Job Qualification

It's interesting to see just how indignant some media folks are over Matt Lauer's passive, enabling "candidate forum" the other night. It's as if they expected some other -- any other -- outcome from having a morning-show hack from a key corporate media monopoly "interview" a reality-teevee actor from one of that same network's shows from the past decade. Did anyone expect anything other than inept softballs?

I mean, yes, Lauer is certainly welcome to fuck off and die; that shitshow the other night was just a ramped-up continuation of what Lauer has done his entire career, which is to hurt America. And now that hurt is on the verge of becoming quite literal. Not that it hurts Lauer, of course; he makes more money in a year than you and I will see in our entire lives. The only thing that would hurt him is if he lost his elite status.

People who fancy themselves as media-watchers, implying that they are savvy to what the corporate media minions are really all about, miss the point by a mile when they start trying to suss out the political preferences of this or that reporter. I have no idea whether Lauer considers himself liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. Probably votes Democrat more often than not, maybe even fancies himself a good and generous citizen by contributing to the Clinton Foundation, if properly invited to the appropriate appletini soiree in the Hamptons. Whatever. Such considerations are irrelevant.

Complicity

Look, what Texas and other states are doing -- and have been doing for decades -- to undermine reproductive rights is shameful, despicable, disgusting (to use the Drumpfster's favorite word). There's no two ways about it, especially considering that the abortion rate has been steadily declining in this country for about twenty years now. There's just no reason for this nonsense, except that it inflames the rubes.

But this is an issue that affects poor women the most, by far, and so here is what I would ask those women:  Do you vote? More specifically, do you vote every time you can, even if a pet issue isn't on the ballot? Do you vote in the midterms? Because part of the reason so many of these fuckers are in office right now is because no one could be bothered to show up in 2010, or 2014. That's why you vote every time. That's why you follow the issues and the people, and pay attention.

Does Anyone Here Know How to Play This Game?

A couple of weeks ago, Brazil -- a giant, swampy, third-world slum masquerading as a real country -- had a ceremony to celebrate its hosting of the Summer Olympics this year. During the ceremony, a jaguar -- which had been rescued as a cub and brought up at the zoo where the ceremony was being held -- was shot dead after it got loose from its handler and attacked a soldier.

Considering that Brazil is also the country that, just two years ago while hosting the World Cup, transported materials up the Amazon for the sole purpose of building a full-size stadium just for the World Cup, that sounds about right. I assume their national anthem is played on a sad trombone.

This is the future of Olympic games in particular, if not world sporting events in general. Real countries are no longer interested in the enormous expense required to host the events; the "prestige" conferred by hosting is just not worth it for American and European municipalities and states that are already cash-strapped.

Nihilism

Britain's vote to leave the EU has everyone in a panic, and it seems almost certain to cost them (as it has already, between stock losses and the pound dropping like a stone). Larger questions like whether Scotland will re-vote for independence (probably) or other countries may start opting to the leave the EU (probably not) are open to speculation for now. In the meantime, the country already seems like the proverbial dog that finally caught the car it was chasing, only to realize that it has no idea what to do with it.

What's perhaps more interesting is the apparent parallels in voting "philosophy" between "Leave" voters and American Drumpf voters. The socioeconomic contexts appear to be very similar, in that the people likely to be hurt the most economically by those respective policies are the most enthusiastic for them.

While it may be one thing for an investment banker to understand that they ‘benefit from the EU’ in regulatory terms, it is quite another to encourage poor and culturally marginalised people to feel grateful towards the elites that sustain them through handouts, month by month. Resentment develops not in spite of this generosity, but arguably because of it. This isn’t to discredit what the EU does in terms of redistribution, but pointing to handouts is a psychologically and politically naïve basis on which to justify remaining in the EU.

There have been any number of similar assertions from Drumpfsters interviewed over the past year, many of them bizarrely attesting that Drumpf is "one of us". Presumably "one of us" in this context can basically be taken to mean, much like "speaks his mind", something along the lines of "not afraid to be a toxic asshole".

I'm With Stupid

Until the votes are cast and counted, it's always too early to get confident and smug, but it seems like Mister Man has fallen off a cliff since clinching the Gooper nom. More specifically, it appears that the precise date was Drumpf's speech on May 27 (my birthday, as it happens, so you'll forgive me if I consider it a small gift from the universe) excoriating Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Since then, Drumpf has only compounded his problems, most notably with his tone-deaf insinuations after the Orlando massacre.

At this point, it's easy and tempting to consider the popular meme that Drumpf is really a plant from the Clinton campaign; after all, even Drumpf himself noted that he had a conversation with Bill Clinton shortly before making his fateful descent on the escalator and throwing his hairpiece into the ring. It makes a certain amount of perverted sense, and really nothing would surprise most of us anymore. The only reason I don't quite believe it is because Drumpf has always been a man of tremendous ego -- yuge, really -- and it's difficult to see him deliberately spend a year becoming a complete jerkoff for someone else's benefit. It's much easier to look at his history and see that he's always been a complete jerkoff.

Idiomentary

Conservatives seem to be under the impression that some progressives, liberals, SJW types, etc., might be humorless prats. What would give them that impression?

The film's legions of defenders call it satire. Well, the overt argument of the film is that good breeding prevents social problems. The so-called satire proceeds from there, presenting the ridiculous consequences of what will happen if we don't rethink how society breeds. Satire isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for all vulgar and illiberal ideas; it has to be pointed and targeting the powerful, not targeting vague notions of idiocy illustrated by Appalachia accents and trailer parks without consideration for what caused the idiocy in the first place.

The message is cheap and easy and doesn’t require us to meaningfully challenge power, much less ourselves. Instead, we direct our disdain at the pseudo-problem of not being adequately intelligent, as if such a problem operates independent of material factors.

I agree with the premise of Idiocracy -- and obviously, have used it here many times over the years -- serving as a convenient shorthand for the extreme dumbing-down of the culture at large, to such an extent that government and science are rendered useless, even harmful, by dumbasses so outnumbering intelligent people that they end up running everything -- straight into the ground.

Failed State

The term "failed state" or "hollow state" generally refers to a nation whose institutions do not or cannot govern anymore, due to collapse by a number of different means -- economic, resource depletion, natural catastrophe, war, internal strife, maniacal despot, etc. The wrong circumstances and the wrong people converge, and structures that were seemingly in place just a month or a year prior are suddenly no longer evident.

The same dynamic can happen to any sort of entity, of course, even (perhaps especially) a political party. So it is appearing more and more to be the case with the Republicans. Antonin Scalia's death over the weekend cast this into sharp relief, not just with McConnell's comically quick urge to show his entire hand when he had no need to, to the bizarre conspiracy theories suddenly surrounding Scalia's death.

No, whatever you do, don't consider the likelihood that a fat eighty-year-old man who kept his health concerns to himself, and whose enjoyment of wine and rich food was well-known, might have, you know, had a heart attack in his sleep. I know, try to contain your surprise. But the Michael Savage types out there pull the "that's what they want you to think, man!" card.

Kudos to Trump for falling for that one, by the way. Jesus, what a fuckin' maroon. He seems like he might just be dumb enough to, say, use junk bonds to fund an overpriced casino in a dying resort community, and have it go bankrupt in just three years.

Liars' Poker

In terms of making a mint from the internets, I frequently think I was born about 15-20 years too early (1967), maybe more. I think people born about 1990 or so, growing up with the modern toys we all take for granted now, are instinctively attuned in a way we older folk had to learn. I can definitely say that even mundane things such as Excel have made me think and process information differently than I did in the previous century, but they've grown up with those things, where we older folks learned them, implanted them on the old paradigm we grew up with, which was so different.

Having a teenager in the house is a constant reminder of how difficult it is to convey how much different life was before these wondrous things. Of course I have tried, by mentioning such oddities as rotary-dial phones and black-and-white TVs, but understandably I just get a blank stare. It would be like my great-grandmother trying to explain how music recordings were once played by wax cylinders.

Like many kids her age, my daughter wants to be a video game designer, which is yet another area in which I can only lamely attempt to tell her how things used to be. Games are as sophisticated as movies now, of course, and as such require not only coders but scriptwriters. I don't have any ironic nostalgia for Pong or Adventure or Pitfall or Pac-Man, as much fun as those games were back in the day, anymore than I would trade Breaking Bad for Dukes of Hazzard. Trust me, your Facebook friends posting memes about that shit are missing the boat.

Blood Libel

You knew the Clownstick implosion was inevitable, but this quickly? Maybe the most fun part of it will be watching his maroon "fans" piss and moan at the unfair treatment their wampeter got from what has basically been his home team.

This is as good an opportunity as ever to bring up again just how weird Trump is, in this observer's humble opinion anyway. I've said this before:  if I'm even a tenth as wealthy as Trump claims to be, if I have walking-away money for the next several generations, I'm fucking walking away. I am not spending my time on Twitter wars and virtual slapfights; I'm not even paying a flunky for that bullshit. I'm on my fucking 300-foot yacht wherever the weather is nicest, living on endless surf-and-turf and Ketel One and Russian supermodel poontang. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

Beyond all the bluster and bullshit and dick-waving self-aggrandizement this asshole has been known for, beyond the cult of dipshits who think he can "fix" everything, this is the most unsettling thing about Trump. There's something to be said about someone who doesn't take any shit from anyone; many's the time we all wish Obama had had a little "fuck you" in his bones to throw back at McConnell and Boehner and the rest of them.

But that seems to be Clownstick's default setting. This is the guy that's going to be negotiating trade deals and arms treaties, this thin-skinned douchebag, this cartoon character blow-dried mook? He can't take a "tough question" at a dog-and-pony debate, but he's going to go balls-deep with Putin and the Chinese and the mullahs? Really?

So far, the guy has proven to be Palin with a penis and a worse hair weave. Everyone else is a loser, crude assertions are pulled directly out of the alimentary canal and waved around as empirical facts, disagreements and cheap shots are reacted to as if they were the gravest of insults. No true solutions are offered for anything, just magic-wand if-I-were-king bafflegab. He'll keep the Mexicans out by building a wall and making them pay for it. He would have resolved the Iran nuclear crisis by doubling or tripling sanctions. You bang your wife doggy style, he'd do her reverse cowgirl and make her forget all about you. And so forth.

I don't know what's scarier -- the fact that Trump's followers clearly swallow this horseshit unquestioningly, or that Trump might seriously believe it himself. He understands his audience, knows that his "message" appears to old, bewildered shitheads who don't have the goddamned decency to go find an ice floe to push themselves off onto already. The idea that he can't be bought because he's already wealthy doesn't quite stick either, because as Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina found out the hard way here in Cali, only a moron spends their own money running for office. So Clownstick has to raise money just like anyone else, once push comes to shove.

I think we need to start looking at the long game here, and what ramifications it has for the Republican Party, which may implode regardless of whether Trump goes third-party or stays in the GOP fray. The party is increasingly driven by its most vocal, loose-cannon extra-chromosome base, people who do not do nuance or big-picture thinking. The world and the nation keep moving on, have left these dopey, ancient crackers behind, and they just can't stand it.

So the question becomes which blustery goofball becomes their next rock star. They get worse and worse with each iteration, from Fredo Arbusto to Caribou Barbie to Ted Cruz to Fuckface Von Clownstick. Sooner or later they're going to strike oil on one of these kampfers, someone with the same message, but smoother, subtler, bluster-free and truly charismatic.

Watching future Cali governor Gavin Newsom last night on Bill Maher's show, sandwiched between Republican consultants Steve Schmidt and Mary Matalin, I was struck at how effortlessly charismatic the guy is. He's good-looking and well-spoken, but what sets Newsom apart is how carefully he chooses his words, and how deftly he co-opts moderate Republican talking points. He understands intrinsically that politics is niched too much to be won by doubling down on your base appeal. You have to get the fence-sitters to take a look at you, and you do that by not saying or doing stupid things that spook the horses. It will be a few more election cycles, probably 2024 or 2028 (or 2020 if Clinton somehow loses next year), but I would be very surprised if Newsom doesn't take a shot at the big ring at some point.

Sooner or later the Goopers will figure that out; indeed, they may have that very person waiting in the wings in Marco Rubio. Out of all the clown car occupants at the big kids' table Thursday night, only Rubio and maybe John Kasich came off as anything resembling reasonable. Neither of them would make a good president, but both understand the value of appearing inclusive and comparatively moderate, and not stomping every hot-button issue into the floor.

And while Hillary Clinton is no doubt dancing in her pantsuit watching this slow-motion clusterfuck, nothing is settled. She has as many negatives as positives; she turns off as many people as she appeals to. Probably ninety percent of the people who will vote for her will do so reluctantly, waiting and wishing for someone better, someone less oleaginous and transparently insincere. Why on earth would I want to vote for someone who willingly hangs out with the likes of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, did someone seriously tell her this would be a selling point to anyone? (Yes, I get it, they attended a fundraiser and snapped a selfie; the larger point remains valid.)

The Republicans will beat mercilessly on Clinton's negatives, real and fictitious, and no doubt create some new ones in the process. It is going to be ugly, and probably closer than people might assume, whether or not Clownstick blows up the narrative by going, um, rogue. If Rubio can polish his own narrative a bit, moderate his impulses, reach beyond the doddering base that can't seem to decide on which asshole of the week they want to roll with, he could make things even weirder than they already are. Getcha popcorn.

The Myth of Reason

Per usual, Driftglass hits it right on the head with the "reasonable conservative" columnists, your Bobos and Frums and Gersons and such like. Brooks, despite his current ongoing emotional meltdown, continues to peddle his pablum in both column and book form, platitudinous observations as to the nature of tradition and character and constancy, sweet constancy. (No link to Bobo's book; I will not be your enabler. Use the Google if you must, and vaya con dios with that.)

The trouble with these middle-aged lackeys and their fusty observations is obvious -- aside from the fact that even their words wear black socks and flip-flops, they collude to present a sensible face on what has become a lurching, shambling, mauling creature of destruction. The idea that, as Driftglass point out, an experienced hack like Frum can (presumably with a straight face) assert that the "liberal left" lead the United States shows that either Frum is a smoother liar than he lets on, or the spectrum shifted tectonically without him -- again, a career professional in peddling this nonsense -- even noticing. Surely the ripples in his empty backyard swimming pool must have hinted at something.

Our collective political perspective has shifted drastically, to the point that Democrats are conservatives and Republicans are authoritarians, and any true liberals remaining are sure to be harangued into voting for Hillary, as early and often as possible. It has taken place in perfect coordination, coincidental or not, with the rise of the permanent campaign and its ancillary industries, with the rise in the money machine behind it.

It never stops anymore, will never stop anymore until public campaign financing takes precedence in some meaningful way (which will never happen). There's just too much money in the machine for the industry players to walk away from; we can blame the Koch brothers and their assorted parasites and dogsbodies, but the fact of the matter is that all that filthy pelf is going into someone's pocket, mostly into the maw of the multi-armed PR monster.

And so your reasonable middle-aged male columnists, their verbal libidos flagging in accord with their physical ones, engage in a different, more financially rewarding type of sexual congress -- weekly attempting to slather a sensible face on a party that now routinely engages in the utterly indefensible. That such diehard, shameless intellectual fraud has not only been elevated, but become an institution in "mainstream" discourse, shows how far we continue to fall.

Flag Hags

Yes, the kerfuffle over the UC Irvine flag banning is a prime example of a meaningless issue inflated to extraordinary stature. It's also a prime example of what Freddie deBoer refers to as the "Rich Uncle Pennybags" test, the flexing of useless muscle over a complete non-issue, at the direct expense of the ability to contest for genuine structural change.

The system has certainly failed these kids, but damned if they haven't just returned the favor. Few things are worse in the political world than an unforced error.

We Agree On What You Are, We're Just Haggling Over the Price

The Duke Brothers are pretty upfront about their intent, their willingness to pony up $889 million to purchase what they consider democracy. Apparently rounding up to an even billion would have been, I dunno, unseemly or something.

At this point, I don't think most of us give half a shit whether it's the Kochs or George Soros or whoever -- the influence of money needs to be removed from the political process by any means necessary. The media now have the perpetual campaign industry, virtual smokestacks belching shit into our brains 24/7/365, so that before the results are even in from one election, the next one is already being gamed out, two or four years down the line.

Now, the media can keep their bookmaking operation if they must; I suppose a great many anchor careers and behind-the-scenes jobs depend on manufacturing this nonsense. But taking the money out of it would render it a process that, while it will never be truly 100% even, at least makes an honest attempt to curb somewhat the overwhelming influence that filthy pelf has.

Which, of course, is why it will never happen. Not enough peons care enough to do anything about it. And yet, that makes perfect sense -- when your political system and its products aren't even talking to you anymore, but only to each other and their ownersdonors, then maybe it is time to disengage from a corrupt process, with an informed perspective.

Matthew 16:26 / Mark 8:36

If 85 individuals holding more wealth than 3.5 billion wasn't enough last year, then why would the top 1% having half of everything be any different?

What's pathetic is when your ordinary average maroon steps in to concern troll the numbers, something along the lines of "it's not a zero-sum game, someone else's success doesn't affect my ability to succeed." The thing is, that simple statement should be true, but it no longer is.

The mantra some of us have been preaching -- and it continues apace, and in fact is accelerating -- is that we have more people than we have things for them to do at which they can earn a decent living, much less get ahead. How much of the current economy is predicated on the app lottery system, waiting for some zit-faced, wet-behind-the-ears kid to crank out some bullshit app to help you find the nearest local rub-and-tug or whatever, and then someone else way overpaying for it?

One of the things to consider in this vaunted "post-scarcity society" of ours is the sorts of skills which have been devalued, or are in the process of being automated, and what skills are going to be needed moving forward. Vocational trades such as contracting (including construction, plumbing, electrical, etc.), automotive engine repair, farming, and cooking cannot be automated as simply as so many of the other occupations that have been replaced by robots over the past few decades. Used to be that creative pursuits couldn't be automated, but a trip to your local cineplex should set you straight on how much longer that's going to be true.

Not yet, anyway, but Flying Spaghetti Monster knows they're trying their damndest to automate every possible thing. I don't know who they expect to buy their products, or how, once half the people are out of work and the other half are slaving for peanuts, but in an extreme skew, they can hoard what they have or just trade with each other I guess. Like Jay Gould said a hundred years ago, they're just paying half the working class to kill the other half.

I've given up on the notion of the average 'murkin deciding to do anything about it; as noted above the usual rubes are always too willing to cut their own throats. And there's never going to come a time when these awful people who inherited more money than they could hope to spend in ten lifetimes willingly pay even a cent more in tax. They'd much rather live in their gated communities and mega-yachts than spend one goddamned dime on improving their communities at all.

What are the options, if you're not lucky enough to be hatched into the Wal-Mart Billionaire Club? Well, if we're not going to break out the tumbrels and guillotines, then maybe a strategy of disengaging (from their system) and diversifying (your skill set and income portfolio) is the way to do it. I don't know what the next generations should expect, though -- knowing these greedy assholes, probably ensuring compliance as a condition of being allowed access to resources.

Oversight

Just wondering what it might be like if this country had, say, a governmental agency that provided regulation and oversight on an untrustworthy and reckless financial industry. Even better might be if there was another governmental department that ensured that when financiers were caught doing awful things -- such as rigging currency and interest rates, money laundering for drug cartels, all the other things these fuckers have been caught doing over and over again -- that these crimes which literally affect everyone's lives and wallets would be prosecuted aggressively and appropriately.

When the next financial crash comes -- and rest assured, it will -- I hope Eric Holder understands his direct role in all of it, that his indifference and unwillingness to drop the hammer on these sociopaths only emboldens them. And I also hope that when it comes, and these thieves try to make us all pay for their bullshit again, that instead they are treated to tumbrels and guillotines.

Another Bloody Election

On the one hand, it's easy to agree (however reluctantly) with The Pantload that the electoral process should and could be more than self-affirmation for celebrity airheads. On the other, one can be quite certain that Pantload is just fine with the usual salt-of-the-earth maroons cutting their own throats once again, because the Kenyan Moooslim is letting illegals with Ebola sneak across the Meskin border in order to distract from Benghazi.

But it was funny watching a bunch of chickenshit DINOs run like hell from their own party, and still lose. I'll give the teahadis their due -- at least they know what they fucking stand for, and by jebus stand for it. I'm still amazed that working people are dumb enough to vote for it, but it's not like halfwits such as Mark Pryor gave them much of an alternative. So this is what they wanted, and it's what they will get. Although I live in a blood-red county of the People's Republic of Cali, at least I don't live in some flyover dump that really takes the hit from the policies they just voted for.

Reap the whirlwind, assholes. You deserve nothing less.

[Update 11/7/14 6:30 PST:  This is one of the better analyses of the whole sordid thing that's I've seen.]

Arbeiten Bis Zum Umfallen; Or, The Hunger Games

Boy, the future ain't what it useta be, is it?

The ads are surreal. They sound like an invitation to summer camp, and not just the ones for Amazon jobs. “Feel like a kid again!” and “Hey workamper, it’s time for fun!” are a couple slogans used by recruiters for Adventureland, a theme park in Altoona, Iowa where migrant workers run the rides, games and concessions for $7.25 to $7.50 an hour. Recruitment materials for the beet harvest, with 12-hour overnight shifts in subzero temperatures, refer to the work as “an unBEETable experience!”

This stuff is propaganda, pure and simple. It panders to the illusion that older Americans are free to retire, working only for fun, rather than acknowledging the reality that many folks need to keep bringing in money to survive.

Much of the work is hard and physically taxing. Several people I met dropped out of the Amazon program after a few weeks because their bodies just couldn’t take it. Others suffered from “trigger finger,” a ten­don condition that can be caused by repetitive movements like UPC scan­ner use. Many RVs I visited looked like mobile apothecaries, stocked with Icy Hot pain-relief gel, foot-soaking tubs with Ep­som salts, and bottles of Aleve and Advil.

This is what the Rubinization of the economy, really going back to the reckless financial deregulation of the Saint Reagan years, gets you. People born since 1980 probably don't realize this, but America was, for a brief moment from roughly 1945-1975, a nation of haves and have-nots, in a more egalitarian sense than that might imply. In other words, most working people were able to live comfortably if not extravagantly, take the family on a cheap vacation once a year, camping or Walley World or what-have-ya, and retire at a decent age with at least enough of a stipend that they could send the grandkids $5 on their birthdays, and not have to live on cat food.

Then we became a nation of haves and have-mores, and oh-hardy-har did Dubya's little snicker with his donors drive that point home. The gist was that now we had extravagantly wealthy people, most of them pelf-grubbing financial bookies, corporate swindlers, or Mitt Romney "creative destruction" types, people who literally became hectomillionaires by gutting American companies and sending American jobs halfway around the world. False promises were made about retraining "displaced" American workers, and because American politicians barely bother pretending anymore that they give half a fuck about anyone not in the donor class, no effort at all was made to keep those promises.

So now we're the worst combination of both of those things -- a nation of have-nots and have-mores. You're in one margin or another; you're either a paycheck or two from the street and up to your eyeballs in debt (which, never forget, is always and by definition someone else's equity), or you're a minted member of the owner class. If you're in the former category, your only course of "action" is to vote for Candidate Coke or Candidate Pepsi, and try to convince yourself it made any difference to your bottom line. If you're in the latter category, you've ensured that voting will not make a difference to anyone's life but your own.

There's your future -- traveling around the country in a 15-foot Airstream and hoping to hell you don't get sick, until you've finally had enough and check out. Awesome.

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.

Primary Colors

It's difficult to decide exactly what is the most tedious aspect of Blind Lemon Clinton's will-she-or-won't-she pas de dunce:

• the sheer inevitability of her candidacy (and really, the "my turn" campaign is usually a Republican thing);
• the shameless crying of poor mouth, at a country still reeling from an economic setback caused in great part by, um, the repeal of Glass-Steagall;
• the promise that Preznit Hillary will sell out the working class almost as quickly as your garden-variety Koch-sucker;
• the predictable scramble by the overpaid talking heads to provide their breathless analyses of loose cocktail party chatter;
• the continued use of "commentary" from proven shitbirds like Newt Gingrich, whose peanut-gallery bullshit will be exactly the sort of thing that nudges nauseated fence-sitters -- who will by then be exploring real estate in Croatia at the prospect of being "given" a "choice" between Clinton and yet another Bush -- over to Clinton, so we can get pretty much what we were going to get in the first place.

Oh, just run already, dear, it'll be a historic moment and all that. Not because of the woman thing -- hell, even a woman-hating country like Pakistan has had a female president already -- but because the bottom is falling out of this country, the foundation is giving way. The transnational merchant princes won, in no small part thanks to Hillary's husband Rubinizing the economy and leaving it the exclusive province of the sociopathic spreadsheet diddlers.

Perhaps the Clintons genuinely thought that the rising tide would lift all boats, that massive productivity gains and ease of financial regulations and securitization would create enough wealth for all. And it did, to a point. But left in the hands of a greedy few, for whom the word "enough" has no definition, even crumbs stopped falling from the table. Obama hasn't had the testicular fortitude or the juice to do anything about any of this, and will most likely be rendered as lame a duck after the midterms as Saint Billy Jeff was.

Say what you will about the teahadis -- FSM knows I've said my share -- but one important part of their argument that actually resonates is that their country has been taken away from them, and no one in Warshington gives a shit about them. Of course, their country has been taken away from them by the bottomless rackets that run this country, and own the media, so as to convince them that it was gays and illegals that did it, but whatever. The core is true enough.

So it will be a(n) historic moment, no doubt. The next president will get to preside over the continuing implosion of a once-vibrant republic, a society that actually gave a shit whether its children could read or count, communities that understood the nature of community and mutual good, businesses that actually paid their employees enough to survive on, to purchase the things they made or sold.

For a time I thought there might be some catalyzing domestic incident that expressed this discontent on a large scale, not necessarily violent, but something that would be apparent to all. It seemed like the Occupy Wall Street movement might be just the thing, but sure as shit, the corporate toadies rushed to their battlements to marginalize and defame these people, while the NYPD let every scumbag they could out of jail and set them loose in the park.

People are simply too atomized anymore, connected electronically, but not socially enough to translate into any meaningful action. The cops are paramilitarized to the teeth, and get away with pretty much anything anymore, so there's no percentage there either. There's not really anywhere to turn -- either you get lucky and generate enough multiple revenue streams to eke your way through what passes for a life, addled by pills and distracted by sports and reality shows, or get pulled under, quickly or slowly, the result is the same.

So here you go, Hillary, congratulations. How do you like it?

Mitt Happens 2: The Mittening

Despite the breathless tone of this article, I seriously doubt Mitt "Mitt" Rmoney would consider lowering himself to the indignity of running for Lord of the Peons again. There's far more precious pelf to be made as a kingmaker, hence the "ideas summit," where the occupants of the next Gooper clown car converge to ponder newer and better ways in which to separate morons from their personal belongings.

With the recent passing of Eric Cantor to K Street nirvana, the Republicans have themselves in a dilly of a pickle. The teabagger hyena they thought they had on a leash has gotten loose, and is rabid, and once enough of the public has been alienated from their nonsensical "uh wants muh country back" jabber, is going to ruin their brand, at least until the Democrats find a way to fuck up their end of it all, which they inevitably do. (Depending, of course, whether one chooses to believe that these things are mistakes or designs.)

To the extent that "conservatives," regardless of their wealth or social standing, tend to see poor people as another species, Rmoney's defining characteristic is that he underscores such a sentiment. The Mittster is indeed the apotheosis of the clueless swell, born on third base and bragging that he hit a triple, and seeing the less fortunate as some vile combination of stupid and lazy.

If there is ever a time where enough people get sick and tired of being treated like shit by a tiny elite that literally thinks they're better and superior in every way, it will be because of that sentiment, that assumption of stupid-lazy on the part of teh poorz. For now, there are enough of the downtrodden who prefer to remain merely envious of the idle rich, because they still hold out hope that they might join them, than to simply see what's been right in front of them all along, and get royally pissed.

In the meantime, here are the people you get to pretend to choose from in a couple of years. How do you like them apples, America?

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.