Economics - In One Easy Lesson

(or, "The Inmates Run The Asylum")
 
I was asked quite a few questions the other day, as well as hearing some folks weigh-in on the current economic situation.   What I'm about to tell you, in point of fact, won't be new - but I'm hoping it'll be in a manner that'll help you understand a thing or two about a thing or two about the state of things.

Economics and religion have a helluva lot in common.   They're practiced in places where the ordinary Great Unwashed can never go (try getting a tour of 11 Wall Street - the trading-floor doesn't admit mere civilians); the practitioners wear funny clothes (when CNN is favored by the admission of a cameraman, take a gander at those oh-so-seventies colored jackets); they speak in riddles which would put the most-arcane priest to shame - everything is intended to keep most of us in a form of awe.

In fact, it's pretty simple.  I grow beans; you need 'em.  We trade for something I need, like fertilizer.   That's what they call a 'subsistence' or 'barter' economy - and there are some, even one of our own congressional representatives, who think it might be a good idea today - she suggested trading chickens for medical care -but that's another tale.

A medium of exchange was needed as things became more specialized - and we started trading bits of precious metals, because they were convenient to carry.   Buying and selling gave rise to the merchant-economies of the ancient world.

Nowadays, economists sort things out into primary, secondary, and tertiary markets - or, if you will, the land, labor (work), and money.   The land provides; labor changes it to something different, and money is used to exchange for it all.

The cocksuckers who run the money-systems are the linchpin here.

Fully three-quarters of the value of the world's economic system is natural - stuff we take from the land.   Ask any Neocon, and he/she will tell you that the supply of natural products is limitless, and we don't need to limit in turn our use thereof, our own reproduction, or anything else which impacts the natural world - but that's another story, too.

Work - or labor - is the secondary economy, and figures for about 20% of the value of a product - the amount needed to turn iron ore, say, into a Prius.   To a finance jerk, labor is a 'factor' - and in truth, finance people and other capitalists detest the idea of paying to have anything done at all - people are messy; they take breaks, maternity leaves, go to their kids' soccer games, need medical care and retirement programs, and are a Pain in the Ass, Generally, when it comes to Making Stuff and Selling It.   In their world, robots are cheaper - this is why they can say the words "jobless recovery" with a straight face and never blink an eye.  The day they can make a robot to give 'em a blowjob, they'll do it, believe me, because relating to anything in the natural world, including themselves, is against their grain.

The third leg of the economic stool is money.   While in reality money only takes around 5% of the productive cycle  -  the amount it takes to finance something and bring it to market - the 'money economy' is now around 40-45% of our GDP and rising.   Most of this is in the so-called 'service' economy - which is a lot more than flipping burgers and cleaning houses.

It's a 'service', for example, to send you a bill for something - or to collect it, or to do any of the things which bilk people by degrees for providing something in the first place.   Miss a cell-phone payment and find out just how well these 'services' work.

Now, if you've looked at all this, read this far, and scratched your ass over what I've just written, you're saying, "Wait!   There's no way this can work in the long run!   Trading little pieces of cotton-rag with ink on them for things we really need just won't work forever!  We can't be ripping things out of the ground forever without some sort of - well - payback."   And, y'know what?  You'd be right.

No tree grows to the sky.   Civilization has been eating-out Ma Nature for several hundred years - mainly through the miracle of cheap energy in the past hundred, which has made possible everything from heating and air-conditioning, cheap transportation, the Popeil Pocket Fisherman and endless reruns of "Sabado Gigante".   The sheer volume of crap we've produced has failed to slow; capitalists are and remain unimpressed by things like the concept of global warming and resource-depletion - and courtesy of the Gulf oil-spill, we now have a new term:  Ecocide.

This 'let's-shit-in-our-own-bed' approach to life is nowhere more prominent than it is right here in America.  We're somewhere around 5% of the world's population, and consume upward of 33-35% of its resources.  So far, the peoples of places like China and India have simply industrialized, made their endemic corruption a part of things, and now the Chinese and Indian laborer is being held up by the capitalist thugs on Wall Street as a hero of sorts, riding his 50-pound, iron-frame bicycle with the fat tires and longhorn handlebars ten miles or more through air that's more toxic-soup than anything else, to get to a job with no benefits that pays the equivalent of $2.00/hour.  The moment his Chinese or Indian masters can create a robot that says "Mee-suckee-suckee-no-cost-to-you", he'll do it - because there's one thing capitalists have in common - and that's the love of money over the value of people.

Now, all that money really can take on two forms - one is a type that's backed by something tangible, like gold, silver, platinum, or something else - and stuff called 'fiat' money (that means 'substitute' in Latin; it has nothing to do with the cheap cars Italy's been foisting on the world for nearly a hundred years).

Fiat money is what we have today.  It's backed by the collective GDP of a nation, plus a fair amount of good will (that's the temporary-suspension-of-reality which says, "I believe you'll keep honoring your money at a given rate, so I'll keep taking it, because if everyone else does, we can all pretend it has value.")

We continued to print this stuff, pretend it had value, continue ripping things out of the ground in disproportionate volumes, and went on our merry way - in essence, screwing everyone in the world in the process. 

By the way, this did not go unnoticed.

Now, in 2001, a group of people took it upon themselves to avenge the treatment of an oppressed people of a place called Palestine, which had all but been taken-over by a group of thugs who said "I have an old book that says this place belongs to me."   We here in the U.S. had supported said-thugs for some decades, and when the people who organized themselves to avenge said Palestinians finally figured out how to get to us, it shook the world's confidence in America's economic system straight to the core.  We lost about a trillion dollars the day that the World Trade Center came down, and there was no way this was not going to affect the nation's economy. 

Within a couple of months, we were in a recession (that's when the process of ripping things out of the ground, turning them into Something Else, and selling them for more than they're worth actually goes backward, rather than forward). 

Now, the president (a sleazy prick named Bush, who was part-and-parcel of the capitalist machine) decided that we didn't need a recession.   He told the fellow in charge of the nation's money supply to print more, and in a hurry.   He did, by way of lowering the interest rates and increasing the money supply (here's where we and they differ - they have a license from the government to print money.  If we do that, we go to jail.  This is where the 'inmates running the asylum' thing comes in).  All that money went looking for a place to 'be', and the cheapest and easiest way to put it all in circulation was to convince people that they needed a house.

Soon, people who had no business owning a house were plopped right next door to people who'd worked pretty hard to build value in their own homes.   In fact, buying houses and selling them to other people and calling it 'wealth' became a business (plus the subject of a whole lot of dreadful TV shows).

Cletus and DaisyMae Sixpack took their four snot-nosed kids, their motor-home, their motorcycles, ATV's, camping-gear and shotguns and moved next door to the town doctor, because they all of a sudden 'qualified' for a loan they could have never gotten before.  Now, I'll allow it wasn't their fault - they trusted the Guy With The Suit who said it was, after all, all right - everyone was doing it.

All this cheap money ruined neighborhoods by the thousands all across America.   It put people in homes they couldn't keep - and when they started to miss payments, the bankers gathered up all those contracts, created a new class of 'security' called a derivative, and sold 'em to unsuspecting mutual-fund and 401K managers all over the country.   Suddenly, Cletus and DaisyMae were getting calls from someone they'd never heard of, acquainting them with the word 'foreclosure.'  

We were told that debt equaled wealth, and it worked for a few months - until the credit markets seized up like the guts of a guy who's sat at a bar eating cheese and crackers for a week.

Overnight, the nation's credit markets ceased to be.  Small businesses couldn't get loans to keep running.   They failed - in droves, all over America.  Cletus?  He lost his house - but the paper that funded his home still went on with a life of its own, sort of like that Jason-fellow in all those movies.

The banks came crying to the government, saying 'bail us out!' - all the while engineering the collective unemployment of damn near fifteen million people.

By this time, in rough figures, nearly 80% of the nation's wealth was in the hands of around 1% of the people living here.  Collectively, it's around $80 trillion dollars.   The bankers managed, in five years or less, to package up enough raw deceit and sell it to other people to demolish the world's biggest economy.

There's an old joke about loans.   It goes like this:  "If you borrow $1,000, the bank owns you.   If you borrow $1,000,000, you own the bank".  This is, in essence, what happened - the government, through thirty years of systematic deregulation of the banking and securities systems, essentially gave the keys of the asylum to the inmates and said, "go play!"   By the time it was done, they owned the government -because they were, literally, Too Big To Fail.

The only real answer was a bailout - because the alternative was revolution - the kind where bankers and securities brokers and other people who traded paper and made money from nothing wind up swinging from lampposts with an "I-Fucked-Everyone" sign around their collective necks - and as most of these people were friends of the aforementioned Sleazy Prick named Bush, he went ahead and forked over the cash.

Now, what did they do with it?

They turned around and said, "We don't believe this is getting any better any time soon.  Let's park it all offshore so if the whole thing really does collapse, we have ours, and fuck-all for everyone else."   This, by the way, is precisely what they did - the intent was that the money would be used to jump start the economy - but human nature being what it is, the cocksuckers who run the banks had other ideas.

Guess what else?

All those bad loan-instruments called 'derivatives'?  They're still out there, gathering dust, to the tune of over a quadrillion dollars. 

Now, if the collective wealth of America is around $80 trillion, and there's a quadrillion dollars of bad paper in circulation, it doesn't take a rocket scientist - or an economist - to figure out that there's never going to be enough money to cover all this bad paper.  Hell, there's not enough wealth in the WORLD to cover this.

You might say, "Gee - Will's really down on unregulated capitalism", and you'd be right.   Smarter people than me have seen for centuries that it's at fundamentall odds with any form of representative democracy, and usually works against people who want to live peaceful lives.

Capitalism was always about theft.  Any other definition is just apologetics (that's the art of convincing someone that something which is really either indefensible, evil, unprovable, or all three is actually true).

Because lobbyists really run the halls of our legislative bodies, the recent 'reform' is going to serve the bankers and other folks who hold your money supply hostage.  They write the rules.  And the rules serve them.

As the whole sorry mess implodes into what they're going to call a 'double-dip recession' (I love that term - it's like ordering up a shit-flavored ice-cream cone - Two Girls; One Cup, gone global) most of us won't be smart enough to look for the exits - that is, if we're capable of living life outside the money-economy at all.  We're going to have to take it on the chin, yet again, in what will finally be called a Depression. 

And before you say, "What about a straight-up revolution?", I'll say this - the average American is still a moron.  The permanent uneducated, skill-less underclass, about 60% of the population, wouldn't have the first clue what to do - and the government will be there to lock the borders down and prevent anyone from leaving who might be interested in so-doing - because they need a permanent supply of cannon-fodder for their empire, and cheap labor for the mines.

The good news is that, for good or ill, the show's about over.  We've destroyed our capacity for production, having handed it over to a cabal of assholes who've not only convinced us that it's right - they've convinced most of us that we actually want and like it.  These same cocksuckers have also convinced most of us that the only thing better for Cletus than popping open a generic brew, then watching DaisyMae take off her top, get on her knees and work up a sweat givin' him a blowjob on a Friday night is turning on the wide-screen while she's down there working, so he can watch his kid kick some raghead-ass in a town whose name none of them can pronounce.

That he's paying twice as much for the beer as he did in 1985 doesn't concern him - neither does the fact that DaisyMae had to work at Wal-Mart all day before coming home and fulfilling his weekly fantasy.  He also doesn't care that he's being bled white come tax time for the privilege of watching his son on TV over in the Sandbox.

Because life is good for Cletus.   He's got his beer, his blowjob, and his boy on TV to show him why God, guts, guns - and thirty years of Neocon misrule - made America the Greatest Nation on Earth.

An Open Letter To The Tea Party....

(This weekend, the Tea Party Federation, the self-declared "executive" committee which seeks to represent all of the Tea Party organizations throughout the United States, expelled Mike Williams and his 'Tea Party Express' for comments made on Williams' blog in the form of an 'open letter to Abraham Lincoln' from 'colored people'.)

 




Folks:

There's a scene in "The Godfather", where Michael Corleone pulls his brother-in-law, Carlo, aside shortly after the baptism of said brother-in-law's son, and tells him that his little ruse regarding a fight between he and Michael's sister - the one which lured Michael's brother, Santino, to the tollbooth where he was gunned down - 'couldn't fool a Corleone'.   Michael goes on to pry the information out of the hapless relative regarding which of the five 'families' put him up to selling-out Michael's brother.

Michael then, in soothing tones, goes on to tell him that he's 'out of the family business; that's your punishment' - hands him a ticket to Vegas, and tells him to get out. 

The foolish Carlo then gets into a nondescript '53 Plymouth for a trip to the airport.  He's then garrotted by one of the family capos, kicking out the windshield in the process.

I tell you this tale because there's an element of comparative here.

Most of us Progressives look at the coverage of your events - reporters from Democracy Now interview your attendees; film your atrociously misspelled signage ("Make English America's Ofecal [sic] Language", and "Thank You, Fox News, For Keeping Us Infromed [sic]"), and help us reach the conclusion that while your ideas and philosophies are dangerous, the vast majority of Americans will never take you seriously.

Your main spokespeople - gals like Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle - are loonies.  One attends a church which has, among other oddities, exorcised 'demons' from her; the other believes that 'God' has a plan for raped women - so they should buck up and accept their unwanted pregnancies.

All this has most of us convinced that you're not dangerous.

I know different.

While many of my friends believe you guys couldn't organize free blowjobs at a whorehouse, I'm seeing the truth - the majority of Americans are actually behind you, antics and all.

In point of fact, you're damn dangerous, and I'm sincerely afraid of you.

Now, understand -- I'm not giving you too much credit here; you're not leaders - in fact, you're not doing anything incredibly original.   Your philosophical-forefathers wore brown shirts and short haircuts, rather than the Colonial garb you're fond of trotting-out while bellowing, "Take our country back!"  They did a damn good job of demonizing racial minorities, just like Williams did.

You've bitched about taxes like my Grandmother used to bitch about nearly everything - finding scapegoats under the rug for all of the world's ills, and offering the universal panacea of 'going back to our roots' as a solution.   Your brown-shirted ancestors did the same damn thing, and they were very successful - because they appealed to the baser instincts of mankind, and wound up with an entire nation as a prize.

Those who saw it coming were few - they were the intelligentsia; the educated minority who ran most of everything and tried to appeal to the better nature of their countrymen.  They learned, too late, what you are in the process of teaching us here in America - that the fastest, easiest and best way to win a game is to move the goalposts and change the rules; that when the other side actually begins to win the argument through reason and logic, it's far simpler to pull an iron pipe from your back pocket and wallop them in the head with it.

Now, relax - those of us who've connected the dots here and actually know what you're doing - mollifying the masses, convincing the easily-gulled and even getting the Progressive elements of American society to lower their hackles based on your 'self-policing' of racist elements - well; we're in a minority.  We won't amount to much, and we won't be heard in sufficient numbers to convince Joe and Josephine Working American that you're pulling a 'Carlo' - a little ruse intended to make us believe you're not really racist thugs, after all.

See, America wants to believe - we seem to be made up of believers and followers, and there's nothing to change that, really.   So did the people who followed your philosophical ancestors; those of the brown shirts.  They wanted to 'believe', also.   They did - in huge numbers.

But I know different.

You've done a great job of creating a strawman - taxes - and then knocking him down, with the help of some slick media hacks (endless drivel, spouted from over 600 radio and TV stations, daily) and bogus 'statistics'.   The fact is that America isn't overtaxed - in fact, we've done a good job of voting in your Neocon cronies for the past thirty years, who told us that cutting taxes, increasing government spending and borrowing the difference was a great idea.

The facts are all there for anyone who really wants to find them.   We're #35 of around 100 first-world nations, tax-wise - hardly an overtaxed people - but you've done a great job of convincing Joe and Josephine that we're the highest-taxed people on the planet.

Your 'patriot' groups have armed themselves to the teeth, convincing everyone within earshot that the government is a heartless entity which will take away your right to do everything from go to church to hold your Fourth of July picnic - and they're calling for the violent overthrow of the government and the assassination of its sitting president.

Your candidates for office (so far) have made it clear that a theocracy - with they and people who believe like them in charge - would be the best thing for America; taking us back to our 'Christian roots' and abolishing everything from Roe v. Wade to the First Amendment.  They've also said that the unemployed are lazy; that poverty is an individual's fault - all philosophies which predate the 18th century, and which have their basis in the teachings of John Calvin and the border Scots.

Somehow, for whatever reason, the worst of everything - Borderer mentality; Calvin's teachings, and the philosophical rants of your brown-shirted mentors - have come together in a perfect storm here in the first part of the 21st century.   Mike Williams' commentary regarding the 'coloreds' and that 'freedom means having to work for real, think for [themselves], and take consequences', and that this is '...far too much to ask....' might have been too much for you to allow at this point - but it's what you people believe.

I've seen it in your placards, misspelled as they are.  As ignorant as you people seem to be, you're also a danger.  Even the scurviest dog still has teeth, and you're no exception.

Yes; there are those of us who see the bigger picture.   Fortunately for you, we're outnumbered, in spades.

Absent a goddamn miracle, you'll have your 'country back' in 2012.

But not without a fight from me.

A Reverend, An Atheist, and Hope....

Occasionally, something comes out of the religious community which gives me - dare I say it - hope.

Recently atheist author Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with a rather fast-moving and nasty form of cancer.  While many in the religious community (especially in the ranks of conservative Christianity) have been all but jumping up-and-down with glee over this news, Reverend Robert Barron, a priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago, offered up an alternative reaction:


Pray for him.

Reverend Barron said recently, "Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the enemy of Christianity—even of Christians—but he is also a child of God, loved into being and destined for eternal life. Therefore, followers of Jesus must pray for him and want what is best for him."

On many an occasion, I've had many Christian friends (and one Muslim) say, "Will, do you mind if I pray for you?"  My answer is invariably "No - I don't mind at all."   I view it this way:  If someone honestly believes - really believes - that someone for whom they care is headed for a Very Bad Place when they die, and that their 'god' has the power to not only change that person's mind, but save them from that fate - then that's a course of action which no person can reasonably refuse from a friend.   In fact, were I in their shoes, I'd view it as a duty of sorts.

Reverend Barron goes on to tell the story of G. K. Chesterton, one of Christianity's greatest apologists, who would debate George Bernard Shaw on the merits of belief vs. atheism - while later, although they'd gone at each other rather aggressively, they'd be seen having a beer together and laughing.

It's this sort of intellectual respect which is lacking today.

Recently, I was taken to task for a comment regarding Ken Ham's 'Creation Museum'.  The individual who responded was of the opinion that I was talking about her.  Her excruciatingly-painful and lengthy response (blog-hijacking, really) elicited a short response from me:  "Next time, you might try finding out if the comment was directed to you.   In this case, it wasn't."

The people I know who follow a religion and for whom I have genuine respect all have some universal traits - beginning with a certain knowledge that, no matter what life might be about, it's not all about them.

They also know that whatever happens, we're all going to die someday - and that universal outcome, regardless of the details, is the Great Mystery - because no one's ever come back to tell us what's on the Other Side.   To that end, they're willing to say, "No, I can't prove it to you - I believe it, though; that's why it's called 'faith'."  


I can accept that.


Now, as to what's on the Other Side - personally, I'm betting it's nothing.   However, I'll cheerfully admit that I don't know.   I'm also perfectly willing to 'believe', if incontrovertible proof is offered that there's a being which Created It All, and is still involved in the lives of humans.   I'm willing to bet, however, that if there is, that being has nothing to do with the world's religions.

In fact, as yet, I've seen nothing but myths, legends, and other suchlike out of the world's main belief systems - plus several thousand years of Slaughter In The Name Thereof - so I remain unconvinced that any of the world's religious beliefs are anything more than one group's means of controlling another.

While I'm told I should learn to suffer fools (especially religious ones) more gladly, that's not likely to happen at my age.  I'm seeing more, not less, polarization - leading to the destruction of many of the freedoms we've taken for granted for far too long here in America (first among which is the separation of religion and government).  That's a particularly dangerous foolishness of which I'm wont to write on occasion - and as that occasion is more, rather than less, frequent, I'm doubting my tolerance for said sociopolitical and religious foolishness is going to be ameliorated any time soon.

Still in all, there are glimmers that perhaps - just perhaps - the religious Right hasn't sucked fuck-all for oxygen out of the national discourse so's to shove the whole thing to the right-hand side of the radio dial.


Glimmers like Reverend Barron's statement.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not backing down one millimeter (or 'inch', if you think the metric system's a Socialist plot) from my position - extremist religion is a particular danger today in America; extremist belief-systems are on the rise all over the world, and if we don't get a handle on this, Cletus McSixpack and his Muslim counterpart are going to go at it, hammer and tongs, until there's not much left of the place.

See, I stayed awake in class.  I know that there's going to be a planet long after I'm gone, and because of that, I care about its future.   Ensuring that I leave the place better than I found it is one of my personal tenets, and if I can add my own sum-of-like to see to it that we don't fight that war, I think my time here would, regardless of anything else, be well-spent.  "To ignore one's past makes one forever a child," said a Roman fellow named Cicero, and he was right.  History tells us a lot about prior behavior, and as that's the main indicator of future behavior, I'd say offhand that more, and not less, of my line of thinking is needed.

Now, sooner or later, some of that action is going to involve curtailing the actions of a lot of religious people -- mainly, taking their toys (weapons) away and making them behave.   That's going to be a tall order, and I don't know that many of us are up to the task.   The math alone is depressing; here where I live, most Americans actually support such a conflict - indeed; they believe it was 'prophesied', and thus more than right - it's necessary.

As Benjamin Franklin said after the Bill of Rights was ratified, "You have a Republic; if you can keep it."   The First Amendment did away with a legion of colonial theocrats - and more than a few were disappointed.  This hasn't happened much in history - a nation without a state religion.   We have a lot of blowhards of late, shouting 'America is a Christian Nation!' from the rooftops, and they're cheerfully willing to take the whole world down with them if it means that their 'god' gets center stage at the opening of that Final Play, entitled  'One More Big Can O' Whup-Ass'.

We have a Republic, if we can keep it.

Somehow, I get the feeling that it's going to depend on people like me -- and people like Reverend Barron -- and everyone like us, regardless of our beliefs - to see to it that sanity prevails.

We're all in a minority.  We're out-gunned.  We're out-organized.   We can spell better than they can, but that's cold comfort when you do the math.

Welcome to the fight.  It's going to be a long one.

You'd Better Get Out And Vote....

There’s a guy I know.
 

He’s a malignant, malevolent cocksucker; the type who barely finished high school, but who can weigh in on every subject from stem-cell research to the logic behind the three-point line in basketball.

He’s an electrician.  He owns his own business, hates unions, fought in Gulf I and knows everything – except why Obama hasn’t been assassinated yet.

Yep.  He’s offered that as a solution to all of America’s ills. 

He’s one of the millions with a short memory; telling him that it was really Bush who bailed out the banks and the automakers doesn’t matter – Obama’s the cause of the bad economy.  

Safety nets?  Forget ‘em.   “I have to work”, he says.  “Everyone else should, too.”  Pointing out that there are at least five (more likely eight) people applying for every open job is a waste of time.  His solution?  Everyone who's not working should just go out and get a job, anyway.

He blames Obama for the meltdown in the building industry, too.   Pointing out that it was Reagan who began the deregulation of the banks and the whole ‘trickle down’ economic theory doesn’t wash with him, either.

“Reagan was a great man,” he’ll say.  “We could use someone like that again.  Let rich people keep their money.  No poor guy ever offered me a job.”

And yes, religion isn’t far from his train of thought, either.   He was turned out, assembly-line style, from a homeschool and a church – a literal Killer for Jesus, who went to ‘Eye-Rack’ to kill ‘godless moslems’ during Gulf #1.   Who Would Jesus Kill?  That’s easy.   ‘Moslems’.  Spics.  Niggers, while we’re at it – but we’d better leave off anyone who plays basketball.

See, everyone is jealous of us – that’s why the equally-godless, unhygienic, pig-fucking, sexually-infected, drug-smuggling hordes are swarming the southern border, and why everyone else from all over the world wants to come here.  That’s why we need to lock our borders down, shoot anyone who gets across, and keep building planes and bombs and all that other stuff – because we need to ‘defend ourselves’.

Yep.   I know this guy.

His ‘heroes’ are people like Dale Earnhardt, who achieved demigod status for (1) driving 200 miles per hour, and (2) turning left every now and again – and is now in the Pantheon of the Faithful, somewhere up in a place called ‘heaven’, because he managed to screw up numbers 1 and 2; above.

His other heroes are people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity.  That gal with the ukulele who sings, “There’s A Communist In The White House” figures pretty highly, also, along with Joe the Plumber (“he’s one of us,” was the comment on the guy, even after being found-out).

He votes.   Every time.   He and his wife sit at the table with their two up-and-coming Neocon snotnoses and he tells her how to vote.  Every time.  They vote Republican – unless the Republicans are ‘too pussy’, and he votes for someone else.

This guy’s part of a critical mass in America right now – and I can tell you, both from reading some fairly dispassionate, empirical statistics and having encountered far too many of this sort that we’re almost to a point here in the U.S. of A. where these people could actually take over.

Yep.   I know this guy.  And, he scares the absolute living shit out of me.

He’s living for the day that “all them libruhls” get handed their hats as the new crop of Neocons take over in Washington.  This is something approaching Holy Writ for the likes of this guy – it’s sort of like the Jews, saying “next year in Jerusalem”.

______________

That’s why I’m saying, “You’d better get out and vote.”  November is it, people – because there’s enough in play here in the NewNighted States to create something the world hasn’t seen since 1934 Germany.

If we win, we’ve won the right to keep fighting.

If we lose – well; be careful when they start handing out those tan shirts, crosses and armbands.

You haven’t seen the price tag.

July 4th, 2010

I used to wax lyrical about my Dad and his experiences as a pilot on the Fourth; today, I'm not feeling terribly patriotic.

As you've probably read recently, I think it's probably time to look for the exits.

They're locking down the borders as fast as they can.  We're going to be under the microscope, every damn one of us, because of cameras, biometric ID, and a host of other things Bush the Second put in place, and which Obama never rolled back, regardless of the mandates both spoken and unspoken.  Thanks to some pretty broad-brush 'executive orders' from the Bush era, anyone who steps out of line can not only be detained without trial, but put to work as virtual slave-labor by the military.

The whole country is at each other's throats - one side wants a social democracy with safety nets and running water and lights and streets; the other side wants a theocracy, where everyone gets the 'opportunity' to root, hog, and die.

The Other Side is winning, folks.   We might have won Nastiness Number II against the Fascists without becoming Fascists ourselves, but we're looking to go that route, thanks to an electorate with a Hooterville High School education and whose highest aspirations are the new season of "American Idol".

Meantime, those of us who Stayed Awake in Class are around 20% of the electorate; give or take (I'm not counting everyone's kids for clarity's sake here).   While we're nearly 100% of the Americans with a college degree or better, and represent most of the professions, arts and sciences, we are a minority.  That's a very dangerous place to be - a minority which is derided for its education - but which is collectively running the show.

Think Germany in 1934 for your archetype.

About four years ago, I had a neighbor who announced that he was moving back to Germany.  He was in his eighties.  Most of the rest of the neighborhood avoided him; he talked funny, and really didn't have much to say.  I spent quite a bit of time over the fence, and later on the porch, talking about history.   Turns out he'd lived through World War II.

"I'm leaving, because I have seen this before," he told me.   "I pay attention.  I don't like it."   His daughter - a woman about my age - was against all this.

"You might pay attention to your Dad," I told her. "He's been right so far."

A year ago, I had two good friends sell everything and move to New Zealand.  They share my political proclivities - and they were getting out and moving to a stable country before they couldn't.  We'd cussed and discussed the status-quo and the right-shift for nearly two years; they concluded that, being younger than me, they could make a go of it.

So far, they're doing well.  I hope that continues.

Meantime, this movie is getting really, really old.  It's been running non-stop for thirty years, and it's the cumulative product of the lunacy that passes for Neocon domestic economic and social policy.  I know how the movie ends.  The theatre is on fire.  It's time to look for the exits.

One of my favorite bands summed up today back in the '80's:

They put the chairs out on the lawn;
Grandma's got her new dress on;
There's fresh flowers on Grandpa's grave;
And Junior smells of aftershave.

Oh boy, hey hey - it's a national holiday.

Everything's ready for the big parade;
The mayor's got his place in the shade;
We can't wait 'till the sun goes down;
Lie on the hill at the edge of town.

The presidential proclamation.
Is blasting out across the nation;
And Mad Dog and his band of jerks;
Are lighting off the fireworks.

Oh boy, hey hey - it's a national holiday.

It's a national holiday....

Pardon me if I don't sound too patriotic today.

With 17% of the work force (and climbing) either scraping by on unemployment, bunking with relatives, maxing out their credit cards, or living on the street, there's not too much to cheer about today - especially as that situation doesn't appear to be getting any better.

Our government's response is to cut unemployment compensation and gussy the numbers so they can sell more junk-treasuries to China.

Courtesy of all of those executive orders from the Bush era, along with the variant 'acts' which made us One Nation; Under Surveillance, we are now what we feared - a police state, with a gang of theocrats waiting in the wings to make it complete.

But don't listen to me.   Not today.

Hey.  It's a National Holiday.....
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Resources:

"National Holiday" - (Timbuk 3 - "Edge of Allegiance"; 1989)

Patriot Act (H.R. 3162; 2001)

Military Commissions Act (Wikipedia summary; 2009)

Civilian Inmate Labor Program (U.S. Army directive; 2005-2009)