have the circus of family values advocates, religious nuts, fetus worshipers, and right wing talk radio provocateurs shouting madly. At their core are professionals paid by the 1% to divert attention from the man behind the curtain. It seems to be working very well.

There is no Hope and there will be no Change. Both political parties work for the 0.01%. The Left simply doesn't exist anymore. The people are in decline and are incapable of self-defence, being too cowardly, complacent, and self-centered to fight even for their grand children's future.

Long live the Koch brothers, Pete Peterson, Sheldon Adelson, Art Pope, John Arnold, and Grover Norguist. God protect and preserve the Walton family. And please, keep Exxon/BP/GE/Goldman-Sachs et al in your prayers. And when the time comes and you are called upon to do so, die quietly and decrease the surplus population.

Diggin' Life in the Ownership Society

Back in the 50's and 60's the vision of the future promoted was one of increasing leisure. That seems laughingly off target now, but the TV constantly pumped out the theme that automation would do more and more of the work done by people, thereby liberating us. By the turn of the century the work week would be shortened to thirty-five hours or less, and if there would be any challenge ahead for the average worker, it would be in finding ways to absorb the huge increase in free time.

Well, as that iconic character of 50's TV, bus driver Ralph Kramden would say, "Hardy-har-har... har-har!" That vision of the future was half right, but blind in one eye. Automation did take over much of the work, but rather than free workers from drudgery to afford them more leisure, it eliminated their jobs and denied them their livelihood. Unemployment was substituted for vacation, which made the leisure far less enjoyable.

The naivete that permitted the grossly inaccurate prediction existed because it was a different type of society then, one in which it was assumed the benefits of technology would be shared across society. We were in the post WWII period, and the prevailing sentiment was "we were all in this together". The New Deal was still viable. Egalitarianism was standard. That was a different world from the winner-take-all, high stakes poker, "ownership society" that we live in now, sold to us by hucksters like Uncle Ron, loyal servant of the sociopathic moguls of industry, who always had their own agenda.

So now, if you're rich you're swell. If you're not, that sucks. You will blame the guy next to you for your misfortune, because the One Percent spends a lot of money to bamboozle you into doing that. Automation and off-shoring have made you redundant, and propaganda has cajoled you into blaming yourself or some other scapegoat for your misery. Obey. Believe. It has always been this way, really. Ignore anyone who says otherwise, they're socialist tricksters. They lie. Theu just want to make you envious of the nice, hard working job creators. They don't love Jesus.

PBS -Plutocray Broadcasting System. Because we haven't funded it 100% publicly, PBS has sold out to robber barons like John Arnold, giving us rancid propaganda like "Pension Peril". PBS is done. RIP

bLadders of Opportunity

"Listen to your enemies, they will tell you the truth, while your friends will spare you." Quote from Machiavelli? Perhaps Dick Cheney. Can't remember which.

President Obama has toned down his references to Income Inequality now in deference to his bosses on Wall St. He started using more positive phrasing in the SOTU, citing the need for "Ladders of Opportunity". In reality, if the wilting and desperate middle class (read working class) had any ladders at all they'd use them to climb down out of the burning building they're in.

We all remember Mitt Romney's leaked statement that he couldn't do anything for 47% of the US population, that he'd written them off. He wasn't trying to be vicious, he was just going over the facts with his constituents, people who know the score because they run the game. While Mitt's statement was chilling, even sphincter-dialating, it was the truth: half of the people in existence now in this country have no place in its economy. They are redundant, they are cluttering the hallways. Thank you for the truth, Mitt.

Now on the other hand, we've had recent Democratic presidents who can "feel our pain" and put forth on the "audacity of hope", but who know full well that there's no room in the lifeboats for half of us and never had any intentions to alter that fact. If in the end we're saved, which seems unlikely, it will be because we heeded our enemies and subsequently wrested a share for ourselves.

The Obama website asked what it was I wanted to hear in the upcoming State of the Union address. I doubt they gave much consideration to my response:

"That wealth will be re-redistributed downward. That the present Neo-Gilded Age is at an end. That the top tier will no longer be allowed syphon off all gains derived from increases in productivity. That Reagan's Ownership Society has been debunked, finally, and exposed as a fraud. That jobs will be repatriated and technology won't be used to eliminate workers. That when necessary, government will employ the unemployed. That we will protect the commons and stave off their looting through privatization. That we will stop blaming the educational system for problems that are due to poverty.That we will cease following in the footsteps of the Roman Empire in all ways including the taking over of government by the wealthy. (I'll be holding my breath.)"

first they got your house, now they're coming for your pension. the maw of financial capitalism must be fed.

TPP is intended to be the coup de grace in the One Percent's class war on ordinary working people world wide. Now's the time for it: OWS has faded away and the US people are going back to sleep. Best of all, it has the total support of a Democratic President!

Neither Repub nor Dem has your back. The System is rapidly losing legitimacy.

The Guardian, Nov 20, 2013

Facebook and Microsoft help fund rightwing lobby network, report finds
(re: SPN, State Policy Network, adjunct/successor to A.L.E.C.)

"...expand the use of child labour, cut the minimum wage, reduce unemployment benefit, make it harder to sue employers for sex or race discrimination, or even to police wage theft where companies refused to pay workers over-time or any wages at all."

we can be sure that CBS, NBC, and ABC news will be all over this story, pronto. after all, their reason for being is to keep the greater public informed of critical issues affecting their everyday lives. ( ...just kidding! )

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) doesn't do the Fox trot

The president, Sanders insisted, has "got to draw the line in the sand. Not on Syria, but on the class warfare that is going on in America. If he does that, he will wake up people who have given up in the political process."

60 Minutes just keeps jumping the shark, week after week. Stick a fork in it 60 Min, you've been compromised by big money and power like the rest of TV news. You are destroying your reputation and undermining your legacy. Give your 7PM time slot up to some vapid reality show that at least doesn't make the pretense of being informative or having integrity.

def The Third Way: the "Let them eat cake" wing of the Democratic Party.

game is rotten

How great is it that the Pentagon gets its funding restored, but 1,400,000 Americans out of work through no fault of their own have just been thrown overboard! And don't forget about food stamp cuts too!

The system not really working for ordinary people anymore? No problem, you can always vote out the corporatist incumbents in the next election cycle and replace them with challengers hand-picked for you by the corporations. That is, if the corporatist incumbents let you vote next time around.

What can you do except meekly accept the dregs and hope your betters throw you a bone at some point? Keep waiting patiently for that trickle-down. It'll get here any decade.

Hounding the Poor for the Hater Vote in Georgia

A candidate for higher office in Georgia has suggested students provided lunch free at school be required to sweep floors or perform other tasks. The reason given is that a free lunch might leave a child with the impression she or he is entitled to eat.

This ignores the possibility that a kid's parents might work long hours for low pay, and despite putting out the same or greater effort than other parents do, simply receive less. In this instance, the lesson to the youngster is: "your mother and father are at the bottom of the heap, and here's a bitter reminder that so are you." Take that!

Of course there's also the possibility the parents really are lazy, in which case making him or her a target for ridicule by other students will almost definitely produce a better person.

This conservative luminary intends only good with this idea, supposedly. He is certain to garner votes from those who feel antipathy toward the poor and relish punishing them, so whatever the intention, this is a rock solid vote getting strategy. And this is the New South.

Aha

Republicans, both those in office and their base, are destroying the country from within, sabotaging the workings of government and creating havoc. They are traitors by definition, although to their mind, at least to the stupidest ones, they are killing off the rot. That the rot includes food to the hungry or medicine to the sick they seem to be impervious to.

They are rebels. They have a spectrum of reasons for what they are doing: greed; racism; religious ideology. They are ALL out to bring down democratic government and replace it with a theocracy, a plutocracy, or right wing racist rule, according to their motives, but they are ALL out to destroy democracy.

These times make it easier to see how the Civil War came about.

The Sting

Here's how it has worked: first, the financial sector fueled the housing bubble, making kazillions off the Ponzi scheme. When it burst, whatever holes were left the Fed and the taxpayer filled, making the investment banks whole. The forlorn homeowner got no such treatment, and if s/he couldn't make full and up-to-date payments, the banks took back their house. Also, in general the working class lost much of its wealth, which was tied up in its home values.

Presently, the BANKS ARE LENDING TO INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS TO BUY FORECLOSED HOUSES. Housing sales -and therefore prices- are up, BUT NOT TO INDIVIDUAL HOMEOWNERS.

So, these rising prices mean you can't as easily buy a house, either as a first time home buyer or a dispossessed one. But don't worry, you'll have a place to live. You will now be able to RENT the house you once owned from one of these institutions (Blackstone, for example).

Their aim is to bundle the rents and SECURITIZE them JUST AS THEY DID WITH MORTGAGES. If that ultimately brings the economy to the brink of collapse yet again, the banks will surely be thrown another life preserver by the taxpayer. However, renters are easier to squeeze and/or throw to the curb than homeowners are, so this particular form of exploitation might be more systemically stable.

And that, boys and girls, is how the 1% turned your working class ass from a homeowner into a lifelong renter. God bless the Rentier Society and may He protect the predatory capitalists from retribution! And with a good corporate D(LC)emocrats like Barack Obama-Hoover in office, they have nothing at all to worry about.

Social Media: a great way to kill time while you're being taken to the slaughter house.

Who is a liberal?

Not "what", but who. This isn't a statement of beliefs, a ticking off things like empathy and egalitarianism. I'm assuming that we do know what a liberal is or should be, but I'm about to question whether we really know one when we see them. For while liberals embrace and champion the rights of the persecuted and those discriminated against, I am not at all sure that those we rise to defend are entirely on board with the liberal agenda as it benefits others.

For instance, the left has promoted LGBT rights to a much further extent than the right, but I wonder if gender and sexuality were no longer any issue, whether given the choice more gay men would prefer to become Log Cabin Republicans than remain within the Democratic party. I don't know the answer, but men, gay or otherwise, do gravitate to the right.

Similarly, the Democratic Party has delivered far more politically to racial minorities than the Republican Party has, but are African Americans in the aggregate liberal or conservative? Their allegiance to the Democratic Party has been unquestionable, but is this loyalty merely a practical matter? I guess the real test would be whether a majority of Blacks are concerned with the rights of gays and vice versa. Further, do either care about immigrants from below our southern border?

The purpose here is not to pass judgement on the ideological purity of any of the above groups, but instead to use their situation as a reference model to assess another group. This other group could and should benefit from applied liberalism, but in fact has pointedly turned away from it, clearly to its own detriment. That group is the white working class, and especially white males.

On the day following the re-election of President George W. Bush, my neighbor remarked to me, "They voted against their own interests!" referring to working people's vote for a man and party that clearly didn't have much concern for their or their famlies' welfare. Again and again working whites elect people who represent the interests of the very class who caged and killed unions, the institutions that once gave working people a place at the table politically and a much larger share of the pie. Stunningly, the working class stands with union's slayers who are presently robbing pensioners and seeking to undermine social programs that are essential to workers and their progeny.

The self-defeating stance of the working class is baffling. The cause for this stance has been partially blamed on blind racism that precludes rational thought. It has also been laid at the feet of a bought-off news media that only presents the viewpoint of the wealthy exploiters. It has deservedly been attributed to a rudderless Democratic Party that is so dissolute it can't capitalize politically on the obvious needs of these downtrodden workers. Certainly, classical liberal ideas like a guaranteed living wage, free post-secondary education, universal medical care, and protection from usury would improve the lot of these working people, so how is it that they cling to conservative candidates nonetheless?

Well, it could be for the reasons listed above, or else it could be that white working people are actually so staunchly conservative themselves that they can't conceive of allying with liberals, even if that would better their own lives. Perhaps the only difference between them and the rich IS money. They could actually share the same values through and through, including greed and lack of empathy.

The greater truth might be that those whom liberals have in the past stood up for and continue to stand up for are rarely liberal themselves. Maybe only a small minority of the population, say twenty percent, is really liberal. Beyond them, half are primarily unconcerned with anyone but themselves, while about a third lay in between.

Consider polling that shows people are overwhelmingly in favor of liberal social programs when the programs are named specifically, but say they are against spending on social programs overall. That's arguably because they recognize they personally benefit from programs when they're cited individually, but fail to see programs in the undifferentiated whole as delivering anything to them them personally. The fact that programs in general might help someone else means nothing to them because they don't identify or empathize with others. In the end, for them it comes down to "I, me, mine." or, as in the case of the Tea Party, "I've got mine."

So, perhaps it all comes down to this: we liberals are a small bunch that can be of use in certain circumstances by making the world more fair for some, but the bulk of the population doesn't think as we do and often adjudges us fools or oddballs even as we help them. Hence the popular and disdainful monikers "bleeding heart liberal" and loathsome "secular humanist."

Well, this is a very unpleasant hypothesis. People suck and we are patsies. Still, I wouldn't change my stripes, regardless of the paltry distribution of empathy and egalitarian impulses among the general population. We ARE all in this together, whether we all realize it or not.

This is the world Ron Reagan gave us. The Ownership Society means we little people have been put back in our place. The essence of it all is that our wages, our share of the pie, have been slashed. Charlatans like Sir Larry Summers run around drawing our attention to random shiny things as though they had found the answer, when all they are trying to do is keep our gaze way from the man behind the curtain, Milton Friedman (with the Koch brothers, Jamie Dimon, and the Waltons in attendance).

George said, "They OWN you", didn't he?

poverty is increasing, and therefore so is hunger. food pantries run by religious groups and other charities are running out. what is the response of the federal government under the influence of the Tea Party? cut food stamps (SNAP), of course!

economic times are bad, and when they are, mental health is affected. the suicide rate among white males has increased by 20% since the 2008 crash. what is the response of the federal government under the influence of the Tea Party? cut funding for mental health services, of course!

those about to retire are in a pickle. their main repository of wealth, their house, has deflated in value to the point many aging boomers are actually under water on their mortgages. further, they have no pensions and their 401Ks have withered, so they face their last years with only Social Security to sustain them. what is the response of the federal government under the influence of the Tea Party AND the Democratic US President? look for common ground to reach a Grand Bargain in order to reduce Social Security benefits for the retired and those about to retire, of course!

the big banks, now more high stakes betting parlors than lending institutions, must be periodically infused with taxpayer money to mitigate their inevitable losses. they dragged the economy down but got their bailouts and have been make whole. they are now back in the mulla while the masses are still at a great loss. the masses simply have been expected to the take the hit. many have lost their homes. unemployment, especially among the young just starting out in life, is high. spending by the federal government on infrastructure and extending unemployment benefits is essential to resuscitate the economy and alleviate the pain. what is the response of the federal government under the control of both the Repugnicans and DLC Demoflats? AUSTERITY, of course!

if you are not in the top 15% of the population in earnings, the US government does not work for you. politicians do not care about about you or yours other than getting your vote at election time. democracy and capitalism have turned out to be mutually exclusive.

For four decades the wealthy elite in the US have worked to undue the restraints of the New Deal in order to regain full economic and political control. They have been largely successful and are on the cusp of total victory. First they busted unions, ensuring profit from all those years of productivity gains went entirely to themselves and none to workers. Then guys like Neutron Jack off-shored jobs, undercutting wages and destroying the middle class. Sen. Phil Grahamm cajoled Bill Clinton into signing laws that undid Glass-Steagel, paving the way, with the enthusiastic help of Alan Greenspan, for the 2008 crash that ultimately enriched the 1% at the expense of the rest, so that they now possess a greater proportion of all wealth than they did leading up to the Great Depression.

They have moved the Republican Party to the extreme right, and by decimating unions, denied the Democratic Party funding, forcing it to turn to Wall Street for support, to the effect that now no one speaks for the working class.

So the rich nearly have it all now and will soon have the rest. They have harnessed both political parties to their wagon, so that there will no longer be political resistance from either. If you doubt this, reflect on the royal treatment recived by banksters from President Obama in the wake of the housing crash. One more crash and the rich will be able to buy at a bargain price whatever remains in the commons of the already desperate states and municipalities, and from the general population. The distribution of wealth was not as uneven in the Middle Ages as it is now, and what's to come will truly be unprecedented in the annals of history.

Why haven't we seen this coming? Mainly because the press started out as indolent and has since become complicit. Obviously, there has been the outright buying of media, a la Rupert Murdock, to control information. But to steer the public away for so long from any realization of its being ravaged, a much subtler and more clever strategy was employed. The far right started the meme of the "liberal media" and applied it anytime the press decried an economic bully pushing around the vulnerable and the weak. By repeating the phrase ad nauseam and by getting useful idiots to take up the chant, the right was able to "play the ref" and intimidate the media, forcing them into their present "fair and balanced" mode where the arsonist is presented as an equal to the fireman. Thus, the media, already corporate owned and profit-driven, has been cowed to the extent it will lay massive inequality at the feet of educational failure or technology, but never dare to speak the truth that the wealthy elite are simply vacuuming up every dime.

In honesty, there was one more critical ingredient in the witch's brew that helped the elite lead the middle class down a path to destruction: racism. The conservative party appealed to white working people's racism, drawing them away from the Democratic Party. Divide an conquer. The dog whistles started during the Reagan presidential campaign, and have been blasting away ever since.

We are at the close of a strategically led, patiently pursued, heavily funded, masterfully prosecuted class war. It has been inflicted on the middle class so successfully because the middle class was vulnerable. The proof of that is it foolishly thought of itself as middle class when it merely was an extremely fortunate working class. It inherited its advantages from parents and grandparents, who painfully won gains through union activity. While this "middle class" flattered itself, the wealthy elite picked its pockets. Middle class wealth, now largely stripped away, is what the wealthy elite call "dumb money".

TPP

"EACH COUNTRY SHALL INSURE THE CONFORMITY OF ITS DOMESTIC LAWS, REGULATIONS, AND ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES WITH THESE AGREEMENTS."

Want to protect the environment? Workers? Forget about it! You are free to make choices, as long as those choices exactly echo what's in the TPP.

Fast Track is a high-handed ploy to ram through this massive give-away of power to global corporations. TPP has very little to do with trade and much to do with protecting monopolies and handing pervasive control to multi-nationals. It will eliminate more US jobs, lower wages, further destroy the environment, steal away self-determination, and eliminate sovereignty.

Apart from that, it's a swell treaty that we little folk shouldn't bother ourselves at all about until it's a done deal. And even then we won't know the specifics for FOUR YEARS after it's passed --that bit's written right into the TPP.

we know only what we knew, despite what we know now

once we have an opinion of something, even contrary facts have a difficult time altering that opinion. this seems to be the way our brains are wired. thus, when we hear something damning about someone, if it isn't immediately countered we will form a negative opinion of that person that will persist even when the original evidence turns out to have been wrong. on one level we will understand the person isn't guilty of the accusation, but there will always be some stain associated with him or her lurking in our minds.

when you think about it, the faculty for casting off mistaken conceptions was not critical in our evolution. in pre-history people lived in small cooperative groups that were close-knit and stable. opinions were formed gradually and didn't turn on a dime. propaganda or calculated slander really couldn't occur because the sham would be obvious. we didn't evolve the ability to erase mistaken opinions based on specious accusations because they didn't occur frequently enough to expend precious neural resources developing a mechanism to defend against them.

now however, nearly all our news and knowledge about others comes from the world at large and is packaged in chunks. professional media have become expert in presenting data with maximal impact. sound bites ands snippets make up the mosaic that is our world. no longer does our information arrive calmly, gradually, and coherently. it's delivery is hyperactive, episodic, and disjointed. thus, we are apt to believe anything about someone we don't know personally because there's no body of experience to mitigate or contradict it, and once we have an opinion we'll never completely free ourselves from it.

this fact is known precisely to sly manipulators of public opinion. the irony is that even when the propagator of a false accusation is exposed, in time he or she will likely be held in higher esteem than the person they slandered. when the particulars are forgotten, public opinion will have slight antipathy for the person who lied, but if the accusation against the victim were in regard to something really odious, the residual stain on his reputation will be greater than the one on the false accuser's. telling a lie isn't as bad as whatever the original accusation related to, so the accuser comes out ahead. vicious slander does pay, on balance.

The need of ordinary people for help has not been as great as it is now for decades. However, the bat-shit crazy federal government is reducing funding for food stamps (SNAP) even as charities are running out of food to give to the ever increasing numbers of needy drifting into food pantries.

It's high time for a new New Deal, but that doesn't seem to be at all where we're headed. Hell, Obama wants to cut even more holes in the social safety net, just like that smarmy dick Clinton did with welfare "reform". What a pair of assholes! Fuck neo-liberalism, fuck New Democrats, and fuckX2 Republican psychopaths.

fast-tracking the abominable with the Gray Lady's blessing

A recent NYT editorial cited all the things TPP is and shouldn't be, then listed all TPP should be but isn't, and then finally went ahead and endorsed TPP on the grounds that trade agreements are generally very nice things, even though this one probably isn't. Wow, that's really solid logic!

Of course, the objective behind this inane editorial was to tacitly urge passage of Fast Track so the general population will have no way of knowing how badly it's been screwed, how much monopolies have been given carte blanche, and how deathly a blow has been dealt to democracy for a period of four years, as stipulated in the TPP itself. Go Times! You're really doing your job now, serving the global 1% like a loyal retainer.

Believe it or don't believe it, but the Republican party is now populated with neo-confederates who are pulling down the pillars of government from within. They have no use, regard, or respect for democracy, as their plantation-owning progenitors had no use for it. When they speak of "freedom" they are referring to their perceived right of privilege over others. They are an army of thugs backed by the ultra-wealthy in order to protect and secure their own high position of privilege. The two groups are joined to defeat their common enemy, democracy.

They are winning too, because with the help of the bought-off media, they and their nefarious acts go unreported and undetected in plain sight. Someday soon they will have conquered, and The People will be dumbfounded. Bill Clinton might still be around to feel out pain, and always reasonable Barach Obama will be still be wearing his mask of composure. And we will be fucked.

Watchin the Detectives

The current internal surveillance paradigm has the horrible potential of enabling a future tyrannical takeover. It's courting a case of "J. Edgar Hoover meets the Stasi... in the Matrix". The apparent good intentions driving this pervasive spying are paving a multi-lane highway to hell, and the real impediment at this point to putting the brakes on is that too many private companies are making way, way too much money from it.

Turn in your coworker: Ministry of Truth -Mike Malloy Show

No Worries

This is now a two-tiered, rentier society. The rich are getting richer while the rest are being pulverized, and it's rigged to continue in that way. The Dems walk right past because they must phone into Wall Street for their orders, so they're too busy to stop and help. The Repubs are the New Confederate Party, bent on replacing gov't with a Christian Dominionist theocracy. Meanwhile, the Koch brothers are scampering around behind the scenes like the daemons they are, lining up to profit from the chaos they promote.The news media is indolent and insipid, giving equal time and credence to arsonists and firemen. The cops see the public as they did the people in occupied Afghanistan. Every communication is logged, gleaned, and possibly perused. There are drones overhead.

(Super, thanks for asking.)

Plantation Nation

President Uncle Ron Reagan brought back the Ownership Society, which had been missing since the advent of the New Deal. Post Reagan, inequality in the US has soared, poverty is exploding, and our kids are stripped naked of protection from heartless and unscrupulous employers, predatory bankers, fascist politicians, vampire rentiers, and the many other ghouls of unbridled free market capitalism.

What's the solution? Shit, nobody seems to even see there's a problem! WE'RE GOING AROUND TRYING TO MAKE THINGS EVEN HARSHER AND MORE IRRETRIEVABLY UNFAIR AND UNEQUAL.

Guns, Jesus, football. That's what I'm talkin' about.

Dominionist Christian Facism coming -courtesy of the Neo-Confederacy

texas senator ted cruz marched on the white house the other day, accompanied by the confederate flag. most who saw the spectacle dismissed it as unserious, ridiculous, an expression of petulance. they were wrong about that.

senator cruz is dropping a heavy hint here, a dog whistle for his followers, but also an epiphany for those who would focus. cruz is attempting to march at the lead of the new confederacy, and his party's rending of the democratic process in order to hobble government isn't just messy protest. it's as much a frontal attack on the united states as the siege of fort sumter was.

rational people always have difficulty taking seriously the goals of outrageous extremists. they trust that sanity will fend off the most blatantly unsound ideas coming from the margins. so it does, usually, except that on rare occasions rational people have woken to see swastikas paraded through their streets.

cruz and company are not being hyperbolic. they want to shrink government down to microscopic size, not to spare the rich having to pay taxes, a la grover norquist, but to reverse its broad role in social justice and other areas. they want a country ruled by religious law that is fundamentalist, intolerant, unbending, and ultimately brutal toward anyone not in full conformity with their precepts. they want to undo all the progressive change of the past 80 years and establish a christian dominionist state. the constitution would become moot and law would derive from the bible. there would be no room in their valhalla for minorities, be they religious, racial, or social, and dissent would be tantamount to heresy.

heed the alarm. cruz is welcoming us all to Plantation USA with his use of that flag.

regrettably, now is a time when the country is susceptible to being usurped by a fringe minority. average people are struggling. all wealth created goes straight to the top. government is festering with corruption by corporate capitalism. even the democratic party's only real concern is to satisfy the wants of its corporate paymasters. the news media are indolent propaganda mills. given all this, the likelihood of people, just out of sheer desperation, throwing in with cruz and his legion of crazies is increased. some morning soon we may wake up to see swastikas AND rebel flags passing by our window.

First Some Butter

Want another war? Sure, have at it, only first there's a couple of things that should happen: raise wages WAY UP so young people can pay their rent, start a family, and eventually own their own house; stop shipping jobs out of the country while rewarding corporations for doing so; make health care universally available, which is not only the right thing to do, but will boost the economy because obtaining medical care under the present system imposes a mammoth economic drag.

After that, feel free to go ahead and tweak Iran's nose by slapping around its little brother Assad in Syria, but this paradigm of low wages, no health care, and continuous wars is getting very, very old.

Banks on the March!

The US Government is a protection racket for the 0.1 percent. It was that way under Sonny Clinton-Corleone, under Fredo Bush-Corleone, and now under Michael Obama-Corleone. Right now the behemoth bailed-out banks are bustling, buying up infrastructure like toll roads, refineries, parking lots and power generation stations. And stocks too! In short, they are gobbling up the earth under our feet while destabilizing the economy.

Not to worry though, because there are delightful new apps for our smart phones coming available every single day! Let's just hope the dungeons in debtors prison have WiFi.

here's the real deal, the straight poop, american working people: you are screwed. your children are screwed, and most likely your grandchild too. going forward all of us will work harder, longer, with less reward, less security, and lead deteriorating lives overall. we are all profoundly buggered.

this didn't happen accidentally. it didn't result, as the planted paid pundits contend, from a natural change in the landscape due to globalization and technological innovation, nor did it happen because our schools suck. that insipid line of bullshit is piped to the nbc-cbs-abc-cnn-fox propaganda machine over a continuous feed from the puppet masters. the purpose is to obfuscate the obvious intentional violence that has been done to working people over the past three decades. the assassin media spews it out without examination or question because they are paid well to do so.

nope, your wages and benefits -and ultimately your lives- have been bleached and boiled in acid because the oligarchs wanted to get your labor for less, your savings for their treat, and to keep you in a precarious survival mode so you would come running whenever they snapped their fingers.

and they got what they wanted by killing the unions. once you the workers were atomized, they knew they could bend you over in the wink of an eye. and your children, and your grandchildren.

that's the whole story. don't expect help from el presidente either, because he is a wall street courtier whose life's greatest ambition is to be accepted by the oligarchs (never gonna happen). the rest of the pols are of no use either. obviously, the repubs ARE the oligarchs, but the dems shine the oligarchs' shoes now too, since the dems no longer get their tips from unions.

so go buy the latest app with money you don't have and play games on your smart phone while the earth beneath your feet churns and falls away. or buy a gun, because more guns and lower wages are just the thing to make it all better.

Hey dude, go ahead an light up! The O justice department has seen the light, it will no longer (it says) hassle you for smoking flowers in a state that says, "That's cool." See how mellow O and his posse are, how totally enlightened? Focus on this and not on the the 35 years Manning got on the same day O and company filed for immunity for the Butch-Cheney clan against war crimes prosecution, or what they are trying to do to Assange, or what they would LIKE to do to Snowden, or that they drove Arron Swartz to suicide. Smoke 'em if you got 'em kiddies! O and the gang love ya! (Say it, sing it, believe it, or O and the gang will fucking END you.)

The Way, a cinematic story sweet and holy, hovering well above this universe of unrelieved drek.

This is not my country. In my country, the one I grew up in, you had every expectation of a good life ahead. That is, if you worked at it you could own a house, a car, raise a family, send your kids to college or post-secondary school -without their becoming indentured, and they too would have access to a good life in their turn.

That isn't this country. In this country working people have the deck stacked against them. My own adult children don't have health insurance because they aren't offered benefits on the job and they certainly can't afford private health insurance. They don't have paid vacation. Not only do they not have paid sick leave, but they are coerced into going into work when they are ill. Their pay sucks and will not support their ever having anything substantial to call their own.

The only way young people today are assured of healthcare is if they go into the military. There the can be exploited to defend the interests of the 0.1%, can trade their bodies and souls for a mere glimmer of what everyone thought was within easy grasp in the country I grew up in.

None of this is of any concern to the pre-chosen from among whom we are allowed to select our "leaders". They work for the rich and the well being of my children and grandchild is of no concern to them. This country belongs to the financiers, not the workers, not even to the manufacturers.

This is nothing like the country I grew up in. This is not my country, not anymore.

"Thin Thread", developed by earnest people toiling inside the NSA before 9-11, could have prevented the tragedy, WORKING COMPLETELY WITHIN LEGAL GUIDELINES; however, the job it did efficiently was parceled off to private corporations for billions. They never delivered. Pity. Privatization is the bomb!

On the same day PFC Manning was sentenced to 35 years for revealing US war attrocities and otherwise embarrasing the State Department by publicizing its CYOA pseudo-secrets, the Obama Justice Department filed in a Callifornia court for immunity against war crime charges on behalf of the Bush-Cheney cabal.

Pax Americana

1) President Obama will undoubtedly fold to House demands for further cutbacks in welfare and transfer payments -it's in his genetic code- so every buck spent on a fresh, shiny new war in Syria will be food out of mouths and medical care denied children in this degenerating empire.
2) Syria is a viper pit politically. Even if you were able to assassinate Assad himself, which no one is advocating openly, who would inherit his power? Would fighting continue among the remaining factions? If someone equally loathsome emerged from the contest, what then?
3) I'm not sure that Obama's avowed concern over gas attacks is the sole motivation for proposed intervention: isn't there a natural gas pipeline in the offing, plus plans by US investors to profit from post-Assad "reconstruction"? Besides, the US left enough uranium dust in Afghanistan to produce a quantity of horrific birth defects to meet or exceed the war crimes of Assad for generations, so US outrage expresed over chemical attacks sounds specious.

Assad is a vicious sociopath like his father and the rest of his odious family, that's obvious. Innocent Syrians are suffering terribly. The question on the one hand is whether US intercession in a complex civil war with many factions would have any overall benefit to Syria, and on the other hand what effect further war spending would have on a corrupt and unstable economic system in the US.

Precisely how many cases of childhood leukemia from ingesting/absorbing fracking chemicals are acceptable in order to avoid implementing conservation or pursuing alternative energy sources? Just wondering if they had done the cost-benefit analysis on that mother fucker yet.

(to the tune of The Eyes of Texas are Upon You)

The ayatollahs are upon you
All the live long days
The ayatollahs are upon you
And you cannot get away
Do not think you can escape them
From night till early in the morn
The ayatollahs are upon you
To demand your eggs get born

The Arne, Bill, and Melinda Experience -an Education Game for Mis-Educated Fools

Arne Duncan and Bill and Melinda Gates push for a regimen of Algebraic Leeches to be used in our schools. These luminaries claim to think there is a desperate war on the educational front that can only be won if every student is turned into a math genius. They are all wet. Mandatory higher math for all might increase the number of scientists imperceptibly, but in exchange it has hobbled the education of hundreds of millions, adversely affected their lives long term, and had a gross negative effect on society. It is just bad medicine.

I was in grade school when Sputnik was launched, so I was present when New Math was introduced. Lucky for me, I gobbled it up and eventually obtained and engineering degree, but I witnessed most of my school chums fall by the wayside and wind up in educational Siberia before reaching high school. Sadly, this make-it-or-brake-it system seems to have gotten more severe over time. I've had to watch my own daughters' educational ambitions quashed by math fundamentalism.

It's absurd, but supremely self-confindent, supposedly well-intentioned celebrities are carrying the banner of a wrong headed, cold war movement to enhance educational competitiveness in order to defend against the forces of evil afoot in the world. Ironically, this equates to sabotage of the educational system. Or perhaps it's not ironic, perhaps the goal is to hobble public schools and induce massive failure so that privitization can take place. Depends on whether they're just fools or they're total assholes.