Handicapping the 2012 Presidential Election

I'm a bit late with this but, since the Republican contest is still going on as their primary voters are apparently deciding which one of their candidates would have the worst chance of winning the general election, here goes. Four years ago I based my prediction on the hair-dos (and hair-don'ts) of each of the 2008 presidential candidates. That worked out well, except for Mitt Romney's classic televangelist coiffe being bested by McCain's no-nonsense, grumpy old combover.

So this time I will tweak the forecasting algorithm and look a little deeper into the issues to try to predict how things should evolve through the course of this election cycle. With the Democratic side set, unlike the wide open race of 2008, we can focus on the Republican primary fight. It is an interesting battle, but it is even more rigged in favor of big money sponsors than four years ago, thanks to the obscene and treasonous behavior of five crooked court justices who decided that the system wasn't rigged enough. So Romney sponsor's will buy the nomination and the only mystery is whether the system is rigged enough for them to also buy the election.

If the economy continues to recover, the conventional wisdom is that President Obama will have an edge, but the real story will be how much Obama's Super Pacs can raise to fight off the bottomless pit of cash that any Republican nominee will have access to as long as the law of the land is set by the Felonious Five judicial whores of finance. This is the simple math that decides who governs the "land of the free". This is the "freedom and democracy" that our leaders' rhetoric calls for being spread across the world. This is the price we pay for disengaging from political discourse.

Checks and Balances

They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. ~ Peter 2:19

Encouraging signs have developed in the long time since I last added an entry here. The popular movement to remove corruption from government that began in Tunisia and spread across northern Africa and the Mid-East finally washed up on these shores. Ignored, then mocked and now repressed by the lackeys of the oligarchy...we wait for a system (that has spectacularly failed to self-regulate in the recent past) to either save itself from within or face a final collapse.

All of the problems of capitalism are, of course, self-imposed. The system of competition will leave behind those less capable of fixing the rules to affect the outcome. This is no boon to society in the long run, though it may be successful for periods of time if heavily regulated. Inevitably, monopolies develop and the regulations are either gotten rid of or poorly enforced. The end result is the robbery of the many for the benefit of the few. We are at the point where the system has been too rigged for too long to be of any use for virtually anyone. Except those that own the government.

A tragic microcosm of this perverse evolution recently ended in the immolation of another supposed paragon of virtue as the big business of college football was given a chop block to its knees. State College, Pennsylvania is a small college town surrounded by farms only a few miles away on every side. In the spring and fall, the farmers spread manure on their fields and the smell wafts over the campus when there is a strong wind. That smell can't compare with the smothering, putrid stench currently hanging over that campus.

The sordid and unecessarily extended period of sexual child abuse in "Happy Valley" occurred because there was a complete breakdown of the systems of checks and balances over a period of time. This was to accomodate the whims of one Joe Paterno, and made possible by the legions of fanatical followers and the tens of millions of dollars of business they generated for the school and local area. I went to grad school there and saw firsthand the cult of personality. Penn State was the church, football the religion and Paterno the combined Pope and King. To tempt fate, his supporters erected a statue of this man while he was still living, unaware that it was built on a foundation of sand. The sand was slowly, grain by grain, falling away and marking time before the revelations of past discretions would come to light.

When the sand finally ran out, the King had just attained one final triumph. He had broken the record of Eddie Robinson of Grambling University for most college football wins in the history of the sport. Little consolation now, one would hope. Defiant, incredibly insensitive, and tone deaf to the bitter end, Paterno had to be forced out, while his brain-dead legions rioted. These incredibly dense "students" were the reason I had hoped the football team would lose every Saturday that I went there, so that the sidewalks would be relatively free from the vomit that was deposited there on nights when they won. They proudly advertised their ignorance of who the actual victims were, lost in the herd mentality that is so carefully cultivated in this country.

Which brings us to Veteran's Day. Reactionary thinkers fail to grasp what should be obvious nuances in separating wars of liberation from wars of agression. You cannot honor a warrior without cursing the sham of the war. Please don't congratulate me on my service without excoriating those who would and so blatantly have used the military for the material gain of the ruling class. To all those who served, honestly ask yourself what you served for. To those currently in the military, get home soon and in one piece and to hell with those who would make you heroes for no good cause!

The People United

Bayonets cannot weave cloth.
~ Joseph Etter, IWW labor organizer commenting on the Massachussetts governor's decision to send in the National Guard to crush a strike by textile workers.

It has been interesting watching the conglomerate-owned media covering the revolution in Egypt. It has also been interesting hearing the Obama administration telling one of the many corrupt lackeys of U.S. foreign policy to not crush the will of the people over there, while the war against the peasantry intensifies on U.S. soil. The union busting threats made by governors of New Jersey and Wisconsin are similar to those of 100 years ago. We are stuck in a reactionary time warp.

Both Republicans and Democrats seem to be on the same side lately. Perhaps this is due to the racheting up of the campaign finance corruption enabled by the judicial activism of five ultra-right members of the Supreme Court. In order to play the candidate game, you now have to be able to raise vast sums of money AND not incur the wrath of those who can raise vast sums of money against you. All this leads to policies that will support the very top of the economic pyramid at the expense of everyone else.

It doesn't take a lot of predictive power to see that this will end badly if a radical change of course does not occur. The attack on the public workforce and unions, along with environmental and safety regulations, the continued reliance on fossil fuels, the neglect to educational and physical infrastructure...all of these things will have negative consequences, many of them dire, to everyone. The least powerful will, as always, be most negatively impacted. It won't stop there, however. Those in charge seem determined to find the limits of popular revolution in this country. At some point, the left-right divide will have to be bridged and the recognition of the common enemy must occur. The appropriation of "not gonna take it anymore" by right-wing corporate stooges will seem rather quaint compared to when the shit actually hits the fan. I hope our government follows its own advice to foreign countries when it happens here.

The Korean Conflict: A Historical Perspective

"General Bradley said that we must draw the line (against Communist expansion) somewhere. The President stated he agreed on that. General Bradley said that Russia is not yet ready for war. The Korean situation offered as good an occasion for action in drawing the line as anywhere else."

~ From the official minutes of President Harry S. Truman's meeting with his top military and foreign-policy advisers at the Blair House on the evening of 25 June 1950

Here we go, again. Another opportunity for people halfway around the word to die, en masse, for the United States to demonstrate its uncanny ability to enforce a global double standard. While Israel, judging from its recent and not so recent actions, is as reckless and dangerous a government as they come, is allowed to keep its nuclear arsenel without sanctions (and indeed without any mention at all in official U.S. diplomatic circles) while other countries who we don't share a "special relationship" with, are not. In this case, North Korea, representing one third of the Neo-con "Axis of Evil", and already being slowly starved to death by economic sanctions imposed by a U.S.-domininated U.N., is about to take things into some very dangerous territory. Namely, they are about to become the noisy focus of the "Loud Little Handful" of Neo-cons. These are people that would like nothing better than to follow Douglas MacArthur, their ideological ancestor, down the rabbit-hole of nuclear abyss. This is history that could repeat itself, hopefully without a brand new, glowing and radioactive ending. So let's look at that history and clear up in advance some misconceptions that will no doubt be foisted on us again in the coming days by the usual suspects.

At the end of WWII, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated and the world became the domain of the two "liberating" powers. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. Even before the last shots were fired in that war, a new ideological war between the two remaining large military powers was beginning. The "Cold War" in which the aspirations of the people of the world were boiled down into capitalist/communist ideological doctrine, would continue to cause turmoil and divert resources from the basic needs of humanity and towards the existance of massive armament stockpiles.

One of the key points of revisionist history is that this massive weapons buildup was able to "keep the peace". In fact, while nuclear war was avoided, dozens of "lower intensity" conflicts raged and millions died. Korea would be joined by a long list of places where Cold War brinksmanship would result in proxy wars, bringing foreign troops, advisors and armament into conflict with eachother.

Most U.S. history books will state that the Korean War began on June 25, 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea. The true origin is murkier, as offensive actions on both sides of the 38th parallel were occurring ever since this border dividing one country into two was established at the end of WWII. The border was in effect a dividing line between the influence of the two superpowers who had divvied up the Korean peninsula after removing the Japanese army, similar to the military occupation of Germany.

Syngman Rhee, the U.S.-approved ruler of South Korea, suffered an electoral setback a month before the war started as popular dissatisfaction with the pace of reconstruction grew among the South Korean population. The tenuous political position he faced seemed to force his hand towards diversionary tactics, such as increased belligerance towards the North, something we may see happening again if Obama tries to get his groove back after the mid-term elections by proving his foreign policy toughness to the incessant cry of the Neo-cons as amplified by the war-hungry corporate media. The Cold War never ended for these people, it just morphed into another War Without End.

Capitalism: The Silent Killer

"The streets and people of New York are devastated for the second time in a decade. This time, the culprits behind the wrecked lives and ruined livelihoods are not foreign extremists, but homegrown. And rather than receive appropriate retribution, the perpetrators receive billions of government dollars for their demolition job."

~Tom Engelhardt

Capitalism. A word that should be at least as well known as Communism or Socialism. Or terrorism for that matter. Yet a word that is strangley missing in most debates about or descriptions of U.S. government. The word is often replaced by sunny sounding proxies such as "freedom and democracy" or "liberty". One wonders about the taboo nature of this word in the imperial lexicon of corporate media. So let's break it down.

This is a system primarily fueled by the most base of base human nature; greed. Yet, this engine of exploitation and inequality is exhorted as instrinsically good and pitted against the intrinsically evil-by-association Socialism. We are thus being sold the idea that greed and selfishness and ranking priviledge by the amount of excess accumulated property is more noble, natural and godly than an egalitarian and selfless existance. What would Jesus do if faced with this assumption? As we are faced with it every day.

And it has been more in our face than usual these days as the system has collapsed in a massive tangle of crooked deals and unstaunched bleeding of outsourced jobs. All of this mess made possible by politicians on a legalized bribery binge pushing continued de-regulation of industries irrevocably driven to excess. Some very public dirty dealing was seen in the last few months as the Democratic congress and president attempted to tackle the most vital issue facing us; health care. We saw how crooked and gamed the legislative process is. The health insurance and pharm lobbies strangled the best option, single payer, in the crib then kneecapped even a weak public option. We saw our lives and well being quite literally given less priority than industry profit. It was there in all its naked, destructive glory, this god called Capitalism, the magical hand of the marketplace that decides whether we live or die.

It also decides where we live and the quality and conditions of our life. One of the sadder stories I have read recently is that of the children affected by the foreclosure tidal wave sweeping the country. This will not be a good holiday season for them, and neither may be future ones as the emotional scars of being uprooted remain for a long time.

So when you hear about the evils of Socialism and Communism or when you hear about the great goodness of freedom and liberty, remember the premature death, suffering and misery of the most dangerous and deadly "ism" out there: Capitalism.

Death By Corruption

"The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

~Justice John Paul Stevens, dissent on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission


The 2010 elections are done and spell further doom to anything resembling the American Dream. The lukewarm, mild, tepid support of the New Deal safety net by the Democrats was swamped by a scalding-hot tea mess of ultra-right nutcases parading as populist reformers. The tea they served was brewed from an ocean of money provided in part by the Koch brothers, savvy businessmen who want a return from their investment.

They spent millions on attack ads, robo-calls and other forms of nefarious disinformation and now expect billions from the U.S. treasury to be provided by their army of looters soon to be sworn in to congress. This will come at the expense of anyone hoping to retire before the age of 80, anyone not raking in more than seven figures a year, and anyone trying to go to college without being saddled with debt for the next 30 years after graduation.

The campaign finance system is no longer just broken, it has been pulverized by corporate cash into a shadowy, toxic fog that cannot even be traced. Anywhere there is dissent from the corporate agenda the fog rolls in and blankets the airwaves with poison. The dissent is killed and replaced with a compliant tool to accomplish the further dismantling of FDR's social contract. This wave election may be the wave of the future if the walls between corporate money and fair elections are not rebuilt. Expecting the politicians to fix this is like expecting a drug cartel to police themselves and a drug addict to come clean without any type of intervention. It is up to we the people to get a constitutional amendment to fix this mess. That's the only hope of stopping the slide back to the Gilded Era of robber barons.

Autumn: Death is Life

My death waits there among the leaves
In magicians' mysterious sleeves
Rabbits and dogs and the passing time
My death waits there among the flowers
Where the blackest shadow, blackest shadow cowers
Let's pick lilacs for the passing time
My death waits there in a double bed
Sails of oblivion at my head
So pull up the sheets against the passing time

~ Jacques Brel

Leaves are falling and blowing across the streets and lawns as cool winds whip through my suburban landscape. Gone are the long evenings of slow twilight. Gone are the slow and relaxed gaits of movement. There is an urgency to get through the more turbulent atmosphere and arrive more purposefully at a destination now. The darkness falls quicker and returns slower. The mud and buds of spring time renewal are far away, both in the past and future. Forgotten and not yet imagined. The reality is currently stressing the cold and the process of going dormant. There will be a long stretch of trying to hold on to the promise of renewal ahead of us.

The chill in the air that appears this time of year is incrementally more chilling with each passing year. We feel the slow transition from summer to autumn as becoming less tangential to our own life's cycle. Yet there is a familiar assurance and reassurance that greets us in the annual dying off. We have been through it so many times before that we can feel comfortable knowing the many intricate variations of what we can expect of winter in these temperate latitudes. Imagine the shock if we had never been through a winter before.

The shorter days can be depressing. The cold wind can be painful to endure. The sense of impending death can be a source of dread. Then comes the revelation of our long experience: There can be no renewal without this dying off. There can be no promise without this finality. There is a reason to this season.

Good Fucking Riddance

Finally and at long last, the year 2010 has delivered some good news. Rahm Emanuel, the destroyer of Democratic congressional majorities, is leaving, supposedly to try to get a piece of the action in Chicago. No one really believes the motive, the more likely scenario is he is bailing out to avoid the stigma of potentially once again presiding over a huge (and hugely avoidable) Republican renaissance. In 1994, it was his DLC strategy of pushing through NAFTA by the Clinton administration that persuaded the Democratic base to stay home, opening the door to the Newt Gingrich-led raping and pillaging of the middle class. In 2010, it was his continued strategy of allowing corporate cash to rule over all else that is similarly demoralizing all voters that aren't batshit crazy, or millionaires (or in some case, both). History repeats itself and the crooked campaign-finance money machine never misses a beat.

President Obama's hiring of Mr. Emanuel right after the 2008 election was the first clear indication that the hope and change rhetoric of the campaign was not going to amount to much of the susbstantive change as we had hoped for. Two years later, we can clearly recognize it as Clinton redux, the corporate and Israel lobbies still rule the day and the rest of us are still serfs populating an ever-growing feudalist chasm between what needs to be done and what cannot be done as long as the real change, a fundamental restructuring of the campaign finance system, is not implemented.

Let Rahm Emanuel be a symbol, the poster boy, of the need for this change. Twice now he has squandered the hopes and dreams of working people and sold them out to the highest corporate bidder. But we must not focus narrowly and concentrate our disappointment, frustration and anger on the player. We must put our effort into finally changing the game.

Bring Forth the Wedge Issues!

"Most voters, he had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic or cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited."

~ 1970 New York Times article on one of the architects of Nixon's Southern Strategy, available here

Wedge issues, as always, are once again a huge part of the Republican Party's electoral campaign strategy this election year. The past two election cycles saw the crash and burn of Republican fearmongering about ruddy-complected terrorists that had been so effective in the two election cycles before that. It is clear that the economy finally emerged as the deciding issue in elections recently and people were seeing that Ronald Reagan's trickle down had turned into a seeping toxic sludge that was annihilating the middle class. Well the Republicans still don't have any answers to that problem except the same old same old, so we can expect to hear a lot more diversion being screamed through the news tickers of corporate media in the next three months. Prop 8, illegal immigrants, health care portrayed as welfare...all the old standards will be new again. Any real debate on how to revive the economy will be drowned out.

As for the Democrats, they do not have the luxury of running against a Republican Party in power, so their strategy is to make people remember how we got here. It will be difficult, since there is the growing realization that the economy will not recover any time soon and may be in permanent decline, only temporarily alleviated by short-lived speculative bubbles. They seem content to let the Republicans go on abusing archaic parliamentary procedures to obstruct any meager attempts to pull us out of the death spiral. Even without their obstructionism, there are no signs of the bold type of actions necessary, such as a radical transformation to renewable energy, and shifting priorities from the military and prison industrial complexes to education and living-wage job creation. This is where the Democrats must take the debate. We shall see how effective they will be.

It seems one seldom goes broke while exploiting the short attention span and prejudices of the U.S. electorate.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Rupert Murdoch's Curse on the World

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”
~Andre Gide

Perhaps the most teachable moment in network news coverage since the "Balloon Boy" fiasco of late last year unfolded this week. The real question is, in this time of 24 hours news cycles, will anyone learn anything? Before we forget and move on to the next celebrity-going-to-jail story here's a recap:

Right-wing media terrorists do a drive by smearing of a government employee. Obama administration tosses the employee under the bus immediately. Someone actually bothers to investigate the right wing smear machine and discovers it was all a disgustingly manipulative hoax (as well as defamation of character, which could be a sweet legal issue to smack down these fools this time). Right-wing media blame Obama.

The real beauty of this, besides a lawsuit against these bastards, is that they had pulled this shit dozens of times before and gotten away with it. Van Jones and ACORN were the most high profile victims of the lie machine's withering attack on Democratic timidity. But now no one will EVER take them seriously again. We hope.

Fox "News" looks more transparent than ever as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. And as such, the narratives they adhere to, such as the divide and conquer strategy that is as old as ancient Rome and as young as Nixon's Southern Strategy, has become obvious to all who wish to see it. Rachel Maddow had an excellent breakdown of how they changed tack on the Sherrod smear once the lie had been exposed. She used the network's own video clips from one day to the next to expose their blatant shilling. They are beneath contempt!

President Obama is walking on eggshells because of the power-charged race issue that Republicans have and will exploit to the hilt. However, I don't believe Hilary Clinton, or any Democrat for that matter, would have had any more fortitude than Obama. Do you recall Lani Guinier? The Democrats have enabled the lies and smears by rewarding them instead of fighting them with the most powerful weapon there is: the truth. Ultimately, it falls back on the American public to put an end to the bullshit, but they seem to be more interested in Hollywood gossip than in politics. That is the real source of the problem.

Tonight We're Gonna Party Like it's 1789

‎"Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."
~Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 1944

Today is le quatorze juillet also known as Bastille Day, marking the onset of the French Revolution, which overthrew a hopelessly corrupt, and ineptly deficient monarchy. Far flung wars of conquest had bankrupted the country to the point it could not even take care of its growing number of war veterans. Years of no-so-benign neglect had resulted growing poverty and inequity between the peasants and the ruling class. Sound familiar? Not to fear, the royal warmongers of this country are currently safe, and at this time even seemingly poised for a comeback. If one were to listen to the right-wing media, the biggest issues in the elections of 2010 are not perpetual war, too-big-to-fail banks, or even the continued decline of the middle class from globalization. No, these topics are not even being debated because both of the major political parties are competing for the big money of those special interests, and no substantive change can occur. None of the major media speak of the one solution to this mess: then end of pay-for-play politics.

What we get instead are plenty of wedge issues as a distraction. How long will peasants fall for this? Instead of "let them eat cake" those holding the reins say "let them swallow this BS" and that not insignificant segment of the electorate with racist/homophobic/xenophobic tendencies put their own heads in the guillotine for another election cycle.

Ode to the Dead Poets

We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.
~Keats, "Endymion"

One of the nicest features of the internet is that it allows you to catch up on your past. Being in a reflective mood recently, I sought to search for the contact information of an English professor whose class (Introduction to English Literature) I took as a college freshman. I wanted to express, almost 20 years later, how much that one course changed my life and made me appreciate the written word as a way of "saying the unsayable", as the phrase the professor used to explain the purpose of poetry.

Now that's deep when you think about it. It means that all poetry is ultimately futile. No matter how well you choose your words and arrange them, they can never fully express what motivated you to write them. But the very act of trying to express those feelings goes a long way just the same. That was just one of the important revelations that unfolded in that class. It was a basic, introductory class, but the reverence shown for the written word combined with the interpretation of the meaning of each line got my attention. The interpretation of each poem was attended by an explanation of the personal motivation of the poet, so that the words could be fully realized and appreciated by the students, who all too often were disinterested, hungover and just there to fulfill a requirement. Which was the reason I was there, too, because I could not get out of it by taking a CLEP test. This was one case of things working out for the best.

When you do intensive physical training, you can actually see your body changing. This class was the educational equivalant of that transformative process. I could actually sense my perceptions of the world around me changing. It made me realize the true purpose of education in making us better at appreciating all we are exposed to and motivating us to seek further horizons. This is what I wanted to thank this professor for after all these years.

So I searched for the name on the internet. Sadly, I found that the professor had died almost five years ago. I knew this was one of the possible outcomes of so many passing years, but it still came as a great disappointment to me. There was no way to express how he had transformed my mind. Then again, it would not have been fully possible to do that anyway, as he had already explained.

Anti-American

"To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."
~ Frederick Douglass "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro", 1852

Each July 4th I am reminded of the classic speech made almost 150 years ago, which fully sums up my feelings about self-congratulatory displays of patriotism made whilst the list of crimes is added to on a daily basis by a government representing not its people, but transnational corporations which despise the very ideals that we are supposedly celebrating. Like most people, I want to join the herd and wave the flag in pride, but unlike so many people, my grasp on reality won't let me. I can feel a quick tinge of emotional patriotism when the promise of what this country is about is alluded to, followed almost instantly by a sense of rage because that promise is so tragically unfulfilled.

To the reactionaries that would call me "Anti-American", I ask for a definition of that phrase. I am anti-war, anti-exploitation, anti-corporate oligarchy, and anti-environmental destruction. I don't approve of democratically governments being overthrown by our government because they threaten the profit margin of an influential cartel of international gangsters. If that's what you mean, then yes, I am Anti-American. And proud of it.

Perhaps someday soon this system will be forced to fall under its own weight. It is unsustainable and therefore will be brought down eventually. But what would make me most proud as a citizen of this country, what would make me wave the flag and feel a great rush of pride, would be if "we the people" forced it to fall BEFORE then. Before it had consumed everything in its destructive path. Now THAT would be worthy of a grand celebration!

The Death of Mars

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
~Voltaire

Our current on-going disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan are recognized as a lost cause by virtually everyone these days. Everyone except those who have the power to stop them. The "War on Terror" is now recognized by most as what it was obvious to some of us in the beginning; a scam. Osama Bin Laden is still alive more than eight years after he launched the impetus for this fiasco. The recent arrest by Pakistan of an ordinary citizen who took it upon himself to go and find him is as tragic as it is comical.

Have we reached a tipping point? Will Congress deny funding for this fool's errand? I would love to see it happen, but doubt it will. The deficit hawks that scream about large deficits when denying another penny of social spending, will no doubt rubber stamp another 50 billion dollars for the pointless and endless bloodletting. They are the true whores of war, even more so than the mercenary armies they give our tax money to.

No, it will be the public leading Congress on this issue, as is so often the case. People are sick of seeing the U.S. Treasury looted and services cut to support this boondoggle. Even the right-wing chickenhawks that plastered their SUVs with yellow ribbons stopped supporting the war once their Chickenhawks-In-Chief left office in disgrace early last year. Their allegiance to their country only went as far as their partisan political preferences. They were the only true believers and now that they have packed away their Chinese-made flags and ribbons all that is left to look at is the huge price tag in blood (never a concern of theirs anyway) and money, which they do care about. Two years ago it was "we can't cut and run". I think we can all agree on cutting our losses now and going home before our economy implodes for the last time.

Short Term Profits, Long Term Problems

There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of human beings. If things keep trying to live, white men will rub them out.
~Chief Dan George as "Old Lodge Skins"

Heavily under the influence, to the point of being blinded by, greed, our captains of global industry are barreling down the tracks toward a canyon wall. The docile cargo of the lower classes are finally becoming aware of the existence of the wall, too late to really stop the impact, but not too late to slow the train down enough to make the impact somewhat survivable.

We've all heard about the poisoning of a section of our waters and coast of course, but we haven't really been told of the destruction of large sections of our land through mountaintop removal and other hideous forms of exploitation developed by the extractive industries. When I heard candidate Obama mention "clean coal" I knew that the two major political parties were not that far apart on environmental policy and that King Coal had covered their bets by buying them both off. Our current Secretary of the Interior, "Cowboy" Ken Salazar has been a nightmare for those who thought wolves were finally safe in the northern Rockies or endangered species were actually going to get a break from the relentless assault by the monied interests. The beat goes on, with people placing more importance on the quarterly reports of their portfolios than the long term survivability of the planet.

The 2010 mid-term elections present the choice between keeping the train going at roughly its current speed, or accelerating towards an even worse impact. Where is the real alternative? Where is the long term plan to forge a sustainable economy? As long as we are using the paradigm of quarterly profits, I doubt it will ever arrive and our fate will be sealed.

Every Day Wingnuts

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
~George Orwell


We all seem to know them. Wingnuts. Or just plain ign'ant folks. If we are lucky, we may only see them when we are in line at the grocery store, or just briefly overhear them spewing their bile at the table next to us in a restaurant. If we are not so lucky, they are our neighbors or people we work with so we have to see them almost every damn day. My question to you is how do you deal with them? I usually take one of two courses. One is to just ignore them because life is too short to use up precious time and energy on a lost cause. The other is to confront the ignorance. I usually only do this when they are either egregiously out of bounds with their comments or I'm in a special mood where I need to educate someone who has been fed the talking points, and is badly in need of some context and background information that they missed from Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, etc.

Of course, the chain emails are the easiest to refute, because you can quickly and devastatingly provide factual links and info against the ObamaKenyanSocialist nonsense. But I do richly enjoy the live contact and seeing a wingnut become quickly flustered when hit with a dose facts from this universe, instead of the parallel one they prefer to dwell in. One thing I don't like is seeing how many other people, who I thought were actually too smart to fall for the bullshit, weren't. Yes, the sad part is seeing how well the corporate media have hidden the real history from so many people who have not had the inclination to find it, probably because of their own deeply ingrained prejudices.

Apathy is Not an Option

From each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out in you where the heart lies.
~ Pablo Neruda

Should the Republicans pick up enough seats in the 2010 mid-term elections Rep. Joe Barton will become chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This is one of the countless reasons why this is not a time for apathy. While the Democrats are certainly not the end all and be all for a better world, at least their measured non-responses are much less worse than outright hostility to progress and complicity in envoronmental armegeddon. Wow, what a choice. But let's at least stave off a biological collapse for another decade or so, shall we?

Free Enterprise Isn't Free

There's a particle of risk involved in every venture.
~Allardyce T. Merriweather

The engine of "free enterprise" that is the "magic of the marketplace" touted as sacrosanct dogma by every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has hit a rough patch recently. First came the great Wall Street meltdown of 2008, and now comes the immolation of the Gulf Coast economy. Both of these things were the direct and predictable result of 30 years of right-wing assualt on "Big Government" through the deregulation and ineffective oversight of corporations. Most of the damage here can be laid at the feet of Republican presidents, especially the petrochemical nightmare years of Bush/Cheney. Of course, the assualt didn't stop under the Democrats, it just barely slowed down. Barack Obama's obviously false promise of change we could believe in makes us recall Bill Clinton's disastrous free trade policies, which haunt us to this day with lost jobs and lower living conditions for working people on all sides of the border.

Let's avoid the knee jerk reaction to defend Barack Obama from the wolves of the Republican Party. The Democrats, Obama included, are part of the problem. They can't help it, they are in a life and death struggle for funding from the truly soul-less old men that have been gaming the system since the days of big plantations, railroads and Northern industrialization. We must not delude ourselves thinking that anything can change as long as the system of legalized bribery which is our campaign finance laws are intact. Unless some major changes are made there, we are going to be learning just how corrupt, self-centered, and downright misanthropic the ruling class can be for decades to come. And the fallout from their fetishes will last decades beyond THAT. We have no real brakes on the system right now. Corporate lobbyists write the laws for legislators that were once lobbyists themselves or will soon be once they retire from or get kicked out of office. And the mainstream media is in collusion with all of them, since they are owned by those same interests that write the laws.

Our last best hope is for the people of WalMart Nation to awaken and fight for an end to the deadly corporate merry-go-round of death and desolation.

Hello, Sixth Extinction!

On Freedom of Expression

Man reaches his full potential when he no longer has to sell himself as a commodity.

~Ernesto Guevara

What is your favorite song? Or book? Or any work of artistic expression? Why is it your favorite? For me, it seems every song, movie, poem or sculpture that I have found enlightening, inspiring or just entertaining was made as a tribute to artistic expression itself and not to sell X amount of units to an audience determined by accountants in terms of demographics.

I'm sure mindless entertainment/escapsim will always be with us, and damn it, sometimes it even has a purpose I suppose, but when you really need to FEEL something, there must be more than a beat you can dance to. As for music, it needs to hit your heart, mind and soul as well as your ass. The song lyrics are as crucial as the beat in those songs that I can really feel and groove to in spirit.

There are many things I detest in this for-profit society and one of them is the lack of artistic expression for its own sake. This seems to get worse every year. Just like speciation of living things, artistic expression is at its peak when there is a new niche to be filled. As the niche gets filled, innovation is stifled. This evolutionary process is hastened by the demands of the marketers, who quash artistic innovation almost immediately by applying the lowest common denominator.

Now imagine a society where the profit motive or state apparatus does not control artistic expression. Where art is created not to be sold or to sell a state-sanctioned point of view but, free from all forms of censorship, was created to exist soley as artistic expression. What a brave new and perhaps ethereally beautiful world that would be!

Wingnut Waterloo

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
-Matthew 7:16

If there is one reason to take solace after the passage of the government insurance industry bailout disguised as "health care reform", it is watching the wingnuts squirm and squeal like an army of stuck pigs. We may not have won much, but these porcine punks lost, and lost big. Let their rallying cry be "Kill the Poor!" Let them show what they are really about, death merchants hired by captains of industry to deny life to those peasants who have not the providence of life to be wealthy enough to afford to live. The mask is off, the ugliness is on the increase. We can take some pleasure in the defeat of actual reform, by watching the defeated Napoleonic Army of Wingnuts march forlornly along, dreaming of future victories while still safely in exile.