Category: Politix

The Postal Service is one of the finest institutions we have.

Personally, I think forty-four cents to mail a letter to anyplace in the country is the bargain of the century. And they will take that letter to any address, no matter how far out in the sticks it happens to be.

But have you noticed lately all the talk about how the Post Office is a basket case, inefficient, poorly managed, and unable to pay its bills? According to this drumbeat they have to shut down a bunch of offices and lay off tens of thousands of workers, and even then they will have to reduce services to make ends meet. They just can’t compete with the leaner, smarter, market-driven private delivery services.

But did you know that beginning five years ago during the Bush Administration, a law was passed requiring the Postal Service to fully fund its pension plan 75 years into the future, and that they are required to accomplish this feat within the next five years? In other words they have to be 100% ready to pay a pension to workers who have not yet been born. And this at the same time that UPS and Federal Express are lobbying strongly to be allowed to use their pension funds today as operating money, claiming that it will enable them to be more profitable, thus “saving” their pension funds.

Meanwhile, the “bankrupt” U.S. Postal Service is sitting on 47 billion dollars, much of which won’t be needed for decades, and instead of being allowed to use it, they are told to sell off property and fire workers.

Put those facts together with the fact the the Postal Service is the second largest employer in the country, with by far the largest unionized work force, and I don’t know about you, but I smell something fishy. The drive to crush the labor movement and decimate the middle class would certainly count it as a major victory to see the Post Office dismantled, its workers laid off, its union shut down, its buildings and equipment sold off and private, anti-union, companies taking over the delivery of mail in the U.S. The nonsensical requirement that it overfund its pension and medical benefits plans so far into the future makes it little more than a large beautiful animal with broken legs, unable to defend itself as the hyenas of greed eat it, bite by bite.

Make no mistake — if we lose the Postal Service, we lose a precious American institution. The centuries have shown that the delivery of mail is a proper function of government. Privatization would put us at the mercy of delivery services which would no longer have to compete. Prices would rise, and with no mandate to deliver the mail, services would surely be reduced — except for those who could pay for them.

One step toward saving our Post Office (and the union, and all those jobs and all that tradition, and all those services) is House Bill 1351, which reverses the 2006 law mandating the benefits plan overfunding. You can read the bill here (PDF) and see some TV coverage of the subject here. If you care, consider contacting your member of Congress and asking them to support this bill.

Jones’ Law Number 2: The superrich get their wealth in one of two ways. They steal it, or they inherit it from someone who stole it.

You can argue with the semantics, and you might even be able to point out an exception or two, but basically if you want to acquire great wealth in this world, you have to take it from someone who is weaker or stupider than you. This is what all the great wars and conquests of history have been about: the spoils.

So now in the 21st century, as the governments of the world morph into giant international corporation-states, we shouldn’t be too surprised to see that the pillaging continues. In the United States and around the world, elites live in regal opulence isolated in fortress-like security, many of them so rich they can’t remember how many homes they own. Bankers and hedge fund managers earn sums that are literally unimaginable. Corporate CEOs pay themselves hundreds of times what their average worker makes, often while the company tanks and jobs are moved overseas. Politicians have been “supported” by corporations for so long now that they have forgotten that they are being bribed, and they look the other way as corporate lawyers and lobbyists write bills legalizing the ongoing money grab. When this corruption occasionally brings down the house, as it did in 2007-08, the corporate-owned government uses taxpayer money to make whole the criminals who caused the crash, and when the bailout money runs out, severe austerity is imposed on the people, as in Britain, Greece, Argentina, and soon the United States. Meanwhile the superrich culprits skate.

Nor, it seems to me, should we be very surprised when people take to the streets in mindless rampage, trashing everything in their path and grabbing for themselves anything of value they can get away with. After all, isn’t this the example they have been seeing at the highest levels of society? When shady-but-legal Wall Street shenanigans have ruined the economy, taken the incomes and homes of tens of millions and wiped out retirement savings and college funds, what’s a few big-screen televisions or a whole boxcar full of tennis shoes? When the bankers have escaped to their mansions with all your money, why not torch the bank?

I am getting nervous about what seems to be developing in this country. Billionaires have usurped the government, leaving no force in its place to temper their greed. The economic and social distance between those at the very top and the rest of us has grown so great that there is no more communication. The story we tell ourselves of justice and equality for all is now mere myth. Some tea partiers have already shown up at Presidential events carrying guns. The violence in the human heart has been amply on display in past decades: the Watts Riots in 1965; in Detroit in 1967; back in Los Angeles in 1992; London just last week. Worldwide there have been literally hundreds of civil disturbances since the middle of the 20 century, with an increasing number of them in the United States.

Our government has not been effective in mitigating the current recession. Saying it’s over and things are getting better does nothing to calm the fear and anger of the common people, especially when unemployment and foreclosures are still at record levels while the upper echelons of society are clearly doing better than ever and seem completely unwilling to share in the burden of rebuilding the economy.

If your job is gone or you fear it might be; if your home has been taken away or you fear it might be; if your grown children are back living in your home because they are broke and unemployed after spending a hundred thousand dollars on a college degree; if you have sent out 500 job applications and got nothing back; if you are sick and can’t get medicine; if you are living in a shelter or a car; if your children are hungry; if your elected representatives bicker like children instead of working toward solutions — how much spark would it take to send you in a rage out into the street to take back what you thought was yours and to wreak vengeance on those who took it from you?

There are sparks every day in every city. At some point will the humiliated working class join the angry, armed tea partiers and the dispossessed Left and start to lash out blindly? I hope not. The people can’t win such a war, and neither can the elites.

As in all wars, there will only be losers.

Might as well add my two cents to this issue:

What’s going on in Wisconsin right now — the Republican governor and Republican majority in the state legislature attempting to cripple public employee unions — is not a political matter. It’s an economic matter. It’s another battle in the war on workers and the middle class that began in the eighties. It’s rich people and and rich corporations trying to get rid of labor unions and kill off the pesky middle class once and for all.

In the 2006 election the people of Wisconsin, like most voters nationwide, decided that the Democrats had had long enough to bring the economy back to life (two years), so they voted for Republicans instead. A lot of Democrats must have voted for Republicans, because Republican candidates can’t win with only Republicans voting for them. Whenever the voters do this, they live to regret it, although they rarely understand exactly how they got fucked.

Because the real constituents of the GOP — those rich people and rich corporations — don’t see anything wrong with the economy. They’re doing just fine, thank you, so what is there to “bring back to life?”

Understand, when I say “rich people” and “rich corporations,” I’m talking about unimaginable wealth. Unspendable amounts of money. Since Ronald Reagan got the ball rolling by destroying the air traffic controllers union in 1981, the working class in this country has seen their income stagnate or decline, while the upper class has taken most of that income and wealth for themselves. The top one hundredth of one percent of Americans now makes an average of $27 million per household, while the average income for the bottom 90% of us is a little over $31,000. Meanwhile, tax rates are currently at a 50-year low, and as billionaire Warren Buffet famously says, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary.

Yet these super rich don’t have enough. They have taken most of our jobs and sent them to countries where people are happy to work for a tiny fraction of what it costs to live in America, and now they say that American workers must “learn to compete in a global economy.” What they mean is we must learn to live on seven dollars an hour. In the future, even that seven bucks will be deemed too extravagant.

During most of the 20th century, the most prosperous century for the the most prosperous nation the world has ever known, labor unions have been the only protection the worker has had against powerful corporations, and so they are the natural enemy of the rich. The war has been going on for some time, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to strip public employee unions of the right to collective bargaining is only the latest battle.

But it’s not really Democrats against Republicans. It’s the upper class trying to see if the time might be right — after two generations of misinformation — to turn workers against themselves. Recent polling seems to indicate that a majority in Wisconsin is not OK with this union-busting plan, regardless of how they may have voted in the last election.

The Republican majority in the state government may listen to this majority, or they may not. They are, after all, contolled by powerful corporate interests. Either way, judging from the massive protests going on in Wisconsin, it seems that the time has not yet arrived when American workers are ready to submit to this type of outrage.

But the American worker is in disarray, confused, divided against himself. We have been fed a stream of lies for such a long time that it has become difficult for us to see the truth. Most of us don’t want or need to earn a hundred million dollars a year. We want fair pay for honest work, decent working conditions, the ability to raise our families, go to the doctor when we need to, take a vacation every now and then, and live out our last years in dignity. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask in this land of plenty.

Of course the upper class will fight us even in this modest ambition, because they and their corporations are programmed always to find ways to accumulate more and more money. They don’t “hate” the working class. But if the working class is comfortable, that means there is money on the table, and rich people will go after it.

They are well organized, smart, relentless and ruthless. I wonder if we are up to it.

Today would have been my mother’s 100th birthday.

When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, I thought it was a joke. When he won, I thought it was just Californians being their kooky California selves. When I found out my mother had voted for him, I was both horrified and confused. Were we not an enlightened, humanist, family of Democrats?! She was unable to explain her vote to me, except to say something like “Oh, I don’t know. I just like him.”

Yesterday was the first time I realized that Reagan was almost exactly the same age as my mom. I’ve always suspected that she married my father because, in a certain light and wearing a certain hat, he looked like Humphrey Bogart. Now I realize that she had another secret affair with Ronnie the dashing young actor who was not just of her generation, but whose entire life paralleled her own, if only chronologically.

Reagan has been a thorn in my side ever since he became governor and started cutting funds to education in California. When I graduated from a California state college it was his signature on my diploma, but I’m sure he would much rather have dismantled the whole college system rather than let freeloaders like me get a decent, affordable education. Then as President one of his first official acts was to fire all the air traffic controllers, who had a union and were striking for better wages and working conditions. Imagine!

Now that he’s dead there’s an entire industry in this country devoted to making him the “Greatest President of the 20th Century.” But let’s take a brief look at who he really was, and what he really did.

For one thing, he was a Democrat before he was a Republican. A staunch, hard-left liberal Democrat. And a union leader to boot. So much for loyalty and principle. When General Electric hired him to shill for them, the Democratic hat didn’t fit, so he changed it.

As for that whole tax-cutting myth, he raised taxes six of the eight years he was in the White House, including one increase that was the largest in history. I owned a small business during those years, and I was seriously gouged.

A law abiding man of honor? While President, he used his office to commit at least two felonies. He sent money to the Contras in Nicaragua to support their insurrection against the communist Sandinista government, an action prohibited by Congress under the Boland Amendment. And where did he get that money? From the sale of missiles and other weapons to — say it with me — Iran! Never mind that Iran was then (and now) under an arms embargo. Both of these actions were impeachable offenses, and even though Reagan admitted doing them in a televised speech, the investigation was impeded when his administration destroyed documents relating to the scandal. Reagan, as we know, skated.

I could go on. He kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, using the veiled racist code phrase “states rights.” Gorbachev was already well into glasnost when Reagan made his grandstand demand for him to “tear down this wall.” Aren’t you sick of seeing that clip over and over? Then there was his totally made-up slur about the “welfare queen,” making baby after baby and driving to pick up her various entitlement checks in her new Cadillac. His wacky “Star Wars” missile defense system, which was supposed to shoot down Soviet rockets in space but has never worked and is still draining the budget 25 years later. And of course the ultimate insult to the American worker, his theory of “trickle-down” economics, which basically says that rich people should always get all the breaks and the rest of us should be happy with whatever money they happen to spill as they become unimaginably wealthier. Let us eat cake, brothers and sisters.

Reagan began a war on the middle class that continues to this day, and his obsession with getting government out of the way of big business leads in a straight line to the economic meltdown we had in 2008 and which is still robbing millions of ordinary Americans of their homes, their livlihoods and their dignity.

Was he senile and mentally incapacitated during the latter part of his term? Who knows and who cares? Maybe I can’t hold him directly responsible for all the damage that was done in his name in the eighties and beyond, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.

Despite all this there is actually an organization whose mission it is to get a building or an airport or a monument named after Ronald Reagan in all 50 states. Actually, I don’t know if they’re still around. From the looks of things they may have reached their goal by now and settled into smug retirement.

So anyway, happy 100th birthday, Mom. I loved you dearly and still owe you big time. But you know you were wrong about Reagan, don’t you?

It’s been a rough ride for Barack Obama these past 20 months.

He has been bombarded from the right and the left for almost everything he’s tried to do as President, and now the inevitable midterm voter’s remorse has taken away his majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, which will probably put a stop to any more Democratic initiatives for the next couple of years, if not to the entire government.

And now, adding insult to injury, George W. Bush is on a book tour.

No doubt he thinks it’s time to start rehabilitating his image. Somehow, though, the idea of a book by George Bush doesn’t ring true. He seems more like a reality show kind of guy to me. Or a game show, maybe. But a book?

I haven’t read “Decision Points” yet, but based on the reviews I’m going to guess that it’s a book about a strong, decisive, hard-working, intuitive, God-fearing patriotic man who would and did do everything in his considerable power to protect and strengthen the country he loves and safeguard his people.

In January of 2009, a day before the end of Bush’s second term in office, revision99 posted a list of his Presidential accomplishments, and now, in the interest of fair play and equal time, here’s a reprint of that list. Think of it as a companion piece to the book, and keep it handy as you examine each of George’s decision points:

• Asleep at the switch on September 11, 2001. He is still bragging about “keeping America safe,” even though he ignored repeated warnings that an attack was planned.
• Illegal wiretaps. Yes, he spied on Americans without warrants, a clear violation of federal law. Yes, he admitted it publicly, and promised to keep doing it. Yes, he kept doing it.
• Invading Iraq. They had no weapons of mass destruction and they had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 2001. He fabricated evidence because he wanted to attack somebody, and he ignored or lied about intelligence counter to his delusions. He took troops out of Afghanistan, where the terrorists were hiding, to do this, thus on multiple levels he made our country (and the world) less safe.
• Federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Here’s a few quotes from the National Weather Service’s warning about Katrina: “…MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER…THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL…ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED…HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT…THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK…POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…” As this monster storm approached, George Bush ate cake (literally!) with John McCain, leaving his totally unprepared crony Michael Brown in charge of FEMA. People died. The city was destroyed.
• Obstruction of justice at Justice. Competent U.S. Attorneys were fired for political reasons, and replaced by right-wing loyalists in an attempt to rig the Justice Department. The Department was used to carry out politically motivated prosecutions, in violation of the Constitution.
• Signing statements. When he was not able to veto a law he didn’t like, Bush would simply sign it and issue a statement indicating that he didn’t agree with it and would not comply. Depending on how you count them, he has challenged up to 750 legally-enacted laws this way, more than all other presidents combined. But, signing statement or not, once a law is signed by the President, it’s the law, and if the President ignores it he is breaking the law.
• Torture. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Suspension of habeus corpus. Detention without charges. “Enhanced” interrogation. Kangaroo courts. Extraordinary rendition. I can say no more.
• Valerie Plame. Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby committed treason by outing her as a CIA agent to get back at her husband for calling them out on their lies about Saddam Hussein buying bomb materials from Niger. Bush either knew or should have.
• Looting the Treasury. A few contractors, most notably Vice President Cheney’s own company Haliburton, have made billions of dollars on no-bid government contracts, delivering crappy service at inflated prices. Adding insult to injury, contractors often work side by side with qualified U.S. service personnel making a tenth of the money. Meanwhile, Bush’s corporate welfare and tax cuts for the extremely rich have redistributed the wealth away from working Americans and up into the vaults of the upper upper class.
• Asleep at the switch as the economy tanked. Bush is trying to blame Bill Clinton for the current economic meltdown, and while there is more than enough blame to go around, you’d think the first MBA president, while in control of all three branches of government for six years, would have noticed what was happening in the Wall Street Casino and done something about it. But he didn’t, and he had no idea how to even slow the bleeding after the crash, and now we will have a depression. Thanks, George!

First, allow me to take a moment to mark the 6th anniversary of this blog, which occurred some time last month.

I started revision99 during the runup to the 2004 presidential election. I’d been fed up with George W. Bush for about four years by then, and I wanted to express my exasperation that he was ever installed in the White House in the first place and my fervent hope that he would be evicted. It gives me no solace today to know that history will not be kind to George, but of course what really hurts is that my ravings apparently had no effect on that election.

Over the years I came to realize that my ravings were having no effect on much of anything, and I had to retreat back into that blogger’s sanctuary of “I’m writing only for myself.” This was the golden age of personal blogging. I had a few readers, and in turn I read and commented on their blogs. As the impossibly stupid Bush Administration dragged on I became so surly that all my readers and commenters disappeared, and even when I promised to stop writing about politics no one returned. After that, I really was writing just for myself. Then in July of this year I stopped writing altogether.

But I can’t very well commemorate an anniversary if the blog is moribund, so what the hell — I’ll write again about politics.

It’s another day-after. The 2010 election was yesterday, and again I’m scratching my head, trying to make sense of it. Sure things are crappy, but why would voters reelect Republicans, who are primarily interested in enriching the already rich? It’s a mystery that has been getting deeper and more confusing for the past several election cycles. But in trying to explain the current political climate to myself, here’s the latest fairy tale I’ve come up with:

Starting some time in the depths of the Great Depression, Americans got focused. They tightened their belts. They worked hard. They built bridges, dams, monuments, parks. They agreed to legislation that reigned in that era’s Wall Street casino and prevented another such meltdown for 70 years. They created and supported a social safety net to protect the weakest among them, and those who fell through the economic cracks. In the 1940’s they went to war and, against all odds, saved the world. And when those soldiers came home, 12 million of them, we sent them to college and trade schools. They became scientists and engineers, teachers and statesmen. They built homes and churches and schools. They assembled the Interstate Highway system. They created the Space Program and went to the moon. America was the most admired nation on earth. And as late as the Eisenhower Administration our millionaires, mindful of the debt they owed their country, paid a marginal tax rate of 94%.

Contrast all that with the atmosphere today: Americans have become selfish, jealous and greedy. It’s every man for himself. We haven’t built or even attempted anything big in 30 years. Our roads and bridges and levees are crumbling, often with deadly results. We trail most industrialized nations in 21st century infrastructure: broadband technology, high speed rail and clean energy, and there are no plans to catch up. The cars we drive and the electronics we use are built in other countries. We have invaded and still occupy nations on the other side of the world, and the world asks why? We speak seriously about withdrawing aid from anybody “unwilling” to work, at the same time we send their jobs overseas. We pay the lowest taxes in generations, and we are enraged by how high they are. In a world in which 3,000 children a day starve to death, we have an epidemic of obesity.

Our parents and grandparents have spoiled us. They built this magnificent edifice where we live, but we don’t want to maintain it or improve it. We only want to buy big screen televisions and sit on our ever-widening butts, smugly and stupidly imagining that we are still admired by the rest of the world.

All we want are tax cuts and bigger televisions, and we won’t give any government more than one election cycle to deliver. We send the Republicans to fix the economy, because the Democrats didn’t do it. Two years from now we will probably be ready to throw out the Republicans. We’ve got the political jitters. We want quick fixes, no matter how long it took to create the mess we’re in. We’ve been watching TV instead of going to college, so we are no longer smart enough to look five or ten years down the road, form a plan and see it through. We are like fourth-graders on the playground, calling each other names, stealing each others’ lunches and dreading going back into the classroom, where we are expected to pay attention, work together, and learn something.

So in summary let me just say revision99: still harshing your mellow since 2004.

UPDATE: A better-written (and darker) discussion of this topic is available here.
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For those members of America’s dumb-ass electorate who don’t know why I keep yelling about the Supreme Court whenever there’s a presidential election…

…take a look at last Thursday’s horrible decision. The court, which is packed with corporate shills, has overturned a hundred years of case law and precedent by saying that there need be no limit on spending by corporations during political campaigns. That’s presidential campaigns, congressional campaigns, statewide campaigns and right on down to local elections for your own city council.

What this means for you and me is that in about five years, all elected officials will de facto be working for at least one corporation, having been supported/paid/bribed by them, and all governing from that point on will be strictly for the benefit of said corporations, even more than it is today.

Congress over the years has sensibly tried to restrict spending by corporations for political purposes, because corporations have no conscience and only one reason to exist: to make more money. Thus their interests do not often — if ever — coincide with those of the nation or its people. That’s you and me, and oh, by the way, corporations have unimaginably more resources than you and me, so don’t get the idea that if we all band together we can outspend corporations and defeat them in that way, because we can’t.

Consider: Worried that the Obama administration was going to hit drug companies with all sorts of regulations and demands for better deals on prescriptions for Americans, Pharma struck a bargain with the White House, agreeing to give up 80 billion dollars in revenue over ten years in exchange for no additional hassles. Yes folks, that’s 8 billion dollars a year that they are able to deal away, so let me ask you: If they have that much to spill, don’t you think they have a lot more that they’re keeping?

And now that they can spend it any way they want, why wouldn’t they just call Obama and tell him they have, say, a billion dollars to spend on his next campaign, and does he want them to spend it for him or against him? Obama’s been a big disappointment, but he’s not a fool. I’m sure his answer will be simple: “How can I serve you, Master?”

Or, consider: Just last June, a New York Times/CBS poll revealed that 72% of Americans favored a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” But after several months of disinformation and fear-mongering by the insurance establishment, the peasants have changed their minds and hit the streets with torches, pitchforks and yes, semiautomatic weapons, crying “fascist,” and “socialist,” and “Marxist,” and demanding that the government stay out of health care.

The court case on Thursday was called “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” and it was about a right wing group (a corporation) not being allowed to release a hatchet job movie about Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. The FEC stopped them because everybody knows these video assassinations are potent and often change the course of elections. For example, look what the lies of the swiftboaters did to John Kerry, a decorated war hero. By the end of that election, many Americans thought Bush, a draft-dodger, was the hero, and Kerry was a lying, cowardly skunk.

So we know that you can determine the outcome of US elections with videos and advertising. Now all you need to do is get the money to make compelling, professional, good-looking videos.

Enter the Supreme Court, headed by ex-corporate attorney John Roberts. Here’s their position: Corporations are people, just like you and me (you and me with hundreds of billions of dollars in our pockets). But they have this handicap. You see, the poor corporations can’t talk. (That’s actually because they’re not people, but pay no attention to that.) So the only voice they have to make their political arguments is their money, of which they have more than God. Thus, according to five members of the Court, there must be no restrictions placed on corporations spending their money during political campaigns, because that would be the same as jailing you and me for standing up and saying “Change we can believe in” or “Country First.”

Anyone who thinks that wealthy corporations will not use this ruling to completely take over the government is simply not looking at what corporations do. (See above, the one goal of corporations.) And this ruling cannot be appealed. And no laws can be enacted to counteract this ruling. And for you slippery-slopers, here’s an icy one for you: Soon, this ruling will be used to show that corporations, being regular folks like you and me, can contribute cash directly to candidates. This will be much more convenient for them, as they will not have to have meetings with campaign managers to find out what to say in their political TV ads and their “documentaries” about opposing candidates. They’ll just be able to pay money openly to whomever agrees to play ball with them after winning the election.

This used to be called bribery. Now it’s Free Speech.

This is going to be even better than fascism. In fascism, the government and the corporations are bound together, and run things sort of as a team, with the government making the policy decisions. In the new era of the Roberts Court, there will be no government, only corporations. They are not interested in health care for all. They don’t care if the roads are fixed, only that the toll booths are operating. Education? Private schools only, charging the most the market will bear. I could go on, but you know what I’m saying. Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

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PS: A quick shout out to the voters of Massachusetts: You sure sent a message to that socialist Obama! Maybe you should work to throw him out of office in 2012, just in time for a Republican president to appoint a couple more big business conservatives to the Supreme Court. That’ll teach him.

As the new year clicked over last Thursday night I pondered the situation in the world, as if I have any idea what the hell is going on.

All the major stuff is bad: The economies of the world are reverting back to feudalism, leaving only the super-rich and the dirt poor. The earth herself may be dying, and the very governments and corporations who might be able to stop it are either denying that it is even happening or blaming each other and refusing to act until somebody else does. Christian and Islamist extremists alike have evidently decided that the murder of innocents is OK with God as long as it’s done in the proper spirit. And here in the richest country the world has ever seen our legislators are bargaining away another chance for us to provide health care to all of our people, while big corporations are demonstrating — again — who is really in charge of things.

On a personal note, while half the wannabe workers in the world don’t have jobs at all, I have to work at a job that I detest, doing the work of the devil.

Now forgive me for my one-track mind, but of all the major stuff that will be stinking up the new year, our various wars around the world are the ones that truly break my heart and sink my spirit. I see that I was conned again during the last presidential campaign. Not that I would have voted for John McCain anyway, but I let myself think that Obama was against the war and that if elected he would take immediate steps to extricate our country from the horrific and useless games we are playing in the Middle East. These days the best spin I can put on it is that his heart may be in the right place, but the War Machine has let him know that it won’t pay for another term if he tries to stop the carnage.

It’s not good enough.

I’ve said before — and pretty much lost all my readers because of it — that I don’t support the troops. (See also here.) They are, after all, the ones who pull the triggers. I got some half-hearted support in this, and at least one holier-than-me comment that I obviously don’t know any military people, because if I did I would know that they hate war more than anybody. That may be true, but there seem to be a couple hundred thousand of them right now who like it just fine.

But I am a poor writer, and I’m afraid I have never adequately been able to convey here the horror in my heart about war. Luckily, Chris Hedges has stepped up to help me out. Hedges is a divinity student turned war correspondent turned rabble-rousing author and columnist (at Truthdig.com). He has been to war and seen it for what it is:

War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.

And:

War’s effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan a week ago and listen to the wails of their parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people.

Read the rest of Hedges’ column here. Caution, though: it’s a little more shocking (and sickening) than what you’ve been getting from the TV and the press and our politicians. Mostly, we see and hear about Freedom, Democracy. Human Rights and safety for the American people. The unspoken subtext in all this, of course, is Glory, Bravery and Dominance.

I call bullshit on all of it.

To you politicians who say we have to win by killing them all, bullshit. The more of them you kill, the more of us they will kill. To you generals and admirals and commanders who pretend to hate war, bullshit. Do you think we haven’t noticed that your lives are devoted to it? To you chickenhawks who want someone else’s kids to go kick some ass and lose their lives, limbs and minds, bullshit and shame on you.

To you young men and women who think you are “defending freedom” by killing the enemy and destroying the countryside, well, sorry kids, but that’s bullshit too. I fear for you, and I weep for you. Like me, you have been conned. When you strap on your weapons and your uniforms and march into someone else’s home, don’t you see that you are the enemy, and all the stuffed animals and candy you hand out to the children cannot counteract the hatred you engender when you haul their uncle off to “enhanced” interrogation or shoot down their brother for running a checkpoint?

I know I’m a fool. I thought we were electing an antiwar president, and except for Dennis Kucinich, Obama did seem to be the strongest antiwar candidate. But he has already sent 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan (to fight an estimated 100 al Qaeda). And let’s not kid ourselves — there’s no way to bring that many people home in 18 months. What use is it to finally get out of Iraq if all he does is bring the ongoing invasion of Afghanistan to the front burner? Obama is the first president in my lifetime with both the requisite crises that demanded action and the juice to actually change the old, corrupt ways in U.S. government. That’s what he said he was going to do. And I, like a fool, believed it.

But here in the cold light of this harsh New Year, it looks like business as usual.

In the 1960’s the Black Panthers upset the California political establishment by showing up at the state legislature armed to the teeth.

They didn’t shoot anybody. It was political theater designed to illustrate their point of view that “power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” Indeed.

It’s probably true that if you and I are in a serious dispute, and one of us has a loaded gun and seems willing to use it, that’s the one with the power, and the one most likely to “win” the argument.

But in the current national conversation (or screaming match) about improving our sick national health care system, logic, compassion, morality and the will of the people are no match for the weapon wielded by the medical-industrial complex:

Money.

Big pharma and the insurance companies have a lot of it, and they are throwing massive amounts of it into their effort to stop anything that might reduce their obscene profits. It’s working pretty well, as one liberal/progressive/Democratic proposal after another is removed from the discussion.

At the outset the one simple idea that is most likely to reduce cost, cover everyone and free us all from the indentured servitude of employer-provided insurance — universal government-run single-payer (or “Medicare for all”) — was simply taken “off the table,” with no discussion or debate whatsoever.

The Obama Administration fell back to advocating a “public option” plan, which would allow people to choose between their existing plan (if they even had one) and a public plan. The public plan would have been similar to Medicare, and would have operated without having to make a profit, which means it would have been less expensive by a wide margin. This was decried as a “government takeover” and is now not likely to make it into the final version of whatever reform bill is passed.

Next comes the notion of “insurance co-ops.” This is the worst idea so far, because co-ops are sort of ad hoc groups of consumers who band together and try to provide each other health insurance. They will not be able to compete against existing Big Insurance because it will take decades for them to get the membership necessary (an estimated 500,000) to spread the risk widely enough. In the meantime they will be snuffed out by the established industry.

And anyway, Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress are already saying they won’t vote for co-ops, either.

Here’s what I think, and I’m pretty sure I’m right: The corporations who stand to lose in any major reform of the health care system are simply paying to keep it from happening. They are able to legally bribe elected officials in the form of campaign contributions. And they are hiring media and PR consultants to confuse and frighten the electorate into demanding that the government “keep hands off my Medicare!” With their billions in cash they are able to control the debate from inception to the final vote in Congress. They don’t need guns. Their wealth is their power, and I am starting to wonder if there is any defense.

I mean, according to early polling Americans wanted universal single-payer health insurance by a margin of two to one. Now after a year of misinformation and specious arguments everyone is mixed up and angry and doubtful and suspicious, and if that’s not enough to turn the tide against reform, our elected officials have been given a a few hundred million dollars by the very industries they are expected to regulate, so how the hell do we expect them to behave?

_______________________________________________

Recommended reading (these guys say it so much better than I):

• Chris Hedges, This Isn’t Reform, It’s Robbery
• Paul Krugman, Missing Richard Nixon

I’ll make this really short because by now even I am sick of my political rants.

I saw Obama’s pseudo State of the Union speech tonight, as, I imagine so did most of the world. It was quite the event, with the whole Supreme Court there (including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fresh from major surgery), the diplomatic corps and the cabinet (including Hilary Clinton, the only one who wore hot pink).

Obama basically said “You know that guy you voted for? The one with the progressive agenda? I’m still that guy.” Despite a lot of talk that he has moved to the center (or totally sold out, depending on who you listen to), it looks like he is still planning to cut taxes for workers, raise taxes for the upper classes and eliminate the free ride for the super rich. He is still planning to get some kind of universal health care for the U.S. He wants to bring back the days when everyone who wants one can get a college education. He still believes that government is there to promote the common welfare, build infrastructure, pass fair legislation and enforce it, and provide a safety net for the people.

He radiated confidence and calm, and even made a joke or two, in the best tradition of people who are up against it but are willing to work to overcome, and pretty much know they will. I bet that most Americans who saw him went away feeling that we are in this together, that we will recover, and we will be better than we were before.

But to conservatives, especially those of the Apocalyptic, anti-Christ, End Times persuasion, this must have been a dismaying performance. They’re probably out buying more ammo and canned food for their mountain and desert hideouts right now. Even regular old Nixonian Republicans must have realized that Obama is on the verge of wreaking a permanent change in American society (as permanent and far-reaching as Roosevelt’s New Deal, which is to say not permanent, but pretty darn long lasting), and for better or for worse they may be consigned for the rest of their careers to the role of minority, opposition party. They don’t have much in their arsenal to fight back with, either. Expect them to pick at small points and try to make a big deal of them, and of course expect them to be yelling “class war” first thing tomorrow morning.

So, to sum up:

• inspiring
• confidence-builder
• campaign promises=not lies
• government part of solution, not problem
• Reagan/Bush era over
• right-wing freakout

My favorite phrase from tonight’s speech:

“…we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future.”

Of course it was a show. And good show, Mister President.