Step into the MoosePoop!

final

once upon a time the majority of the people did not live very well. medical care was sparse, education beyond high school or even elementary was unattainable for most, and the contrast between those at that top who lived well and the masses was stark. that is to say, it was then as things are coming to be again. to the victors go the spoils.

the fact is that New Deal programs and laws changed the distribution of wealth, if only for a few short decades. but those laws have been attacked, weakened, and are on the brink of being expunged completely.

the crucial irony is that american workers fared so well only because of the threat of communism during that period. fdr knew that unless he toned down the harshest aspects of predatory capitalism, there was a real chance that communist ideas might penetrate even further than they already had. so to save capitalism, he instituted reforms that distributed wealth downward.

and as a result, economic and educational opportunity existed for the many, not just the few, and the country flourished. but when the ussr caved in on itself, american businessmen immediately realized they didn't need to make nice anymore. their competition in the realm of ideas was vanquished, and there was no damn reason not to go back to a winner-take-all system. none.

so, we're awash in the tide of trickle-down that uncle ron brought us. things will not get better for my children and my grandchild, because there is no incentive for the overlords to do anything other than continue taking, stealing, grabbing everything for themselves. there's no silver lining and no way out because the very rich now control the levers of power more pervasively than they did even before fdr.

go back to sleep

the buzz around st. louis is that boing (nee mcdonnell douglas) has a new contract to build a flock of fighters for sale to saudi arabia. this will bring badly needed jobs to the area, so you can't blame people there for being enthusiastic. however, isn't it absurd that we're selling advanced military jets to the country that underwrote the 9-11 attack a decade ago? the money for the operation came from saudi arabi, and not from average joes, but from the ruling class. also, most of the hijackers were saudi. but business is business!

funny how we thumped afghanistan in the early going, then turned our furry on iraq (?). later it came out that the afghani taliban were actually working with our government in the lead-up to 9-11, trying to find a way to turn over bin laden to a western power like france. they didn't dare give him directly to the us because they were afraid we'd execute him, and that would destroy their street cred. that makes invading afghanistan over 9-11 seem analogous to bulldozing the cheap motel timothy mcveigh slept in the night before he bombed the murrah building in oklahoma, blindly vengeful and heavy-handed.

that's ok though, once we'd stomped iraq into a stupor, one sufficient to assure it couldn't flare up again while we withdrew, we went back and redoubled our fury against afghanistan. (but we did leave behind ten or fifteen thousand contract fighters in iraq, a small private army under direct control of our state department.)

none of this seems to make any sense, and if you get your information from context-free, amnesiac tv news, it all just seems infuriatingly inane and stupid. there has to be more to it, but without real information to explain, we can only surmise what the point of all this is. whenever we try however, we we leave ourselves open to being branded conspiracy nuts. so rather than attempt to understand what the hell is going on and be an informed electorate, the corporate-approved answer is just keep buying electronic trinkets and watching reality tv. go back to sleep.

Sad to Say

For a period after the second world war, the US saw enormous growth of its middle class. This resulted from laws that favored unions and prevented the financial sector from again becoming a casino, as it had been leading up to the Great Depression. It was a time when nearly everyone, if they were white at least, could work and benefit in direct proportion. There were jobs aplenty, they paid well, and a young person emerging from the war could expect to achieve his particular version of the American Dream. The period lasted long enough so that even the next generation, the baby boomers, enjoyed a promising start in life and a secure future.

All that's changed. Expectations for children of the working class majority are severely reduced. Most jobs don't pay well enough to live on for millions, there are no benefits, and the past norm of fair wages, benefits, and an attainable retirement has evaporated. Without unions, without worker protection laws vigorously applied, or regulations on the financial industry, a well paid working class has been plunged into a form of serfdom in a comparatively short time as New Deal laws have been rolled back.

The paradigm has shifted back to the Robber Baron era, when a small percentage of psychopaths garnered all the benefits of productivity, and we the people fought each other for the crumbs that fell from their table. How this paradigm shift occurred is intriguing, disappointing, and infuriating, but it is sufficient to say that the crafty elite drove the change and we the people bought into the selfishness of a winner-take-all society. Consequently, serfdom is the new normal, and without a revolution cannot be changed.

These ultra-wealthy have no empathy for the majority. Quite the contrary, they disdain and despise average people. Having plundered the wealth of the middle class the elite are actively engaged in engineering the system to preclude working people's ever regaining any of their former power. The abominable Citizen's United Supreme Court decision is a glaring example of this. Further, the elite see the people as a potential threat and invest great sums in security to fight them off should they revolt, as unlikely as that seems.

Don't expect redress through government action. The cold fact is that politicians of both parties work exclusively for the wealthy elite. It is they after all who make the large campaign contributions necessary to return sitting politicians to office. This money was once offset by union support, but with the decline of unions the Democratic Leadership Council found it necessary to recast their party as courtiers of the rich. Clinton and Obama certainly exemplify this pragmatic conversion.

Even Democratic governors engage in selling off the commons to private interests like Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Ultimately roads, bridges, and water supplies will be in private hands and the cost of using them will be set by a rigged market. Even now the global price of food is affected by commodity speculators, with the result famine is not a function of food shortage, but an inability to pay inflated prices.

So the defeat of ordinary people is complete, irreversible, and global. Predatory financial capitalism has the world by the throat, and there is no incentive for it to change. There is no room for empathy in an unbridled free market. The rich are getting richer around the world, while the little people are being ground to dust.

The Dog Whistler

Newt is pandering again when he facetiously suggests putting poor children to work as janitors. He's blasting a dog whistle audible to those outspoken and obnoxious Tea-baggers. They perk their ears up, and what they actually hear is "put them in the fields picking cotton", and they love it. It's a coded transmission between a lifelong opportunist and a group of selfish, racist, coddled curs who are howling out one last chorus of "I've got mine" before they contaminate the soil with their carcasses. And they vote.

In Greed We Trust

Congress recently passed a resolution affirming the motto "In God We Trust" on US currency. There are 50 million people without medical coverage at present. Young people aren't paid enough to live independently, don't receive benefits, and have no real future. One in five children in the US knows what it's like to go hungry, but continuously views TV commercials hawking luxury cars. Sixty cents gets added to the price of a gallon of gas to put money in the pockets of commodities speculators at Goldman Sachs. Corrections Corporation of America successfully pushed legislation via A.L.E.C. to lengthen jails sentences solely to make more money warehousing prisoners. The Washington clowns almost got the wording right, it's "In GREED We Trust".

the weakest link

you've heard him spouting off at at work. he starts with a story about people on welfare gaming the system. the story is either cherry picked or completely made up, but either way, he poses himself as the long suffering, hard working victim of calculating freeloaders. after bashing the supposedly undeserving poor he switches to carrying water for the rich, championing a flat tax and decrying the perfidy of the graduated income tax.

in truth, he neither believes his own story about the poor nor cares about some purported unfairness in the tax code. he knows full well being poor sucks and he also knows he will not gain by a flat tax because he himself earns only a modest income. then what motivates him? he is a hater, an opportunistic hater.

more than that, he is a coward who openly targets only the poor because they lack the power to defend themselves and because they have few outside defenders. just to be safe though, he cloaks himself in mores of the wealthy to purchase safety in the same way the imitative viceroy moth mimics the truly poisonous monarch butterfly to ward off attack.

he is the angry white male who listens to conservative talk radio every day, reveling in that free-hate zone tended by indignant gargoyles. the unfortunate thing is, this human dreck represents a plurality now, which means we are very unlikely to address the impending disintegration of our society due to increasing wealth stratification, marauding of middle class wealth by Wall Street, or the atomization of working people which renders them incapable of defending themselves against the onslaught.

Tony Baloney's Picnic

"Inspector Bologna, who formerly led the 1st Precinct and now works in counterterrorism" --that was the buried lead. Countless government manuals now list protest as "low grade terrorism". Protesting Wall Street Robber Barons is terrorism, get it? Heck, if a guy can't even pepper spray a terrorist, what's this world coming to? Back in the day when cops clubbed, beat, and shot at union strikers they were just being thugs. Now they're patriots. This is the new "Freedom" of the burgeoning authoritarian police state. And by the way, a portion of the NYPD is now the domestic spying arm of the CIA and operates in several states. So sleep tight while you wait for the knock on the door.

Austerity, reducing the federal budget in order to shrink the federal debt, will mean cutbacks in Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutritional supplements among other things. Down to brass tacks, that means millions of pregnant woman will not receive food supplements during pregnancy, jeopardizing their baby's normal development and increasing the chance of birth defects. After that, because supplements to infant and toddler will be cut, in countless cases the developing child will not only be more vulnerable to disease, but its full mental and physical potential will not be reached. In a real sense, this is a tradeoff of IQ points against debt dollars.

A lot of average working people support the Austerity movement despite the fact it will affect many of their families directly in a profound way. For everyone, the cost of shortchanging mothers and children will also be massive down the road. The diminution and stunting of a generation will require vast future expenditures in special education, ballooning of otherwise preventable medical costs, and in twenty years, skyrocketing increases in crime and incarceration.

Of course, it isn't just WIC, Medicaid's under the budget cutting knife too. Forget about vaccinations then, and childhood diseases could regain some of the power of life and death they had in olden times. In a way, the suffering will have been a tradeoff for the satisfaction of bringing the budget in line. And to the contention it will spare future generations burdensome debt? Perhaps, but it's no bargain for the price they will pay.

Who's Your Class Warrior, Baby!

There has been a thirty year campaign waged by business to suppress wages. A lynchpin of this war has been to eliminate unions, and it has been very, very successful. As a result, wages have not increased over that entire period, while the wealthy have benefited vastly.

If income distribution were the same today as in 1960, the median household income would be $106,000. Instead, it is $50,000.

When the wealthy are publicly confronted with this, they act horrified and cry, "Class Warfare!" Their hypocrisy and gall is astounding, considering they have been in full battle mode for three decades, and now when the vanquished present minimal push-back they act horrified.

I've heard the term "chutzpah" defined by an example: a boy murders his parents, then asks for leniency in court because he's an orphan. These wealthy guys present another good example of chutzpah. (Consult US Rep. Michelle Bachman for correct pronunciation.)

How one man felled an empire.

Bin Laden had goals: get US forces out of Saudi Arabia; drag the US into a quagmire in Afghanistan for the purpose of bleeding the US economically and thereby weakening it, just as had been done with the Soviet Union. Within a year of 9-11 Donald Rumsfeld had removed US troops from Mecca, and the US is now entrenched in a never ending bloody occupation in Afghanistan that is sapping the country's wealth. Our economy is on the edge of implosion. Osama bin Laden will forever be remembered as a murderer, but he will simultaneously be credited with bringing down an empire.

He was inadvertently abetted by forces within the US that had long wanted a military incursion in the region. The Cheney Administration was spoiling for a war in Iraq for the purpose of controlling enough of the world's oil to put the Chinese at a disadvantage, causing them to pay Western powers (US and British corporations) a tribute for every drop of oil they used in the future. Cheney would have done to the Chinese with oil exactly what the British had done with opium.

Cheney, although a psychopath, was not a fool. He eschewed spending too much time in Afghanistan on his way into Iraq. President Obama however, apparently did not see bin Laden's trap.

By the way, having captured bin Laden, why would we kill him? That would be like blowing up the entrance to a gold mine. My bet is he's being held in a basement somewhere, information being extracted from him bit by bit, day by day. That's what Cheney would do.

Forget the Media

The media is insisting on being told what the demands of the 99 Percenters are, as if the reason for occupying of Wall Street were some incomprehensible mystery. This doesn't surprise in light of the media's long standing practice of obfuscating the financial elite's three decade old campaign to marginalize and fleece working Americans, the very thing that has precipitated the occupation.

Here's a recap of the undoing of the other 99%. The picture's dirt simple, really. The top 1% have harvested the wealth of the other 99% in four easy steps, which began in the 1980's:

Step 1, Undercut wages. Off-shoring jobs is merely a new twist on the old ploy of flooding the market with immigrant labor to drive wages down. Now because of technology and innovation in shipping the the replacement workers can stay put and the factories come to them, with the same effect. Thanks to Bill "NAFTA" Clinton for this, and a special shout out to Reagan for paving the way by busting the unions.

Step 2, Keep up consumption. Lost jobs and lower wages naturally lead to reduced consumer spending unless something is done to prop it up. Voila, CREDIT CARDS!

Step 3, Mine the accumulated wealth of the 99%. Once the plastic was max-ed out, a way had to be found to get the peons to keep spending. Presto, HOME EQUITY LOANS! These allowed the 99% to tap into their only major source of wealth to pay off card blances and keep on buying the cars and electronic trinkets their overseas replacement workers were grinding out.

Step 4, Make them debt slaves. Having drained the wealth of the 99%, the plutocrats needed to keep the game going until they could shift revenue stream to the developing markets overseas and begin collecting from the new class of consumers being cultivated there. But how to get the peons to extend spending beyond the point of being broke? BINGO, inflation in the housing market!

This was tricky, but avarice will always find a way. With the help of able men like Alan "Mr. Bubble" Greenspan, it was accomplished. (Artful Dodger Clinton assisted here too, by overturning Glass-Steagall at just the right moment.) Who though, could be found to underwrite loans for these obviously inflated assets? Why, the peons themselves, through their own pension funds, of course! Now their mortgages are under water, they're facing foreclosure, and unable to retire. SHAZAM, you're a serf!

So there in four easy steps is how the 99% came to be where they are. The media must have seen it coming, could have said something and might even have averted the collapse of the middle class, but they were too preoccupied practicing the steps to the Fair and Balanced Tango, sitting in makeup, and writing checks for their kids' private school tuition. Anyway, let the fatuous media fret that they can't get a list of demands, who cares? The media is at best irrelevant, and has been for decades.

Mazel tov, Mother Fuckers

Greed is good. Greed is a mindset that displaces charity, empathy, and communality. Greed is however consistent with heartlessness, fear, hate, envy, and mutual victimization. WE as a nation have evolved to embrace greed as our main tenet. That is why our political system is in thrall to psychopathic CEO's and why our only remaining industry is pure financial capitalism, not production of goods. It is why the pendulum has swung back to the pre Depression Gilded Age. Our world has become the dreamland of Gordon Gecko, sold to you by the avuncular Ronald Reagan. And now the only way forward is down.

Tax cuts create jobs? give me a break.

Let's cut the baloney, tax cuts to businesses don't create jobs. The claim they do presupposes that business owners would put more workers on payroll if only they had the money, as if giving people jobs were a business manager's priority. This is poppycock: a business's goal is to make money, and it only pays workers as necessary to produce the goods or services it sells in order to make money. What leads to job creation is DEMAND, and this exists only when consumers have money in their pockets to spend.

Actually, putting more money in the pockets of the wealthy during an economic downturn not only fails to spur hiring, but tends to create market bubbles because there's no productive place for them to put the extra cash. Thirty years of devastation from Voodoo Economics and we're still clueless. Meanwhile, our descent into fascism is picking up momentum.

Something Doesn't Add Up

If nearly everyone is working for low subsistence wages, how can a consumer based economy ever be restored? Isn't that the gorilla at the end of the kitchen table? How is a broad recovery even mathematically possible under these circumstances? If politicians were ever to address this, assuming they could take a mini break from heeding the voices of their corporate bosses, the next question would be: will you tax the wealthy to compensate the general population for its inability to provide for itself, or is this a simple case of "Let the poor die in the snow"? Of course, Washington's answer to this, as everything, will be: Austerity!

Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck: can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
-George Eliot

(Try telling that to a Teabagger!)

Whiplashed by Hate

We succumb to the politics of envy, piling on the remaining unions in the public sector because those workers enjoy the last vestige of a dying era of good pay, security, and benefits. Rather than challenge the paradigm that drove us down, we denigrate teachers and other public workers on command like obedient attack dogs. We are seemingly unaware that the media is carrying water for the economic elite that has calculatedly (Re: the "Powell Memo") wrought our economic downfall. We passive-aggressively tear into teachers, firefighters, and letter carriers to bring them down to our own new level of hand-to-mouth existence. Well, I guess that's just a part of human nature, a trait that dominates in a climate of misinformation and hate mongering.

Reagan's Tragic Verity

It's thirty years since Ronald Reagan stood in front of the American people and told them "Government IS the problem." That's the government that stood in the way of corporations' doing whatever they damned well pleased, not the government that fostered and protected unions to bring us the 8 hour work day, sick leave, vacation, and pensions. Not the government that oversaw inspection of our food supply, that monitored and enforced laws to prevent our air, water, and soil becoming laden with poisons. Not the government that regulated wall street practices to prevent its becoming, once again, a wild west casino. Nope, not that government.

Now what we have is a government that didn't shrink in any dimension except it has become far less democratic and is dominated by Wall Street. It is simply an organ of control for very wealthy corporations and individuals, and the ordinary people's interests are ignored, their modest wealth has been torn away from them, and their children's future savaged. Democracy is gone, having actually been made a bad word by the well-funded right wing propaganda machine. Ironically, Reagan's assertion has become the truth.