Step into the MoosePoop!

(A cranky collection of grumblings about the way things are. Entries are reverse chronological, undated, and sporadic. It all goes in here to marinate while the sociopaths in power run amock, filching anything of value and dooming the rest of us.)

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//////// Hate is the ultimate waste of conscious existence. Love is the pinnacle. ////////
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"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould (1836-1892) financier & tycoon.

"There's class warfare, alright, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning" -- Warren Buffett, financier and potential successful eye-of-the-needle pilot

"The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands. This is the comedy of science." --Karel Capek's play, "R.U.R." (premiered January 1921)

Prescription for Precarity

Mommy, who makes "low-low prices" and why doesn't daddy go to work anymore?

Well Johnny, everytime big retail companies buy something from their suppliers, they tell them they must make their products for less money next time. The manufacturers say that they can't do that because they have to pay their workers a living wage (like the money your daddy used to make at his old job). But the big retail companies come back and say that the manufacturers only need to move their factories to somewhere else where the labor costs less. The manufacturers want to stay in business, so they obey. Then they can still stay in business, but now all the mommies and daddies that used to work for them here can't make a living in the factories anymore. Prices in the big stores and on the internet are lower though, so people are happy.

But mommy, daddy isn't happy.

No Johnny, but everyone else is because they pay less at the store or on the internet for the stuff they buy. They can buy more now for the same amount of money.

But we can't buy stuff anymore, can we?

No, we have to cut back since daddy got laid off.

Won't the same thing happen to all the other mommies and daddies too?

Well, I guess you're right Johnny, sometime it probably will, eventually.

Then what's the point of low-low prices if nobody has money to buy things anymore?

They can still buy things. They can use their credit cards to buy things in an emergency.

Do we use credit cards to buy stuff?

Well, we did, but now we have used up all our credit. Let's talk about this another time, OK? Now, go tell daddy it's time for supper.

OK, but I don't understand. Why don't people get mad?

Well, because it's really their own fault. They should have gotten more education when they were younger. They should have become software programmers.

Can everyone be a software programmer?

I don't know. Go get your father.

He's snoring. He smells like beer. Hey mommy, the TV says we're going to war with CHINA!

Dog Eat Dog

As we left the 1950's and proceeded toward 2020 we devolved into a culture that treats working people like dogs. Some are well fed but many are strays that are left to starve or likely to be shot in an alley.

Things got this way because a few big dogs have worked tirelessly to assure their food bowls will always be overflowing. They manipulate and hoard, not just so they will never have to go without, but also so that the pack never gets used to being fully fed; this way the pack won't challenge the hierarchy during periods of shortage because they are accustomed to hunger.

The full mouth wants to keep on eating and it will maul anything that comes near its food bowl. Of course, we are not really dogs so our elites don't actually attack the undernourished and underprivileged: they pay others to do it. These others come from the ranks of the underdogs. The rich arm them and dole out rewards to buy their service and loyalty. That's how the rich maintain a protective force that's as mean as a junkyard dog.

Financier tycoon Jay Gould put it succinctly in the 1890's: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

In the upcoming election, it's kind of hard at first to tell which one is the less self-serving of the two big dogs. It's confusing, but if you put your mind to it, it's not impossible to figure out.

united separately

the soft rays of the sun on a winter day's ending,
lighting in warm yellow the snow heaped on bushes,
throwing long shadows while the 10 degree air burns your lungs.
and in the air a silent music
singing that all this could be shared
and you feel that somehow it is being shared
with someone you haven't met yet.
this makes you feel part of the infinite.
perhaps once in life, probably when you are young, this sharing actually happens.
yes or no, at least you've had this.

(September 2020)

The Evil of Two Lessers

Trump is not a committed fascist, although he does have strong authoritarian tendencies. But because of his bull-in-a-china-shop, meandering mismanagement he has collected a menagerie of unhinged minions that preach violence, white supremacy, and social Darwinism. He never should have gotten the job, but thanks to a collapsed two party system that has forsaken democracy to serve an oligarchy of monopolists, he slipped in through a side door.

We have a rampant pandemic, permanent wealth inequality, a wounded Post Office, hobbled Social Security, courts packed for the next generation with troglodytes, and Trump Administration officials inciting civil war. Not to worry though, the Dems have a knight in shining armor, a corrupt, lifelong corporate stooge ready to challenge Trump in the November election. It's as if the Dems keep choosing a candidate capable of winning the popular vote but vulnerable to losing the electoral college.

Of course this would be the case because the Dems' whole starting lineup are corporatists posing unconvincingly as champions of the working class. Their motto is "Who else are you going to vote for?" The answer might be "no one" again this time, and Trump will win by default as 100 million people still decline to vote for the lesser of two evils.

Conservative Catch 22

Hey, looks like we're sterilizing women from minority groups that we don't like again! Great to see that we've taken a giant step back in time and flushed a century's worth of enlightenment. What a wonderful experience, watching our civilization devolve! (And apparently, conservatives think precluding pregnancy through forced sterilization is OK whereas a woman electing to have an abortion is beyond the pale.)

Sins of the Fathers

For decades the US trained counter-insurgents at the School of the Americas (now called something else even more Orwellian) in Georgia, teaching them how to deal with elements in Latin American countries that were a threat to governments the US backed. The trainees returned to their homes to murder and torture hundreds of thousands of leftists. They either employed paramilitaries to "disappear" citizens from their homes or did the wet work themselves. The result was to stabilize, through brutality, governments that were not usually the choice of the people, but which were friendly to US business interests. Now we have paramilitary vigilantes in the streets of our own cities who are coddled by our own authorities. We stand on the cusp of wholesale murder of anyone who does not truely adore Trump --all to the advantage of business interests. What goes around comes around.

The Black Lives Matter protest has a point. Not only do white supremacist cops have their way with brown people, as they have since reconstruction, but there is new energy to their terroristic, sadistic behavior. Having spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers cum cops have preconceived ideas about how to treat the people they oversee. The assumptions in the Middle East were: everyone is a potential enemy; in any field situation proceed as though you are facing saboteurs who plan to slaughter you; don't worry about retribution because your government will back you up. Even a misbehaving 13 year old white kid with autism was shot multiple times by cops recently! So, what kind of treatmentment do you think people with dark skin can expect? What goes around comes around.

Through the IMF the US for many years imposed austerity, prescribed by the Chicago School of Economics, on foreign countries. We did this to assure that payments to US businesses which were vampirizing those countries would be paid on time and in full. Now the overwhelming majority of people in the US are mired in debt and in thrall to those same rentier businesses. We lack adequate health care, are one paltry paycheck away from oblivion, and are too busy trying to survive to muster any coherent challenge to the vampire class. What goes around comes around.

We too have been martyred by neoliberalism's crushing invisible hand. Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, obsequiously seeking approval from the White Christo-Fascist power structure, have delivered us to the feeding bowl of the elites. But then, we deserve it in a sense because we have been self-congratulating and self-fellating for 70+ years while our elites vigorously rear-ended more than half the world on a daily basis.

Vote With Your Amygdala

We are approaching the election and there are several things that should be major determinants in forming people's voting decision but probably won't be:

1) Under Trump, the rich have received a massive tax break that was not only unnecessary, but will accelerate the already monumental inequality in the US. As soon as Trump's signature was on the legislation, Paul Ryan retired, his life's goal having been obtained.

2) Trump is defunding Social Security by declaring a payroll tax holiday and promising to make it permanent. This sits well with workers in the near term, but is a death knell for SS. Medicare is included in the wasting. The effect will be that after a lifetime living in precarity, today's workers will face a painful and desolate old age just as people once did prior to the establishment of Social Security during the New Deal.

3) EPA rules to protect the air and water are being shredded in the name of helping the economy. Of course, the real purpose is to bolster profits for business, and rather than enjoying any trickle down effect, the average citizen will simply breathe dirtier air and live with increased chances of acquiring things like pancreatic cancer. All the benefits go to the powerful and the costs are scraped off onto the general population.

4) The administration has booted the response to the pandemic, regardless of whatever the Pence/Jared/Fox choir sings to America. We have a quarter of the world's deaths despite constituting less than five percent of the world's population. (The same thing can be said about incarceration rates.)

5) Trump has sabotaged the USPS to a) deny voting to the majority and b) kill the second bird, privatizing the Post Office, with the same stone. (This goes for the attack on Social Security also.)

6) Trump is a provocateur. He uses fear and anger to motivate his base, then sics them on others. It's never really clear whether this is more a tactic to gain power or whether he really does hate the other. In either case, people are being killed and there is an escalating potential for an outbreak of massive violence, perhaps even a civil war. Trump welcomes it, revels in it.

But to the people wearing red baseball caps none of the above is of much relevance. They are more concerned with scary news clips and fractured internet memes. They are angry, afraid, and addicted to their fear and anger. They are following Trump as millions followed Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. They have their authoritarian strongman who will lead them from the wilderness and into a glory from a mythical past. Their reptilian brain dominates. Their empathy is on ice. They are impervious to facts.

Everything that's happening in the news now rings with what was going on in Germany in the 1930's: baiting, beating, and killing those on the left; paramilitaries and vigilantes being egged on by authorities; bringing previously independent government institutions to heel under the regime; stoking racial and ethnic hatred; undermining democracy; scaring the populace and convincing them that only The Strongman can save them.

Of course, fascism eventually burns itself out as it did in Europe and has in Latin America. Unfortunately, while it is alight fascism creates a searing conflagration. Just look at what Hitler did to Germany in the end. In the case of the USA, which has a thousand or two deliverable nuclear weapons, there's the true potential to incinerate the planet. And don't forget, DJT has repeatedly asked what's the use of having nuclear weapons if we can't use them!

So, let's all freak out over dubious internet memes posted by no one knows who, and in a paroxysm of angst and reactionary rage let's reflexively pick the tyrant. Forget rational thought.

Lastly, none of this is really attributable to Trump. He merely pounced on an opportunity that was created by decades of greed and political cowardice. The Democrats joined the Republicans forty years ago in serving the rich and selling the working class down the river. If Trump hadn't hijacked the country another demagogue would have done so sooner rather than later.

"Twelve more years!" said Trump, half-jokingly. Doubt there will be anything left standing for that long. Wouldn't care much if I didn't have children and grandchildren. Only hope it's quick and painless for them. Best to be sipping lemonade and sitting on a lawn chair at ground zero when it happens.

The Mousolini of Manhattan wants you to vote for him twice: once by mail; once in person. Go for it.

Real Voter Fraud, Georgia Style

From Greg Palast on completion of an independent survey of Georgia's voter roll purge: " ... 3 out of 4 names the Secretary of State [of Georgia] claims are on the Post Office's change-of-address registry are not on the Post Office list."

So, unless everyone checks their voter status online very soon, 200,000 people will go to the polls in November only to be turned away unfairly and illegally. Serendipitously for Georgia Republicans, these will be overwhelmingly young people and people of color. Now that's really the way to steal an election.

Donnie Gets a New Puppy

Gee, if police continue to look the other way while white vigilantes gather to intimidate and attack protesters, perhaps the next time a white supremacist fires at black people someone will shoot back. Then there could be runaway escalation and the race war that a few have been dreaming of since reconstruction would begin. There would be massive loss of life, terror, and pandemonium, leading to martial law. That in turn will make one megalomaniac hate monger running for reelection as happy as a six year old with a new puppy!

Things the Wealthy Feel It's Necessary to Deny Workers

EDUCATION
The reason college is so expensive as to be borderline unobtainable is simply this: the people in charge, the conservative wealthy class, didn't want everyone to go to college, so starting in the 80's they began shifting the tuition burden onto students and putting up hurdles to keep them away from campuses. That's not a paranoid conspiracy theory.

The blueprint for the campaign against universal higher education was laid out in the 1971 "Powell Memo" written for the US Chamber of Commerce by conservative soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. It is an attack plan against creeping "socialism" throughout society. That is to say, it was a call to arms for the rich to protect their wealth, to maintain and increase inequality. It goes after colleges specifically.

Universities were a hotbed of political activity in the 60's and 70's. Too many people from the lower classes were becoming wakened and empowered at post secondary institutions. It was time to control who went to college and equally important, eradicate the spread of the liberal ideas taught there. The wealthy class jacked up tuition, purged faculty, and made schools unfriendly for working class and poor students.

The sixties and seventies taught the oligarchs an important lesson about the danger of everyone's getting a higher education, and they did something about it.

UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE
We in the US pay about twice per capita what those in other countries pay for healthcare, but despite the high cost, health outcomes here are poorer at every stage of life. We pay multiple times the cost for the same medications as they pay in other countries. Plus, we have millions of citizens without any care at all. Further, the major cause of bankruptcy is medical costs incurred by people who had insurance when they got sick. Most people would like this to change, and yet even the Democratic leadership says we can't afford it. Richest country in the world, richest in the history of the world, but we can't take care of people when they're sick.

Won't, not can't.

By chance, the US wound up with a system largely based on healthcare as a benefit of employment during WWII. Now, although it would be easier and cheaper for corporations to come into line with the rest of the advanced world, they resist changing. Why? Well, it is a concern of the upper class that if you give the working class this plumb, they'll just want something else next. Slippery slope.

There is also the element of control employer-supplied health care gives the boss. A worker is going to be much more compliant if the boss literally has the power of life and death over the employee's family via access to health care. From the worker's standpoint, it's like owing your existence to the medieval lord and depending on his benevolence and good grace. Evidently, this servitude is what anti-universal health care activists/lobbyists are referring to when they say people will miss having their choice of health plans under a universal system. Guess so, if you're a masochist.

Bottom line is that you are chained to a job that's a velvet prison, you risk losing your house as a result of illness, and you might have no healthcare at all because the rich don't want you to get uppity. They also don't want you to be able to strike out on your own and potentially become their competition.

SUMMARY
We are brainwashed from infancy to think there's no such thing as class in the USA, but in actuality class is the driver behind everything. Most of us blame things in everyday life that are painful, unfair, and wrong on a raft of red herring rather than on the exquisitely executed class war carried out by the rich. This is a testament to the brilliance and persistence of right wing propaganda. Money, combined with psychology, can buy anything.

Slippery slope. Slippery slope. Slippery slope. Start giving the working class too much and you'll lose control. The wealthy must fend off government policies that make things too easy on the working class; otherwise, they will start acting like equals.There's no damn point in owning a Mercedes if everyone has one! It's a class thing, baby.

Educational Purgatory

We don't force everyone, even those with poor athletic abilities, to play varsity sports. We don't insist that all young girls enter beauty pageants continually until they're 18. But we do insist that everyone strain to be a mathlete. Day in and day out throughout their childhood and adolescence we force millions of kids to sit in a classroom to learn and relearn one recurring lesson: I'm dumb.

Kids vary in their scholastic abilities. Teachers can predict which of their students will do well at the next grade level and which won't, but we push them all forward and let the parade march on, disregarding the fact that many will struggle and continue to suffer daily humiliation.

All kids can learn, but at their own pace. The competitive aspect of education is toxic for those who are genetically endowed to be less quick. Witness the forlorn child who is forced to sit in mute suffering while others are praised for their performance in class. To praise one in front of the other is to denigrate the other. Further, the child who does well is simply the lucky recipient of advantageous genes. Praising them for that is unnecessary and undeserved. The concommitent slight to the less fortunate child is horrendously stupid and cruel.

The bottom line is that school is agnostic to any metric other than scholastic, and that is not only unfair, it is altogether wrong. The world contains many clever people who excelled in academia and who subsequently blossomed into sociopaths who have perverted humanity and diminished the world in manifold ways.

Our system has tortured, abused, and crushed the spirit of millions of innocent children who might otherwise have made valuable contributions. Let's try something different.

NO

Most people would like to have universal healthcare, free higher education, childcare, and a basic living wage. None of these are forthcoming. Instead, we have an overly expensive and inadequate healthcare system that depends on the largesse of employers, exorbitant college costs that restrict attendance to any but the rich, childcare costs that swallow most of earnings, low wages and burgeoning wealth inequality so staggering that it makes the pharaohs of Egypt look like they'd taken a vow of poverty.

The coronavirus pandemic has placed millions of families in dire financial circumstances, but government is as indifferent to their plight as it has been to the pandemic. The Green New Deal could buoy up workers economically, combat global warming, and fix the country's dilapidated infrastructure, but neither Republicans nor Democrats will allow it because their wealthy donors don't want it. Why? As with healthcare, the elite do not want to undermine the existing economic and class structure. "Give the plebes an inch and they'll take a mile! God bless worker insecurity!"

The rich just don't want us to have nice things. They have always felt this way, but now they are solidly in charge and calling the shots without any interference.

All this has led to desperation and caused working people to follow a demagogue who in the end would do to the US what another demagogue did to Germany in the last century. Even if Biden were to win in November despite the sabotage of the Post Office, we are certain to be facing other demagogues in the near future as things continue to go downhill for ordinary people.

Deprivation, discontent, and possibly violence loom as the puppet masters skillfully pit working people against each other. Also, war is a distinct possibility as we scapegoat China for what US corporations have done in pursuit of massive profits over the last four decades. But the stock market up, so we can all rejoice and relax.

Not Our Fault

"Basement level labor costs and tax breaks! Count on me to move my manufacturing to China! Now I can meet the wholesale price Wal-Mart wanted me to reach and still stay in business, still be rich, even richer! (Unlike all the workers I'll be laying off.)"

Fast forward several decades: "Those damn Chinese have stolen all the technology we handed them to build our stuff at ridiculously low prices! Who would ever do that? Now that they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps they are besting us in our own technology. What else can we do now other than start a cold war? "

None of this is our fault. (It never is.)

Missing Leadership

Picture a cranky old man playing whack-a-mole in a very disinterested way. There's no effort to strike quickly when a mole pops up. The mallet is held loosely in one hand and the man's body is turned aside. He's talking and not really paying attention to the game. Occasionally he flips his wrist to hammer ineffectively at a spot where a mole had just appeared but is now gone. The performance is languid and pro-forma at best.

Now picture his rival, whose turn may come in another few months to take over the whack-a-mole game. He says nothing, not feeling compelled to provide any advice which might lead to the first man improving his performance. This second old man merely sits in his basement, believing that he will cakewalk into the role of player because of the first's embarrassing performance. Meanwhile, mole after mole after mole slips by unwhacked.

Now consider that unwhacked moles correspond to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The first incompetent player is responsible for most of them, but in failing to put forth a strategy of his own, the second players is partially responsible, more so as time goes on.

Epilogue

Is this the autopsy phase of the USA? Are we fretting about the gyrations of a decadent megalomaniac when in fact the end has already arrived and Trump is merely the profane epilogue?

I recently saw a photo of him and a sleazy Southern governor sitting in front of a poster that stated, "We are in this together." That is the furthest from the truth of any claim Trump has ever made, in that he sustains himself politically by constantly promoting division and acrimony. It's a lie so blatant that it seems to have been placed there just to goad.

However, there is a poiniency to this particular lie in that it points to the true cause of death of the USA: extreme selfishness combined with social atomization, the antithesis of "We're all in this together." This disease predates Trump, and it has been devouring the country for decades.

The disease is caused by neoliberal social economics, which is now the universally accepted paradigm. Neoliberalism posits that there is no such thing as society or the common good, only individuals selfishly seeking to maximize their own advantage. While this might be a self-justifying creed for oligarchs,� it means death to a democracy and misery for ordinary people.

There is no longer a USA, there is just its ravaged corpse. We must leave it now and join the macabre procession that refutes the very idea of a city upon a hill.

USA: FUBAR

Although news coverage of climate change has taken a backseat to COVID-19� temporarily, that doesn't mean it's on hiatus. "When [Iowa State University climatologist Dr Gene]Takle was a teenager, baling hay in 1960, there were 18-20 days a year when the temperature would get above 90 degrees. By the end of the century, Takle warns, this region could be scorched by temperatures over 100 degrees 50 to 60 days a year." (From The Guardian, 8-17-2020.)

The aquifer that waters fields in the central US, making it the breadbasket of the world, will dry up in 20 years because the region is in a historic drought.� Added to scorching temperatures, flash floods, and the usual tornados, there is something unusual, the derecho. This is a wind storm fifty miles wide and blowing at over 100 mph that knocks down silos like they were made of cardboard.

We are all hypnotized and cybernated to agree that The Holy Marketplace will find a ready solution to the food crisis that will soon result. And in fact, it will: the oligarchs will find a way to steer the economy so that they will profit from the disaster; in the end they will have found a way to ride out the storm and not just survive it, but increase their wealth in the process. Many, many millions will suffer and die, but that is not relevant to the oligarchs who firmly control media, policy, and politics.

Meantime, we watch as the supreme leader destroys the US Post Office so that mail-in voting can't be accomplished in November. He is also picking apart Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He lusts for undoing Obamacare. He has undermined environmental reguations so oligarchs can greedily defile the land for profit, poisoning the people in the process. And he is trying to foment a civil war because that's his M.O.

He has bequeathed gargantuan tax breaks to the oligarchs so that politicians can claim that although they would love to help, they can't do anything for the millions that will soon go bankrupt, lose their houses, and become homeless. Pols will plead that there's just no money for it :(

And heaven forbid that we should have an adequate and purposefully run testing system to contain the virus. (The reason we don't is that the supreme leader made the call early on not to implement one: his thinking was that the virus was only affecting Democratically controlled cities, so let them suffer, and besides, perhaps that would lead people in those areas to vote Republican next time.)

At the moment, we're readying our kids to go back to the coronavirus corrals we call schools. We have to send them because we need someone to watch them while we go to work. Ironic that we're working so that we can raise children that we're sacrificing so that we can go back to work!

America is fucked. Enjoy the gathering miasma.

How's that 'Personal Responsibility" thing working out for ya?

When it finally became apparent to the government that coronavirus was not just a nuisance bug that was only affecting New York City, US Senators and Congressmen dumped much of their stocks and bought shares of others that were certain to benefit from the pandemic. They called up their rich donors too, letting them know about the big churning that was about to take place in the market. Insider information all the way, and it's certain that members of the Trump White House did the same thing. Not surprisingly, working people did not get the heads-up. Working people were not even told to go out and buy Lysol before it was all gone, apparently never to return to grocery shelves again.

Think we working people are getting screwed and that the fat cats have it rigged so they can't lose? Most people think that in varying degrees, but they accept it rather than protest. The reason for this isn't really complicated: our culture of rugged individualism inculcates us with a sense that the rich deserve the lion's share and workers deserve to get shafted every bit as much as the rich deserve their unbroken stream of wealth. While we've all said to ourselves, "Wait a minute! This isn't right, is it?", ultimately we resign ourselves to getting the short end because we are trained from infancy to do so. It's a dog-eat-dog world and the big dogs always win. We're told from the time we're born that it's God's will.

To get people to buy into this, even with the advantage of constant repetition, people's innate sense of fairness needs to be suppressed, along with their tendency to cooperate for the common good. Fairness is overcome by mean spiritedness, which springs from our legacy of slavery and society's systemic racism. If we didn't act abominably toward others, we could not so easily participate in screwing ourselves (and vice versa).

But we do act viciously, beating, poisoning, imprisoning, excluding, disenfranchising, dispossessing, and denying medical care to many, as well as allowing others to go hungry. We are inhumane enough to rip infants from their mothers and put toddlers in cages, isolated from their families. If not for the influence of slavery, we wouldn't have the moral mutation that allows us to do these things to others, and ultimately to ourselves.

As for cancelling the impulse to work for the common good, that takes atomization. In practical terms, atomization has been achieved through the eradication of unions and the resulting installment of the neoliberal paradigm in government and civilian life. Ronald Reagan famously said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help' ". Real-gone Ron wasn't even close. The real most fearsome words are, "personal responsibility", when they are used in a failed state by oligarchs to callously dismiss the sincere needs of citizens who are in dire circumstances. We are each of us on our own now.

Mnuchin Mean and Muddled

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says it's time to stop paying an extra $600/week to people unemployed due to the coronavirus pandemic. He stated his rationale for this as: supplementing people's income has led to some actually making more being unemployed than they did working, and this is a disincentive to their returning to work. Well, the weakness of his argument is easily pointed out.

First, even if you accept that it's wrong that some are making more now unemployed than they did when working, they constitute only a small percentage of all workers laid off during the pandemic. So, is it reasonable and fair to take the 600/week away from ALL WORKERS because of an anomaly that applies to only a few? Of course it's not!

Second, the economy has shrunk by a third and there are fewer jobs as a result. Steve seems to be worrying about a disincentive that doesn't apply because THE JOBS AREN'T THERE ANYWAY!!!

Thirdly, $600/week projects to about $30,000/year. Steve is a billionaire. If he earns just 7% on his investments (and it's likely to be more), he's making around 70 million per year, equivalent to $1,400,000/week. That's more than 2,300 times what the recipient of that $600 that Steve's so worried about gets. Steve is a bit of a privileged, heartless aristocrat, wouldn't you say?

Eat the rich.

Shooting a Guy on 5th Ave.

He's handed the %1 the Republican Holy Grail, massive tax cuts that perpetuate and accelerate inequality. He's sabotaging the Post Office. He's weakening Social Security and Medicare.

He's starting a cold war with China, essentially blaming them for taking all those manufacturing orders over the last three decades from US corporations who greedily wanted to increase their profit. We consumers wallow in the cheap electronic gadgetry, even as it's swollen our credit card debt and eliminated our jobs. But let's join the Orange One and hate on the Chinese for our own folly, Ok?

He's worse than mishandled the coronavirus pandemic. He squashed his son-in-law Jared's early plans for widespread testing. He decided to do this because then the virus was limited to blue cities in blue states, so a) he didn't give a damn about people who didn't vote for him, and b) he reckoned that when things went badly in those places people would turn against their Democratic officials. Hence, there are now at least 100,000 dead people who needn't have died, except that they had failed to kowtow to the boy king. Too, he's abetted insider trading by multi millionaires and senators alike during the pandemic, making sure they get their beaks wet while the majority faces down the barrel of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

And lastly, he asks, "What's the point of having nuclear weapons if you're not going to use them?"

But for all that, his base still loves him. He's their authoritarian hero, a wouldbe dictator they can idolize. Evangelicals, anti-abortionists, gun nuts, white supremecists, and authoritarians think he's great. They don't mind his narcissism, his bullying, his cruelty bordering on sadism, his self-dealing, or his disregard for law. You can blame them, certainly, but you can also understand that they have wandered into the orbit of authoritarian fascism because both parties are pro-business and therefore anti-worker. That has spread rose petals in the path of this demagogue and probably worse ones to follow.

It must also be said that Trump did not arise spontaneously. The road to Trump was engineered by Newt Gingrich and paved by neoliberal Democrats. And we accept the abominable easily because the mores of this country are rooted in its foundational institution of slavery: it took practice to overcome innate caring and decency to become this mean spirited. This is the era of the sociopath, and it might be our final one as a country, if not as a species.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Trump accuses others of making political hay regarding the pandemic when he is the most flagrant offender of all. His suspension of his son-in-law's plan for nationwide COVID-19 testing on the grounds it was only affecting predominantly blue cities at the time is the ultimate in politicization. This was an act of murder by a callous, sadistic, authoritarian, tinpot dictator.

Further, he has a personal vendetta against TicTok because its teenage participants punked him by inflating the size of the gate at his embarrassingly underattended Tulsa rally. So, he is speciously declaring TicTok a security threat that needs to be shut down, solely to get even. This is the move of a petty tyrant. If the Rebublican Senate were not so cowardly and craven, he would be impeached and removed from office before the end of August. However, they are a "win at all costs" and "the ends justify the means" bunch, and they won't act honorably under any circumstances.

The Coming Social Economic Catastrophe

There is a huge hole opening in the social safety net. It's being created by the pandemic's effect on the economy combined with a refusal to patch the hole. States are required to balance their budgets. This is impossible to do during a pandemic because the real economy has been throttled back to two-thirds speed and revenues are concomitantly down. With their checkbooks empty, states can only say "Sorry" to those who were in need before the pandemic, as well as all those who are now in need because of it.

The Republican dominated Senate and the president have refused to lend a hand to the states in this regard. If pressed, they will say "Where will we get the money?" This is a spurious response because the answer is to create it through the banking system the same way money for defense is created. That's the beauty of being a sovereign nation with its own currency: you can print as much as you want of it for whatever you want it for. The only thing stopping you is the inflation that will result if too much is printed in relation to economic output, but inflation hasn't been a problem in the US for a generation, so there is room here in this emergency to chance it.

There is an alternative funding source for states, but it's the third rail for politicians, taxing the wealthy. Don't expect that to happen, as New York's Governor Cuomo can tell you.

So, meals and medicine for the traditional poor and the emerging newly poor will be cut to balance state budgets while we continue to give gargantuan federal tax breaks to the top one percent (who are making out like bandits during the pandemic). We will also be purchasing more of the fabulously expensive and famously defective F-35 fighters while people are turned out of their homes onto the streets.

Once upon a time, an essential function of government was to protect its citizens in a crisis. No more.

The Great American Feces Throw

Well, it's been almost six months and the rest of the world except us and our pal in Brazil seems to have been able to contain the pandemic. We are still flailing, waiting for a magical market based solution to right the ship and set the sails in one stroke.

Since that is unlikely, our Dim Hitler is flinging his feces again to try to take our attention away from his astounding incompetence, calamitous performance, and disastrous missteps. He's cranking up violence related to BLM protests and running provocative dry runs for 1970's Argentinean-style death squads, sending federal goons into cities with Democratic mayors. He's a colossal prick, but you have to give him points for velocity and accuracy in feces slinging!

Still, this isn't working for him like it used to because the somnambulist public is finally waking up to his tricks. If he's not careful, even the US press will stop chasing after his every bouncing wad of dung, although that won't happen for a long time yet because chasing it is central to their revenue stream. (Remember: "Bad for the country, but good for us.")

Unless he can summon up a monumental terrorist attack soon to rally support behind the s(h)itting president, he's likely to go down in November and take a whole raft of Republican plutocratic sycophants with him. But he's not going down without a fight, even if the fight results in bloodshed and/or the collapse of our democratic system. The repubs are doing everything in their power to deny voting rights to anyone likely to vote Democratic and Dim Hitler is hinting that he will either stop the election or refuse to accept defeat when it comes. This would bring us to true third world status at last. Meantime, let's all enjoy our favorite apps!

Protests on TV, then and now

I remember seeing as a kid TV news clips of black protestors in the South being bowled over by water cannon and attacked by police dogs. My thoughts then about Southern authorities, as a kid from Cambridge Mass, were, "What assholes!". Ironically, I got over it enough to move to Atlanta in the late 1980's, where inertia has held me ever since.

Now I'm witnessing something almost as awful and even stranger on the news: protestors taking pot shots to the head with (mostly) non-lethal bullets from federal agents sent to DOMINATE them. Whereas the spectacle I viewed in the 60's seemed to be driven by pure racial hatred, this one smacks of cynical exploitation. Rather than a gutteral�reaction from atavistic authorities, this one is a coldly calculated ploy to create the appearance of a crisis in order to frighten fearful voters into choosing the more authoritarian candidate.

Not Going to Happen

The way forward in dealing with COVID-19 should be for the government to conduct testing and contact tracing while encouraging everyone to wear a mask and social distance where possible. On the economic side, we should be anticipating the needs of millions of people whose livelihoods are being destroyed (not just lavishing federal money on large and well connected businesses as we have been doing). Yes, there will be human loss, tragically, but going forward with the best practices available only seems rational.

But the narcissistic nincompoop and the craven opportunists surrounding him are having none of that. Nostrums, conspiracies, and outrageous distractions flow from DC like screams out of old Bedlam on a full moon.

Sowing Discontent and Cultivating Enemies

I rarely listen to politicians because they project a narrative that once heard doesn't warrant reexperiencing. Bush was "Aw shucks/ with us or against us/ WMD/ blah blah blah" while Obama was Mr. Smooth, an entrancing orator who never actually said anything. Listening to them was a waste of time. But I accidentally heard snippets from Trump's 4th of July rally at Rushmore, and his vituperation shocked me. This man does have something to say, and it is disturbing.

He exaggerates the threat of any who differ with him, rhetorically turning them into irredeemable villains. Minor rivals become mythical monsters. He then projects his aggression onto his opponents and casts himself and his constituents as the victims. Thus, he provokes his followers, who like him are intolerant and authoritarian. They are innately inclined toward obliterating, rather than coming to an understanding with, anyone who contradicts their worldview.

What does he get out of it? He gets to be a political rock star! He is a shallow man, so this alone is enough for him. What do his followers get out of it? Permission to give vent to longstanding grievance and smouldering hate, and the potential to indulge in violence.

Painting the Roses Red

POTUS has responded to an increase in detected coronavirus infections by throttling back on testing. This is consistent with the US approach from January on: ignore and minimize. While there is no simple and easy solution, the only rational approach would be to test and contact trace, but that's not in the cards. Six months into the pandemic, we are just now flirting with the idea of wearing masks. It would be laughable if it weren't fatal.

Republicans don't want workers to stay inside any longer and are determined to stop helping them financially, on the basis that it just incentivises lazy bums to stay at home and get paid for doing nothing. Republicans refuse to recognize that workers aren't goldbricking, but are actually frightened of being exposed to COVID-19. To show the depth of their resolve, POTUS et al are demanding that schools resume this fall as if there were no pandemic. No concession whatsoever should be made to prevent spreading the disease.

This begs for a new statistical category for coronavirus, School Acquired Infections, comprising four sub categories: infections; deaths; strange ongoing neurological effects; knock-on deaths of grandparents. Of course, nothing will be done with this knowledge. It will merely contribute to the feeling of hopelessness and disbelief that is at the heart of our COVID-19 experience.

This is pandemic under a kakistocracy.

When the unemployment insurance runs out and the moratorium on eviction ends, millions of families will be in dire circumstances. Homelessness will be as epidemic as COVID-19, and the anguish ordinary Americans experience will equal anything felt during the Great Depression.

But having bailed out Wall St., neither the administration nor Congress seems inclined to do anything to address the agony that will afflict everyday people. Contrast this with what's being done in Germany, Ireland and elsewhere and it is obvious that some governments provide for their citizens in a crisis, whereas ours supports only business and thinks that is sufficient. Sadly, the people affected won't ever dare to challenge the powers that be on this. For all our guns and bravado, we are as meek as lambs.

The Accumulation of Bad Ideas

Having employer-provided health insurance rather than universal healthcare is a bad idea. It forces people to remain in jobs they dislike just to keep their coverage and prevents them from striking out on their own. Of course, it also leaves people without medical care during a pandemic.

Further evidence of its being a bad idea is the SCOTUS decision that employers needn't provide forms of coverage, birth control in the current instance, that is contrary to the employer's beliefs; an extension of this reasoning is that if you work for a Christian Scientist, your medical coverage could be restricted to bandaids.

Which leads to the point that the Supreme Court itself turns out to be a bad idea, in that historically it has sided with the ruling elite and against the people.

Russian Roulette Therapy

If you haven't noticed, the infection rate has soared to over twice what it was when we worried about "flattening the curve". Back then, we fretted that hospitals would be overrun. Now our worries all seem to have evaporated. We're "back to business", and no matter how bad things become, we have decided not to be concerned. At least that's the stance of our federal and state governments.

Donald Trump has decided that he looks good in a mask, so perhaps we might get masks finally, but overall we are totally on our own. Let the poor and elderly die and decrease the surplus population! Rather than testing and tracing we have a different plan: Russian roulette.

Eviction

the dread. knowing that The Day is coming, making its slow, unstoppable advance. aware it will arrive in a shocking instant when the sheriff knocks on the door with the order to evict.

then you will be cast into a spinning, surreal state. unable to escape the horror of watching your life being thrown over a cliff, but at the same time your mind separating you, protecting you. you will be a watcher, forced to witness the destruction of another you.

grab what you can! what defines your life, which momentos? beyond the clothes on your back, what's practical? do you leave family photos in the pile on the sidewalk and take the cherished baby clothes? your mind somersaults back and forth. impossible choices.

how many plastic bags can you carry in each hand, looking like an upside down balloon vendor?

bombs dropped cause immediate violence, the tearing of flesh, splintering of bones, burning of skin. this is a slower violence, a drawn out dissolving.

sour odor. matted hair. dirty clothes. decaying teeth.

shame.

dying meekly as an indifferent world moves on.

Fear Mongering on Cue

As anticipated, Grump is trying to exploit the rioting that accompanies the protests to his advantage. Using splashes of chaotic, hellish scenes with an unflattering cut out of Biden's eyes superimposed, Grump's political TV ads are portraying Biden as the Prince of Darkness who is aiding and abetting�a leftist anarchist insurrection.

Let's face it, scaring the emotionally vulnerable is all Grump has left, or perhaps all he ever had. Certainly, the tens -and ultimately hundreds of thousands of unnecessary coronavirus deaths he has caused should overshadow any threat from rioting, but the networks have once again�done the job of causing droves of quivering simpletons to pee their pants over the more sensational story, thus aiding Grump in his drive to stay in power. Good for ratings/profits.

Fauci's Little White Mortal Lie

What sort of people are we? What if we had been told, "This virus is spreading, and wearing a mask will definitely slow down that spread; however, because masks are in such short supply, we implore you to shelter in place and refrain from hoarding masks and other PPE so that essential workers and front line medical staff can perform their duties for the good of all with as much safety as we can provide them."? Would we do our part like the English did during the Battle of Britain, or would we act selfishly and jeopardize all of society by snapping up PPE in total disregard for anyone but ourselves?

There isn't much question about Dr. Anthony Fauci's assessment of our character. He thought it necessary to hoodwink us, saying masks don't really do much to safeguard a healthy person. In the next breath he said to stay inside.

And you know, his assessment was probably on the money.� For at least four decades we've� been inculcated with the creed that taking care of Number One is the most efficient and best way for everyone, and furthermore, doing otherwise is wrong headed and burdensome to everyone. Margaret Thatcher said, "There is no such thing as society, only individuals". Good thing for England she came thirty years after the Battle of Britain or the men and women who flew in the RAF to answer the Luftwaffe would have stayed home. Then she would have delivered that snappy little aphorism in German instead of English.

So, Fauci's little white lie is understandable, but part of the reason people aren't wearing masks even now is the residual effect of their being told masks didn't help. People just haven't kept up. That's a shame, because in the absence of a coherent federal system to contact trace, and in the heedles returning to business as usual, masks are all we have.

THIS Government is not the Solution

The Trump administration failed to focus on the pandemic at the beginning and it didn't provide information to the public. Subsequent directives have been contradictory and scattershot. Because of its inability to test adequately, the government was belatedly forced to settle on the tactic of a general shut-down to slow the spread of the virus. Even then it failed to provide the population with necessary supplies to support sheltering-in-place, nor did it support medical workers, showing it was still unengaged.

On the subject of testing, although it is more available now, it's not being used effectively. You can be tested, but it's like sending your DNA off to be analyzed by Ancestry or 23-And-Me: you do it mostly to satisfy your own curiosity. Presumably the independently run, mom and pop COVID-19 test tents will pass along results to some cognizant authority, but it's a passive system. Nobody oversees or directs the testing. Inexcusably, there is no functioning federal system for contact tracing, which is the only informed way to stem the spread of the virus and protect the public.

Congress passed the CARES Act, which contained a one-shot handout to everyday people that will nonetheless leave them in dire financial circumstances in the very near future; on the other hand, the act saved the stock market with the result the very wealthy actually increased their worth by 12.5% during the pandemic. Ordinary people come last.

Because both the administration and the Senate are opposed to helping working people out beyond the original CARES Act, they are arbitrarily declaring the shut down to be over and forcing everyone back to work, to mingle and spread the disease. This is causing a resurgence in the number of COVID-19 cases, but they aren't admitting that; instead, they are proffering the idea that the rise in infection is an artifact of increased testing. This is a convenient way to hide from the obvious fact that ending isolation is causing unnecessary disease and death.

Even before the order to end shelter-in-place the US had more deaths and infections than any other country. Our population is far from the largest, so it's obvious that this government has done a miserable job, out of incompetence and indifference toward its citizens. The policy of forcing a premature return to pre-pandemic life is an outrage and an act of mass murder, committed solely to protect the stock market and salvage Trump's chances for reelection. That's all Trump and his mob care about, certainly not the tens of thousands more who will die like lemmings to protect the wealth of the investing class.

The Trump administration has been a no-show from the start of the coronavirus pandemic. However, forty odd years of dismantling government at the federal level set the stage for its abysmal performance. Jimmy Carter vied with Ronald Reagan in declaring that government was useless and regulation was pernicious. Both politicians were enemies of the New Deal and sycophants of business. After them, the political landscape became monolithically neoliberal. The result is a pandemic death toll equivalent to a 9/11 every week, week after week, month after month. This will soon be aggravated by a further decimation of the wealth of the working class that might be worse than in 2008, something DC is studiously ignoring.

This time government, as with Katrina, was not the solution. But that's only because functional government has been hamstrung, humiliated, and hollowed out for decades.

The Lighter Side of the COVID-19 Pandemic

At his Tulsa rally, Trump said, "When you do testing to that extent, you�re going to find more people, you�re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, �Slow the testing down, please." Later, his staff liars said it was a joke. Pandemic jokes are hilarious!

The Trump Presidency, Brought to You by Fear and Loathing

In an early Trump speech (SOTU?) as president, he spoke darkly and at length about the threats looming everywhere in the US. To be honest, I wasn't too interested, but I remember thinking "What is he talking about?". After all, domestically, things were tranquil and our endless foreign wars were purring along normally, which is to say horrifically but out of sight. So, WTF? Evidently, his followers were just accepting his meandering speech uncritically, not being sticklers for factual content from their pied piper.

Or so I thought, but a recent conversation I had made me think that Trumpers saw then and still do see existential threats that I am unaware of. Those people were worried about ISIS. They were worried about the government taking away their guns. They were worried about immigrants taking their jobs. Trump spoke to those issues. Trump's picture of a world in peril resonated with them.

On the point of immigrants taking jobs, I honestly don't know whether that's real or not, but daemonizing immigrants can't be the solution to the supposed problem. As for the other perils Trump touted, they are red herrings thrown beside the path to divert attention from actual problems created by an economic system that mimics the board game Monopoly.

The true threats to everyday people in the US are low wages and ever expanding inequality. These are ceeding all power to the rich and they are anathema to democracy. The lack of healthcare is a paramount consideration too. There are other prime concerns, and they all outstrip by orders of magnitude the things that give Trumpers the heebeegeebees. Wouldn't it be helpful if people (on all sides) resisted being sidetracked by trumped up values differences and aesthetic disputes and instead concentrated on crucial bread and butter issues?

But the crazies are too fond of their conspiracies to focus, too frightened of boogeymen to think clearly, too intent on indulging their pet hatreds to sort out who and what is really shafting them. Enter the demagogue to mine their discontents and amplify their fears.

Life is but a Meme

Now everything everywhere is a sell. Work is a sell. The corporation you work for creates a self-serving narrative about its goals and purpose and sells it not only to the outside world, but sells it endlessly to its employees in emails and at "town hall" meetings. The employees know the company's only purpose is to make as much money as possible, but cannot contradict the story openly. Even internally, we do not dare to utter the self-preserving incantation, "Bullshit!".

We are a sell. We "are our own brand". People present themselves on social media as living splendidly, not because that's anywhere near the truth, but because we must advertise and sell ourselves. That's what's expected, and to do otherwise would be to accept loser status. There is a lot of pressure involved in continually lying about ourselves to ourselves. It takes energy away from actually living.

Our government is a con game too. It does little more than collect taxes, hand the money to defense contractors, then tell us how lucky we are. We wave the flag on the Fourth of July and repress the knowledge that during a pandemic the government fails to even provide basic medical supplies and does almost nothing to help the population. At the helm is a narcissistic grifter who spends most of his time sending random and incendiary tweets defending his brand.

We just don't grasp what is real anymore. The vast majority of us are headed into debt poverty, but all we seem to care about is getting the newest smartphone. We are bound for a future of high tech feudalism but all we can do in response is take selfies and spread memes.

When the bubble bursts and reality does finally make its reprise, things will not be pleasant.

American Miasma 2020

Rigged. Starting even before Reagan's determined assault, business targeted unions for destruction. The Democratic party had been supported financially by organized labor, but with the demise of unions, workers no longer have representation in our pay-to-play two party system. Now both parties' politicians kowtow solely to their wealthy donors. While Republicans openly display their disgust for working people, saying as Romney did that he has written off 47% of the population, Chuck and Nancy keep up the charade of having empathy for everyday people while still denying them a living wage, universal healthcare, education, childcare, ect. The vast majority continues to slip deeper into debt and poverty as the US becomes a cast system. Trump adroitly went to Hillary's left, promising to help working people, and although that was a farcical lie, it was a shrewd�tactic on his part that helped him win (surprising even himself).

Ratfucked. Republican led voter suppression/disenfranchisement and�gerrymandering have combined with that hallowed vestige of slavery and privledge, the electoral college, to elect the Republican candidate with fewer votes than the Democrat in multiple recent elections. Similarly, gerrymandering and voter suppression at state and federal levels have enabled Republicans to hold onto most elected offices despite receiving significantly fewer votes.

Divided. The Republican party has always been and always will be the avatar of the wealthy, so it must skillfully use divide and conquer to stay in power despite its small numbers. It exploits single-issue voters in the separate categories of racial animosity, anti-abortion, religiuos zealotry, and gun fetishization to cobble together a voting coalition that in the end gives power to the tiny minority of ultra-wealthy masters in exchange for consessions to these special interests.�

Unjust. The Supreme (supremely atavistic) Court has paralized the voting rights act, unleashing a devastating�new era of Jim Crow. It also has said that money spent on political ads is free speech, so now corporations can drown out the rest of us with a bullhorn. It ended vote counting in Florida and (wrongly) declared George W. Bush president, prompting Al Gore to roll over like a true Demoflat.

Racist. Goobers want a race war because they have been told by the overlords that blacks have taken all the goodies. Of course, the overlords are the real bandits, but they have bamboozled the goobers into scapegoating blacks. If the goobers were to have their race war and obliterate all blacks they would find out very quickly that the real villains were alive and well in their gated communities. After that, the dragoons would be busily busting the heads of goobers in lieu of the then missing blacks. What goes around comes around.

Unequal. Supply-side, voodoo economics gives a huge advantage to the wealthy over workers while hilariously promising that riches will trickle down to those at the bottom. Naturally, the result of this has been no wage growth in forty years and the highest inequality of wealth in the history of the world. The younger generation is doing less well than their parents, something that in the middle of the 20th century seemed impossible.

Neoliberal. The great rotting of the soul of society (in the US, the UK, and elsewhere) is the universal acceptance of the marketplace as the center of life. If you can't put a price on something then it doesn't have value, or so the neoliberal creed goes. Thus, charity, altruism, and friendship are wasteful pursuits. There are no common interests,� just individuals grabbing for a dollar. Result: we are lonely, broke, atomized robots compulsively yanking the arm of a grand slot machine. Maggie Thatcher declared, "There is no such thing as society, only individuals." Thanks to her and her boyfriend Ron, we are now all dead inside. (Props to Ayn Rand here too.) Neoliberalism is to social theory as Skinnerism is to psychology, a minimalist mistake.

Going Down with Supply-Side

What the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about the United States of America in 2020 is that the federal government is reneging on its New Deal era promise to safeguard the welfare of the general public. Government's inadequate, farcical, and calamitous response to the epidemic is apparent; what is not so obvious is that while the lives of millions of everyday people are in great financial jeopardy because of the pandemic, politicians just aren't paying much attention to the looming disaster.

The reason for this apparent callousness is that more than forty years ago, political-economic thinking became singularly focused on the marketplace. The market is the whole enchilada, so the thinking goes, and everything is encompassed by the market. To consider things separately is redundant and inefficient. Leave the market to function on its own and it will resolve everything.

That's why almost nothing is being done now to actively prevent a swath of the population from sinking into poverty. Government seems blind and indifferent to the tragedy about to befall millions because it relies solely on the magic of the marketplace to fix everything. Here then is the government's simplistic strategy for dealing with the pandemic's economic effects: save the market and everything else will follow. And their way of saving the market is to backstop business.

Consistent with that, the CARES Act effectively enabled the Federal Reserve to hand a low interest credit card to large corporations so they could overcome the losses caused by the initial impact of COVID-19. They could buy back stocks with that card. They did, and it worked insofar as stock prices that had�plummeted were picked up off the floor and put back to where they were before the March crash. This was the three second rule for cookies applied to the stock market. The investor class was made whole. For now the strategy is a success, despite itself being a violation of the rule of non-interference in the marketplace, strictly speaking.

But although it temporarily boosts unemployment payments to some workers, the CARES Act is really the "Nobody CARES" Act regarding the well being of everyday people. Despite its $1,200 bonanza, piles of unpaid bills remain on ordinary people's kitchen counters. Working people wrestle with worries of how they can ever catch up. They can't get to sleep at night as they try not to think of the day when the sheriff might come and pile all their belongings on the sidewalk. They are dependant on the magic of the marketplace to rescue them before they drown.

But here's a sobering point: belief in the cornucopia of the market, dubbed "trickle down economics" since its inception in the 1980's, has produced no income gain for workers in forty years and has led to the greatest income inequality in all of human history. So don't hold your breath.

What's potentially worse, there might be a follow on crisis created by reckless corporate spending, enabled by that sweet Fed special offer credit card. Corporate debt could combine with reduced demand due to so many people being out of a job. This is likely to produce another economic maelstrom, and soon. The Fed will respond again with another supply-side, businness friendly infusion of credit and cash, but will that work? After all, there must be a limit on that Fed card. One thing is for sure, if there's another storm that causes the investing class to take on water, it will certainly drown the average working person.

If the government were to change tack immediately, putting money in the hands of people rather than big business, it might avoid a perfect storm. But the present orthodoxy is supply-side, and we're going down with it. Full speed ahead.

Thanks to Obama, Hillary, Joe, and Nancy

If the coronavirus were as addled as Trump followers it would have bought his perpetual river of bullshit and be gone by now. Over and over he has failed to act and refused to view the situation in any terms other than the stock market and his reelection. He flings out inane red herrings, blames anyone other than himself for the miasma he has created through his incompetence, and meanwhile ridiculously declares what a stupendous job he's doing. He is a clown of epic proportion, but his followers buy his bullshit even as they get sick and die.

That the best the Democratic Party can come up with as a challenger to Trump is goofy Joe Biden explains why there is even a place for a demagogue like Trump. Joe's signature career achievement has been to clear the path for credit card companies, to the disadvantage of average borrowers. Doing her part to advance Democratic disillusionment, Nancy Pelosi had herself filmed in the lap of luxury in a "Let them eat chocolate!" moment.

Obama failed to support unions and "foamed the runway" for crooked bankers after the 2008 crash. Hillary effectively told distressed working people to go shit in their hats. As result, we are likely to have another 4 years of a depraved orange psycho screwing everyday people behind the scenes to the limitless advantage of the rich. Fizz goes the country.

where do we go from here?

in response to the public's heightened awareness and disgust over racially motivated police brutality, the dragoons have reacted viciously against protesters of all colors, and also against journalists and bystanders. when they deal with protestors, the dragoons revert to their reptilian brain. they corner protestors, and when those protestors have no escape the dragoons pummel them, mace them, attack them with flash grenades, tear gas them, and shoot them with rubber bullets. since the protestors are within their rights to speak and present no danger to the dragoons, this is an act of sadistic retribution, not law enforcement. many, many civilians have been seriously harmed and suffered permanent damage, probably including cognitive loss.

this is what the dragoons do to those who are not rioting, those just voicing their opinion. but the police also goad and provoke protestors with their brutality, which is not only for the dragoons' entertainment and to satisfy their lust for domination, but is done in the hope of starting a riot which the press will report and thereby undermine the validity of the protest in the eyes of timid TV viewers. also, police authorities are almost certainly deploying agent provocateurs for the purpose of igniting riots.

many of the police are returning vets who probably view the public in the same way they viewed civilian Iraqis or Afghans, as the occupied enemy.they ride around in armored personnel carriers, screaming at civilians who are not even protesting, and sometimes assault them as well. they have been encouraged to be especially brutal by Donald Trump, who always projects authoritarianism.

in the minds�of authoritarians, you should never have the temerity to protest. perhaps the Constitution guarantees you free speech, but that right ends short of your ever daring to criticize the modus operandi of those in control. your infraction is especially serious where it promotes a liberal cause. notice that right wing protestors parade around carrying assault style weapons and the dragoons do nothing and even fraternize with them. more or less, they're both on the same side, that of draconian authority.

Divide and Conquer As Always

At the moment, there are riots in reaction to extreme police brutality directed against black people. Chances are that the situation will be presented in the media not as sympathetic to the oppressed, but emphasized as menacing to the white community. Rather than find common cause as they should, white people will once again allow themselves to be frightened into a defensive mentality as they were in the 1970's. This in turn led to the election� of Reagan, Margaret Thatcher's US counterpart.

The government will come down hard on the rioters, not because it fears them, but because it fears the possibility of the white population waking up to their common interests and siding with the protestors. After all, now is the time when people would be most likely to recognize the general oppression visited on them by the market-based neoliberal paradigm.

But that will never happen. Sleep tight Richie Rich, the plebes will kill one another or starve to death before they figure it out.

The Looming Financial Crisis and Death by Austerity

When the coronavirus has killed another 100K people, perhaps in another 6 months to a year, it might finally slow down, but we will still be left with a general population that is financially and socially ravaged. The government did little-to-nothing to help everyday people survive the pandemic (got any Lysol yet?), so it is reasonable to expect it will do little to save them when the economic tsunami hits.

In fact, the government will use the excuse that the debt incurred during its shaking a stick at COVID-19 necessitates AUSTERITY, the complete opposite of helping. No argument for paying through repeal of the recently enacted massive tax break to the rich will be raised, so the debt must come out of the hides of the people.� Take solace in the fact the CARES Act accomplished a colossal transfer of wealth upward to the 1%. This will not feed your children, however.

There is only one solution. Eat the rich!

But I kid, we will never counterattack, we will suffer and die, blaming ourselves. It's what we do. Even if we were to strike and protest, Donny Demento would send in the military to "dominate" us and Chuck and Nancy would do no more to stop the slaughter than virtue signal. They are post New Deal Demoflats, and that's the limit of their range as proscribed by their wealthy donors.

Will Calamity Don get his Reichstag Fire?

Things aren't looking great for the reelection of Donald J. Trump in November. However, if the riots occurring in response to the latest police killing of an unarmed black man can be stoked, his reelection chances will increase. He has an indisputable talent for knowing how to use people's anger, fear, and discontent to get out in front a crowd. That is why he is making incendiary remarks/tweets about the situation in Minneapolis: if he can parley the situation into something akin to the 1970's riots, he will vastly improve his chances.

Roughly, the math is this: around 30% of voters are devoted to him, 45% loathe him, leaving another 25% who are perennially noncommittal and apt to split down the middle. This leaves him with less than 50% of the vote. But if television news starts showing scary riots night after night (which they will because they are enslaved to ratings), many white voters will be frightened. Everyone in the business of influencing voters knows that people vote more conservatively when they are scared or depressed. He might then get 20% of the noncommittal vote, bringing him to 50%. And if his machine can scare the right voters at the right moment, he might even get a few defectors from the Democratic camp. Voila, 50%+, a reelection win!

The parallels to 1930's Germany here are astounding. Hitler scapegoated Jews; Trump scapegoats immigrants. In Germany, the great fear was the Communist Party; in the heart of the USA today there is racial prejudice and enormous fear of black retribution. The Weimar Republic was corrupt and failed the common people; the Democratic Party is corrupt and stiffs working people in favor of its rich donors. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to consolidate power; Trump is lining up to use the riots. And of course, both Trump and Hitler are masterful at mining discontent (the former actually learned his craft from studying the speeches of the latter, according to his first wife).

(Two Netflix movies vividly illustrate the parallels: "Babylon Berlin", a very serious and intriguing dramatic series that is now dubbed over in English; "Look Who's Back", a black commedy in German with subtitles that will singe your hair off. Picture Hitler riding around in a pink maid service van while he mines the volk's discontents.)

Imagine being anti-abortion but also against free universal childcare and TANF (food stamps). It's like extolling puppies then feeding them to alligators.

After the Mussolini of Manhattan, then What?

Although it would be blissful come November to dispatch the Mussolini of Manhattan back to some Langolier infested golf course, taking the rest of his kakistocracy with him, we would still be living in a society with intensifying inequality and increasing deprivation for the many. There will soon be no middle class left at all, just the ultra-rich and their retainers making up around a fifth of the population, with the rest of us living a marginal, precarious existence with no path to salvation. The country was broken before Trump even started The Apprentice and it will remain broken when he's long forgotten.

The Voting Game

Remember playing "Monkey-in-the-Middle"? Of course you do. You probably remember being tormented by two bigger kids who skillfully tossed a ball back and forth just out of your reach until you were exhausted and humiliated. There is a grownup version of that game. It's called voting. You go to the polls and select between Democrats (Pelosi-Schumer) and Republicans (Trump-McConnell)and no matter which you choose they always keep a decent life just out of your reach.

Arbeit Macht Frei???

Business is reopening in some states, forcing people to return and rejoin "essential" workers who have been on the job all along. Elsewhere, mobs shout for their "freedom", demanding an end to self-isolation. This pairing of forced work along with touting freedom evokes the haunting phrase, "Work brings freedom", written as "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the gate at Auschwitz.

According to Benito Mussolini, "The definition of fascism is the marriage of corporation and state." Here and now we have vulnerable, powerless people being coerced to expose themselves and their families to contagion in order to protect financial interests and bolster political aims. Further, the armed mobs are actually underwritten by right wing billionaires Koch and Betsy DeVos. Looks like fascism, according to Mussolini's definition of it, is enjoying a resurgence.

Forgotten Value of the Intangible

Decency and empathy cannot be commodified. Neither can conscience. Neoliberal capitalism does not even acknowledge the existence of these qualities because they can't be traded at an established price in the market. And because market based thinking controls everything now, these traits have been pushed out and forgotten. They were not attacked directly, they were just ignored to the extent they now don't even register in the zeitgeist. They are gone from discourse, missing in everyday interactions, even banished from religion.

Neoliberal capitalism is essentially "dog-eat-dog" passed off as a highbrow philosophy. It was peddled initially by those who feared socialism because it threatened their class. Then it was picked up by "economists" (marketing specialists� for the 1%) who foisted it on two world leaders, at least one of whom was in the early stage of dementia. It was given a patina of scientific validity by attaching it to game theory which said a stable society could exist if everyone were to look out only for his or her interests --and gave no consideration to others. The mathematician whose work they used created a game to illustrate his work. He playfully named his game, "Fuck You Buddy". We have consequently arrived at adystopian state that while stable is one in which the few own everything and the rest go begging.

Because of its emphasis on only the self, a corollary of neoliberalism is that we are each an atomized individual. There is no such thing as society. There is no basis for the commons. Also, there is no purpose in collective action. This last leaves the ordinary person powerless with respect to the boss, the politician, and the plutocrat. This corollary makes the institution of neoliberalsim immune to attack by any self-preservation response.

We are at a point at which empathy, decency, conscience, and even honor are words belonging to a dead language. Because of it we have a world that is dominated by the sociopath and a playground for the psychopath. What comes next will be either a democratic upheaval or totalitarian control.

Contact Tracing is for Sissies

Contact Tracing: 1) identify an infected person via universal testing; 2) trace all that person's contacts and test and quarantine them. This strategy will enable health officials to slow or stop the spread of communicable disease.

This is something China and South Korea did months ago, and they greatly slowed the contagion. With President Donald J. Trump at the helm, we are only beginning to test widely, and there still isn't any comprehensive plan for tracking. News flash: there won't be so long as he's president.

And guess what? We're number #1 now! The USA has the highest number of infections globally and the highest death toll. Donny and his Minni-Me, Jarad, will tell you endlessly that the job they've been doing is FANTASTIC. You have to be a true believer to buy it, otherwise you must be a commie/socialist sissie snowflake.

Too Late Now for Duck and Cover

When I was a kid growing up in Cambridge Mass. in the 1950's, I remember the cold war nuclear scare, the era of "duck and cover".� During drills we poured out of our classrooms into the center hall of Agassiz Elementary (since razed, rebuilt, and renamed) and pressed against the walls in a kneeling position with our heads covered by our folded arms.

Terrifying, right? Not a bit of it. Some kid named Lyons, the class wit, was always on queue with his, "Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye!" We chuckled. We didn't believe for a second grownups were capable of blowing up the planet, so this was just a lark for us, a break from drilling the times tables. We couldn't believe that the same adults who went on obsessively about our looking both ways when we crossed the street would ever let us kids incinerate in a nuclear Armageddon. They would pull back before it came to that. Sanity would win out, we kids thought. We were right.

Being working class in the 1950's was to live in a world of optimism. My parents both worked at least one job each at all times. Money came in. There was enough for cars, vacations, and Christmas presents. They hustled, but it was not done in desperation. Wages were high because of unions� and the more you worked the more you made. There a was opportunity for all. My parents, children of the depression, were happy to put in the extra effort to get the material things they had been denied in their youth.

Everything was rosey for everyone (at least for most whites). You didn't need higher education or specialized skills to make headway. You just had to want to work and you would be rewarded for the time you put in. Although my generation would come to look at our parents' consumerism� critically, you can't deny the feeling of being free to build a better life that existed in that time. My parents, so poor in their childhood, retired comfortably with pensions, property, and money in the bank.

Personally, I have done OK in the intervening years. Used the WWII GI Bill (the good one) to get a degree in engineering. I was able to maintain a decent lifestyle for myself and my family, although nothing extravagant. We were able to live comfortably on my income, so my wife was able to stay home with the kids, which was uncommon. Things were smooth, so smooth that I missed what was going on in the world of everyday people. People were being dealt a skinnier and skinnier hand over time. Now, sadly, I am watching my kids struggle where my parents had thrived and I cruised.

I was aware that Reagan was beating the hell out of unions and I realized that would probably reduce income for everyday people. After all, the forty hour work week, eight hour day, good pay and overtime were gifts from unions and the left in general. Reagan was out to put an end to that era of dominant worker power and he succeeded. What I failed to anticipate was the devastating loss for the working class that would result.

Long story short: it's a pay-to-play electoral system; the unions once paid for the Democratic side while business paid to elect Republicans. After Reagan busted unions, the Democrats had to find new patrons and turned to wealthy sources, which meant serving the same donor class as the Republicans. This left ordinary people without representation, unprotected and atomized.

Well, that's it. No power, no luck. The one percent eventually stripped people of good jobs and their wealth. Now it loans them money until payday so they can buy food and make car payments to enable them to keep getting to work and making substandard wages. People are trapped. They are slaves.

This didn't just happen. Taking away the power of working people was accomplished meticulously according to a long term plan. Rich right wingers have disempowered and impoverished everyday people in a 50 years class war that has been a resounding success. Paradoxically, workers aren't even aware they have been assaulted, although they can't ignore the reality that they have indeed been conquered. They are clueless as to the source of their woes, so they buy into memes like they were displaced by automation, or that they lack enough of the right education, or that the damn Blacks/Mexicans/Chinese screwed them. That kind of bullshit propaganda is working like a charm.

And guess what? There is no going back. The system is now set and hardened to funnel all wealth to the rich and none to the rest. This is just the way it is now.

Neither political party cares about you and while the Republican Party openly shows its disdain and hostility (Mitt Romney said he can't do anything for 47% of the population) the Democrats are leading you to the same slaughterhouse, only pretending to care about your condition along the way.

The US is devolving toward a Brazilian social-economic model: two classes, one small and privileged and one large and continuously living on the edge. There is nothing to be done about this shy of a revolution, and Americans are just too well trained and obedient for that sort of thing. We are even now getting used to a system with 80% or more living in precarity and desperation while those in the top tier live better than gods. In between is a thin layer of professionals that serves the top, sort of like remora attaching to sharks with their suckers in a symbiotic relationship. (Been there, done that.)

That's it. Where it concerns average people having any real hope of a decent future, the USA is a wasteland, a workhouse, a plantation. The USA, as we knew it in the decades after WWII, is gone. It just doesn't exist anymore. Period.

Like the class clown said, "Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye!" We're not chuckling anymore though. Joke's on us. Joke's on our kids and grandkids. There might never be a return to normal.

Decency from out of Eire

While the US carries on its time honored tradition of ignoring and actively undermining the well being of Native Americans, the Irish have been donating to a COVID-19 fund for Navajo and Hopi. Seems surprising, but there is a link. During the Great Famine, the Choctaw Nation made a donation to Irish relief. The Choctaw did this despite just having been pitilessly driven to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.

There's an old joke about the definition of Irish Alzheimers: you forget everything but your grudges. Well, apparently there's a flip side to that tenaciousness of memory: you never forget a kindness either and you don't take a humane gesture for granted, ever. Though it was more than a century and a half ago, it might as well have been yesterday.

This ain't no market based solution. It's empathy, solidarity, and a kinship with fellow human beings. It's decency and honor too, and with that there's the hope the Irish might save the world. Again.

Incidentally, during the famine, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire defied British edict and shipped food into Cork. That's right, the Muslim leader took pity on the starving and did The Right Thing. Decency is not a commodity. We are all in this together.

Out of the Trenches! Charge!

Forcing everyday people to go back to work now, especially without widespread available testing, is like ordering those pointless charges from the trenches in WWI. Like the pitiable doughboys forced to leave safety to be cut down as soon as they climbed up on open ground, workers will succumb to the virus, which will exhibit an immediate resurgence. But like the generals on both sides during that previous era of unrelenting slaughter, today's masters of our universe appear eager to sacrifice lives if there's some chance or belief that it will boost GDP and rescue the financial assets of the investing class.

Would that our politicians were less willing to sit in a bunker in DC and give the order "Charge!" Would that our politicians didn't begrudge everyday people the chance just to survive. However, they work for the top one percent, and this is shaping up to be the "Let the 47 percent die and decrease the surplus population" inflection point in US history. This is your world on neoliberalism.

Bad Stats for the US of A

The US population represents only 4.4 percent of the world's total, however: it has over 20 percent of the world's prison population; it has 30 percent of the world's coronavirus cases. We're #1! --if you're just counting going to jail or getting sick and dying. But chins up, we also pay twice what anyone else pays for healthcare and our medical outcomes at every stage of life are half as good. Plus, we die younger than in most rich countries. Of course, being jailed, dying from COVID-19, and dying prematurely impacts people of color most, so white American Christians are fine with the status quo. They'll put up with the odd family member getting shafted or even dying if it means the blacks are still frozen out. Freedumb!

Seriously, the US overlords have been fantastically successful for more than 150 years at playing the races against each other to stay in power. Give the devil his due, that's impressive.

The question is, can The Donald turn on the charm hard enough in coming months to bamboozle The Gullible, to successfully wipe clear their memories of his insipid bungling and tragic failure to act during the pandemic? He's devastatingly good at double-talk and bombast, and they are as suggestible as they could be, so it's possible. Record of his dereliction could very well be be overpowered by his and son-in-law Jared's continuous repetition of the outrageous lie that they've done a FANTASTIC job during the pandemic.

Our ability to discern reality has been so weakened by the fair-and-balanced paradigm that fact is now optional and reality has become completely subservient to perception. Just repeat the Big Lie often enough and you can shoot somebody on Fifth Ave. and people would still love you --or cause thousands upon thousands of preventable deaths through incompetence and indifference to the well being of others and still come out smelling like a rose. What's more, you can rinse and repeat! Trump will continue letting people die and The Gullible will love him through it all, even when the dead are close to them.

Facts don't matter in this era, but let's look at the factual chronology of the epidemic just for argument's sake:

Trump did nothing in the early stage of the pandemic. He called it a hoax. He said there were only a couple of cases and that they would go away. His son-in-law Jared, Trump's Mini-Me, told him it would blow over and Trump accepted that. Secretary Azar, who has a background porking the sick in the pharmaceutical industry, was at least ringing the alarm bell, but Trump dismissed him.

Then came the oh-shit moment when the stock market dived as it became obvious to everyone but Jared and Trump that there was a tsunami coming. Randomly, Trump rose to action by closing the borders to some. It was too little too late, because the contagion was already planted and spreading within our borders. But it's all marketing and PR with Trump, so effective action is never a priority, not even a goal. The point was to give the stock market a Xanax, that's all.

Conspicuously missing from planning was the use of testing for the coronavirus. (It's still not a priority in mid May of 2020.) The proper way to deal with the pandemic would have been to identify the first cases, test those with whom they'd been in contact, and isolate them. This would have prevented the spread. But that's not our style. Because of a SNAFU and Trump's rejection of the use of tests developed in Germany, we have never had anything even close to adequate testing and it doesn't look as if we will during the pandemic.

When the Used Car Salesman in Chief finally got of his golden throne and stopped Tweeting for long enough to do something, it was to put us all on lock-down and self-isolation. This was a shotgun approach compared to testing and methodically isolating, but it was something.

One big problem during this lock-down is that this has not been supported logistically (big surprise). There is no hand sanitizer, there are no masks in stores. Supplies are rare. There is not even any facial tissue or toilet paper. We have been hunkering down, worried about coming in contact with an unseen virus that we don't have any means to guard against. Does anyone in D.C. upper circles get the continuous burden this puts on people?

But this is nothing compared to the lack of support to medical staff, hospitals, and states in general. Trump got a really slow start on providing the basics to deal with COVID-19. There's a shortage of protective gear for medical personnel and a lack of ventilators for the severely ill. Trump has refused to invoke his power to force production of these essentials. Probably because it's a really hard lift and he doesn't see any huge PR value to it. And when it comes to getting supplies to states, he's said that those in the federal government aren't shipping clerks, that nothing is his fault, and that states can fend for themselves --and compete against each other for essential supplies. When he has relented to provide something, he has made it conditional, based on whether a particular state has shown him enough appreciation personally.

As lock-down has ground on, Trump has discovered there's an economy beyond the stock market. Things like the GDP are getting clobbered. Not going to work is putting a burden on individuals who prior to the pandemic were one paycheck away from financial oblivion. Trump couldn't care less about these American workers though. His only bond with them is to mine their discontents for his political gain. What happens to them in reality is irrelevant.

Given this dynamic, it is unsurprising and even expected that the Trump regime would pivot and order an end to lock-down in order to get the economy rolling again in order to salvage his reelection chances. That giving up the only working defense we have against contagion, self-isolation, will result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of additional immediate deaths is not of any concern to Trump and the rest of his kakistocracy.

At first he said he would order an end to lock-down by Easter, then backed off when medical experts showed their unbending resistance. Then he said he would decide at some near point to start phasing out lock-down. Following that, because he was apparently informed that would put him on the hook for mass death, he switched to its being the responsibility of state governors to decide when to end isolation (preferably soon for his taste!)

Then came Trump's most masterful political move, the most blatant and daring since the Nazi Party burned down the Reichstag: he turned protesters, some of them armed with assault weapons, against those governors in their state capitals to pressure them to open up. The astroturf performance was coordinated by his inner circle, and the planning and execution was paid for by Betsy DeVos and Koch. From a machiavellian perspective, this was genius.

One state governor who didn't require pressure to throw his own constituents under the bus was Georgia's governor Brian Kemp. He abruptly undercut most of his state's lock-down in order to please his fuhrer and also to screw low wage workers in his state out of unemployment insurance. Of course, in a typical Trumpian double-cross, The Donald announced the very next day that Kemp was premature, but behind the scene it's likely Kemp was assured of compensation and reward. Makes you wonder if Pence's days are numbered and DJT is shopping for a new VP. At any rate, a joint Harvard-MIT analysis predicts Kemp's move will result in an additional seven thousand deaths by mid June. This was reported in The Guardian, not in American papers, and even if it had been Trump would have called it fake news about fake science pushed by elites in the Deep State.

Ultimately, the Trump Administration, being good capitalist actors, was not going to let this crisis go to waste and drew up a stimulus package that lavished money on large corporations, including defense, oil, and airline industries. It also purported to fund a rescue of small businesses, but that turned out to be ethereal. Big shock. In addition, it gave up to $1,200 to every individual of working age. That was a paltry buy-off to the plebes who will be in dire straights in the very near future, finding themselves unable to pay back bills and debt even if they still have a job. The 1200 is just cover for the further fleecing of the country by the oligarchs, and Baroness Nancy Pelosi and Count Chuck Schumer were whole heartedly in favor of the stimulus as written --in fact, they wrote it!

Neroliberalism and the US system of privately funded elections has shown the working class is without support from either party. The field is open for demagogues, and DJT has capitalized on that.

But the real agony for American working people ravaged by the epidemic and the recession to follow will come from the AUSTERITY that will be imposed afterward. It will be claimed that we are just too saddled by debt as a result and so we'll have to curtail aid to people in dire need. This will be pure 18 karat BULLSHIT because we print our own money and can do so with impunity up to the point it becomes inflationary. Without irony, even Dick Cheney said that the federal deficit is a meaningless figure.

However, this crisis is, again, too good of an opportunity to pass up. The oligarchy will cry DEBT!!! from the rooftops as an excuse to reduce spending for greatly needed social programs in the wake of the pandemic. If they really cared about the debt they would pay more in taxes, rather than less, but they don't want that! What they want is to own more of everything and the working class to own less. This alone gives them a sense of security and satisfaction.

And hey, dig those F35 stealth fighter-bombers! (aka Lemons) Worth every fuckin' penny, aren't they? Who needs food, clothes, and a roof over their head anyway?

Subsidizing Obsolete Oil

Giving federal money to oil companies is like subsidizing horse stables at the start of automobile mass production. As horses were made obsolete then, oil is doomed now to be replaced by renewable energy, wind, and solar. Not only is it destructive to all life on the planet, including human, it's uneconomic. Still, because big oil has effective lobbyists and lots of money at present to throw into politicians' election campaigns, they are wastefully and shamefully rewarded.

That's in normal times, but lavishing them with extra cash as part of the coronavirus bailout is tantamount to shredding money that could be spent on something useful to the rest of us, something like a fund to help out all the working people who will be out of a job and/or crushed under an avalanche of bills when this pandemic subsides.

This won't happen though because our system of government is pay-to-play and naturally, both parties are hopelessly corrupt.

The Marketplace has Spoken --so says Larry Summers, economic advisor to Joe Biden

Are you sick of never having enough money to make ends meet? Haven't seen regular pay raises in decades? Burdened with credit card debt from just trying to stay alive? Can't afford to send the kids to college, go on a vacation, or even get the car fixed?

Well, according to Larry Summers, who was just picked to be Biden's economic advisor, the marketplace has determined that you're just not worth that much to society, so you have no cause to complain. You're shit, that's all. Shut up.

So, there's your alternative to Trump. Congratulations and good luck.

He who smelt it dealt it?

"There has been so much unnecessary death in this country. It could have been stopped and stopped short, but somebody a long time ago it seems decided not to do it that way, and the whole world is suffering because of it." --Trump

The worst guy, Trump, in the worst system, neoliberal capitalism, together produced the worst outcome in the face of this pandemic. Don't expect anything to improve unless and until both are replaced. Meanwhile, if you don't succumb now to the coronavirus you will later to the draconian austerity neoliberals will impose --not out of true necessity, but because they will be allowed to use the economic crisis arising from the pandemic as cover to enable the few at the top to own more and more and more of everything.

The American Working Class -Making Do Without a Spine

The rich are taking all the money, as they have done for decades. The cumulative result is that they own almost everything and they get more of the pie every day. They charge us to use what was once ours or was part of the commons. This was not accidental, they planned it. Because the New Deal took away their power and gave it to unions and "liberals", they came up with a multi-pronged plan to regain the upper hand. (Outlined in the "Powell Memo", which was written in the 1970's for the Chamber of Commerce by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.)

Step by step they strip mined the working class. They had time and plenty of money, so they patiently put their plan to work. They busted unions, took over universities, divided the working class along the fracture lines of guns, race, and abortion, and attacked and dismantled public education.They privatized, privatized, privatized. The effect since 1980 has been to redistribute all wealth upward.

If you dare to suggest distributing wealth downward they scream that you're a socialist! So what? They receive handouts all the time. Large corporations that pay no taxes get federal money and tax concessions non-stop. After the 2008 crash large financial institutions were lavished with cash which they used to buy back their shares, making CEOs richer and pumping up the stock market. They also bought up foreclosed houses in bulk, then turned around and rented them back to their former owner-occupants. Now during the pandemic they are again receiving vast sums from the federal government which they will use for the same purposes this time.

Most importantly, the rich just got an enormous tax break under the Trump administration. That was item #1 on their wish list for more than a decade. They will use the deficit this creates as an excuse to further dismantle the social safety net (and not prepare for the next pandemic either). Next they are coming after Social Security and the US Post Office. Also, we will continue to be the only major country without universal health care.

In short, working people are being ravaged by the rich in a 40 year class war that there doesn't seem any way to stop because most of us aren't even aware it's happening. People vaguely understand they're being turned into serfs, but rather than blame corporations that shipped millions of good paying jobs overseas, workers follow red herring thrown out by their overloards.

We obediently blame minorities and China for our lost jobs, the disapearence of a living wage, and permenant indebtedness. We blame immigrants from below our southern border who are virtual slaves in the fields and slaughter houses rather than big agriculture that's squeezing workers and farmers. Another outrageously stupid canard is blaming black people for "using up all the medical care" rather than placing the blame correctly on the insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry which charges us up to forty times what any other country pays for the same medicines.

There is a way to avoid being turned into serfs: tell the fat cats "No more, enough is enough!" But we Americans are so independent and freedom loving that we will continue to allow the oligarchy to bamboozle and decimate us. That is to say, we're so afraid, timid, cowardly, and submissive that we won't do a goddamned thing and will continue to hide within our fantasies even as we are being buried.

We insist on ignoring reality. We fondle our guns to feel momentarily powerful and then gawk at pictures of exorbitant F-35 fighters to feel safer. All while the kids are sick so we must go online to see if there's some herbal cure we can get from Amazon. Put it on the credit card. Hey, later we can join a white power group to compensate for our craven capitulation to the rich! And after that we can watch Trump speak, he's soooooooo stroooooong! (if by strong you mean cruel).

We're getting exactly what we deserve. We, the American working class, have anesthetized brains and mouse guts. We will turn our blessed guns on ourselves before we dare to confront the oligarchs.

Feels like 1933

By reopening Trump claims to be leading us into war against the virus, by which he really means sending us over the top without reconnaissance and no cover. He wants us to reenact those pointless, wasteful bursts from the trenches during WWI that littered the open ground with rotting corpses and didn't accomplish anything. He'll do whatever it takes to boost the stock market to try to salvage his reelection.

First he says, "I'm in charge", then when told that'll put him in the frame for countless deaths he switches to "It's up to the state governors", then he sends in armed minions (underwritten by Koch and Betsy Devos) to intimidate those governors into doing what he wants so that they will take the blame, not him. Very sly. You can almost smell the Reichstag burning.

Let Georgia's poor die and decrease the surplus populationm -if it pleases The Donald.

Georgia Governor Kemp's curtailing isolation while the epidemic is raging and before test kits are available is playing Russian roulette with lives. A week or so ago Kemp admitted that he hadn't known COVID-19 could be spread by people who were not yet symptomatic. Now he says he understands the consequences of what he's doing in opening up restaurants, movie theaters, massage therapists, nail salons, and bowling alleys. Oblivious then, but focused now?

What he's really saying is "Go back to work or starve because I'm not paying waitresses and bartenders to stay at home!" That and "This one's for you Mr. Trump!" This is murderous and craven. He might be the worst guy that ever stole a gubernatorial election.

What happens to restaurant employees who are expected to return to work ? Do they loose unemployment insurance if they decline? Does Kemp have a supply of face masks and gloves for them? Freely available COVID-19 testing? They have no health insurance, so does he have a program to treat them when they get sick? Will he deploy an army of inspectors traveling around Georgia to enforce distancing rules at all their work places? Does he take these things into account when he says he understands?

Or is he just sucking up to Trump and trying to save money?

He campaigned holding a shotgun and posing with his pickup truck. He elected himself by taking voting rights away from tens of thousands of young and minority people. Now he's effectively sending hundreds of workers to their deaths to avoid paying them unemployment insurance and to please a tyrant who threw him under the bus the very next day saying he disagreed with the decision.

Things don't look too rosy anymore for Atlanta, the city once touted as "too busy to hate".

P.S. Harvard and MIT have released an analysis projecting an extra seven thousasnd deaths in Georgia by mid June as a result of Kemp's move.

White Supremacists Get a Pass from the Cops

When lefties hold a demonstration, the cops show up in force and are often quick to pepper spray, stun, beat, and arrest them. When right wingers hold one, toting handguns and assault riffles, the cops are nowhere to be seen. The obvious conclusions are that either the cops are sympathetic to right wing groups or that the intimidation tactic of bringing guns is working and the cops are just afraid. Either way, fascism has a leg up.

This is an echo of the past. In 1930's Germany the police definitely considered communists a bigger threat than Hitler's brown shirts and often gunned down the former while abetting the latter. Hear the rhyme?

To be fair, all law enforcement isn't completely in the bag for the right, not yet. The FBI has been stopping right wing cells from carrying out mass murder plots. Because they pose an imminent threat of violence and they have avowed to start a civil war, federal law enforcement is duty bound to suppress them. But as time goes on, the toleration in official circles toward right wing violence might shift.� Already Trump has bragged that "his people" have the guns, creepily insinuating that he will turn them loose in a civil war against those not in obeisance to Him.

Biden's Healthcare Non Sequitur

Biden maintains that a system in which everyone has healthcare is no better than one that leaves millions untreated even in ordinary times. His rationale for this is that Italy has universal care but suffered great losses in the pandemic. However, Italy's difficulties were due to initially not imposing strict isolation measures, so their type of healthcare system is irrelevant.

Tragically, the choice in November is lining up to be one between Dumb and Dumber, or one who Twitters while contagion spreads and another who denies reality in the aftermath. The asshole and the idiot go head to head.

Class Competition

The rich are rolling the American people. Have been for a long, long time, are doing it right now, and they will continue. In the US, once unions were gone the Democratic Party turned to the professional class and Silicon Valley for funding, so workers no longer have a voice. If you're not a fat cat the Republicans don't care about you, and if you're not a tech wonderkind the Democrats will tell you, "Go fish."

Workers in the US� are politically defenseless, continuously beaten down by capitalists who only know two words: Mine! and More! Neither political party will raise a finger to check the wealthy from stealing every scrap away from the vast working majority. Every day they take more and leave you with less. They own more of everything and demand rent for it.

Wake up.

It's not that all rich are sadistic (although some are), it's that the full mouth wants to keep on eating. Your standing in the world is your set point. Whether you make billions or you are trying to squeeze by on an ordinary wage, the one thing you are certain to be adamant about is not having to do with less. If possible, you even want to rake in a little more just for insurance, and that goes whether you are at the top or at the bottom. Rich people are at least as worried about going broke as poor people are. It's all relative.

So, the thing to do is just explain to the affluent that they are taking more than their fair share, that this is causing inequality and great suffering on the part of the many,� and that redistribution of wealth combined with a stronger social safety net would make the world a better place in which everyone felt happier and more secure.

Yeah, right.

Suspension of payroll taxes: Social Security privitization, CHECK!

Refusal to include USPS in stimulus package: privitization of Postal Service, CHECK!

In the US people fear the government; in France the government fears the people.

...Would there be more ventilators if there were more guillotines?

We Get What We Deserve

Amazon, one of the biggest employers in the world, treats its employees like galley slaves during the best of times. Now Emperor Bezos has doubled down and is forcing people to come to work sick and infect the rest of his workers in the process. He has obviously done the math and determined this is the most lucrative option for his company and himself at this moment.

Amazon and Walmart are monopolies, and according to law should not even exist, but we all were put to sleep regarding the need to protect the market from towering empires in the retail and financial world. Things are very unlikely to change because both parties are completely in accord with whatever mega donors desire. It's as if Bizarro Teddy Roosevelt were in charge. It's not just Donny I'm talking about here, but all "mainstream" politicians. Joe Biden has fucked the consumer in his service to credit card companies for decades. Nearly (?) everyone is bought by big money and is a tool of the one percent. Money is free speech, after all!

Glaring proof of this is the stimulus package just offered by the political class. The $1200 onetime payment granted to the plebes has been dubbed "the cheese in the trap". It enables the gov to give $500B in loan guarantees to corporations who will use it to gobble up distressed assets resulting from the pandemic. Donny has already indicated there will be no accountability, and you know what they will do with the money? They will buy your foreclosed house in six months when you have defaulted because you had no income other than that astronomical $1200 chunk of cheese.

It's the same deal as after the 2008 crash. Maybe Donny can get Obama to bullshit us all again when it happens. The rentiers are out to own it all, and our honorable pols are happy to oblige.

But let's be absolutely honest, we the people are�ultimately to blame. We don't care that Bezos abuses his workers. We are willing to accept crumbs because we are too fearful and too lazy to mount a defense. We squirm our way to the center of the herd and ignore the death shrieks from those on the edges as they are devoured by lions.

We get what we deserve.

DNC Shills of The Phew

A couple of days before he dropped out of the race, Bernie Sanders appeared on The Phew where he was assailed for not already having dropped out. He was aggressively challenged and asked the question as to how Medicare for All would have been of any help during this pandemic. The question illustrates the elitist, out of touch attitude of rich mainstream Democratic shills and their unquestioned fealty to the DNC.

Let's rephrase the question: "Given that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their job -and with it their employer provided medical insurance- how could guaranteed universal healthcare have helped those people who are now embroiled in a healthcare nightmare?"

It's an amazingly stupid question, isn't it? You could go into the ramifications such as people continuing to go to work to preserve their health insurance and thereby catching/spreading the virus, and while that's a valid point, it's only a secondary effect. The real issue, which those at The Phew seem inherently unable to grasp (given their close association to the DNC and their enormous paychecks) is that WORKING PEOPLE WOULD HAVE ACCESS TO TREATMENT DURING A PANDEMIC!!!

The wizards on The Phew live in a bubble. They are as dumb as the dumbest Trump supporters. If their aim is to try to convince me to vote for Biden/VISA in November it hasn't worked, and if anything has had the opposite effect. Certainly, the lesser of two evils is less evil, but both candidates are so profoundly in the pocket of the plutocracy that their shared level of evil is astounding,

Hillary me once, shame on you; Biden me next, shame on me.

Epitaph for the 99%

After all he's done and is still doing to rescue working people, they didn't turn out for Bernie Sanders. He's fighting the plutocracy to give people a better life with some dignity. They aren't paying attention. They are app sodden somnambulists. They will be devoured by monopolies and banks. They have passively chosen the Trump/Biden/Hillary/McConnell/Schumer/Pelosi hydra that will scour their bones.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now Baby

last time we had a crisis it was entirely in the financial sector and the federal government responded by lavishing banks and Wall St. with taxpayers' money. now in a biological crisis, the government is doing it once more. the lion's share of the stimulus/aid package goes to US international corporations. some goes to workers, a max of a twelve hundred in the form of a one time payment per individual. nothing is being said about what will be done when the food runs out.

on the last go-around, the financial sector used the bailout money to buy up assets whose value had been deflated in the crisis. hedge funds were the ones on the courthouse steps with cash in hand snapping up foreclosed houses once owned by families. it turned around and rented the houses back to families who were transitioned from owner to tenant. once housing prices rebounded, hedge funds put the properties on the market again to reap a large profit. one wonders if there might have been cases where a foreclosed owner actually ended up buying back the same house, having forfeited all equity in it during the first crisis. it's possible.

after the current crisis, will the financial sector snap up distressed properties at fire sale prices again? will they do it with the money given them by the taxpayer in this stimulus package? of course they will. why wouldn't they? does anyone seriously think they will be constrained by ethics or morality! they will do whatever the gov lets them, plus some. that much more wealth will have been taken from working people and handed to the wealthy.

this periodic draining of workers' assets is kind of like giving blood. you can give a pint and safely go back in a couple of months and give again. i did this for years. the only difference is that donating blood doesn't tangibly set you back. we live in a rentier world. those at the top increasingly own everything, and stimulus packages like this are one way they can score a step gain in their holdings. they will get it all anyway, eventually. in a rentier system the lower class constantly pays the upper class for the use of all needs, which are owned by the latter. workers are fated to pay them from birth to the grave.

but why wait to drain the lower class slowly when there's an opportunity to take a large windfall in an instant? the people in charge are as crafty as they are greedy. Disaster Capitalism dictates that in a crisis the top dogs move in and grab whatever they can while the average schlub is reeling. it isn't just capital assets either. right now the gov is suspending EPA rules so that corporations can pollute freely. kids near a manufacturing plant will be born with defects as a result, but to worry about that will be said to be communistic. we will be gas-lighted.

if the ruling class plays its cards right and doesn't kill the golden goose, this can go on forever. 90% will be serfs and about 10% will live to fluff the top 0.01%. it's a sustainable system as long as nobody hips the lower class to the vampires. with their control of the media, tranquilization of the masses by religion, and adroit use of demagoguery,� the vampires have little to fear.

freedom

We are on our own. Aggressive testing and early action would have helped greatly, but the window for that has long since closed. Now we're "sheltering in place", waiting for the inevitable, and we're running out of the very things we need to save ourselves and our families. Can't get antiseptic wipes, hand sanitizer, Tylenol, or tissues. Even the ingredients for DIY versions of hygienic supplies are in short supply. We are up the creek without a paddle.

Public health turns out to be an abstraction, not something we can actually depend on to function. Hospitals are short on everything, and the president suggests that it's all due to medical personnel stealing supplies and selling them on the black market. We should be absolutely problem-free at this point, because if "government IS the problem", as we have been told, there's little to none of it left around now to spoil things.

And while Trump sits on his golden throne and tweets (not being talented enough to play a violin), his apparent challenger, Biden, is too timid to criticize him for his ongoing disastrous mistakes. So, we sit around and wonder when IT will find us and whether it will kill our loved ones. We are on our own. A pox on both parties.

Only the Right People get to Vote

Crystal Mason served time for tax fraud. After she was released, she voted in the 2016 election, or tried to. She was allowed to submit a provisional ballot, which was subsequently thrown out. Seems that because she was still on probation it was too soon for her to exercise her voting right in her state.

So, the ballot was tossed out and that was the end of the story, right? No! Ms Mason is African-American and the state is Texas. Somebody in the system resolved to go after her with a vengeance. She was charged with voter fraud, and even though her vote wasn't counted she has been sentenced to another five years in jail. The court accepts that it was unintentional and that the rules are confusing, but ignorance of the (arcane) law is no excuse. Not in Texas, especially not for people like Ms Mason.

Meanwhile, President Trump has said the quiet part out loud again and admitted that if everyone were allowed to vote, Republicans would never get into office again. And he wants to suspend habeas corpus.

Any questions?

If old Sam Donaldson came back as a ghost
seeking to do what he loved to do most
he's say first,"Let's have some fun,
let's go flay that son of a gun!"

"He doesn't like questions
that make him look bad?
Then he'd better get ready
to answer to dad."

"If he thinks he can bully
this seasoned old troop
I'll render him down
to an orangey goop."

"This is my country
and I won't brook the man
who tweets like a tyrant
on a solid gold can."

"Once he's seen me
he'll no longer be cruel,
but a blubbering, stammering,
rectified fool."

He will ne're again bluster
or try spike the scoop
of a guy with true gumption
in a working man's toup.

Trumpers

Trump followers despise elites, but only educated elites. they trust business elites, however. this means that they will hector and reject those with technical expertise and allow business people to step in even if they have no idea of what they're doing. think Trump v CORVID-19, believing he can bullshit his way through the pandemic.

i understand their negative reaction to the professional class in that during past decades experts have relegated them to a permanent inferior position. it all started when the Democratic party began courting the managerial class during the McGovern campaign, distancing itself from unions, and hence working people. the brave new world that has resulted treats workers as gammas, barely human and only slightly above dumb apes. so, they react by embracing a demagouge. not the first time in modern history.

but their faith in the business elites is puzzling. professionals dismiss them, but business elites steal from them, exploit them, and ultimately devour them, so it seems strange they would throw in with their overlords. perhaps the influence of religion explains it to some extent: religious leaders and movements have been supported financially by conservative business for a very long time and have dutifully inculcated reverence for the free market in their parishioners.

it might also be that Trump's followers strongly believe in their chances of becoming rich themselves, so they feel they have common cause with business elites. it's an illusion, but it might be a source of hope to them. finally, the misogynistic, racist bully Trump probably appeals to many of them on a personal level. after all, they are authoritarion followers.

for whatever reason, they have put Trump in office and we now have a sleazy used car salesman handling the country's response to a pandemic, and doing it in a comedically bad and tragic way.

No Hand Sanitizer for You!

It's been weeks, and you still can't buy hand sanitizer or tissues at the grocery store. Forget CORVID-19 testing, that boat has sailed! It's too late to use that tool to head the virus off at the pass. We didn't have any horses. Didn't order any. Now we have to fight the virus on open ground and blind. Without even hand sanitizer.

We have no idea who is infected, how many, or whom to quarantine, so we have to assume it's everybody and shelter in place. This crisis was handled worse than it could ever have been in any worst case scenario, and now it's actually about to get worse: the administration and the right wing is now saying people should be allowed to die so that the stock market might live. This is a crowning achievement for neoliberalism.

While hospitals run out of basic supplies, Trump tweets insults at state politicians whom he thinks haven't been as appreciative to him personally as they should be, with the implication they won't get any ventilators at all if they don't change their tone. One cannot injure the feelings of the boy king and escape retribution!

To recap: we are sheltering in place without any idea why we can't get basic supplies to make it possible; we are hearing that at some point the federal government and Republican run states will blow a whistle and everyone will pour put into the streets and cross-contaminate so that the weak can be culled and the stock market thereby freed to rebound.

This would make a great Marx Brothers movie plot, except maybe it's a little too absurd even for that. "And how this moron got into my pajamas I'll never know!" The answer is simple: Republicans are demonic, Democrats are feeble, and 40% of people are grossly misled and willfully ignorant.

Soylent Green is What? or Altruism for Some, Self Interest for Others

Courtesy of Republican Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, we now have a foreshadowing of what Trumps's market based solution to COVID-19 is: parricide.

Because self isolation and quarantine are taking a toll on the economy, Patrick suggests we go back to business as usual and the at-risk elderly simpley chance making the supreme sacrifice, as he says he is willing to do for the sake of his six grandchildren. This is consistent with Trump's desire to cancel isolation and get the economy back up and running in time for his reelection. Patrick also seems like a guy who has the assurance of access to a ventilator if he needs one.

So, the Solution being pitched here pits the young against the elderly, divide and conquer. Granny might have to die, but at least the stock market will recover quickly. Granny's demise should compensate for the administration's gross negligence in failing to prepare for the pandemic.

The plan won't work though, it's a ruse. Many more than the elderly would die if we just quit fighting now and allowed nature to take its course. Patrick/Trump want you to think its just unproductive old people that would perish in the tsunami of COVID-19 cases that would follow, but tens of thousands of others would be sacrificed as well on the altar of capitalism.

Personally, while I wouldn't much miss the surrealistic hellscape neoliberal sociopaths have constructed over the last forty years, I have grandchildren who depend on me for their material well being, so I won't be volunteering to walk of the cliff like an altruistic lemming as Patrick/Trump suggest. Their idea, so let them go first. Boeing, Walmart, and Amazon too. Then maybe we'll talk.

George Carlin said, "They're coming for your Social Security --and they'll GET it!" I believed him at the time, I just didn't think they'd have the gall to ask you to let them kill you to get to it.

DIY ventilator challenge -Calling all nerds!

There will likely be a tsunami of COVID-19 patients coming to emergency rooms soon, so there will be a shortage of ventilators. The thought is that it might be possible to develop a simplified DIY ventilator that individuals or small groups working together could produce. There are retired mechanical engineers, people with 3D printers, and smart high school kids out there that could pull this off. First thing they need is a simple design that satisfies minimum operating parameters. Distribute that, then it's off to the races.

Plutocrats Punk Plebes in Perpetuity

The Trump Administration and the Senate are using the COVID-19 crisis to line the pockets of corporations.� Further, politicians like Georgia's newest senator, who is married to the CEO of the stock exchange, have engaged in insider trading based on their special knowledge during the crisis, cashing in. Meanwhile, working people are shut out.� It's the usual American split: extravagantly generous� socialism for the rich; austerity, personal responsibility, and moral hazard avoidance for working people.

It occurs to me that decades from now kids will read about this in history books and think "those were the bad old days". I remember thinking that during history class (many, many years ago) about the Teapot Dome scandal and similar outrages from the late 19th century. Implicit was the belief that we had progressed beyond that scale of injustice and corruption, that people were no longer so crass and stupid as to attempt or put up with something so blatant anymore.

Surprise! Civilization doesn't really improve, it just goes through cycles. It's a myth that there is steady progress through time and that the world constantly gets better. The people in power at any given point will push that myth because it serves to justify their being in the driver's seat.

It's pure BS. Just ask the increasing legions of homeless, people unable to get medication, people who can't pay their water bill. Ask kids being bombed, starved, or put in cages about the great forward march of history.

And as for kids reading about this current corruption in history books: that presumes that history will be taught in years to come, or that there even will be universal education then. Don't count on it.

Slavery - "The condition in which one person is owned as property by another and is under the owner's control."

and what is you're position relative to the banks, credit card companies, hedge funds, and payday lenders?

you're a slave with a smart phone. you owe interest while you sleep and there's no way out of it.

they're watching you , so don't complain or they will cut off your food and put you outside.

Why do we have a Trump?

The answer is compound but not complicated:

1) A Democratic Party that is an utter sham, pretending to represent working people while catering only to the rich. (It is our contemporary analog to the German Weimar Republic of the 1930's.)

2) A system that is massively corrupt, with bribery being built into it via election campaign funding laws and a "money is free speech" law of the land.

3) A Supreme Court that is a sounding board for concentrated wealth. It has always been this way, with the exception of the short period under FDR.

4) A Senate. Period. Just its existence is a guarantee of oligarchic rule and massive inequality.

5) Neoliberalism. If there was ever an embodiment in history of "might makes right", this is the one.

Trump is a silly SOB, but he didn't break the USA. It's been on its way down since Reagan, and even he couldn't have jammed through Trickle Down Economics without a successful appeal to inherent US racism.

The game is over. We can go vote for Joe now, someone who wants to cut back on Social Security and stop Universal Healthcare in its tracks. Someone who has spent his career doing the bidding of credit card companies to the detriment of average people. Someone who voted for every US war that ever came down the pike. Good luck with him as your "leader".

The wealthy have gotten their tax break now, so it really doesn't matter. We will either starve, die of disease, or broil in the heat. You can scream about how Trump will pack the courts if we don't elect Biden, but remember how Obama/Biden let Mitch McConnell block appointments without raising a fuss? Like they say on the Young Turks, Republicans are paid to be tough and Democrats are paid to be weak, and they are both paid by the same people.

George Carlin said it best: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."

We are Rome at the point it ceased pretending to be a democracy. Surly, fascism is next, followed by a military takeover. The latter will occur because the military and the police are the only institutions that are still funded.

Pandemic in the Time of Neoliberalism

As the story goes, Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Similarly, Trump will be said to have sat on his golden throne and Tweeted while contagion crept through the population. But neither actually deserves the knock. In Trump's case, he has merely followed the edicts of neoliberalism laid down by Reagan/Thatcher, which have been adhered to by all subsequent politicians and are accepted now by most of us: government is not the solution, it is the problem; the marketplace will find a solution without any government interference; there is no such thing as society, only individuals.

So, unlike socialist-tainted countries that test massively to find out who is exposed and then isolate victims to prevent the virus from spreading, we just let nature take its course. Here kettling is something cops do to demonstrators, not what public health services do to contagion. Besides, we have decided to reduce the size of our government health services so that we don't have the manpower to identify and isolate anyway. Our approach: tell the population to keep its chins up while a market based solution gels out of somewhere. Meanwhile, some random, too-late-in-the-game travel bans will placate them.

And let's face it, the marketplace solution will be that those with sufficient means will have access to care. The virus does not discriminate between rich and poor, but access to respirators and ventilators will correlate very strongly with cash on hand. Dickens' Ebeneezer Scrooge put the neoliberal approach to this pandemic as succinctly as it can be put: "Let the poor die and decrease the surplus population!"

And think of the reduction in Social Security payouts!

When Trump says none of this is his fault, he is right. He's merely the inheritor and preserver of a market fundamentalist system. Like Nero, however, he will forever be blamed. Life is not fair -Jimmy Carter said so.

Voting for Biden in the primary is like eating your own brain -unless you're a credit card company

Yeah, he's affable, our very own Uncle Joe. He's a greasy politician from a bygone era, and he's not benign. He made his bones schilling for credit card companies, to the detriment of consumers (nee citizens). He likes the Big Business crowd in general because they make huge campaign donations. That's why he's consistently voted to rig financial regulations and bankruptcy rules to favor the big guy and fetter the little guy. Why he's also always voted for "foreign involvement" might be down to coddling the defense industry, or it might be something else. Who cares, anyway? He's an asshole.

Voting for him is like accepting a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lector. Gee that smells good! And who's that orange guy smiling at you from across the table? The more you eat, the less you get it.

To: Gen X & Millennials

Act Now or Wait Decades to Take Back Control of Your Own Life

What if you found out that by showing up on a particular day you could end your medical insurance worries, clear up any educational debt you have, get access to quality childcare, increase your wages, have control over your own medical decisions, and make your life better overall for now and the future?

Well, there are no guarantees, but it's a sure thing that if you don't show up to vote for Bernie Sanders in your state's primary, you will have to live like a pauper for a decade or two longer than you otherwise would have had to.

You see, Bernie hating, centrist Democrats want to keep you in the economic cellar as much as Republicans do. Both parties work for their rich donors and don't care whether you live or die or whether your life is good or awful. Republicans will tell you to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps." (Which is physically impossible, obviously.)� Democrats, who don't go out of their way to spit on you like Republicans do, will make nice to you right before an election but once in office will neglect you completely and take orders from the same rich and powerful people as Republicans do.

Both parties are loosing control, however. People are waking up to how badly they've been screwed. This presents a challenge to the Demo-Repub elite ruling class, but the real monster from their perspective is demographical: you, the young, are replacing us boomers, and soon the numbers game will change in your favor, finally.

The establishment is fighting a rear guard action to hold on to power as long as it can. Republicans are doing their part by blocking the vote for young people and minorities in red states and pitting generations and ethnicities against each other (the modus operandi of The Donald). To hold up their end, establishment Dems are telling you, "You can't have the things you want and need because it would break the budget." (There's always room in the budget to fund the military-industrial-surveillance complex though!)

Your liberation can begin this year, or it can be put off for another two decades. Your failure to vote will abet the establishment's rear guard action and propaganda, so if you want to suffer unnecessarily for 15 or 20 years more, stay home on primary day.

P.S. Well, seems like young people are staying home rather than going out and voting�for Bernie Sanders. It's their future, their loss. They will taste the bitter fruit of neoliberalism for a long time to come. No matter if it's Biden or Trump in office for the next four years, the oligarchy wins.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

P.P.S. This opinion piece in Truthdig refutes my optimistic belief that demographics will right the ship eventually.

Losing on both ends: we pay more for medical care in the US, and we die sooner.

pay more (pct. of GDP):

die sooner:

Source: Commonwealth Fund - U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2019

The Cowardly Deeds of a Strongman

The Trump regime separates small children from their mothers for one simple reason: it is unthinkably inhumane. The rationale is that word will get back to Central American countries that the worst thing imaginable will occur if they try to seek asylum in the US. It is cruelty with a purpose.

Of course, it hasn't worked because the situation in countries from which immigrants are fleeing is even worse than Trump's contrived nightmare. And this is largely due to US meddling in those countries and especially our insipid war on drugs. Remember, Hillary backed the coup in Honduras, from which now so many are forced to leave and come to the USA, even if it means having their children stolen and then isolated in a child's hell.

And while we're talking about hell, let's consider the MAGA Christians who back the Trump Reich's policy of isolating tiny tots from their mommies. I am tempted to ask them, "Don't you think that's going to be a tough one to explain on judgment day?" (It's their religion, not mine.)

Lastly, this is what that lying, cheating, tax evading, deceitful, cowardly, bullying, draft dodging, orange coated, wealth coddling, narcissistic sociopath should have been impeached for, rather than for trying to fuck over dopey Joe Biden and his goofy son. Talkin' to you, Nancy.

Think how much we've progressed in the two centuries since the French Revolution. With Trump's decimation of the Clean Water Act we've gone beyond "Let them eat cake" to "Let them drink Perrier!". This is a giant step forward.

Lest Your Children Starve

Listen fellow wage slaves, in 2020 we live in a rentier (raan-tE-A) society. What does that mean? Well, the answer revolves around rents: someone high up owns everything, and we must pay them rent. They don't have to move a muscle, but we are forced to pay them at every turn, without end.

This is true not just of apartment rent, but of debt. Wages haven't moved significantly for decades, while wealth for the rich has multiplied. This has allowed them to extend credit to us which we've been using to try to keep up our standard of living. However, it's a doomed pursuit because now we have to pay interest above what we've borrowed, with the result more and more of what we earn --which wasn't enough for us to live on to begin with-- goes to the financial class. Furthermore, they raise the interest rates even as we struggle to pay.

In short, the monopoly game has been played and we're no longer in the game.

There is an ancient practice called Jubilee in which debts are forgiven periodically. This wasn't done to be charitable, but because even in ancient Sumer they understood that unless this was done most people would end up with nothing and no way out of debt poverty. Present financial overlords know this too, but don't care. That's why, barring debt forgiveness, there is only one way out: Eat the Rich

You might want to get your head out before you starve.

While we chase after Trump's antics du jour...

The regime's new budget is called �A Budget for America�s Future.� More specifically, A Budget for America's Future of Irreversible Inequality. It will go a long way to convert America to a permanent two class system, the affluent v the poor, with the former comprising less than twenty percent of the population. Media elites, centrists, corporate Dems, and the plutocracy find the plan copasetic.

Know Your Frenemies

Liberal elitist pundits in the corporate television media are showing their true colors now. Their loathing for Bernie Sanders is blushing through their starched white shirts. But know whom they really loathe: ordinary people. They despise Bernie because he threatens to return power to ordinary people that was stripped away when unions were destroyed. Now that it seems Bernie might win, they are absolutely panic stricken. Even Obama has indicated that he will come out and fight for once, this time to overtly sabotage Bernie; this will be in stark contrast to his stealthy obeisance to the banks in 2009.

The lives of ordinary people have become frighteningly precarious while life for the elites attached to both parties hasn't been this good since the Gilded Age. Know who is trying to suppress you, guys like Chuck Todd and Chris Mathews who are millionaires themselves and stand for the top 0.1 percent.

Working Stooges

The wealthy continue to punk the working class. They own everything, having rigged the system over the last forty years to ensure that every loose dime rolls their way every time and never yours. As they remove more and more from your reach, they expect you clothe, feed, and shelter your family on meager wages without assistance. They refuse you healthcare, childcare (needed to permit you to go to work), education beyond high school (and someday perhaps not even high school).

If you are a single mother struggling in fiendishly difficult circumstances to raise your kids and you have the misfortune to become pregnant again, the rich will insist you add to your already crushing burden by having the baby; this isn't because they detest abortion (their own wives and daughters will always have access), but because they've made a deal with religious extremists: that single issue faction has and will continue to support the plutocracy in exchange for punishing women of loose virtue, even though in all other ways the plutocracy is screwing them along with everyone else. Same deal with the gun nuts.

So, working person, continue to vote for the right because you want to shame hussies or you want to own more guns than you have tires with tread left on them. Or just vote for centrists because the popular TV pundits (who make millions) tell you voting for any candidate who's in favor of your having access to the things you need is anathema and will bring about the implosion of the universe.

Be a good stooge and take the punking, ad nauseam.

Lemming Force (from Military Miasma magazine)

President Rancorous has just announced the creation of a new, even newer branch of the military. Added to the Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, Coast Guard, ICE, Lords of the Dance, and Space Force is the newly consecrated Lemming Force.

The job of the Lemming force will be to pump men, women, and war material into an area in great numbers and quickly. This will be done without strategic planning, any clear objective, knowledge of the people and culture in the area into which they'll be injected, or even any consideration as to whether military involvement in a particular case makes any sense at all. A blind eye will be turned toward potential blowback and action will commence without ever weighing the burden placed on members of Lemming Force or taking into account foreign (or even domestic) civilian casualties. Needless to say, the negative impact on the US economy and further deterioration of US society will also be overlooked.

Whereas this functionality is presently encompassed by the existing disparate military branches, the creation of the Lemming Force is projected to streamline the act of plunging heedlessly into any military quagmire. This supports the underlying mission of greasing the skids for defense contractor fat cats to keep the money spigot wide open while simultaneously tapping new revenue streams from the arteries of the empire's subjects.

The criteria for Lemming Force recruits will include: origin from blighted urban and rural areas; dire lack of job opportunities; desperate need for healthcare. Fortunately, previous pursuit of the above mission has inherently provided vast numbers of potential applicants. The desire to obtain higher education, combined with a willingness to postpone same until a vague and indeterminate date is also a criterion. The motto of the new military branch will be, "Nothing to Lose and Nowhere Else to Go :(".

Implementation of the Lemming Force necessitates concomitant formation of a new political party to facilitate freeing up lavish funds for the Force's big ticket missions. This is so because of the increased need to brush aside "wait-a-minute" assertions from those few remaining congressional members stubborn enough to insist on pleading for sanity in moments leading up to blundering commitment to sketchy new military misadventures. It is also "because".

Applicants to this new party will be sought and accepted solely from within the the Washington DC beltway or from districts surrounding major defense corporation sites. Their desired characteristics will be: a willingness to fall into line; lack of curiosity; absence of political courage; aversion to questioning; a deep desire to lobby for the defense industry once the party is finished with them. The working title for this new political entity is the "How Much and Where Do I Sign?" Party.

In a rare magnanimous gesture, President Rancorous announced he will give top preference to Corporate Democrats and members of the press.

Ever reflect that while we supposedly live in a democratic system (we don't, Oligarchy was enthroned by the Citizens United SCOTUS decision), most of us spend the majority of our good hours under completely dictatorial, authoritarian rule at work?

We accept this because we are inured to it. But that's not the only way, and in fact, that way is more than just oppressive, it has warped the economy and diminished our lives generally.

Once again, even before most of us have awakened fully to the problem, Bernie Sanders has already thought of a way to fix it, the Corporate Accountability and Democracy plan.

Fran Lebowitz, Myth of the Middle Class
Majority FM interview with Sam Seder

George Carlin, The Owners of America

"When you've traveled the Third World, the violence that erupted in Baltimore should come as no surprise. It's the symptom of hopelessness. When people feel the system is rigged and they are victims of structural poverty in a world of obscene wealth, they don't navigate life by the rules others would expect of them. They attack symbols of authority. They burn corporate icons. They support demagogues. They believe wild promises. They join ISIS."
-- Rick Steves

Lilly knows.

Replacing square peg with triangular one doesn't work when it's still a round hole.

Understandably, The People got sick of being stiffed by The Elites, so they voted The Rednecks in. Turns out The Rednecks only have one trick: demolish functional government to please The Elites. (Functional governments levy taxes, and taxes are kryptonite to The Elites.)

Behold the Criminal Injustice System

about one in three of the world's female prisoners is held in a US jail;�the US population is less than one twentieth of the world's, so that means a woman in the US is about 7 times more likely to wind up in jail. that also applies to white males in the US, and black males are about 15 times more likely than the average citizen of the world to be incarcerated.

95% of all court cases in the US are plea bargained. the apparent conclusion is that we as a nation produce a great number (more than anywhere else in the world) of self acknowledged criminals who deserve to be locked up without benefit of a trial. the reality is very different, however: unless you have money you will be dependent on a court appointed attorney who is certain to be overworked and very apt to be inexperienced or just unskilled. so, if you chance going to trial you will loose. the reality is that you have to take the plea in order to reduce the overall amount of time you will be inside. there is no question of your serving time unless you possess the talisman of money, whether or not you are guilty is immaterial. "It's better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent" is not hyperbole.

if you're not rich you could be next. if you are dark skinned you are especially vulnerable, because let's be honest, most laws that are used to put people in jail were contrived specifically to control people of color, followed by people who buck the system.

bolstering this sham system is a burgeoning privatized jail industry that, like any business sector, seeks to increase sales and market share. so, agnostic of the grave injustices inherent in the current system, they lobby to lengthen� sentences so they can make more profit from holding human beings behind bars longer.

justice my arse.

Dominion by Dolts

we've had a couple of things going for us here on earth from the start: liquid water that floats when it freezes; a churning molten iron core that forms a magnetic umbrella shielding us from constant bombardment by cosmic rays, thereby preventing our being zapped into sterility.

we have difficult challenges ahead: global warming and the climate changes it is causing; burgeoning numbers of people that will become impossible to feed because there is only a finite amount of land on which to grow food; looming shortage of potable water (although the capitalist entrepreneur sees this as a business opportunity rather than an incipient human tragedy); the return of unstoppable bacterial infection as antibiotics lose their effectiveness due to squandering and lack of development of new drugs to replace the old.

it's very doubtful we are up to any of these challenges.

the Bible states we have dominion over the sky, land, sea, and all the animals thereon. good stewardship so far:

steady elimination of staggering numbers of species; pollution of the air with greenhouse gasses and industrial poisons; acidification of oceans, causing decline of fish stocks and water plants; ocean heating that is interfering with climate equilibrium; massive, ever growing islands of plastic debris in the Pacific; ubiquitous microplastics that fall with the rain and interfere with biological functioning of mammals and other animals; defiled land, where it is not used as a feedlot, is made a toxic waste dump loaded with asbestos and heavy metals; drinking water contaminated with lead, solvents, antibiotics, antidepressants, mutagens, and carcinogens; land denuded of trees and other plants so that what we increasingly see is a barren hellscape.

apparently none of this matters because the Bible says it's all ours to play with. we're cool. to be fair though, we're doing a superb job following the edict, "Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply", at least the last part.

given our limitless greed, arrogance, and shortsightedness, it seems like change will only occur through either a pandemic or thermonuclear war. haven't read it, but i think the Bible implies the latter is the way we'll go. i salute the Bible for its pessimism.

The Landlord's Game

capitalism isn't working. the system is corrupt, rotten. the US government is a play-to-play operation, a system of legalized bribery. we don't have elections, we hold auctions. capitalism corrupted government, not the other way around.

those with money have paid politicians to rig the market for themselves and against average people. we are enslaved in debt and drained by financial vampires. many of us die so that the medical industry can maximize profits. the next generation will go uneducated because we have chosen to purchase F-35 fighters from the defense industry rather than invest in the intellectual capacity of our children. every problem we have is ultimately traceable back to unbridled capitalism. it is the wellspring of misery. since the fall of the USSR, capitalism has had no competition and has thereby been freed to become a draconian juggernaut.

the period after the Great Depression saw a softening of winner-take-all capitalism. the effect was to delude my generation, the boomers, into thinking the world was a much kinder place than it really is. we thought the avidity of the money chasers was an aberration on the decline, but that's where we were so very, very wrong. the New Deal period, when the federal government actually fostered union growth rather than attacked it, was an exception. we are now back into the historically normal mode of plutocratic control.

so far we are bamboozled by slick and pervasive propaganda into believing there's equality and opportunity. this seems incredible given the present situation for working people, but the veil is slipping away. many are waking. some have turned to a demagogue who is shrewd enough to parley their discontents into political power for himself and direct their rage toward helpless scapegoats. this is the road to fascism. others heed the advice of a lifelong fighter for human dignity and a Democratic Socialist. i fear fascism will win in the end because anyone can be angry, but few can channel their anger into coherent thought and reasoned action. further, when the plutocrats are forced to take a side they will put their weight behind fascism, like they did in the 1930's.

capitalism is a Monopoly game (originally called "The Landlord's Game"). everyone does not succeed or even survive. there is only one winner on the board when the game is finished.

My Bernie Story is about a 50 year old vision of the future

My Bernie story began a long time ago, about 1971. I was a 19 year old buck sergeant in the USAF, stationed in the Philippines, having been redirected there rather than to Vietnam from a base in Japan. (No complaint about those orders.) Rather than drink my weight in watery beer at the Airman's Club every Friday and Saturday night like a good troop, I choose to roam and see the country on weekends.

One night I found myself in a street market in Manila. It was late and the street vendors were winding down for the day. They were picking over the fruit in their carts to remove produce that was going bad and not suitable to keep for sale the next day. They tossed the fruit into the gutter, and as they did, small kids swooped in like sparrows to snatch the fruit, thrilled to have something to eat.

Of course, this shocked me and made a deep impression, even though I was still young and mostly clueless. I thought how horrendous life was in this place that was dominated by a few wealthy families who cared nothing for ordinary people. The rich viciously deprived, ignored, and stole from the vast majority who lived in poverty. Further, the people knew no other way and seemingly could not imagine any other type of system.

Flash forward ten years: my first child was born; Ronald Reagan took office, promising to restore the "ownership society". Well, I'd seen the epitome of an ownership society and my heart sank because I knew where we were headed from then on.

Know what? Every year since has gotten worse. People have become meaner, and overall we have moved backward as a society. We are unhappy, uncharitable, desperate, atomized, and constantly losing ground.

So, when I first heard Bernie talk, and I have to be honest and say I don't recollect when that was exactly, I said to myself, "That's one guy who gets it." It's obvious he understands the peril of the demented "ownership society" creed. It has warped our culture and political system so that it spits on caring about others and celebrates sociopathy. Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman be damned, it's time we pull out of this "ownership society" death spiral before we slam into the earth.

Door Number Three

The Democratic Party is an imposter. It has the reputation of representing average working people, but that is merely an echo from the deep past. Apart from a vestigial commitment to social liberalism, the Democratic Party serves the same class and very same rich people as the Republican party does.

If you are a working person, you will be either devoured by the sneering Republican wolf or gnawed away slowly by the bashful Democratic wolf in sheep's clothing.

Some point out it's better to elect even corporate Democrats than Republicans because the latter pack the courts with atavists, and that's true. They do so to pay off the various factions of their cobbled together, composite base: those wanting a theocracy; financiers wanting to entrench the rentier system; corporations wanting to be permitted to pollute at will and cheat their workforce.

On the other hand, when the Dems are in power they don't seem to appoint judges anyway. They allow themselves to be bullied and chased away by Mitch McConnell and his ilk. This is because the Democrats' donors don't want open clashes which might wake up the masses, who need to be kept asleep. That's absolutely paramount. This prevents Democrats from taking any strong stand on the moral high ground.

While it's true that failing to elect Democrats will lead to catastrophe in the near term, voting Democratic will just slow the attrition of the working class by a tiny amount. The tide won't ever turn in our favor. Democrats will stand by while working people continue to slide into serfdom, more slowly than under Republicans, but inexorably.

For average people, voting Republican is suicide, whereas voting Democratic is opting for debilitation. So, be a good citizen and go out and vote for the lesser of two evils. Or be a better one and start a revolution, because if you don't flip over the tables you are going to wind up living under authoritarian fascism. That's where this sort of political dilemma ends up by default.

To anyone who's not behind Single Payer:

Tens of thousands, perhaps up to 45,000, die every year in the US because they lack medical insurance. That figure might not include additional deaths of people who have insurance coverage but cannot afford deductibles and "co-insurance", so they delay or forgo seeing a doctor, buying prescribed medicines, and obtaining surgeries and other forms of treatment, which ultimately leads to their demise.

I find this tragic and infuriating, and my question to those who oppose the only viable fix for this, universal single payer healthcare, is: what the fuck is wrong with you?

Have you zero empathy for those people? Are you so selfish and self-satisfied that you are content to receive health insurance through your employee benefits and just say "go to hell" to anyone who isn't as lucky as you are? Luck can change, asshole. The problem with conservatives is they can't muster empathy until it happens to them, then they're "Why can't the government DO something for people!" Shit stains.

Are you worried about it costing too much? Well, if you were able to put yourself in someone else's shoes (too much to ask, I realize), it wouldn't seem outlandish to cover everyone. Not that I think you're really concerned about deficits anyway because you're just a selfish prick. I always say a conservative can't enjoy a good meal unless he's certain someone else is going hungry. But go ahead anyway and ask where the money would come from:

We've spent trillions on a war in Iraq that was based on the false claim of Hussein's complicity in 9/11 and bogus WMDs. The war against the Taliban in Afghanistan also has cost dearly,� and its purpose was dubious: fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from SAUDI ARABIA, not Afghanistan! Osama was only based there because we foisted him on Afghanistan during our proxy war with the USSR. We effectively said, "Here's your new roommate, find him a place to sleep." When he turned on the US (absolutely predictably), we thumped Afghanistan for the next two decades and we aren't finished yet. Surely, some of the treasure we spent and are spending still could be used to save lives at home, rather than destroying lives in the Middle East.

That would be sad for US defense contractors though, wouldn't it? Who would they sell all those white elephant F35s to?

Anyway, if you could handle simple arithmetic you'd be able to understand single payer would cover everyone for less than the current cost. And no more deductibles, plus dental and vision, and real mental healthcare included. (You always claim the continual mass killings unique to the US are a result of mental illness, right?) Rather than be paid for by employers, healthcare would be paid for through TAXES. So what? Would you rather depend on the good will of your employer? Do you enjoy being submissive to your boss to hold on to your insurance?

Maybe you do. Maybe that's your whole problem. You're such a fucking wimp that you can only think about saving your own ass and can't spare a thought for anyone else. Fuck you.

A Flawed Election in a Debilitated Democracy

Electronic voting machine are susceptible to hacking, either from inside the US or by foreign actors. Paper ballots would eliminate the problem, and there are myriad other solutions too; however, Mitch McConnell refuses to take up legislation from the House that addresses hacking.

Another threat is subliminal manipulation of voters. This isn't just theoretical. Social media can push stories that anger or depress a targeted user, making him or her more likely to vote conservatively. They then spur the user to get out and vote. This has been done by Google as an experiment and by Cambridge Analytica as a business model. It's an open field. (Mitch doesn't care at all, for obvious reasons.)

Selective disenfranchisement of young and minority voters is a game red state politicians play to counteract changing demographics that are loosening their grip on power. Citing voter fraud as a pretext for this is disingenuous, as voter fraud is vanishingly rare. (Mitch just chuckles at this one.)

Between the above and the infamous Electoral College, we could see a total failure of our system in 2020. Of course, 100 million citizens won't even bother to vote because it's obvious both parties work exclusively for their big campaign donors, not for average people. (Mitch and Nancy are dancing cheek to cheek here.)

Marie Antoinette Hall of Fame Entry, Seema Verma

Head of Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, is a conservative who doesn't believe in government handouts. To her way of thinking, if poor people are given medical care at all they should be required to work off the debt through community service. If the poor can't afford insurance they shouldn't be allowed to put the burden on taxpayers when they get sick.

Ms Verma put in a government claim recently for $47,000 for lost luggage, $43,000 of which was for jewelry. So, while she thinks the poor have no entitlement to medical insurance, she definitely expects the taxpayer to replace her lost jewelry. Poor people must assume responsibility for their losses, but the rich should be made whole under all circumstances. Two sets of rules, obviously.

The rich are too rich, no? Ms Verma deserves her place in the Marie Antoinette Hall of Fame. She isn't alone either, just listen to Betsy DeVos.

Organized religion has served as a human resources department for those in power since the time of the pharaohs. Interestingly, although all of us can clearly see the high priests were on the pharaoh's payroll, few of us can make the connection between Rolex-wearing evangelicals and the fact they've taken money from the American Manufacturers Association for many decades. The latter is just a coincidence, apparently, and doesn't indicate that these Godly men are in any way leading their flock on a path prescribed by their anti-union, capitalist patrons.

The Great Atomizing

Society is unraveling, not because of moral decay, but because the common spirit we once had is evaporating. Everybody has become atomized. To counteract this isolation, people have sought out others who share their attitudes and values so that the individual's worldview is becoming narrowed and more tribal. We are no longer "all in this together", but stand apart from any common identity and withdrawn into subcultures. While some might see this as a wonderful example of free choice, this fragmentation bodes ill for the country. Each group pursues its own goals and seeks its own advantage, failing to consider the needs of others, which is leading to conflict and could eventually prove fatal.

Think of all the forces at work that propel this atomizing. First, there's the neoliberal creed, pronounced with great authority by Margaret Thatcher, that there is "no such thing as society, only individuals". Each person is merely an actor in the free marketplace whose best course of action, indeed whose obligation, is to act in his or her own self interest. To do otherwise is to throw a wrench into the workings of the market and cause unnecessary suffering for oneself and for others.

This isn't a harebrained economic hypothesis, it is the way we have come to live in the post Reagan-Thatcher world, with everyone being his or her own brand, a one person company. It's absurd, pigheaded, and pernicious, but it is presently the universal paradigm, one that prevents us from banding together for any common purpose. This lack of cohesion among the plebeians is extremely advantageous to the plutocrats, so they spend lavishly on think tanks and pay shills to reinforce the notion that we are all self-serving robots without charity, empathy, or compassion, and no need to form alliances -especially not unions! It's working marvelously: never in my sixty-eight years have I seen people care less about each other and been more hardhearted. But it's all to no purpose because people are living more precariously now than ever.

Another large, although accidental, contributor to atomization is social media, which filters and aggregates information that its algorithms deem we will like, based on our previous online activity. This is done to profit from our consumer dollars, but the end result is to reinforce prejudices and narrow perspective. (Even worse, social media monopolies have recently taken an evil turn in which they have experimented successfully with mood control and subliminal manipulation to affect voting behavior. Let the good times roll with that one!)

Finally, there's the numbing and dumbing effect of TV news that abets atomization. At one time, everyone watched the evening news. It was a shared experience. Broadcast news tried to be objective and wasn't even expected to generate a profit, but was instead thought of as an obligation to the public in exchange for use of the airwaves. Then the Reagan Administration abandoned the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting, allowing TV news to became what it is today: glitzy, high production value fluff meant to entertain, dissemble, and sell tons of prescription drugs. This in turn has forced all but the elderly to seek information from social media, which pumps consumers full of whatever they prefer to hear.

There is one thread that runs through all of this and it's neoliberal capitalism, with its monopolies, greed, and propaganda. It privatizes while it atomizes.

Faschey the Pain Clown is a Straw Man

while it would certainly be cathartic to toss out our Thug in Chief, what would his impeachment change in the long run? we would still be living in a plutocracy, a faux democracy in which at least 80% of people live in precarity. we would still experience "worker insecurity" as that demigod of finance Alan Greenspan once put it. what would not change at all is the ruling oligarchs' disregard for anything the majority needs or wants.

even if Bernie Sanders were too survive a second political assassination in the primaries by the duplicitous DNC and then go on to win in the general, the oligarchy would employ their minions in Congress to quash any attempt at instituting real change.

the country is run by monopolistic corporations and billionaires who will never consent to universal healthcare, debt forgiveness, childcare, public higher education, or undoing inequality through restoration�of taxes on the rich. and forget about doing anything to slow the global climate catastrophe because that would hurt business. above all, they would fight to the death against upholding anti trust laws, and by death i mean shooting people in the streets and wholesale incarceration. the oligarchs will retain their monopolies at any cost.

recently, the number one centrist sellout of the 21th century, Barack Obama, has spiked his $400,000 (payoff time!) speeches to plutocrats with spiteful belittling of progressives and their ideas. as comedian Jimmy Dore put it, Obama now admonishes Democrats to forget about hope and change, shut up, and get back in line behind the DNC. the man who was going to do so much for the ordinary citizen but instead immediately returned power to Wall Street bandits is making this clear to working people: their discontent over inequality and their grief over their strangled hopes is a mere bagatelle, and they need to stop being whiny babies about it.

what is needed is a revolution, but a revolution is unlikely because we have been atomized by neo-liberal dictum that we are solitary players who must look out only for ourselves, disavow group action, and never complain because our failures are always our own fault. so sayeth the prophets Obama, Blair, Thatcher, and Reagan. and we believe them. after all they have strip mined from us in the last 40 years, we still buy into the con that we are just not worthy of anything better.

so, vote for whomever they let through their filter and shut up. there's a good boy or girl. the Dems will now pretend to want to impeach�Faschey the Pain Clown to give you a little thrill, OK? now sit. sit! good dog.

Hillary, you're freakin' me out

Every time Hillary Clinton opens her mouth these days, I feel a little less remorseful that DJT is President. This is not to say that I have changed my opinion about his being a monumental grifter, it's that she seems darker, stranger, and more sinister every time she speaks with an interviewer. I voted for her in 2016 because she was the lesser of two evils, but she seems on track to close the gap. The real problem remains: it's an eroded system within a dissolving society that could only offer a choice between Cruella DeVil and Eric Cartman for the office (not to mention VP Stewie Griffin and Senate Majority Leader Monty Burns).

Capitalism and the Future

Capitalism isn't anything more than feudalism with an electronic banking system.

Neo-liberalism isn't anything more than capitalism with all the fences removed so there's no impediment to total exercise of greed and nowhere on earth to escape it.

Overall, people are too distracted, too unceasingly entertained, too propagandized, too infantilized, and generally just too stupid to figure out that the capitalist class is parasitizing them to the point of collapse. So, they will be in thrall to the top ten percent until they are so miserable that they finally lash out blindly.

Because they haven't the tools to figure out it's the system that has held them down and plundered their dreams, they will turn their anger against some scapegoat, be it a racial minority, cultural deviants, or leftists. They will run to the arms of fascism, as they did in the 1930's.� (There will always be a demagogue in the wings ready to capitalize on social crisis. Trump is adept at mining people's discontents and then scapegoating, a skill he apparently learned by studying Hitler's speeches.)

It's happening now. There's murder and mayhem ahead in a civil war that, while being incited by our shameless, sociopathic president, is actually driven by the failures of capitalism.

Following that, there will be global upheaval.

Heads, they win. Tails, we lose.

In the 80's, President Reagan persuaded us to lighten the tax load on the rich. His argument was that we'd all benefit from the growth in the economy that would result. This was dubbed "Trickle Down" economic theory, although his rival in the Republican primary who later became his VP had called it "Voodoo Economics". It has never performed as promised. Working people did not see gains in their income or wealth as a result, not then and still not now. Instead, the rich have simply gotten vastly richer while life has become less secure for the majority and inequality has exploded.

Now pundits and think tanks are saying that if we impose/restore taxes on the rich to fund social programs like healthcare it will slow down the economy and everyone will suffer as a result. The trickle will stop. So, it seems to be a lose-lose for working people: when we give tax breaks to the rich we get nothing, and if we try to recoup wealth we get even less. We can only ratchet downward, we cannot rise. It's an artful lie, but there's no breaking out of it because the establishment (political and media) will not stray from the hard line of "taxes are bad".

Working people, 80-90% of us, are in a dilemma. We are like lab rats who get a shock whichever switch we push. We are never going to see any cheese, ever. How will this end? Eventually there will be massive unrest, and the political class will impose taxes on the working majority to pay for an authoritarian security state to protect the rich from the backlash. This will be applauded as responsible by the media. And then we will sit and wait for the next Hitler or Stalin.

[Under an oligarchic government,the American people] �must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four;� andthe sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they[poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, nomeans of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistenceby hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.�� --Thomas Jefferson

Established US Foreign Policy -Sawing off the Limb You're Sitting On

We have been sending our all-volunteer military to the Middle East and Africa to fight and bomb for two decades, and while they and the occupants of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria have inflicted and sustained great suffering and massive loss of life, nothing much ever changes. "The lines on the map, they move from side to side."

The underlying reason for our interest there, when all the pretext and rationalization is stripped away, is to control the world's oil and gas. This is deemed necessary to secure the our standard of living, for now and into the future. At the end of the 1970's movie, "Three Days of the Condor", Cliff Robertson's CIA character gives a chilling soliloquy explaining why the government was (and still is, 45 years later) dedicated to preserving the flow of oil at any cost. Robertson's delivery was so compelling that you actually have some sympathy for the devil.

However, it is a plan formulated and executed with complete tunnel vision, without any regard to impending climate change. We send our military to kill and die to protect our burning of fossil fuels while our doing so damns the planet. US policy is compartmentalized such that two antagonistic goals are being persued, although to be candid, we seem to be much more invested in maintaining our access to cheap gas than warding off the calamity of drought, super storms, and displacement of vast numbers of people. That's because the oil industry has more lobbyists than the scientific community has.

So, our climate change rump sits out on a limb while our fossil fuel arm saws away next to the tree trunk. ...Whoopee!

Le Show interview with Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism starts 4 min into the podcast... enough said

President Cartman's Groove

President Cartman operates on a very simple but effective principle: stoke the fears and discontents of 30 % of the population, telling them you are the instrument of their deliverance, then pit them against all outsiders. In our system, because of gerrymandering, voter suppression, a weak and phony opposition party, craven media, and global corruption of government by the plutocracy, this strategy works perfectly. It fits the situation exactly. Just ask Adolf.

SNAPped

To: Sec. Perdue, USDA / Re: Cuts to SNAP / 11-24-2019

I cannot fathom what the motivation is for reducing food stamps (SNAP) to families with children, which the new calculations for Standard Utility Allowance will certainly do. Shaving off one billion per year might thrill some in government, but every dollar that's cut represents hunger and malnutrition for a child, stunting their development and causing groaning pain.

This administration just gave trillions in tax breaks to the wealthiest. Is the plan to make up for the resulting shortfall by trimming around the edges, no matter how cruel the effects are for the least fortunate?

I was born in 1951, and I have watched this country gradually change from a charitable, high minded cathedral of hope to a bordello of selfishness. There even seems to be an expanding element of sadism in recent years, as this proposed rule change glaringly demonstrates.

Evolution of a certain tech giant's motto: Don't be evil --> Do the right thing --> Do the Right's thing

Hey Media, Bolivia fell to International Oligarchy

In the US the mainstream media says: Evo Morales was 1) a cruel dictator who 2) stole his elections and then 3) was removed by patriots within his own country who wanted to save their country from his tyranny.

WRONG, WRONG, and WRONG

1) Morales was Bolivia's first indigenous president, who elevated the status of his people in Bolivia, both economically and socially. He left Bolivia's economy in excellent condition. He was recently legally reelected by a wide margin.

2) The OAS, which resides in D.C., lied. He did not steal the last election. His lead grew as time went on as remote rural areas, always where his strongest support resides, trickled in. Previous elections had shown the same pattern and it is an easily understandable phenomenon. OAS made it all up. OAS is majority owned by the US.

3) What occurred in Bolivia was a military coup. It was almost certainly CIA backed. The people taking over are definitely NOT indigenous, but of European ancestry, so there's a huge class and racial aspect to this in which the elites are taking the country back by force.

Finally, Morales' real transgression is not handing over his country's mineral wealth to US and Canadian mining companies with the alacrity they would prefer. One resource they really want to get their hands on is indium, which is used in LCD displays in TVs, computer monitors, and smartphones. He also didn't turn over lithium (used in batteries) with both hands.

So, Bolivia is no longer a democracy because it stood in the way of the oligarchs who wanted to take what they desire without restraint. The same reason the US is no longer a democracy.

Ossified ditto heads who persist in calling the press the "liberal media" are off by one syllable and about a mile: it's the "NEO-liberal media". Papers and TV news in the US serve their owners and therefore protect their owners' general interests. Count on their presentation of the news to align with the economic interests of the wealthy and with the deep state. That's why when covering events in foreign countries the press never gives leftists fair representation while they routinely give authoritarian rightists either a pat on the back or at least a pass.

As long as a foreign government adheres to the policies laid down by the Chicago School of Economics they can depend on being treated favorably by the US press. And why not? They and the press both have the same bosses.

The way our press is covering events in South America mirrors what the US has become, an ownership society that is driving eighty percent of its population into peonage.

The free press is a corpse. Therefore, so is democracy.

Hillary, you are the weakest link!

Hillary belongs to an era during which the Democratic Party turned to the wealthy meritocracy for funding out of necessity. Unions were decimated, so Dems needed to find a source of funding to stay alive in our pay-to-play system. The upshot is that while Bill and Al saved the party, the working class was abandoned. The Dems have continued to be good on social issues, as long as it doesn't cost their rich donors anything. This is in contrast to the Repubs who have become the party of atavists.�

Problem is that this has left working class people to twist in the wind. We boomers didn't get it and still don't, but younger people have no illusions. They see class because they are at the bottom.

Hillary's time has come and gone. So has the DNC's. Without radical change the Dems will continue to lose. Republican-lite might be more palatable aesthetically, but if we continue to ignore inequality, if we continue to emphasize only the barbarity of Trump, then we will continue to lose and slide toward authoritarian fascism.

Hillary is not the answer to Trump. That should be obvious. Trump is merely a symptom of the failure of a political system that studiously ignores the well being of 80% of our citizenry.�

"Fuck You Buddy" -the board game of the 21st century

i grew up in the 1950's in Cambridge Mass, where my father was fireman and my mother worked at the Star Market courtesy�booth, to which everyone went on Friday evening to cash their their paycheck in the days before direct deposit or ATM's. my mother even cashed�Julia Child's paycheck from WGBH once. there were no cellphones then, and no internet. we're talking pre-technology boom. what there was however, was a feeling of optimism, belonging, and strong belief that "We're all in this together."�

today it's different, obviously. we are awash in electronic gadgets, apps that entertain and placate us, and an internet that can inform while simultaneously isolating us. but the big difference is the feeling that we are now unsupported, isolated, and solely responsible for ourselves. we have either the perspective "I've got mine", or that we don't, never will, and it's our own fault, period. people are less optimistic, less secure, less charitable toward each other, and atomized. if it weren't for our smartphones we'd have no friends. correction: we actually have no friends because we are only out for ourselves; we have contacts.

things were bound to have changed in more than 60 years, but the magnitude of change and the overthrow of the charitable attitude we had toward one another is staggering. we just don't give anyone a break anymore, nor do we expect one for ourselves. we are as mean to each other as junkyard dogs. how did this come to pass? i've always thought that the very wealthy pulled this off by relentlessly chipping away at the New Deal. this is true, but it turns out to be under-appreciative of particular events, persons, and intellectual forces that propelled these changes.

now i've come across a five year old, three part BBC miniseries, The Trap, which lays it all out clearly. economics has been restructured to conform to extreme market fundamentalism, which first required the re-engineering of the individual. that sounds like goofy new age hype, but as the the series shows, Margaret Thatcher and John Major openly advertised they were doing exactly this in Britain. Reagan did his part on this side of the Atlantic too, although he was less direct in his pronouncements. bottom line is that people HAVE been changed. people have been reduced to robots to conform to a paradigm set by elites.

the world has been converted from one that embraced "We're all in the together" to one insisting "We're all individuals, it's every man and woman to him/herself, and that's a beautiful (albeit lonely and desperate) thing."�here's the gist of what happened:

Friedrich Hayek was a contemporary of Ayn Rand. They both had an ax to grind with socialism, and while Rand attacked communism through propagandist novels, Hayek formulated a system of extreme free market fundamentalism which was the antithesis of socialism. A lot of young people, myself included, read and were captivated by Rand's clumsy novels. her Virtue of Selfishness had an appeal to the narcissistic teenager. On the other hand, Hayek's economics were largely ignored for decades, having to impress a more demanding audience.

then along came a brilliant Rand Corporation mathematician, John Nash (of "A Beautiful Mind" fame), whose work on game theory had become a mainstay of nuclear strategic planning during the cold war. in addition to that, he had constructed mathematical proof that if everyone were to act solely in his self interest, it would result in a stable, dynamic system. this was latched onto by Hayek's camp and used to give it credence. there was now a mathematical argument for everyone acting like a sociopath! this was a great leap forward for the Chicago School of Economics neo-liberal, free market fundamentalist world view.

that Nash was at the time suffering from paranoid schizophrenia was unknown or ignored. he believed everyone was out to get him and each other too. although everyone's being the most selfish SOB they possibly could be might lead to a stable condition mathematically, nobody ever said it would make for a nice world, and it hasn't turned out to be very nice, has it? the dog-eat-dog world we now inhabit was born out of paranoia.

so, to recap, a fringe economist from a wealthy aristocratic family whose class position made him a natural enemy of socialism gained acceptance for neo-liberalism via the deeply tainted produce of a paranoid schizophrenic. his ideas were then implemented by two politicians, Reagan and Thatcher, who were both in the grip of incipient Alzheimer's disease. and of course, the rich cheered them all on because it guaranteed their expanding wealth.

the upshot is that they sell a lot of antidepressants nowadays, and there are increasing numbers of deaths due to overdose because we treat each other like dirt, as we have been trained to do. altruism is dead. love is dead. community is passe. sociopaths alone can flourish in today's barren landscape.�

as Maggie T. said, "There is no such thing as society, only individuals." (good thing for England the guys who flew in the RAF during the Battle of Britain weren't told this.)

sorry about all the inequality, personal suffering, and precarity. history just happened to encounter a few loose nuts in high places along its way. this might result in the complete breakdown of society, the ultimate collapse of civiliztion, but no big deal.

the punch line is that John Nash created a game to illustrate his work� and named it "Fuck You, Buddy", which by no coincidence sums up our relationship to our fellow man in this post Reagan era.

Congratulations! You're the star of your own Truman Show

what if the government were analyzing every message or email you sent, not just for content, but even for the way you expressed yourself, how you formed your sentences, used punctuation, and your mental and emotional states? What if it went further to use this data to create a model of you that reproduced your personality, your inclinations, and predicted your actions and reactions? What if it also experimented, successfully, with effecting your mood, making you either happy or sad? What if it further experimented, again successfully, to induce you to vote.

you would be greatly worried that your behavior, at least in the short term, could be manipulated without your even being aware of it. the government could conceivably persuade you to vote for one candidate over another by influencing your mood, and hence your choice, in the hours leading up to an election. (if you're angry or frightened you tend to vote more conservatively.) it could then spur you to go out and cast you ballot they way they shaded your mood to do.

well, breathe easy! the US government has done none of these things. but google has, and facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica, which put these practices into overdrive, with great success (Trump/Brexit) and for considerable profit. in tight contests these practices can make the difference.

tech giants, led by google and facebook and followed now by a herd of others, sell not just their data, but their ability to predict and control your actions using their model of you. they put you in the center of your own Truman Show.

and even though the government is prohibited from to doing any of the sort of things above, intelligence contractors could go out and buy the services and then turn around and proffer them to their employer, Uncle Sam. As long as the government isn't doing the snooping itself, it's all jake. makes Orwell's "1984" look like a spring pageant.

by the way, that whole Pokemon thing? google invented it and projected their digital hallucinations on the premises of companies like McDonald's that paid to draw players in through their doors. this is probably the least underhanded and exploitative thing they've done.

Is Your Candidate Pitching Something other than Medicare for All?

If you have health insurance currently and don't want to risk change, you might want to reconsider because this is what you can look forward to: increasing premiums; escalating drug costs; more and more denied claims; increasingly common "surprise" out-of-network costs; deductibles in the fine print that can push you into bankruptcy.

If you feel protected by health insurance you receive through your employer, even if your deductibles and "co-insurance" (read: "no-insurance") payments are low, you are still vulnerable to losing your health coverage overnight. If there's a layoff at work you'd be in a jam because most companies self-insure and you would definitely have a hard time affording their astronomically priced COBRA while you look for another job. And then of course, if you were to do something tomorrow that your bosses found displeasing you and your family could also be without any coverage in a heartbeat.

If you �still feel satisfied with your employer supplied health care, that dependency has a side effect your employer likely banks on: �it makes you �a more docile employee! On the other hand, universal health care might help you decide to try to find a �better job or even strike out on your own. (The fact is that entrepreneurship is higher in Europe than in the US, due to the ability there to strike out on your own without having to gamble with your or your family's health.)

There are more than 30,000 preventable deaths per year among the uninsured in the US, a toll numerically equivalent to a 9/11 every month. Even those with crappy ACA policies forego treatment because they just can't afford it. An increasing number of people are unable to afford absolute necessities like insulin injections. Rural hospitals are shutting like clams throughout the country. All this so that a parasitic insurance industry can skim off about a third of every dollar spent on medical costs while fostering an immoral, predatory pharmaceutical industrial complex. The for-profit medical care system is an abomination.

Are you worried that your taxes will go up under Medicare for All? Well, they sure will, especially if you're rich. But your care will be better and cost you less overall. Plus, everyone will be covered. Drugs will be cheaper. There will be no co-pays, no out-of-pocket. And because the company you work for won't be paying medical �premiums anymore, there's no reason they shouldn't pass that money on to you to offset any tax increase. What it comes down to is this: would you rather pay more to private insurance companies for worse care just to say your taxes are lower?

(If so, you should have your head examined. But your insurance probably won't cover it.)

"When will they ever learn?"

At the beginning of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech pointing out that spending on the military came at a real cost to society:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Dwight Eisenhower was not a pacifist. He had been Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe when Hitler was brought down. (He was not a sociopath either. Sending soldiers to their death affected him. He was a three pack-a-day man when he was doing this job, which ultimately contributed to his death.) There are no Eisenhowers around anymore in the Republican Party, or the Democratic either.

The point is this: the US spends far more than any other nation on defense. We are also the only wealthy country that doesn't have universal health care. There's a connection there, which Eisenhower pointed out clearly. Beating plow sheers into swords brings about a shortage of plow sheers and surplus of swords --and invites more war.

Still, when polled recently, 34% of the people in the US say the amount we spend on defense is too little, and another 30% say it's just right. So, almost two thirds are in favor of more or the same extravagant defense spending. Hats off to the military/industrial/congressional/corporate-news complex's propaganda, it has been fantastically effective.

The irony is, however, that in addition to sacrificing so much to the god of war we are getting very little in return for the massive outlay. Most new weapons systems are inferior to those they are supposed to replace, so they make the military weaker rather than stronger. The F35 supposedly replaces the A10 and F18, but the exorbitantly expensive F35 is fat pigeon in a dogfight that can't even shoot back reliably. And -surprise! it isn't cheap.

Of course, the main reason we have Forever War is to guarantee continued profits for the fossil fuel industry and the defense/surveillance business. The fact the military is hobbled by inferior equipment isn't really that critical, just as long as we continue to spend, spend, spend.

Toward the end of his second term, Eisenhower said this:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Aw, what'd he know!

Scrubbing Plastic Trash is the Wrong Way to go

When I was a kid back in the 50's, everything from the grocery store was packaged in either a can, a glass bottle, or a paper box. Most of the glass had a deposit on it, so you returned it to the store on your next shopping visit. You didn't need to wash the bottles, manufacturers took care of that at the factory when the bottles were refilled.

Then came plastic. It was a huge convenience for the buyer because it didn't require a deposit, didn't need to be returned, just thrown out in the trash. Naturally, plastic took over packaging. It was also immensely profitable for the food producers and the plastics/petroleum industry.

Flash forward to 2019. The oceans contain vast floating islands of accumulated plastic debris. Landfills are full of practically immortal plastic. When plastics do break down they produce microplastics that are found everywhere on earth, even in the remotest areas. They fall with the rain. They are in our bodies. We ingest them with our food and water. They are micro-interrupters to our hormonal systems.

So, do we put the breaks on and return to the pre-plastics packaging solutions of the 50's? No. We have been enticed to recycle. The once wonderfully convenient plastic is no longer even disposable. We are obligated to separate, wash, and dry chintzy plastic containers and put them in a bin beside our normal trash for collection.

Where is the convenience for the consumer now? Worse yet, the reality is that much less than 10 percent of recycled plastic actually gets turned back into usable material. Most of it is incinerated or dumped on remote islands in the third world.

Recycling doesn't work, and even if it did it is a solution that only benefits food producers and plastics manufactures from the petroleum industry. The better approach is to return to degradable packaging and reusable containers. So what are we going to do going forward? Apparently, we will be fighting over straws.

Hating Venezuela on Command

Think about it. The Iraq war was about oil but they sold it as being about: yellow cake, which might as well have been corn bread; mushroom clouds that were no more than portabello; Saddam's gassing of his own people, who were Kurds, killed with our knowledge at the time and with gas that we gave him. (By the way, the first person to gas these same people was Winston Churchill.)

Just as all the rationale was specious regarding Iraq then, the same can be said now for reasons given for the US led coup in Venezuela. It's purely an incursion to benefit Exxon. Period. The US has been dragging down the economy there to force the people to replace Madero with a handpicked US corporate puppet. The good old CIA is employing all its usual dirty tricks to make this happen and the corporate press is obediently singing the chorus.

Although never discussed by the US press, in Venezuela the conflict is predominantly class-racial. Madero represents the majority, who are black and Indigenous, while the US backed opposition refer to themselves as Spaniards rather than Venezuelans.

The white guys the US backs are the elite minority who can't wait to get back in the driver's seat and sell out to corporate interests. That's democracy, US corporate style, and it's certainly nothing new.

So, all this noise about Madero being a brutal socialist dictator is propaganda and pretext for corporate plundering. And by the way, when centrists or right wingers (just a matter of degree) hold up Venezuela as the ultimate example of evil socialism, it should be countered immediately with the better, more representative example of Scandanavian socialism.

Hey Kids! Remember to practice your schoolyard taunts each and every day so that someday you too could become President of the United States! Just be the biggest, most ignorant bully that you can be and millions of authoritarian half-wits will gleefully follow you off a cliff!

On the other hand, if you want to be a hapless Democratic Party loser, practice saying, "I may be a pointless centrist sellout, but you should vote for me anyway because I'm not HIM!"

How the Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars is Setting Us Back

Why computers aren't up to the task of making cars autonomous:

The human brain is amazing. So is a cat's brain, or a frog's, or a fly's for that matter. The brains of all animals higher than a planarian worm are composed of myriad interconnected neurons that operate at once and in concert to process the animal's surroundings, guide it, and regulate it. Most notably, the brain's structure gives rise to awareness and to varying degrees, consciousness. The animal knows it exists.

Digital computers are nothing like brains. They process one instruction at a time. Newer computers have several levels of tricky instruction look-ahead and several processors, but nothing even approaching the simultaneous processing by billions of neurons that takes place in a real brain.

Digital programmable computers work very fast though. If a programmer is clever, s/he (the original programmers were mostly women) can use this speed to create the illusion of intelligence. It can seem as if the computer is aware, but it isn't. It is not conscious at all because it is processing one step at a time. With the right programs, digital computers can pull off the illusion of seeming to be sentient, but only by virtue of their speed and intensive programming.

Brains composed of neural networks ARE magic. Digital computers never will be, HAL 9000 notwithstanding.

So when using the term "Artificial Intelligence", it's necessary to stress the "artificial". Expert systems can be developed to cover many contingencies and they can even be made to be "self-teaching" (adaptable), but there is no self-awareness, no capacity for inference, no broad understanding, and no true reasoning occurring. It's just doing a mountain of "IF THIS THEN THIS; ELSE THIS" decisions one after another very quickly. Programs written for digital computers will always have astounding blind spots, things that just weren't taken into account by the programmers. These blindspots will be spectacularly disastrous.

And this is why self-driving cars coming into general use in the near future is hype. Surely, they can be made good enough to only get you killed a small percentage of the time under rare and unanticipated circumstances. But until they can be made to do more than outperform the typical texting, distracted, multi-tasking commuter they will not be accepted.

How we could better expend our resources:

For now, wouldn't it be better to bury an antenna wire down the center of each lane on a highway and let the car follow it's path? Sensors already found in newer cars could judge a safe distance to follow behind the car in front. Pace cars, initially driven by actual human beings, could control speed by leading the pack. The pace car would receive data from a central office on what would be the optimal speed under prevailing conditions, which would avoid the "accelerate to 70/ jam on the brakes around the corner" scenario that every commuter goes through a dozen times a day. Lots of fuel would be saved and everyone could finally give their full attention to shaving/makeup/reading/texting, rather than the boring task of safely maneuvering their car. Collisions would be reduced, as long as the system was well designed.

Perhaps an in-car computer could be programmed with the destination and it could communicate/negotiate with the central office as to when it's permissible to change lanes. There are lots of details to be worked out, but it seems a buried wire approach would be more realizable than completely autonomous cars. We really should start cutting back on emissions ASAP, and this would be one way to do that. That's what we should be doing now rather than waiting for HAL to come along.

Why we are pursuing self-driving cars now:

Follow the money. Untold wealth awaits s/he who could field a reasonably safe self-driving car. Silicon Valley wunderkinds are vying to be the first, to cash in and have their egos cast in gold. On the other hand, a less sexy solution, one in which local, state, and federal governments had a hand wouldn't have the same appeal to the gods of Silicon Valley or their fans, including politicians. The press is on their side too, breathlessly repeating every quixotic claim they make, never following up after the gods have been forced to backpedal.

Let's face it, we live in an age when many people believe that government can't do anything. They have been led to believe only entrepreneurs have real answers. Well if that's true, how did we land on the moon? Who built the interstates? Who does the basic research for most new drugs?

(To be honest, government is pretty inept at everything except starting war and footing the bill for it. It wasn't always this way, but government has been sabotaged by those who said it was inept as they took office and then proceeded to scuttle a once functioning government. It's an example of the self-fulfilling prophecy.)

While we wait for arrogant wunderkinds to hit the elusive jackpot, our opportunity to turn down the burner on this over-heating, suffering planet goes unaddressed. We're stalling in order to indulge in our national myth of the self-made man.

The Price of Gas (DJT's re-election trumps tiny lives)

Can't withdraw support for the Saudi war in Yemen because too many JOBS are at stake. China and Russia would step in and provide the armament and expertise and we would miss out.

So says the President, who continues the war begun during the Obama Administration that has caused the death of 85,000 children under the age of 5 from starvation and disease. That's equivalent to almost a million dead children in the US. Jobs supersede their lives. Evangelical bigwig Pat Robertson has backed Trump up on the overriding importance of protecting jobs related to supplying the Saudi with the tools of war (and thereby sacrificing children).

But jobs aren't really what's driving US policy. It's the price of gas, mainly. If we cheese off the Saudis they will cut production. Worldwide supply will shrink, driving up prices globally. Gas will go up here too despite our being energy self-sufficient through fracking. The last time the price of gas skyrocketed, then president Jimmy Carter lost re-election.

So it's really about cheap gas for SUVs and how that affects Trump in 2020. Life is incidental, and neither the media nor politicians would be paying much attention to Yemen now if a high profile reporter hadn't been murdered in Turkey.

Blaming Susan

(Neo)Liberals are still slamming Susan Sarandon for HRC's loss and this resulting Trumpian miasma. Wrong. The Demoflatic Party turned its back on ordinary working people as early as the Carter Administration, and that's why so many are presently in a fugue state and susceptible to a Trump, or just about any fascist demagogue. But the Dem establishment is paid by Wall St. and Silicon Valley not to realize or acknowledge its own sin. So, blame Susan!

Narcissists Galore

Proposition: this is the era of the narcissistic sociopath. It began in the 1980's and is in full swing now. Each thinks only of his own welfare, solely of making a profit for himself, and endlessly grabbing for more.

This is embedded in our economic philosophy, which in turn drives our zeitgeist. It is an ingrained truism in US society and much of the rest of the world that if everyone pursues his or her own self-interest, the best outcome for all will be achieved. Conversely, expending energy over concern for others is wasteful and in the end lowers the benefit to all. That is to say, charity is an "inefficiency".

No one dares challenge this. It is the gospel of the Chicago School of Economics as preached by its high priest, Milton Friedman, who himself was brought out of the wilderness by the greatest president of all time, Ronald Reagan. In the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace we trust. Neoliberalism has completely engulfed religions, and Greed has vanquished Compassion.

In this age of the narcissistic sociopath, Wall Street bankers brazenly state they are "doing God's work" and nobody's head explodes. "Leave the poor alone and let them die in the snow" is enlightened sentiment in our time, against which almost no one stands up and shouts, "Shame!"

And as final proof, just look who's President. Or for that matter, look at the Neoliberal corporatist who was his unsuccessful rival.

Q.E.D.

Best joke:

"White people with type 2 diabetes voting for Trump proves they hate [black people] more than they love their feet."

--D.L. Hughley

without unions to intervene on their behalf, capitalism reduces the average person to eating shit sandwiches. the Koch brothers are preparing lunch for us right now. bon appetit, America!

Trump's Reelection a Gift from the DNC

Republicans have been attacking the New Deal from front and sides since the day of its inception, but it took a Democrat, Bill Clinton, to assassinate it from behind. Sixteen years after he left office, when life had declined --predictably-- for the average citizen, the feckless and corrupt Democratic Party foisted Clinton's ambitious wife on working people as their presidential candidate. Not only does she have the the stigma of association with her husband's betrayal of workers, but her personal disdain for average people is palpable. Any wonder Donald Trump won? Surely the vacuous DNC will pitch an irrelevant Kennedy in 2020, then blame millennials and Susan Sarandon for Trump's reelection.

Average is the new Moribund

Work hard, get nowhere. Get sick, then get even sicker. Watch your children fail to thrive. Relinquish your dreams. That's the prescription for you, young AVERAGE American. The rich will get richer, and you will be left behind to watch your teeth rot out of your head, slowly, gradually.

Welcome to the 21st century, the era of ascendancy of the 0.1% and their upper 10% remora. The age of narcissistic oligarchs, be they meritocratic (favored by the Democratic Party) or plutocratic (worshiped by the Republican Party), has arrived. They -through the agency of your parents and the complicit media- taught you that you are soley responsible for your own situation, that you have effectively chosen to be miserable through you own laziness, worthlessness, inferiority, and stupidity, and therefore deserve to be trampled.

By all means, continue to believe them. Go after their enemies, the left, when they tell you to. Be a good dupe and believe in the magical goodness of unrestrained capitalism under neoliberalism, even while it crushes you and gnaws away at your children.

Walmart Republicans do not get that the purpose of most regulation is to protect the average man, woman, and child from being ravaged by the sociopathic wealthy lunging for every last buck. Are Walmart Republicans stupid, self-loathing, demented, or some combination of all three? There's surely a big chunk of racism in there too.

Trump's base forms a triad of God, Greed, and Guns. He cynically courts evangelicals and Catholics, promising evangelicals they will be free to denigrate, hound, and attack everyone outside their group with the state's blessing, and telling Catholics they can soon return to controlling the bodies of women. He's telling gun nuts they can wallow in ammunition and high capacity clips to prepare for the race war they've been praying for, and kill a bunch of blacks and liberals when the shooting starts. He has already pleased the rich by slashing their taxes and will continue to whittle down regulations so they can continuously break new records for profits, accomplished on the backs of workers, the weak, the needy, and at the cost of people's health and the environment.

Each of his base groups has a distinct agenda that Trump adroitly addresses with his carnival con man bluster. What the God, Greed, and Gun groups have in common is they are each single issue and don't care what the fallout might be for others as long as they get the specific thing they want. Such is the nature of narcissism. Such is the base of Trumpism.

Very Short History of America's Working People since 1980

People today have a harder and harder time making it, and this applies disproportionately to young adults. The historical reasons for this are two. First, with the destruction of unions (an active, planned decimation perpetrated by the ruling elites and in no way an accident) wages stagnated even as productivity doubled. In other words, you have to work twice as hard now as you did in the seventies just to stay even. This is not news to anyone over the age of 55. They know the score, were around when things were a dam site better for working people, and if any of us old codgers ever deny it we are filthy, stinking, cowardly liars.

Because of wage suppression, there is an ever growing need for public assistance. Without it life becomes increasingly unbearable for the many. Ironically, as the need is burgeoning, the ability to fund it has diminished because over the decades Congress has reduced tax rates for the rich. Politician: "We'd love to feed Johnny and provide him pediatric care, but the funds just aren't there." Well, the funds aren't there because the rich who bankrolled that politician's political campaign and for whom he/she will work when they finally leave office have ordered them to reduce taxes and then cry "DEFICITS!" whenever anybody suggests doing something to alleviate people's suffering.

Thus are the young screwed out of welfare as well as wages. The PLAN all along was: bust unions; pay low wages and create "worker insecurity"; saddle working people with credit card debt; cut taxes to avoid any responsibility for dealing with the resulting miasma.

Why don't working class people rise up against all this? First of all, most boomers don't even realize they are working class, although their sons and daughters get it. The longer you've been around the longer you've been exposed to brainwashing by popular media. The newspapers and the networks don't cover labor issues. Instead, they're all over Trump's latest boorish tweets and bleats. They cover very little of importance, and in the case of TV news, coverage is without any context whatsoever. Furthermore, the conservative right has "played the ref" so adroitly in past decades that the media gives equal time now to the fireman and the arsonist. Fair and balanced has replaced truth and sanity.

In the end though, the gross inequities in our society could never have flourished without the primal force of endemic racism. We put up with outrages because we fear THEM and we think the hardship created by our punitive, heartless and cruel system falls mostly on THEM. So the injustice, deprivation, and inequality which befall all working Americans are tolerated like some sort of national social chemotherapy intended to suppress THEM. Since Reconstruction the elite have pitted poor whites against African Americans and Latinos.

Reagan, the union-buster-in-chief, got into office by telling the white working class, "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem." This was a dog whistle indicating he was going to put a stop to all that federal civil rights enforcement that empowered African Americans. That's why he announced his candidacy for president in Philadelphia Mississippi, where three civil rights worker were infamously murdered. (Nudge. Nudge.)

Employing divide-and-conquer has allowed the overlords to stay either in, or very close to the catbird seat, regardless of setbacks. They direct you to Fox news to get your daily "two minutes [of] hate". So far, too many still go for the ruse. Maybe someday, perhaps even before it's too late, we'll get our heads out. But I kinda doubt that.

US Setting up to Relive the Greek Economic Tragedy

What caused the collapse of the Greek economy? Were ordinary people just not working hard enough or failing to put in long enough hours? No, the Greeks on average work longer hours than the Germans, so what caused the crash then?

The answer is: tax avoidance. Not paying taxes was a national pastime, especially among the wealthy. In fact, the rich from all over Europe bought houses in Greece to avoid paying taxes.

Because Greece belonged to the European Union it could no longer just print drachmas to cover the shortfall, so it had to borrow euros. Eventually, that led to its falling prey to vulture capitalists.

With Trump's Tax Cuts, the US has stopped paying its taxes too. Unlike Greece, the US can always print dollars so it really doesn't have to borrow. Thing is though, not collecting taxes will preclude the redistribution of any wealth downwards because today's Republican spendthrifts will morph into tomorrow's deficit hawks when it comes to spending for the common good. Inequality will accelerate at an even faster rate than now. In the end people of the US will suffer just as much as those in Greece. (Where there are lots of big, beautiful suicides!)

I you're a free marketeer, you'll say of the rich not paying taxes, "It's their money, they should be able to keep it." I argue that it isn't all theirs, and in fact a good deal of what they took and continue to take should have gone to working people in the first place. The rich have grabbed all proceeds from productivity increases in the US over the last three decades. It ain't their money, it's ours.

We'll see what happens now that the Angry Creamsicle has converted us over to the Greek economic model.

the worse things get for the average person, the more s/he longs for a strongman to make everything right again, to save them, to lift them out of the pit. the powerful who are actually making the average person's life so miserable and precarious, the ones who kicked them into that pit, will provide the strongman. that's how it works. neat trick. [fuck a duck]

R-58 v MS-13

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans say they are in agreement with the Trump/Nielsen/Sessions action of separating small children from their mothers and placing those children in detention camps where they have no contact with relatives or any other comforting, caring adults. The rationale for doing this is that it provides a brutal message to others in the south who might be considering coming north across our borders (even though the influx is at a relative low now, and on balance there are as many leaving as there are entering).

Suspending bewildered, petrified little kids in a terrifying void inflicts unending toxic stress on them. It is an action supposedly justified on the grounds it protects Trump's base from the one in fifty-eight thousand chance they might otherwise run across a member of MS-13, as they are repeatedly warned about by their calculating, manipulative, demagogic, con artist, racist, narcissistic, fascistic, dictator-wannabe leader.

Oh, and by the way, these same Republicans are unyielding defenders of the pre-conscious fetus ...but have they considered the infinitesimal chance that a fetus could grow up to become a member of MS-13? Or even R-58!

What really motivates staunch defenders of the Second Amendment?

The first thing to realize about people who ferverently defend the Second Amendment is that they don't give a shit about the Constitution or the rule of law. They would be hard pressed to even give the the numbers of any other amendments, although the more clever among them might reason that if there's a "2nd" there's probably a "1st". (They just can't tell you what's in it.) In fact, they haven't even read their sacred Second Amendment, because if they had they would know it says zilch about an individual's right to own a gun. It only says a state has the right to maintain a well regulated militia. How you go from there to muttering uncle Joe carrying around an AK-47 is anybody's guess.

Nope, despite claims of cherishing the Constitution, and although there might be exceptions, the average gun nut wants a personal arsenal to 1) protect himself and his family and 2) maintain as a precaution against an oppressive government. And by these he means, respectively: 1) shoot black people in an upcoming race war he eagerly anticipates, and 2) kill all liberals.

Don't kid yourself, Elmer Fudd wants to fuck you up, and as things are going now, with a racist, bullying, dictator-wannabe in the White House who openly tells his followers to beat people up, defends Nazis, and demonizes minorities, the last thing you're apt to see before the lights go out is Elmer's burning glare over the barrel of his gun.

He's a Christian and believes in "Love thy neighbor", except he's particular about who he's going to leave around to be his neighbor.

A Letter to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai:

Thinking of taking away basic telepone and internet from the poor, are you?

Tens of millions of children in the US are living at or below the poverty line and you want to strand them on the far side of the digital divide. Further, their parents need access to government websites to obtain assistance. Actually, beside wanting to make your cronies like Comcast richer, I strongly suspect you're rolling back Lifeline in part to make access to aid more difficult for these families. Instead of a lifeline, you're throwing them an anchor. You are acting like true sociopaths, which is what we've come to expect.

The Epiphany That Will Never Come

Ironically, HRC's recent brutal and insulting analysis of her loss to Donald Trump inadvertently illustrates why that loss happened. She pointed out that states voting for Trump are backward and impoverished, and also that people with higher degrees voted for her instead of him. It never occurs to her that people living in precarity are looking for a champion and that the Democratic Party, the erstwhile party of the working man, has flatly failed them for decades. That's why, when Donald Trump gave lip service to their plight they responded positively, just as downtrodden Brits voted for Brexit to spite their elites.

Hillary, like the entire Democratic leadership, cannot acknowledge they have abandoned average poeple and gone to work for the wealthy, the same as Republicans do. It's a pay-to-play system, and when unions were decimated, the DLC under Bill and Al rebranded itself as the party of white collar management. Nobody stands up for the average person in the USA anymore. Just a fact.

Rather than apologize to struggling workers for decades of Democratic neglect, HRC chooses to denigrate them. Hillary hates "average", and it plainly shows. She's a huge fan of the meritocracy, just as Republicans adore the wealth oligarchy. That's why Trump's re-election in 2020 is in the bag, assuming he survives Mueller's investigation.

Tax Cuts: Poison to the Populace, Panacea for the Plutocracy

Democracy cannot survive in a system that tolerates massive inequality. The Republican tax gut will increase inequality, and the US is already the third most unequal country in the world. The rich are awash in cash and have been for years, yet the majority of people, especially young adults, are finding it difficult to maintain their standard of living. They have lost hope of doing as well as their parents. Tilting the playing field even more will further gild the lily for our modern day robber barons.

As for the idea that business is yearning to create jobs but is stymied by regulation and taxes, that is preposterous. Recall that Americans business happily sent countless jobs overseas to take advantage of cheap labor to boost profits. No rational neo-liberal capitalist will hire any US worker unless it becomes unavoidable. Beside that, another word for business regulation is consumer protection, and we need more of that in the face of corporate assault on ordinary people.

Surprisingly to most, US upward mobility is less than in many European countries, and the rate of entrepreneurialism is lower too, for one simple reason: unless you have a rich daddy you can't afford to fail over and over until you finally succeed (like Trump did). If you were not born with a silver spoon and have a family that needs medical insurance, you can't risk their well being by recklessly striking out on your own.

The real reason behind this tax gut is that it will completely erode the social safety net. Sycophants would rather help the obscenely wealthy further inflate the stock market and private housing stock (which they vacuumed up after 2008) than take care of our beleaguered working people and their families.

The GOP tax bill, which is a reverse Robin Hood scheme, should be called the "Ascendant Aristocracy of America Act". It's the culmination of 40 years of unrelenting class war waged against average people by the rich. It began in the 70's with the Powell Memo, written for the US Chamber of Commerce, which called for the elite to retake control from workers, academics, and unions. Its underlying point was this: kill the New Deal. Paul Ryan et al have now delivered the coup de gras.

What will be the outcome of increasing inequality and precarity for the many? Will it lead to a demand for more equality and social justice? Fat chance. People are too easily manipulated by right wing propaganda into blaming scapegoats like immigrants and minorities, or even their elders. The go-to strategy of a cornered pickpocket is yelling "Thief!", and it always seems to work.

Life will continue to get harder and people will need to be held in check through more and more authoritarian means. As financier Jay Gould said in the 1890's, "I can pay one half of the working class to kill the other half." Look around and you can probably spot tomorrow's death squad recruits.

Sometime tomorrow morning the earth will have completed one entire revolution around the sun since the morning I found my wife's lifeless body.

I have survived the intervening time largely by fortifying myslef against sentimental indulgence.

Too much feeling in desperate situations is incapacitating. (Hence the survival function of shock.)

Now after one year, although I acknowlwdge the value of resisting sentimentality during the grief storm, it occurs to me that living life without feeling is just keeping a ledger.

Time once again to start cherishing little things, to foolishly stash momentos in drawers and put up trivialities with refridgerator magnets.

To be alive for yourself and to be present for others you have to feel.

Democrats are flower girls at a fascist wedding, stepping daintily over the corpse of the New Deal. They walk alongside the Republicans, making a path for their common masters. The system is so corrupt it's probably not salvagable.

Where do working people stand in their claim to political power at the end of 2017: they have none.

In the USA a political party is sustained by contributors. It's a system aptly described as "legalized bribery". Currently both parties get their funding from Wall St., Silicon Valley, and the rich; therefore, laws are made to further enrich wealthy donors.

Prior to the 1980's the Democratic party received much of its support from unions, and so it passed laws that favored working people, the union members. But beginning during the Reagan Administration, unions were crushed by lawmakers who were put into office by big business. Subsequently, a main pillar of Democratic Party funding disappeared, forcing Dems to appeal to Big Money.

This led to the situation we live in now: the working majority are being completely left out of consideration in our pay-to-play political process. Realistically, despite their inherited mantle of "Friend of Working Men and Women" Dems routinely whisper sweet nothings into the ear of working people just before an election and then deliver for their wealthy overlords exclusively once in office. While they aren't as bad for average people as today's Republicans are, today's Dems aren't even as good as moderate Republicans of the 1970's were.

And that's reality.

Working people were on the rise in this country after the Depression. Capitalists back then were forced to give ground or possibly face a communist/socialist uprising, so we got the New Deal which redistributed wealth downward. Well, Paul Ryan and the GOP now have put the final nail in the coffin of the New Deal. Their new tax plan guarantees the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. That has been their goal for 40 years, and with the help of an indolent and conflicted Democratic party, they have finally achieved their Holy Grail.

And if you think the wealthy will stop before things get too extreme and that they won't turn your grandchildren into destitute waifs, then you don't understand power, either in contemporary practice or in history. News flash: "The full mouth wants to keep on eating". It thinks it is ordained by God to eat endlessly and that it is justified in resorting to whatever it needs to do in order to keep filling its maw. Here's the paradigm we're in from now on: winner take all, and let the poor die in the snow.

Now Go Shopping and Don't Worry about Debt Slavery!

So, you have that new credit card in hand and you're ready to join the world of buy-now-pay-later? First there was your driver's license, your passport to physical freedom. Now there's this, your visa to consumer candy land!

Welcome to the fold, but just as driving has it's dangers, so does credit card use. In fact, credit cards are a lot like a car that's prone to run out of gas the farther you are from home and in the worst weather.

Credit cards are handy for letting us get something on sale if we don't have the cash in hand at the moment, or for paying an unexpected car repair bill, or co-payment at the doctor's office when we're sick. What they are not advisable to be used for is everyday things we could wait to get later or go without.

Think of it this way, if you use a credit card to buy groceries because you're a little short right before payday, by next payday you are likely to be in the same situation again, and at the end of the month you'll also owe on the credit card, which if you pay in full will make you even more prone to being short all next month.

On the other hand, if you pay the minimum on the card you will be paying compounding interest on the milk, bread, and bottle of wine you bought last month through coming months and even years. Heap onto that additional groceries you'll put on the card and you will dig a deeper and deeper hole until you eventually reach the point when you must skip a payment just be able to buy food.

Then of course, you will incur a penalty fee from the credit card company for the missed payment. They will act very stern to make you feel guilty about it, but don't be fooled, they absolutely LOVE you at that point. They could not stay in business without others (which includes millions of people) like you. In fact, do you know who they don't love? People who pay their bill in full every month. Know what the credit card companies call those people? DEADBEATS!

The credit card companies want you to live beyond your means, which is pretty easy to do nowadays because nearly everyone's salaries have shrunk and subsequently everyone borrows continuously just to keep going. So the credit card companies stick a needle in your arm and draw off a little blood continuously. If there any transient interruptions in the blood flow, that is if you miss a payment, they'll make up for it next month by using a bigger needle. They will continue to take blood when the goods and services you bought have long been paid for. With interest and penalties, the debt never goes away.

Note: Senator Elizabeth Warren, when she was still a professor, gave a talk to a credit card company crowd. Because her expertise was in bankruptcy, she advised them to refrain from lending money to people who had defaulted previously. After her talk a company executive took her aside and explained that formerly bankrupt people were EXACTLY the kind of people they, the credit card companies, went after. Why? Because the companies knew those people had a REAL TASTE FOR IT! (Borrowed money.)

If there is any difference between the business model of a credit card company and a heroin dealer, it's that occasionally a heroin dealer shows pity toward an addict.

Any credit card use is dangerous. Credit cards are a scheme by the global financial industry to put young Americans in a condition of permanent debt. Welcome to slavery. Now go shopping!