ectoblog.com

(ABC on McCain links to a .flv version if & when youtube takes this down)

When the Thundering Herd Comes up Lame

–Keith Fitz-Gerald

I’m sick and tired of hearing how “we” caused this … how, according to the mainstream media, “we” somehow did this to our financial system.

Baloney.

For the most part, “we” didn’t do squat. The average American had nothing to do with this. For the most part, “we” pay our taxes, “we” pay our credit card debt and “we” pay our mortgages – on time, and in full.

…

While I truly feel sorry for the people who honestly didn’t know better, or for whom there was no other option, I cannot extend my sympathies to others like my neighbor who spent through his home equity to buy a Hummer, a new boat, two jet skis, and a lavish European vacation.

He’s now about to lose his toys – and his home – not to mention his marriage.

Nor can I extend my sympathies to the modern robber barons like the corporate chieftains of Fannie, Freddie and the other bailout candidates – who pocketed millions while shareholders lost billions.

I don’t see any of these guys offering to return their bonuses, or to forgo their “golden parachute” severance packages, to help their former employers pay off the debts they helped these companies accrue. And forget about them reimbursing the U.S. taxpayers, who are stuck with the bill for cleaning up this mess.

No, instead these ex-boardroom warriors are now lying low somewhere in Old Greenwich, out at The Hamptons, or out on their yachts somewhere – until the storm blows over.

The fact that the profits from this colossal fiasco will be privatized while the losses will be socialized fills me with hatred for these people. The fact that the public is maneuvered into a position that requires socializing loss in order to prevent system collapse creates in me the urge to crush skulls.

IF I COULD REACH OUT AND CRUSH SKULLS

Crisis talks over $700B ‘toxic debt’ rescue plan - CNN.com

“The risk of doing nothing far outweighs the risk of the package. And so I decided to act and act boldly.”

Thanks, George. Now do us a favor and get your chimp-ass out of office so people who know what the fuck they’re doing can come in and clean up the damage you and your cronies have done to the country and the world over the last eight years. ‘Preciate it. You chimp-ass chimpy motherfucker.

Former Secretaries of State to next President: Get over it. Get real. Be smart.

Obama and McCain Tax Proposals - washingtonpost.com

According to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are both proposing tax plans that would result in cuts for most American families.

I mean, people: could the choice be any clearer?

U.S. sticking with tough stance on Iran negotiations - CNN.com

Here’s a thing that bothers me: 10 years ago, if someone in a position like Condoleeza Rice’s said that Iran was a difficult and dangerous state, I’d think to myself ‘Shit, I hope Iran doesn’t do anything dangerous and weird.’ Now when I hear someone in a position such as hers say such a thing, I think ‘Shit, I hope we don’t do anything dangerous and weird.’

I’m pretty tired of thinking of us as the dangerous and weird guys.

Governments are in the business of redistributing wealth. That’s what they do. Political parties make it their business to direct this redistribution in the way that suits them; that’s what they do. My party, the Republican Party, makes it its business to redistribute wealth in a way that suits the captains of business and industry, our only real constituents. That’s what we do.

This is a challenging task, of course, because this constituency is very small. To facilitate the process, we as republicans must create a much larger, nominal constituency that supports this aim. The cheapest way to do this is to support issues that are cost-free yet also lead large sections of the electorate to vote for us without realizing they are voting against their own best economic interests. These fear grenades–abortion, flags, the pledge of allegiance, handguns–disguise the real aim of the party, which is to funnel wealth toward the rich. It’s just that simple!

How does one become rich enough to benefit from republican policy? I mean, how do you gain enough wealth to benefit from real republican policy, instead of the cheap, red-meat issues with which we chum the waters to attract your support?

First of all, it’s important to understand that the Republican Party doesn’t want you to be rich. We are already rich; all of our friends are, too. The only thing we want from you is your vote, which will enable us and all our friends to keep buying expensive things while people who aren’t our friends work hard for little benefit. But if, by chance, you somehow become rich–despite the rules and regulations that we have put in place to prevent this from happening–you will be allowed to become our friend. That’s what makes this country great! And if, by some chance, you become rich, then lose it all through illness or serendipity, you will no longer be our friend. It’s a tough world! But please continue to vote for your old friends, because maybe, just maybe, you will become rich again.

I ask you to keep in mind that the future is a magical place where anything can happen. In the magical future, you are not poor. And while it may be true that your former friends are laughing at you in contempt while you continue to vote for them, belief in the magical future still allows you to laugh in contempt at the other poor people around you who vote for republicans because they have been directed to fear non-bible thumping and non-allegiance pledging. And don’t despise your former friends for continuing a policy here or there that allows poor people to continue to be poor instead of dead; throwing a few bones to the hoi polloi is, regrettably, necessary to avoid having to step over their lifeless bodies in the streets, civil war, and the Wall. We republicans have great respect for the Wall, and would prefer that the rest of you never get smart and line us up against it.

So here’s to magical thinking, fear grenades, and the inability to understand how desperately fucked you really are.

Thank you for your support!

Obama lays out energy, tax plans, criticizes McCain’s - CNN.com

Obama says McCain’s gas tax plan would “actually do real harm” and take “$3 billion a month out of the highway trust fund and hand it over to the oil companies.”

Doug Holtz-Eakin, the McCain campaign’s senior policy adviser, told reporters in a conference call Thursday that McCain “is not out of touch with the pressure on gasoline prices. He proposed a gas tax suspension for the summer that would put $600 in the pocket of a trucker buying diesel fuel, take some of the pressure off the price increases of all the things that they deliver, help American families get through the summer.”

So McCain is focusing on getting us all through the next few months. If we can just make it through the summer.

Finally! A politician who understands the underlying desperation and pointlessness of existence!

McCAIN IN ‘O8.

Grumbling Clinton supporters make Democrats nervous - CNN.com

A newly released CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that if Obama does not select Clinton as his running mate, 22 percent of her supporters would stay home this fall — and another 17 percent would vote for McCain.

I have this urge to slap 22 percent of Clinton’s supporters, and this other urge to shake the piss out of another 17 percent of them.

I think every democrat whose last name is not Clinton can agree that we have entered the time when Obama cannot fail to win the nomination unless he is filmed eating a basketful of live puppies. I think most of us can agree that’s where we stand today.

The war’s been going on so long, I can’t remember if I was originally for it or against it.

If I was for it, that only means the lies were successful. If I was against it, good for me. If I qualified my opinion, I was just being my usual qualifying self.

The war’s been going on so long.

I comment on two blogs/bboards. I used to comment on more. I don’t comment on the two that I still comment on nearly as often as I used to. The reason, I think, is that the lively conversations that attracted me to these bboards in the first place have devolved into predictable kneejerk bloodbaths, with certain prolific parties on the left and right treating most new threads like they were WWI battlefields, fighting over every square inch of dirt whether it makes sense or not. The threads degrade into exercises in name-calling in the blink of an eye. So now, most times, I read a comment I want to reply to, I write a reply to it, then I erase it before posting. I think “why bother?” Sometimes I have an insight into something because of what I do or have done or where I’ve been. It usually doesn’t get posted anymore. Why bother? These people don’t need or want to know what I know. It’ll be just another square inch of dirt in Verdun.

These people aren’t interested in conversation. I know that’s a pretty broad brush, and not true for many, but it seems that way. It seems that way because those who do want to have a conversation, who want to learn or teach something, don’t anymore because they see the same battlefield I do.

It’s amazing: it’s almost as if there is a natural lifespan to a good bboard. Because eventually the Tribes find it and squash it and leave it when it’s dried and dead, and then they look for the next one to kill.

So here’s to the good bboards. May they spring eternally from the ashes of those that came before.

Brown mulls UK oath of allegiance plan - CNN.com

Goldsmith calls for a pledge of allegiance, the establishment of a new national holiday to celebrate Britishness, and expanded ceremonies that would take place when new immigrants become British citizens. He also said schoolchildren should have a citizenship ceremony as well.”We are experiencing changes in our society which may have an impact on the bond that we feel we share as citizens,” Goldsmith said in the report. “I propose a range of measures that may help to promote a shared sense of belonging.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve had occasion to say “at least I don’t live there.” Can you imagine having had to attend a compulsory citizenship ceremony when you turned 18? At 18, when you were old enough to be spooked by the kind of off-handed paranoid power the government would have to invoke to make that happen? Being forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at 8 years old was bad enough, in hindsight. Blessed hindsight. But there would be nothing “hindsighted” about this; this would be dumped right on your developmental front porch step just as you step out into the world for good.

There is nothing wrong with having a sense of place and community, which is what the British government is trying to foster here. There is only something wrong with the idea that a dictated sense of place and community has any worth. It does not. It took me years to get over the fact that my government made me stand at attention and chant at a flag when I was little. In some ways I’m still not over it.

It’s a funny thing: there is no faster way to persuade someone to hold a particular attitude than to demand he hold its opposite.

Bush vetoes bill banning waterboarding - CNN.com

“We created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous al Qaeda operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland,” Bush said. “If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the field manual, we could lose vital information from senior al Qaeda terrorists, and that could cost American lives.”

George is a colossal ass, of course; King of the short-sighted political decision. “Torture is okay for us to use.” Say that, and you can no longer complain about any god damn thing somebody else does to any of our citizens without exposing yourself as a hypocritical fool.

So that’s true. But something else unsettles me about this article, too. Been annoying and unsettling me for quite some time now: I find the use of the word “homeland” over the past few years very spooky. I don’t remember hearing it used in any kind of official way prior to 9/11. It’s as if George and his pals had wanted to use “fatherland” or “motherland,” but recognized that the nazis and the commies beat them to it.

I’m not comfortable living in a country that has a pet name for itself.

We establish the importance of an event or idea by mashing and smashing it, kicking it around, to see where it ends up in the community’s Big Ball of History and Importance. “9/11 goes here; pet rocks go here.”

After the thing has found its spot on the ball, if it’s deemed important, it takes a lot of effort to move it. That’s why no one wanted to hear what Galileo had to say. It would involve a lot of digging and heavy lifting, and everybody was already sitting down comfortably in easy chairs.

If it’s deemed unimportant, it comes to occupy a little hidey-hole in some out of the way place, and is very easy to move about. If one can track down all the mentions of an event, one can fabricate plausible lies and change history: “The pet rock was first mentioned in conversation in Little Rock, Arkansas.” “Really? Whoa.”

Britney Spears will end up in a little hidey-hole in an out of the way place, eventually. People will tell the most obtuse lies about her, and other people will believe them. But since we had the tremendous foresight to hammer her onto an inconsequential region of the Ball, none of it will matter.

Here’s an example of what we will deem important: the coming presidential elections. The coming presidential elections will matter. These elections are weighty, and what comes out of these elections will be even weightier. Sides will be taken. No dumb lies will be told; all lies will be cagy and mean.

These elections are going to be put in the Ball’s juicy center. It will be decades before a historian offers a different view of what happened than that which the winners will dictate: “We’ve agreed to bury it here; we’re going to bury it right here.”

Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.

The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.

And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.

Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.

Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.

We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.

Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.

And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.

In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.

I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.

That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.

Superjumbo ends historic flight - CNN.com

The airline says its jets will set a “new standard for luxury and comfort,” fitted with 399 economy seats, 60 business seats and 12 Givenchy-designed “suites” featuring a flat bed behind sliding doors.

Thank goodness new standards for luxury and comfort are being set for those who can afford it.

Not so fast, Christian soldiers - Los Angeles Times

You need a free login (or bugmenot) to access the story, which is a good read that illuminates (again) the cozy relationship between the military and the evangelical Doomsday crowd. A fundamental idea concerning the war and our strained relationship with our Muslim friends is noted and bears repeating: “The Rapture is not a viable exit strategy.”

AlterNet: Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Listening

From time to time, National Review - the bible of American conservatism - organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in - and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.

These are the winners, the smooth talkers, the sundogs; certain the losers deserve to lose, and they themselves deserve to win. They believe in the wall, in the way things have always been, in examples and lessons. But a time is coming, and they are afraid of it, when the wall will be used for reasons other than those they built it for. When that time comes, it will come heavily.