“Government doesn't work”

Turns out that government works just fine, so long as it's not run by Teabilly Corp-Loving Privatisation Zealots.
This is entirely manmade...specifically, One Man: Snyder.
All those cities and towns in Michigan(and other places) eviscerated by the deportation of manufacturing--which wasn't their idea, after all, but a brilliant creation of the same Masters of the Universe who run the Goptea-Corps(e) Nexus.
Those Masters...those elites....they've been banging drums for decades, yelling that “government is the enemy of the people”...that it simply cannot work as advertised.
In Flint, that lead didn't just magically appear....it's been there for a long time...for as long as there's been manufacturing...
But I can't find any record of widespread lead poisoning on this scale, prior to the Snyder “administration”.
Step one, fire the elected local officials, step2: install an Imperial Viceroy in their stead...unbeholden to the citizens...step 3: privatise everything that government used to do=> which necessarily entails cost cutting measures like those that created this specific instance.
Step 4 hope that nobody notices(like by testing the water), while continuing to rail against the evils of government, and the need to hand all of its functions over to Immortal Fictions.
This is what Republican “Governance” looks like.
This is what the Gop would like to do to the rest of the country.
Remember when Snyder first took office, and began the antidemocratic experiment, it was lauded in the “conservative” press as a Model for Governance.
It was great! A “Success!”.
Why isn't the Democratic Party(tm) railing against corporate rule and privatisation and all the rest?
Here is the perfect answer to the 40 year shout that Government is the Enemy...as with all Right Wing Tropes, it's mere Projection. Ie: Every Damned Thing they say about “Big Government” actually applies to themselves and their Corps(e) and Hedgefunds.

If I lived there, I certainly would not be paying the water bill.
And I'd likely be thinking about “second amendment remedies”, if the waffling and blame-escaping behaviour continues...The population of Flint should be camped out on the lawn at the governor's mansion, building scaffolding.
Burn that fucker down, and chase the bastard into the lake.

h

Hippy-Dippy Utopians

The DLC/Triangulating/Corporate Wing of the (formerly) Democratic Party are out in force...with Krugman as the latest....telling us that, in so many words, “No,We can't!”.
That a Sanders Presidency would be a failure from the start and that what we really need is “Pragmatism” which translates as “give up before you begin, and bow down to your Feudal Overlords”.
They selectively remember much of the History of Us...forgetting, for instance, that Single payer was removed from the table pre-emptively, so as not to freak out the Right overmuch...and that the Public Option soon met a similar fate. Third Way Democrats are really good at capitulation.
Here's Robert Reich's answer, which I agree with:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/bernies-movement_b_9068990.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

and here's Palermo's answer, which I also agree with:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/paul-krugman-on-bernie-sa_b_9062786.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

and just for fun and context, here's a piece about what it means to love one's country, which hits rather close, for me:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/micah-conkling/3-things-i-want-my-son-to-know-about-patriotism_b_9053690.html

…......................................

For my whole life, we've watched the Corporate Oligarchy take over the country.
This was a Republican Project, to be sure...but they had ample assistance from the so-called opposition...often under the banner of “Pragmatism”.
“Neoliberalism” has worked it's way into the very Idea of America...and even today, few want to label themselves as “Liberal”...let alone “Socialist”.
I think it's instructive that so few of the folks in the comments sections of the first two linked articles seem to remember the incredible reaction to the Occupy Movement, by a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and federal, state and local “law enforcement”....and how different that reaction was from the reaction to the numerous uprisings of the Right Wing grass roots...all of this under a so-called “Liberal” President.
Are the Bundy's still in possession of the bird sanctuary?

(Thought experiment: what would happen if I took over some federal shack in the wilderness?)
…..............................
The problem with the Democratic Party is one of Definition...of who we are, and of what the world really looks like.
For my whole life, we've allowed the Oligarchs and their Lunatic Enablers to define Reality, and to define “Liberalism”.
We've allowed them to define what it means to be an American.
The Clintons(and the numerous talkers who have been so busy attempting to preemptively trash Sanders) have played right along with this.
I long ago stopped caring if a Liberal resurgence was possible.
The point is that we'll never actually find out if we never even try.

(see: Palermo's rebuttal of Tomasky's dour assessment...which reads like a eulogy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/michael-tomaskys-despairi_b_619780.html)
…........................................................
At this moment, the GOP's three legged coalition is falling apart (http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/18-reasons-why-donald-trump-vulgar-two-bit-caesar-according-americas-conservatives)

Ie, strike while the iron is hot.

Now's the time to present a Vision of America that is not beholden to Oligarchy...that is(or can be) of, by and for the People...instead of of by and for the Corporate Aristocracy.
I don't expect the Media, nor the Democratic Establishment to allow any of this...they are part of the Machine, after all.
...and the Machine doesn't want an America for the People.
That, right there, is why I'm voting for Bernie...even if it's a so-called “wasted vote”.
And we must remember that there is a media bias at work, here...further evidence of the stupidity and dishonesty of the Right Wing Mythos(Liberal Media, my shiny white ass):
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1280100871

http://usuncut.com/politics/nationwide-march-for-bernie-sanders-sweeps-across-35-cities/

Remember, as well, that the pollsters still haven't discovered cell phones,lol...continuing to rely solely on those folks who have land lines.
How does this skew the results, I wonder?
I could go on and on, of course.
The Democratic Party has lost me.
This feels like the last chance to say No to the coming hellworld that we are steadily being led into, and we are expected to hold our nose, yet again, and support the Lesser Evil.
It's likely already too late to turn it around, when even the Language has been perverted in service of Corporate Feudalism, when so many of our countrymen are Stupid and Hysterical, and when someone like Trump can have a real shot at being the “leader of the free world”.
If there was ever a time when a Hail Mary Pass was justified, this is it.

On Bill Clinton, Trade and Instrumentality

Billary didn't invent “Globalisation”....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-l-kearns/bill-clintons-trade-legac_b_8945180.html

"Globalisation" is a useful euphemism whereby Immortal Fictions escaped the fences we had placed around them, and became Supranational.
This was merely one more step, albeit a large one, in a long line of such steps...Nixon in China...the entire Cold War/Mideast Policy...interrupted, for a while, by FDR's collection of gnawed bones thrown to the hoi polloi to stave off becoming food, himself.
...on and on.
It has little to do with “capitalism” as envisioned by Smith, or even Marx.
It has even less to do with the “capitalism” defended so vigorously by all and sundry....those defenders are analogous to priests of Baal, alone on their hill tops...their deity having been replaced by another, more sophisticated ghost.
We the People are mere instrumentalities in this regime...truly Cogs in a great Machine...
What Clinton did was tear down an already decrepit fence...full of holes and made of rusty barbed wire.
“Free Trade” is Global Government for the 1% and the Paper Entities they hide in...again, to avoid becoming food.
Notice, that at the same time as they have constructed the WTO, et alia, they have ramped up the Borders we must navigate....this is instructive: “illegal Immigration” is a hot topic...can't have the Little People being free to move about the world, chasing the money....such freedom is only for the Aristocracy.
The Post War Boom was enabled by the destruction of the Physical Plant of Europe and Asia; the Clinton Era Boom was fueled by euphemism and a sort of Find the Queen/Pea game of Promises and Belief.
The Hidden Aristocracy moved the bulk of our Physical Plant to Bangladesh, and the like..chasing lower wages, and fewer rules.
Labor Arbitrage, sold to us as the Path to Prosperity.
We were stupid to allow it...even cheer it on....
In the time , since, I note, the Prisons have filled, and we've even privatised them...somewhere to put our Surplus Population, now essentially useless.
Of course, if we were interested in anything but “Efficiency”, we could have kept some of the Means of Production...but, again, it's Instrumentality that rules the day...Profit is all that matters, even when the digital version of printed pieces of rag-paper are objectively worthless.
Nietzsche worried what we would replace God with, after we had killed him.
Perhaps we have replaced him with Economics and our Organisations....

Angrywhitemanistan

Boehlert has a good point:


(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/the-media-and-trumps-rall_b_8955056.html)


FTA:”For anyone who thinks the coverage has been pitch perfect, just imagine, for instance, if Hillary Clinton supporters were roughing up conservatives at her rallies, punching and choking them. Imagine if Bernie Sanders supporters were kicking and taunting attendees at Sanders rallies who were protesting the Democrat's agenda. Imagine if conservatives quietly protesting Clinton and Sanders were being hauled out of events by cops while mobs of Democrats hurled insults at them.
Cardiac arrest barely begins to describe the type of communal meltdown that would occur within the Beltway press if any of those things had taken place under the auspices of the Democratic Party. Let alone if they took place over and over and over again.”

Fuck.
Remember Occupy?
Remember that cop?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/pepper-spray-cop-settlement_n_4152147.html

Remember the nationwide coordinated “response”?

(http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy)


Sure seems like the Right can do just about anything they want, these days(while crying “Persecushun!!!!) and get right away with it.

Nom-nom-nom...

Visions of Teabilly revolutionaries, with that vacant but angry visage, gnawing on a human index finger...fat dripping in their three day old shadowbeard:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/us/politics/for-republicans-mounting-fears-of-lasting-split.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

The Grand Coalition...Reagan's Three Legged Stool...is no more.
Didn't I warn them that the Tea Party was a bad idea?

That the rhetoric and vituperate rage that it engendered would eventually turn around to bite them?
Rough Beast....
When even Paul Ryan is a RINO...I can see the future, and it is filled with blood and fire.




the Dems have their own problems a brewing:
http://www.alternet.org/comments/drugs/debbie-wasserman-schultz-keep-arresting-pot-smokers#disqus_thread

Look at the comments....calls for beheading DWS and worse(!)...identical inchoate rage to that found on Tea Fora.
At least here the Ugly is interspersed with intelligent discourse, eyes remarkably free from the usual scales and blinders. But there are no real solutions offered by the Intelligent Libs...there are no solutions...not even Bernie...which is pretty damned clear=eyed for politically engaged Americans.
The bloom is off the rose, and the rose is now crushed into the icy mud.
Dystopia is all we can reasonably hope for...a precipitate decline in standards, a continuing fall in hopes and dreams...where even the Ideal that we work towards is tarnished...is Less....


And, as Synthesis(a la Hegel), a sublime, near Kerouacian exegesis:

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/white-mans-pathology-deep-inside-popularity-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders


Aunt Hannah said, in some thousands of words, that Evil is Banal...ordinary.
One could say, boring....
The homogenaeity of the parts of America I have been to in my adulthood speaks to this.
There are many things that we could do, of course...to allay...to put off...even avoid what looks like our fate.
But those things require understanding and trust...two things that are noticeably missing from the body politic.
They also require work and sacrifice...which, while given a whole lot of lip service...are anathema.
The defining feature of Neoliberalism is “MEMEMEME”...the idea that I am an Island Nation in my own right...and fuck everybody else.
Mr Marche's offering points to the end result of this universal selfishness: Politics is over.
We are each alone.

Tarpman

So this happened




a defender of the federal bird sanctuary under his Freedom Tarp.
(made in China, of course)
The thing that gets me about these folks is that they are unwittingly supporting the very forces that have ruined the country...while railing against their fellow victims, and against a bureaucracy that, while well intentioned, is sometimes myopic and stupid in their enforcement activities.
If they “win”, these sage brush yokels, and all that federal land is handed to the states, and/or sold off, it will spell the end of Wilderness...and that beautiful country will become a wasteland.
And they, themselves, will not benefit from it.
It's sad...and absurd...like so many things, today.
Misplacing their ire, and ignorantly staking out such a place for their Thermopylae fantasies...
I hear the ghost of Hobbes, whispering in the wind:”Bellum omnium contra omnes “.

There are many such groups, and near-movements, scattered in the backwaters and podunk enclaves.
There are neoconfederates right here...proudly flying their confederate flags, and unashamedly pontificating about the evil fedgov and it's army of poor black people and “illegals”, ready for the balloon to go up, so they can subjugate all these “real amercuns”, and march them into camps.
This is the result of the confusion and mud-in-the-water of our collective mind, and the anti-intellectual policies and trends that have so dumbed down the people...or at least a substantial portion of them.
Economics plays a large role, as well...it takes more than one job to get by, so folks are scrambling and have no time for Thought...the simple explanation fills the gap, helpfully provided by the Great Wurlitzer...
It is the Year One...there is no History, instead a smattering of myths...there is no ideology, rather a half-baked conglomeration of contradictory aphorisms that pretend to salience.
Does the world, seen through Tarpman's eyes, even resemble the world you see when you look out your window?

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,

...whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” --UN Convention Against Torture(to which we are a signatory)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-gordon/america-revisits-the-dark-side_b_8929918.html

https://www.hrw.org/node/283564

Two of the most Obscene Things I've ever read.

Makes one want to burn a flag...or storm a Bastille...
And here all I gotta do to go to jail is sit quietly on my porch smoking a joint in silence...fully clothed.

But there's Wolfie working for the Other Brother(the “smart one”, we're told)...and there's no mention of this issue, save for , as the woman said, promises to be better and more vigorous Torturers than those who came before.
Justice will never be served, I'm afraid...and things will only get worse.
There is a great ugliness loose in the world, and an entire media empire/ political organisation set up conveniently to fan the flames of hatred and fear...and simultaneously ensure that nothing whatever can be done to mitigate the myriad causes of this ugly despair... and at the same time, remove any obstacles to actions and policies that will only accentuate those causes.
It's hard not to be terminally cynical.

And Iran

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/02/politics/barack-obama-2016-wish-list/

http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2016/01/03/444332/Iran-tells-banks-to-prepare-for-bans-removal/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/saudi-executions-nimr-iran_56893488e4b014efe0dab27d

http://irannewsupdate.com/news/nuclear/2505-obama-administration-promoting-iran-economic-growth-and-collaboration.html

…...............................................................

Some of my earliest political memories are of yellow ribbons on pine trees, during the Iranian Hostage Fiasco.
At the time, I remembered an issue of National Geographic from the 60's(I have my dad's and my grandad's stashes) on the Shah, Pahlavi, and the Peacock Throne....and re-read that, as well as a long Wander through the Giant Deluxe Set of Britannica on the history and culture of the region, going back to pre-historic times.
They did not leave out the Post-World War 1 rejiggering of borders, nor Operation Ajax; although they were not near explicit enough to engender much outrage.
Those two events are why there's a beef between Iran and the USA(and UK).
Remarkably, France was a party to the first thing...redrawing the maps...but the are relatively friendly with Iran, today. Britain, too, seems rather less hostile than we do.
The Islamic Revolution was a direct response to Operation Ajax, however, and the government we thereby created.
We're still mad about those people having the audacity to throw off our approved dictator, and withhold their oil....and they're still mad about us being mad.... as well as about that whole Coup d'etat thing.(see:”Savak”)

Obama seems to have changed this, or at least made a beginning to changing it.
Simultaneously, Saudi Arabia may have finally run out of sufficient oil reserves to coddle any longer.
(all the exportation of Wahabi-ism and box cutter wielding lunatics, and the whole Burqa, wimmens can't drive business, has likely helped to sour that relationship,too)
Iran still has oil...and a lot of Natgas...and they're buddies with now-Shia Iraq...who also has a lot of oil(last big pool of light sweet).

This looks like a Big Pivot in the making, to me.

It's also worth thinking about how much the GOP relies on Saudi money...lol.
(And by extension, Corporate America)

One could be extremely cynical, and posit that the current insanity in Syria is part of this Chessboard...and that Damascus would make a fine pipeline route...one that doesn't entail big slow-moving tankers/targets lined up in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea or Suez.
If one were extremely cynical...