Que darse Los Paranoias una vez
"My dog Ronnie can go anywhere in the house he wants to" "That's the trouble with your dog; he goes anywhere he wants to and if Ronnie could speak I'd tell him I'm not a friend of "trickle down"
Moral Support for this Posting Supplied by Johnny Rhythm
So what do I mean by invoking a Beatles song to describe what I'm referring to. I have been saying one reason why I'm not a believer in the theory advanced by "The Fourth Turning" is because that apperatus is broken. Sure it used to work- - more I believe on a forty year rather than an eighty year basis, which ties in with the movements of Venus for the astronomically inclined. I'm talking about this "Cultural Awakening" cycle Americans go through now and then where we rediscover ourselves and who we really are as a people, often in times of economic termoil. We can chart this all the way back to 1730 before the country was even Born. But I'd just like to highlight a few things. The 1770's were an era of intellectual and cultural and political furor. It was really in the 1850's rather than the 1860's that most Americans made up their mind that Slavery was an evil, no doubt to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 I believe. Forty years later was 1890 or so when a lot of Western states were admitted and it is called "The end of the Frontier" as we had known it. We were becoming more "citified" with inventions such as the electric light bulb and the telephone. This was the era of the original women's libbers and sufferagettes as well as seminal Labor Union attempts, and the first Business regulations in the Shermon Anti Trust Act. Skipping right up to the 1930s like with forty years previous we have economic turmoil and government taking steps to help business, but also increase regulation and defining the relation between business and labor. We then come right to forty years ago. Again there was a revolution. We had the raft of environmental laws, and the Equal Rights Amendment was something many Americans naturally assumed would be part of the Constitution giving women equal rights. There were changes in laws on such things as women's sports, as well as divorce and abortion laws, as well as legislation reigning in powers of both the Presidency and the CIA and the FBI. We now skip up to around the turn of this past decade. According to Hartman's book, yes we had a crisis beginning with a market crash as in 1929 and again the democrats swept into both congress and then the Presidency. It was naturally logical that from here we would at last "awaken" to all the economic and wall street abuses and undo the "Reagan Revolution" and that congress would become very active and that democrats were destined to continue to gain seats in congress just as they did in the 1930's. But that didn't happen. Not Any Of It. Why? Clearly whatever "Cycling' there on was short circuited and derailed. It was broken. Here we are in 2014 with no sign of any "Awakening" of the American psyche to find out "what we need to do". So in Beatle speak - - it's the "revamp" of Strawberry Fields Forever with the "funeral dirge" ending, which was not a part of the piece as originally conceived. It's the "unexpected unhappy ending" (Selah) We have suffered from the effects and scourge of the Reagan Revolution now for going on 34 years. In fact, it could be argued that Bill Clinton was "The best Republican president they ever had", judging by how business friendly he was. It was said "The era of big government is Over" which I would only modify to read "The era of responsible government is Over". We have the selling out of the media air waves, and a return to the Wild West in Wall Street, and ALL of our lives are impacted by the sweeping treaty which is N A F T A. Clearly, if we're fair, Barock Obama should be the Republican's 2nd favorite President in terms of what was "accomplished" under his watch. How did this happen? Why is that cycling mechanism that saved us previously now - - Broken? We have our suspects. It could be Lewis Powel and his plans for a right wing news network as far back as 1975. Maybe it was Buckley vs Vellejo. Maybe it was Jude Wanisky, or Paul Warwick and his "Our power in government quite frankly goes Up as the voting activity goes Down. It would be that meeting of fifteen republicans from the House and Senate pledging in almost a blood oath that Barock Obama would be made a failure as a president. He in fact needed to be "Completely Invalidated" as though he never existed. (Selah) Below are a few tidbits from George Washington's blog, of which you need to read the entire thing.
Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc. However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite. Those who benefit from this crony capitalist state go to extreme lengths to paper over the reality and convince Americans that the system works, the American Dream is still a reality and that American democracy is in fact democratic. Below I hope to begin to outline some of the underlying dynamics and trends that have evolved in recent decades and led us so far from what we once were. As fun as it would be, the answer is not some evil conspiracy by the Illuminati, but rather the unfortunate result of three long term and mutually reinforcing components that have been attacking the fundamental roots of the structure of our Republic. The first is the increased concentration of corporate and private wealth. Both of which are quickly yelled down in the media as anti-free market and class war hysteria. The second is the use of this wealth to capture all three branches of government in order to ensure the continued extraction of capital from the many and to the few.The rich might have climbed the ladder because they earned it, but they have then purchased government to pull up the ladder behind them. The consequence of the first two components is a democracy in name only that represents the very few.
Thom Hartman is never at a loss for making charges. He spoke of how they are “getting fat of all
kinds out of our food when it’s only the trans fats that are now regarded as
dangerous”. But then he goes on to say “And
they used processed sugars to replace that fat so things continue to taste good”. He suggested that there should be a sugar tax
for all of the people that come down with diabetes type II from the sequestered
sugars customers don’t know about. He
then spoke of “food deserts’ where fresh produce has now become rare in
neighborhoods, and at any rate more costly now than junk food. Hartman pointed out that George W Bush did
desert his post in the military and moved from Texas to Alabama where he went
on a yearlong drinking binge. We would all agree that whatever compromises
President Obama has made to our national security; Reagan and Bush 43 are
guilty of a lot worst breeches of faith.
Next Thom went after the gun
owners who want to bear arms openly in public.
Hartman says these are men who feel they have lost their masculinity
because thirty years of Reagenomics has rendered them impotent and powerless. I would note there is a strange similarity
between early Christianity and the tea party.
Because it’s the very rich and the very poor and ignorant who join them. It’s like the Black slaves on the plantation
singing “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming fore to carry me home” sung more out
of a burden than any true sense of joy.
“They were happy negroes, they were godly negroes”, we are informed by
the Duck Dynesty guy. But the tea party
relies on the adherents to the tea party message to be all “dumb as fence posts”
to use country jargon.
Some of these tag lines of Patriot Radio don’t make sense. For instance the one about how “It isn’t free
if your neighbor is paying for it” makes little sense, and can be self defeating, if
you’re a major industrial polluter and your neighbors don’t like it. Hartman refers to these as “external expenses
such as the “true cost” of gasoline being much higher than is as apparent when
we fill up at the pump, due to the effects of petro chemicals on the
environment. Hartman says one quarter of
the big corporations pay absolutely no income taxes at all. Then there is the one about how “Those who
would deny personal rights, have no business talking about minority rights”. Logically, I don’t see why hypothetically
you could have a Communist- - who wasn’t a racial bigot. And then there is the one about “The trouble
with socialism is that you eventually run out of rich people’s money to tax”. These people have obviously never looked at
an income distribution curve. The lead
posting on George Washington’s blog when I looked this morning was a lot of
stuff about how this government has ceased to become people centered and become
corporation centered, with pet laws and carve out personally scripted by the
corporations. We learn there is a sugar subsidy
for instance. Assuming government
subsedies are things we want to encourage, why would we ever want to encourage
even greater sugar subsedies than we already have? I suggest that if you are not as familiar with
the grime statistics on national income inequity you read that blog and study
all the flow charts and graphs and everything.
Of particular note is the disparity you see for the first time- - the
widening gap between worker productivity and hourly wages that began looks like
about 1978 and only gets worse with time.
Also of note is the cost of political campaigns due to Citizens United. As late as 2004 I think the total figure was “only”
900 million dollars. President Obama
gave up the moral high ground when he announced in 2008 that he would “opt out”
and not abide by mandated spending limits, and the figure jumped to over two
billion. And even the 2008 campaign
expences was dwarfed by the 2012 campaign figures, which run in the multiple
billions of dollars now.
We still have more grim news and aftermath on the Bowe Bergdoll
case. Shawn Hannity had this guy from
George Washington University, who has been a law professor for some time, saying
that he distrusted President Obama the minute he took power noting “He was not
at all the idealist who ran for that office”.
I would note that Health Care’s passage took on a highly unorthodox
procedure I don’t fully understand. The “reconciliation
process” was used, as a way of skirting the sixty percent filibuster rule,
because Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts as the 41str vote against the
Affordable Care Act. The professor notes
that ACA was “a very poorly written bill, that read more like a crude first
draft”. In the Bergdoll case we were given assurance
in interviews of “There are no plans for any prisoner transfer, and if there
were to be such a thing it would have to go through congress first”, and that
didn’t happen. The professor took
exception to congress applauding in the State of the Union address this past
year when President Obama announced “If congress isn’t going to act, I’ll just
bypass you people and start issuing executive orders”. James Madison and others were wary of one
branch of government somehow acquiring a lot of power to itself and becoming tyrannical. And while it’s true that fewer laws will get
passed under our Constitutional system, history proves (Madison believed) that
they would be better, more thoughtful laws, were a consensus was reached. It would seem that the welcoming home parade
was canceled by Bergdoll’s home town because of “threats’ or something, which
we don’t know the origens of. It seems
that this Hicani network back in Afghanistan- -
will be taking over in Afghanistan more ruthlessly than ever the minute
our troops leave. In the old days you
would have things such as Peace Treaties, where the exchange of POW’s would be
appropriate. But the US hasn’t fought a
war like that in decades. Rather the US
will get into a war which then becomes unpopular, and then we just pull out our
troops, and leave the native peoples to the threats we went there to protect
them from. It’s not a pleasant picture
but accurate. The relation of Bowe’s
father to the Talliban is also a mystery.
And there is something strange about an adult individual losing the
ability to speak his mother tongue, in this case, English in favor of “Pushti”
or Arabic or something, and the father speaks both. But the good news is that according to Shawn
Hannity is that the Republicans are not considering impeachment at this time,
but their first hearing on this topic will be next Wednesday June 11th.
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