Impasse

Greetings good citizen,

The Kabuki dance that passes for our government is being presented to convince you that the BAD (non-existent) LIBERALS are responsible for the ‘automatic austerity’ that somehow found its way into law.

Naturally, to that end, we have this headline:

Boehner Halts Talks on Cuts; G.O.P. Cheers
By ASHLEY PARKER

Speaker John A. Boehner seems to have decided that he may have more to lose by negotiation over the impending spending cuts than letting them happen.

Just to provide a clear starting point you must be aware that the ONLY reason the Republicans have retained control of one branch of Congress is to provide the ‘illusion of conflict’.

The voters of this nation aren’t that stupid…but they are powerless, thanks to the mis-steps of the founders.

Conservative rhetoric aside, we all KNOW who is responsible for the economic devastation being visited upon us.

The conservo-whackos keep pointing to the liberals (who no longer exist) claiming they are responsible for policies that passed during conservative administrations!

Why is there A SINGLE conservative in government today? Because the electoral process is rigged!

Hanging chads and all…(like we need to go there.)

The >One Percent tells their very willing puppets what to do and they do it.

Is this eventually going to get those puppets lynched? Undoubtedly! But that day has yet to come.

I remind you good citizen that the only people who need secrecy are people who are up to no good as we see in this headline from today’s front page:

Soldier Admits Providing Files to WikiLeaks
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Pfc. Bradley Manning confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks.

Even more tragic than his arrest is the track record of the current administration towards ‘whistle blowers’.

And naturally, the, er, suspension of the young Pfc.’s rights makes the whole situation reek of justice being steam-rolled.

But that’s the funny thing about coups…they don’t give a fig about justice! They exist to PROTECT THE GUILTY!

Once you start doing that your whole justice system falls apart.

World’s largest inmate population…broken justice system, guess what? They’re related!

Record income inequality and a corrupt banking sector…related again!

You don’t have to look very far to find links that stretch right down to the local level.

The ‘rot’ goes right to the core!

Here you sit, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Miraculously things haven’t come unraveled (yet) but tick-tock good citizen, that old clock just keeps ticking off the seconds to zero (and you know it's going to happen soon because nothing is being done to head it off.)

(Ironically, acting to prevent derailment will be the most likely cause of one!)

Hmmn…maybe that’s what’s behind the latest Republican strategy!

Hanging in the balance here good citizen are school systems across the nation.

However, this situation is not unprecedented, across the south school systems closed during the (former) Great Depression due to ‘lack of funds’.

Given our inevitable conversion to a Banana Republic, this will be viewed as ‘no big loss’.

Thanks to ‘financial manipulation’ we have already been rendered ‘uncompetitive’ by those (union busting) conservative ‘haters of freedom’!

You either cut the schools or you cut fire and police…and you know the only reason Fire and Police protection exist is to protect the >One Percent…

YOUR tax dollars at work…protecting those who oppress you!

Same as it ever was.

So…what do we do about our ‘runaway government’?

Short answer, replace it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Extend & Pretend...

Greetings good citizen,

As the clock/calendar rushes past the halfway point towards the final quarter of the year we can’t help but wonder why things haven’t crumbled to dust yet.

We are currently faced with an ‘any day now’ situation in the Euro-zone and but for the grace of god(s) they'd be gone already...

Just providing further ‘proof’ of the ‘funny’ nature of that legal construct we all call ‘money’.

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the global financial system went bankrupt in December of 2008, everything since has been the product of ‘extend and pretend’.

And in yet another corner of ‘The Twilight Zone’, those pretending to be Democrats are scrambling to keep their sheep in check:

Political Memo
Spirit of '08 Gone, Democrats Reunite Against G.O.P. Threat
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

The party is not as united as it was four years ago, but Democrats are finding common purpose in denying Republicans control of the White House and Congress next year.

Hard to tell if the ‘abandonment’ of the Hope & Change message of four years ago is a good thing or a nod in the direction of the hypocrisy such a strategy would represent.

They have already handed the conservo-whackos enough ammo to sink their ‘do nothing’ platform, why make it worse?

Why remind the public of all of the change that didn’t happen? It could be fairly argued that the Obama administration has done more for the oligarchy than the McCain administration could ever have done!

Obama WAS Bush’s ‘third term’.

How sad is it that electing EITHER of the two ‘corporate owned’ candidates will result in the furthering of a plan to dismantle the US that dates back to the Reagan administration?

How scary is it that we are getting a chance to see how things might have worked out if the US had joined WWII on the side of the Axis…

And I’m not positing that in the rhetorical sense, we have literally become the Nazis! (By losing control of our government.)

The ‘extremists’ can do whatever they like (as exemplified by the invasion of Iraq (for something Afghanistan actually did!) and we (the vast majority of us) are powerless to stop them…

Go ahead, prove me wrong!

Or if you think you’re that good, why don’t you explain to the rest of us how, precisely, this works?

TOP NEWS
Democrats Say U.S. Is Better Off Than Four Years Ago
By JIM RUTENBERG

The party's message to wavering voters is that President Obama was the right choice in 2008, and that he has the country on its way to a sustainable recovery.

Okay so the big hairy ‘butt’ in that claim is how things ‘would likely be worse’ if not for the efforts of the Obama administration.

And they’re ‘kinda’ right. The Rethugs have been trying their damnedest to scuttle the Obama administration right out of the box…

And it’s not like stupid hasn’t been helping them out at every opportunity, (hey they are both in the pay of the same masters ya know!)

Which leads us to this last puzzling conundrum:

The Elevator Speech
By DAVID BROOKS

President Obama needs to tell us what he stands for, and unearth a big policy proposal to prove it.

Is Sporky Dorky begging Mr. Obama to produce a ‘pork barrel’ budget busting spending plan to get the USA back on it’s feet JUST so he can wag his finger at it and say, ‘I told you so’?

And you KNOW that’s just what he’ll do…(even if it’s a good plan!)

Too bad the incumbent is so beholden to the One Percent for his position or he could make a lot of points with the forgotten and abandoned working women of this country by jacking up the tax rate on ALL income over $100,000 to 100%

If he was willing to do that he could run for fucking DICTATOR of this country and he’d win by a landslide!

But he has no cajones…

And in fairness, that’s not how ‘the game’ is played.

The day after he made the announcement of such a tax proposal he’d be the headline…president assassinated. (And the part that wouldn’t make the papers would be ‘by the Secret Service’…)

That’s how deep the corruption in this cesspit is!

It is NOT an unfair question to ask why the Secret Service has FAILED to protect this nation from its ‘domestic enemies’…

Too bad we no longer have a Justice Department to look into issues like that.

Um, tick tock good citizen, regardless of the rhetoric keeping this CF rolling, the end is literally just around the corner…

Try not to be blindsided.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Last Call!

Greetings good citizen,

The day is hardly over and things could turn back around but it must be getting close to last call if the stock markets of the world are any indication.

And all of them ‘dogs’ have miraculously become ‘foxes’ again.

Go figure…

And while you’re pondering the imponderable we have yet another ‘book review’ serving as an editorial on the state of our civilization

The following snippet comes from just after the intro to this story which explains how it was spawned by the Twilight Saga:

Invisible Handcuffs

This has been coming for some time. Ever since the Reagan era, from the factory to the office tower, the American workplace has been morphing for many into a tightly-managed torture chamber of exploitation and domination. Bosses strut about making stupid commands. Employees trapped by ridiculous bureaucratic procedures censor themselves for fear of getting a pink slip. Inefficiencies are everywhere. Bad management and draconian policies prop up the system of command and control where the boss is God and the workers are so many expendable units in the great capitalist machine. The iron handmaidens of high unemployment and economic inequality keep the show going.

How did this happen? Economists known as “free-market fundamentalists” who claim Adam Smith as their forefather like to paint a picture of the economy as a voluntary system magically guided by an “invisible hand” toward outcomes that are good for most people. They tell us that our economy is a system of equal exchanges between workers and employers in which everybody who does her part is respected and comes out ahead.

Something has obviously gone horribly wrong with the contract. Thieving CEOs get mega-yachts while hard-working Americans get stagnant wages, crappy healthcare, climate change, and unrelenting insecurity. Human potential is wasted, initiative punished and creativity starved.

Again we find ourselves wondering (and if you aren’t you should be) just who these Democratic Replacements really are.

First they pick a lame, Ayn Rand inspired pseudo horror story as a ‘mirror’ of our society when the truth is far more horrific.

And I will again remind you that you won’t end up with the right outcome if you aren’t fighting the right battle.

We ain’t fighting vampires or zombies here. While the ‘enemy’ is indeed ‘soul-less’, it is not ‘supernatural’ nor is it ‘independent’…as the antagonist in the book is (or claims to be.)

(If I’m not totally goofy here, the girl is the ‘protagonist’, the ‘villain here is the ‘anti-hero’. But some twisted people would be inclined to reverse the two…)

But who is who is unimportant, it is the circumstances we need to pay attention to.

Let’s start with the ‘pauperization’ of the workforce.

Prices go up but your paycheck doesn’t…and there’s no place you can go to correct this situation.

(The age-old solution to stagnant income has been to get a ‘better’ job, but these days those jobs are being shipped overseas wholesale.)

In most cases, the shiftless boss knows he’s got you over a barrel.

Hell, he could fire half of you and force the survivors to pick up the slack (and if they couldn’t, he’d fire and replace them too!)

It’s the old ‘more with less’ situation…the sad part of this arrangement is it’s YOU who end up dealing with the ‘less’ part of this proposition.

YOU get ‘less’ pay for more work.

And again Mr. Boss-man is ready to show you the door if you don’t ‘like’ this situation.

Worse, the asshole honestly believes YOU’RE ‘overpaid’.

Now, he isn’t about to make you wear a ‘butt-plug’ to extract ‘more value’ from what he’s paying you…but he is equally disinclined to shower you with gifts even if you have agreed to be his private meat puppet on the side.

Because he has YOU over a barrel.

He holds what you ‘need’ hostage. (For this he should be hung…but we aren’t up to that part yet.)

In the future it will be a crime to hold anyone’s job hostage. In the future, your job (a.k.a. ‘the ability to support yourself’) will be one of your rights!

Yes, good citizen, we need a new definition of the word ‘criminal’.

Because many things that are (wrongly) ‘celebrated’ today should be crimes against humanity.

And if we succeed, they will be!

But I digress.

It all comes down to ‘choices’, good citizen.

The circumstances we live our lives under are of our own choosing…to a degree.

The criminals among us have, er, ‘tilted the playing field’ to their advantage, it is up to us to tilt it back…forcibly. (It is no longer a question of ‘necessity’, it must be done!)

Nobody can live in an economic desert (which our politicians did nothing to prevent!) and now it is up to us to correct this situation!

[Sidebar: the bulk of my readers are from outside the US and this advice applies to them as well…]

YOU must break the monopolist’s grip on the global economy and restore ‘local’ balance if you or your children are to ever experience ‘prosperity’ again!

2012 is as good a time as any…and what comes next promises to be more ‘draconian’ than anything we’ve seen thus far…which is more horrific than any horror novel!

The part you SHOULD BE marveling over is how our politicians flaunt our well-being with impunity!

Corruption is not a ‘game’, it’s a DISEASE and we must eradicate it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Fear & Loathing on the Potomac

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