"The condition in which a person who suffers illness or disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her illness/disability; may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments, such as blindness or paralysis." Or Fucktard/wackloon GOPhuxism.
Jolly little gnome, Bobbie Reich, joked about it recently, spoofing us all with the suggestion that the Obamster would start to put things aright by going to Wall Street next week and proclaiming a program to restore Glass-Steagal.
Just KIDDING!!!! Jeez!
Restore Glass-Steagal doesn't have the je ne c'es pas of Occupy Wall Street, but Reich's quite correct: It should be done.
But even he realizes it's naganahapun...The banksters are gonna get off scott-free, and the regulations that would prevent them from engaging in yet another round of economy-shattering bubbles are NOT going to be re-written and re-introduced; those that are (almost laughably) in place thanks to the Chris Dodd Platinum Parachute bill last year cannot be enforced because the FBI still devotes about 80% of it's man-power to "counter-terrorism."
One bankster got sent to jail last week, but that was for the entirely separate offense of insider trading: apparently the game wasn't satisfactorily rigged for this schmuck. But also, Reich wrote, "Just last week Citigroup settled charges (without admitting or denying guilt) that it defrauded investors by selling them a package of mortgage-backed securities rife with mortgages it knew were likely to default, but didn't disclose the hazard. It then bet against the package for its own benefit - earning fees of $34 million and net profits of at least $126 million. So what's Citi paying to settle this outrage? A mere $285 million. Its CEO at time (Charles Prince) doesn't pay a dime."
Woody reckons, okay: we can't prove, indisputably, that these skeevy mother-fux like Prince, Blankfein, Dimon, Rubin DID tank the economy AND fuck the People, for no more reason than for fun and profit. But since they're the only ones who COULD have done it, and the circumstantial evidence is at least as strong as that which convicted Troy Davis, and since they have prospered so handsomely by it, it is difficult to dismiss the near certainty of their intervention and impossible to grant them any clemency in the collapse.
So, since deterrence is evanescent, but recidivism is permanently prevented by the expedient, Dimon, Blankfein, Vikram Pandit, both Paulsons, Bernanke, Geighner, Rubin Summers, BOTH Koch Bros, and Phil & Wendy Gramm--at a bare minimum-- should be taken hence and their heads removed, and then be displayed atop Pikes in and around Zuccotti Square. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Have you noticed? No more color coded alerts? Right. Who needs 'em when you get your Stiff-of-the-Month, the faux-terrorist entrapment schemes the Feds pull off about every 30-45 days.
Some 'authorities' are recommending that OWS should find ways to make alliance with the Tea-hadists, and thereby join the two disparate streams of USer disaffection into one mighty torrent.
They'd lose me, straight away.
Why I'd never ally with the Tea-baggers? My dear ol' Dad, dandling me on his dear ol' knee, imparted this bit o' wisdom to little ol' me, back in the day. He said: "Laddie, ye canna negotiate with 'em 'at wants ye dead and done. Ye've got no leverage. Y'can offer 'em a part, in payment. Tell 'em: "Here's me left 'and. I ain't using it, much. Take that and leave me alone...But they won't. Won't leave ya alone, that is. Aye, they'll take the hand yer dumb enough to proffer. But they want you dead. This just makes it the easier, later. And they got time. Plenty of time.
"And yer left hand!"
Malcolm X said: "...So don’t you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who’s depriving you of your rights. They’re not your friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom; and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don’t have hate in me.... I’ve got some sense. "I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him."
My biggest objection to the whole "Tea-bertardian" phenomenon is still that it has never, to my estimation, been anything BUT an astro-turf creation of Dick Armey, the Koch Brothers, and Fox News, cannibalizing on the still-reeking remains of the lumpen racism embedded in the GOPhux "southern strategy."
I want NOTHING to do with ANYONE who would voluntarily identify as a tea-hadist, or who wouldn't shun them, with me. I feel exactly the same way about the Ron Paul acolytes, the "Paul-lyps," as I think of 'em, feeding on the contents of the Ayn-Randian fanatic's political lower intestine. Ayn Rand, in any guise, brings to whatever discussion in which her name is raised the same considerations which 'coprophagy' brings to the discussion of cuisine.
There is ZERO common ground for agreement with such sentiments, and also zero room for compromise, on the actual purposes, proper structures, and orderly functioning of culture and society. No thanks. Not going there...
A story that got a lot of play on the Blog Monday was this one:
"Obama to announce actions on housing, student loans WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama this week will announce a series of actions to help the economy that will not require congressional approval, including an initiative to make it easier for homeowners to refinance their mortgages, according to a White House official."
But Y'r Ob'd't S'v't, Dr WOODY, disrespectfully demurs, in any case: What the FUCK?
I've mentioned this some months ago, and it seems nothing's changed. It is STILL long YEARS--almost 36 months--into his term, and Shamwow is JUST NOW getting around to authorizing "fiat"-remedies for under-water home-owners--and providing a little relief for the deluded proles who were told to "buy an education" to achieve the Murkin dream--to possibly alleviate some of the most draconian consequences illegally inflicted upon them by the depredations of Obomber's BIGGEST BACKERS, the banksters and fraudsters? These measures do NOT REQUIRE CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL!
AND THEY NEVER DID. So, how come it took our Constitutional Scholar President nearly 36 months to figure THAT shit out? And WHY THE FUCK DID HE WAIT SO LONG?
Answer me this, if you think I'm being unfair: What the FUCK was the skeevy, grinning, toothy, jug-eared fuckwit WAITING FOR?
?Time enough for the tame O'bots to arrange their excuses, and explanations, along with the hopeful, exculpatory cries that "It's better late than never?"
I am terribly SORRY, BUT why IS IT BETTER LATER than "never?". "Never" is already here for several hundreds of thousands of broke, displaced, unemployed Murkin families immiserated by the banksters and fraudsters and the "market."
In the intervening 34 months, millions of people have been tossed onto the streets by those same banksters and fraudsters, people who might have been spared that if the skeevy, grinning, jug-eared fuckwit had begun this on DAY FUCKING ONE!
Which he COULD have done. But he DIDN'T! Either he neglected to, through some oversight, or he just didn't WANT to do at the time.
FUCK THIS 'forgiving" crap.
This is the "meritocracy." Either you perform or you don't.
Fuck your excuses for the shitwhistle!
Meanwhile, there's THIS crock of shit: (Post The "Rome" image here)
Which Woody thinks is the deepest, stinkiest, murkiest BULLSHIT!
It wasn't "eight years of madness" that brought us where we are.
It was 50 years of concerted, bi-partisan effort, a hundred billion or so dollars spent to buy the Press, and the complicity of EVERY SINGLE MOTHERFUCKER WHO occupied the office. Remember: Bill Clinton signed off on repealing Glass-Steagall, at the behest of Robert Rubin, et al...(end it here)
Bill Clinton PROUDLY put an end to "welfare as we know it."
And, in case you have had yer head up Obasmster's keester all that time, the last 30 MONTHS haven't brought us one CENTIMETER closer to changing ANYTHING, and the next 60 months, won't either...
Eleventh-dimension chess???
I doubt he wins at "Slap-Jacks" with four-year-olds...
Hey, Bugs, Got my "scholar hat" on today! Thanks, Win-stone! AND Gaudeamus, Hippies (Begin Image Here) As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, with its cries for social and economic justice, probably it behooves us to inquire how unequal we REALLY are.
So here's the "Top 5 Facts You Should Know About The Wealthiest One Percent of Americans." Courtesy of rogue economist Ravi Batra:(End OverImage Here)
# 1) The Top 1% Owns 40% of the Nation's Wealth:
Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz noted recently, 25 years ago the top 1% owned only THIRTY THREE percent of national wealth.
How much of the wealth does the bottom 80%--that'd be you'n'me, hippies--own? Only 7%.
#2) The Top 1% Take Home 24% of National Income:
In 1976 they took home just 9% -- which means that their "share" of the national income pool has almost TRIPLED in 35 years.
#3) The Top 1% Own Half of the Country's Stocks, Bonds and Mutual Funds:
The Institute for Policy Studies has calculated that the bottom 50% of Americans own only one-half percent of these investments. That's POINT FIVE...
#4) The Top 1% of Americans Have Only 5% of the Nation's Personal Debt:
While the bottom 90% hold 73% of total debt.
--Allow me to explain, hippies: You/we are INDENTURED servants of Kapital; you/we work our whole lives MOSTLY to repay what we borrow just to stay afloat.--and finally,
#5) The Top 1% Are Taking In More off the Nation's Income Than at Any Other Time Since the 1920s: Not only the 1% of Americans taking home an overwhelming portion of the national income, but their share of this income is greater than at any other time since the before Great Depression.
Here's a little mantra for ya, hippies:
The wealthy make choices: Shall we drive the Porsche or the Benz, tonight?
But the poor make decisions: Shall we buy food or meds, we gotta decide, babe...
A fair amount of unseemly triumphalism is again attending the assassination of another world leader by forces allied with and supported by the USofA and our blood-soaked, international criminal, Barack Hussein Obama. You KNOW there is NOTHING in international law about when it's permissible to overthrow a sitting ruler, or to institute "regime change." But the O'bots are gleefully claiming the Bushian mantle of "Mission: Accomplished." (By the way: The deceased looks faintly "Christ-like," doesn't he? But i suppose ANY dead, blood-covered Levanter looks faintly "Christ-like," splayed on the ground like that.)
But what "mission"--for the AMERICAN PEOPLE, rather than the international big money cartels--has he actually "accomplished?" Other than turning the economy entirely over to the banksters and financial fraudsters, keeping the war profiteers rolling in dough, and driving USer jobs overseas with NEW "free trade" agreements which , i f memory serves, he campaigned AGAINST?
We've STILL got 4 or 5 (or 6 or 7, depending on how you count 'em) wars draining the treasury.
We've STILL got (unofficially) 15-20% unemployment (The "official" number is about half that; but the official copunt is flawed by SO many factors asa to make it laughable when reported witha strraight face...)
We've STILL got nearly 50 MILLION people, and 20 MILLION kids, in poverty, and CUTS promised to their meager benefits. The average wage, inflation adjusted is STILL about what it was in 1980. Median income is around 42 THOUSAND, but for the lowest NINETY percent it's a full TEN thousand dollars per year the "median." "OFFICIAL POVERTY LEVEL IS $22, 400 FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR).
We've STILL got Goldman-Sachs running the treasury and the Fed. (Geithner, the Bernank, Daly, and close to 100 other close, financial advisors and officials, owe their loyalty to Wall Street, NOT Pennsylvania Ave or "Main Street.)
We've STILL got millions who cannot get medical insurance. Remember the 44 THOUSAND people it was said died every year for lack of adequate insurance? They're STILL dying.)
We've STILL got NO "green" energy policy. (He ran off the ONLY credible "green" advocate he even brought into Gummint, Van Jones. And clean energy plans are invisible).
We've STILL got no--or at least a sorely diminished--4th Amendment. (Where, o, where has our "habeas corpus" gone?)
We've STILL got more and more GMOs entering the food supply. (And Big Ag--Monsanto, ConAgra, Cargill, Koch Industries--alumni and alumna pervade the US Ag Dept.)
We've STILL got The PATRIOT ACT. (Remember when he said he'd "revisit" it once elected? He did, to strengthen the fucker.)
We've STILL got Cunt-Hair Clancy on the SCROTUS. With a black president and AG, this is the only arrangement by which the DoJ could investigate and indict him WITHOUT bringingf out the cahrges of another "High-trech lynching".)
We've STILL got an out-of-control medical system. Costs are rising faster than inflation, wages, and the GDP combined.)
We've STILL got no national industrial policy except out-sourcing and off-shoring. (He's signing or signed off on FTAs with Korea, Colombia, and Panama this year.)
C'mon! What fucking "mission" has the skeevy, grinning, jug-eared fuckwit actually accomplished, other than strengthening the lock-grip of the CorpoRats over EVERY aspect of our lives?
Don't all try to answer at once, hippies. You can tell me when I see you at the beach...
Good morning, hippies! Prior Warning: There's gonna be a bit of profanity and a bit of blasphemy ensuing here shortly... Just so's ya know! (Begin BUFFETT IMAGE HERE) There was an image up on the Web the other day, of a kindly, elderly Warren Buffett, proclaiming, modestly: "I' could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says anytime there's a deficit of more than THREE PERCENT of GDP, ALL sitting Congressmembers become ineligible for re-election."
Doncha just love the sound of that? So self-assured, so REASONABLE. Like some elder statesman bringing wise council...(Stop the BIG BUFFET image here)
But Fuck ME Running! Who is fucking kidding whom? What kind of fucking MORONS actually BELIEVE to this turgid, runny shit?
The key phrase, which elevates this discourse from modest, dorm-level, late-night, sophomoric speculation to the level of complete, utter, unmitigated BULL-SHIT is this:
"You just pass a law..."
Ex-fucking-sCUSE ME? What the FUCK! I put this in the same class of moronic, imbecilic, cluelessness as: "Well, all we need to do to roll back Citizens United and revoke corpoRat citizen-hood is pass a Constitutional Amendment."
Just WHO the fuck do you think is gonna PASS that law, that amendment, you drooling fuckwitz?
Oh, yeah! We could fix the whole fucking COUNTRY if we could "just pass a law..." Like: Hey, Mickey, I know, We'll have a SHOW!!!!
That's the whole fucking problem! We CAN'T "JUST PASS A FUCKING LAW." And Buffett and his billionaire buddies are mainly the ones who made it impossible. They spent dozens of years, and millions of dollars, to set it up THIS way, packing the Congress with millionaires (more than half; 66 Senators), so that every deal redounds to their EVERY benefit, and we, the people, can't pass ANY laws that reduce their influence one fucking iota...
GET THIS STRAIGHT! THEY named the candidates, THEY financed 'em, THEY got 'em elected, THEY supported 'em in office...WHY?
BECAUSE those skeevy "congresscritters" KNOW who owns'em, and pays'em, and keeps 'em shittin' in tall "gummint" cotton.
Jeezus FUCK, people. It's the same kind of purblind ignorance--or pretense, it's hard to tell, sometimes--as that which at a distressing number of times appears to drive the likes of Robert Reich and Paul Krugman to their ambivalent conclusions about the power and motivations of the T-baggers.
Reich and the rest do not seem to understand a fundamental dynamic in this equation.
It is this:
The t-bagger contingent is QUITE content if their standards of living are diminished a little as long as, in in consequence, and along with it, the situations of the people they despise as their inferiors--mainly 'coloreds'--are affected even WORSE than they are.
To yer basic t-bagger, the WORST thing about Social Security and Universal Health Care, or any gummint assistance program is that it treats the T-baggers, the rednex and crackkkers who regard themnselves as SUPERIOR to the rest of those whom the benefit includes--EXACTLY THE SAME as the people they detest, and they cannot ABIDE that.
They don't WANT to be thought 'equal" or 'equivalent' to and be treated exactly the same as those whom they despise as their inferiors! And they'd rather crash the program than be regarded as in any way the same way as those "Nigras" and "Messkins."
So they don't mind if their own piece of the pie is a little diminished, as long as their "inferiors" take a BIGGER hit, or preferrably are entirely deprived.
That's just how that cookie crumbles down in those t-bagger precincts, hippies.
Stop by the Store on the way out and pick up a tank top with the cool WWH logo, or a bumpersticker. Those dichoric ampules are pretty nifty, too. We'll watch 'em change colors when I see ya at the beach...chers.
Chris Hedges on Tuesday had a piece in the Blogosphere about how, after returning from 20 years as a foreign/war correspondent, he came home to the US only to discover that there had occurred, in his absence, a "corpoRat" coup d'Etat.
Coincidentally, I was listening to activist/lawyer/blogger Kevin Zeese the other day--he was a guest on one of the former Air America hosted spots, someone sitting in for Randi Rhodes, I think--who reminded me of the so-called "Powell Memorandum." It was the TEMPLATE for the coup to which Hedges testifies.
It's possibly the most influential document you NEVER heard of. Truly, there is probably not a more influential document in the WORLD, in so far as the shaping of the corpoRat climate in which we now struggle to survive--the world of CorpoRatocracy, Oiligarchy, and fiduciary servitude--than the Powell Memorandum.
Probably, you don't even remember Lewis Powell, either. Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, from 1971 til he retired in 1987--his mission already well underway under the Reaganauts. He cast himself as a mild-mannerd jurist; he was not a high-profile guy, considered a 'conciliator.'
A southern Aristo, Powell drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that described a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society--schools, the press, universities, media, etc--in early 1971, just before Nixon put him on the SCROTUS. On the Court, he was regarded as a "moderate," but the memo suggests his alleged moderation was simply a well-worn, comfortable costume which covered a radical, corpoRatist agenda.
I borrowed from Wikipedia the following outline of the basic premises of his plan, which was based mainly on his experiences as a corporate lawyer who was a representative for the tobacco industry with the Virginia legislature, to say NOTHING of his leadership, in Virginia of the '50s, of strident, official opposition to and defiance of the "Brown V. Topeka," school integration decision.
He wrote the notorious "Memo," privately, to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Investigative reporter Jack Anderson turned it up several years later. In it Powell called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding politics and law in the U.S., and suggested among other things, the formation of "friendly" think tanks. Can you say Heritage Foundation? American Enterprise Institute? The Coors Foundation? The Olin Foundation? Etc?
With it's title, "The Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," Powell, a subtler culture warrior than many of his time, sounded one of the opening calls of the culture wars. In shock from the dramatic upheavals of th 50s and 60s, Powell like so many of his generation--Alan Bloom, notably, who was ineradicably scarred by the sight of black men with shotguns outside Columbia in '67--Powell (for this instance at least) shed his reticence.
The tobacco litigations and civil rights actions were his watershed. The previous decade had seen the increasing regulation of many industries, as well as a burgeoning of civil rights laws. Powell argued the "most disquieting voices" joining the chorus of reprobation and criticism for the Murkin CorpoRat system "came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." He firmly resolved to make any further or future recrudescence of such aberrations impossible.
To counteract these pernicious influences, in the memorandum, Powell advocated a variety of expedients which sound strange coming from the pen of a person considered at the time to be a futuere Supreme Court Justice: he urged "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a "purge" of left-wing elements from important institutions, including University faculties and media posts.
In an extraordinary prefiguring of the social goals of CorpoRat State for the next half-century at least, Powell named the main goals of corpoRat propaganda/public relations campaigns: changing how individuals and society think about the corporation, in relation to the government, the law, the culture, and the individual.
Shaping public opinion on these topics became, and would remain, THE major element of the corpoRatist agenda. In pursuit of which goal, the corpoRats immediately began a program of acquiring media outlets, in a process called "press consolidation," which ensured "the People," whom Powell instructed the CorpoRats to seduce and confuse, would seldom if EVER be exposed to ANY rhetoric contradictory to the CorpoRat/Capitalist/Consumerist mantras of the Right.
You have only to look or listen around you to determine the power of the strategy, after only 40 years.
Thing is, hippies, and the thing they want us to forget, izzat the CorpoRats have been planning and executing their surreptitious, stealth coup d'Etat for nearly 60 years. And it's a done deal.
I even wrote a poem about it, called "Don't Eat the Souffle!":
"The fix is in: "The deal is down; "The game is cooked; "The dice are loaded; "The wheels are rigged; "The decks are all marked, Shaved, and stacked, and "The dealers cheat,
"That's just how it is. "If it bothers you, tough! "It's what's on the menu! "Eat it, or starve. "The House don't care. "So just shut up and deal.
"The chefs, To express their disdain, For the bosses and the clientele, ALWAYS spit, Surreptitiously, In the souffle…"
---Woody, 2011
An' dat's jus' how de cookie crumble, hippies...See ya at tha beach!
The House Thursday last passed a bill that would permit an exception of conscience if a doctor refused to perform an abortion even if it meant the death of the mother. Friday morning the Zuckersphere (or my part of it) was understandably abuzz.
Remember, it passed the House, but that's all. It's not 'veto-proof. The vote was too close. Over-riding needs a two-thirds majority. This is just more fucking GOPhux kabuki for their basest base, and another distraction to the Dims.
The true arbiter of this law would be the Senate.
And even in the unlikely event it passed there, then St, Barry would have to veto it.
Though his actually doing so would depend on two factors, I think:
1) How close to the election it was, and 2) How close they wanted us to think the 'election' was gonna be.
Shamwow's a TOTAL "pragmatist."He'll do what he thinks will get him the "results" he's after.
Really, friends! Don't worry about St. Barry's second term. He's a shoe-in.
The GOP wants NOTHING more than to have St. Barry back for a second term. He's GOOD for 'em. He does EVERYTHING THEY WANT, BUT makes the Dims responsible. It's a perfect arrangement.
If they REALLY wanted to "win" it, they'd have a candidate who, if they "won," would NOT raise the election fraud flags like ANYONE in the Clown Car would.
They'll be happy to just take the Senate, hold the House, and leave St. Barry, the Compromiser, dangling in the wind, there to take the blame for the "fall of the American Empire," which will begin around 2015, when China's economy surpasses the US.
Then the GOPhux will ahve a sure-fire issue for the rest of the Century, or as long as the White majority lasts: "RESTORE MURKA to it's greatness that the Negrow and the Soshulist party destroyed."
A total money-maker, I gay-RON--tee, it, chers.
And a final thought: Though the analogy is not perfect, Capitalism does resemble cancer, in that BOTH require and promote indefinite, unlimited growth.
In Capitalism, this is called "progress"; in cancer it is called "metastasis.
In both cases, the hosts are killed.
Be Safe, Hippies! Back to you in Hippie Central, Win-stone!!!
Shazama's loosely named "jobs" bill was rejected Tuesday by the GOPhux in the Senate, where the Dims could barely garner 50 (of the 60) votes needed for cloture on the measure. Of course, it was ALWAYS a corpse in the GOPhux/T-bagger controlled House. The only thing you can get 60 votes in the Senate for are more intrusive national security measures and bank bail-outs.
Ben Nelson (DINO-NEB), and John Tester of Montana broke ranks, though it didn't matter; once Reid and Schumer (the whip) realized they weren't gonna have 60 votes anyway, it was strictly a pseudo-event, conducted because somebody was watching.. - To ANYONE with more cognitive competence than an earthworm the proposal was NEVER--any better than Dead On Arrival. Whatever plusses there were with it, there was ALWAYS a significant negative embedded in the bill: the "tax holidays" and the provisions to increase workers' take-home by reducing workers' payroll taxes.
The payroll tax cut –-an enlargement of one already passed last year in a previous move to appease the GOPhux in the PREVIOUS economic Obama cave-in--is what economics writer R.J. Eskow at the time called a "poison pill." Increasing the damage of the previous 'tax cuts,' the new measure would have taken a 240 BILLION-dollar bite out of Social Security revenues in 2012. And would do the same in several SUBSEQUENT years. It's a 'death of a thousand cuts.'
The Obamanauts SAID they planned to replenish the lost FICA (Federal Insurance Contribution Act) taxes with money from the overall federal budget-- keeping Social Security 'whole, for the time being, but forcing the government to borrow more and further swelling the federal debt to pay for it.
Which would retroactively validated the lies the GOPhux have been telling about the costs of Social Security to the budget now.
This would have the effect of turning Social Security and the Trust into a ploitical football, by removing Social Security from its secure position and predictable funding from the Trust, and throw it into competition for scarce Federal dollars with the REST of the 'discretionary' postulants. This is part of the plan to turn Social Security from a universal insurance program into a discretionary "welfare" program with all the attendant rhetorical baggage that would ential. In other words, a death sentence.
Which, if I may say so, seemed to me to be the plan all along. The Owners and their political lackeys couldn't stand the political gaffe of killing it out-right, so they're killing it a little--$240 Billion--at a time. Brilliant, doncha think?
In my always humble opinion, this would comport with exactly what St. Barry was tasked to do, by his oligarchic financial boosters, in the starting gate: Finally putting paid to the last remaining (though always minimal, inadequate, eroding-- but, to the owners, nevertheless odious and threatening--) provisions of the New Deal social safety net.
And he's getting the fuck away with it, too.
It is PATHETIC that folks believed just because he is a "person of color," St. Barry would be "different" from the 44 White dudes who preceded him. Shazama's "jobs" bill was DOA, from the first instant it was proposed.
But I shore was hoping it would pass.
That's cuz I could then have released the pressure building up in my innards from housing the host of pastel-colored, paisley-printed, pan-pipe-playing piglets that are just WAITING for the legislative excuse to fly out my flapping butt-cheeks and circle the globe playing Bach cantadas in 3-part harmonies.
See whatcha been missing, Hippies?
Swing on by the Store and get a handful of bumperstickers. Those dichoric ampules would make nifty stocking stuffers, if you don't happen to have any legs to put in 'em, too...or a WWH "wife-beater"/tank top to wear so I'll recognize ya when I see you at the beach...
I am always somewhat bemused--not amused, not c-mused, but truly bemused--when I read those oft-cited/posted/repeated, presciently cautionary speeches of Roosevelt, or Eisenhower, or Truman, or even Smedley Butler, about the encroaching dangers of BIG government.
These worthies carefully--even lovingly, it sometimes seems-- describe SOME increasingly obvious, malign, and invidious consequences of this or that the other, institution or policy or event, which always proceeds from the creation, installation and maintenance of some, potentially repressive GOVERNMENT agenda.
They prophetically decry the Military/Industrial complex, or the National Security State, or the evils of massive fortunes in accumulated wealth, which empower private interests with the capacity to overwhelm and drown out contrary or contradictory voices, howsoEVER "popular.".
And then these prophets strenuously, ringlingly enjoin the people to "resist."
And this is where the bemusement sets in, hippies...my head grows heavy and my eyes grow dim.
Just exactly how the FUCK, I wonder absently, do these statesmen--FDR, Ike, JFK, et al--expect the "people" to resist that much POWER??? The Military Industrial COmplex hasn't grown any weaker; the national Security State hasn't grown any less intrusive, and those enormous fortunes haven't goptten any SMALLER in the last 50 years. And resistance ALREADY was damn near impossible, even then...
Resist them? Who? Got names? Where? How and With What? Money is the ONLY meaningful factor anymore. Voting is basically futile. And what's left? At Bunker Hill, at least BOTH sides had muskets and black powder. In the NEXT extreme, we've got 22s and Piper Cubs, and they've (6,000/rpm) 20 mm, Vulcan mini-cannons and F-22s.
I am growing daily more and more averse to and impatient with the smug, snarky reminders of the splendiferousness, magnificence, and accomplishments of St. Barry, the Incumbent; you've seen 'em: his "Two Hundred Forty Four Accomplishments?"
Here's a recent example, en precis: See what I mean? More revisionist BULLSHIT! While the dung is still damp and stinky, they're spinning it into shapes of their own design.
Let's examine the claims:
It SEZ he "killed Osama." But we have no actual evidence of that. We have people SAYING they killed him. But there were people SAYING they killed him in Tora Bora in 2002, too. There is no physical evidence of it that I ever saw. When they killed Dillinger, the cops posed with the corpse. Nothing like that here; so we can say that's pretty thin gruel to feast upon for heroism and heroism.
Toppled Gadafffi: On whose say so? What gives him or ANY Murkin potentate the right to 'topple' the legitimate ruler of ANY sovereign state. And start ANOTHER war in the Middle East for which we are expending billions of dollars. And then he claims the right to exercise extra-judicial powers nobody EVER said they had before to assassinate an AMERICAN CITIZEN with drone missiles, 10,000 miles away No trial, none of the civilized niceties. Just "Blammo!" What the fuck??
Prevented 2nd Major Depression: Oh, fucking really? Three of my tenants are currently STILL unemployed after almost two years. 46 million in poverty, 20 plus million unemployed, record home repossessions continuing, stagnant wages, diminishing benefits, but record corpoRat profits, banksters awash in money, mergers flourishing and in general, big money is prospering. Anything wrong with that picture?
Then it's BRAGGING that he didn't drown any major cities through indifference and political calculation during the last spate of nature's fury from a hurricane? The implication is that we should be glad he didn't fuck up? How high is that bar? I see crawfixh jumpin' that puppy.(End end image here)
FUCK the donuts! I WANT THE 4TH AMENDMENT BACK. I want an economy back. I want Habeas corpus back. I want Glass-Steagal back. I want the fucking wars over. more than anything, I WANT THE FUCKING WARS OVER, you church-talking, skeevy, jug-eared, son-of-a-bitch! End the wars, and we don't HAVE a financial crisis. Just end the fucking wars!
As CiC, you can do it by fiat.
Just order the troops to stop shooting and to stay in their bivouacs.
Dare Congress NOT to fund their withdrawal. Analogously with TR, sending the Great White Fleet off without enough coal to return, and daring Congress not to buy fuel to bring 'em back.
Tell 'em you'll just let 'em rot, in Afghanistan and Iraq, if Congress wont spend the money to bring 'em back.
And if the Generals and the CorpoRats and their flunkies, gunsels, and lickspittles then arise and overthrow you, well, fine.
At least we'll know, unambiguously, where we stand and can plan accordingly.
I come not to praise rumors, but to bury them. This cookie will crumble by the numbers.
Despite what you may hear/hope or heard/hoped, THERE ARE NOT GONNA BE ANY ACTIVE-DUTY, UNIFORMED MARINES appearing at ANY demonstrations to SUPPORT the demonstrators, either on Wall Street or anywhere else...Not as DEMONSTRATORS!
Nor will the members of ANY OTHER USer Military service, Army, Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard. Nagahapun! Just ain't. --- Well, unless there's real trouble and they're called in for crowd-control.
I served in the USAF veteran (1964-68), and I want to dissuade the optimistic and the innocent as to that possibility, to disabuse the naive and the hopeful (often the same people, unsurprisingly). I wasn't a combat trooper, never fired the gun at anything other than paper targets. But I did EVERYTHING ELSE soldiers do, and that included learning about the UCMJ. Military "justice" is probably a more egregious oxymoron than military intelligence. The UCMJ is its "code." The Uniform Code of Military Justice...well, yuo wouldn't expect a military code to be OUT of uniform, would you?
US active duty military personnel ARE permitted by the terms of the UCMJ to join any such demonstrations as Occupy Wall Street in civilian clothes--though they are usually sternly, unofficially discouraged from it, and it would probably be worth their careers to be photographed doing so...They are also strictly forbidden to do so IN uniform. It's a courts martial offense.
So, If ANYBODY shows up at Occupy Wall Street in uniform, they'll be veterans, not active duty. (There appear to be exceptions made for officers, the more senior, the more exceptional. What they say in the ranks is: Different spanks for different 'ranks'... No officer would go to Leavenworth for appearing in uniform at a pro-war gathering, but that would surely be the fate of a mere soldier or NCO who attended an anti-war demonstration in uniform.)
Strangely, some people DO seem to believe that like the Russian Army at Petrograd in 1917, ordered to restore order among rioters and demonstrators, USer troops WOULD NOT open fire on their fellow proletarians, if ordered to do so. But that's wishful thinking. They have either short lives or short memories. Remember Kent State, May 4, 1970--Four Dead in Ohio...
I personally have suspected that's one of the reasons the Busheviks--especially Cheney-- ordered up the Guard and Reserves to fight the Iraq war: to "blood" them, to get them used to looking at civilians as 'the enemy'; to teach them the mortal amorality of taking orders and to inure them to shooting at innocent civilians when ordered to do so.
Cuz ANY place CAN be a combat zone, and ANYBODY CAN be a suicide bomber, and NOBODY is to be trusted who is NOT in the Uniform.
Shoot first, and whatever happens later is later: THAT'S the way you stay alive and whole. Whatever else they SAY at Regiment, that's what the Sarge will tell you, down at squad level.
Caveat, hippies:
I don't wanna make ANY pretense about being any kind of grizzled old warrior. I'm not. I was a glorified clerk with an NSA security clearance. But I was in for four years, during a war, made my rank, got my medals and shit. It was almost 50 years ago, but not that MUCH has changed...
We've all at one time or another idly speculated with the megalomaniac game of "What I'd Do If I Ruled The World."
But the prior question is just as interesting: What do you need to do to take over in the first place?
I've often thought that if I were on the "CTRTW"--that's the "Committee That Rules The World"--and our design was to surreptitiously, but irremediably and irreversibly, fatally undermine the "grand experiment" of USer 'democracy,' and then to corrupt its mythic residue to my own designs, I would radically "problematize" the whole idea of "gummint" itself.
I would aim to make it STOP working. I'd make people dread encounters with the State. I'd make 'em wonder, with every breath, if 'freedom' was really worth it. Is liberty worth THIS MUCH hassle? And I wouldn't have to do ANYTHING any differently than every president since Johnson has done, to foster an increasingly toxic, 'institutional disenchantment' among "average citizens" with their frustrations with their own popular sovereignty.
I would, first, arrange it so that BIG MONEY was in control of the "public media." That's key. Rebels ALWAYS take over the TV stations first, cuz you gotta control the message. You don't have to exert control over every individual's every thought. It's enough to control the 'frames," and the 'vocabulary'--words and images--and the 'trends,' the perceptions. When you've got that much influence, thought control takes care of itself, cuz there's only so much you CAN think...
And I'd turn politics into a circus, a kind of pseudo-sport, like "professional wrasslin'." The wrestlers ALL work for the same guy, the same company, no matter what ostensible role they play in the ring. Good guys, bad guys, they're interchangeable from one night to another. It's just spectacle though, like kabuki drama, which it also resembles, it has a didactic function too.
I would see to it that the overwhelming majority of citizens were irretrievably indentured, through easy credit and/or "home ownership, to the dominant, PRIVATE, CorpoRat/State financial structures--with credit cards functioning as mobile contracts of indenture to the company store.
I would arrange it so that the people elected to 'represent' the interests OF the 'people" would, instead, mainly come from, and PROUDLY owe their primary social , political, and economic fealty to the Ruling Class. My "party" system would be stratified by class, with easily identifiable winners and losers...
I would direct things so that my "Executive/Presidential" officers were both buffoonish and ineffective sock-puppets, who were were as divisive--but as philosophically similar to one another--as possible, thereby serially alienating one, then another, then another, then another constituency, until NO 'president' would really 'represent' the country, but only the interests of their CorpoRat Bosses.
I would exhaust the public treasury with ruinous, futile, immoral, bloody--but small-scale--international wars of opportunity and or avarice; then I'd use the ensuing financial crises enforce 'austerity' on the people, whom I'd use my media empires to blame for their own plight, while simultaneously extolling their "exceptionalism."
I'd unfairly use loopholes in federal banking regulations to dispossess the 'uppity' folks--whatever race/class--of the things they thought they had "earned." Depressions don't hurt EVERYBODY. There's around 5% who do SPLENDIDLY, thank you, repossessing the tchotchkes and gew-gaws--you know, like houses and cars--which the rubes thought they'd bought, but which they would shortly learn, to their dismay, that they had in fact only leased.
I'd blame EVERYTHING on the "political culture," on the seeming impossibility of legislative consensus, and one day I'd spend a couple of million dollars and I'd get together a "patriotic," oath-loyal, stridently moralistic Committee of Private Citizens and I'd pledge to "RESTORE" America,!!!" if you people would just LET me.
I think they're just about ready to completely throw off the masquerades of 'democracy,' and maybe even 'politics' itself, and exchange if for the 'discipline' of the boardroom. No more moral hazard here, you betcha!
They usta say beware the man on horseback; today, it's the demagog in the $15,000 suit and the private jet. Beware, cuz they're the same guy, hippies...
Oh, yeah! OCCUPY WALL STREET!!! and I'll see ya at the beach...
You think there's wackloon/Conservaturd fury NOW about the state of the schools, wait til the local Family Research Council or such like gets wind of the NEXT academic sacred cow to gets rendered.
Homework. Yes homework. Homework, that baleful bane of youthful innocence and idle distraction, may be on the academic chopping block.
The attack, of course, comes from the forces of evil, discord and social upheaval on the left.
It's funny: You'd think that by giving kids more of something to do, they'd learn to do it better, wouldn't you?
But the research (there's that word again, drat it!) shows otherwise. Not only does it NOT improve "learning," but it actually IMPEDES other important growing and learning experiences.
One of the folks who've spend the most time DOING the research on the matter is education gadfly, author and critic Alfie Kohn. Kohn and a colleague, replying to a recent piece in in the NYTimes which outlined some information and asked personal opinions about the value of homework, had the following to say:
True, the trouble with homework isn't limited to quantity: it can be counterproductive even in limited amounts. But a lot of it can be damaging even if we approve of the assignments themselves.
We also dispute the suggestion that the only important issue is whether homework advances "learning."
First, the research cited concerns how many facts students can memorize, a matter less consequential to anyone with more ambitious intellectual goals, like helping students think deeply and enjoy doing so. (Homework seems to be the single most effective way to destroy children's curiosity.)
Second, this research doesn't support homework, per se. The critical question is whether children must be made to work a second shift after spending a full day at school. The available data say no, particularly with younger students. So do the many anecdotal reports we've collected of teachers and entire schools that have eliminated homework, with very encouraging results.
Finally, tweaking assignments to maximize the number of facts retained ignores homework's effect on children’s social, physical, artistic and psychological development. We worry about not only the other activities that homework displaces but also the exhaustion and family conflict that it often causes...
Homework serves one very important function, though one NEVER expressly explained by its advocates. It inures children--gets them used to, in their very bones--being called upon--required--to take "work" home with them without complaint, and without additional reward/remuneration.
It is not my habit to read extensively from other's texts, but...I make an exception in this case. Old professors never die, though they do get hoarse...
What I'm going to read is an extremely well-edited synopsis of the origins and purposes of what we are at pains today NOT to call "propaganda." Listen, because in here as in few other places, will you hear SO respected and authoritative a voice, SO frankly and candidly discuss the naked structures and motivations of our controlling institutions. Ready? Feel free to take notes:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
The author of that passage, and of the passages from which that account was expertly stitched, was Edward Bernays. The best media biography of him that I know of is in a BBC program, "The Century of the Self," the first installment of which is dedicated to Bernays, Freud's favorite nephew, and frequent amanuensis. Bernays took Freud's general insights into human behavior and built gauzy edifices of the "professions" of "public relations" and "advertizing" around them.
Bernays, a Wilsonian (capital L) Liberal who demonstrated a clearly "enlightened" understanding, but a too tolerant acceptance, of the nature of the political status quo, published those sentiments in 1928, whereupon they were immediately seized upon, wholesale, by Goebbels and Hitler.
(Aside: Capital L-Liberals, I've always thought, occupied the position in the political framework of the US at the time, and exerted approximately the same epistemic authority, as Lenin's Vanguard Intellectuals? The "eugenicists" were capital L-Liberals, too. As were the social Darwinians. )
It was Bernays who coined the phrase, "the manufacture of consent," which Chomsky and Hermann quoted in titling their landmark work in the '80s "Manufacturing Consent."
Television, and its recent flickering, blue-screened scions, such as the one on which you are likely regaring these images and hearing these sounds, are the source phenomena, the inventions, most responsible for the decline and demise of "collective intellect" in the USofA. In consequence, it is VERY VERY VERY difficult to impress upon the 'average 'Murkin' that they are, in fact, mainly responding to propaganda all the time, in every aspect of their lives, to the extent that they are personally involved in a mediated activity... One of the genius moves of the PRopaganda industry was to create the ENTIRELY artificial distinction between "propaganda" and "advertizing"
The most accurate measure of the success of the propagandizing to which ALL citizens are subjected is the readiness of ther 'subject' to repeat the 'differences' between, say, Coors and Bus, or Ford and Chevy, or Coke and Pepsi as if they were "real." Item: There is a 'real' difference between a ford sedan and an apple tree; there is no (meaningful) difference between a Chevy and a Honda.
Now think again of the template upon which the virtually uniform indoctrination of the whole, mediated reality we now inhabit is founded upon. Now think of it again. Go back. Read it AGAIN! Read it to your children at bed-time. Paste it to the mirror, so it's there when you brush your teeth/tooth and hair...Here, I'll help:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power...
Thought control needn't be exercised by restricting individual expression, when one exercises editorial discretion over the vocabulary, literal and imaginal/figural, in which the common business is conducted.
Bernays was the first person to formalize that insight, and he packaged it in the glistening wrapping of suppressed sexual suggestion which is STILL the underlying discourse of MOST sales campaigns, inCLUDING political ones, one way or another.
If you divide to conquer, what are you doing when you fragment, do ya think, hippies...
HOW nominally reasonable, normally intelligent people could think that the owners of the country--oligarchs, plutocrats, aristos-- would ever turn management of THEIR "property," or the system of its administration, over to somebody--to ANYBODY--who wasn't utterly, totally, and completely trustworthy; to someone who posed even the tiniest, remotest, slightest, slimmest CHANCE of undoing the least jot or tittle of their immensely profitable, unimaginably powerful status quo?
No. That's preposterous! Who could believe such a thing?
Thus, "thePrez" has already faithfully demonstrated he neither will, nor even particularly wants to, upset any hegemonic applecarts or otherwise in any way disturb the Owners in their well-earned rest...
And to ignore or deny this quite evident set of facts is a text-book example of "Anosognosia."
"He's an old blind bear....alone in the winter woods...with only the smell of his breath for comfort. Too mean to die, too lost to care. But show some caution....he's still the Bear."
Hey, Bugs, Got my "scholar hat" on today
