The Democrats, slowly but surely, seem to be finally catching on that, per just the unredacted information in the Mueller report, it is clear that both William Barr and Donald Trump have respectively engaged in various tactics to obstruct, impede, and thwart the normal processes of fact-finding and justice. Anyone who insists that these simple observations are in any way untrue or unreasonable has a vested interest in the matter.
As such, since the Republicons have openly admitted they don't give a fuck and plan to do nothing at all, the Democrats find themselves with a moral and legal obligation to pursue this issue as far as it takes them. If that means impeachment, so be it. Presidents have certainly been impeached for far less.
Just as the operational ethos of the GOP exists in an ipse dixit structure of the law means what we say it means, the Democrats have their own articles of faith. Their reluctance to move with any sense of urgency seems to stem from their own teleological notions that, if they could just find a way to oust the bastard, that things will return to "normal" -- that is, to 2016. You can hear it in Pelosi's attempt to keep her cats properly herded, and you can hear it in the "we all gotta get along" bromides of some of the 2020 Dem contenders, such as Mayor Pete and Bernie Sanders.
Does it really need to be pointed out that those days are gone, are not coming back, and the Democratic Party really needs to start learning how to represent their base unapologetically, the way their opponents do routinely? You think Addison McConnell loses a wink of sleep over "incivility" or evangelical fanaticism or burgeoning white nationalism in his party's base (not to mention many of the party's elected politicians)? Hell no. They understand all too well that if they can't stoke enough of these mutant rubes to show up at the ballot box, they're dead in the water.
But like I've been saying, the incompetence and mendacity that oozes from every pore of every scumbag involved in this administration transcends Mueller's investigation and report. Again, even if none of it had ever happened, look at all the other illegality just this week, between the tax returns and the security clearances. They are openly defying congressional orders to produce the tax returns -- Trump is now suing his own accountants to prevent them from handing over the documents.
And he has forbidden the director of the White House Personnel Security Office to obey his congressional subpoena, after it turns out that literally dozens of staff had their security clearance disqualifiers overruled. And they're neglecting cyber-security for the next election, and rigging the census for the next decade (at least) of elections. This is all right out in the open. Totally innocent behavior!
I mean, if you didn't know any better, you might start to suspect that these people think they are above the law, and operate as such. This is unacceptable. The so-called blue wave was mostly a collective insistence on that very point, that the routine abuse of power needs to be checked immediately. I have no idea what makes Democratic politicians think they can "work with" people who are fine with these banana-republic shenanigans. Things are urgent and steadily escalating; anyone operating without a real sense of urgency should find another line of work.
So far, Elizabeth Warren seems to have processed this had enough sentiment the best out of all the Democratic candidates. Trump voters aren't the only people who are angry, you know, but again, the Dems are welded to their outdated notions of comity and civility. Just as I don't know what to make of someone who has read all the evidence and viewed the ongoing behavior of the man and his minions, and concluded that there is nothing amiss, I have no idea what to make of someone who can look around them at the ongoing racketization of the American economy, and not be pissed about it.
Warren's proposal of student-loan forgiveness is not just the morally right thing to do, but it's far and away the most economically sensible. Anyone who cries about how they paid their student loans can fuck right off. For one, the cost of college has steadily escalated, and continues to do so. Someone taking ten years to pay down their package from 1995 or 2000 is in an entirely different boat than some kid going through the meat grinder now, knowing that unless they land a plum job right out of the gate, they're on the hook until they're at least forty years old. Obviously, that has additional impacts on other decisions they might normally make earlier in life, such as getting married, starting a family, or purchasing a car and/or house. We are seeing those economic impacts.
I don't use the word "racketization" lightly. It is a racket, just like the health care system is a racket. The costs are way out of whack with what the services actually cost to provide, because there are parasitic entities and economic externalities that customers are forced to subsidize, above and beyond the services they're actually paying for.
It is naked profiteering and usury, nothing more nor less. I've already resigned to the fact that I will be paying interest on two-hundred-dollar textbooks for the rest of my life. I really don't see any way out of this anymore. I make decent money, but not enough to get ahead or catch up. It took too long to get to this point, and now I have ten years of interest accrued on me. I turn fifty-two next month and have no retirement savings. It is mathematically impossible for me to pay down my student-loan debt, and save anything significant for retirement, before I'm, say, sixty-five or probably even seventy.
Here's a more detailed example: I have been making payments on two of my "smaller" Sallie Mae loans since day one, which is about ten years now. At about $85.00/month, that comes to about $10k so far paid into these loans over the past decade. Looking at the dashboard of the company that services these loans, the combined principal was about $7k, and after ten years of steady payments, again about $10k total so far, I still owe about $5k on the principal. I've already paid out far more in interest than the principal was in the first place. And even if I win the lottery tomorrow and pay it all down overnight, I will have paid out $15k on a pair of loans totaling $7k to begin with.
And again, those are the two smallest loans, in a portfolio of nine loans. I have no problem with paying down what I borrowed, with reasonable interest, but it took ten years to get a job that still pays a bit less than the average for an MBA degree in California (which means that I didn't get the value that I still have to pay for), and so unless some mystery windfall takes place at some magical point, I'll simply never catch up.
It's not a catastrophe, I'm not out on the street or anything, but one practical outcome of this situation is that I have less disposable income to spread around my local economy. I would take my family out to dinner more often at the local restaurants. I would upgrade my vehicle from the quarter-century-old beater I currently use (thankfully I have a very short work commute), by purchasing a newer vehicle from one of the local dealers. I would take vacations more often. I have some work I would like done on my house and property, that I would hire local contractors for. So there is all this money I could be putting into my local economy, but instead I have to send across the country to some faceless bloodsucker that's just going to put it in a stack.
Now multiply that situation times a million, or several million. This is not just a moral issue, it is an economic one. This is yet another way in which an institutionalized racket hoovers money out of the pockets of working people -- who again, would actually spend that money -- and into the Hamptons homes of wealth hoarders, who will just use it to bribe some university to accept their unqualified fail-children..
This is not by accident, this is by design -- the best way to keep the populace under the collective thumb of the privileged few is to hook them on debt, and never let them off that hook. Our debt, after all, is their equity; they have a vested interest in keeping us hung on that hook in perpetuity, and it has the added benefit of keeping the peons compliant.
Elizabeth Warren appears to understand these things better than the other candidates, or at least she is articulating them more concretely. She is connecting those ideas to actual policy, sometimes in pretty granular detail. If we had a functioning media ecosystem, instead of corporate careerists hosting a fucking beauty pageant, we might get somewhere with that.
Regardless, if you take a step back and look at what's good for the country at this point in time, a few things are inescapable:
When someone -- from either party -- has the balls to step up and take on the douchebags with their Fuck Your Feelings tee-shirts, and their incivility, then I'll be impressed. Until then, fuck you and your hippie-punching bullshit. Go sell used cars or something. I have no interest in making nice with people who have been telling me to go fuck myself for years.
I liked Sanders in 2016, but less so now, as he is vague on policy, and seems to have the same issue with making his tax returns public that Agent Orange has. Even if there's nothing incriminating in them, the longer a pol takes to do that simple thing, the more suspicious we should be of their behavior. Bernie Sanders specifically waited until April 15th to release the last ten years of returns, hemming and hawing for weeks on end, which leads reasonable people to conclude that there's something in his 2008 return he doesn't want you to see. Whatever it is, it's almost impossible for it to be as bad as what's in Trump's returns, but it doesn't look good.
I get why some folks have just become too inured or exhausted from the reality-teevee nonsense to bother to tune in anymore. It feels tedious and useless, part of a stupid game you didn't want to play in the first place. Fair enough. But right now, there are children kept in cages like dogs, separated from their parents, terrified and alone, because these fucking monsters decided that the violence and terror they were fleeing wasn't quite bad enough. Maybe it doesn't matter that it's being done in your name too. Each of us has to decide for ourselves what we're willing to live with.
But sticking to the pretense for now, that we still strive to be a nation of laws and accountability, even if that isn't always realistic, we have to acknowledge that if we give up on even trying for those things, even when our collective faces are being rubbed in their wrongdoing every goddamned day, if we give up then we might as well give up for good. Don't bother to vote, don't bother to care. Nothing matters anyway, right? Fuck the kids and the planet they'll inherit. It's all just competing, equivalent forms of corporate cynicism. Is that really the way it is?
You have to decide for yourself if it is or not, and then act -- that is, take action -- accordingly. Even if it's just a letter to a senator, enough of those things make a dent. Or we can just be above it all and let someone else deal with the repercussions of our collective indolence. So far the Dems seem to be bouncing back from their initial abdication of responsibility in these pressing matters.
What Trump and Barr have cooked up here may end up not requiring impeachment (although I believe they already do), but they definitely merit further investigation, and Trump's defiance of that only reinforces the impression that he's waaaayyyyyy more guilty of a lot more shit that we don't even know about yet.
This is where striking that delicate balance between patience and urgency come into play. It's only been a week since the report dropped, but what a week, right? Every week seems faster and worse than the last, like a particle accelerator powered by shit. It only gets worse until enough of the peons decide they've had enough, and remind their employees who really works for whom.
As such, since the Republicons have openly admitted they don't give a fuck and plan to do nothing at all, the Democrats find themselves with a moral and legal obligation to pursue this issue as far as it takes them. If that means impeachment, so be it. Presidents have certainly been impeached for far less.
Just as the operational ethos of the GOP exists in an ipse dixit structure of the law means what we say it means, the Democrats have their own articles of faith. Their reluctance to move with any sense of urgency seems to stem from their own teleological notions that, if they could just find a way to oust the bastard, that things will return to "normal" -- that is, to 2016. You can hear it in Pelosi's attempt to keep her cats properly herded, and you can hear it in the "we all gotta get along" bromides of some of the 2020 Dem contenders, such as Mayor Pete and Bernie Sanders.
Does it really need to be pointed out that those days are gone, are not coming back, and the Democratic Party really needs to start learning how to represent their base unapologetically, the way their opponents do routinely? You think Addison McConnell loses a wink of sleep over "incivility" or evangelical fanaticism or burgeoning white nationalism in his party's base (not to mention many of the party's elected politicians)? Hell no. They understand all too well that if they can't stoke enough of these mutant rubes to show up at the ballot box, they're dead in the water.
But like I've been saying, the incompetence and mendacity that oozes from every pore of every scumbag involved in this administration transcends Mueller's investigation and report. Again, even if none of it had ever happened, look at all the other illegality just this week, between the tax returns and the security clearances. They are openly defying congressional orders to produce the tax returns -- Trump is now suing his own accountants to prevent them from handing over the documents.
And he has forbidden the director of the White House Personnel Security Office to obey his congressional subpoena, after it turns out that literally dozens of staff had their security clearance disqualifiers overruled. And they're neglecting cyber-security for the next election, and rigging the census for the next decade (at least) of elections. This is all right out in the open. Totally innocent behavior!
I mean, if you didn't know any better, you might start to suspect that these people think they are above the law, and operate as such. This is unacceptable. The so-called blue wave was mostly a collective insistence on that very point, that the routine abuse of power needs to be checked immediately. I have no idea what makes Democratic politicians think they can "work with" people who are fine with these banana-republic shenanigans. Things are urgent and steadily escalating; anyone operating without a real sense of urgency should find another line of work.
So far, Elizabeth Warren seems to have processed this had enough sentiment the best out of all the Democratic candidates. Trump voters aren't the only people who are angry, you know, but again, the Dems are welded to their outdated notions of comity and civility. Just as I don't know what to make of someone who has read all the evidence and viewed the ongoing behavior of the man and his minions, and concluded that there is nothing amiss, I have no idea what to make of someone who can look around them at the ongoing racketization of the American economy, and not be pissed about it.
Warren's proposal of student-loan forgiveness is not just the morally right thing to do, but it's far and away the most economically sensible. Anyone who cries about how they paid their student loans can fuck right off. For one, the cost of college has steadily escalated, and continues to do so. Someone taking ten years to pay down their package from 1995 or 2000 is in an entirely different boat than some kid going through the meat grinder now, knowing that unless they land a plum job right out of the gate, they're on the hook until they're at least forty years old. Obviously, that has additional impacts on other decisions they might normally make earlier in life, such as getting married, starting a family, or purchasing a car and/or house. We are seeing those economic impacts.
I don't use the word "racketization" lightly. It is a racket, just like the health care system is a racket. The costs are way out of whack with what the services actually cost to provide, because there are parasitic entities and economic externalities that customers are forced to subsidize, above and beyond the services they're actually paying for.
It is naked profiteering and usury, nothing more nor less. I've already resigned to the fact that I will be paying interest on two-hundred-dollar textbooks for the rest of my life. I really don't see any way out of this anymore. I make decent money, but not enough to get ahead or catch up. It took too long to get to this point, and now I have ten years of interest accrued on me. I turn fifty-two next month and have no retirement savings. It is mathematically impossible for me to pay down my student-loan debt, and save anything significant for retirement, before I'm, say, sixty-five or probably even seventy.
Here's a more detailed example: I have been making payments on two of my "smaller" Sallie Mae loans since day one, which is about ten years now. At about $85.00/month, that comes to about $10k so far paid into these loans over the past decade. Looking at the dashboard of the company that services these loans, the combined principal was about $7k, and after ten years of steady payments, again about $10k total so far, I still owe about $5k on the principal. I've already paid out far more in interest than the principal was in the first place. And even if I win the lottery tomorrow and pay it all down overnight, I will have paid out $15k on a pair of loans totaling $7k to begin with.
And again, those are the two smallest loans, in a portfolio of nine loans. I have no problem with paying down what I borrowed, with reasonable interest, but it took ten years to get a job that still pays a bit less than the average for an MBA degree in California (which means that I didn't get the value that I still have to pay for), and so unless some mystery windfall takes place at some magical point, I'll simply never catch up.
It's not a catastrophe, I'm not out on the street or anything, but one practical outcome of this situation is that I have less disposable income to spread around my local economy. I would take my family out to dinner more often at the local restaurants. I would upgrade my vehicle from the quarter-century-old beater I currently use (thankfully I have a very short work commute), by purchasing a newer vehicle from one of the local dealers. I would take vacations more often. I have some work I would like done on my house and property, that I would hire local contractors for. So there is all this money I could be putting into my local economy, but instead I have to send across the country to some faceless bloodsucker that's just going to put it in a stack.
Now multiply that situation times a million, or several million. This is not just a moral issue, it is an economic one. This is yet another way in which an institutionalized racket hoovers money out of the pockets of working people -- who again, would actually spend that money -- and into the Hamptons homes of wealth hoarders, who will just use it to bribe some university to accept their unqualified fail-children..
This is not by accident, this is by design -- the best way to keep the populace under the collective thumb of the privileged few is to hook them on debt, and never let them off that hook. Our debt, after all, is their equity; they have a vested interest in keeping us hung on that hook in perpetuity, and it has the added benefit of keeping the peons compliant.
Elizabeth Warren appears to understand these things better than the other candidates, or at least she is articulating them more concretely. She is connecting those ideas to actual policy, sometimes in pretty granular detail. If we had a functioning media ecosystem, instead of corporate careerists hosting a fucking beauty pageant, we might get somewhere with that.
Regardless, if you take a step back and look at what's good for the country at this point in time, a few things are inescapable:
- You can't have a coherent foreign policy without a comprehensive domestic policy. Right now we have neither.
- You can't have real domestic policy without social justice, in the sense that everyone feels like they have an equal stake in the outcome, can vote without some peckerwood removing all the power cables from the voting machines in the black precincts, etc.
- You can't have social justice without economic justice. The only people who fall for those "cultural" blut und boden distractions are broke-ass rednecks with too much time on their hands. News flash: when people have a future worth looking forward to, they don't have the time or inclination to worry about gays marrying or abortion or wedding cakes or whatever.
When someone -- from either party -- has the balls to step up and take on the douchebags with their Fuck Your Feelings tee-shirts, and their incivility, then I'll be impressed. Until then, fuck you and your hippie-punching bullshit. Go sell used cars or something. I have no interest in making nice with people who have been telling me to go fuck myself for years.
I liked Sanders in 2016, but less so now, as he is vague on policy, and seems to have the same issue with making his tax returns public that Agent Orange has. Even if there's nothing incriminating in them, the longer a pol takes to do that simple thing, the more suspicious we should be of their behavior. Bernie Sanders specifically waited until April 15th to release the last ten years of returns, hemming and hawing for weeks on end, which leads reasonable people to conclude that there's something in his 2008 return he doesn't want you to see. Whatever it is, it's almost impossible for it to be as bad as what's in Trump's returns, but it doesn't look good.
I get why some folks have just become too inured or exhausted from the reality-teevee nonsense to bother to tune in anymore. It feels tedious and useless, part of a stupid game you didn't want to play in the first place. Fair enough. But right now, there are children kept in cages like dogs, separated from their parents, terrified and alone, because these fucking monsters decided that the violence and terror they were fleeing wasn't quite bad enough. Maybe it doesn't matter that it's being done in your name too. Each of us has to decide for ourselves what we're willing to live with.
But sticking to the pretense for now, that we still strive to be a nation of laws and accountability, even if that isn't always realistic, we have to acknowledge that if we give up on even trying for those things, even when our collective faces are being rubbed in their wrongdoing every goddamned day, if we give up then we might as well give up for good. Don't bother to vote, don't bother to care. Nothing matters anyway, right? Fuck the kids and the planet they'll inherit. It's all just competing, equivalent forms of corporate cynicism. Is that really the way it is?
You have to decide for yourself if it is or not, and then act -- that is, take action -- accordingly. Even if it's just a letter to a senator, enough of those things make a dent. Or we can just be above it all and let someone else deal with the repercussions of our collective indolence. So far the Dems seem to be bouncing back from their initial abdication of responsibility in these pressing matters.
What Trump and Barr have cooked up here may end up not requiring impeachment (although I believe they already do), but they definitely merit further investigation, and Trump's defiance of that only reinforces the impression that he's waaaayyyyyy more guilty of a lot more shit that we don't even know about yet.
This is where striking that delicate balance between patience and urgency come into play. It's only been a week since the report dropped, but what a week, right? Every week seems faster and worse than the last, like a particle accelerator powered by shit. It only gets worse until enough of the peons decide they've had enough, and remind their employees who really works for whom.
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