The Dept of Free

Years ago, a wiser man
than you or I devised a plan
to dole out goods at zero cost
to those of us whose jobs were lost.

It seemed benign, so nice and kind
the plan grew to include the blind,
the old the lame then you and me,
and they called this plan
The Department of Free.

It started as a helping hand
to needy folks across the land,
so those who could not make ends meet
would not be forced out on the street.

Unemployment benefits
were just a start, because now it’s
free food, free homes, free surgery,
rebates, bailouts, loans — all free.

Now half of us just stand in line
all day long and gripe and whine
about the stuff we feel we’re owed
the list of which has growed and growed.

The line wends hither, the line wends yon,
and by and by it comes upon
a door above which we can see
those magic words:
Department of Free.

Once inside: a shopping spree
of endless handouts: it’s all free!
Drunken on entitlement
we grab a meal, a house, a stent.

The other half? We’re all employed!
Hearing this, you’re overjoyed
to know that at least some of us
have jobs and never cause a fuss.

But one last thing you ought to know,
our economic Alamo:
The place where we all work, you see,
is in the accursed Department of Free!

I push papers,
while he counts beans.
She helps seniors
and they help teens.
It takes a village to raise a child;
it takes a nation to run hog-wild.

Paul pays Peter, and Peter pays Paul,
yet neither makes anything at all.
Round and round the money goes
but where it comes from no one knows.

It all runs out eventually,
can’t simulate prosperity.
The shopping spree was just a dream,
a baseless potlatch Ponzi scheme.

With nothing left to give away,
The Department of Free itself must say,
“We’re all laid off, the end is near.
There’s no point working, even here.”

The last employed man not offshore
has just one more remaining chore:
Switch off the lights
and turn the key
in the broke
Department of Free.

From Medicare and Medicaid
came Medicould and Medishould
now Medimust and we’ve gone bust
we’re trust-fund kids without a trust.

smart phone

?

Buncha BS

http://www.youtube.com/user/theotherstuff1#p/u/24/CEj1DW1bUtQ

H/T Zombietime Blog

This is a memo to America’s hippies:

Tea Party values are hippie values.

You heard me right. The Tea Party is the one social movement in contemporary America that can rightfully claim to be the ideological heir to the original hippie movement that started in the mid-’60s. And because of this, all current hippies and ex-hippies should support the Tea Party, and by extension Tea Party candidates.

I’d like to have a private heart-to-heart talk with my fellow hippies here, so can the rest of you please stop reading now and leave us alone for a while? Thanks.

Let’s Rap

If you, as a hippie, think the thesis of this essay couldn’t possibly be true, you’ve been paying too much attention to the mainstream media. The Tea Party has been intentionally misrepresented, villainized and smeared by the powers-that-be. But this too is a feature that the Tea Party shares with hippies — the hippie movement was itself misrepresented and smeared by a different mainstream media over 40 years ago.

This essay will elucidate in a fresh way how Tea Partiers are the true heirs to the hippie ethos. When you’ve finished reading, you’ll see the Tea Party in a new light and (hopefully) understand that you may have been on the wrong side of the fence until now.

In short, the Tea Party and the hippie movement share four fundamental core values:
• A craving for independence;
• a celebration of individualism;
• joy in the freedom offered by self-sufficiency;
• and an acceptance of the natural order of things.

The Real Political Spectrum

A necessary precursor to accepting any new worldview is to first jettison the previous worldview. So let’s start at the beginning: for the duration of this essay at least, pretend you’ve never heard of the left/right spectrum. Stick with me on this. As an intellectual exercise, just toss the notions of “left-wing” and “right-wing” out the window and begin your political education anew. Because it is this unnecessary (and now inaccurate) dichotomy between “left” and “right” which prevents most people from clearly conceptualizing the way that political thought is actually arrayed.

OK — is your mind clear? Now look at my newly conceptualized spectrum which schematizes political philosophies in a much more sensible and incisive way:



Now, I realize this may take a bit of getting used to. But soak it all in for a while as I explain.

The chart, as you can see, has not just one but two axes along which people’s worldviews are sprinkled:

The horizontal axis measures “government control,” ranging from a desire for less governmental power at one end of the scale, over to a desire for more governmental control at the other end of the scale. Most of you will understand this axis intuitively. But the vertical axis is a little more subtle, but also more eye-opening: it delineates people’s beliefs about human nature. At one end is the assumption that human nature is innate — that our personalities and other essential human attributes are built-in, unchangeable, and naturally occurring. At the other end is the belief that everything about humans is “constructed” — that we only are the way we are because of the particular cultural environment surrounding us, and that as a result people can be changed, through indoctrination, education, and/or alteration of the culture itself. I’ll expound on this more in a moment, but first I should explain the words in the ovals scattered across the chart.

Each oval contains the name of an ideology or social group positioned exactly where it fits on this new political spectrum. Note in particular the lower lefthand corner, where Hippies, the Tea Party, Libertarians and Hobos are all closely clustered together. That’s not random — they’re all near each other because their ideologies are in fact all similar.

(I include “hobos” and “bums” on the chart because the distinction between these two classic types illuminates the nature of the spectrum. In case you’re thinking that hobos and bums are just different words for the same thing, note: A hobo is an itinerant laborer who chooses homelessness because of the freedom it affords him, but who is proud of his self-sufficiency and will take temporary jobs to support himself wherever possible. A bum on the other hand is someone who is poor because he simply refuses to work or support himself, and instead is unashamed to survive on handouts and other people’s generosity. Because hobos celebrate individualism, freedom, independence and their own self-worth, they occupy the “sweet spot” at the bottom left corner of the spectrum, along with hippies and Tea Partiers. But since bums are essentially parasites on society and who survive on either formally or informally doled-out welfare, and often blame others for their predicament, they rightfully belong near the other end of the spectrum.)

On the right half of the chart are all the different varieties of political collectivism, or people who seek to impose or benefit from collectivist government. Those collectivists who think that human nature is malleable and a “cultural construct” are at the upper right; those collectivists who think that “people are the way they are” can be found at the lower right. What unifies the collectivist Nazis, Fascists and Islamists is not just their belief that humans have built-in attributes, but that their specific social, ethnic or religious group possesses built-in attributes superior to everyone else’s.

You will note that I neglected to include many political ideologies and social groups on the spectrum. That’s not an oversight. In fact, my original version of the spectrum did not include any groups whatsoever — I just wanted to introduce the idea of these two interlinked axes, and not clutter up the image with a bunch of other stuff. But I realized that some examples were needed for the illustration to be effective, so I placed some representative ideologies and identities at the appropriate places on the chart. Feel free to add your own. And if you think any particular group or philosophy is misplaced, you are encouraged to argue your case in the comments section — perhaps I’ll issue an updated version incorporating your additions and suggestions.

People who adhere to the outdated and overly simplistic left/right divide may have trouble grokking this new way of looking at society. Newsweek, for example, recently claimed that the Tea Party has an “anarchist streak”. I find this interesting, because the Newsweek writer understood that both Tea Partiers and anarchists are on the same end of the “Government Control” axis, but couldn’t grasp that, viewed from a different orientation, Tea Partiers are at the opposite end of the “Human Nature” axis from anarchists, who want to construct an (impossible) law-free utopia based on the assumption that people can change and control themselves in the absence of any authority whatsoever.

This brings up a good point: Scroll back up to the chart and think of it in terms of “halves.” Leftists want to highlight the fact the both Tea Partiers and Nazis are in the same “half” of the chart — the bottom half, as it is currently oriented (although of course the way I rotated the chart was completely random — there is no inherent meaning in the up-down-left-right placement, and I just as easily could have designed it to be 90 degrees or 180 degrees a different way). Of course, as mentioned above, the crucial difference is that Nazis and other totalitarians want to use government to enforce their idea of the natural order of things, whereas Tea Partiers have the exact opposite urge — to have no government enforcement at all, and to let the natural order of things play itself out — naturally.

On the other hand, The Tea Partiers (and I) want you to notice that all the “bad” ideologies, including Nazism and communism, also share space on the same half of the chart, in this case the “more government control” half.

So, the chart is viewpoint-neutral; each person can express their pre-existing political bias by pointing out how this-or-that political enemy is at least in the same half as some identifiably bad ideology. It just all depends on what angle from which you choose to view the spectrum.

About That Vertical Axis…Bill Whittle to the Rescue

I was scouting around with some frustration trying to find an existing concise encapsulation of the Tea Party movement when, as if on cue, Bill Whittle released “What We Believe, Part 1,” a pitch-perfect summation of the Tea Party’s core belief system, brilliant in its brevity. And in the process Bill just happens to solve my other problem: He lays out in crystalline tones an explanation of the “Human Nature” vertical axis of my political spectrum. Since I can’t top Bill’s calm and reassuring demeanor, I’ll just let you watch him yourselves; the full video is several minutes long, but the part relevant to this essay begins at 0:52 into the clip and ends around 5:21:


I realize not everyone wants to interrupt their reading to watch a video, so here’s a transcription of the key section of Bill’s monologue, with the passages explaining what I mean about the difference between “constructed” and “innate” human nature highlighted in bold:

Let’s recap for our conservative friends, and introduce to our liberal ones, some of the key points of what we conservatives, especially Tea Party conservatives, would call our core beliefs. And we’ll start with the two biggest ones: Small government, and free enterprise.

OK — why do we like small government? Well, the first and most important thing you need to know about us is that we don’t believe that human nature can fundamentally change. You may not hear this a lot, but when you get down to it, it really is the basis for conservatism in general.

We don’t think people are perfectable, if only they could make the right laws and rules. We believe that human beings, like every other creature on the earth, are motivated primarily by their own self interests.

Now, many modern people see this belief that we have — that human nature is fundamentally flawed and selfish, and essentially unchangeable — as cynical and pessimistic. On the contrary. It is this belief that generates a society with the checks and balances against the natural human bastardliness that basically wants to tell other people what to do.

These checks and balances prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of too few people. And that defiance of these checks and balances by the current political class, of both parties, is the real threat that the Tea Party movement is a response to.

Because all you have to do is open a history book with just the most basic sense of fairness and you will discover time and time and time again that the very same ideas being tried by big government today — ideas which we call “progressive” — have been tried in one form or another all the way back through recorded history, and have always failed. Because they’re based on what people hope and wish that human nature is, instead of what it really is.

Y’know, the British tried Big State Socialism in the ’60s and ’70s. It was a disaster. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was about remaking human nature into the new “Soviet Man,” who would share everything: “From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need.”

…[Litany of communist atrocities]…

The French Revolution was fought for the belief that they could make what they called “The New Man,” perfect and virtuous, once free of religion, income disparity and all the rest. Now, in order to bring about that paradise, thousands of people had to be guillotined each week, in what was called the Great Terror.

And on and on and on it goes. The Romans, in 150 BC, were promoting these same “progressive” ideas.

There’s nothing progressive about progressivism. The belief that you can get something for nothing, that you can get the government to take something by force from other people and give it to you — like, the money for your health care, for example — has been tried many, many times before and it has failed every time.

No, my friends, there’s only one really progressive idea. And that is the idea of legally limiting the power of the government. That one genuinely liberal, genuinely progressive idea — the Why in 1776, the How in 1787 — is what needs to be conserved. We need to conserve that fundamentally liberal idea. That is why we are conservatives.

Is it clearer now? Artificially constructed collectivist utopias require that human nature be altered for any new society to work, because elements of existing human nature — greed, jealousy, lust for power, a need for privacy, and so on — would render the system unfeasible. So utopian collectivists necessarily believe that humans must be changed and can be changed (for the better, of course). This may seem like a minor detail to the collectivist program, but actually it’s the main sticking point, one which the collectivists have never been able to solve (because, as any sane person knows, it’s unsolvable; human nature can’t be changed). But that hasn’t stopped them from trying, again and again, with ever-increasing levels of coercion, to mold the human spirit into the desired shape. Entire fields of philosophy have been devised to prop up “constructionism,” but reality is a stubborn thing.

(As an aside: If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend Stephen Pinker’s 2003 masterpiece The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which gloriously demolishes the foundational assumptions of those on the top half of my political spectrum.)
…


The earliest proto-hippie protests against the Vietnam War were overtly anti-LBJ

But aren’t hippies inherently pro-Democrat and anti-Republican? Hasn’t it always been that way?

Au contraire. In fact, as the photos sprinkled throughout this page show, the mass-movement hippie era first arose during the Johnson administration, and was explicitly hostile to Johnson’s Democratic Party agenda — in particular his foreign policy agenda. Despite a fair amount of after-the-fact revisionism in which Nixon has been retroactively cast as the villain of the Vietnam War, remember that Nixon did not become president until the end of January, 1969, and that for the vast majority of the anti-war protests of “the sixties,” LBJ was president and LBJ was consequently the target of the protesters’ wrath.


This 1967 hippie poster depicted President Johnson’s big-government “Great Society” programs as hell on Earth.

The truth is: Hippies didn’t particularly like Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats, or their ’60s-era “Great Society” big-government programs. Look at the poster on the right for a typical opinion, untouched by the revisionism of later historians.

A popular hippie chant at the time, as you may remember, was “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” Now — does that sound like the kind of thing Johnson voters would say?

But above all it was LBJ’s interventionist foreign policy which most outraged the hippies, primarily because they — selfishly, but understandably — didn’t want to get drafted (or have their boyfriends get drafted). So they opposed the war out of self-interest, not really because they wanted the communists to take over Vietnam. (At least not at first — more on that later.)

In fact, which candidate ran as the anti-war candidate in 1968, at the height of the hippie movement? Why, it was Republican Richard Nixon, who won the election in part because of this issue — despite himself being totally disconnected from hippie-dom and having no grasp whatsoever of the counterculture. (Of course, the fickle electorate, having up until that time held the Democrats responsible for the war, rapidly turned on Nixon after 1969 and blamed him for not ending our involvement in the conflict as quickly as he had promised.)


Chicago police massing at the 1968 Democratic convention.

1968: The Hippies turn their wrath on the Democrats

1968 was the apogee of the original hippie era, and it also happened to be an election year. If you knew nothing about actual history, and believed that hippies were from the beginning pro-Democrat and anti-Republican, you would likely assume that hippie protesters must have descended with fury on the 1968 Republican National Convention, intent on showing their displeasure with those nasty conservatives. And, of course, you’d be entirely wrong. The 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach was pretty much ignored by hippies, protesters and the media. But the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — now, that was a different story entirely. Right from the beginning, the Democratic convention was wracked with violent protests, as hippies (along with many other related groups) fought with police and the National Guard.

Throughout the convention, as the clashes between the protesters and the police got worse, Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was accurately pegged by the hippies as the big-government totalitarian thug that he was. And Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey wasn’t getting much love either — he was dismissed as just another tool of the system.

So, the hippies of 1968 didn’t particularly like either major political party, but they showed a particular anger toward the Democrats for screwing everything up — while giving the Republicans a shrug. Which, amazingly, is exactly the way the Tea Party feels today: Anger towards Democrats, and a grudging acceptance of Republicans as the lesser of two evils.


Just like the Tea Partiers do today, the early hippies tried to keep their protests peaceful.

Where Are the Tea Party Love Beads?

You might be thinking, “But wait — Tea Partiers don’t take LSD or wear long hair or practice free love or dance barefoot in Golden Gate Park. So they’re not really like the hippies at all.” Yes, all that may be true, but those surface cultural details are not the point; the underlying philosophy inspiring both movements is the point. Don’t confuse the form that a movement takes with the inspiration behind it. For example, the Gold Rush of 1849 and the dot-com boom of the 1990s manifested in completely dissimilar cultural contexts, but the underlying financial excitement was exactly the same. The same is true of the Tea Party and the hippie movement. Actually, considering that the Tea Party demographic skews toward people in their 50s and 60s, it may very well be that many Tea Partiers did wear long hair and practice free love 40 years ago when they were young. In other words, a certain percentage of Tea Partiers aren’t simply like the original hippies — they were the original hippies, but in the intervening decades have grown less ostentatious and these days express their anti-authoritarian urges in a more culturally conventional manner, now that adolescence has worn off.

And don’t fall for the media misrepresentation of Tea Partiers as nothing but a new label for right-wing Christians. Yes, there are some “social conservatives” in the Tea Party — but they’re only one of a wide array of types within the movement. In fact, plenty of Tea Partiers strongly distance themselves from social conservatives. It’s not monolithic.

Hippie Roots

Of course, as has been documented endlessly, the hippie movement originally grew out of the Beat movement, and the two primary guiding lights of the Beats, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, were both wildly anti-authoritarian. But that doesn’t mean they were “liberal”: what most people don’t know is that Kerouac, while being anti-authoritarian and unconventional for his era, was in fact politically conservative, something which continues to mystify naive young leftist historians:

At the height of the counterculture, Kerouac declared: “Listen, my politics haven’t changed, and I haven’t changed! I’m solidly behind Bill Buckley, if you want to know. Nothing I wrote in my books,” he confessed in a 1968 interview, “nothing could be seen as basically in disagreement with this.”
…
In other words, Kerouac was a true individualist iconoclast, a fact that [Tom] Hayden still finds incredibly frustrating.

I don’t see this as unexpected at all: Kerouac’s keen mind noticed and then recoiled in horror from the collectivism and anti-Americanism that had begun to creep into the hippie movement as the ’60s progressed. To anyone who understands the kernel of philosophical clarity which conjoined the Beat movement with the early hippies, it should come as no surprise that Kerouac, the original inspiration for hippiedom, self-identified as a conservative. Individualism was the whole point, from the very beginning of the postwar counterculture. (Burroughs, for his part, seemed stubbornly apolitical; and Allen Ginsberg chased every cultural and political fad that came down the pike.)

In one of those cosmic coincidences which only reveal that the cosmos may not be so coincidental after all, while I was putting the finishing touches on this essay, the New York Times published in its Book Review section an essay comparing the Beats to the Tea Party and touching on some of the same points I make here — though focusing exclusively on the Beats and their 1950s brand of iconoclastic individualism, rather than the hippies. While at first I thought it extremely odd that the New York Times would anoint the Tea Party as the inheritors of hip by publishing such an essay (leaving aside the momentary frustration I felt in having what I thought was an original idea partly scooped a few hours before I posted), the more I pondered it, the more I realized it was inevitable: As the election approaches, the Tea Party is rapidly maturing into a significant societal movement, and anyone with a sense of history who ponders this cultural sea-change will immediately recognize in it the precise same anti-authoritarian attitude which drove earlier American social upheavals.


Mass anti-government hippie protest in 1967 San Francisco — the precursor to the Tea Party?

Communist Co-option

If everything I’ve said so far is true, then why does most everyone associate the hippies with left-wing politics, and why do most neo-hippies also identify as left-wing?

Ah, very good question. And the answer is the tragedy of the hippie era.

After 1968, hippie politics swung very rapidly and very deeply into leftist ideology. And this is because communists and socialists very effectively co-opted the anti-war movement and transformed it during the Nixon era into an anti-American and anti-capitalist movement. This infiltration and co-option of what had been a pacifist/individualist/isolationist movement is actually one of the major turning points of American political history — one which reverberates to this day, because that new framework adopted by the counterculture remains in place to this day and deeply influences 21st-century politics.

Of course, things are not so cut-and-dried. History rarely is. There was a leftist presence in the hippie movement from its very beginnings. That’s undeniable. And most historians now zoom in on and focus intently on those early leftist influences. But between 1965 and 1968, the heart of the hippie era, overt nanny-state leftism was actually just a minor thread in the hippie philosophy, which was more focused on planting the flag of personal freedom and getting away from government influence, rather than demanding that government take an ever-increasing role in our private lives.

And there are plenty of former ’60s-era radicals and hippies who now see the light — that the heady counter-culture and political excitement which swept them up in the late ’60s and early ’70s became contaminated and ultimately ruined by noxious oppressive big-government communists who harnessed the era’s youth energy for ultimately nefarious ends. People like Roger L. Simon and David Horowitz are among the best-known examples of an entire class of former hippies and radicals who now realize that modern-day “conservatism” — including the Tea Party — embodies the true ideals they had been seeking all along as hippies.

And yes, that includes me. I’m not of the same generation as Simon and Horowitz, but I did grow up in a hippie-ish environment and considered myself a “hippie kid” for most of my young life. And I looked the part. Once while taking my first cross-country trip through Middle America I and my fellow young rebels were chased out of a small town by a mob of angry citizens shouting, “Get out of here, you long-haired hippies!” Oh, how we laughed. A moment to be proud of. And yet, years after the fact, I can now almost understand the motivation of those shotgun-toting “bitter clingers” — they saw us hippies as an invading force bringing the taint of leftist ideology into their community. I can sympathize, in retrospect.

But that was long ago. In many ways I still consider myself a hippie (but more of the pure unadulterated Eden Ahbez/Gypsy Boots variety), even if I no longer look like the kind of person you’d chase out of town. I still hew to many of my earlier hippie opinions — I’m an environmentalist, an eccentric, and I pretty much stay away from consumer culture and mainstream society. But, as it is true for many Americans, my natural tendency to drift toward conservatism as I grew older was given a life-altering jolt on 9/11, after which I became more of a foreign policy hawk. But still a hippie in my mind. A hawkish hippie, let’s say.


LBJ announcing escalation of the Vietnam War in 1966. Note the similarity between this image of LBJ and the fictional big-government totalitarian dictator depicted in Apple’s famous “1984″ ad (seen on the right).

Big Hippie Tent

Which brings me back to the beginning. This essay was addressed to self-identified hippies — but I assume that plenty of non-hippie liberals have been eavesdropping on us. And it may very well be that you eavesdroppers may not personally think of yourselves as “hippies,” per se, but you do hold to some hippie-esque values which place you in the Big Hippie Tent. There are all sorts of “neo-hippies” who use other identifiers. And any number of preferences and habits and opinions would make you a semi-hippie, as it were. Do any of these apply to you: Are you a Deadhead? Attracted to alternative spiritualities? Avoid chain stores? Love nature? Listen to ’60s music, reggae or jam bands? Smoke pot? Go to Burning Man? Wear ethnic clothing? Like world cultures? You may not be a full-on hippie, but you’ve been influenced by hippie culture. And because of that you may feel some allegiance to what you have always assumed is hippie politics: left-leaning and “progressive.” And that allegiance, perhaps unconsciously, has prevented you from embracing, or even truly acknowledging, the anti-authoritarian vim of the Tea Party. Tempting, isn’t it? And now you no longer have to resist temptation. Let it all in: your newfound awareness that the Tea Party is the embodiment of the hippie ethos after all.

You’re home at last.

SSDD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg&feature=player_embedded

the North Beach Grill review~ too funny

Re: North Beach Grill
Aug 15, 2010, 7:09 PM
This restaurant has gone broke and closed for a year. Recently, it reopened and is owned by the same person - George, who still doesn't have a clue about safe food handling. His new business partner is City Councilwoman Kathryn Williams, who got him his lease back, despite the facts that he defaulted on his lease, others were willing to pay more for the space, and he had poisoned numerous diners - including me. Welcome to Tybee Island, where everything is for sale.




I decided to give George another chance yesterday, and all is the same with the North Beach Grill. The service is still crappy, and George still doesn't know a damn thing about safe food handling. I just knew I had eaten bad seafood when I had left. Some of it I had sent back, but I just knew I hadn't caught it all..and I was right. All of the Pepcid AC and Nexium in my medicine cabinet could not quell the salmonella in my stomach last night. A quick trip to the emergency room and a stomach pump and all was well. Or so I thought.




It all started innocently enough. I woke up this morning. I sat down on a cold ring of porcelain, picked up a mag, and got to work. What followed will haunt me every time I enter my bathroom - or any bathroom. A great stream of molten feces shot forth from my exit, carrying with it a pungent wave of putrid flatus. Liquid quickly gave way to foam. Through even the many foldings of two ply paper the liquid soaked. Many flushes were flushed to suck down the wretched beast. Yet I and the throne beneath remained vigilant, steadfast, unyielding. There was no going back. My buttocks now burning with the fire of a thousand suns, I pushed, squinting, face red with strain, forcibly casting from my entrails the demons within. With one great heaving noise, I at last expelled that which had poisoned me, the North Beach Grill lunch. Still wiping, I slowly began to reclaim my flesh from under the curtain of yellow and green excrement that had so thickly draped it. My hindquarters no longer drowning in a sea, I jumped into the shower for a more through cleansing of my hind quarters.




Never again will I eat at the North Beach Grill. Never again will I permit you to infect me with salmonella or botulism. Never again will I have to get my stomach pumped because I ate at your vomitorium. Never again will I suffer such post-meal indignities at your hands. Never again.

Revolution number whine

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-on-the-brink-of-a-second-revolution-2010-09-28?pagenumber=1

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- “What’s distinctive about the Tea Party is its anarchist streak -- its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns,” warns Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek. But why not three cheers for the Tea Party Express?

Admit it, something historic is brewing. And yes, it’s good for America, even the anarchy. Revolution is renewal. Tea-baggers want to take on both parties, “restore honor” and “take back the country.” Bring it on, the feeling’s mutual.


Obama: GOP pledge a disastrous planPresident Barack Obama used his weekly radio address Saturday to accuse Republicans of overlooking the middle class by creating policies that would benefit only the rich while making a pledge of his own to continue supporting the national economy.
OK, maybe most Americans just silently mimic the words, “we’re mad as hell, won’t take it any more.” But watch out: After November the campaign’s shrill rhetoric explodes into action.

Tea-baggers are kicking the revolution into high gear. Debt is sinking America. Both parties are to blame. So vote out incumbents. Spare no one. We need new leadership, another Reagan or Truman. Congress better get the message: Cut that budget, or they’ll dump the rest of you in the coming Great Purge of 2012.

Unfortunately they’re tone deaf. Congress cannot see past the election. All that changes in November.

So thanks Tea Party, Vegas odds must favor a Second American Revolution. Actually, the revolution is already roaring, hot, it’s about time. The GOP and the Dems had more than a decade. But America’s worse off. We need a real revolution to restore sanity … or we can kiss democracy and capitalism good-bye, permanently.

Warning: Another revolution will cost investors 20% more losses
Yes, big warning, the Second American Revolution will extract painful austerity, not the “happy days are here again” future touted by tea-baggers. For years it’ll be impossible for most of America’s 95 million investors to develop a successful investment or logical retirement strategy.

Why? Political chaos will translate into extreme volatility and a highly unpredictable stock market. Result: Wall Street will lose another 20% of the value of your retirement portfolio in the next decade, just as Wall Street did the last decade. So if you think you’re “mad as hell” now, “you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

Here’s the timeline:

Stage 1: The Dems just put the nail in their coffin by confirming they are wimps, refusing to force the GOP to filibuster the Bush tax cuts for America’s richest.

Stage 2: The GOP takes over the House, expanding its war to destroy Obama with its new policy of “complete gridlock,” even “shutting down government.”

Stage 3: Obama goes lame-duck.

Stage 4: The GOP wins back the White House and Senate in 2012. Health care returns to insurers. Free market financial deregulation returns.

Stage 5: Under the new president, Wall Street’s insatiable greed triggers the catastrophic third meltdown of the 21st century Shiller predicted, with defaults on dollar-denominated debt.

Stage 6: The Second American Revolution explodes into a brutal full-scale class war rebelling against the out-of-touch, out-of-control greedy conspiracy-of-the-rich now running America.

Stage 7: Domestic class warfare is compounded by Pentagon’s prediction that by 2020 “an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge” worldwide and “warfare is defining human life.”

What’s behind our 2010-2020 countdown? It became obvious after reading the brilliant but bleak “Decadence of Election 2010” report by Prof. Peter Morici, former chief economist at the International Trade Commission. He sees no hope from America’s political parties, just a dark scenario ahead.

Here are the 10 points we see in his message:

1. Expect nothing positive from Dems, the GOP or Tea Party
Yes, we’re all “justifiably ticked off.” But “Democrats, Republicans, and yes the Tea Party offer little that is encouraging.” Earlier Morici warned: “Democratic capitalism is in eclipse. … Politicians have deceived voters,” and are “suffering from delusions of grandeur, self deception and good old-fashioned abuse.”

2. Democracy has become too-big-to-govern … by anyone
“The current economic quagmire is a bipartisan creation.” Bush failures led to a “Great Recession … reckless Wall Street pay and fraud, a breakdown in sound lending standards by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac … Countrywide, and a huge trade deficit with China and on oil” leaving “Beijing and Middle East royals with trillions of U.S. dollars that they invested foolishly” in bonds “financing the housing and commercial real estate bubbles.”

3. Clinton, Bush, Obama policies all feeding revolutionary flames
Even before Bush, “all was set in motion by bank deregulation engineered by Clinton … Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers … Clinton’s deal to admit China into the World Trade Organization” handed “China free access to U.S. markets” while blocking exports. Earlier Dems blocked “domestic oil and gas development” and froze “auto mileage standards.” Obama “finally imposed higher mileage requirements,” but after pushing offshore drilling, he “punished the entire petroleum industry” for the BP disaster.


Will Pelosi allow tax vote?Indiana Republican Congressman Mike Pence and Stephen Moore discuss taxes.
4. Bush’s biggest mistake: Goldman CEO Hank Paulson
Morici admits: If Bush is “culpable for anything, it was to not see the gathering storm on Wall Street.” Worse, his Treasury picks were disasters: [John] Snow was clueless, Paulson devious. He conned a clueless Congress into bailout trillions, “believing banks could borrow at 3% and lend at 5 and pay MBAs three years out of school five-million-dollar bonuses to create mortgage backed securities.” Greed drove the Bush Treasury.

5. All partisan political leaders are destined to sabotage America
One thing is clear to Morici: Not only were America’s leaders a “bunch of second-rate incompetents” on both the Clinton and Bush teams, “Obama’s ratcheting up government spending and taxes won’t fix what’s broke, and neither will the GOP prescription of tax cuts and deregulation.” Get it? Democracy is in a classic double-bind, no-win scenario.

6. America’s democratic capitalism trapped in systemic failure
Morici simply dismisses “Obama’s two signature initiatives -- health-care reform and financial services reregulation.” They “simply don’t work.” Why? Politicians “failed to address the root problem, Americans pay 50% more for doctors, hospitals and drugs, than subscribers to national health plans in Germany, France and other decadent socialist European countries.” Yet, insurers hate reform, will self-destruct America first.

7. Wall Street’s insatiable greed is a virus that never sleeps
Wall Street banks are “back to their old tricks,” warns Morici, “hustling municipal governments into the kind of quick-fix budget schemes, like selling parking meters and airport fees.” Why? Wall Street’s “hustling shoddy corporate bonds that lack adequate collateral and may never be repaid” to justify their absurd mega-bonuses. And they’ll keep doing it till the revolution creates a new non-capitalist banking system.

8. New political leaders offer no hope -- Wall Street rules America
GOP’s next leaders will fail: “Cutting taxes and mindless deregulation are not the answer.” We need the revenue. They have no real plan to trim “$1 trillion from federal spending … few believe deregulation will fix health care or Wall Street.” The GOP has no “effective government solutions to health care, Wall Street, fixing trade with China, and dependence on foreign oil.” And the Tea Party “only offers a purer form of failed Republicanism. Tax and spend less, and turn the country over to the robber barons.”

9. Praying for a messiah, we’re sleepwalking till the revolution
Morici’s solution: America “needs a prophet, another Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan.” But we’ll never get one, until a catastrophe hits. Wall Street’s so greedy, so corrupt, so untouchable, so much in control, they will bankroll and control all future “prophets.”

10. The Second American Revolution coming
Yes, extreme austerity: “Americans must accept fewer government-paid benefits -- for the rich, the poor and those in between -- and must acknowledge the market works best most of the time, but it is not working in health care, banking, China, and oil.” Huh? Sounds like classic economist’s double-speak: “The market works most of the time” … except the market doesn’t work at all in the four biggest economic sectors? Fuzzy thinking?

Morici warns, we need “new approaches to regulating, yes regulating, what the medical industry charges, bankers pay themselves, what Americans tolerate and buy” and “guiding big oil and car companies to sustainable solutions.”

Holy cow, he suddenly sounds more like a liberal politician than conservative economist. Yes, he’s reflecting the total chaos coming on the short road to the Second American Revolution.

In the end, however, you have to admit the good professor does make a lot of sense: “Sounds radical but running the world has never been a choice between statism and anarchy,” says Morici.

Choice? Unfortunately, he offers a false choice: Running America effectively means accepting “that the private sector is not the enemy and government is not evil, but neither can serve the other, and us, if value is not seen in each.”

Laudable, but impossible because once the GOP Tea Party of No-No is back in power, compromising is not on their agenda, “gridlock” is. So anarchy is the only choice -- they will never, never work with Democrats … until forced by the Second America Revolution when the middle class finally rises up and overthrows the greedy wealth conspiracy of Wall Street, Washington, CEOs and the Forbes 400.

Till then, anarchy rules as the conspiracy keeps looting Treasury, stealing from taxpayers, conning us all.