Never Forget

One of the key components to pseudo-conservative/alt-right “thinking” is forgetfulness. If you remember history, you would never admit to being conservative because that would mean you are always wrong. Always, in the history of civilization and humanity. For example, pseudo-conservatives delude themselves into believing that Reagan was some sort of economic savior. For southern California, maybe, on a short term, but for the rest of the nation and the world that is total bullshit. Long-term, Reagan did damage to California that won’t be repaired without another Great Depression and a massive population drop.

For example, do you know when the United States became a permanent debtor nation? 1985, the beginning of Reagan’s second term. As tough as reality is for pseudo-conservatives, it's a fact. On September 17, 1985, the New York Times published an article titled “U.S. Turns into Debtor Nation” (“The United States has become a debtor nation for the first time since World War I, owing foreigners more than they owe it, a Commerce Department report indicated today.”) which should have tossed traditional conservatives into a fit of panic and generated a wave of cost-cutting, but Reagan and his band of nitwits convinced the New Right that “deficits don’t matter,” at least when fake conservatives are creating them. So, like every pseudo-conservative administration since Reagan, Republicans have stood for borrow-and-spend, instead of actual conservative principles.

Pseudo-conservatives have just elected the least conservative President in modern history. Trump’s “business” history is a sad tale of leverage gone wrong, with six bankruptcies and a long list of Trump-scam vendors and customers robbed and left broke in his wake. When his administration has spent its wad, the US will be further in debt and the economy will be crushed into a shadow of what it could have been. Like the post-Reagan and Bush I and II years, actual national security will be non-existent, the economy will be in shambles after a series of deregulation scandals and regulatory mismanagement, and U.S. citizens will be an international laughing stock. Our national resilience will be further stressed and our capacity for a comeback weakened by a degraded national education system and the resulting loss of technological capability and increased international competition for the bits of talent our education system produces.

Like every other pseudo-conservative President in the country’s history, national mismanagement will produce one or more extreme terrorist events; probably tossing us into another endless and mindless “war on terror” or some such bullshit label. Those of us who actually read will look back on the Obama years as the last gasp of Washington’s great experiment ("And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."). The American people have degenerated far below any hope Washington might have held for democracy and the republic concept. We are a Nation of Stupid and, worldwide, we’re turning into a species of stupid.

Every good technician, engineer, and scientist knows “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” The inverse is also true. A relatively recently described human trait, the Dunning-Krueger Effect, explains "a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately." Or, the less you know, the more you think you do know. Trump voters are that crowd. Their science, psychology, technology, economics, and mathematics are so shallow that they barely qualify as humans, but they have convinced themselves that they are of above-average intelligence. The less they know, the smarter they think they are. This isn’t going to end well.

Let the Whining Commence

Half-wit Trump voter, Teena Colebrook, is already whining about the result of her thoughtless vote, and the middle-class misery hasn’t even started yet. When Trump announced that he was nominating general all-around Wall Street scumbag, Steven Mnuchin, for Secretary of Treasury, she wimpered, "I just wish that I had not voted. I have no faith in our government anymore at all. They all promise you the world at the end of a stick and take it away once they get in." The majority of the country is with you, Colebrook. Everyone with an IQ over 50 wishes idiots like you weren’t allowed to vote.

Colebrook’s whining comes from the fact that Mnuchin was the CEO of the bank, OneWest, that foreclosed on her property in 2009, forcing her out of her home and investment property to the tune of a $517,000 debt on a $248,000 loan. She is one of the many Trump voters who knowingly voted for the guy who told the idiots enrolled in his bogus Trump University, “People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I'm excited if it is . . . I've always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.” So, who did Colebrook think she was voting for,  Santa Claus? Based on the fact that this math-disabled character “purchased” the property with an “interest only loan,” I suspect she believes in a collection of mythical characters, so Trump’s inane “I will give you everything” promises (at least 276 of the craziest things anyone has ever said to the voting public) probably sounded credible.

A friend was in Red State territory, Kentucky, during the election and she was struck by how many times she heard, “I’ve never vote for a Republican before, but I’m voting for Trump.” Her argument was that Trump said the things these once-working class voters wanted to hear. She was convinced that Bernie Sanders was the only Democrat who had a similar message, but that’s not true. Sanders promised things that his opponents, including Clinton, called “free stuff,” but he had plans for financing everything he promised. Sanders was consistently truthful, while Trump was consistently disinterested in reality or facts. Sanders promised that he'd work with and for his voters and the middle class, but warned that the forces against accomplishing anything significant were powerful, vested, and well-heeled. "It will be a fight," he promised.

Trump’s chumps were equally disinterested in reality or facts. Completely nutty promises like making the Michigan auto industry “bigger and better and stronger than ever before” or getting "Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries” or bringing the coal industry back to the Appalachian Mountains (and the old coal-mining jobs) without a lick of knowledge about manufacturing, rational tax incentives, technical education, or any other bit of expertise that might be useful in recreating the manufacturing society that Nixon, Reagan, and the Bush’s trashed.

Telling Americans the truth is not a politically successful tactic. President Jimmy Carter tried that in 1980 and Americans fled the dismal, hard truth for the Reagan fairy tails and many still feed themselves the “we can borrow and leverage our way back to prosperity” drivel Nixon started and Reagan perfected into a “deficits don’t matter” mantra that every Republican politician and faux-business-critter has abused since. Republicans and alt-rightwingers have committed themselves to “borrow and spend,” pretending that is somehow better than the “tax and spend” charge they levy on Democrats and progressives. Carter tried to be a role model for Americans scaling back to their means and they rebelled, choosing the phony pomp and pretense Reagan offered, general criminal and treasonous behavior, and the massive national debt he generated.Before Reagan, the US was a creditor nation. Since, we've been deeper and deeper in debt.

And we’ve done it again.

Our Timid New World

Today, I woke up to my youngest daughter calling to gloat about Trump’s victory. Since we hadn’t had the guts to check the news yet, I didn’t know that Donny had defeated Clinton but I suspected he has since her husband is a pseudo-conservative and she’s tagged along out of some sort of loyalty. We had bigger issues on a personal level to talk about, so we just avoided the subject and I’m sure she was disappointed.

Later today, I experienced a second opinion on our election process and the outcome. Amana/Maytag sent a guy to try and repair our twice-failed Amana dishwasher. The service call was supposed to be under warranty, but the guy and the customer service people decided it wasn’t. I got stuck with a $60 bill for nothing and, then, a demented lesson in politics and history from a guy at least my age driving a beat up van working for a small town appliance repair company.

“We just got rescued.”

“What?”

“We finally have a president with business experience.”

“If bankrupting six companies, stiffing your vendors, and losing stockholders millions is ‘business experience,’ that’s what we got." This is the same 'business man' label every mobster calls himself. The Sopranos are 'business men' by that definition.

“In 1980, I was running a mechanical contractor business. When Reagan got elected, it was like the whole country breathed a sigh of relief.”

“Not where I lived. In 1981, the market tanked, interest rates kept climbing, and you couldn’t get an engineering job anywhere in the Midwest unless it was with a military contractor. And what the fuck is a "mechanical contractor?”

He went on (and on) about how “the whole economy” turned around overnight after Reagan took office. Of course, reality has a liberal bias and as Forbes Magazine tell it, “Unable to borrow money at an interest rate they could afford, 17,000 businesses had failed by the fall of 1982 and unemployment reached record highs.” When I contested his weird take on 1980’s economics, he asked, “Have you ever run a business?”

Why yes, I have. Several, in fact. A couple for employers and a half-dozen of my own. I supported my family working several jobs and going to school nights. I never stiffed my vendors or declared bankruptcy, either. Turned out, he’d done both but he thought that was just “business.”

If a “business man” was what we needed in the presidency, Jimmy Carter was overwhelmingly more qualified than a demented talk radio jock who was a B-actor in his prime. Carter had turned a small family farm into a substantial farming and distribution business after a successful career as a Navy officer and nuclear engineer. His stint as Georgia governor provided that state with one of its few moments of respect and national prominence. But, according to this repair guy the whole economy suddenly turned around when Reagan took office. Of course, the facts contradicts the myth, so we print and worship the myth.

In 1983, I left Nebraska for California, since Reagan’s home state was the only functioning economy in the country. If I’d been willing to work for Northrop, Lockheed, or one of the dozens of military-industrial complex employers in southern California, I’d have been rolling in money. Instead, I clung to my values and worked for a consumer products manufacturer for ten years and came away from California poor but debt-free.

So, I met a Boomer generation Trump-voter and he turned out to be who I expected him to be: a barely-literate, failing student of history; including his own past. I don’t know how you fix any of this crap. A very few people are doing a lot of work to support the rest of the country and I think they are going to have to lay down that burden and let the country’s deadbeats know how precarious their position is. From my own family experience, it has become clear that people are very selective and creative in their memories and that seems to me to be an impossible educational hurdle. If most people are incapable of learning from history, we don’t have much hope of ever getting beyond our cave-dwelling habits and violent past.

Dumbing Down the Nation

A recent poll found that 26% of the country doesn't know that the American Revolution was a revolt from British rule. Fox News has 3.3 viewers every day. Americans listen to the voices of fools and corporate shills and ignore pretty much any information that comes from sources with above sub-human intelligence. I actually had an acquaintance recommend that I listen to Limbaugh and Beck to "learn something."As George Carlin said, "."

NOTE: When I want to learn something I look for intelligent sources. I have absolutely no interest in what the fools of the world are thinking and saying; if you are willing to give them credit for the capacity to think.Listening to Glenn Beck in the hopes off "learning something" would be as stupid as asking G.W. Bush to explain quantum physics.

In 1950, the country listened to the inane babbling of Joe McCarthy and voted for Ike because the conservative majority was terrified of an intellectual President: Stevenson. Nearly half of the country voted for Nixon in 1968 out of the same fear of Kennedy's intellect. Nixon won two elections, even when there was every expectation (and hope) that his criminal regime would end in a huge collection of jail terms (for folks who ended up in the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II regimes) . A look at the interesting and informative list of those pardoned by past Presidents says a lot about the ethics of those people.

The conservative majority has little respect for law and even less respect for our Constitution or our history. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and all of their cronies and fellow mobsters are all working for purposes that serve a collection of masters who are disinterested in the best interests of the United States and its citizens. The Republican congress is working for those same un-American, un-democratic, regressive wealthy interests. Unfortunately, those interests are not in sync with the interests of the nation as a whole.

Desecrating the nation's education system is a terrific way to convince the public that "four legs are better than two" or "two legs are better than four," depending on the propaganda of the moment. Even a conservative as wingnutty as Phyllis Schlafly is worried about the quality of the US education at the college level. Of course, she wants the world rewritten to reflect her nutty view, but that's nothing new for the far right. The problem with providing a scientific, mathematical education is that knowledge goes in all directions at once. That was the reason the religious right dumbed down public science education in the 1950's, to suppress all discussion of evolution. At best, I suspect today's idiot public education system motivations are to create more gullible consumers.

One of the nation's founding fathers, Roger Sherman, suspected we'd end up in this condition if the country opted for "one man, one vote" democracy. He said, "the people . . . should have as little to do as may be about the government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled." The gross ignorance of much of the media's audience proves Sherman's fear that the public would lack ("want") information. Their willingness to follow the advice of fools and criminals proves the are easily "misled." The dumber we get, the more likely this advice will be prophetic and accurate. Without an active, focused attempt to rein in the media's corporate propaganda, the idiots will rule and the criminals will profit from the fall of this nation. 

Interpreting News

The more media we have, the more sources that appear on the web, the more cable "news" channels we have, the more dense the new digital on-air world becomes, the harder it is to figure out what's going on. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Ever since crazy Ronny Wrinkles abolished the "Fairness Doctrine," the media has steadily gone downhill. Of course, that was the intent behind eliminating the one thing that held the American media accountable so Reagan could have claimed "mission accomplished" if he had been able to put together two such obscure words into a single sentence.

With the advent of all of these news "sources," American citizens are all the way back to those days when being more than 10 miles from the event is the equivalent to being across the ocean from useful information about the event. If you didn't see it, you can't know what happened. Even pictures lie, words are valueless. This is a serious problem for democracy. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." - Thomas Jefferson

Clearly, today we are not to be trusted with our "own government." Our government, our world, belongs to corporations and their representatives in governments all over the world and they don't trust us, themselves, each other, or humanity at large. All my life, I've realized that two things float to the top of the toilet bowl: cream and turds. In the corporate world, cream isn't often produced. Which means that the people who are running the world are the lazy, inbred, retarded children of the people who have been running the world for decades. George W. Bush, for example. (No, by the way, I don't miss him.)

Until a solution like the one the Fairness Doctrine represented is found, the integrity of our democracy, the quality of discourse, the value of our actions, the usefulness of "information" will be minimal. If that seems unimportant to you, you are not alone. Reagan's FCC henchman, Mark Fowler, argued that abolition of the Fairness Doctrine was a First Amendment "matter of principle." The principle was the "right" of corporations and the elite to have their position strongly made over all objections. You have to give Republicans credit for consistency.

Obviously, the authors of the First Amendment would have gone to war to defeat that sort of argument, but Republicans have freely interpreted the Constitution for their own purposes since Teddy Roosevelt fooled the party into being responsible to all citizens for 8 short, incredibly productive and progressive years. Of course, TR had to invent his own party (Bull Moose) to try and hold together the people who were honestly "conservative" and ethical after Taft returned Republicanism to it's rightful, corrupt, inbred roots. The Taft administration was intellectually lazy, administratively incompetent and corrupt, and personally gluttonous (sound familiar?) and set the nation and the world up for the first World War and 1929. The Republican Party has been repeating that formula ever since. The intention and end result is redistributing wealth from the many to the few: socialism and wealth for the elites, capitalism and disaster for the rest of us.

But this kind of discussion is blasted out of the MSM with the irrational "class warfare" argument and as far as Faux News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Murdock and Sun Myung Moon's media conglomerates, and the rest of corporate wingnut America's "news sources" are concerned that is the end of the discussion. Of course, the American Revolution was the ultimate class warfare and our Constitution was supposed to be the platform from which that battle could continue throughout the life of the Union of States. The classes will battle, regardless of the illusions and fantasies of propaganda, and the only real issue is "are both sides equally armed?" Today, the rich and powerful have all the weapons.

Reagan and his cynical and corrupt henchmen and heirs fired a fatal shot to the heart of democracy in 1985 and there has been no sign of democratic life from the corporate media since. Despite the fairyland wingnut whining about "left wing media," the media is overwhelmingly far right. Apparently, any sign of responsibility, integrity, fairness, or curiosity displayed by reporters is taken as evidence of political apocalypse by the wingnuttery. While it is true that the majority of intellectuals are liberal, it is equally true that most corporations are owned and mismanaged by the inbred children of inbred children of robber barons and ancient royalty. Those true "elites" hold the purse strings and money is what makes our world spiral down the toilet.

Without the protection and balance provided by the Fairness Doctrine, fairness is the furthest thing from the mind of corporate America. Without honest, balanced news, corporations like Murdock's and Moon's are free to distort and pervert "information" until it is as credible and useful as the babbling of priests or miracle cure peddlers. Once that task is complete, democracy has a half-life measured in minutes. The cynically misnamed "Patriot Act" was an example of that sudden death as were G.W.'s grotesque overuse of the State Secrets Privilege and Cheney's secret "National Energy Policy Task Force" meetings. From where I stand, it looks like the ride is all downhill from here.

Imaginary Alternatives: Reagan's $50

In one of his most quoted statements, Reagan said, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. " And then, in true Republican fashion, he went on to deregulate a hoard of industries that had a long, well-documented history of desperately needing regulating and he created one of the longest periods of unemployment and wild government spending in US history. In the end, he left a shattered economy and massive debt as his legacy. The Republican history revisionists want to recreate his legacy as one of moderation and economic opportunity. There was opportunity alright, but it was for mobsters who took over S&Ls, the military-industrial complex who had a field decade with taxpayer "investment," and Wall Street's gamblers.

What was lost was the opportunity to fix America's real problems: taking on alternative energy solutions, converting to international metric standards, downsizing the post-Cold War military, modernizing our education system, facing the end-of-the-Industrial-Period and American Century facts and realigning the country for those reduced resources, and the rest of the unaddressed list of real problems. Instead, Reagan put on his happy face and set the country back two decades or more. He deregulated the media, giving us Faux News and the rest of the right wing corporate spokesperson networks. He busted unions, shipping the working class out of the middle class and into debtor slavery. He set Wall Street free of its post-Depression shackles setting the economy up a half-dozen boom-and-bust cycles since he took office and turning our economy from one that produces goods and services to one that produces con games on an international scale.

In a complete flight of imagination, Republicans are promoting a change to the $50 bill. They want to replace U.S. Grant with Reagan's mug. There is some historical connection between the two: 1) they both headed supremely corrupt administrations providing federal and state prosecutors with working material for a decade after they left office, 2) they were both hands-off Presidents (Grant was drunk for his two terms, Reagan was senile and asleep through most of his administration), 3) they both presided over substantial periods of economic recession, and, least likely, 4) they both supported Civil Rights. Grant was a strong advocate for the 15th Amendment (before the Supreme Court turned it to crap) and Reagan once said, "I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary." Who would have thought that the man who took best advantage of the southern flight from the Democratic Party because of the Civil Rights Act actually believed in its principles? Of course, Ulysses Grant actually provided a service to his country, leading the nation's military against the hillbillies of the Old South and saving democracy, the Union, and ending slavery in North America (until the 20th Century revived slavery in a variety of forms, something R Reagan had a hand in).

Since Reagan never actually accomplished anything useful in the defense of the nation or in any other useful area, I think dumping Grant for Reagan would be a foolish mistake. However, Reagan and G.W. Bush did an awful lot toward burying the country in debt and I would strongly recommend that their likenesses be put on an instrument of debt; the $100 savings bond, for example. I am in no way a graphic artist, but the included example is along the lines of what I would recommend. A legend such as, "I need your money to burn" or "Buy U.S. Bonds so Democrats can pay off our bad debts" or something equally quaint could go a long way toward truth in advertising our national savings bonds.

It looks like the $50 Reagan bill is doomed to failure. Something like 80% of Americans favor Grant over Reagan. Apprarently, the repackaging of Sleepy Ronny hasn't gone as well as the promoters hoped. Republicans always want to take the easy way out of work, representing the idle rich as they do. It's going to take a lot more Faux News propaganda before Boomers forget their losses from Reaganonmics. Of course, the quote Reagan should have been remembered for is, "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?" He never did.