We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
Carl Bernstein.
Surely nothing could be more indicative of this than a sixth seventh eighth season of 'Brothers and Sisters' or present opinion polling forecasting ascendance of the same Republican Party that not so long ago presided over eight years of economic stagnation and decline for all but those few conscientious citizens with stock portfolios weighted heavily toward defense contractors, big pharma and fossil fuels.
These are in fact the same selected officials who in their infinite wisdom gave us more stringent bankruptcy laws for individuals--as if credit card companies needed anymore help raping street cleaners and bus drivers--and prohibited Americans from buying cheaper Canadian pharmaceuticals despite the fact we have this thing called the NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT. Just for good measure they also loosened regulation of banking interests (and I do mean INTEREST, as in compiled interest on the oceans of red ink these grubs amassed while they had control of the purse strings) investment firms and multinational corporations, all in the wake of Enron and a scant eight years after the first S&L debacle.
Wonder how this has been working out for all the good folks in foreclosure country who seem to want these civic minded stalwarts back in the saddle again?
How soon we they forget. It seems like only yesterday the dynamic duo I like to refer to as Dr. Evil and Mini Me--wouldn't those have made great secret service code names--upon re-selection embarked on the most stupendous campaign to reimburse usurers for their exotic speculations since the portentous denouement of one of their more ambitious speculative enterprises at Versailles.
So what's changed then?
Well, not very much of anything as it turns out. Two years into his term it's finally dawned on even the most partisan democrats and liberal independents that the Obamessiah didn't come as advertised. Boo Hoo. That wouldn't have come as a revelation to anyone who had gone to the trouble of discovering who the paragons of virtue were underwriting his ambitions from the start--since his selection to the U.S. Senate anyway. Goldman Sachs alone contributed more than $1 Million to his Presidential campaign--and that's only what they were required to disclose. Free speech, don't ya know. Gotta love Scotus, corporations are people too.
To say Barrack Hussein Obama has been a disappointment is like saying Lindsay Lohan has trouble keeping a low profile. There is every indication that very much like the previous White House occupants, the current administration is simply not in touch with reality much less the plight of middle and working class America. To exhibit one stark example, last month when the President came to Seattle to raise money for Patty Murray, he used the occasion to 'sit down' with a handful of small business owners at a Deli in Pioneer Square, presumably to discuss 'economic rejuvenation'. This sort of window dressing is a hallmark of every administration, but you would think in these historically challenging times for those at the helm of modest entrepreneurial enterprises it might have occurred to the Rhodes Scholars who set up the photo op that shutting down many of the small businesses and vendors in the surrounding area for a good part of the day (for security reasons) might result in something of a mixed message being sent.
I wonder if the same protocols are effected when the President visits Wall Street?
So no, things are not good.
Having said that .. .. ..
Are you sh_______ me!
Bring back the Party of Lincoln Savings and Loan?
Shall we bring 'Great White' back to West Warwick while we're at it?
Sarah Palin defies expectations by not getting lost on the way to the microphone. The woman needs GPS to find the crapper on an airplane. What's really scary is that Bristol procreating with Wasilla's version of K-Fed has probably spawned evolution in the Palin gene pool. Mitch McConnell is the beltway bagman for every CEO who wants to outsource your job to the third world, and every venture capitalist who wants to outsource your income to his high risk indemnity fund. And John Boehner .. John Boehner is a reptilian shape shifter more than likely thinking everything Joe Barton says. Boehner is exactly the sort of lizard who would come up with a tag line like “tell Senator Asshat BP doesn't deserve a handout” for an 'issue advocacy ad' currently running to build opposition to the newly proposed 'energy tax' BP presumably would have to pay until the selected officials give it back to them in the form of some loophole.
If you liked the Newt, you'll LOVE the lizard.
Oy Vey.
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Audrey Hepburn is also my very favorite actress and one of my very favorite people. She was actually born on the same birth date I have. Did you know she witnessed the summary execution of her Uncle by the Nazis in Occupied Holland? She also suffered malnutrition and other privations which is probably why she later became the face of UNICEF.
Here's all you need to know about Big Pharma. I'm on a medication right now that is so obscenely expensive I cannot afford to go off of disability--the Psychiatrist wrote down Bi-Polar, which isn't even the illness I applied for--for fear I may not have adequate insurance coverage to pay for it. So yes, I'm basically bankrupting America on Big Pharma's behalf, and there are A LOT more out there in the same predicament I am in, doing the same thing.
That said, the quote was to apropos to pass up. And yes, Nixon was rightly forced from office, for something less egregious than conduct committed by LBJ, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and most certainly Dr. Evil and Mini Me.
Sorry about the homily.
I am not sure either if we can pull ourselves out of this abyss. If the Dollar goes the way of the Reichsmark when the rest of the world stops underwriting our profligacy and calls in the markers, America is obviously finished as we know it.
That should read "too apropos".
Yeah, Obama is disappointing (tho he may turn out to be a careful craftsman as opposed to the knight in shining armor we were hankering for), but, ye gods, a government dominated by O'Connell, Boehner, Gingrich, Palin, Bachman, etc. etc. The mind boggles (and the heart quakes...)
The problem with stupid people in politics isn't that they're stupid per se, it's that some are so unforgivably vacuous that they are easily persuaded by evil smart people to do shit like get us into endless wars. If you could assure me that would not happen, I would be just fine with electing the most simple stupid ignorant people in existence right now, it's unlikely they could do much worse with the economy than what the smart people have been doing for the last decade. Some of them would undoubtedly do better, but we could end up, in the process, with some unintended ripples in the placid waters ... like a Holocaust.
I think that campaign laws have to be vastly retooled, even if that means amending the Constitution so the empty robes on the Supreme Court can't wrongly interpret the First Amendment to apply absolutely to corporations and other entities that didn't even really exist when the Bill of Rights was written. If we take money out of the equation, the lobbyists will be shit out of luck unless they can make a compelling argument for their special interest. That applies to Big Pharma most of all.
No one ever expects the Guillotine.
Believe it or not it was Robespierre who had the laws on who was entitled to death by the guillotine redone. He believed this gave a valued right to those that were apart of the third estate. It is the right of death with equality to all others.
Usually when we think of death we do not think of equality. I think and hope to see a more middle ground achieved in how we dethrone those in the positions of power but realize at the same time as a person that has studied the French Revolution that sometimes to change systems that it has to be a take over that involves bloodshed. It would be nice to think man has evolved, but I am not sure so as an observer I am very much watching this play out with much interest and a lot of hoping that a repeat of France is not witnessed.
I have studied a lot of history, and of all the events I've studied I would have to say the French Revolution is probably the most complex. WWI was no picnic, but I still feel like I understand it better than I do the French Revolution. I will say that I often have a tendency to give a superficial treatment to events I don't already have some measure of familiarity with, and that would probably have applied to the FR. I can be lazy that way. Regardless, if you have been able to negotiate the elaborate convolution and intricacy of what strikes me as one of the more esoteric episodes in the annals of European history, you have even more of my respect and admiration.
The only thing I really know about the Guillotine, other than it was the final reckoning for about 10,000 Parisians, including of course the monarchs and later the bloodthirsty lawyer himself .. is that far from the gruesome instrument of brutality it has come to be known as, it was originally conceived by and named for a physician who thought he was inventing a machine that would render death largely painless, in the physical sense. I did not know any of that information about Robespierre, but it is interesting and definitely sounds like his peculiar brand of Democracy .. or I guess Republicanism. Like I said ..
Unfortunately my family on my father's side (my maternal lineage is Irish) has first-hand experience with violent bloody revolution. My ethnic German grandmother was born on the Volga not too far from Volgograd, which of course is more familiarly known to historians as the former Stalingrad. She was 13 yo when the family abruptly emigrated to Eastern Washington in 1913 after having lived in the adopted old country for roughly one hundred fifty years (since the time of Catherine the Great, whose invitation to come to Russia their progenitors had originally accepted). Lenin hadn't arrived yet on the 'sealed train', but the Revolution was well under way for all intents and purposes, had been since 'Bloody Sunday' in 1905. For Lenin it went back further than that, as his older brother had been executed by Imperial authorities in 1892, for political reasons. Oddly enough, my great grandfather Kanzler's reason for leaving had less to do with the impending overthrow of the Tsar--although as ethnic Germans they certainly did not support deposing Nicholas II--and more to do with conscription, which none of the Volga Germans took very kindly to. Germans who hated the military .. I know, right?
I'm afraid I have to agree with you. I have thought for a long time---and hoped just as long that I was wrong--that Thomas Jefferson's maxim that 'for the tree of liberty to grow healthy, it must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants' .. would have to be bourne out.
I don't know if you saw the earlier comment, but speaking from very direct first-hand experience Big Pharma is wreaking absolute social havoc, mostly under the radar as you alluded to.
Medicare and Medicaid--I'm on disability for a mental health condition--are paying more for my prescriptions than the tuition cost for most Universities. It's obscene and bankrupting the country. One of the medications is still patented, and so prohibitively expensive that I could not go off of disability if I wanted to, because I probably wouldn't be able to afford the co-pay, much less the full retail without insurance.
I haven't looked into it, but I strongly suspect the healthcare reform that was passed is only going to be a bigger boon for both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. In the case of the latter, they now have a much bigger market whose prohibitively expensive medications they can bill taxpayers for.
Basically Americans are paying not only for the medications of everyone on Medicaid and Medicare, but also for the medications of everyone around the world whose Governments have negotiated lower prices for their own citizens.