Family Affairs

Isn't it wonderful to live in a country where an endless line of otherwise unemployable fail-children can lecture everyone on the evils of nepotism? I mean, Hunter Biden seems like a garden-variety cheesedick failson who rode his last name as far as it would take him. Which makes him different from Ronna Romney, Liz Cheney, Meghan McCain, the adult Trump offspring, and all these other tedious assholes, exactly how?

Yes, it's bullshit that Hunter Biden should be able to get this makework bullshit job and scoop up an easy $50k/month for nothing. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to what the conniving, chiseling, pelf-grubbing spawn of Donald Trump's polluted seed raked in last year, and the year before, and next year. You know? The fucking balls on these goddamned people.

What the fuck does Meghan McCain do, sits her fat ass on a morning talk-show for bored housewives and inflicts her worthless opinions on everyone else, since she's completely unqualified for anything resembling actual labor where there's a tangible product at the end of the day. Her skill set includes calling the manager and pushing around the help. She doesn't do a single thing that you would trade a hard-earned dime for. If she was on a cruise that shipwrecked on a deserted island, she'd be roasted on a spit within a week -- one, because then you'd finally get her to shut the fuck up, and two, because she's completely useless otherwise.

I've always despised the Kennedys and Bushes for this same nonsense, this false sense of noblesse oblige intertwined with the expectation that since you know their name, you love their game. Oh, how nice of you to take a break from your Hamptons parties to pretend you give two shits about the peons. But at least most of the scions of those families made some minimal effort to be marginally competent at something. Not anymore. You wouldn't hire Eric Trump to fix your fucking toilet.

Once again, you have to give Paris Hilton some credit -- she may be a clueless idiot, but at least she had the common decency to take her hard-earned money and go the fuck away.

One Down, Many More To Go

Fuck the Koch brothers, right in their evil hearts. The family fortune was literally started with their dad digging oil wells for Stalin, then building an oil refinery for Hitler. It's gone steadily downhill since then.

David and Charles Koch epitomize the Scrooge McDuck scumbag who hoards pelf for its own sake, occasionally doling out a crumb here or there to the "right" type of philanthropic endeavor, but never anywhere near the ballpark of what it would be if they just paid their goddamned taxes.

It would be nice to think that that sort of person is actually somewhat miserable, that having to spend all one's time plotting and scheming in order to hoard and accumulate endlessly would eventually create a mental feedback loop where that's pretty much all you can do anymore, just in terms of having an existence, rather than a life that you take joy in. Maybe not. Maybe people like that are just hardwired to endlessly compete with one another, to play dress-up and go to the big parties and schmooze and pretend they don't all hate each other.

Check out the intricate mechanisms of the political system right here and now -- there are enormous, deliberately set fires engulfing hundreds of thousands of acres in the Amazon rain forest at the current moment. It is an ecosystem within itself, and a cornerstone of the world's ecosystem. Destroying enough of the rain forest would drastically accelerate an already looming climate change situation.

This has been going on for years, of course, mostly to clear land for cattle ranchers, but since the election of the current Trump clone there, the process has been intensified. Since Preznit Genius Q. Dealmaker has decreed that trade wars are good and easy to win, China in response has cut off all American agricultural products for import, especially soybeans, which as you might imagine, China consumes a great volume of.

Guess which country China just signed a huge soybean deal with?

All of these features are natural results of the system the Koch brothers have quite literally purchased with their ill-gotten pelf -- not just lower tax rates, but the steady elimination of even basic environmental protections, and installing climate-change-denying clowns in important government offices. This is what they wanted, and we've let them do it, at the very least by having enough chumps fall for their self-serving propaganda.

It's a small consolation that, for all his filthy money, David Koch is every bit as dead as the homeless heroin addict in the next drawer at the morgue, and from the look of things a hell of a lot more reviled. It's a reminder, though, that the homeless guy deserves better, but hopefully it's also a reminder to the surviving Koch brother that no matter how many crumbs he disperses to the art museum or the philharmonic or whatever rich-asshole hobby, what he'll be remembered for is ruining the planet.

Oh, the rented dogsbodies at Reason and AEI and all that will slap together some insincere encomia, but Charles will know. He'll know that the family name has passed on to utterly useless progeny -- fat, soft, spoiled jerkoffs who will be used as catamites and barbecue in the eventual climate change holocaust. He'll be every bit as dead as the poorest dirt farmer he poisoned or exploded, and most people will spit as they say his name.

There's your legacy, Chuck. That's your mark on the world, after all that. Nobody in your life ever really loved you, without due compensation. Know that above all else. Enjoy what's left of your time, with your empire of dirt.

Golem

I've never really been the "guilty pleasure" type, but I have to confess that I'm enjoying this Clownstick thing more and more by the day. Whether he intends it or not, Trump and his candidacy have revealed more about our sclerotic joke of a political system in general, and the Republican party in particular, than perhaps even Trump himself would want.

This is the natural, entirely foreseeable result of Citizens United, of the teatards' jabbering incoherence and raving toxicity being empowered and enabled. Since they are for nothing, only against things, and don't know or care how things actually work, the teatards act as an attacking swarm of fire ants, mindlessly converging on a target until they're bored with it, moving on to the next one. Johnny Walnuts had their reluctant fealty when he had the northern sorceress at his side, and hardly seven years later, he might as well be Jerry Brown or Jimmy Carter as far as they're concerned. Boehner and McConnell are next.

Clownstick understands how this game is played, understands his audience, knows that you never apologize and never admit wrongdoing. Even ol' Billy Jeff, likely to be your future first First Gentleman come November next year, once famously opined that 'murcans would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right. Trump has honed this knowledge to a science, perfected the technique, finessing his bluster and turning his greatest weakness -- an almost bizarrely thin skin, a complete inability to take even a mild joke at his expense -- into a "take no shit" demeanor that jibes perfectly with how his maroon followers see themselves, at least when their parole officers aren't around.

Pack all of your ongoing "cultural" signifiers into a hobo's bindle, and to an item they perfectly align with these miscreants' view of everything -- the world, the country, themselves. They seriously do not get that they are in the minority on these issues, that most people know that the traitor loser flag was a direct product of one of the most vile institutions known to humankind, and the only reason it was brought back in 1961 was to tell civil rights activists to fuck off. That most people understand that Benghazi!!1!one!! is a crock of shit kept alive by liars and intellectual perverts. That the Republican party has become a haven for crackpots and sociopaths, bankrolled by a handful of evil old men who literally do not understand money the way you or I or almost anyone else understands money.

The Iran nuclear "deal" is just the newest sack of steaming horseshit for them to sift through and smear on the walls. It is a perfect example of how their collective mindset is about fifty years out of date. The Cold War mindset is no longer operational, no matter how much Putin "rears his head" and annexes pieces of Ukraine. Iran is not going to blithely accept the conditions of a treaty signed by the hated shah 45 years ago, while its next-door neighbors build their arsenals.

Trump's reaction to the deal was just priceless, though. He said something to the effect that he would have "doubled" or "tripled" sanctions on the Iranians, presumably until they said  "uncle". That's all well and good, but it rings with the mindless bluster of someone who doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. For one, sanctions were internationally imposed, and were on the verge of expiring and collapsing, with no international support for renewal. European countries trade quite freely with Iran, and as the EU continues to unravel, the sanctions are hurting their bottom line. It's just business, and even a thrice-bankrupted casino huckster like Clownstick should understand that. Without international support for sanctions, you've got another Cuba on your hands, something the rest of the world looks for decades on as a monumental waste of time.

Secondly, despite how the deal is being portrayed as a handshake between John Kerry and the mullahs, this is a multilateral deal -- Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany are also signatories to this. It's an acknowledgement of reality, that the world is multipolar rather than unipolar or bipolar (heh) and we can't just piss on any and every hydrant we feel like anymore. Trump reinforces the notion, which should have been dispelled over the last decade in the sands of Sykes-Picot's hundredth anniversary, that we call all shots. It ain't like that anymore, hoss, and no amount of John Wayne posturing will change that.

That too is the fault of the elites:  globalization really means interdependence, which means that if we fuck around too much and China decides to stop buying our T-bills as a hedge for their own economic issues, we're fucked. They're fucked too, of course, but they dropped some 20 million souls during the Great Revolution, just from famine and hardship. They're not afraid to take a hit, where we talk a big game about sacrifice, but reserve the actual sacrifice for the 1% who actually participate in the warrior caste. There are no Clownsticks in the fucking army, nor will there ever be. This is all a money game, and there is no money to be had in serving, only in contracting.

While the Koch Brothers and Shelly Adelson and Foster Friess and Donald Trump use money to keep score and measure their shriveled, lifeless cocks, the rest of the world scrambles for crumbs just to stay afloat, to pay the mortgage, to buy food and medical care and birthday presents for the kids, to keep the student loan sharks at bay one more month, to purchase the fading glimmer of hope that maybe things will work out. It would be bad enough if these obscenely wealthy, do-nothing cocksuckers just hoarded their pelf and hid from the world; far worse that they instead choose to use said pelf to turn what's left of the working class on itself, against each other.

I don't feel a bit sorry for the working-class dogs who've been tricked mercilessly into voting against their own rational self-interest. I agree with them that the beauty of freedom and capitalism is that we are free to choose a great many things. And in a world where information is free and over-abundant, they choose to run after the bright shiny object, the fools' gold of reality teevee hucksters and comic-book movie franchises. They asked for all this; they still want it. Mencken was right that they deserve to get it good and hard. Try to insulate yourselves from the consequences as best you can. As I've been saying for some time now, I hear Costa Rica is nice.

Velikaya Voyna, Letom Akuly

So, now that some time has actually passed since Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down, by Russian-backed separatists using Russian-supplied weapons, have we actually learned anything new?

Putin is a bastard. Well, no shit. Good thing he got the Winter Olympics this year, and the 2018 World Cup. Sanctions are one way to hit this prick, another is to delegitimize his prestige goals. So we'll see how many of these outraged countries boycott the World Cup in 2018. But that's a pretty effective way to take the piss out of the guy.

Despite what armchair tough-guys Poor Ol' Straight Talk and Huckleberry Closetcase are braying every Sunday morning on the network circle-jerk, we aren't going to war with Russia. Here is where The Googul, or a history book, or even a decent memory, is helpful. Despite being in some sort of conflict or other since World War 2 ended, almost none of those military actions have been against countries that can actually fight back. Oh, your Iraqs and Vietnams and such like can muster enough guerrilla insurgency to wear us down and make us leave, but I'm talking about countries who can strike back in the US. That hasn't happened, and it ain't gonna happen.

Russia may be something of a Third World despotate (albeit an enormous one), in terms of laws and life expectancy and such, but they aren't in the same league as the banana stands and oil cans we're used to knocking over with our swinging dick.

What we're seeing in Ukraine is a civil war, pure and simple, and it's one that at least in part could have been avoided by more prudent action on the part of the US and Europe. Continuous instigation to get Ukraine into NATO and/or the EU, or to get them on the IMF debt hook, was always going to be unacceptable to Russia, just as Soviet incursions and overtures into (for starters) Cuba and Nicaragua were completely unacceptable to us. Do these people not recall the Saint Reagan years, or was it all just a collective coke-fueled dream?

"So what?", you might say, and not without some justification. "Fuck the Russkies, we run this popsicle stand, baby! USA! USA! Dee-fence, unh-unh! Dee-fence! We're the hegemon, we run the show, we call the shots."

Well, ah, yes and no. This is a classic case of "we got the guns, but they got the numbers"; yes, we have 11 aircraft carriers where no other nation has any, and we have state-of-the-art machinery in every phase of war -- land, sea, air. Hell, our killbot roboplanes are more sophisticated than all but a few conventional manned air forces.

But this has all come at a cost. Fat, drunk, and stupid, as Dean Wormer acidly observed so long ago, is no way to go through life, son. Militarists can jabber on about how the defense budget is at or near an all-time low as a percentage of GDP, but that is meaningless in the context of banana-republic levels of economic inequality and mobility. It is a zero-sum game; all those aircraft carriers and killbots come at the price of something else along the line -- a school, a road, a bridge, an educational grant, something to give someone in the lower dalit strata of 'murkin life an opportunity besides working multiple shit jobs just to survive, or worse yet, becoming a Juggalo.

In the meantime, they attempt to whip the maroons into a jingoist frenzy about Russia, or Syria, or whoever. Ambrose Beirce famously said that war was God's way of teaching Americans geography, but he would be disappointed to know that that is no longer even true, as in order to teach someone something the other party has to be willing to learn. And Americans just don't give a shit about where any of the multifarious objects of this or that week's Two Minutes of Hate are, or what the history or context might mean.

(Or that, uh, it ain't just Ukrusky separatists that shoot down passenger jets. There's your inconvenient truth, podna.)

The thing is, you're supposed to completely ignore the fact that the owners are screwing you over, every day in every way, that quite literally the more people they fuck over, the wealthier they get. Instead, you get bombarded with either a barrage of "the world is going up in flames" stories, again devoid of meaningful context or analysis, or completely meaningless features on the comings and going of "royals", or how some imperceptible change in yet another interchangeable comic-book movie franchise is, like, rilly rilly important.

When 1% of the people control more assets than the bottom 90%, it's a recipe for destabilizing levels of inequality. An increased level of anxiety and fear becomes systemic, and must be, via the corporate propaganda machine, projected onto The Other as much as possible. Whether it's assholes in a country you can't find on a map, or teeming hordes of Central American maras coming to steal your flat-screen teevees and virgin daughters, it's always someone else's fault. Pay no attention to the leveraged-buyout specialists behind the curtain.

Not to fear, though, gentle reader -- though your job has been outsourced to Bangalore, you will still be able to purchase the item you once manufactured for less money, so long as it doesn't exceed your gubmint assistance allowance. But hey, those Apaches are swell, aren't they?

The 1% needn't worry about any of this, mind you -- they can and have put millions of their countrymen out in the street without a care in the world, because increased capital mobility. And if there's one thing they know, it's that large groups of people will literally go live in tents before they'll mobilize and at least try to do something, anything about the fuckers that put them there.

And on the off chance we actually were to send any sort of ground force into Russia, or Ukraine, or anywhere else for that matter, there won't be any one-percenters' kids in the action. There is never any rich skin in this game.

Also, too.

Misdiagnosis

So now that Very Important People are showing how aware they are of this inequality thing, alarums have been raised, and remedies proposed. Here OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria throws some ideas into the ring for consideration:

Main remedies are activation policies, meaning get services in the governments that will get the people who are unemployed or seeking for employment with the job opportunities.

This is not being done enough. The United States spends one-fourth of what the rest of the OECD countries spend on this particular service, getting the unemployed or seeking employment with the employment opportunities.

Second, skills, education and skills. There’s a big mismatch between the skills and what the market is demanding. Therefore, your — you have people have diplomas, but they can’t do very much with it. Third, use a tax structure and use a budget in order to support companies that may be providing jobs or better opportunities.

And last but not least, remember, this is a problem that is affecting the capacity of the United States to get the people at the lowest revenue levels and at the lowest education levels to get up in the ladder, in the social ladder, in the ladder of opportunities.

Ah, the fabled "ladder of opportunities," esteemed tool of the privileged class who long ago pulled it up after using it. Look, Angel, chanting "jobs" and "education" like some oligarchist mantra means nothing at all when there are few jobs worth having anymore, far too many individuals chasing all of those jobs, and higher education is a fucking racket.

The implicit promise of the "jobs 'n' college" evangelists is that those things work hand-in-hand to improve the lives of individuals. And that's how it should work, certainly.

But the reality of it is that rather than a promise, it's more of a threat -- that if you don't go to college, and set yourself up for 10-15 years of indentured servitude in order to pay off the costs of said college, after which maybe you can start making real money, if there's enough jobs in your area, etc., etc., you're screwed.

These rackets serve not only to enrich the coffers of those who run them and profit from them, but they serve an ancillary purpose -- the masses of people who are herded into these rackets, and get on the financial hook, are instantly rendered compliant, complicit in the racket. They now have a vested interest to not be disruptive, to not ask too many questions -- or the wrong questions, such as why wages stagnated while productivity doubled, why the only people to profit during the so-called Great Recession were the already wealthy, why the "practical" thing to do with the one life you've been given is to be some indentured wage slave to some bastard who will fuck you over at the first opportunity, if it will make his stock portfolio go up a quarter of a point.

They don't want you asking questions, or protesting your ration of crumbs -- not that it matters; should you find the sack to get on your hind legs and say something out loud they'll just send Erin Burnett or some other water-carrier down to make fun of you, marginalize you before your plaint even gets a fair hearing.

They would prefer that you either go along to get along, or just say "fuck it" and give up your eternal tilt at an indifferent windmill. I don't think it can be overstated, how little the elites give a red-hot monkey-fuck about you, your families, your communities, your country. Make no mistake, as far as they're concerned, you're either a tool for them to use, or an impediment to their efforts. That is the extent of what you are to the people who actually run this country, run the world.

Serious People jabber about this condition of persistent, escalating inequality, make modest proposals, hem and haw as if this is some trick of the tail, a logistical impossibility to correct. Folks, it is almost heartbreakingly simple, and it does not have to involve tumbrels and guillotines (though you'll get no argument from me should it go in that direction).

The mechanics of a capitalist society, to the extent that we still live in a truly capitalist society, are premised on carrots and sticks, incentives and disincentives. Ideally (heh), the carrots and sticks should be applied as needed, regardless of the situation. From a purely systems analysis perspective, it's not supposed to be a question of who applies those carrots and sticks, so much as what applies them. In systems dynamics, they are applied to optimize the overall efficiency of the system.

In the post-World War 2 era, it worked that way for a few decades. Americans of that time realized that an empowered working class spent its money on goods and services, thus enriching the companies who produced those things. Rich people paid taxes, and paid their workers a wage they could live on and spend money on. It was tacitly understood by all that incentives and disincentives would be applied by the system to keep the machine humming.

But as you may have noticed, it no longer works that way. Rich people and corporations get carrots, everyone else gets sticks. There is nothing resembling even application. This is because the system is no longer run and maintained by systems people, relatively non- or bi-partisan people who understand the utilitarian notion of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

In deregulating the finance and lobbying industries, Saint Reagan essentially sold the system to the elite money class, who of course simply run it for their own benefit -- and everyone else's detriment. It is not enough for them to gain, everyone else must lose in the process. Saint Clinton continued this new dynamic and globalized it, put the final nail in the coffin with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Bush the Lesser drove the cock home with the jackhammer fury of a thousand Ron Jeremys, Obama has done jack shit to remove said cock, and if you think either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush will ever consider not doing whatever Wall Street tells them to, you should really stop huffing industrial solvents.

On and on it goes. It will continue, probably worsen for most. It will not change, no matter how much you wish, no matter how fervently you participate in the useless voting ritual. It is true that only one party wants to get rid of the EPA, Department of Education, the minimum wage, a woman's right to choose, and so on. But it is also true that neither party will ever stand up to the people who have perpetrated this economic monstrosity that pervades everything else, not even a little bit.

I feel like a broken record most times anymore, bringing up this topic. Not because I'm bored with it -- far from it. I'm utterly fascinated by this tiny claque of transnational merchant princes, who actively -- deliberately, mind you -- are on an open mission to fuck this country over, and everyone in it. I'm fascinated by people who have more money than they could ever spend, and yet it's still not enough for them. I'm amazed by people who look at the millions of lives they adversely affect as some big fucking game.

I'm fascinated by the poor people that these soulless fuckers rook into voting against themselves, an enormous swath of chickens who can't wait to enthusiastically show their support for good ol' Colonel Sanders. How could you not find these people interesting. how could anyone not watch this dynamic and be compelled by its narrative, by its inevitable outcomes?

And people like Angel Gurria fascinate me perhaps most of all, because Gurria probably thinks he means well. These dogsbodies of the merchant princes, they should know better -- I mean, they do know how to read fucking spreadsheets and charts, right? But they seem sincere in their convictions that if "we" just made "opportunities" available for "them" to bootstrap themselves, the problem would solve itself. No matter how much evidence over the last generation is available and observable, they faithfully hew to their standard "remedies" -- go through the "higher education" racket, get balls-deep in debt so you can get a better job (doing what?), spend most of your working life trying to repay that debt and not get your job shipped to Asia. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

So I mentioned that this situation is simpler to resolve than the Serious People make it out to be, and it is. But there has to be willingness to use carrots and sticks on everyone, not just carrots for the owners and sticks for the peons. Incentivize keeping companies stateside and not exporting labor. Incentivize paying a living wage. Disincentivize screwing your workers, the way shitheel companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's have become accustomed to doing. Make corporations pay their fucking taxes. Disincentivize offshoring profits. Disincentivize overcharging for college education. Start a massive infrastructure work project, like Eisenhower did with the interstate highways. Enact a 1-2% redistributive tax on the "high net worth" assholes, say, anyone with over $10M in wealth. Spread it around. Institute a one-time debt jubilee, paying down either a certain percentage or amount of interest-bearing debt on people's homes and educations (which are usury and overcharging in the first place). The Masters might be surprised at how quickly the economy surges from such measures, and everyone, including the owners, would actually profit from these measures. After all, if the peons have more money, they will buy more stuff. Shocking, I know.

Obviously none of this will ever happen, but what's really pathetic and disheartening is that no one with access to the corporate media would even consider mentioning such things. If there's a system that's incredibly self-regulating, it is the system that manufactures "official" opinion and consent. And the pillaging of the rentier class will persist for exactly as long as the peons are willing to put up with it.

Frustrated Incorporated

What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years, at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane? -- Steve Buscemi, Con Air

As we head into the middle of the second decade of this blessed new century/millennium, there are some clear issues that societies will have to deal or cope with, if they are even to continue, much less progress. Almost all of the major ones -- water, climate change, health care, extended longevity, resource consumption, habitat depletion -- revolve around population (or more accurately, overpopulation).

Add into that mix the notion of work, as defined as the performance of productive duties and tasks, in order to secure an income by which one may survive, and even participate in the greater economy. This is an issue I've been dancing around here and there in recent months, but I reckon I'll spend most of this year teasing out ideas more and more as they occur, as events necessitate.

One such event that just took place was the rejection of UAW unionization among workers at the Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What's peculiar about this, as Ed points out in the link, is that not only is VW pro-union, but the Chattanooga plant is their only one without a union workforce. In other words, this was not the usual instance one sees in American sweatshops, where the threat of moving jobs overseas, in response to unionization, is more explicit than implicit.

No, what happened was an equally usual combination of cheap politics and ingrained cultural assumptions regarding the uselessness and corruption of unions. (As opposed to the mighty corporate bootstrappers of the world, who have never goldbricked or bullshitted their way through anything, no sirree Bob.)

This is what fascinates about this issue more than anything. Although I obviously have written a lot about economic issues over the years here, and I believe that the observations and occasional predictions have been proven correct far more often than not, I have no real specialized knowledge of economics. So I don't know or necessarily believe that Chattanooga is some sort of bellwether for American labor unions, in general or in particular. Obviously unions have massively declined since the '70s, in conjunction with globalizing labor and capital, and all those things are important factors in the concurrent median wage stagnation and the accrual of income and wealth to the very highest economic strata.

So the fascinating part is how willingly -- indeed, eagerly -- the worker bees have embraced the insect overlords who have systematically destroyed their lives and communities for four decades running. Anecdotally, one of my oldest friends, whose parents had union jobs, "shared" some bullshit anti-union graphic the day after the Chattanooga vote, with the smug surety that could only be possessed by someone who didn't think about their own childhood. Given the lack of self-awareness or intellectual consistency we see from the average 'murkin on virtually any issue of note, it's probably safe to say that this idiotic sentiment is the norm, rather than a statistical anomaly. An entire generation of right-wing radio loons has desensitized the proles to even basic reflection and common sense.

It's very difficult to feel any sympathy or pity for people who so consistently vote and rant against their own rational self-interest, time and again, and then are surprised to reap the exact consequences which they sowed. But the thing is, not only do those consequences affect everyone, as the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, but they will continue to hit harder.

Overpopulation in globalized "emerging" markets obviously exerts downward wage pressure across the board (except, of course, for our wondrous job creators -- o bold transnational merchant princes!). This is what we have been seeing the past two generations, and the pace has increased the entire time. At the same time, technology and innovation have served to automate and commodify routine jobs, workflow processes, and entire jobs and production lines. In other words, whether you are building Volkswagens or flipping burgers at Mickey D's, you are only doing so until a robot can be developed to do your job.

So your best options become either to be the person who maintains and repairs the mechanical lines of production, or to spend 4-6 years and $100K or so to get into the manager class and "optimize" those operations. You don't have to be a whiz with numbers to intuitively grok that you only need so many folks to perform either of those functions.

Imagine what things will look like in 10, 20, 30 years, even without increases in, say, extreme climate events and patterns, or water scarcity. More humans to contend with, and by definition, the increased efficiencies in producing and distributing commodities will be disruptive, to say the least, to the normal mechanisms of commerce. You don't have something for x number of people to do, but you need them engaged in the economy at some point, purchasing things that are produced and move through supply chains. Proposals for guaranteed minimum incomes are being discussed, and will out of necessity be implemented on some level at some point, probably sooner rather than later.

How much do you pay this x number of folks to essentially do nothing (or at least nothing that adds direct value to the aggregate economy), and how will that square with (again) consistent downward wage pressure on people who do perform necessary tasks? There is a point of equilibrium for any set of multiply competing dynamics, so there is certainly one here.

In short, what price-point will Joe Average have in this future workscape, where his options are circumscribed by participating in the "higher education" racket, meaning (in the best case scenario) years of indentured servitude paying down his overpriced tuition, versus being someone who can just kick back and collect a stipend that, once the externalities of the "traditional" career path are accounted for, may end up being comparable?

Another recent event that highlighted this coming paradigm shift was the announcement from the Congressional Budget Office that a labor effect of the Affordable Care Act will be a large number of people leaving the conventional workforce, to trade in jobs they hate or are just tired of, but were hanging on to for the necessary health-care benefits, to pursue their entrepreneurial or creative dreams. Of course this is tragic news to the class that has a vested interest in keeping their work staff cowed and compliant, but again, it also begs the question of what those folks will do.

There will always be something to do, don't get me wrong. You can't automate every single thing, can't commodify every single experience. This is something the optimizers didn't really think through, as all these technological blessings and productivity gains began accruing mostly to the top of the food chain. Sure, it's been neat to be able to get those nifty electronic devices from Chinese sweatshops at bargain prices, but there's only so many teevees and iPhones you can buy, and there's only so many line-waiting dunces to buy the same thing with new bezels every year.

We can't all make each other $5 cups of coffee, or self-publish e-books (though FSM knows I've given the latter my best shot). The more entrepreneurial among us will come up with more and better scams and rackets by which to grift the poor and gullible; exploiting the vulnerability of others is, aside from fouling our own nests, probably the most charming of all innately human characteristics.

Of course, once enough people realize that their Tinkerbell economic system is largely smoke and mirrors and imaginary wealth in the first place, subsistence will be the job, and just about everyone will be employed at it.

1 Timothy 6:10

So plutocrat performance artist Tom Perkins, apparently trying to leave no doubt amongst the proles as to whether he really is an asshole, lobs this little polemic:

In order to vote, [Perkins] proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should have a million votes."

Perkins demurred afterward, claiming that he had "intended to be outrageous and [he] was," but it was probably the truest expression of his beliefs about society at large -- and by association, the beliefs of many of his pelf-grubbing peers. These beliefs are simple, and pervasive, and borne out by the things they say and the things they do.

They believe firmly that poor people are poor not because of luck or circumstance, but because they're lazy and/or stupid, that they're basically children of a lesser god, and only by the benevolence and forbearance of their betters, and an occasional crumb from the table, can they be truly managed to a level of competence that is tolerable to the elites. They believe that they comprise the sum total of "greatness" this country still has to offer, choosing not to look back and see what really made the US great, a true world leader, for a considerable period of time. They have the luxury of being able to fuck things up, and then to sit back and complain about it.

To be (somewhat) fair, you have to give Perkins this much:  he's not an entitled idiot who walked into Daddy's money and just assumed he hit a triple. He has degrees from MIT and Harvard. (Then again, George W. Bush has a coveted Harvard EmBeeAyyy, doesn't he?) Still, Perkins does at least seem to have (or did at one time in his life) a marketable skill. The problem is that he thinks that skill gives him some sort of helicopter view over the rabble, and the right to exercise it as such.

Coming from a guy who weaseled out of a fatal yachting accident with a measly $10K fine, the whole thing is, pardon the expression, too rich. It's all just so terrible for them, the ingratitude of the peons. Not quite enough to change places, mind you, but terrible nonetheless. They have it all, but it ain't enough. They need us to love them, apparently, or at least admire their swagger and fortitude.

But that would be like a rape victim sympathizing with their attacker; the family of one of Ted Bundy's or Richard Ramirez' victims sympathizing with the animals that slaughtered their loved ones for the thrill of it all. There's Stockholm Syndrome, and there's mental illness catalyzed by extreme trauma.

The one-percenters, in their inexplicable defensiveness, have chosen to fight fire with stupid, to lash out at the least fortunate with the most despicable plaints. The peons need to organize enough to grab Perkins and his scummy ilk by their custom silk lapels and say:  Listen close, motherfucker. You won life's lottery. You and your children and grandchildren will never know for a day what 99% of us know every day of our lives -- that life is struggle; that we're lucky to cadge a paycheck-to-paycheck living doing something we can barely tolerate through the best years of our lives; that we're one bad break, a job shift to China or a health-care scare, from the street.

It barely merits pointing out that, since the political system is already owned lock, stock, and barrel by rich assholes like Perkins, that the "one dollar, one vote" principle he espouses is already in play, has been in play as long as any of us can remember. I don't know what system he's talking about; the system I know is one where rich people (like Perkins, who sits on Faux News' board) pit poor people against each other with imaginary distractions.

These idle rich fuckfaces use the system not just for their own benefit, but for their own amusement -- while you try to figure out how you're going to make it through the next week or month or year, they look for a new toy to play with, something else to keep score. It really is a game to them, and my long-standing contention that "Wall Street hates Main Street" couldn't possibly be clearer now. Although it does overstate the point; to hate something you actually have to care on some level, and they don't care. At all. At all. At all.

One assumes that Perkins' greatest expense, aside from taxes and stepstools to plant his nose up Danielle Steel's ass, is a team of minions to help him get his pants on around his giant fucking balls every morning. It's a toss-up at this point whether a more satisfying fate for him would be for him to be rendered destitute by some random ill fortune, or just to see his head on a pike.

Either way, Perkins is 82, so he'll be dead, sooner rather than later, but not soon enough. And some stray three-legged dog will stroll by, and piss on his headstone and take a massive dump on his grave.

School Daze

As someone with a 12-year-old daughter who is bright, inquisitive, and certainly would benefit from the college experience (were it not a racket), I am honestly at a moral and ethical crossroads as to whether to encourage her to simply keep learning and achieving on her own, or to go into indentured servitude for a magic piece of paper that ain't all that magic anymore.

Knowledge is free. It's credentialism that costs you.

Capitalism Y'all

I think most of us can agree one at least one thing -- when you attempt to underpin an essential economic principle with observations from the staged talk show of a woman who actively pimps her children for a living, you've lost, and hard. It's hard to imagine the sort of soulless fuck who attempts to intellectually square the nonsense of a creature like Kris Jenner with the philosophy of Adam Smith, but here you have it -- people who will reach for literally anything to justify their biases.

I have no wish, good or bad, regarding Kris Jenner or her skeevy, starfucking progeny, save that they get actual jobs producing something useful.

Ownership Society

Let's see if by chance anything at all unrelated to royal babies or Anthony Weiner's cock might be happening in this crazy planet of ours, shall we? Maybe there's a reason we're hearing about those things instead of these things:

Apparently the slithering evil that is Halliburton continues its unholy bargain with the Elder Gods of R'lyeh, in that they have admitted to incompetence and the destruction of evidence that may very well have cost 11 men their lives and poisoned the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, yet pay a whopping $200,000 fine for all that. They may yet take a hit in civil court, but we're talking about a company that routinely pulls down $7bn in revenues quarterly.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh CheneyCthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, indeed.

Kids, are you up on all the latest super-awesome oil-extraction technologies? If you love 'murka, then you are down with fracking and tar sands like Lindsay Lohan chasing a dime bag of bathtub crank. Ah, except for the fact that tar sands EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is usually 25-50% of conventional oil EROEI, which may not be a dealbreaker, but is still substantially less than ideal. That and the problematic issue of the breakeven costs of tar sands range at $65-70/bbl for in situ (steam) and $90-100/bbl for mining.

IOW, the promises of petroleum plenitude for all are belied by the fact that those methods are only cost-effective at higher price ranges -- that is, if there's a scarcity. So either there's a scarcity or there isn't.

Also, too, the small problem of increasing environmental issues. Yeah, who'da thunk something would go south with injecting pressurized steam into substrata in order to melt and steam tar out of the topsoil. Jesus H. Christ, how could anything possibly go wrong there?

Which brings us to fracking, and as always, the day any of its bought-and-paid-for proponents agree to have it done in their backyards, with their water tables and aquifers, then I guess we can all be okey-doke about all that. Till then how 'bout them crickets you hear?

All of these things are just parts of a greater looming environmental issue, as the oceans acidify and fishing stocks continue their decline, at faster and faster rates. But we got what we paid for, which was "cheap" oil, without the bother of innovating truly renewable technologies. The U.S. government dumped half a billion dollars into Solyndra, while the Chinese gov't poured over $30bn into the same tech, and all we could do when Solyndra inevitably failed (in no small part due to health insurance costs, like every other American industry these days, held hostage to the most pernicious racket of all) was hold our dicks and scream about sociamalism.

And hey, speaking of which, how about the "revelation" that the parasitic financial class is manipulating commodities prices? You're shocked, right? The real issue here is not that Goldman Sachs jacks up the price of a can of Coke by a tenth of a cent by scooting tons of aluminum from warehouse to warehouse, but that they make billions of dollars by not producing a fucking thing.

Seriously, when I say that this is parasitism, I fucking well mean it. These people do not produce a goddamned thing, they simply broker and hedge and take bets and game the system. Because it's their system, you're just forced to participate in it, bunky. They own it all, and they rent the people who make laws and policy, and fuck you in the neck if you have a problem with any of that.

Investing used to mean that you participated in the creation of wealth and value, by collaborating in a financial endeavor that produced an item that a mass of human beings would want to buy. An innovation, an invention, a new item or service. Read any "get rich" volume from the uniquely American cult of "self-improvement" books. One thing they will all tell you is that you need to analyze and profile who you expect your customer base to be, and then to provide them with something of value.

Take my own example that I've undertaken this year -- I've played guitar at a decent skill level for a couple of decades now, and taught at various times throughout, so I constructed tabs, wrote text, and created books for people wanting to improve their game. The market will ultimately decide whether or not those things add value to the desires of the customer base.

But the bottom line is, for better or worse, I created something. I didn't hoard a vital commodity in order to leverage prices and game the system, and then skim a commission off the top. That is the Tony Soprano approach to economics, I don't care what these leeches try to rationalize this bullshit with. They're nothing but thieves and vipers. Instead of innovating and creating, people get rich these days simply by making book, taking bets, gaming systems for their own benefit at the expense of the unrich.

This is the system that they've bought and paid for, and contrary to popular plaint, that system is not at all broken, it's fixed. Keep that in mind at all times, when you're not distracted by the deliberate inanity of the corporate mockingbird.

Public Service Announcement; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Bomb

We all know this fact intuitively, but it still bears repeating and reminding ad nauseam -- all debt, whether it's your own personal household debt, or the debt incurred by your municipality, county, state, whatever, is someone else's equity. Just keep that in mind at all times when observing how the Masters of the Universe continue to find creative ways to rejigger the usury on their 30:1 leveraged derivatives on assets that frequently don't exist in the first place.

When they talk about "solvency," what they really mean is making goddamned sure that you and your kids and your grandkids and so on remain on the hook to paying them in perpetuity to the value they removed from your economy to hoard offshore. This is an important point, since the banksters' plaint is that they are worth the pelf they accrue, because of the value they add. But the only value added goes to directly to them, and comes out of everyone else's hide.

This is not politics, especially since they rent both parties. It's just math. It's simple -- if you have debt, the entity whose equity your debt affects has a vested interest in keeping your dumb ass on their balance sheet as long as possible. This is what I mean when I talk about "debt peonage" and "wage slavery," which are mutually reinforcing phrases.

If you make just enough money to get by, but never ahead -- as the majority of Americans do -- then you are on the hook forever, unless you're smart and lucky, and design the next hot app or whatever. Hard work alone will not do it anymore; there are plenty of folks out there busting ass at two or three pud jobs, who will never get off the hamster wheel.

Rule of Law

"We must be careful about what we pretend to be." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

So let's see if we have this straight:  some two-thirds of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo -- most of whom have been cleared for release, yet not released all the same -- continue to rot in their subtropical dungeon, without charge nor trial, for over a decade now. The only way for them to get out of their Orwellian sentence is suicide, and some of them have managed to take that path.

Now those who remain get force-fed, nasally. Perhaps this is because it was deemed to be even more painful and humiliating than being force-fed anally. Who knows? Nothing makes sense about this situation anymore. Except that nobody seems to give a shit whether these people will spend the rest of their lives stuck in some legal limbo that no one is in much of a rush to rectify.

Either they are guilty, or they aren't. Either there is evidence against them, or there isn't. Put them on trial and have done with it if they actually did something, or admit a mistake and set them free, and close this place already.

Just as we executed enemies who waterboarded Americans during World War 2, but reserved the right to use the same form of torture when it suited us, so the application of basic jurisprudence appears at this point to be nothing more than a polite affectation. Again, either we -- and our endlessly dithering constitutional law scholar of a president -- believe that it is wrong to imprison a human being without charge, trial, or proof of crime, or we believe it's perfectly fine to do such a thing for no better reason than political convenience and cowardice.

This is yet another in a long (and getting longer all the time) line of issues where Obama continues to whiff. If he wants his legacy to be something other than "Congress wouldn't let me" then he needs to sack up and by god do something about anything.

Seriously, dude, no one's expecting loaves and fishes. Create a few decent jobs; take some steps to alleviate the impending clustersomething that health care deform will perpetuate, since it does nothing at all to address the usurious racket comprising the American health care system; enforce basic party discipline to keep retiring Democrats onboard with simple background-check measures for deadly weapons; maybe pressure Harry Reid to insist on actually having to get your ass up there and spend time filibustering, rather than this lame "threat" dodge the goopers get away with routinely. Take a bold stand that civilized nations don't lock people up without charge and lose them in an offshore gulag for a decade or so.

Put these people on trial; if they're guilty, shoot them as enemy combatants. Whatever. But do something, ferchrissake, something slightly bolder and more principled than strapping a person to a table and jamming tubes up their nose to force-feed them like a foie gras goose. The fact that said person may not only have been supposed to be released, but may very well be innocent in the first place, and spent a decade of their life in hell because of someone else's chickenshittery, is a disgrace.

You can make fun of Dubya's ridonkulous Liberry and its self-serving exhibits, but what's Obama's library going to look like at the rate he's going, a cartoon of Barry O getting pushed around by Mitch McConnell and Jamie Dimon for eight goddamned years?

I know his acolytes console themselves that his feckless 11th-dimensional chess mastery is somehow infinity better than whatever shit sandwich Romney and Ryan were cooking up. But only as a mild, eroding bulwark against the eternal predations of the oligarchy, not that Obama has done thing one about them or even slowed them down. In the meantime, every bloody thing you despised about the Bushies -- imprisonment without trial, drone war without end, the ongoing and deliberate ruination of the financial system, the rich getting richer and the poor no longer even getting by -- continue unabated.

There's not much more time for Obama to decide and act on whether he wants to end on eight years of excuses and ineffectual moderation, or to take a risk and do something, anything, pick a direction and grab a shovel. I have zero faith that he'll do the right thing, and it no longer matters whether he wants to but can't, or if he simply was never the transformative figure he was pretending to be. Just another politician, forever chasing the next election and too timid to do anything that might actually impact someone from the non-donor class.

Everybody Hurts

This is awesome. This is my favorite thing for the weekend so far (especially since the Raiders failed to show up yet again today). I could watch 20 minutes of this with nothing but a wah-wahhh muted trumpet noise every few seconds. Extra props to the glassy-eyed blonde dingbat at 1:27, "ROMNEY" written across her forehead. She looks like her cult just told her to start crushing pills in the applesauce, so they can catch the comet coming around the dark side of the moon, mind processing the command as pure gabble, but still not bridging the synaptic divide caused by weeks of barinwashing and protein-free porridge.

Seriously, you wonder about folks like that. Did she scrawl across her forehead bu herself, getting in front of a mirror to get the lettering just so, or does the poor thing actually know someone who's enough of a friend to do the writing for her, yet not enough of a friend to talk her out of it in the first place? (And yes, anyone who wrote "OBAMA", or "PELOSI", or "SPRINGSTEEN" across their forehead like that deserves an equal measure of ridicule. People who pretend to hold deeply-conceived political philosophies, and then dress up like they're going to a Florida State-LSU matchup need to get a damned grip.)

Anyway, so long as we're clear -- the core of the schadenfreude (or as TBogg is calling it, Mittenfreude, nicely done there) is not that these poor souls dared to disagree with "us", as if Obama voters were and are monolithic. It's that they failed to explain their discontent sufficiently, it's that both they and their candidates failed utterly to clarify their positions, what they'd change, what effects those changes would entail, how those changes might help the economy.

It's pretty simple, folks -- when plutocrats wreck the economy to their own advantage, and your party then has the balls to put one of 'em up as a nominee before the wreckage has even been cleared from the playing field, you need to explain yourself. And if you can't, it's your own damned fault.

Master Debaters Part 2: Binders Full of Women

So the Obama shows up last night to better expose Mittens for what he is --  a smug, pompous jackass who needs to kindly go away and hug his precious hectomillions already, leave us peons to what's left of our scraps for the next four years. Extra super bonus points for the faces of death Mrs. "You People" Rmoney and son Tagg "Tagg" projecting at the stage, apparently hoping for some effect on Obama. Not only that, Tagg was so darn angry, he was like totally gonna get up all in Obama's face and throw a punch at him, because he's a tough guychickenhawk just like dear ol' Dad.

Lest anyone out there on the intartubez might think this is schtick here, it isn't. If we talk about "character" mattering, then what sort of "character" does it take for someone to lead pro-Vietnam War counter-demonstrations at Stanford, while getting four deferments and then heading off for France? For a nation that refuses to forget the most marginal slight, it's something that this barely merits mention. It seems to me to be about the most chickenshit thing a man can do, to protest loudly and vociferously for poorer, less-connected kids to go fight and die, and turn tail yourself every bloody chance you get.

Anyhoo, the narrative is back on track, Obama will have just enough momentum to push him back over the top, but not enough to actually change anything, and in four years we'll be switching between the Andrew Cuomo-Todd Akin debates and Honey Boo Boo's Celebrity Rehab show, while holding on for dear life as Our Betters continue to skim 90% of what economic gains there are to be had.

Some Folks Is Even Whiter Than Me (Slight Return)

[Graphic credit: Under the Mountain Bunker]

So the Mittster takes a detour from Hamptons fundraisers for douchey swells to have rap session with the NAACP, and, well, another day, another unforced error:

The audience initially welcomed the unofficial Republican nominee with a standing ovation and applauded when he promised to represent "all Americans of every race, creed and sexual orientation," and noted that "old inequities persist" even half a century after the civil rights movement.

But murmurs of disagreement rippled through the crowd early on when he argued that his policies would help "families of any color more than the policies and leadership of President Obama." When he added that he would reduce spending, in part, by eliminating "nonessential, expensive programs" like the president's healthcare plan, the audience booed for 15 seconds. And when Romney harshly criticized the president for failing to create jobs and "better educate tomorrow's workers," he appeared to have punctured much of the goodwill that was initially directed his way.

Romney stood quietly behind the lectern, smiling at the audience as it voiced disapproval. "I do not have a hidden agenda," he continued. "If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community, you are looking at him." To a scattering of boos and catcalls, the candidate paused and nodded firmly before carrying on with his speech. "You take a look," he said.

While a few audience members credited Romney for his bluntness, a number of them suggested that he intended to be provocative.

"He wasn't speaking to us," NAACP Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond said after Romney's speech. "He was speaking to that slice of white America that hasn't made up its mind about him, and he's saying, 'Look at me; I'm OK. I can get along with the Negroes. I can say things to them that they don't like, so I'm not afraid to stand up to them.' … I think that's what this is all about, and that's the reason he came."

That sounds about right. Now he has options -- he can run off to Dick Cheney's for another fatcat hoedown, or go on tour with Dave Chappelle. Either way, hilarity ensues.

Two Americas

Mitt's big fundraiser in The Hamptons proves once again that having an assload of money doesn't prevent one from being a complete turd of a human being. Hell, with this crowd, it's a qualification:

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."

Indeed. Stoopid poorz, don't they know what's best for them? Well, no matter -- Mitt and his rich buddies know, and they're gonna give it to them good and hard. If only someone would make these uneducated lower-income morons buck up and bootstrap themselves, why, they wouldn't have so much time to complain. See, Miss Range Rover's got it all figured out.

Is it wrong of me to hope this fucking bitch gets herpes from her pool boy?

Remember, folks, the best way to hurt rich assholes is to turn them into poor assholes. There's a goal worth working overtime for.

Our Dumb Media

Whether or by accident or by design, because it's impossible to tell anymore, the cheap, disingenuous re-interpretation of Hilary Rosen's poorly-phrased remarks about Ann Romney gained traction where none should have been had, creating the typical unforced error for the usual circular Democrat firing squad. It is ever and always thus, a vested interest for The Party, its largely artifical divisions, and most importantly for the perpetual campaign industry, to keep "the race" "close".

To the extent that a former shill for the dinosaur music mafia ventriloquizes the sentiments of corporatist limo-libs, what Rosen meant should have been clear enough to anyone. But the game is to be drawn into the weeds by a contrived "debate", a hollow controversy to distract from that which is not controversial in the least.

Saying that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life is obviously not the point -- the point is that Ann Romney has never had to work a day in her life; that is, she (and of course her husband) has never not had the luxury of financial self-determination. She has never had to hold on for dear life to a job she detested, just to pay bills or retain something resembling health insurance. Never known the glory of getting a 5% annual bump at work, like it'll offset the 10-15% increases in food and fuel prices.

She has never had to put something back at the supermarket because she just couldn't afford it. She's never had to live paycheck to paycheck, to know the ineluctable frisson of understanding that you're just a paycheck or two, quite literally, from the street, from utter destitution. How many hard-workin' mommas had hard-workin' husbands who got their fuckin' jobs outsourced by Mittford and his Bain Capital buddies? Nothin' controversial 'bout that, right? Just bidness, son.

None of this makes Ann Romney a bad person, any more than her experience at being a parent and grandparent automatically fast-track her for sainthood. Rosen's point was and is, and will remain, exactly the same as the point used to be about George W. Bush -- that a person who has never had to worry about their financial future is manifestly unqualified even to speculate, much less authoritatively comment, on the realities that the average 'murkin faces every time they try to pay bills and remain solvent.

And no one should expect anything contrary to what they've heard this past week along this line, not from the Romneys and the GOP establishment, nor the Obamas and the Dem establishment, and certainly not from the refs. The first group has no shame nor scruples, the second no guts or backbone, about even the most uncontroversial points. Obama would rather make a career busting pot growers and drone-bombing villages than stand up even for a second against his professional calumniators. I'm not sure what's sadder, that simple fact, or as bad as he is, he's still light-years better than anything on the other "side".

Six more months of this bullshit. It's almost enough to make one miss the comedic stylings of the rest of the Republitards that have been tossed by the wayside. Where's Rick Perry when you could use a good laugh?

Clownocracy

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Graphic Violence

The next time someone asks for a nice visual of the banana-republic wealth/income disparity this nation continues to endure, show 'em this:

[Via Decline of the Empire]

I'm not even sure what to say anymore, hence the almost non-existent posting level these days. For a long time I attributed my dwindling output to the rigors of school and work, and to a great extent those things did and do occupy a great deal of my time.

But it's also a lack of knowing what to say anymore. When I started this little thing back in 2005, I figured there was a niche for this sort of parodying and lampooning of public figures, especially politicians. And there still is, though The Daily Show handles much of the heavy lifting, in terms of knocking out the easy meat most reliably. (Maybe I should have become a writer for TDS, if I had any clue how; at least once a week I'll know what Stewart's going to say before he says it, or predict the comic headline.)

Everything about this nation has simply become impossible to parody at this point -- our political choices and sentiments; our pop-culture touchstones; our propensity to put up with the viciousness and abuse of a corporate media structure that runs interference for the robber barons who have burgled this country's future for themselves. The media is such an easy target, over and over again, because it is the correct one. They engage, in the aggregate, of polishing corporate turds, and presenting them to you, gentle viewer, as something worthy of attention.

Anything and everything, from the interchangeable chlamydia-ridden Joisey Shore mooks, to the daily "missing attractive white woman" updates on The Today Show, to the sculpting of whatever manufactured crisis crops up next on the nightly news radar, is presented as equally important, equally meaningful, equally impactful to our lives, when in fact very little of it is. Maybe our (and by "our", I mean the majority of 'murkins) critical faculties have just been irreparably dulled, worn down by attrition, from the daily -- hell, hourly pummeling of this contrived nonsense.

Next week, media-wise, will especially suck -- starting with the tenth anniversary 9/11 remembrances, that day where everything changed, but we all went right back to doing what we were doing, and changed nothing about ourselves, certainly not in the collective sense. Nevertheless there will be interminable, mawkish plaints to the sky, and any number of other modes of emotional manipulation.

Then on Thursday we get Obama trying to compete with the opening of football season with yet another proposal that will require fruitless negotiation with the Boehner gang. Assuming that Obama even has "good" (meaning those he campaigned on) intentions anymore, or if he's even permitted by the rentier class to retain them, it is all for naught if he does not learn to negotiate with even a modest amount of skill.

Again, giving Obama some small benefit of the doubt that he has not a completely owned tool of Wall Street at this point, let us sketch out a reasonable metaphor for his pattern of negotiating things. I've probably used this one before, but whatever.

Let's say you are dealing with somebody who insists that 2+2=6, and they will brook no disagreement, will not discuss the issue, will not listen to entreaties of empirical reason and cold rationality. You know that 2+2=4, and no amount of magickal thinking on the part of you or them or anyone else is going to change that. However, you also have to figure out a way to work something out with your idiot opponent. What do you do?

Well, whatever you decide to do, one thing you most definitely don't do is open with, "Well, what if we compromise and say 2+2=5, and work from there?". You may, after long and hard-fought debate, eventually be forced to concede something along this line to move things along and get something done, but only an asshole does this as an opening gambit.

Yet this is what Obama has done and continues to do with every major economic initiative. He doesn't just punt on first down, he routinely concedes before the ball has even been kicked and the clock has started ticking. I would not at all be surprised if he fucks over the entire next generation (or more) on Social Security and Medicare, and grants yet more bullshit "job creating" tax cuts (because the ones he's given up have created so many already) just to get some hopelessly-compromised "job bill" going.

This is how the man does every blessed thing. It does not seem to occur to him that granting upfront concessions to an irrational opponent does not defuse the antagonism of the negotiating scenario, it emboldens the opponent. If you give up that much without even so much as a fight, before the bell has even rung, how much more will you give up when you take a right cross to the nose. Over and over, again and again, Boehner and Cantor and their merry little friends delight in playing Lucy to Obama's Charlie Brown, getting that sadistic frisson every damned time he lands on his back, not knowing or caring why he can't ever seem to believe his own lyin' eyes.

And of course the Thankralphers are already scuttling out of the woodwork, reminding us all of the burn-at-the-stake heresy of even murmurs of dissent at how Mister Man has chosen to make good on any of his campaign promises. You're getting a shit sandwich either way; Rick Perry's will probably come with one slab of stale crust, but other than that, essentially identical.

It's not that that isn't true and correct, mind you, that as awful as Obama has been and continues to be, and his inability and unwillingness to fight has wrought his current stature, he's still preferable to an unrepentant knuckle-dragger like Perry. But it should beg the question of why this is our "choice", why this is always our choice, why it is we, every bit as much as Obama, who plays the Charlie Brown sucker role, whatever and ever, amen.

Friends 'n' neighbors, that helpful little graph at the top of your screen is the answer to all of those questions, why your politics, culture, news, economy, and so much more is just a big box o' turds. It is that, and absolutely nothing more, I promise you. And it is never, ever going to change until we do something about it.

Les Mots Justes

Of course M'sieur IOZ is absolutely correct in this week's unceremonious roasting of EnriqueMatt Yglesias. The current era of economics reeks more of careerism and credentialism for self-selecting opinion-mongers and audiences, and less of empirical data-crunching and pattern-theorizing. Consider this paragraph of Yglesias' which IOZ excerpted:

The fact that the economics profession can offer so little in the way of consensus guidance about dramatic, crucially important events like the panic of 2007-2008 is a huge problem and a very legitimate knock on the enterprise, but it doesn’t actually undermine the overall epistemic status of the discipline.

First is that the bumptious prose of this sickly little paragraph may as well be a sixth example for Orwell to present in Politics and the English Language. It is merely a hymn plucked in church to appease the faithful. It is difficult -- at least for me, because life is too short to spend too much time reading Teh Woodchuck with anything approaching regularity -- to really know whether these guys actually believe the guff they spread, or they've simply sunk too far into the sales pitch to divest credibly.

It doesn't matter. Just in that stray paragraph one sees much more fundamental errors, namely the classic Princess Bride issue of words not meaning what the user thinks they mean. Yglesias mentions "the panic of 2007-2008", as if those wascally Hunt brothers had tried to corner the dang silver market and caused a stampede. "Panic" is as inaccurate a term to describe what happened as the more tendentious debate over whether the real-estate collapse caused a "recession" or a "depression". An accurate term would be correction, or perhaps heist. "Panic" merely implies unknown causation producing unpredictable results via mass alarm and random collective action.

As opposed to, say, a bunch of boiler-room shysters pushing loans on people they knew full well wouldn't be able to afford them, just so they could slice and dice and tranche a bunch of derivative side bets, knowing full well that their investment in Barack Obama would be recouped when the mathematical reckoning inevitably came. Causation was known, results were predictable, and on the off chance that the engineering of this mess wasn't flat-out deliberate, it was at the very least sociopathically indifferent.

A lesser, but still substantial, semantic failure to follow through in an intellectually honest fashion is the "knock on the enterprise" line. Look, if economics is not an out-and-out religion, as IOZ calls it, with its impenetrable dogma, its cloistered priests, and laity suckaz like Yglesias, then at the very least one can ham-fistedly paraphrase Yogi Berra and point out that it's 90% psychology, and the other half is mathematical.

The problem is, the math side of it has been perverted beyond all honest recognition by the economists' brothers-in-arms, the rentier financiers, who every now and again pay some Indian kid from MIT to swing by the offices of Lloyd Blankfein's subordinates, dump some esoteric algorithm on a spreadsheet for them, and figure out how to plug in the numbers on whatever scheme they devise for the next round of rubes. The banksters neither know nor care how the formula works, or that it doesn't actually produce a tangible good, merely a new twist on the numbers game they run.

Now, I realize that the "enterprise" Matty refers to is economics, but seeing as how that discipline exists more or less symbiotically with finance, perhaps the current lack of, ahem, "consensus guidance" can be attributed to a poisoning of the epistemic well. Finance is not so much an "enterprise" these days -- a system that generates ever more money for ever fewer people, without producing any tangible goods or wealth, even secondarily (such as loaning that money or creating jobs with it) is not an enterprise, it's a racket.

The financiers are always going to maintain the pretense, especially since they have the government by the balls, and the assurance that when the new algorithm becomes mathematically unsustainable, they get bailed out and keep their goddamned bonuses. This is not about the creation of value or wealth, this is about recoupment by the very few from everyone else.

To the extent that intellectually honest economists realize all of this -- and how can they not? -- they are collegially and professionally constrained from stepping up and speaking their minds, fearing to be recognized as dupes to a street-corner hustle, or traitors to the common cause. Financiers move money around, economists track the results and develop arcane theories about yesterday's motions.

But neither group cares to mention the huge behavioral aspect to both, preferring to pretend that it's all mechanical, and therefore predictable and controllable to some degree. And the biggest behavioral factor is the return of a Gilded Age mentality, a smug, patrician assumption by a shrinking claque of well-heeled rulers that the rest of the population are merely sheep to be fleeced.

So no, the lack of "consensus guidance" is not undermining the "overall epistemic status of the discipline". But that status is being undermined all the same, by the failure of its prime movers to simply call things what they really are.

Orwell intrinsically understood the obfuscatory power -- and intent -- underlying cluttered language. It does not have to mean some firebreathing propagandist trying to conceal his true intent; it applies equally well to professional catechists.