Hell, for all of the crap being run by the Right about "zOMG, Teh Socialism!!!1!", the truth of the matter is that Obama might as well be a Republican.
His deficit hawk act in the middle of a recession with the recovery stalling out is an atrociously bad idea. Not that it matters all that much, not when the opposition has politicians who are frothing at the bit to cut taxes for the wealthy while making sure that those at the other end of the economic pyramid are ground further and further into the dirt.
It would be nice to see Obama stand for something, to come out swinging, win or lose, and fight for those who are getting the short end of the stick. But Jesus Motherfucking Gawd on Roller Skates, he makes Harry "No Balls" Reid look like a total bad-ass. Neither one of them have a tenth of the political guts of Nancy Pelosi.
I weep for this country.
There was a time when, no matter how dark the day was, the future was bright. Those days are gone and may be gone forever. Ever since the 1960s, it seems that things have kind of jumped the rails. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the USSR seems to have brought even more confusing strife to the world. The Internet is nice, but the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. Cable TV is hundreds of channels of bullshit heaped on bullshit. Whoever conceived of reality shows should be drawn-and-quartered as the guest star of the last ever reality show.
People seem to be meaner and nastier. Society seems to be becoming more barbaric. "Please" and "thank you" seem to be as rare in usage as spats. Common courtesy and manners are almost extinct. You don't see people giving up seats on the subway or bus to those who obviously cannot stand. The men who think that it is good manners to wear their hats indoors should have those hats pinned to their heads with 20-penny nails.
The political noise level has exploded. It used to be that legislators would horse-trade and cooperate to get the people's business done, but now they seem to just yell at each other (for pickup by C-Span and the news channels). The clowns who agreed to televise the House and the Senate should be skinned alive and thrown into vats of hot salt water.
The extremists, especially on the Right, are in ascendancy. The legislators are running afraid. Those who did what needed to be done two years ago to avert another depression (bailing out the banks) are being punished for putting pragmatism ahead of ideological purity. The economy is stalling and it is on the verge of a deflationary cycle (if it is not already in one, as BadTux thinks it is) because the budget hawks will not permit the spending necessary to jump-start the economy. Obama's stimulus package was too small, it was like trying to turn a stampede with a bamboo switch, and the idiots on the Right are yammering that not doing enough is proof of the concept failing (which is sort of like using a plane crash to say "man cannot fly").
Meanwhile, the rich are amassing dynastic trusts because some of the greediest states repealed their rules against perpetuities. More and more money is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people and tens of millions of morons who are at the bottom edge of the economic scale are cheering them on.
Because of the Right, in refusing to permit anything meaningful to reform the banking system, we are one good crash away from the entire system coming down in ashes. And yet the brainwashed devotees of El Drugbo and the Weeping Nazi think that is all just fine.
I don't feel any undercurrent of optimism in this country. What "optimism" exists smells more like disguised desperation. Between the economy and climate change and peak oil and impending water shortages, I feel a real sense that the next few generations are going to have a far harder life. I look at my siblings' children and I feel like weeping for them and their future.
We are so screwed.
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7 comments:
Like the Weimar Republic, the right shat all over us and are successfully blaming the stink on the cleanup crew. All they need is some laughable twerp willing to say anything, with lots of passion and hand gestures, who already has a large audience...
The only two things that will keep the U.S. from becoming an evil empire are nuclear weapons in other countries, and the otherwise disastrous Citizen's United ruling.
Out of self defense, other countries can now anonymously propagandize against wars of aggression. Enemy nations can train the public to hate funding the military. The rich will try to bend us to their will.
This brownian motion of all the monied interests should sort of cancel out and just leave the surviving 280 million without a clear goal. For a while.
Until the political leaders start nuking cities to get us motivated to attack some powerless foreign countries.
Nag,
Your talking wag the dog. Go rent it.
It's a mess, I've been watching the political cycles and the every time we get a swing one way it swings back with a vengence the other way. Often taking
a decade or three to do it.
More than any other time we are witness to the process of making sausage, err law and it was never pretty.
Georege Jetson: 500 channels and still nothing on.
Today: 2000 channels and still nothing
on.
We always knew the rich only get richer. The system always favored those that have money to loose without busting the bigger egg already saved. We reward that with tax breaks for investments, losses
and even donations to charity.
Politically active charities and
organizations should _all_ pay taxes.
After all they are asking for money
and influencing laws about the expenditure of money.
When I was a kid gas was 25 cents, mortgages were 4.5 percent, hoses were 20K$ a good job paid 10,000/year. Now gas is $3, mortgages are 4.7 percent, houses are 400K$ and
15K$ is minimum wage. Of course in the now part of the equation is are you working at all for lack of jobs.
Yes, we are screwed. Our kids may not even have a chance because they will have been denied science and critical thinking and been given the new Texas truth.
Eck!
Comrade E.B.,
I am glad to know I'm not the only one with so little hope for the future. I used to think that mine would be the last generation to die before the whole $#¡†house starts going up in flames. Now I think my parents' is.
So, in this spirit of hopelessness, and because I gather you are a lawyer, may I ask a trivial question after a lot of background and context?
You mentioned men not taking hats off indoors. I like 1940s style, so that's how I often dress, which means hats. A few months ago, going into a courtroom for jury selection, we were told to take off our hats, which was directed at me as only I was wearing one. According to Miss Manners, Emily Post, Letitia Baldridge and others, women's hats (actual women's hats, not unisex ones) stay on even in such places as houses of worship and courtrooms.
So it seemed to me that the "no hats" directive was a well-intended effort to recapture one respectful propriety from the past: but. Just as the trend of men wearing hats indoors indicates ignorance of prior ways, so did the court woman's ban on *all* hats. That is, I assume she would say she was applying a traditional standard of respect, when in fact she was expanding it well beyond its traditional limits in response to modern (non-traditional) hat practices, and in doing so, actually violating the traditional standard as it applied to women.
Anyway, what say you?
Eck,
I'm toying with the theory that all of history, every last event, can be explained as a class war against the poor. The motivation being to immiserate the enemy, increase their numbers and the weight of the yokes on their necks.
Dr. Bubbles, I suspect that the requirement that women remove their hats is grounded in equal parts of ignorance and fear of a sex discrimination beef.
Nan, the serfs keep stepping out of their place and acting as if they are as fully human as their masters. How dare they!
I saw the dynamic at work every day growing up in the segregated South, where acts of abject brutality against black people were justified as, "keeping the niggers in their place." Because if they weren't kept "in their place", they would run roughshod over good upstanding white people, because they were by nature just savages and not fully human.
Our lords and masters have that same attitude towards the rest of us. We're acting "uppity", and need to be put "in our place". The more things change.... the more they don't. Just sayin'.
- Badtux the Long-memory'ed Penguin
BTW, my jaundiced opinion of the future is one reason I don't have kids. I saw the inevitable end when Reagan gutted the Pell Grant program (which previously paid 100% of the tuition and textbooks for poor kids) in order to fund B-1 bombers that nobody needed and that never fired a shot in anger until the Iraq II war. Taking money away from the poor to give it to the rich, it was clear, was going to be the future, and taking away the bootstraps necessary in order to pull yourself up by the bootstraps was going to be the order of the day, and the future of our children would be as slaves. I am not happy to say that my jaundiced view of the future from the mid 80's is bearing true...
- Badtux the Childless Penguin
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