What Reagan Said

USA USA USA

A return to the bad old days of Protectionism, and of Unions that were too big and too powerful isn't a good idea either.  So don't try to play that binary bullshit on me.  What I'm talking about is making an effort to get some sanity and balance back into the system.

Legislative / Judicial / Executive

Management / Labor / Government

Company / Customer / Vendor

Ya gotta have balance.  If you let any part(s) of any system overwhelm the other(s), then the system becomes unstable.

The guiding principle is that when anything becomes too big and too powerful, it has to be beaten down and brought back into balance.  I'm pretty sure that's what American Exceptionalism is supposed to be.  All of history before the USA was about playing and replaying all that imperial crap; "we're God's chosen people"  Well shit, how many empires were "chosen by God" before us?  How many of them are still around?  Is God just really lousy at choosing empires?

I'm pretty sure the people who started this country had the same ideas that occur to me, and they tried to set up a system aimed at resisting the temptations of power; to make it as hard as possible for any one entity to dominate the others; to ensure that we'd at least have the means to prevent the ruinous drift back into monarchy and empire if only we could muster the will.

Over time, of course, people forget.  We get sold on a different idea of how it's supposed to be.  Politicians and Marketeers blur the lines and turn meanings upside down.  We end up believing it's our patriotic duty to support policies that do damage to our founding principles.

And now we have giant multi-national Mega-Corporations taking the place of the old lines-on-a-map Nation States.  (This is nothing new, btw)  People who sit at the top of these Mega-Corps are not called Barons or Captains or Kings for the hell of it, or because it makes them seem quaint or whimsical.  We call them Barons and Captains and Kings because that's how their organizations function, and that's what they are.

300 years ago, Nation States were family-owned private enterprise military organizations that subcontracted out for food, clothing, shelter and trade goods in exchange for protection.  Whenever one of those contractors pushed a little too far into somebody else's territory, the Crown would try to hold up its end of the bargain by invading or otherwise making war on somebody to protect the interests of the merchants, which were in turn, the interests of the Crown.  Government and Business both gradually morphed away from the Inherited Entitlement System towards a more egalitarian system, but there's always a kind of gravitational pull; always something inside us that wants us to return to what our faulty and selective memories perceive as a better time; fueled by the relentless energy of profit-at-any-cost (an oxymoron if ever there was one).  We have to resist that backslide, and remember always that good people continue to fight and bleed and die - sometimes for the noble cause, but mostly for the good of the multi-national companies, and to further the interests of an Entitled Aristocracy that is again coming to believe it owns the government - and owns it by God-given right.

If you want the power, you have to take the power.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I try never to be unaware of boobies, but I truly appreciate the concept of a whole month dedicated to them; when it's more or less OK to tell women how much you love those beautiful secondary gender characteristics.

Yo, Thumpers

Art Of The Deal

Dad: I want you to marry a girl I've chosen for you.
Son: No way.
Dad: She's Bill Gates' daughter.
Son: Well, in that case, sure.

-- Dad goes to Bill Gates --
Dad: I want your daughter to marry my son.
Gates: Nope.
Dad: But my son is CEO of World Bank.
Gates: That's different - OK.

-- Dad goes to the Chairman of World Bank --
Dad: I want you to appoint my son CEO.
Pres: No way.
Dad: He's about to become Bill Gate's son-in-law.
Pres: By all means then.

And that's how shit gets done.

Corporate Media

Things are changing pretty fast.  We're becoming more aware that some things we've been told over and over for the last 20 years are total bullshit.  Like the notion that we have a free press.  The press is not free - it's owned and operated by big corporate interests, just like practically everything else in this country.  Another one is the lie about "the liberal press".  Take a quick look at the utter contradiction at work here.  Corporations are anything but liberal (most of them anyway), so I'll bet you dollars to dog shit that the people who run those corporations aren't voting for a lot of "Lefties"; and they're going to use the very powerful tools at their disposal to shape a narrative that makes the political climate favorable to themselves and their Corporate Clients (ie: Cronies)

From Wonkette, via Balloon Juice:

Mainstream

Has anyone ever heard either Roger Ailes or Rush Limbaugh say that their organizations present a general viewpoint that ISN'T widely-held?  Don't they at least intimate that their political bent is in agreement with a big majority of the American people?

How do these bozos get away with bitchin' about "the mainstream media" when they ARE the mainstream media?

We Are So Fucked

Campaign Finance has to change if we're ever going to get anything that remotely resembles what American Democracy is supposed to be.

From The Atlantic:

"This may be the first presidential election where we really have no idea who's funding the campaigns until it's too late," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "By January 31, the first five primaries will be done, the nomination process could be all but over, and we'll just be finding out where most of the money came from."

Payback's A Bitch

Don't Let The Bastards Get Ya Down

But Is It Real?

We hear and see what want to hear and see.

It's A Problem

Part of the bigger problem of "they're all alike" and "both sides do it" is Obama's pursuit of the terrorist bad guys, and the use of drones to kill them.  Bush put the program together and now, under Obama, the operators seem to have refined it to a very sharp point.  And that's usually at the heart of this kind of problem.  We develop these deadly capabilities without regard for the legal ramifications, and then we find it almost impossible not to use them in the face of political pressures.

I think we can see the standard political calculation going on here too.  Obama kills terrorists (and sympathizers - and some innocents as well) while ignoring the niceties of due process because he figures he gains more against his political enemies than he loses among his friends.  It's cynical, and I don't like it, and I'm sitting here every day rationalizing it away because I support Obama on most other issues; plus I can't stand the thought of putting any of the current crop of Repubs in power.

This really sucks.

Exactly

If they're not as deliberately ignorant as they seem to be, why are they constantly providing evidence that they are?

Action

Two basic choices for any politician who wants to survive beyond the next 14 months - get something done or get the fuck outa the way.

I've also wondered some about the criticism that this thing can't possibly get anywhere because it "lacks a clear message". This of course from the people who helped get us into this mess to begin with. But never mind. What Occupy Wall Street is showing us is that it doesn't really matter where you start - but ya gotta start. Act faithfully and faith will come.



From We Are The 99%:

Deep Down

I think it's a good idea to remind myself once in a while that politicians are always in search of a unifying theme to shape the political narrative, and one of the most powerful is Self-Loathing.

How many of the TeaBaggers (eg) are people who absolutely deify "The Greatest Generation"?  How many of them were too young - or not physically present on the planet - to have had much to do with either the Great Depression or WW2 (the events they keep telling us made that generation The Greatest)?  How many of them look back at their own lives and "hold their manhoods cheap" because they didn't have the chance to test their mettle in the forges of hell?

How many Boomers are thinking they copped out on their opportunity to mount a protest and missed their chances to get "hassled by the pigs" or shot at by teenagers in Nat'l Guard uniforms?  How many are thinking they should have stayed true to what they used to believe in because a lot of what they thought was wrong back then is coming back on them now?  Or we can take that one in the other direction, and ask how many Boomers were happy to duck military service in the 60s and 70s, but now feel a little guilty about it?

And how many of us feel the need to make up for our past failings by finding ways to demonstrate how worthy we are now?  Seems pretty natural - a shot at redemption is a powerful thing.

Nobody likes the feeling that their main problem is themselves.  Smart politicians are always looking for ways for us to take the anger we all occasionally feel towards ourselves, and redirect it at a conveniently unpopular target.  Starting to sound familiar?

Both Sides Do It

Except when they don't.

I dunno exactly what the score is, but when I look at things in general, I see one side making some large sized efforts to restrict people's rights.

Abortion
Collective Bargaining
Marriage Equality
Religion in Government
DADT
Voting

This is not my Republican Party.  These people are rabid and radical, and I wouldn't trust them to run a coin-operated laundry, much less a government.

From Balloon Juice:

...in my opinion, conservatives and media have succeeded beyond my worst nightmares in convincing people that the fundamental and constitutionally guaranteed right to vote is exactly the same as cashing a check, using an ATM, or purchasing a bus, train or airline ticket. I’m sure I missed one or two comparisons there, although I believe I’ve heard every one. Like everything else under the sun, the franchise is now akin to a commercial transaction.

War Sucks

You wanna do everything possible to avoid war because once the shit starts, you can't contain the costs.  War is just plain bad business.

Listen to Peter Van Buren on Fresh Air.

The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers. When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased twenty- five chickens that morning specifically to kill for us. This was good news, a 100 percent jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.

Holy Fuck, Batman

Elections are decided by an average of 12 votes per precinct. Don't believe for a minute that there aren't people out there who think they're doing their patriotic duty by stealing an election or two.

The current narrative in the press is aimed at setting us up to accept "a stunning upset win" by a GOP that is nothing more than about 20% of the electorate.

Save A Pretzel For The Gas Jets

I guess the real tragedy is that he makes almost as much sense when you hear exactly what he's actually saying.

(hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

Listeria

The story about the Listeria outbreak is several days old now, and I have yet to see or hear hardly anything at all on the aspects of food safety inspection - except on some of the blogs I read.

AGAIN - where the fuck is the reporting?  There was one piece a day or two ago that briefly mentioned the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, and said food handling/processing facilities were supposed to be inspected at least once every three years, but apparently, nobody has brains enough to go to the FDA and ask about the status of inspections at Jensen Farms!?!

This one, from The Guardian, is typical.

From the Business Section, NYT.

Every article at least hints at the industry policing itself.  Apparently, we're deeper into an era of privatization and free market self-regulation than I thought.  In the NYT piece, the food safety manager at CostCo is calling for better Quality Control measures from the growers and handlers, but he says nothing about an actual food safety inspections regime on the part of any level of government.  I'm not saying every food item should be tested, but there are sampling techniques that work astoundingly well in manufacturing (eg) that could be applied to cantaloupe or potatoes or practically anything else.

So I'm asking American Business to tell me what the calculation looks like: how many people have to die before it becomes cost-effective for you to stop killing your customers?

FInally, here are a couple of dots that can be connected to this story:
1) All those annoying emails about how grand it was once, back in those golden days when we could do as we pleased and we didn't have to worry our little heads about anything.
2) Tort Reform; particularly Product Liability.

Do you really think this shit just happens at random?