American Lawlessness

I can't run no more,
With that lawless crowd.
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud.
They're going to hear from me. Leonard Cohen – Anthem

But they likely won’t hear from enough of us, will they? Usually, in American history, the “thunderclouds” that get summoned are in service of the 1%, the planet killers, the real “baby killers” who do their work in quantity not quality, and outright criminals who belong either behind bars or standing in front of a firing squad convicted of treason. But the United States are no longer united and at least half of the voting public (those allowed to vote) are “that lawless crowd.”

You see their distain for law and order, peace and quiet, the public spaces, and decency practically everywhere you go. You hear them flaunt laws and polite behavior all night long in practically every town in the nation. They do it for both fun and profit and they do it knowing the police are, mostly, on their side. The country is rapidly becoming half-“that lawless crowd.” And they are clearly proud of their ability to repeatedly commit crimes against the “public good” and national security without consequences. How will this play out on both the world stage and locally? Probably, badly.

I’m going to work from the bottom up in describing the symptoms of an empire in rapid decline. At the dead bottom—where local, state, and federal laws are broken and flaunted on a moment-by-moment basis—are vehicle noise laws. Here is one of many places where you can see that rural areas are in a state of far more deterioration than their urban cousins. On mild spring-thru-fall days, you can hear the sounds of blatantly illegal vehicle exhaust systems coming from every direction. While it is clearly and obviously illegal to alter any EPA/DOT-approved vehicle’s intake and exhaust system, local and state cops ignore those criminals because of . . . money. Irrationally powerful special interest groups like the IAPO (International Association of Professional Bar Owners) spent buttloads of cash putting up obstacles to prevent the weak attempts of “law enforcement” from patrolling the obvious sources of a substantial number of vehicle deaths and serious injuries: bar “closing time.” That same pack of gangsters and the amazingly powerful (and totally lame) MIC (Motorcycle Industry Council) put up all sorts of political noise when the noise their customers make destroys the peace and quiet and citizens begin to demand actual law enforcement (instead of minority harassment.).  And cops?  They are both terrified of biker gangs reprisals and too often the gang members. The same goes for the characters with illegal exhaust systems on their pickups, Honda Civics, and other assorted law-breaking vehicles.

That’s one of many examples of lawlessness at the lowest levels of society. At the national level, we had a violent insurrection that attempted to cancel the votes of tens of millions of Americans in an effort to install a egotistic, foolish reality show actor and his 3^rd-tier élite handlers as a permanent dictatorship. Everything works top-down and our culture is infested with lawless 1%ers who imagine themselves to be above the law and, worse, the law itself. When those at the top of society or business consider themselves to be ungoverned by law and order, that attitude showers across the nation with all of the worst people imagining themselves to be “special.” No only are they not special, but they are capable of destroying anything that is special within their reach.

Rigged Against Them?

I watched a little of Dave Chappelle’s SNL opening last night (Yeah, I know it’s “Saturday Night Live,” not “Sunday Streaming.”) and his remarks about his poor (not really), dumb (really), Republican-voting, Trump-loving Ohio rube neighbors struck me as totally clueless. I’ve been hearing whining rural and urban underachievers bitch about the “system” that is “rigged against me” since I was a kid 70 years ago. Out of every group of this pitiful group of losers will come several people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and have a whine-free life, blowing the hell out of the “rigged against them” argument.

Genetics are what are rigged against them. Like Larry McMurtry said

“He’s [Trump] is very loved. The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an ‘honest liar’. . . That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen a white male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This whole system is rigged,’ he said. And across the stage was a white woman, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama saying ‘No, it’s not.’” Of course, that is a fairly perverted observation of what happened in that debate and the resulting national argument about electing a con artist and known mobster to national office. “Another con artist,” would be more accurate, since the whole Republican establishment has gone over to the darkest of the dark side.

Chappelle’s political and social analysis is, of course, as goofy as most of Dave’s career of funny over-simplifications. Those “poor white people” in Ohio have seen hundreds of Trump-like “honest liars,” Trump was not only not the first but not even the 1,001^st. They see and hear them every Sunday in their fundamentalist churches and on television where they pour money into the pockets of televangelists in the equally insane and gullible hope that if they can’t make it in this world they’ll make it in the next by following their pennies and dollar bills into heaven. And, of course, Trump was lying (as always) about being a billionaire, but there has never been a shortage of bullshit artist millionaires and Ohio has more than a few of those characters.

But low brows like Chappelle’s neighbors (who “love” him because of his money and tolerate his color) and Dave himself conveniently neglect to mention the reason Republicans hate Hillary Clinton with a passion. She tried and failed (thanks to the people she was trying to help) to start a first step at a national health care system in 1993. She tried to start unravelling the worst part of our rigged system, 60% of US personal bankruptcies are due to medical expenses and a fairly conservative estimate means at least 650,000 medical bankruptcies occur every year which would mean about 18,000,000 personal bankruptcies are due to the Republican effort to squash national healthcare. Currently about 1 out of 6 Americans are carrying significant medical debt.

And they voted for that fucked-up system, repeatedly. You don’t get to bitch about a rigged system when you keep voting for the riggers. Worse, your whining rings false when you fall in love with a con artist who has failed at every business he’s started, even with an $800B head-start in life, left a long trail of ripped off customers, vendors, and business partners (including almost every major bank in the western world), and had an obvious conflict of interest with his Russian “business partners’ and the job of US President. That’s who you think is “telling the truth?”

The problem with Trump’s whining lovers isn’t that the system is rigged against them. The problem is that they are too dumb to know what “rigged” means. Start with this definition from Webster’s, “manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest means." Trump’s fans manipulate themselves and purposely choose the people who obviously lie to them without restraint. When you are in the driver’s seat and you choose to drive off of a cliff, you are not being manipulated or controlled by anything but your own foolishness.

Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.

Gratitude, Don’t Leave Home without It

Twenty-five years ago, our youngest daughter suffered dozens of critical injuries in a car crash. Luckily, she was quickly rescued and treated by some of Denver’s most dedicated and talented police, firefighters, EMTs, and doctors. After she had been released by the hospital, Denver General, and was on the road to recovery, I began an effort to thank the people involved in her rescue and recovery. My motivation was not as self-inspired as I wish. When we were waiting for our daughter to regain consciousness in Denver General’s brand new ICU, I noticed a picture of a young man on crutches stuck to a post in the middle of the sparkling, hyper-busy, multi-million dollar ICU. It was an unprofessional photo in a cheap 8x10 plastic frame with a small note from the parents of the young man, thanking the medical personnel for their dedication and for their son’s life. After reading that note and seeing how special it was to the people who worked in one of the country’s busiest and most sophisticated hospitals, I started bringing in pastries every morning while our daughter was in the ICU. For several years afterwards, I sent the Denver General ICU a picture of our daughter with an update on the life they had given her and a box of artery-clogging pastries from one of our favorite Denver shops.

That got me into a cycle of trying to identify everyone involved in my daughter’s rescue so that she and I could thank them. What I learned from that was that of the three million people living in the Denver area and however many thousands of people rescued by first responders, almost nobody felt particularly grateful when they or a loved one was rescued, kept alive, brought back to life, and/or returned to good health from near death or terrible injury. The chief of the fire department that cracked open my daughter’s demolished pickup, extracted her from the wreckage, and delivered her to the helicopter the moment it arrived at the scene (14 minutes after the crash) had been with the Denver fire department for 40 years. During his career, the only time a citizen had contacted him about any of the thousands of rescues he’d been involved in was a lawyer delivering a lawsuit summons.

The same goes for the citizens who take on the responsibility of running our cities, counties, states, and the federal government. At the lowest level, it’s a thankless job that sets up the office holders for disrespect and abuse without much return on the time and energy investment. At the highest level, as we saw in the 2016 election, the more service and committment a candidate has given to the community and the country the worse that candidate is treated by both the media and the voters. There is a price for creating a society where greed, ignorance, and narcissim are valued characteristics: that price is best described by “we get the government we deserve.”

A recent editorial in my local newspaper, “Thank Our Elected Officials,” was a timely and decent reminder that we can disagree with our elected officials while still respecting them and appreciating their service. There is no such thing as a successful non-participatory democracy and Americans better either step-up to the responsibilities of maintaining that form of government or we’ll have to relearn that, as disorderly and inefficient as democracy is, it is far better than the alternatives.

What’s with All the Hate?

I just got off of a two week cruise and, if you’ve never done that, a cruise ship is a floating retirement village for old white people of a particular income class. Our cruise departed from Ft. Lauderdale, so it was mostly white Americans (including Canadians). The last day of the cruise was the day after Trump’s “State of the Union” chin-dribble. Mostly, what I heard from people was “Trump’s an idiot, but I really don’t like Nancy Pelosi.” Mostly, I heard that from old white women. One thing old white women do not like is other old white women. They may not be consistent in any other thing they say or believe, but they hang pretty tightly on that subject. Old white women with power and/or accomplishments are just one more thing to stack on to the “reasons I don’t like her” pile.

I wish I could tell you why that is, but I can’t. Most of the women from whom I heard this refrain were of a type I would generally describe as “angry old white women.” Politically-incorrect or not, I know you know the type. These women are fixed with a permanent scowl that has created scowl lines that make anything resembling a smile look painfully out-of-place. The odds are good that they don’t “like” anyone much.

As much as all that is true, the job of Speaker of the House is not about being “liked.” Leadership, in general, is about making decisions; often hard decisions. The job is about as much fun, and as necessary, as being a dentist. Here are a few of Pelosi’s accomplishments as Speaker of the House:

• The Affordable Care Act with the public option (the option was eventually taken out for the Republican compromise of the Heritage Foundation mandate)
• Dodd-Frank
• Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay
• Economic Stimulus Act of 2008
• The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
• The Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights issued new regulations on card companies, demanding that they increase transparency
• The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act increased the amount of Pell Grants for college students.
• The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate the tobacco industry.
• The Food Safety Modernization Act giving the Food and Drug Administration more power over food producers (passed by Senate, not yet signed into law).
• Raised the minimum wage
• Hate Crimes Prevention Act
• Established the Office of Congressional Ethics (the one Republicans are trying to eliminate for obvious reasons)

It’s hard to find fault with that list of accomplishments, but because she is all of the things old white women (and too many white men of all ages) hate, accomplished and powerful, she gets hatred instead of appreciation. Honestly, I suspect a lot of the hatred is based on her appearance. She looks too much like what they see in the mirror and they do not like mirrors. While she looks like them, she is a lot smarter than them and that pisses them off too. I can see that.

A Disorganized Party or Country?

This weekend, I helped campaign for a local Democrat running for the US House against one of the most corrupt, decadent, incompetent, and dishonest Republicans in the House; and that is saying something in this current pack of do-nothing right Republicans. Standing among the crowd of campaigners waiting for a parade to start, I had a variety of conversations with traditional and less traditional Democrats and was constantly reminded of Will Roger’s quote, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." Like Rogers, in some ways I am proud of that position. Democrats don’t tend to fall in line as do their docile Republican counterparts. Democrats argue because they think, they have independent opinions, they sometimes realize the complexity of the problems the nation and their community face and the fact that some problems have many possible solutions. Those are good things.

The down side of Democratic disorder is that an awful lot of people who drift into the Democratic Party have simply wandered to that place driven by their dislike of the monotheistic Republican doctrine of worshiping the rich and powerful. Their grip on the actual issues is so base and simplistic that they might as well be Republicans. The complexity of real solutions just frustrates them and they degenerate into bickering factions easily defeated by the conservative Marching Morons.

For instance, there was a pair of conflicting groups at this rally: labor and environment. Two of the new Democratic members were from the steel workers union and they argued that the party needs to focus more on labor if it wants to win, especially in the rural north where people are backwards, uneducated, and completely dependent on outside investment for any sort of occupational or economic activity. So their big issues are the major polluting and high carbon construction projects like the Enbridge Energy Line 3 oil pipeline and the PolyMet copper mines near the Boundary Waters. It should be obvious that these are both corporate welfare projects with minimal long term employment opportunities for Minnesota and it should be even more obvious that they are both projects with the potential for massive negative environmental impact. It should be, but it isn’t to the labor faction and pressing that issue is likely to drive them back to the Republican hoards. Hearing that “we have plenty of environmental protections in place to protect the environment” from a union guy who clearly could care less about the environment, as long as he got a union wage for his part in destroying it, was pretty depressing. I know someone who was in the EPA during the short period it was allowed to actually protect the environment and I suspect the two union guys at the rally would do everything possible to avoid hearing how limited and powerless the EPA has become, even before Trump castrated it with an oil company promoter.

Rogers also said, "You've got to be optimist to be a Democrat, and you've got to be a humorist to stay one." For sure you have to have a well-developed sense of humor, at least. With Trump and a perfectly corrupt Congress full of bought-and-paid-for Republicans and not a few equally completely owned Democrats, you’d think this would be the traditional mid-term election where the party in power loses its grip. I wouldn’t count on it. Democrats and “progressives” have shown an ability and willingness to snatch defeat from the claws of victory in all situations. Part of that comes from the “purity test” mentality and part comes from true fact that all issues are infinitely complex and hard to grasp and a bigger part comes from the fact that America is no longer anything resembling a collection of United States. Humans, as a species, have never shown much will toward creating a better future for our offspring but modern Americans clearly would eat their own children if it came to that or missing a meal. I think we should get ready to accept the possibility that this mid-term election might signal the end of this collapsing empire.

Who Democrats Need to Be

"I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." Will Rogers

I’ve used that quote to define my own politics for most of 50 years. While it’s true that most of the history of the Democratic Party is full of disorder and general stupidity, it wasn’t all like that. The Democratic Party that gave the country FDR and Henry Wallace was a lot more unified and a lot less concerned with bullshit. In 1933, Roosevelt desperately needed his Iowan farmer-intellectual Secretary of Agriculture New Deal star to bring order and discipline to the country’s collapsed and desperate agricultural economy. In 1940, Roosevelt dumped John Garner after the conservative VP opposed the attempt to stack the Supreme Court and ran against Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination. Roosevelt picked Wallace for the job and the Roosevelt/Wallace ticked won 449 Electoral College votes and won the election by 4,000,000 votes. Wallace was a practical Progressive who ran as a real Democrat along with Roosevelt’s more traditional ruling elite Democrat. The party hasn’t seen that many actual Democrats since.

That, however, is the solution to the party’s current schizophrenic lack of personality. The problem with what’s left of the Democrats is “the left.” If you read the stupid crap the DNC lists on its “mission statement,” you’d think the party’s purpose is to get anyone willing wear a DNC badge elected to any office they can afford to run for: “The DLCC's mission is to build and maintain winning, state-of-the-art campaign committees through a continuing partnership with legislative leaders, professional staff, and supporters.”

What the hell is that bullshit? The purpose of a political party is NOT to get elected, but to accomplish something useful for the country. Doing stupid, selfish, greedy, useless crap is why people elect Republicans. Democrats need to quit trying to appeal to every CEO, bankster, moderately liberal Hollywood actor or rock star, or, most importantly, any aspect of the usual crazy-assed left wing of the party. Let the progressives, LBGT’s, anarchists, BLM’s, socialists, communists, and whatever else has been swept up by the disorganized party of mostly losing candidates. If any of those groups can find a home or make one for themselves, they’ll be lucky to attract the usual 1% of the alternative vote; just like the Libertarians, Socialist, Communist, Progressive, Green, Independence, and the other responsibility-avoidance distractions.

Democrats, on the other hand, need to appeal to one group and only one group, the 91-99% of the American voter pool; working class Americans. Fuck their special interests, but everything that should matter to the 127 million working adults in this country should matter to the Democratic Party. Subtracting the 1-9% of that group who represent the faux-working bunch of executives, that leaves 126 million voters whose votes should be the exclusive property of a functioning Democratic Party.

The problem the voters have is figuring out who the actual Democrats are. Nobody, right or left, wants to vote for a Republican wearing a DNC badge. Harry Truman said, "Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time." I suspect that is true for real Democrats, too.

Say "Wow!"

I don't often read a piece from the right or the left that does much more than depress me even more. In an odd way, Tom Engelhardt's piece today, "Tomgram: Engelhardt, America Last?" did the opposite. "So much of this has, of course, already been buried in the sands of history, but that’s no reason for it to be forgotten. Almost 17 years after 9/11, the parts of the planet that 'the greatest force, etc., etc.' was loosed upon remain in remarkable upheaval and disarray, while failed states and terror groups multiply, producing more displaced people and refugees than at any time since the end of World War II. Another great power, China, is rising, and an economically less than great Russia continues to hang in there militarily and strategically by force of Putinian chutzpah. Not surprisingly, American decline has become a topic of the moment."

The essay does an clear and insightful job of analyzing how far the country has fallen since 2001 and how many challengers have arose since we decided to stomp off on an "empire building" fit of hubris that put the wisdom and benevolence of the United States into such doubt that even our long-time allies began to make alliances that would eventually challenge American supremacy to the point that even the dumbest people in this country desperately went searching for someone who could convince them that America could ever be "great again."

Here is what we should have learned from our insane response to the 9/11 attacks, "Lesson one: It should have been too obvious to say, but wasn’t: Earth can’t be conquered by a single power, no matter how strong. Try to do so and you’ll end up taking yourself down in some fashion."

The United States is being "taken down" internally and externally and the lesson every failed empire has learned from doubling-down on military firepower is that a powerful military is never all it is cracked up to be. In fact, building a powerful military is always a precursor to a nation cracking up. "Lesson two: In the twenty-first century, military power, even that of the 'finest fighting force in the history of the world' (another presidential descriptor of these years), isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars you put into building up and maintaining that military yearly or how many trillions of dollars you sink into its wars and the mayhem they produce."

Engelhardt lists three other lessons the world should learn from watching the US disintegrate into a chaotic relic and he anticipates at least four more lessons we will learn on our way down the chute. It's worth reading if you are inclined to want to learn from history. Otherwise, you can be a typical American and keep your head buried in the sands of superstition and nationalism, you can chant the variations on "four legs are better than two" ("lock her up," "make America great again," "America first," "drain the swamp," etc.) until your unemployment and/or Social Security checks stop coming because the nation is bankrupt and dissolving. History is usually examined by the survivors, not the perpetrators. So, it's likely that everyone but the remnants of the citizens of the United States of America will be doing the analysis in the near future.

Voting Blocks

We keep hearing about the Boomer voting block being some sort of daunting demographic that will stifle the future of the next century. The facts are that Boomers are a substantial minority, according to the US Census Department. Here are the real numbers as of May 2016:

• 18 to 29 years         48,930,023    21.60%
• 30 to 44 years         53,919,202    23.80%
• 45 to 64 years         78,123,072    34.40%
• 65 years and over   46,047,189    20.30%

20.3% of the potential voters in the 2016 elections were Boomers. 77% were white, which is a more important demographic, but one that is thankfully shrinking. 31% had a batchelor’s degree or higher. 25% had a household income of $100k or higher. Nationally, a little more than half (55%) of potential voters turned out for a 20-year low voter participation rate in 2016, about 18M fewer than in 2008.

What all this tells us, or should tell us, is that it wouldn’t take much effort for the 18 to 44 (Millenials and X-Gens) to overwhelm any voting capacity from the old white Boomer crowd. So, now those two generations need to get off of their mom’s basement couches and do some work.

Making 'Merica Great "Again"

Aside from the Trumpetes’ foolish jabber about turning back the clock on technology, trade, energy and natural resources, employment and management skills, and reality, I think an examination of what it would take to return our economy from a deficit to a surplus system is an interesting idea. Of course, Republicans deserve massive credit for driving the economy deep into deficit spending: Reagan and Bush II were both huge deficit spending believers. In spite of their big talk about the terror of deficit spending, Republicans absolutely rebelled when Obama told them he expected future spending bills to be on a “pay as you go basis.” The Party of Stupid is also the party of “borrow and spend” and nothing is going to change that in any foreseeable future.

 

However, if we did suddenly become responsible and decide to put on our big boy pants and do the dirty work of turning around the economy, what would we do? This is my list, in order of importance:

1. Money and politics has to go. Not only does Citizens United need to be overturned, but we need a Constitutional Amendment banning private money (corporate and individual) from our political campaigns. That law needs teeth, as in “you get caught, you hang.” We won’t seriously look at any real solutions until our government is not bought and sold on a daily basis.
2. The tax system has to be fixed. We’ve been at “war” since 2003 and the only way to pay for wars is to progressively tax income until the war debt is gone. I can see how eliminating the corporate tax could be incentive for business in the US, but that has to be coupled with doubling-down on unearned income taxation, inheritance taxes, and upper-income tax rates. Continuing to encourage rock stars and athletes, banksters and money laundering, and Trump-like con artists with tax incentives to do unproductive money-shuffling has cost the country at least two generations of scientists, engineers, and people who could be doing actual work. Incentives are everything and our current tax system provides incentives for exactly the wrong things; including activities that endanger national security.
3. The world is on the metric system and the longer we put off moving to modern weights and measurements the less competitive American companies and workers become. Face it, nobody but us cares about the length of the King’s fuckin’ foot. If you think that is an exaggeration, the only non-metric countries in the world are: Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Talk about being late to the party! Thomas Jefferson was the first President to recommend the metric system and we still can’t figure it out. Not being comfortable with the world’s weights and measurements puts a serious crimp in the abilities of American workers, technicians, and engineers. It makes many of our manufactured products useless to the rest of the world. Constantly doing mental or paper/computer conversions slows us down, creates errors, and makes Americans look backward and foolish to the rest of the world.
4. The current slow death of religion has to speed up. Currently, about 18% of people 60 and younger attend church and fewer than 50% believe in God. That's an improvement over the past 50 years of superstition, but not enough and not nearly quick enough. Every thing from science, energy production, employability, democracy, to national security is being damaged by our national proclivity toward superstition and fantasy. To keep up, we’ll have to grow up.
5. The war machine and military-industrial complex have to go. Not only do we have to quit pretending we're the world's policeman, we have to admit we suck at the job. We can't tell national security from corporate interests and until we can we need to put our weapons back on the shelf. The US loves war, but we can't afford it. As a peace-keeper, we’re not that talented.
6. Our public education system needs to be overhauled. First, private education needs to die. When the wealthy can abandon public education and do everything in their power to contaminate the discussion about how to educate the whole country to benefit their class, the whole country gets screwed. Finland provides us with a terrific example and, since our own experiment has been a disaster, we need to look to someone who has built a wheel that actually turns and supports weight. As Jeff Beck said, “Amateurs borrow, professionals steal.” We need to rip the pages out of Finland’s education reform book and paste them into our own system.
7. We have to go back into space. The brief moment when 'Merica was great by almost everyone's standards was when we were in the Space Race and were focused on a big accomplishment. The scientific and industrial spin-offs from NASA were incredible. We owe much of what we know today about climate change to NASA's research. As crippled as our industrial and scientific power is today, without the space race we'd be 3rd world. This is a no-brainer.
8. Every “for profit” industry in the country needs to be re-evaluated to see if it is working better than when those activities were performed by non-profits and government. Personally, I think deregulation and privatization has been a disaster, but I have not made a scientific study of every area where it has been applied. I have been upfront and close to education, health care, energy, and infrastructure and I am unimpressed with the performance of the private sector.
9. Our legal system needs to get over its power tripping and empire building and develop a sense of proportion. Police need to go after big crime and quit screwing around with the easy and safe stuff. Victimless crimes do not belong at the top of the priority list. The War on Drugs was a fraud and it’s long past time to admit it. The big money and long-term damage to society is in white collar crime and that’s where the main enforcement and prosecution focus needs to be: cybercrime, financial fraud, corporate environmental and consumer abuse, and the government contracting corruption and bribery that risks national security. Our prison system needs to be refocused on rehabilitation rather than punishment and revenge. We can not be the country that leads in citizens incarcerated and hope to be anything resembling “great.” National, state, and local police departments are over-staffed with unskilled goons who are great at beating up protestors, jailing small-time criminals, and protecting corporate criminals, but they are helpless when it comes to tracking down the lowest-level hacker who has ripped off a few thousand retirees bank accounts. Our law enforcement system needs to be updated and technological to get the right job done. Use the Pareto principle to identify the most effective places to spend time and money and quit knee-jerk reacting to squeaky wheels.

That’s my list. What have you got?

#164 Who Won?

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

The election is over. Republicans lost the U.S. House and won a microscopic (1 vote) advantage in the Senate. The American public spoke and their voice was heard. Yeah, right. A single "accidental death," like Paul Wellstone's, could allow a nutty Republicrat governor to appoint an equally crazy Republicrat replacement, putting Cheany in the deciding vote position in the Senate. All that energy into one of the most stunning electoral repudiations of government in US history and it can all be overturned by one of the old farts in the Senate acting naturally and dying.

It's true that the public spoke with their feet and votes. It's true that the nation's anti-war sentiment is pretty damn strong and that a few Demolicans managed to identify that movement and march at a safe distance behind the voting public. In the end, even before the polls closed Pelosi and crew were backing off of their promises and rearranging their priorities. Power corrupts and political parties are all about power. It's going to take a lot more than an election to fix the mess the Republicrats have made in the world. In fact, I suspect it's beyond fixing.

A few years back, Michael Moore produced a film called "Bowling for Columbine." The film obviously had an agenda and Michael pursued it relentlessly until he discovered, near the end, that his original premise was disproved by Canada and Switzerland; two countries with possibly more heavily armed civilian populations than the U.S. He ended the film, honestly and sadly, without a conclusion.

He gave me a lot to think about, though. My conclusion, as usual, is that every institution (government is the ultimate institution, size-wise) is led and inspired top-down. Since the early years of the 1800's, the United States government has been a violently corrupt institution; invading neighbors to steal territory, devastating Native American populations out of greed and general viciousness, and beginning the tradition of destabilizing other countries' governments so our robber barons can take advantage of their natural resources without interference. The 1800s turned our for-and-by-the-people government into a corporate tool for the hostile takeover of anything not bolted down and well-defended. We'll whip out the guns and cannons and bombers for practically any justification imaginable. Is it any wonder that neighbors resort to trading bullets over property disputes, marital arguments, or parking space? It's a national tradition.

As individuals, we might be tired of sending our children to foreign wars of corporate interest. As a nation, we're perfectly happy to toss kids into flames if someone convinces us that it will make a Bush, Rockefeller, or Halliburton a little richer. In fact, there are whole regions of the United States that specialize in producing cannon fodder; Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Mississippi, and most of rural America, for example. It takes, literally, minimal motivation for parents of these states to decide to send their boys and girls into the breach. They have been conditioned, since the Civil War, to toss their kids into the hands of politicians and corporations anytime the words "patriotism," "national security," or "threat to the economy" are mentioned. I am going to be hard-pressed to imagine that anything in this last election will alter that national mindset.

War is such a vicious, terrible, evil option that it's hard to imagine why a nation would select a foolish, slimy, amoral scumbag like Bush or Chaney to a position where they might be able to sacrifice nature or youth to their whims. It's a critical human fault that puts serious doubt on any "intelligent design" fantasy.

I don't see this election as a solution to any of the country's worst problems. A single Demolican defection on any vote will maintain the status quo. A single assassination would return the country to 2000's Republicrat corruption. Do you really think that Chaney and the Oil Barons wouldn't kill anyone to keep the oil money flowing unimpeded? We're a long way from out of the frying pan and the fire is still burning under the pan.

November 2006

#132 So Now that You Can't Vote, What Can You Do? (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I predict that the violence this country suffered during the 1960's will return.  In fact, I predict that political assassinations and kidnapping will begin to occur at a state level in Florida and Ohio.  Since Florida and Ohio suspended voter rights to further the neocon Republican agenda, it only seems logical that the violence would begin there.  I could be wrong, maybe people won't care which state politicians they attack, but I think it's inevitable that politicians and the government will come under attack. 

For all practical purposes, Republican power mongers have eliminated the right to vote in the United States.  In most states, Republican radicals have physically taken over the voting machinery and, now, the act of voting is an unnecessary and pointless exercise.  The outcome is predetermined and there is, politically, nothing individual citizens can do about it; nothing democratic. 
Voting is a non-violent, relatively painless way to affect political change.  When fair and honest elections are unavailable, the only method left to affect change is civil disobedience violence.  L.B.J. and Tricky Dick created a similar non-responsive political system in the late 1960s and their political ineptitude spawned the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and the Symbionese Revolutionary Army along with a generation of political activists who often considered violence along with traditional political action. 

The problem with non-democratic political systems is that they have to be totalitarian and viciously self-protective.  The mythical benevolent dictator is an impossible fantasy.  As Phillip Dick wrote, "Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."  I suppose that explains suicide bombers.  When citizens have no way to change their political system other than through violence, violence becomes a valid and effective political option.  If you can't vote with a ballot, you can always voice your opinion with a bullet, a bomb, or by kidnapping the nearest politician's family members. 

Of course, whoever the powers that be, who are The Powers That Be, will call that response "terrorism."  Terrorism is defined as " the use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create a climate of fear in a given population."  When the "given population" is a group that wields a grossly disproportional amount of power and controls an overwhelming portion of the nation's assets and has worked hard to create a "climate of fear" in the general population, the definition still stands but it doesn't elicit anywhere near as much sympathy for the "terrorized" population. 

The response of many Americans to the Oklahoma City bombing was surprisingly neutral, until the media focused on the injured and murdered children of the federal employees who were attending the government-provided childcare in the federal building.  I was regularly surprised at middle-Americans who felt sympathy for "the kids" and apathy toward the adults who died in that act of terrorism.  These were not just right or left wing extremists, but unbelievably ordinary, middle-class working folks from all areas of life.  Americans, apparently, are incredibly disassociated from their government and the people who work for that government.  So isolated, in fact, that we have a hard time deciding who to root for, the bomber or the bombed, when a U.S. government is blown to bits. 
The current political system is creating an atmosphere ripe for revolution.  In forcing the middle class to carry the weight for the rich, our government is destroying the economic system that created the nation's wealth.  David Cay Johnston, the author of Perfectly Legal, The Covert Campaign to Rig Our tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everyone Else and a New York Times reporter, describes how we suffer under "the only government in the world that is pursuing a low wage strategy."  Our tax system is designed to export middle class jobs, to transfer wealth from the middle class to the rich, and to provide economic security only for the rich; especially the inherited rich. 

If there is a perfectly worthless, deadbeat class in America today, it's the inherited rich who believe they have a right to their sloth and destructive traditions.  You'd think that Americans would be repulsed by the existence of a class of citizens who are "royal" and powerful simply because of their parentage.  We aren't yet, but that doesn't mean we won't get there damn soon.

Without the bright lights and sparkly distraction of television and video games, I suspect that we'd be in the middle of a revolution today.  As it is, most Americans haven't noticed that their children are sliding into an international third-class status as uneducated, unskilled, minimum-wage laborers.  With the deadly combination of religious hallucinations and credit cards, they can distract themselves from the painful facts that should be faced, sooner or later.  But that doesn't mean those distractions will put food on the table or a table under a roof or a roof over a family. 

Society's usual canaries in the mine are already beginning to show the strain, though.  Revolutions are not carried out by the masses.  Only 1% of the population participated in the American Revolution.  Fewer than 1% of the 1960s kids fought against the Vietnam War and Nixon's corrupt administration.  The overwhelming majority of every population is cowardly and conservative, but change doesn't depend on the majority's participation.  Change is driven by a innovative, energized, creative few.  The rest of the human sheep simply follow the flow or hide and watch.  When one mechanism for change is removed (voting rights, for example), another will take its place.  If the United States' government no longer interested in guiding and protecting democracy and freedom, another entity will take its place.  This country's power comes from the middle class and the energy of the middle class won't be contained as easily as the Bushies hope.  Bush should be careful about dismantling the systems of democracy. The tools for change won't vanish, but they will change.  Sometimes, when the tide changes, more than just sandy beaches are washed away.

March 2005

#116 Who Are We to Export Democracy? (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The Bushies are still jabbering about "nation building" and "holy wars."  Bush preaches that "we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy from our friends in the region (Iraq)," while doing everything to repress democracy and reform in the US.  More of that "do what I say, not what I do" parenting. Business that can't build quality products find that they can't design them, either.  Governments that aren't democratic will be as disabled when it comes to building democracies. 

Bush was the first unpopularly un-elected President since 1888.  Even worse, Bush is the first appointed President in the history of the nation.  Not only did he lose the popular vote, he lost the fair count of the state and, therefore, the electoral vote.  He used his daddy's Supreme Court to overrule state and federal Constitution law.  The Republican brown shirts revel in this triumph of power over public choice, but the rest of the world wonders "what is next?" for the most powerful country in the world. 

The makings of a democratic undoing have been with us since the beginning.  This isn't the first time the country's future as a semi-representational democracy has been in doubt.  This may be the worst time for it to happen, though.  The Electoral College is a decrepit concept that was intended to compensate for pre-electronic communications difficulties and the founding ruling class's distrust of the "unruly masses."  Alex Hamilton was one of the big supporters of the Electoral college and he's possibly the least democratic of all of the folks who had anything to do with the authorship of the Constitution.  Aaron Burr did the nation a great favor by shooting Hamilton.  Burr should have kept going and shot the Electoral College. 

Since 1789, barely 20,000 people have elected all of the Presidents in our nation's history.  In 2000, a half-million more citizens voted for Gore than Bush, but 271 electors voted for Bush and that's all she wrote for democracy.  The rest of us were just exercising our right to put marks on pieces of paper and to waste a few hours on a November Tuesday.  This country is as far from a one-man-one-vote nation as was the old Soviet Union.  In fact, in the least populous states (like Montana), one man exercises approximately 670,000 votes. 

Let's look at this institution that elects our President and Vice President.  When we're through, if you still believe your vote counts, I'd like to hear your opinions on the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, informative news outlets, and honest politicians.

First, the electors are selected by the two major parties long before the election takes place.  This is to ensure that no third party ever has a chance in hell of winning an election.  48 states have a winner-take-all elector selection system, regardless of how split the state's vote actually was the winner takes all of the electoral votes for the state.  This further entrenches the two-party system and, effectively, tosses out the minority voters before their vote leaves the state.  One-man-one-vote?  Hardly.  Only Maine and Nebraska have a proportional system that divides up the state's electoral votes in relation to the actual citizens' vote.  The majority of states don't even care who you vote for, as long as you vote Demolican.  If you vote for a member of one of the major parties, it's assumed that you voted for the candidate that party has selected.  Names don't matter.

In half of the states, the electors are legally committed to vote for the party's candidate, in the rest of the states the electors can vote for anyone they see fit.  Electors rarely exercise judgment or ethics, but they do have the right to do so if an actual human ever managed to be in that position.  Our system has been so perfect at eliminating humans from the Electoral College that only 12 people in the history of the institution have bucked the Powers That Be.  It's a nearly perfect, immoral, mindlessly undemocratic system. 

The actual voting for President and Vice President takes place on January 6, most years.  The votes are counted by the US Senate in a special, damn-near secret meeting in the chamber of the House of Representatives.  If no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the 12th Amendment allows the House to pick the president.  Of course, they can pick anyone they see fit, regardless of how you and I voted.  I wouldn't put it past the birdbrains we've had in the House in the last few years to select their favorite Hollywood actor or the King of England, if there weren't minimal limitations on their options.  However, they can only pick from the top three candidates in the general election.

In the 2004 election, 538 electors will decide the Presidency (based on the states' 100 Senators + 435 Representatives + 3 electors from the District of Columbia).  A candidate just needs 270 votes to win.  Some fools think that the college was founded to protect small states.  The fact is only 11 states are necessary to elected a President.  For example, if California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina vote together, the rest of the country can go to hell.  If that's a representative democracy, I am a Republican. 

It's true that the citizens of smaller states wield greater influence on their state's electoral votes, but the states themselves are less important.  States are not the big issue in a democracy, though.  States are just border lines between sales tax rates.  The real issue in a democracy is citizens' ability to govern themselves.  The Electoral College is another example of how corporations have installed themselves in the real power seat of the country.  They select the candidates, they control the electors, and they decide who will be mismanaging the country for the foreseeable future.  The rest of us are just expendable employees. 

The "battleground states" are the states with big Electoral College membership.  The first seven, California through Ohio, are the most populous states and they possess 256 of the necessary 270 votes necessary to win the election.  This system makes it possible for corrupt politicians to cater their platform to these states, damning the rest of the country to political purgatory.  If you still have any questions about why California receives so much federal personal and corporate welfare, the Electoral College is as far as you need to look.  Want to do your own math, as the Demolicans have already done?  To see how few states are involved in electing a President, here are the numbers for your experimentation pleasure:

The 2004 Electoral Vote

California - 55
Texas - 34
New York - 31
Florida - 27
Illinois - 21
Pennsylvania - 21
Ohio - 20
Michigan - 17
Georgia - 15
New Jersey - 15
North Carolina - 15
Virginia - 13
Massachusetts - 12
Indiana - 11
Missouri - 11
Tennessee - 11
Washington - 11
Arizona - 10
Maryland - 10
Minnesota - 10
Wisconsin - 10
Alabama - 9
Colorado - 9
Louisiana - 9
Kentucky - 8
South Carolina - 8
Connecticut - 7
Iowa - 7
Oklahoma - 7
Oregon - 7
Arkansas - 6
Kansas - 6
Mississippi - 6
Nebraska - 5
Nevada - 5
New Mexico - 5
Utah - 5
West Virginia - 5
Hawaii - 4
Idaho - 4
Maine - 4
New Hampshire - 4
Rhode Island - 4
Alaska - 3
Delaware - 3
D.C. - 3
Montana - 3
North Dakota - 3
South Dakota - 3
Vermont - 3
Wyoming - 3

#106 The Rat is Disgusted (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The more I know about what's likely to happen in this coming election, the more disgusted I become. 

Americans have the lowest science and math test scores in the industrialized world and we're demonstrating our incapacity in our political system. 

For example, the folks in charge of the current pitiful excuse for the US government failed to protect the American public in the most incompetent mismanagement of national security in the history of the nation.  Bush and CRAP were so busy packing their pockets and "reforming" the tax code to benefit the scumbags they represent that they were totally surprised by the fact that there are people out there who would love to do major damage to this country.  There were intelligence warnings flying in all directions and the Bushies ignored their job because they were all geared up to rape and pillage the economy, the public education system, and wipe out the middle class. 

The military was equally busy double-dipping, saluting itself, and wasting time and resources and, when it was finally called upon to protect American citizens.  Our military, especially the Air Farce, was so incredibly impotent that the task fell to the passengers of a hijacked airplane to commit suicide to protect Washington DC.  That same military drones failed to put an end to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to find Osama bin Laden, or to make a reasonable effort to secure the nation's boarders from terrorists.  If these folks had been in charge of a corporation's internal security, they would have been fired, blacklisted, and publicly humiliated in the national media.  Being government deadbeats in a nation of sheep, they have distracted the public eye by pretending an invasion of a tiny, starving third world dictatorship has something to do with national security.  That tactic would only work in a country where the public eye is connected to a very tiny public brain. 

After failing miserably at the job they were assigned, Bush and CRAP have dismantled the Constitution and Bill of Rights as quickly as possible.  The very freedoms they pledged to protect are the first freedoms they chose to eliminate.  In the interests of "national security," the folks who couldn't protect a goat from a poodle are turning the United States into a replica of the old Soviet Union.  

With this background, the average American Joe and Joan are telling pollsters that they are going to vote for Bush and CRAP because they think Bush will better protect the country from terrorists.  This is the same logic that says "fight fire with fire."  If you think setting your bedroom on fire to slow down a kitchen fire is a smart tactic, then you are the kind of voter the Republicans are hoping to see at the polls; really dumb voters. 

They are offering us a nancy-boy, cheerleading frat brat who hid behind his daddy's skirts to evade the draft, was overcome by fear at having to fly office flowers in the rich kids' branch of the National Guard.  A twerp so cowardly that he went AWOL to keep from having to flunk a physical because he couldn't disguise the layer of coke dust powdering his nose.  The little feller is totally incapable of providing a strong national security.  Impossibly unlikely.  But dumbass Americans who can't do basic math or comprehend simple logic are unlikely to figure this one out before the rest of the world is unable to tell us from the other bad guys. 

Yeah, I'm disgusted.  This is a pitiful time to be an American.  We're too dumb to breathe and there is no sign that we're likely to get smarter in the next few generations.  I suppose that means we're about to suffocate.

#72 Turning a Page (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

In the summer of 2001, my excuse for randomly producing Rat Rants went cold.  At the end of August, I quit my Fortune 1000 job and wandered into the world of unemployment and, hopefully, self-employment.  A year later, self-employment is a reality, although an intermittently paying reality, and my exposure to management is minimal.  Hence, my inspiration for Rants has been stunted.

At the moment, I'm actually relishing being out of the Rat race.  Of course, at 54, it's possible I may be further out of the race and so far off of the road that I've become irrelevant.  In some ways, it was the fear of obsolescence that drove me to the decision to leave my cube life.  In my 54 long and disillusioned years on this planet, I've found that confronting fear is not enough.  I usually have to dive into the pit with whatever I'm afraid of and see how sharp its teeth really are.  And so I am in the pit with uncertain income and it's a lot less scary than I'd imagined.  But it pays about as well as I'd expected.

Last night, I had a dream that actually stuck with me through my morning coffee.  I'm likely to misinterpret it in this Rant, but it's my dream and my column, so you'll have to suffer with your Jungian or Freudian disagreement.  I dreamed that I was in the military, but still working for a manager from my last job who I actually liked and respected (imagine that!). 

The two of us were all trudging up a staircase, not knowing where we were going or what we'd be doing at the top, when he reminded me that "it is inappropriate for an enlisted man, to be walking ahead of an officer."

I asked him, "If we were walking on to a battlefield, would you still want to be in front?"  He replied, "That is an inappropriate question."  This guy actually uses that kind of language in normal conversation, which is why I remembered the dream so clearly.

Believe it or not, that must have been my version of a nightmare because I woke up at that point.  I, clearly, lead a sheltered life.  After realizing that I wasn't going to fall back to sleep, I was stuck trying to figure out what the damn dream meant, or what it meant to me.  My personal irritation with the dream's concept was that his officer's "credential," not his skill, courage, or knowledge, was what gave him a position at the head of the staircase.  And, of course, I was pissed because I knew he'd be climbing the stairs too slowly.  I don't usually follow people up stairs, because I take them two at a time.  I get bored easily.

After exercising his leadership, away he went, in front of me and just as cluelessly as I'd been when I was in front.  In the dream, there were only two of us in this military column, which simplifies the symbolism.  Even my subconscious knows that I need simple and direct instruction.

Much of my Rat Ranting MBA-directed ire is based on the kind of academic aristocracy that I'd experienced from my last two employers.  Many of our large and stodgy employers have taken the position that college degrees are evidence of competence, not inheritance and lack of necessity or stunted adolescent inspiration.  Now that the bloom has fallen off of the last ten years of economic "irrational exuberance," I wonder if this mistaken belief will be revisited.  If we want to jump-start the economy, again, the way it was cranked up in the early 1990s, talent will have to be more important than pedigree. 

A visit to any major state or private university will make it obvious, even to HR drudges, that the majority of the kids in school past age eighteen are rich, idle, privileged and clueless.  With an average cost of $50,000 per year, it's pretty obvious that average folks aren't sending their kids to college, unless there's a scholarship involved. 

At the University of Minnesota, school officials are campaigning local apartment complexes to encourage them to cater to college students.  Because there are more kids in school than the college can provide for?  Nope.  Because the kids whose parents can afford university life have grown up with their own bedrooms (and telephones, entertainment systems, Jacuzzis, and Porches) and they're not willing to share a dorm room at this self-important point in their lives.  So, working-class folks are being forced out of their hard-to-find apartments to accommodate housing for multinational children of the ruling class. 

It's happening all over the country.  An invasion of snobby apartment snatchers.

I've said this before and will most likely repeat myself at a later date, anyone can do well in college if college is the only thing that person has to do.  Between the dumbing-down of the education system and the high-tech availability of everything from test questions to Masters thesis, it's not that hard to survive four through eight years in our university system.  If you have money and time. 

All of this tells us that the real justification for using a college education as selection criteria is to keep the good jobs in the hands of the rich and privileged.  In really good times, we can probably survive that kind of foolishness.  In bad times, ability and aptitude ought to become more important than breeding.  Bad times might be on the way and it remains to be seen that business is agile enough to rearrange its poor habits and irrational priorities.

Universities, on the other hand, react as slowly as glacier ice.  Their budgets get bigger while their service to the culture shrivels into approaching zero.  In a frenzy of public spending, they collect sports coliseums, performance amphitheaters, art galleries, and other monuments to uselessness.  Their administrators throw tantrums when state governments consider withholding funds for these arrogant extravagances. 

The only way to reign in these folks is to ignore their existence.  Since most Americans can't even afford to send their kids to a college sports event, let alone to college, at least half of that job is already accomplished.  Outside of television athletics, the majority of us only think about universities when we're bitching about management and the people who spawned that ilk.  Hopefully, "out of mind" will soon turn into "out of funding."  Not long after that, universities will pare down to necessary survival functions and, possibly, return to providing education and useful research. 

Right.  I'm living in a dream world where everyone breakfasts on lobster and Johnny Walker Blue.  Dream on drunken Rat.

Contrary to popular fantasy, Americans love royalty.  We appear to crave a return to King George's reign.  I once read that less than 1% of the population participated in the Revolutionary War.  I suspect that it's probably safe to say that the other 99% were perfectly happy with serving an aristocracy.  Some things never change.  Our soap opera crowd practically slashed their arms and tore hunks of hair in mourning after the death of spoiled Princess Diana.  A good portion of the voting public flushed their vote toward George II because there was a George I and good money and breeding ought to follow bad.  Or some weird logic that escapes me.  We still turn out good crowds to bow before popes, kings, and rock stars.  And so on.

Nuts.  After 200 years, the American Revolution may have come to an end.  We're a royalty-loving, aristocracy-sustaining, ruling class mismanaged socialism for the rich and while that might be a luxury we can afford when we're rolling in success, it's not something we can afford now that the rats have invaded the corn crib. 

April, 2003

Every Four Years, Nothing Changes

Canada Tightens Border

OTTAWA (The Borowitz Report)—Canada announced today that it was tightening security along its border with the United States amid concerns that there could be a mass migration of illegal Americans after Tuesday, November 6th.

According to Randolph McTavish, Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, border patrols are on alert due to an “increase in chatter” indicating that a threat to Canada’s border might be imminent.

“We’ve been intercepting troubling comments from some very freaked-out people,” he said. “Most of it has been on NPR call-in shows.”

Stating that the R.C.M.P. is patrolling every kilometre of the Canadian border, he issued this warning to Americans who might try to cross into Canada illegally: “If you drive a Prius, you will be stopped.”

He also warned Americans against trying to slip across the border in the hopes of passing as Canadians: “It is very difficult, if not impossible, to pretend to like hockey.”

Mr. McTavish said that he was sympathetic with those who might flee across the border in search of a new life and socialized medicine, but added, “At the end of the day, forty-seven per cent of Americans is more than Canada can handle.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/10/canada-tightens-border.html#ixzz28p5TOsD1

Two Reasons Why We Should All Vote 
for Willard Mitt Romney

(Denny Crane’s argument from “Boston Legal,” 2008)

“If McCain [Romney] wins, he’ll help save the salmon.

“Wild Salmon stocks in Canada are threatened… climate change, sea lice… and once they go, there goes half the ecosystem.  I don’t need to tell you!

 “He won’t save ‘em directly!  The polls show that if McCain [Romney] wins, it’s like a third term of Bush – and a lot of Americans will immigrate to Canada.  The smart ones.  The intelligence level of Canada will go up, and they’ll figure out how to save the Salmon.”

And the second reason?

“Women are easier during a Republican administration.  It’s a fact that during Democratic regimes, volunteerism goes up.  Then, you get a lot of women running around for this cause or that… and they start to think they have something to say.  Republicans tend to reinforce the idea that a woman’s place is in her home, on her back.  Now, I haven’t even taken into account all the depressed women, if McCain wins.  Sad girls are easy girls.  I don’t need to tell you, they’re vulnerable!”