As The Cookie Crumbles: Jobless

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..
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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...

HN&S: 10/10/11: Resistance

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.

No contest! hippies...

But I'll see ya at the beach...

As The Cookie Crumbles: Accomplishment

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.

Right hippies?

As The Cookie Crumbles: Uniform

Friends, Romans, and Hippies, lend me your ears!

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...

Okay,then, hippies: Dis-MISSED!

See ya at the beach...

As The Cookie Crumbles: The Old "CTRTW"

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...

WWH~~ Hippie News & Such: The End of Homework

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.

Why do ya think they do that, hippies?

We can talk about it when I see you at the beach.

As The Cookie Crumbles (10/1/11): Age of "Consent"

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...

See ya (almost naked) at the beach...