Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Clearance Sale!

Greetings good citizen,

It appears the market tickers are out of whack (but how do we tell?) They had the date right but the clock indicated it was already 2:35 in the afternoon! (and this was before the open!)

But that is not today’s topic, today’s offering comes to us straight from the headlines of today’s NY Times

Naturally, whenever you see a ‘this isn’t new or news’ item, we are compelled to ask why this and why now?

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.

But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.

Well, ‘the divide‘, which has been growing steadily for the past few decades, has become more stark partly because the rich have indeed been getting richer and mostly because the poor have been getting considerably poorer.

Worse, the ‘bar’ for entry into the, er, ‘public arena’ has also risen at an alarming rate. The merely ‘well-to-do’ can no longer, er, ‘afford’ to mount a campaign, much less buy a seat on an influential committee if elected!

Politics have indeed long been the preserve of the ‘idle rich’.

Thus has ‘leadership’ been lacking for so long.

To give you an idea of how bad it has gotten good citizen, Connecticut has long enjoyed the status of having the highest per capita income of any state in the nation…but not anymore.

Recently it has come to light that there is a place where the per capita income dwarfs that of Connecticut…but it’s not a state!

So this, er, disparity may have existed for quite some time…

Can you guess which, er, ‘district’ has snatched the crown from Connecticut, home of hedge fund Billionaires and other Wall Street tycoons?

Correct good citizen, the enchanted district that contains ‘K Street’ has snatched the crown from the desert state of Connecticut.

What Connecticut isn’t in a desert?

The fuck it ain’t!

The biggest employer in the state is Stop & Shop!

Not that the rich give a shit about that! They don’t do their own grocery shopping…

Unlike the vast majority of us…although these days, more and more of us are purchasing our necessities from the local dollar store!

Makes you wonder what places like Stop & Shop are going to do when we are all reduced to buying pet food with our food stamps?

But it stands to reason that we’ll all have bigger things to worry about if it comes to that.

So, we have rich politicians AND a ‘leaderless’ world…how the fuck did that happen?

Aren’t the wealthy ‘natural leaders’?

Apparently not.

Doing what’s good for you often involves doing what’s not so good for a bunch of other people…but you aren’t gonna stay rich if you aren’t willing to, er, ‘crack a few skulls, I mean eggs!

So we return to the very limited pool our politicians are drawn from. Sure, on occasion some rich bastard will stake a poor man’s run for office but this is done as a ‘spoiler’, it is not done out of any sense of civic pride or a genuine desire for ‘honest government’ (despite robust claims to the contrary.)

It might fairly be said that the current incumbent is a fair example of this ‘spoiler’ in action. Give the public what they want but then tie his hands behind his back once he’s in office!

This tactic has made the public wary of what is now viewed as a ‘puppet government’, the ballot box has never been more suspect than it is today.

Which returns us to our original question…why point to corrupt politicians now?

Are they trying to focus our attention on the futility of changing anything while politicians and the system used to elect them are on sale cheap?

Or are they attempting to ‘deflect’ some of the hostility currently aimed at the financial community by pointing at their ‘enablers’?

There can be no doubt that our legislators are just as guilty as the finance boys…who are just as guilty as those who employ them!

Which only re-enforces my cry that we need to redefine the term criminal.

Justice disappears when criminals get to decide what is and what isn’t ‘just’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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