FTSOA: No Messiahs Here

For almost six years now, it seems to me, folks have been bemoaning the apparent fact that Prez. Lowbar is NOT the "liberal" messiah the moaners had hoped he'd be: someone with 'the ballz' to stand up to the Owners and Oligarchs, face down the Corporatz, and beard 'em in their own boardrooms: Somebody who would, in the words of one disappointed commentator, "kick ass.

The rampant disappointment among former advocates and acolytes betokens what I think is an error in understanding, both of Prez Lowbar and of the conditions under which he was selected.

In the first place, it is totally and completely LUDICROUS in the extreme to believe the Nation's actual Owners would permit anyone to exert even largely _managerial_ control over their "properties" who wasn't vetted completely reliable in his loyalty to the established order and his fealty to the Corporatz State...

if Prez LowBar had been the kind of guy who'd 'kick ass,' name names and make the Oligarchs quail--and if THAT meant upsetting ANY oligarchic applecarts--or if he had even been thought remotely to BE such a person--he'd never have gotten to where he is.

He himself sees himself as a deal-maker, a broker, a "unifier," a "negotiator" (we could argue that one). With his "Cabinet of Rivals," from BOTH 'parties," he wanted (apparently) to portray himself as a conciliator, a healer of the nation's divisions.

No. really.

That's the "legacy" that America's First Black President was supposed--by Lowbar himself, his retinue, and the "community" he "represents"--to leave: One of unity and healing, and of binding the wounds of 4 Centuries of racism; all that "long arc of justice" stuff they're always quoting.

Which has always seemed kinda, oh, I dunno, "naive" to me; as if they somehow expected (or at least hoped for) some kind of divine intervention to smooth away the resentment and even down-right fear and loathing that his ascent to that position (properly) spawned in the hearts of his opponents, enemies, and detractors.

THEY knew that Lowbar's ascendancy, itself, was both his singular accomplishment, and the most obvious signal of the approaching end of "white supremacy," and of "white privilege," and that no matter how much they objected, with their petty petulance, that ship had, finally, sailed: The South was NOT gonna rise again.

Play "Dixie" like a dirge.

FTSOA: Job Insecurity Is Job One...

This extravagantly lugubriously visaged, perverted old sad-sack is Allen Greenspan, former, long-time chief of the Fed, from 1987 into 2006, under four at least nominally different presidents: Raygoon (appointed him), then Poppi Bush, next the Clenis and finally the Chimperor. It's strong, circumstantial evidence that those who struggle to discern meaningful differences between the GOPhukkks and the Dims may be on to something...but I digress...

Before coming to gummint, Greenspan was Aynal Rand's spiritual and intellectual towel-boy, before he latched onto Andrea Mitchell. (They're into BDSM, I'm sure of it.)

The logic of insecurity represented in the poster is exactly the logic undergirding much so-called 'industrial relations' theory, including what is called "structural unemployment." It is a constant rate of unemployment. The economic analysts and planners build in an unemployment rate into their calculations. A certain level is given.

The problem, for the Bosses, izzat in the event of "full employment," workers could and would move with their skills to other jobs if their current employers were to disappoint them. This is bad for business.

Monetary fluidity is good; labor fluidity--workers being able to up and move--is bad.
So, through various expedients--including recessions, depressions, and the like--capitalism builds a pool of "structurally unemployed" workers with whom to (implicitly and/or explicitly) threaten workers with the loss of their jobs--and concomitant benefits--to keep them in line and compliant, if not docile.

Structural Unemployment used to be about 2%, in the boom times after WW II; then it was about 4%, in the 70s and 80s. Since the Collapse of '08, they're readjusting upwards again to between 6 and 8%.
Interesting to note how the number of "structurally unemployed" has risen as union membership in the private sector has fallen.

Meme Banditry: "Get The MONEY Out!"

Meme Banditry:
 
It's true, enough. Unarguable. Self-evidently TRUE!

The FIRST problem: Removing priovate money fom public poilitical action. Some say: "Power has to be taken away from Wall Street."

In the 30-plus years since the ascent of the bankers to their unchallenged hegemony, w/Raygoon, I have YET to see, read, or hear any practical suggestion as to HOW that is gonna happen?

Realistically, there is ZERO probability that any of the current corpoRatz in Congress will vote to do anything of the sort. It'w what they get the BIG MONEY to prevent.

Realistically, also, there is ZERO probability of displacing enough of them to change the balance in the Congress, since 90-95% of incumbents are re-elected.

All the rest depends on that first point, and that seems to be a will-o-the-wisp, at BEST.

But somebody, somewhere, sometime, is gonna hafta come up with a way to achieve that most desirable goal.

Yes, guillotines and firing squads would be the MOST effective.

But I'm thinking that that day, if it is EVER to come, is still many, many moons--not to say years--in the offing.

In the interim, the rate at which sitting Congress critters are replaced is glacial, with a re-election rate approaching 95%, which precludes the "idea" of voting the bastards out--besides guillotines, the only practicable plan.


https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=813212912027682&set=a.176326335716346.47428.125842260764754&type=1

As The Cookie Crumbles: "Binness" as Usual.

Woody'z alwayz been one of Forp Yksmohc' s biggest admirers. In a recent article on F-book he poses the following puzzler: "

“Let’s pose that for some perverse reason that we were interested in ruining an economy and a society.” Now, who would want to go and do a thing like that?... The current economic system in America, he says, is so dysfunctional “that it cannot put eager hands to needed work using the resources that would be readily available if the economy were designed to serve human needs rather than wealth beyond the dreams of avarice for a privileged few.”

I think that while it may be perverse, it is NOT an "imaginary situation. We're living it.
The entire telos of the Right--all its components--since at least 1980 has been to destroy the confidence of the "people" in their own political sovereignty. One of the largest contributing factors to this exercise has been to impoverish workers by driving wages down, reducing the Govt's ability to extend services to the neediest victims, and to undermine popular confidence in the economy.

The growing spread between the wealth of the "haves" and the burgeoning poverty of the growing population of "have-nots" is not an accidental artefact of unforeseen and unmanageable series of acts of "God." It began in earnest in 1981, with the ascent of the Raygoons to power. That's when the (extremist, right-wing) Gummint and the national 'binness' lobby, and the Congress colluded to uncouple wages from productivity, and appropriate any and all "surplusses" into executive perqs and generous campaign donations.

To keep the "Consumer" economy alive, even while damming its lifeblood by NOT increasing wages as productivity grew, they hit upon the expedient of easing the requirement for credit. Thi served two purposes: 1) it kept the consumer economy afloat (at least temporarily) and 2) it made permanently indentured servants of the workers, who more and more were entrapped into debtorhood to the Company Store. The official measure of domestic quality of life is the amount of debt any given person carries, and the higher the amount, the "higher" the quality of life.

First, by using tax incentives to encourage the "binness" gunsels and greed-sacks to export American workers' JOBS, and even whole INDUSTRIES, and then by conducting extravagant attacks on organized labor, and later by virtually abandoning the manufacturing base of the USer economy to exploit cheap labor in "emerging" economies, the GOPhukkkers in Raygoons crew ensured that USer workers would be chastened and disciplined and docile. A frightened, nervous, deeply indebted, disorganized worker is--as far as the Bosses care, the PERFECT employee, because they are not likely to complain if they're being exploited and abused, for fear of losing their jobs.

Mission: Accomplished!

Aynal Retentives

A pal from the 'old' days, asked me why I thought the fans of Ayn Rand/Atlas Shrugged --I've started calling 'em "Aynal Retentives"--are so thoughtlessly rabid in their devotion to the writer and the book?

(Aynal Retentives. Ya like that? I do...)

Rand, A sociopathic Soviet emigre in the '40s, penned SEVERAL turgid, tedious, inexpert, mundane, pedantic, sloppy novels, a (ahem) "philosophy" book (so-called), and a handful of sophomoric, splenetic, panegyric essays, all of which celebrated the wonders of selfishness, and spawned LEGIONS of childish, intolerant, narrow-minded, intellectual and emotional delinquents and moral cripples.

What's the charm?

I replied: Remember/consider Galbraith: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

That's the precise description of the "Randoids" and the "Shruggers," which have included--along with the last three or four generations of pre-and intra-adolescent males--such luminaries as the Koch Bros*, former, long-term Fed Chief Allen (Mrs Andrea Mitchell) Greenspan and the late, unlamented Milton Friedman. Friedman, as a minion of the Real Estate industry, in the 40s, invented "Libertarianism" from scraps of  Rand's cockamamie codswallop and a dose of Viennese ideology, to give the vultures and reptiles of that industry some spurious claim to "intellectual rigor."

They are megalo-maniacally devoted to that justification of selfishness, and this has led them to ennoble Rand's risible "philosophical" system --"Objectivism," which is based on the total rejection of altruism and hypostatizing of the "proudly selfish individual."

It's the "moral philosophy" of a pubescent, 14-year-old boy in a position of unexamined social privilege.

I've said before: Ayn Rand contributes to anything with which she is (mistakenly) associated--philosophy, literature, politics: anything--the same ineffable 'quality' which coprophagy--a fancy word for eating feces--brings to cuisine.

For the Sake of Argument, this is the Doc...Now back to Winstone, in the studio...

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I read the Rand canon in my youth, pretty much all of it. And, whilst still commanded by my own adolescent understandings of moral philosophy, I found it quite compelling. I 'believed" it. It made sense. But I was, of course, almost the quintessential example of a callow, privileged youth, OF the dominant majority, observing the world from the position of unexamined social privilege. I got better...

Paraphrasing--Foucault said: We think we know what we're doing. Sometimes, even, why we're doing it. We don't ask what what we're doing actually DOES. Once you make it to that third step, there's no going back.

*The Koch Bros, as a condition of their funding a chair at George Mason "University" (imho, less than half a step above "Liberty U", Bob Jones "U", or Oral Roberts "U", but with a better hoops team), demanded that "Atlas Shrugged" be required reading in the Econ Dept/Business School.

FTSOA: Pipelines Are "Safer"

Woody'z in that uncomfortable position of being, once again, the bearer of bad tidings, this time regarding the tar-sands pipelines--yeah, plural.
The pipelines--yes, that's plural--are a done deal. Their final selling point will be (believe it or not) "Safety."

In the wake of recent train-wrecks in the US and Canada, we'll all be told that 1) continuing to ship this toxic, explosive sludge by rail tank-car is too dangerous; 2) the tank-car owners don't wanna double-hull 'em like ocean-going petro-haulers cuz it's too expensive, and 3) since we're not gonna NOT exploit the tar-sands, 4) the pipelines are the "safest" way to do it.
What pipelines are, of course, is less photogenic.
A pipeline leak just looks like an oil spill. No biggee.

But a rail-car derailment can feature columns of billowing, black, toxic smoke, pillars oif fire, and massive destruction to all around it. It's GREAT fuuking video, but it makes the industry look bad, mush worse than a spill you can cover over and/or deny.

So, the pipelines will be approved an built, not LEAST because Prez Lowbar would rather sell his darling baby girls into a life-time of sexuyal bondage than disappoint even one Oilgarch.
The decision, though already made, will not be announced until AFTER the Nov. 'elections," probably during the 'lame-duck' session before the new Members are seated.

FTSOA: "Pot Warz"

Even WOODY'Z sprized with the alacrity at which spam and slanders arise.
This took three days to appear.
Snopes won't permit us to c&p.
Here's the link...Conclusion: False http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/potfoodstamps.asp
http://nationalreport.net/colorado-pot-shop-accept-food-stamps-taxpayer-funded-marijuana/
This will have ALREADY become an unchallenged fact on Faux Nooz and the RWEcho Chamber.
The story being circulated is NOT satire. It IS political propaganda, though, designed to demonize campaigns to legalize recreational cannabis use, by locating it in the discourse of poverty/minority bashing.
With this story and probably others, now "out there," every and any time the fuckheads wanna disrupt a serious discussion on the merits, all they gotta do is throw this "story" into the heap, and the discussion has to cease. Many who hear such a tale will WANT to believe it. It's called 'confirmation bias..' It confirms their already deeply held predispositions about cannabis users, poverty, and social class. So the conversation HAS to cease.
Because you cannot debunk that kind of misinformation with truth. It is immune to such appeals, because its appeals are to prejudice and "moral" superiority.

For The Sake Of Argument: Holy Claptrap!

Thanks Mr. Smith:
In Albuquerque, I'm Dr. John Konopak, and this is "For the Sake of Argument:
Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on Bill Moyers' PBS program last week, and as usual, was a rational, erudite advocate for science. This year he will appear in the 're-boot' of the most successful science show in history, Carl Sagan's "Cosmos."

Prof Tyson is a shining light of reason and rationality in a "discussion" which is mostly full of obscurantism, denial, fabulism, and really muddy thought.
(Actually, "arguing" with fundies about ANYTHING is almost exactly the equivalent activity to playing Scrabble with baboons: Pointless, fruitless, useless, and annoying, because they have no IDEA of what is going on.)
Of COURSE "creationism" doesn't "belong" in a science classroom. OBVIOUSLY!~
As Tyson says, they're in two different universes of discourse.
And equally obviously, though Tyson (strategically) refrains from saying so, baldly, the 'discourse of faith in the reputed sayings of imaginary beings and invisible friends" is equally incompatible with issues of law and justice. Neither Christians, nor Jews, Jains, or Jehova's Witnessed have "standing" to impose their 'spiritual' fantasies upon the secular 'body politic.'
Unfortunately, I fear, no one with the reputation, or credentials of a Professor Tyson who can claim the lectern in the social sphere the way Tyson does for the 'scientific' one.
Usurping the mantle of "the Bible," or "God's word" to impose sectarian superstitions on the Civis, the polis, is every bit as specious and spurious as doing so in the classrooms of a public school, but there seem to be no figures of Tyson's repute in the sciences to intervene in the broader arena, and expel the drooling, fabulist fantasists and their Holy claptrap from the positions of influence they increasingly, and destructively occupy in our public, policy debates. And it's a telling absence.--For the Sake of Argument, I'm Dr. John Konopak...Now back to Winstone Smith in the Studio...

FTSOA: No Help!

Thank you, Winstone...In Albuquerque, this IS John Konopak, aka Dr. Woody, and this is "For the Sake of Argument."

As the term of "America's First Black President" winds down, there are some who point with what I judge to be an unseemly degree of relish to the fact that he hasn't managed to do very much for his "natural" constituency--the poor, minorities, marginalized, elderly, etc--who haven't fared particularly better under the Lowbar regime than they had done under previous regimes.

In reality, Prez Lowbar is and has always been hamstrung in the matter of visibly assisting minorities and the poor, because any effort which does do so would be criticised by the Righturd echo chamber as pandering to "his people." So the people who had the most invested in him--poor, black, marginalized--were ALWAYS destined to be the most disappointed. And of course, the bulk of whatever was his "promise" was to the people of color was redeemed merely by his being elected. That, in itself, was WAY more than they'd ever expected.

Both Prez Lowbar and his handlers are now wholly consumed with the 'business' of his "Legacy." It is IMPERATIVE from the POV of the "narrative-of-freedom" and "the long arc of history"  that he be remembered as a "unifier," a 'bargainer," a "negotiator," because the opposite qualities, were they to attach to him, would validate the righturds' counter-narrative: that he's a divisive, angry, Black, Muslim, Kenyan, Socialist, un/anti-American Anti-Christ...

Lowbar's "usefulness" to the poor is and was a public relations/perception problem: If he (Lowbar) had made any REAL efforts to assist the down-trodden, it would be 'sold' in the SCUM/MSM as being divisive, as "income redistribution," as a threat to whites, and as a betrayal of "ALL" Americans for the interests of the 'few'--funny how that's okay when the "few" are white and rich, innit?

I think these critics are accusing him of being someone he never was, and then of BETRAYING "who he never was" by being, in fact, what most of his "leftish" critics knew him to have been from the start: an opportunistic, unprincipled, "pragmatic" corpoRat hack on the make...For the sake of argument, I'm Dr. John Konopak,...
And now back to my man, Winstone, in the studio!!!


Even in the extremely unlikely event that Lowbar HAD really BEEN a Nation of Islam mole and an under-cover bomb-thrower who had skillfully maneuvered his way into the very innards of the white power elite, and was now biding his time, waiting to use the power of the Presidency to attack 300+ years of inequity and iniquity, there was the whole 233 or so years of institutional inertia and 43 previous, weighty precedents to overcome. And he would have faced them alone, because the DLC Dims would surely have joined the rabid Righturds in resisting, instead of the mere passivity they've offered so far.

WWH/CHE Soapbox: On the "JOB."

Hola Hippies, from high (yeah) atop the World Wide Hippies/Citizen Journalists' Exchange, massive, globe-spanning digital Soap-Box, this is yer ol' hippie pal, "Dr. Woody," Dr. John Konopak in Albuquerque:

One of the most heart-wrenching and terrifying videos on the Netz lately features two Orange County cops beating a homeless, mentally handicapped man named Kelly Thomas to death in the streets of Fullerton, Ca. last year. They got the whole thing on video...Which is terrible, and heart-breaking, and pitiful, and infuriating, and depressing all at the same time. It'll break your heart.
The Fullerton, CA, cops just plainly beat the shit out of the guy, and bragged about it.
Yet they got away with it: Acquitted on all counts.
How, the horrified observers want to know, could a jury look at that video and NOT convict the killer cops?
It's not easy, but here's how I think it went own:
The cops who beat Kelly Thomas to death were, in their own eyes, just "doin' The Job."
It's dirty, they'll tell ya, but SOMEBODY'S gotta do it. Besides they're just following orders, even if the orders are mainly implicit and tacit. They believe themselves to be doing only what the people who pay their salaries want and demand of them.
And what the people there in Orange Country, but anywhere where poor and homeless congregate, want is to have the cops keep the rabble moving.
Cops in such circumstances are under instructions to make it "unpleasant" for "undesirables." You got a NICE little town and nobody wants "THEM" hanging around; it spoils the ambience. They're bad for business, they beg, they stink, and piss in the street. The good burghers, their wives and children, and their patrons, don't want to be made uncomfortable by the piteous plight of the poor; don't want to SEE 'em... So the cops roust 'em, don't let 'em get too comfortable, keep 'em moving, give 'em reasons NOT to stop in Fullerton, or Orange or Garden Grove or Westminster...
I expect it's working.
Especially now, in Fullerton...The poor, the homeless, the beggars and street people avoid Fullerton, like the plague, these days, just keep stumbling down the tracks.
Cops KNOW they have support in their community and at least tacit aspproval of their harrassing tactics. It's rciprocal: The same community also supplied the jury that, later, acquitted the killer cops. That's like the ultimate in "home field advantage."
Now, the process is not over; the FBI has already said it would launch an investigation based on the video of the incident.
But local juries almost ALWAYS excuse local cops for excesses like this...
Anything for "Safe Streets," you know?
Keep yer heads down, hippies, and I'll see ya at the beach...
From Albuquerque, this is Dr Woody, John Konopak. Paz, chers...

As the Cookie Crumbles: From Barney Fife to Urban Storm-Troopers

There's a meme circulating on F-Book in which the smiling visages of Martin Milner and Kent McCord in their "period," '60s LAPD gear are juxtaposed with a foto of a pair menacing, anonymous, black-clad, masked, helmeted SWAT deputies with automatic weapons in combat-ready position. Beneath is the legend asks, basically,
"When did the smiling faces morph into these masked warriors?"


Here's my timeline:

The transformation of the police from Barney Fife to Urban Storm-troopers started with SWAT teams, which came into being in the late '60s and '70s, primarily as a response to urban and campus, racial and student demonstrations and strife. The media jumped all OVER it, hysterically. Soon every town wanted a SWAT Team.

Then in the 80s, under deputy Raygoon Ed Meese, DoJ started "saving the Pentagon money" by acquiring 'surplus' DoD equipment--Armored Personnel Carriers, mainly--and spreading it around around to counties and municipalities, free to all takers, under the rubric of the War on Drugs, a very popular item in DC and on the hustings. Every 'Burg and 'Ville lined up excitedly. Politicians LOVE to be pictured with the latest LawnOrder gear...

Both police tactics and philosophy of policing soon adapted to the exciting, dynamic, really cool war toys in the department, and it wasn't long before the standard motto, "Serve & Protect," had become "Search & Destroy," as cops came to view themselves not as members of the community, but as "peace-keepers" in a no-man's land of insurgency. Insulated in heavily armed and armored cruisers, they patrol a sector, not a neighborhood.

This was exacerbated since 2002-03, by the placement of many returning Iraq and Afghanistan war vets in local cop-shops around the country on federally approved programs.

Ya gotta LOVE the logic: Let's don't wait for cops to develop PTSD in the line of duty. Let's hire people to BE who already HAVE it.

Gotta admire bureaucracies: Always trying to save money somewhere, innit, hippiez?

Soapbox: Fold it six ways...

Hola, Hippies! From HIGH atop the WWH/CJE Great American broadcast Soapbox, this is Dr. Woody, John Konopak, on the stump from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Recently, in the wake of the poisonous chemical spill into the drinking water of 300,000 West by-gawd Virginians, Rep. John "Too Much Tan Time" Baner, the "Congressional boner in chief," declared that West by gawd Virginia probably already had enough regulations, and by gawd, I agree.
I too, am sure that 'west-by-gawd' Virginia has enough regulations to have prevented the spill.
Unfortunately, that's not the issue.
The problem izzat: Regulations, all by themselves can't prevent spills, even if you wad them up and shove into the cracks in the infrastructure. That needs inspectors and regulators.
But West BY GAWD VIRGINIA had no where enough REGULATORS with powers to enforce those regulations--and NEITHER does anybody ELSE.
The tanks where the spill occurred hadn't been inspected in 23 fucking YEARS.
NOT cuz they didn't need it.
It's because there weren't and aren't and never are enough people to inspect all the facilities where shit like this might be going on.
Remember West, Texas? Literally...Nobody'd inspected that fertilizer plant/bomb factory for a dozen YEARS or more. One night: Boom.
And that's because those regulatory agencies which SHOULD have been catching dangerous violations have been systematically and chronically underfunded by legislative bodies for DECADES, at the behest of the industries to be regulated, to keep them from interfering with "commerce."
Or they've been colonized by CorpoRatz' influence through "regulatory capture" through revolving doors and other stratagems by the industries themselves they're supposed to be overseeing.
In any case, it's not a shortage of regulations which is at fault, of that you can be assured...It is with the will and the ability to enforce them where the most significant failings occur.
In West By-Gawd Virginia, by the way, in the last three elections, voters have chosen to reduce regulatory oversight.
Correlation isn't causation, but it's close enough for schadenfreude.
From the WWH/CJE Soapbox, this is yer pal, Dr. Woody...See ya at the beach shars...Paz!

FTSOA: Spy vs Spy

I'm Dr. John Konopak, and this is: For The Sake Of Argument...
As reported by The Washington Post last week, the NSA is apparently advancing towards a quantum computer that could crack almost any conventional existing encryption algorithm.
I garondamTEE you, shars., you definitely NEED to be worried!
Because technology is fungible:  if it can be build, and NSA doesn't build that sucker, SOMEBODY else will.

To me, that's the elephant in the room of this whole surveillance/intelligence debate: the most vocal critics seem to treat the issue (in my opinion, incredibly naively) as if the process goes on ONLY within a national vacuum, ending at water's edge.

But: Mais Non! No, Nyet, Nichts, and Ne. Ei (Estonian)...etc. It's not only about "us." It's more complicated than that.

Remember: Knowledge REALLY IS "power", not only in the abstract. The more you know, the more power you can exert. And information is the raw material of knowledge. And data is key constituent of information.
And an edge is an edge...

In case you missed it (the last 3/4 Century): In this modern world, full of jihadis, fundies, Mossad, the Russkis, and Kim Jung Un, you do NOT want NOT to have an edge, ANY edge.
An edge like that quantum computer, fer instance...It's gonna get built, if it can be. That's in tha bank.
If NSA doesn't build it, one of those other guys will, guaran-fucking-TEED, sha!

For the sake of argument, this is Dr.John Konopak, in Albuquerque, New Mexico...
Now back to the studio and Winston Smith...

For The Sake Of Argument: Quim Pro Quo

For the Sake of Argument: This is Dr. John Konopak, in Albuquerque, NM:

As the country struggles, still, more than FIVE years later, to climb out of the latest financial pit dug by unregulated, predatory, crony Capitalism, it's worth remembering that the roots of the recent "Great Recession"
go back to the late '90s, when the Clenis WhiteHouse/regime and the Congress agreed to repeal the Depression-era law, known as "Glass-Steagall Act."
Which was KINDA strange, cuz there really was NOTHING "wrong" with Glass-Steagall, of course.
Unless you were a banker, financier, or globalist...Because it prohibited the kinds of financial manipulations, scams and tricksy deals that got the banksters terribly wealthy, and brought on and ushered in the Great Recession of 'ought EIGHT."
The Clenis' penis was just a pretext under which the Righturds could undermine the LEGITIMACY of any opposition to their rule, AS WELL AS the actual foundations of the people's sovereignty which is their long-term goal.
L'affaire Lewinsky was a SIGNIFICANT part of that project. Distracted by the scent of that skanky pussy, "the Press" followed the obvious, poontang "trail," and ignored what ELSE was going on simultaneously and far more importantly in Congress...
I sometimes wonder if Clenis didn't sign the Gramm-Leach-Blilely bill in a some kinda deal with the GOPhux, a sort of "quim-pro-quo," so they'd lighten up on him in his last year.
That's what it looked like in retrospect.
For the sake of argument, this is Dr. John Konopak. Now to the studio, Winston. Paz!

For The Sake Of Argument (FTSOA): Job-smacked

Hola hippies!
"For the Sake of Argument," I'm Dr. John Konopak--in Albuquerque, NM
A piteous refrain resounds, like a dirge, through an embattled populace: "What happened to the middle class? Where are the JOBS? Where did they GO? When will they come BACK?"
Bear with me, I'll postulate some answers.
As for the middle class, Raygoon's gunsels, the Corporat/righturds in Congress, and the USChamber of Commerce and the rest of the corporatz' lobbies agreed that the US middle class had just about outlived its usefulness. It was TOO wealthy.  So they all colluded to decouple wages from productivity. That's where the decline and fall of the USer "middle class" began.
They replaced higher wages with easy credit With appropriate collateral)...and it worked, for a while... until the time came to call in the markers. That was 2008.
Where the jobs are?
Ever hear of "Elsewheristan?" That's where.
The corporat, globo-oligarchs began, and the Congress and the Raygoons facilitated, the rapid, almost frantic, export of USer jobs and industries to the third world, where those jobs and industries created consumers who are now replacing the USer market, but without all those meddling unions and regulations.
"Everybody" (the MSM/SCUM/Corporat press in the lead) applauded these "inefficiencies" and the growth of "world trade."
But USer workers were left sucking an empty tit. Still are.
And when will the jobs return:
In all honesty, maybe never.
And if they DO come back, it will be when USer workers are sufficiently "disciplined" to accept 3rd-world wages and working conditions.
Not before...And maybe not even then...
For the Sake of Argument, I'm Dr. John Konopak. Paz, hippies...

For the Sake of Argument: Weed DOESN'T "Make You Dumb"

Woody envy's the lucky ducks in Colorado who are ushering in a new experiment in tolerance with the legalization of recreational cannabis use.

The move is and will be criticized as facilitating 'dumb' behavior because cannabis use allegedly induces such behavior, at leasat in the popular, ant-cannabis canon.

But weed doesn't make anybody "dumb."  Unless you're already pretty far along that road to begin with, before your first toke.

I've been a daily cannabis user since the '60s, during which time I've garnered 4 degrees, three of them post-grad, several professional certificates and awards, written scores of articles and hundreds of news stories, taught high school and university, and gotten certified and earned a living as a journeyman carpenter. 

Oh, did I mention I learned also to surf?

On the other hand, I'll admit, I have known a fair number of dazed, flaky lay-abouts, toasted on weed, too stoned to move very far, or with much facility.

My own case is anecdotal, I realize. There are literally hundreds more like me, and there is a large number of very accomplished "stoners." 

Which seems to me to lead to the conclusion that recreational use of cannabis operates merely and mainly to accentuate traits one already possesses.

That is: If yer a dumb-ass, it ain't gonna help you NOT look like a dumb-ass.

But if you're moderately smart, skilled, or talented, it can help sharpen those faculties.

One thing for certain: What mass cannabis use will reveal izzat there really ARE a lot more dumb-asses than smart, talented people.

TBGO: Lawless

In the next few weeks and months, you are likely to hear quite a bit of rhetoric about "precious freedoms," your "constitutionally guaranteed rights," and how the gummint REALLY, REALLY, REALLY WANTS to keep YOUR privacy secure.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, and the rest of the recent news about USer domestic intel gathering, there will probably be some kinds of legislation percolating through Congress to "rein in" the abuses by the NSA, and the CIA, and the HSA, and the USIC, and the rest of the more than 20 government bureaus which operate their own intelligence-gathering services, along with the more than 2000, private corporations conducting intel-gathering and analysis FOR the Gummint.
The powers-that-be will swear--promise and assure us, on their sacred honor, or their mother's grave, or their love of God--that they are doing everything POSSIBLE to ensure the security of our personal communications, records, and data, and that the preservation of the integrity of individual privacy is their foremost concern.
And they will be lying.
Not maliciously.
Defensively.
Like how Intel Director Clapper "prevaricated" (lied) to Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Wyden in the Senate: "As close to the truth as I can be," he replied when asked if US Intel surveilled USer citizens (Wyden and Paul BOTH knew Clapper couldn't answer them without violating CIA regs and federal law...It was a cheap shot, and a put-up job. There's a reason Clapper wasn't charged with anything, and this is it). OF COURSE they do. Derp...
And so they're being FORCED into lying because what you/we, the citizenry, demand is impossible to supply: There is NO WAY the USofA, the largest, most powerful, richest, most hated, envied, most loathed superpower on the planet, can STOP spying.
Knowledge is power. Information is the raw material of knowledge. An empire needs all of both that it can gather. It won't stop.
Because: There is NO ALTERNATIVE, from the intelligence perspective, to broadly collecting EVERYTHING, and storing and sorting it for later. If your "NATIONAL SECURITY" depends on an informed leadership--and it does--then you can in fact leave no stone unturned; you look at EVERYTHING.
So you HAVE to either 1) ignore or 2) work around the laws and regulations which well-meaning naifs throw up to "protect" themselves from Gummint interference. And rest assured, any such laws which are passed WILL CONTAIN language which opens the door for "exceptions."
And those "exceptions" will be used (and mis-used) by the clandestine 'warriors' to accomplish their national defense missions.
For which, should they prove to have been derelict, they would be (justly and rightly) pilloried for the damage consequent from their failures.
It's a double bind, which the bureaucrats will resolve in favor of the status quo, ante.
So if you don't want anybody to know about what YOU'RE up to,  keep it to yourself, and don't reveal it on the intertubez, cuz that what they'll be watching.
Worth remembering, also: There is no sovereign state in the world --not one--today which does NOT operate as large, and as comprehensive an array of intelligence gathering and analysis operations as they can afford and support, and which operations DO NOT surveille their own citizens. We've been spying, officially, on our own citizenry for 150 years, at least..
It's just that in the past the people being surveilled weren't the good burghers. They were the "trouble-makers," "activists," "civil rights workers," "labor" or "student" leaders, Communists, Socialists, and other rabble whose rights didn't matter...Good times!
We can have private conversation about this when I see you at the beach, chers. PAZ!

TBGO: Why Murkins Hate the Poor

Welcome! Ladies and Gennemuns, Boys and goils around the woild, to the WWH/CJE electronic soapbox. This is yer ol'perfesser, "Dr. Woody," John Konopak in Albuquerque NM with today's installment: 

"Unclean! Unclean!"

The Gospels and lots of other sources acknowledge: The Poor are ALWAYS with us.

It's true, and never more so in a zero-sum economy such as the one in which the vast majority of citizens/consumers struggle to survive.

Not only are they always with us, but increasingly it seems they are also greatly hated. 

One detects lots of consternation about this particular phenomenon. Why, why, why? cry the 'liberals' and the socially conscious? Why do we hate the poor?

Well, it's really not All that difficult. 

Think leprosy, in the days of yore. 

Nobody knew WHY someone contracted the condition, in which parts of the victim became all too obviously  'diseased' and then just fell off. 

However much or little it was understood, they blamed the victim for his condition...

But NOBODY--other than saints and martyrs--wanted ANYTHING to do with them.

Unclean! Stay away! Stay Away@!

Like leprosy, a thousand years ago, in the Levant, being poor is the worst thing that can happen to any Murkin. 

Like lepers, the poor most often have no control over what happened to 'em, no way to fix it, and nobody wanting, willing or able to help.

This ain' NO country for poor folk, folks...Murkins detest the poor, the same way that people detested and fled from lepers in earlier days. It might be contagious! Stay away! Stay Away! You really DON'T wanna get any of THAT on ya!

Poor people mostly STAY poor, unless they luck the fuck out on some lottery. 

That's part of capitalism, along with structural unemployment, there's structural poverty.

And that's not an accident. Capitalism requires compliant workers. Workers with disemployment and poverty staring over their shoulders are a lot less likely to stray into unions, etc...

On top of that, of course, the Ownerz and Oligarchz have directed their pet, corporate media to make sure the Murkin people blame the poor for their poverty. 

They have succeeded beyond imagining...

You've heard the drill; you know it by heart: The poor are to blame for their situations. They're lazy, or they fornicate, or they take drugs, or they're just naturally inferior in motivation and other good, american, social virtues..

OR as some gurus would have it: Maybe they didn't draw the GOOD ju-ju to 'em; instead, they complained and the BAD ju-ju got 'em. 

But anyway, it was their own fault. Warn't nuthin the system coulda done...

You've heard and seen the same message THOUSANDS of times from every imaginable source: popular entertainments, advertisements, dramas, preachers, politicians, business leaders of every stripe: "They had choices, but they made bad ones!"

It's the underlying theme of the whole literature of self-help and so-called "positive thinking" scams. If you're not "successful," it's YOUR fault.

I wanna remind ya, hippies: The wealthy make "choices": Escargot or Foie Gras; the Benz of the Porsche. The poor make decisions: Rent or food, utilities or meds. There is a difference and it's not just semantic. 

We can discuss it, later, when I see you at the beach.

As the Cookie Crumbles: Help-less-ness

Prez. LowBar today (Wednesday) gave a speech in which he described income inequality in the USofA as 'the defining problem' of the current period.
APART from the fact that he's dreadfully, and probably fatally, wrong--CLIMATE CHANGE IS THE DEFINING ISSUE OF THIS WHOLE EPOCH--Aside from that, ya gotta admit, that there Prez LowBar, he gives purty good speech.
But, of course, that's just about ALL he can do about it.
Govt spending is down, govt hiring is non-existent, and wages are frozen. Departmental budgets are gutted by the sequester, jobs go unfilled, programs wither, and the House isn't gonna open the exchequer...
That's WHY he can give so rousing an address about it.
But way down, he knows (and I hope it eats at him) that ANY initiative he proposed which set out to actually rectify or specifically dispel income inequalities would IMMEDIATELY be MIS-characterized and LOUDLY condemned by the White/Right/Teahadists as "nothin' but blatant give-away to "HIS" people," aka "thim dam, lazy, shif'less, fornicatin' nigras!"
Any such proposal would, as such, be DOA--Dead on Announcement--in the House, and only slightly healthier in the Senate.
Such is the influence, still, of the Bagger Bloc. It is undiminished by recent events and/or apparent set-backs. It still commands both an outlandish share of press attention and of political influence.
A bitto history: The Bagger leadership, the money, comes from the right-wing, business/oligarch class, people allied and/or affiliated with the Olins, the Coors, the Kochs, et al. The rank-and-file Baggers, on the other hand, are the remnants and the political descendants of the the "Raygoon Democrats."
The Raygoon Dims were mainly white, center-right, working class folks who read and perfectly understood the subliminal, racially coded signals the GOPhux campaign was sending by holding its first official campaign event of 1980 in Philadelphia, MS, where 16 years before, the KKKlan had murdered three civil rights organizers and buried their bodies in a dam. Mississippi Burning, anyone?
The signal Raygoon and the GOPhux sent and the signal the racially disaffected Dims read was that civil rights movement was as dead as those three "troublemakers,"and the days of giving "them damn mahnorities everythin' they demanded" were over.
That set well with a LOT of lower class, low status white voters, who flocked to the Raygoon standard. That was the signal which set off the "Great Defection" in 1980, which broke the old FDR coalition. It signalled the onset of the systematic roll-back of all the "liberal" social gains of the previous 50 years. It's influences and consequences are still potent even today.
We can discuss 'em further when I see you at the beach...Paz, chers...
http://youtu.be/Baf2cax-1gI

Dr. Woody'z Fabulous, Fascinating Factoids: Pious Pin-headed Preachers.

With all the fabled folderol of Thanksgiving on the horizon, these days you cannot swing a cat without bumping up against the despicable revisionist "history" propogated by the pious pinheads of the Wackloon/Fundie/Cristo-Right. David Barton, anyone? 

The charlatans are EVERYWHERE. The latest to join the fray was that pious pinhead, the AFA's Tony Perkins, who was out last week, in advance of the 'seasonal remembrances' spreading the falsehoods about the "religious" origins of the USofA, and of the colonists fleeing oppression, seeking 'freedom' in the New World. Perkins claimed that the Puritans' departure from Europe to seek 'religious freedom' presages and authorizes their contemporary "right" to deny birth-control to the population in general because it offends THEIR principles..

No, I'm NOT making that up. I've left the link in the comments below.

The story of the Puritans is one of the most cherished, and most abused, myths of the Colonial era.. 

Even though the lies are embeded in the national "exceptionality" narrative, somebody needs to instruct the these holy dickwads and fuckwitted, cretinous "preachers" that only a tiny fraction of the earliest colonists came for "religious freedom." 

Of the original 10 colonies, only those in "New England" were founded by Puritan religious zealots. The vast majority of the REST of the colonists came for the chance to make a buck/pound/guilder by exploiting the "New World." They were a population, in the words of a contemporary observer, of Murtherers, Theeves, Adulterers, [and] idle persons.” Such a description, indeed, fir the vast MAJORITY of our "first citizens."

And those religious zealots--the Pilgrims--left Europe only because it afforded them the opportunity to practice religious EXCLUSIONISM. The Puritans could NOT abide living in communities with those who were NOT of their particular, primitive, fundamentalist persuasion. They expelled those whom they couls, and fled from the rest.

They were self-exiled from Britain, settled in "Holland," where they were deemed too reactionary even for the tolerant Dutch, and were forced to migrate to the New World--- where, everyone profoundly hoped, they would just die out.

The "religious" history of the colonies is a part and parcel of the same "exceptionalist" propaganda which has polluted our national discourse for more than 200 years. So, let's just be clear, here. "Religion" provided only the slightest impetus to the colonization of the East Coast, outside Massachusetts and Connecticut. And it is fundamentally dishonest to pretend otherwise.