Would you like to know how many people have visited this page? Or how reputable the author is? Simply
sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too.
I have 90 fans: Become a Fan. You'll get emails whenever I post articles on OpEd News
I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really.
Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am.
We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 1, 2013 Hobo's Lullaby
Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that jobs and wage losses from Hurricane Sandy were negligible and therefore would not be included in job or wage loss statistics. See, if the building you worked in was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, your job loss doesn't count. It can, however, be included as a legitimate reason for slow Christmas sales.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 10, 2011 100 Reasons for Revolution
I began this article before the events in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race were announced. When I first heard of this rape of a public franchise my hands began to tremble with rage. You see in a past life I was once an assistant poll manager in Georgia. Every state handles its elections a little differently but the processes are the same. Every box, polling machine or computer terminal is numbered, locked and sealed.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 22, 2012 Guns or Butter
Twenty percent of all children in this country live in poverty; sixteen percent of all seniors live in poverty. Forty nine million American struggle to put food on their tables and fifty percent of all Americans will live in poverty at some point in their lives.
SHARE Thursday, December 13, 2012 Taken at the Flood
The death of democracy is no small thing; its mock replacement is but small comfort. Its death comes not by a swords gushing wound, but by paper cuts. The democracy of the locked door and the midnight gavel,
(13 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 10, 2010 When will the Economy Collapse? You're Looking at It!
Our economy is now wholly dependant on cash from foreign powers and nobody talks about fixing that. Long term unemployment is expected to last for years and nobody has a plan to fix that. By the UN's measure of skewed income distribution, the US falls somewhere between India and Mexico.
(11 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 26, 2011 In this Country at Least, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Across the races, religions and continents of mankind the root cause is always the same. Whether that be in the form of antiquated repressive Islamic monarchies, Wall Street corporate banking cartels or well armed drug gangs. Their desire is to carve out wealth and power on the backs of the poor and powerless and to take from them with guile, gun or legal edict.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2008 "As GM Goes, So Goes the Nation"
"As GM Goes, So Goes the Nation." Such was the conventional wisdom in the 1960's when GM churned out Chevelles, Camaros, Cutlasses, Catalinas, and Cadillacs by the millions. Maybe the saying "runs like a Cadillac" will outlive the company; maybe "As GM Goes, So Goes the Nation" has never been truer. GM's future is bleak, analysts predict that GM may soon go broke as new car sales stumble.
(25 comments) SHARE Friday, May 6, 2011 Enabling Acts
The story sets up like Jell-O and changing from hour to hour as the Dallas police announce that a suspect in the shooting of the President has been arrested, "His name is Lee Harvey Oswald, "The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Deputy Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin." --FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 29, 2010 What FDR Gave Us
My father grew up in Springfield, Ohio, which at the time was a mill town. Springfield once had eight iron mills, but during the last Great Depression most all of them faded away. My father was the youngest of seven boys and because of the hard times he was sent away to live with his grandfather on the farm in Ross County.
(16 comments) SHARE Friday, October 2, 2009 The Mean Country
I read a book about a woman who was a holocaust survivor. She described how she would drag out the dead bodies from the barracks in the morning so that she could have the corpse's clothing. She could then trade the clothing for extra food or necessities. She said something that has always stuck with me. “Many people gave up on life because this was a world where it was very easy to give up on life.
(10 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 13, 2011 Welcome to Phase 2
Something strange is going on around here, the type of thing that make you ask yourself, "what's up?" The quitting virus is moving through Washington and Wall Street. When these folks begin to voluntarily give up wealth, power and privilege you can bet your bones that there is some bad juju just over the horizon.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, August 29, 2011 The Miserable Ones
On July 11, an eleven year old boy awoke from his bed to find that his father was gone. The boy found two notes left behind, the first instructed the boy to take his play station and go to the neighbor's house. The second note asked the neighbors to take his son in because the father was no longer financially able to care for his son.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 27, 2011 Were There Actually Two Ronald Reagan's?
Anyway, the story was told to me like this; Missile Toe is an individual who is now dying of cancer somewhere in Southern California. He or she will not tell me their gender out of fear of what might befall their families if his or her actual identity were ever to become known to the public. In the early 1950's, Missile Toe had worked on the Warner Brother's movie studio lot in an undisclosed position.
SHARE Sunday, November 16, 2008 Too Poor for Bankruptcy
We, as a country, seem to have little problem saving the wealthy from the clutches of poverty. We'll bail out banks and insurance companies, mortgage funds. The formerly big three automakers will meet with the new administration this week to arrange a further multi-billion-dollar bailout.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 20, 2011 The Capitalist Follies
There are days in this world when the events overwhelm us. Forces of nature batter us and remind us of how frail our lives and our societies truly are. Political events and political upheaval appear and vanish before our eyes. The United Nations authorizes a no fly zone in support of anti government rebels in Libya.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 3, 2011 Caligula's Orgy
It has been ten years now since this country began beating its plowshares into swords and beating its people into submission. It has been ten years of Caligula's orgy, ten years of banquets and fine feasts, ten years of high tech weaponry and low tech poverty, of high tax cuts and low wage cuts and an age of societal dissolution.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 29, 2010 You Just Can't Make This Stuff Up!
How could this happen? Is there no justice in this world? A nice honest business man who made himself rich by selling Ronald Reagan commemorative coins, NASCAR collectors plates and over sized matchbox cars has been accused of ripping someone off?
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, July 23, 2012 The Free Market
This is what Capitalism offers us, rather than a food store, a candy store, a junk food store. We have a choice, this is what we are told, Capitalism offers us variety and in that variety is said, opportunity. Take for example our choice in soft drinks, if we don't like Coke we can have" Pepsi. If we don't like either of those choices, we have Fanta soft drinks, but Fanta is owned by Coca-cola.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 17, 2012 It Sucks to be You!
In 1925, a new ore ship was added to the Cleveland -- Cliffs Iron Company line plying the Great Lakes hauling, coal, iron ore or grain. She was six hundred and eighteen feet long and sixty two feet across. She carried the wealth of a nation and her nickname was "The ship that built Cleveland," because of her frequent deliveries of iron ore to Cleveland steel mills.
(15 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 14, 2010 Excellent Job!!!!
The conservative politicians and talk radio pundits continue to rail against extended unemployment benefits. They argue, that there are thousands of jobs available but those big fat unemployment checks make workers prefer to stay home and watch "The View."
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 19, 2011 Bite Me Clown!
"Each McDonald's spends nearly $507,595 on wages," Sorry, McDonald's doesn't spend any money on wages, McDonald's pays out wages to its workers who have done labor for the company and earned the money. McDonald's calling wages spending is like a farmer saying that he is buying his dirt seeds.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 5, 2010 My Plastic Penis
It was ironic that Turner Classic Movies was playing "Farenheight 451." Oh so appropriate for a man trapped in an apartment without Internet access, because as I watched the film for probably the twentieth time I realized that we are there. "Isn't that right, Linda?" Big screen, flat panel, high definition televisions on which to watch subliminal social narratives
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 26, 2015 End of the World Blues
In Winston Churchill's epic A History of the English Speaking Peoples, the story begins with the image of Julius Caesar gazing covetously across the English Channel. One hundred thousand people: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They lived in a big world, a world bigger than they were, surrounded by an ocean brimming with fish and bountiful harvests.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 14, 2009 Why Eric Cantor Hates You
Cantor sees the world a little differently than most Americans; his world belongs to the wealthy, and the middle class and poor are seen as an impediment to his world. You are the garbage to be swept off the street; he will gladly support prisons to incarcerate you, but not colleges to educate you.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 15, 2011 Waking the Dead
A so called liberal Democrat rolls away a foundation stone of the New Deal and the public is left unaware. It means that after the banks and speculators have crushed the economy and forced millions of Americans from their homes the Congress of the United States will now reward them with a banking monopoly.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 7, 2009 Why the Coming Great Depression will be Worse Than the Last One
During the 1930's the country was almost 60% rural; times were bad but most still had food to eat. Even most people who lived in cities still had relatives back on the farm. When my father was twelve he was sent to live on his grandfather's dairy farm because his parents couldn't feed him. Times were hard and he never owned a new pair of shoes until he joined the Navy, but he always had food to eat.
(32 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 23, 2016 The Case for Revolution
NAFTA, GATT & the WTO are the foundation stones of Neoliberalism. These alone, by themselves make the case for Revolution valid. Neoliberalism is a fancy intellectual term for fascism. Under Neoliberalism there is only one right granted to humanity. That right is the ownership of property. Free speech, freedom of assembly, even equality under law"all make believe.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 20, 2011 The Outcast
I feel as if I've have been immersed in a bad dream from which I cannot awake. I've witnessed the changes in myself which unemployment and homelessness have wrought while I have witnessed the playback on our society as a whole. I no longer feel at home anywhere,
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, October 5, 2009 Stuck on Stupid
If Sarah Palin had been trying to get the 2016 summer games for Alaska, would it have been wrong if she took the state Greyhound Bus to Denmark? No one would have complained until she announced that she would try again next year to bring the 2017 games to Alaska.
SHARE Monday, May 14, 2012 Carroll Shelby 1923 - 2012
By January of 1954, this farmer in bib overalls running good ole boy road courses in Texas catches the eye of Aston Martin team manager John Wyer. Wyer introduces Shelby to Grand Prix racing greats Juan Fagio and Peter Collins. On the strength of his record Shelby drives an Aston Martin DBR3 finishing" second.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 10, 2009 The Real Reason Van Jones was Fired
Ordinarily you ignore the asshole remark and you apologize, saying that you misunderstood the full intent of the petition, and everyone goes back to work. So for Mr. Jones to get fired so quickly and so stealthily it becomes obvious that there is more to the picture than meets the eye.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 20, 2010 A Word with My Republican Friends
I thought that perhaps I'd take a break from my usual fare to try and reach out a hand to the other side. Sometimes we let rhetoric get on top of us and the name calling escalates to rock throwing and anyplace where we might find common ground is lost. I hear things said from the Republican side that I don't understand, and I find it hard to believe that many Republicans believe it themselves.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 20, 2013 That's why they call it a Police State
As a population we live with an overload of inputs, 9-11, the wars, the shootings and the endless carnage brought about by the political philosophies of those in our government, who are neither Republicans nor Democrats.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 3, 2012 Fleecing the Poor
This is Capitalism; this is the glorious system which exploits all human frailty and all human need. It is the system which forces Ethiopian children to pack palm seedlings six days a week for starvation wages and forces the elderly to pour out their life savings on insurance policies
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2008 When Money Goes Out the Door, Love Flies Out the Window
How do you explain it? Without need or justification Barack Obama has begun the Democratic death spiral. Like a moth to a flame or a lemming to the cliff, the presumptive Democratic nominee has started moving toward the center. Like Charlie Brown, running at full steam towards Lucy with the football, unburdening himself of his principles along the way to build up speed.
(23 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 27, 2019 Inside the Third Reich
History does not repeat itself, history is a river of time running in parallel tributaries. This may be different from that or that different from this. The warriors may use swords or airplanes, but the behavior of the humans involved is always the same, be it Speer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
(16 comments) SHARE Friday, October 22, 2010 Testicle Importation
Its humiliating, there was a time in this country when twenty thousand marched in Detroit demanding food and jobs. The fire department turned fire hoses on them and the police fired into the crowd. Two days later sixty thousand more showed up.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 8, 2011 Imaginary Nation
payrolls rose by 117,000 but that is the view as seen through the keyhole, the civilian non institutional population rose by 182,000 but the members of what your government calls the civilian labor force dropped by 193,000. Nearly 200,000 Americans dropped out of the labor market in the last thirty days. Lottery winners, independently wealthy or perhaps alien abductions are to blame?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 6, 2011 Being Woody Guthrie
Today we have so many celebrities who take on social causes; it is almost a given that they will each have some charity or cause that they support. That is good, I suppose, but still there is a clear distinction between being socially conscious and being Woody Guthrie
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, October 12, 2009 One Big Circle
You see, like me, I'm sure many of you thought that fears of global warming had come from world scientists and NASA. How wrong we are! This is all a front set up by Al Gore and fear mongers to rob you of your future!
(20 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 11, 2019 Truth is Boring
Nobody wants to be that guy, the party pooper. The guy that says it's a helicopter not a UFO. It's the hot water heater not a ghost. I don't know how many of you have seen "The Big Hack" on Netflix but it's worth a look. It's worth a look because you'll never see social media quite the same way because you see their product is you.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 19, 2011 Breaking the Fall
The Bush administration adhered to a strict policy of non-reality politics. Every pronouncement and every sentence contained the word terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. Who was the male prostitute signed into the White House over 100 times? Where were the weapons of mass destruction hidden?
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 20, 2011 Personal Responsibility
Personal responsibility is favorite rallying cry among the right wing reactionaries. It is a euphemism to justify their own wealth and to disavow the suffering of millions of others. It is not unlike Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" only it is steeped in the plantation owner's nascent paternalism.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 8, 2008 The Shot Heard Round the World
When 90-year-old Addie Polk put the gun to her chest and pulled the trigger she was seeking an escape from foreclosure. The first shot failed to do the job so the elderly widow pulled the trigger a second time as Sheriff's deputies waited on the porch to serve her with an eviction notice. She was rescued by her neighbor, Robert Dillion, who grabbed a ladder and climbed in a back window.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 23, 2011 Murderland
This is who we are and this is what we do, we kill people and break things and cheat people for money. All is for profit, we love money, it is our God, our golden calf. Jesus said, "Blessed are the peace makers: for they shall be called the children of God." In America, the short answer to that statement would be, f*ck you hippie.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 18, 2019 Give Him His War
Imagine for a moment you own a $400 million-dollar super tanker that carries $100 million dollars of crude oil through a twenty-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz. A silkworm missile traveling at 650 miles per hour could hit that tanker in less than a minute and a half. And all the king's horses and all the king's aircraft carriers can't stop it.
(12 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 7, 2009 Why I Hate Microsoft
I have always wondered what it would be like to spend the evening with Bill Gates. Never having known a billionaire before and being known for bad haircuts myself I thought that it might be interesting.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 1, 2011 Love or Money
All that matters is money, so I shot my bolt and found myself a little worse for wear and tear. All of those old feelings came back and I was reminded again of why I had taken this simple vow in the first place. Yet three years has also taught me that being alone was an unnatural state of affairs as well.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 31, 2011 For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Corporate America has declared themselves sovereign and are instrumental in fomenting this budget impasse. First, Washington Republican's throw down the gauntlet and declare that they won't allow the debt ceiling to be raised. Then Mr. Obama's declares, What? Why that will cause a crisis, which could cause the United States to default on its obligations and to lower it's credit rating.
(19 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 13, 2019 Like Gilligan's Island
Humankind claims to be an intelligent species, a questionable claim at best. One with little factual data to back up it's claim. George Washington famously said, "Millions for defense but not a penny for tribute." Which has become billions for fighter planes and weapons systems and pennies for science. It reminds me of Gilligan's Island, the professor could do anything but the obvious, patch the hole in the boat.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Pigs on the Wing
Ah, that things weren't so, then I wouldn't have to crack my head open to try and make you see what I see; not to harvest pity nor to draw attention to myself, for I'm trying to draw attention to you. These stories are about you. I am three feet ahead of you in a dark cave holding the flashlight, so please understand that when I say, "Look out," it is not for me as much as it is for you.
SHARE Monday, September 3, 2012 What Is The Meaning Of Labor Day?
We'd had enough. Why in 1913 alone, 110 men got killed in Colorado mines and they left behind 51 widows and 108 orphans. Being paid on the tonnage system made some of the boys reckless with their lives, cause they was desperate for money, cause they had hungry children, but sometimes their recklessness got others hurt as well, I reckon.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 7, 2008 McCain: Maverick, Mad Man or Sad Clown
McCain, Palin, old man, empty suit, young demagogue, blind ambition, it becomes easy enough to focus on the foreground and ignore the background. Was Sarah Palin a good choice made by McCain? The better question to ask would be, who picked Sarah Palin in the first place?
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 31, 2008 Look At All Those New Cars
The Christmas rituals are over; we've eaten the pumpkin pie and listened to Aunt Martha's annual stories of her health problems, all in the face of incompetent and unfeeling physicians. While I was with my wife's relatives they pulled out their home movies and we watched as the family jumped from holiday to holiday in three-minute, Super 8 vignettes.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 23, 2019 Reigns of Terror
Isn't Capitalism wonderful? In 2008, before the world was robbed, I had my own business and lived in a nice house with two cars in the driveway. Life was wonderful blissfully ignorant. Wealth is the greatest opiate anesthetizing us to the misfortunes of others. They must have made poor choices or had bad habits pitting us against each other. But graduation day in the course of misfortune is an epiphany.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 15, 2020 FDR was a Liberal Democrat
At that time there was no Social Security, no disability, no unemployment insurance, no food stamps and no aide to mothers with dependent children. In his Second Bill of Rights, Franklin Roosevelt declared healthcare a right due all Americans
(20 comments) SHARE Monday, December 24, 2012 My Fourth Year
There is much to be said about having nothing,
If you can stay alive,
If you can breathe and feel and eat and sleep,
If the pain doesn't catch up to you,
If the shadows don't kill you,
If the loneliness doesn't break you
If the cops don't take you,
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 15, 2012 The Job
I had lost everything I owned and everything which I had worked for. It was as if I were being stripped naked and left as carrion for the buzzards. I was angry at the world and I was angry with the woman who at lowest ebb of my adult life had kicked me to the curb. Then something happened which is hard to describe.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 8, 2011 1984
In America, these are known as conspiracy theories and anyone who offers or dabbles in them is a called a conspiracy theorist, because our media always tells the American public the unvarnished truth, right? Can I get an Amen on that?
SHARE Tuesday, August 6, 2013 The Black Death
A generation of Americans see no future for themselves -- a generation who see themselves as doomed. Recently, in a Bloomberg article about Detroit's bankruptcy, the most common explanations given for Detroit's financial woes by the audience were: Democrats, Unions and Black mayors. Post-racial America"give me a break.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 17, 2013 Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer -- Behind the Legend
He turned a birth defect into a multi-million dollar empire. Rudolph was shy as a child and was taunted by his classmates for being different or so the legend says, but classmate Herbie Wanamaker remembers it differently. "Oh it's true, nobody played with him. But it wasn't because he was different"we'd be playing cards, you know penny ante stuff and here he'd come, running down the alley imitating a police siren
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 12, 2012 Now, You See My Fists?
As the video opens, a cop waves his baton assertively, like a peacock preening or a wild bull rutting in the ground. It is a full fifteen minutes after police begin their interrogation of this young man before things start going terribly wrong.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 19, 2020 The Manchurian Candidate
The line between friend and enemy is distorted. Even though I'm wearing an enemy uniform, I'm your friend, I like you and I will protect you. Do you know why? I feel sorry for you, America has abandoned you. America is a bad place; America is a war criminal but don't worry"I'll help you. No super drug needed, just apply stress and offer a more
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 16, 2020 Watch the Crowds
It's too serious to laugh but it makes you want to laugh. This is the old media razzmatazz asking a question with dower and serious intonations, is Joe Biden too old? Is Bernie Sanders too Liberal? Can a woman win the White House? Can a Black man be elected President of the United States?
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, September 5, 2011 The Real History of Labor Day
The courage of unarmed men who charge a line of well armed men for a principle is the epitome of valor. When government shoots down its citizens in the street it is a public admission that any references to liberty and freedom are nothing more than pale illusions; an admission by government that their power is exerted from gun barrels alone.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 3, 2011 A Thread That is Not About Bin Laden
In a builder's economy growth is generated by the building itself. Ten thousand new homes being built each month meant new jobs. Jobs for carpenters and concrete truck drivers and roofers, new jobs for building suppliers and closing attorneys, Real Estate sales people and bankers. It is an economy based on real growth but the real growth supporting the artificial growth,
SHARE Saturday, November 27, 2010 What was, What is, and What's Coming Next
Hindsight is 20/20, you can look back throughout history and choose any three events and the future becomes explained. The American Revolution 1776, the French Revolution 1789, the terror 1793" - Napoleon 1799.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, March 4, 2011 Ronald McDonald and Other Clowns
Through the ongoing events in Wisconsin and nationally it should be abundantly clear by now to thinking people that the US corporate media is no freer than the monkeys are in the zoo. They live on Monkey Island and are free to report on the events from one end of Monkey Island all the way to the other.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 28, 2009 The Ghosts of Detroit
For the most part they have been forgotten; they are just empty, vacant memories like the empty, dilapidated homes which line her once proud streets. It was a land once ruled over by giants, captains of industry and labor and political thought.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, February 17, 2020 An Army is coming
Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me. The big orange fuhrer struggles at his childish name calling. Thrashing about after calling Bernie a Communist. Bernie Sanders answers by winning the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. What's that big mouth? What else have you got to say? Crickets, as Bernie's lead in the polls grows as America coalesces around his candidacy.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 31, 2016 Playing Monopoly with the World
Mrs. Clinton and her husband raked in millions from Wall Street. She refused to release the transcripts of her speeches. Do you suppose the tens of millions who lost homes, jobs and families in the crash of 2008, were okay with that? Remember those" "Basement dwellers?" Well, guess who helped to put them in the basement?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 24, 2011 He's Not Serious
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sickening, college tuition paid out for jobs at McDonalds and the Gap are called job training while interning for pennies is called retraining.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 13, 2011 God is a Concept
We are taught in this country this myth of religious freedom and yet, in fact, most of the early founders were religious bigots. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by Puritans, Maryland by Catholics and Virginia by Anglicans and their beliefs were state beliefs, believe it or get out.
(10 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 6, 2008 In the Shadow of an Apocalypse
The media has coined a new term, "The great recession." The media loves terms like that, terms they can use to encapsulate ideas. It allows them to rationalize and generalize, and in this case, minimize. To call this the great recession is as insulting as calling a train wreck a boo boo. It ignores the pain and suffering that millions of Americans are going through with a vulgar, sugar-coated euphemism.
(10 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 30, 2016 Lines in the Sky
Yesterday, I saw the lines in the sky again. I'd always heard about them, but had never actually seen them myself, until this Spring. I had seen the Facebook Meme's, of course, about mind control and the dumbing down the populace. I never put much stock in any such wild theories. First, this is Ohio, why the overkill?
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, December 20, 2010 The Trojan Horse
In the conspirators desire to save Rome from an all powerful Caesar they instead destabilized Rome and sent it into decline. I sometimes think that mankind's epitaph will be. "Too smart for their own good and not half as smart as they imagined."
SHARE Tuesday, May 5, 2015 Shiny Pretty Things
Orwell was dead on the button, you know? Describing a mass surveillance, mass hysteria media state, stratified and deified by strict obedience to an artificial political dogma. A yellow ribbon stuck on the back of the ole gov'ment minivan right next to the smiling stick figure family, lobbing cruise missiles into third-world countries most couldn't find on a map.
(27 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 16, 2019 What is Objectionable
When the policy of ever-expanding military spending and tax cuts for the rich fails to motivate the base, what else is left? Why, we're protecting YOU from THEM, from those people. Those murderers and rapists, the drug dealers and gang members. No need for policy discussions, no need for explanations, those people want to kill you and the Democrats want to let them do it.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 24, 2011 Waiting for John Brown
From a thousand roads they come to a place where none expected to ever visit, let alone to stay, but the roads upon which they travel are all one way, like a clock, it ticks away and you find yourself set up here, like concrete, and you look to the future and you begin to wonder.
(17 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 1, 2011 Capitalism
Our American political system runs not on one man one vote, but on one man one million dollars. Candidates' chances of success or failure are determined directly by their ability to raise funds. Successful candidates then find themselves beholden to which ever special interests funded their campaign. Barack Obama is nothing less than a prime example of this principle.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 24, 2012 Perception Management
The harder the state tries to control us the more it spins out of control, the Revolution has already begun and just because they haven't shot at you yet, doesn't mean it isn't so. If you are a college student you already know it. If you are a teacher you already know it.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 21, 2010 Brave New World
You can get up now, the war is over. Look upon your ruined cities, look upon your devastated economy! Look upon your diminished wages and contemplate upon your children's decimated futures. It is perfectly normal for the populace to be confused once the war is lost. To look back over their shoulders and to ask themselves, "how did this come to be? How did we get here?
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, April 6, 2020 A Pattern of Leadership
They say a court martial ruins two careers, the one charged and the one who brings the charges. The nail which sticks up will be hammered down. Take notice all around you and cover your ass. Don't make waves, don't make them notice you.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, April 7, 2014 The False Face of Capitalism
The premier American liberal politician in the candor of a private letter asserts, the system is fatally corrupt and has been for more than a century. Seventy--five years later, it's only gotten worse. All the rogues, Republicans and rascals of FDR's day are long dead and gone, leaving behind the same rotten system.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, December 23, 2013 The People versus George Bailey
"Yes, your honor. George Bailey had operated his savings and loan scam, targeting low-income borrowers for years and when it all began to unravel Bailey snapped.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 16, 2011 Which Republican Party Do You Support?
Governments are servants of the people and when they fail to provide for the people they are intended to serve, then, they should be fired. We can label or pigeon hole governments as free or independent or Capitalist or Communist or any label in between.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 16, 2010 Taking Care of the Deadbeats
We have become a cockroach economy, an economy where we feed on each other. Title loans and "We Buy Gold" are feeding on the relics of our lost prosperity. I have been selling my possessions to stay alive, an electric guitar and amp, a projection TV, a car, and soon I will go sell my wedding ring. You don't need a wedding ring when you don't have a wife because you can't keep a wife when you don't have a house,
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 6, 2011 Oh Brother Where Art Thou?
"Join us in the fight to keep building a better, more prosperous America. Are you in?"
Are you in? Poverty?
Are you in? Foreclosure?
Are you in? An unemployment line?
Are you in? The military on your fourth tour?
Are you in? A panic trying to pay increased tuition?
Are you in? Desperation trying to keep your family together?
Are you in? The street?
SHARE Thursday, March 24, 2011 To Grind Your Bones to Make their Bread
In a cynical and orchestrated campaign the American populace was presented a choice between an elderly ne'er do well millionaire with a psychotic illiterate beauty queen running mate or a young vigorous young man with a beautiful wife and two small children. Understand? Sarah Palin was the poison pill; she was chosen to guarantee that moderates would flee from the Republican Party.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 3, 2008 Dead Babies Can Take Care of Themselves
When is enough, enough? Sometimes reading news stories can be unsettling and then sometimes it can just make you damn angry. Here in America we live with a multi level media colossus that spews out garbage on every level, they too also lie who just ignore the truth. We are all familiar with Fox news 24 hour running propaganda network but they have to get these stories from some where, they can't make them all up.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 29, 2020 Take a Chance or Disaster
A Radical Bernie Sanders Administration is infinitely a better choice for all so, go with the flow. To dream, to imagine taking away victory from a clear leader and against the will of the electorate is insanity. To drop the mask of legitimacy and risk the best opportunity to win all three branches of government in a generation. It boggles the mind.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 15, 2011 The Big Book of Freedom
In those long ago days our soldiers were referred to as our brave boys serving their country, today they are called only heroes. The irony has not escaped me that some of my friends served in Vietnam and now my son's friends who serve in Iraq / Afghanistan and they return home damaged and broken just as mine did.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, February 14, 2014 The Distant Sound of Thunder
They've called this a jobless recovery, but it's not so, it's a jobs somewhere else recovery. The Fed's been adding $85 billion per month and while most of this cash missed the US economy, it found a home in the emerging economies. The money was let out to fuel growth, which in turn fueled growth in a redux of 2008, the day the music died. Goldman Sachs,
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 24, 2013 The Religion of Capitalism
With our alleged higher human reasoning, it's humans alone who have concocted this theory of fairness. A big guy jumps on a little guy and we declare it as not fair. This empathy of ours is wrestling with the Yang of our predatory nature. So who's to be the final arbiter of fairness in this life? How can we reconcile all in the world that is fair, and all that is not? Why that could only be the providence of the almighty God.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 16, 2014 A New Dark Age
Republicans railed about birth certificates and Obama care, but when the administration used the oil company's estimates for the size of the spill, Republicans were Sphinx silent. Neither side of the aisle wishing to speak of those issues. Remember how the Republicans complained about Obama's abuse of power, when he used the Coast Guard to block reporter's access to the Gulf? Nope, me neither.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 17, 2008 Communist Obama Waffles
We've all heard the expression " bringing a knife to a gun fight." A mismatch and a fundamental underestimation of the situation. We lament the loss of civil politics in favor of emotion-based attack politics, where truth becomes a useless appendage, almost an appendix in the body politic.
SHARE Friday, April 29, 2011 Kingdoms of Greed
The banks which acted illegally now look to subvert even the process which lets them off with a slap on the wrist. The sufferings of millions of men, women and children are subverted and discounted all in the name of greed. This is what America is about, only here; only in this place could such a thing be possible.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 6, 2019 Collapsing Universe
Scientists predict our universe will continue to expand until sometime in the distant future it will dissipate, having filled infinity. That's one theory, another says, the universe will expand until it snaps back like a rubber band. I don't think you want to be around the day the universe decides to do that.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 29, 2011 A Lower Order of Being
George Washington was born the son of a farmer and began a career as a surveyor. He fought for the British in the French and Indian wars and led an unsuccessful charge in pursuit of retreating Native Americans into a forest. George learned that day that you never follow Native Americans retreating into a forest.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 9, 2008 Let's Call It a Palinism
Watching the demise of the big three automakers and the attempts to save them I cannot help but listen to the pundits. "It is the large retirement structure that is sinking them and making them noncompetitive in a world market." Gee, but that has a familiar ring to it. "They took those loans knowing that they wouldn't be able to pay for them."
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 12, 2011 Will You Walk to the Gulag?
How do you explain to small children about losing a home? How do you explain why daddy isn't come along? How do you explain why so many of their toys must be left behind? How do you explain why the new place is so small and isn't as nice as the old place? What does it mean when a generation of children grow up without a real home?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 11, 2010 When Truth Gets in the Way
The U.S. Chamber wonders why they are being singled out for pretending to be something they are not; after all, politicians do it all the time. We've been down this road now several times. Enough, in fact, to know that the American public will be lucky if the proposed legislation won't emerge from Congress with a tax payer subsidy to assist in the lobbying.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 4, 2011 The Obama Deception
I spent a week with both "Stop the Machine" and Occupy D.C. in McPherson Park in Washington. I had a chance to get to know these people and I have listened to their stories, stories of unemployment. A 26 year old man named Kevin who lost his job and his home after his IT job was outsourced to India. I listened to a mother who lost her son in Afghanistan
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, April 1, 2011 I've heard Enough, I've had Enough
But the corporate invertebrate can be excused, this was a mere formality. A banal explanation to a dead eyed war weary nation why when it has no resources for its own people it can spend billions to protect "our interests" in Libya. There was another event going on in New York the other night, this one just for the insiders, for the schmoozers and users, those animals more equal than others.
(19 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 19, 2019 Dave's Razor
When the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964, they drew an audience of 73 million viewers. It was astounding and phenomenal, it was Sunday night and if you weren't watching Ed Sullivan you had two other television choices. Short of the second coming or Trump performing a nude ballet recital on the White House lawn, it will never be equaled.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 15, 2012 The New Poverty
The new poverty is subsidized with food stamps to the multitude which end up in the pockets of merchants. It creates a baseline economy, a brutal Dickensian society with a whiff of paternalism which says, "Feed them but don't actually attempt to improve their lot," merely subsidizing their poverty.
SHARE Thursday, March 12, 2020 Corporal Bone Spurs
Four Score and seven years ago our for fathers, had great plans They we're gonna do stuff. The only thing we have to fear is no plans or great stuff! The markets were so heartened to see this act of Presidential leadership the futures markets tanked to the maximum and were shut off.
SHARE Tuesday, February 15, 2011 The Phony Phony
Capitalism's sole purpose is to make money. Why didn't AOL with their deep pockets and expertise build their own web site? Capitalism buys to either make their own or to eliminate from competition its rivals. AOL will maximize the advertising while minimizing the product until it is just another organ of the loyal opposition, the phony left, the phony center, the phony phony.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 25, 2010 Bad Santa
Yes, Christmas was so beloved by our ancestors in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that they passed a law against it, "anybody who is found observing [it], by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way." The law was later repealed after twenty five years
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 14, 2010 Cheech and Chong Don't Live here Anymore
One day, during one of our chats Hugh told me his wife Martha had been diagnosed with cancer and had to begin chemotherapy. As time progressed I could see the worry and anxiety grow across his face. The chemotherapy was killing his wife. He complained that he couldn't get her to eat and that she was wasting away. My conscience began to hurt me; I had something in the house that might help that woman to ease her suffering
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, October 29, 2012 The Secret Bridge
So there was this old Civil War hospital for the insane, one night during a full January moon, the inmates all went crazy and rioted. They burned down the house and the footbridge after they had murdered the staff, but they was crazy see, and they didn't know the foot bridge was the only way off the ridge. The escaped lunatics wandered aimlessly in the woods, all night, until they froze to death.
(18 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 6, 2016 A Picture of Guernica
Of wars of nebulous and distant causes, smokey and imaginary. A war of resource conquest, no differently than Germany invaded Poland. The policy of we can, because nobody can stop us, is in force. Hillary Clinton, as a Senator, whole heartedly supported it. As Secretary of State, she encouraged it. As President, she'll instigate it. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for authoritarian war.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, January 24, 2014 Why Socialism?
The only goal of capitalism is to make a profit and if a few acorns of social improvement fall to the ground, well and good, as long as we don't remember that the roots of the tree are feeding on those pushed below ground. Can a little shade in exchange for their life's blood, be considered a fair exchange?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, January 27, 2012 Alabama Bible Thumping Jesus Cult
The room was awash in subtle nervous tension, this was after all, a job interview. I was reminded of that, by the woman sitting next to me whose stomach kept growling loudly. The walls of this room were covered in environmental posters describing the project we would be canvassing for.
SHARE Sunday, March 8, 2020 Handguns and Whiskey
The world holds its breath over the corona virus. The irony, as the orange ape plays on his tire swing. In retrospect, all the things he's done in this ham-handed presidency. The crimes, the mistakes, the foolishness, pettiness and mean spiritedness and in the end"it wasn't his fault. Just as blameless as a baby, but he will be remembered for this.
SHARE Thursday, June 2, 2011 Silent Season
In 1962 Rachel Carson published her book, "Silent Spring." It warned of a future without song birds because of the use of the pesticide DDT. The DDT caused a thinning of the bird's egg shells so the eggs would break and the birds could not reproduce.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 3, 2011 And The Country Went To Hell
In August of 1930, Herbert Hoover addresses the American Bankers Association in Cleveland,
"During the past year you have carried the credit system of the nation safely through a most difficult crisis. In this success you have demonstrated not alone the soundness of the credit system, but also the capacity of the bankers in emergency."
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 14, 2020 Your Fault
Here is a challenge for you; I want you to think about something in a different way. The next time you see a homeless person begging for change on the side of the road with a cardboard sign. I want you to ask yourself, could I do that?
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 19, 2014 Crazy is the New Normal
So there you are at work and just for fun and giggles, the CIA puts a crazy dose of LSD in your coffee. Tiny neon dinosaurs are dancing like rockettes across your desk as you hear strange whispers, "repeat after me, I hate commies, I hate commies!"
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, March 6, 2020 The Iranian Hikers Guide
During World War II my father was a flight engineer on a US Navy blimp. The Navy used blimps because they could carry radar and stay in the air for twenty-four hours. Because they carried radar, and radar was top secret my father had to get a top security clearance which he did. He knew that we'd broken the German Naval code. Their mission was not to attack the subs but to make sure they were where they were supposed to be
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 2, 2019 One Toke Over the Line
But outside the Mcwhite House the matrix board says; Now hiring managers and cabinet secretaries--- Great Pay! Sifting through the sands of suffering supplicants you come down to three types. Type one, smile, pucker and kiss. Type two, lock the door, don't answer the phone and order a four-year calendar.
SHARE Monday, March 2, 2020 Save the Tiger
If some alien travelling through space and time happened upon the Earth, they would probably say, "Stop! Oh my god we've got to help them." This would be aliens of average intelligence taking pity on a comparable life form. Super intelligent beings would keep going looking at us like a drunk in the gutter. "Nope! This one can't be helped."
(19 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 23, 2019 Frankenstein Junior
It's amazing what you can learn on the Internet. I didn't know, I just didn't know, who knew? Are ya sitting down? This might come as a shock to you but, all of the world's telescopes are controlled by"you'd never guess. It's the Vatican! I know, who knew? I asked, "How do they do this?" It was explained, through laws, intimidation and bribery.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 11, 2010 Instant News, The Genius of Brit Hume
The ratings for Fox News have been in decline, especially in that all important demographic of all their fingers and toes, to thirty-four. They have safely locked up the demographic of walk-in bath tub and casket shoppers, but like the tobacco industry they must constantly seek out new customers, the newly elderly and mentally infirm, to keep that cookie jar full.
SHARE Wednesday, February 26, 2020 What We Could Have
The madness of King George, Nero, Caligula and Mussolini. If only, he would appoint his horse proconsul! The mad king has emptied the cells of the Bastille for those able to exercise contriteness in the form of a check.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 1, 2009 The War on Sense
It is a shocking statistic and one that should spur us to action. In 2006, 4,800 Americans lost their lives in the search for illicit pleasure. Most were young people under the age of 35 and there were thousands of others who were injured, some permanently in pursuit of kicks and cheap thrills.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 12, 2013 Catch a Bloody Knife
In answer to the expected, anticipated, and gleeful joy at the prospect of starving American children, the Department of Homeland Degradation is spending $80 million for added security measures anticipating food riots. Spending eighty million tax dollars to protect the government from you its citizens!
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, January 17, 2020 Why We Fight
Ronald Reagan saw the unfairness in the world and began taxing Social Security because the elderly were just too prosperous. Hungry school children were getting too much free food in school lunches and solved the problem by declaring ketchup a vegetable.
SHARE Saturday, February 22, 2020 Be Prepared
Who was in this Goon Squad"it didn't say. How many were in this goon squad"it didn't say. What were their names? Who was their ringleader? Were they menacing with knives and machine guns? Had police been contacted? Yeah, you got it.
SHARE Saturday, June 20, 2020 Typhoid Mary Meet Covid Donny
Despite lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, the Cheeto's poll numbers continue to slide. Even his base is saying to knock it off with the tweets. But he can't help himself he's anxious to get back out on the road to those hot crowded areas filled with excited white faces in the over sixty-five high risk groups.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, January 22, 2010 This Thing We've Become
They all had in common that they did not consider themselves heroes, just men doing the job they were assigned to do. But now, ever since 2001, all of our service people are heroes. We hold ceremonies before football games to honor them and we invite them to the State of the Union message. I don't want anyone to think for a moment that I am deprecating their service
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, July 30, 2010 Before We Lost Our Souls
Our nation is ensconced in the long night of eclipse whose shadows darken us all. The President's HAMP mortgage rescue program is a failure for the same reason that Bush's program was a failure. They both leave the banks in charge and the banks do what's best for the banks and not the people. We have an elected government to look after the welfare of the people, not banks.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 6, 2012 Playing Along?
They never really did have any connection to us, but now, in this new life; it is even more obviously so. In retrospect, the rise of Barack Obama looks trumped up and foisted upon us. The rise of an articulate political unknown young black man, versus a crotchety old white man after eight years of George W. Bush. It's been a long time since I rock and rolled...
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, April 4, 2011 A Bright Future
Big money carries a big stick, Jeffery Immelt of G.E. practically lives in the White House. Corporate Obama is still pro nuclear power despite the Fukushima disaster, he assures us that we will do it better and we will do it with government money! Capitalism is all about the free market unless the free market doesn't want it but big money does.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 22, 2020 "Local Boobs Challenge Virus to Gunfight!"
The disease has a ten-day gestation period and some of you protestors are going to come to town like you did today. You are going to stop at the gas station and fuel up and maybe pick up a six pack and some smokes. Then you're going to drive home put the AR-15 over the mantle and infect your entire family.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 25, 2010 Vichy America
"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"
SHARE Saturday, April 16, 2011 Upon the Wreckage of Oligarchy
Then this hearty band of self reliant individualist began their self reliant trade of brewing corn whiskey. Their healthy skepticism of too much government ended at the barrel of government muskets. The issue wasn't strong drink; the issue was a means of storing a corn crop and adding value to an agricultural product.
SHARE Friday, February 21, 2020 This Solidarity Thing
That night in 1932 changed a lot of things, it meant the Franklin Roosevelt would have a free hand. It also meant that the Republican Party was repudiated and reduced to a fringe Party and reduced to irrelevance.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, November 3, 2014 Ebola!
Now you got to ask yourself, why are people eating fruit bats? Obviously, they're more nutritious than say eating at McDonalds, but still. McDonalds has a drive through and thousands of locations but remember you have to catch fruit bats yourself. These are hungry people; fruit bat isn't their first choice of entree. So, it's not so much an epidemic as it is a famine, instead of sending food, we're sending the military
SHARE Saturday, February 8, 2020 The Private Economy
A cellphone factory was using a toxic chemical to clean the glass before installation. They could have used alcohol, but it took too long to dry but the toxic chemical made people sick and only a few workers actually died. The difference in drying time between the alcohol and the solvent was seconds.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 13, 2011 The Obama Two Step
Through poor perception management the Icelandic government has been unable to convince the populace to accept responsibility for the losses of foreigners in a private Icelandic enterprise. All the agreement has called for was the repayment of $61,000 by each Icelandic family, a mere 40 percent of the countries GDP.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 24, 2010 The Arsenal of Kleptocracy
You can see the perversion, speech becomes money and the more money you have the more free speech you have. The less money you have the less voice you have. The Supreme Court's ruling makes Bush vs. Gore look like a bad call in a PeeWee Football game. Rather than picking one President, the court has institutionalized that from now on money is the true voice of the people. Don't have any money?
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, December 7, 2012 Dickensian!
Wonderful, the largest utility in New Jersey estimates damages of over 300 million dollars calling it, the largest power outage in the state's history. The Bureau of Labor Statistics crosses its fingers declaring that storm related unemployment doesn't count.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 27, 2010 Planet Hoover
It is a dangerous time to be alive, it makes the zoo keepers nervous when they enter the cage to feed you one more bowl of sawdust helper. These great tin foil supermen who march in unison singing my country right or ripped off now plan an international chain of counting houses called Planet Hoover's.
SHARE Thursday, June 16, 2011 The Vestibule of Hell
I watched John Pilger's film, "The War You Don't See" the other night and of course it should be banned or better still ignored, America is no longer a reality based environment. America is a video game for erectile dysfunctional stock brokers.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 5, 2020 Just One Flush
One the few points I have to agree on with the financial types, its bad juju to interfere in markets. Case in point, this is not the Feds job. And this is dumb, you know how dumb? This is Donald Trump dumb. Making it cheaper to borrow money isn't going to help with your supply problem.
SHARE Thursday, January 9, 2020 The Trumpian Knot
Trump threatens to destroy fifty-two cultural sights in Iran. Nothing says bone spurs, I mean courage like threatening more war crimes. The number fifty-two is significant because Iran took fifty-two American Hostages back in 1979 - 1980. Sure, it was forty years ago, but an elephant never forgets what he just learned.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 19, 2010 It Ain't Me, Babe
This is the dynamic in our government. The Carter administration plan was to use tax revenues to develop clean energy technologies. The Reagan administration plan was to cut taxes and let the energy companies develop clean technologies if they felt like it. This is the fundamental difference between our two parties.
SHARE Sunday, March 15, 2020 A Monkey Too Old to Dance
Who wants to talk about the Corona virus? Yeah, me neither. Anxiety phasers on stun. Can you believe it? Store shelves empty of toilet paper in the United States of America, the capitalist wet dream of conspicuous consumption? What's next, waiting in line for shoes?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 20, 2009 Breaking Bad is Breaking Ground
Walter White has been given a death sentence; all his life he has worked and struggled to find the American dream, and now it comes to this. Stage three lung cancer with a prognosis of two years to live. His insurance from his job as a high school chemistry teacher will help, but he has a wife and children to think of, as well.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, February 22, 2010 A Half-Truth is the Most Cowardly of Lies
Furthermore, is saving a job the same as creating a job? It is good, of course, to save jobs, but it is a crutch and not a faith healing. Proving the negative the administration claims, "You should have seen what would have happened had we not acted." Had the captain of the Titanic not closed the watertight doors, the ship would have sunk sooner, but she still sank.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 25, 2011 Big Brother's Box
Keith Olbermann was fired by MSNBC, is anyone really surprised by that? Really? Edward R. Murrow was fired, Hunter S. Thompson was fired, anyone with an inch of backbone or an ounce of credibility will get fired. The late Tim Russert once said, "Integrity is for paupers."
SHARE Sunday, May 1, 2011 Corporate Fascism Marches On
The Mexican's are then left to deal with the pollution, and because of the low wages paid to their workers, there isn't enough money for the citizens to build a new water treatment facility. The corporations pay little in taxes as part of their inducement to set up shop in Mexico and Mexico is forced to compete against other third world nations on wage scales alone, creating an escape proof industrial sweat shop.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 1, 2012 May Day
I am consistent with my beliefs. Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am," only one of a different sort: one who risks his skin to prove his truths.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, February 1, 2010 There's No U in Recovery
I'm sure that you've seen the headlines, Ford racks up $2.7 billion in profits for the year. That's great news, that's wonderful news, see, the economy is turning around. Ain't that great? That's the headlines, good news, it's all getting so much better now. Only how did Ford become so profitable? They did it by reducing their North American workforce by 47%.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 31, 2011 Beyond Caricature
Politicians have always buttered the bread to make the sale, but it seems, they are no longer tied down to any branch of the reality tree. Georgia Congressman Paul Broun claimed after the State of the Union speech that, "the President didn't love the Constitution" and really only loved Socialism.
(12 comments) SHARE Friday, December 30, 2011 Bathing in the Blood of Virgins
The scenario was written out long ago, a cast of ne'er do wells, misanthropes , retreads and dead heads were to compete for the honor of being soundly trounced by Barack Obama in next November's coronation err, I mean, election. It has everything a TV viewing audience could want; plot, pathos, angst and philandering.
(15 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 18, 2012 Socialism
If fascism is the co-mingling of big business and government, socialism is the co-mingling of the people and government. Everyone in this country deserves some sort of half-ass, fair shake in life. Can we agree on that? Do we really want to see children born into urban squalor, who are then told to lift themselves up by their own boot straps?
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 27, 2020 Just Another Day in America
At worst Sergio Adrian Hernandez was throwing rocks and feigning attempts at border crossing. Obnoxious behavior is now grounds for lethal force? Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca was fifteen years old. The Supreme Court ruled, Yeah that's all right. Keep doing that, keep shooting kids if they throw rocks at you.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, October 26, 2009 Falling in Love with a Prostitiute
We've become a populace living in a semi-conscious state, unaware and clueless. Numb and emotionless, clinging to meaningless euphemisms and statistics. Reciting jingoistic slogans over a mother's tears. A "casualty" means that some American boy's head has been splattered on the ground for some god-damned political theory for the ignorant. Wasted in the name of corporate America, but we love our troops.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 25, 2012 The Symbol
For more than a decade we have witnessed high crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated against the people. We have seen stolen elections, questionable returns capped with court decisions, which invalidate even the appearance of legitimate democracy.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 4, 2020 The Real Terror
So, Donald Trump has finally shut up. You would think it to be a moment of worldwide rejoicing, but it is not so. After hiding out in the White House basement bunker with his Richie Rich doll and Binky his orange plush bear Donald Trump became mute. The White House announced Sunday the President would not be making any statements.
SHARE Saturday, August 27, 2011 Summer Winds
There is no competition here, only the desire to cooperate with each other and to work together communally. The gardeners share their stories and their problems. It's been a tough year for corn and the potato bugs were especially hungry this year. The gardeners share their extras as well,
SHARE Sunday, June 14, 2020 They Profiled Me Just Because I was a Criminal
But the current incarnation the Cheeto bandito and Bill "Stealing for Jesus" Barr are funny only in a cannibals eating a clown sort of way. "Does this taste funny to you?" John Gotti's stand up routine, Al Capone in floppy shoes you know the lighter side of the Third Reich.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 9, 2011 Missy Wants a Bridge
Growth is a good thing most of the time. Growth with the aim of good community development is a good thing but growth for the sake of growth alone is nothing more than the manipulation of government in the name of greed.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 13, 2010 Which Way to the Bastille?
Who do we throw our shoes at now? Does Wal-Mart have everyday low low prices on torches and pitchforks? Made in China of course, but the question is a serious one, what are we going to do, in this country, about a government that refuses to acknowledge our distress?
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 15, 2014 50 Things the Working Poor Never Say
18. The food stamps keep piling up.
19. I don't care what it costs.
20. What's a dollar store?
SHARE Sunday, January 12, 2020 American Nero
The running cross current of impeachment, MAN BITES DOG, IMPEACHMENT CALLED OFF! General Soleimani has been on the table for twenty years. But, but, but, there's a problem,
(15 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 2, 2019 You are Disposable
If it hasn't become apparent to you yet, let me make it clear our planet is dying. And with one single word I can tell you why Capitalism. This unfounded undemocratic belief that those with capital should be allowed to run roughshod over the human population
SHARE Saturday, January 11, 2020 Without an Exit
Two criminal co-conspirators with no daylight between them. They begin an investigation into the origins of the Russia probe as retaliation. What other reason could it be? Trump claims he was vindicated by the Mueller probe. Why would you investigate the investigation, if it proved your innocence?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, October 28, 2011 When The Whistles Don't Blow
In 2001 Bradley Birkenfeld went to work for UBS Bank in Geneva, Switzerland, and Bradley Birkenfeld is no angel by any stretch of the imagination. He is everything that you would expect a corporate international banker to be. The son of a neurosurgeon, Birkenfeld earned a master's degree in business administration and worked for State Street Bank in Boston before joining UBS.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 9, 2019 The Monster Factory
When you are homeless it is difficult to escape, you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps when you've nothing to stand on. When the bus fare downtown is five dollars round trip, your choices are, seek help or eat. You have no stability; you deal with rain and snow directly and not aesthetically while being disparaged by the world.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 24, 2010 Headed for Jonestown
The idol worshipers of the golden calf say, "No, no, that's not true. All benefit who have faith and believe!" Mark Twain said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." We know all the world is a stage and these so-called leaders are but actors and the Republicans blame the Democrats and Democrats blame the Republicans.
SHARE Sunday, September 25, 2011 Schizophrenic Nation
If the Bush administration had been looking to invade just any old oil rich nation they should have chosen Mexico and saved the bus fare. A nation of 107 million souls where a ruling elite of one million rightwing ideologues controls a majority of the society's assets. Forty seven percent of the Mexican population owns nothing, not land or cars or homes, they own nothing.
SHARE Wednesday, June 26, 2019 Whakindashitisthis
Fox News suffered a 25% decline in ratings. Of course, it's Summertime and the Klan rallies are being held outdoors. Or maybe grumpy old white men just can't watch the 24/ 7 love fest. "Come on damn it! Bomb something!" Maybe a game show would help the ratings, "Today" one lucky contestant will play for the opportunity to Kiss Trump's Ass!
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 25, 2020 It's a Good Life
Adam Schiff has taken the impeachment trial to an ethereal level, a case for the ages. The Trump administration's nanny, nanny, boo approach is no longer effective in the face of a court of law. Schiff's closing argument might be taught in rhetoric classes forever. Trump's attorneys must now argue the rain is not wet and the sun shines at night.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, March 8, 2010 And So It's War!
In January Prime Minister Papandreou said the following, "There is only one dilemma: Will we let the country go bankrupt or will we react? Will we let the speculators strangle us, or will we take our fate in our own hands?"
SHARE Saturday, March 26, 2011 For the Money
The west was whistling, "It Can't Happen Here" while strolling past the graveyard. The Russians were directing attention away from the culprits responsible by praising the heroism of those sacrificing themselves because of careless and foolish decisions and design schemes. Except that the Russian designers weren't so foolish as to build a multiple nuclear reactor facility on the edge of their countries capitol and largest city
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 5, 2010 Give it to Me Straight, Doc. Will I Ever Work Again?
Our politicians have mobilized to do the only thing they seem capable of doing anymore, organize a spin campaign. President Obama went on the road back in February to push his jobs plan to take $30 billion in TARP funds and give it to small community banks to increase lending to small business. There you have it, a broad-spectrum jobs program from the biggest banks right down to the smallest banks and nobody will be left out.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 25, 2020 The Kids are All Right
He's a no good dirty long hair! Probably on drugs flying higher than a kite! Okay, you got me, but I turned out all right. As Hunter Thompson said, "Multiple felon perhaps but still a decent person." Today it's lazy no-good Millennial or Gen X er.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, September 17, 2010 Walk a Mile in My Shoes
I used to drive new cars and I had a 1965 Mustang with a "K" code motor and a four speed top loader transmission in the garage but now I walk every where I need to go. I traded the pony car for start up capital for a business and for a year or so the business did well and I thought I was living the American dream.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 2, 2009 From Haymarket to Ludlow from Harlen to Matewan from Mother Jones to You
So what does May Day mean to you? Probably nothing, maybe you've got a job, maybe a real good one and you're only concerned with your own look out. So you don't want me jostling your bed cause you sleep good at night. I used to sleep good at night too. Then by the moonlight I began to wonder why it is that there is always money to help big business and never enough money to help the workers?
SHARE Thursday, June 25, 2020 Shattered
When you try and foist the idea that you are somehow perfect or smarter than the average bear and it blows up in your face. Then it has to be someone's fault. When the five-year plan is four years behind schedule and the collective farms have failed it has to be someone's fault.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 17, 2019 Radio Nazi
Now, this next product was well"you just can't even make this sh*t up even though somebody did. "Is your home ready in the event of an EMP?" The most common cause for an Electromagnetic pulse event is a nuclear explosion. What they are selling is a giant tin foil hat for your house. Protect your home and your electronic devices. Yep, where would you be if you lost Mad Max's cell number.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, April 24, 2020 That Little Country Church
It was a weird amalgamation protesting in the streets. Rednecks, militia types, anti-vaxers, Bible thumpers, new world order conspiracy theorists and a general assortment of low intelligence Fox News voters. Simultaneously discovering the unfairness of their quarantine grabbing up their rifles and bullet proof vests and headed for downtown.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 4, 2011 The Flowers of Madness
I wonder if this is how the average American felt in 1860 or 1931? The rest of the story is inevitable and predictable and shameful. This is no less than our own raid on Harper's Ferry and from here there is no turning back. I had begun to write a story filled with inglorious facts and figures about the economy but I canned it. It told a story alright, but it didn't say nothing really,
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 6, 2011 The History of the 2012 Presidential Campaign
In 2008 Barack Obama came from out of nowhere and was presented to the American public as a strong principled, decent man. Complete with his own log cabin story of being a community organizer, Barack slew Goliath and now he wants to save America from the evil Republicans. He was presented to the American public as a great reformer and a champion for the middle class. Get it? Holy Bandersnatch Batman!
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 8, 2011 Two Visions
Can Capitalism be saved from itself? Will the phoenix rise from its own ashes again only to circle again above the injured looking for to select more innocent victims? With rumors of benevolence, whispers of appetite with the bared teeth of a carnivore.
(11 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 9, 2010 Lost Children
As we entered the new century I watched as any plausible belief in Democratic government disappeared under faux judicial robes that explained away their ruling as "just this once." A tragedy worthy of Shakespeare, a government worthy of Stalin,
SHARE Sunday, April 24, 2011 Paint it Black
If we consider what Machiavelli is trying to tell us across the centuries then we can begin to understand all that is going on around us today. If you sought to destroy a free society you would first stifle incomes of its workers. Poor people working longer hours and earning less money have little time to organize resistance.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 27, 2010 I Am Just a Dreamer and You are Just a Dream
Most people today wouldn't know a true liberal if we hit them in the ass with a bass fiddle. Most people fail to realize that it's not the picture, it's the frame. Someone like Glen Beck gets a national broadcast and someone like Noam Chomsky couldn't buy his way onto the air. It's not just Fox, it's across the board;
SHARE Friday, December 23, 2011 All the Way Home
We were headed for Panama City Beach Florida, the redneck Riviera. Back in the days when it was still fun, back before the Real Estate developers got a hold of it and paved it over with condominiums and shopping malls. In the early1970's it was a near endless chain of little mom and pop hotels broken only by the Snakatorium,
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 6, 2010 The Death of Party
When Ms. Solis was asked if, due to the poor job numbers, perhaps the economy needed a government public works project, the answer was a firm "No." Her plan and the President's plan to solve the unemployment crisis is "tax credits" and "creating a sound business environment." Those are indisputably core Republican positions. Let the free market work to solve all the problems and help business and all will be well.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 14, 2019 Just Not Worth It
This is a President who has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Accords. A nuclear arms treaty and treaty with Iran. A President who has gone out of his way to insult and demean our major allies while he is cozying up to third word dictators and somehow Ms. Pelosi is worried about divisive.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 3, 2009 God is With Us
Tom Lehrer, one of the first satirical, political song writers, once penned a song entitled "National Brotherhood Week." The song went, "Oh, the black folks hate the white folks and the white folks hate the black folks and the Indians hate the Mexicans and everybody hates the Jews." Funny, because it is was so true.
SHARE Wednesday, February 4, 2009 The Evil Dr. Phil
Our own nocturnal Dr. Phil is a Nosferatu, hiding in the shadows and working for the darker powers with an agenda of helping the few at the expense of the many. Perhaps it is not bricks that we need to combat him but wooden stakes, and failing that perhaps the morning sunshine to prevent him from returning to his dark resting place.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 2, 2011 They Don't Even Try to Hide it Anymore
On the cover of this weeks Time Magazine is a photoshopped picture of Barack Obama standing next to Ronald Reagan. Reagan has his arm around Obama's shoulder as Obama gushes a smile like he's meeting Frank Sinatra. The lead story in this mainstream magazine is "Why Obama, hearts Reagan and What He's Learned From Him."
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, June 5, 2020 The President of Law and Order
You know what makes America great? The orange one tries to play Dirty Harry and threaten the American people and the numbers in the streets only double. I'd wager that the more he opens his mouth or does cartwheels on the White House lawn the larger the crowds will get.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 1, 2009 The Gate Keepers of Death
“I’m old, damn it; how the hell do you think I am?†But I didn’t let him rain on my parade any. He was at least mobile and lucid, as inside, down long corridors, were the rooms of the deteriorating elderly.
SHARE Saturday, February 1, 2020 Upon the Gears
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the statue of Abe Lincoln stood up from his memorial and walked out headed for Canada. Or perhaps he'd walk over to the Jefferson memorial and helped Tom raze it to the ground.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 12, 2010 The Clueless and the Shoeless
Imagine the Titanic striking that iceberg and the Captain announcing, "Free margaritas and party hats on the promenade deck for the first class passengers!"
"But sir," a young ensign asks, "What about all the other passengers?"
The Captain's answers brusquely, "You mean the f*cking retards? They'll just have to hang on and hope for the best. After all I'm doing all that I can!"
SHARE Saturday, May 23, 2020 The Question
Revolving door at the White House meets revolving door at the publishing house. An endless chain of paper pulp all saying the same thing, "Donald Trump is a crook, Donald Trump is incompetent." Until the story becomes a dead horse. But we don't have to take their word for it the Cheeto's incompetence is on full display. Anyone had their bleach inoculation yet?
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 31, 2019 The Road to Defeat
Truman was begged to drop desegregation as a plank and Southern delegations threatened to walk out of the convention. And when they did, Hubert Humphrey lead a cheer as the band played "Happy Days are Here Again." The Party elite thought Truman was done. Like Generals, the Party is always fighting the last war.
SHARE Monday, March 16, 2020 "We're on Our Own Out Here"
The whole affair gives insight. They know what they want to do but are too incompetent to know how to get it done. Like the Cheeto's Muslim ban, just a baby with a nail gun firing around the room wildly. A thousand ping pong balls on a thousand mouse traps all going off at once!
SHARE Tuesday, March 17, 2020 Revolution for $100 Alex
Hoover came up with a $2 billion-dollar corporate aid package to help industry to re-open factories. So, Ford could produce new cars to sell in cities with 70 and 80% unemployment. The reality of the Depression overwhelmed Hoover, personally, professionally and philosophically.
SHARE Tuesday, January 28, 2020 What Do You Do for an Encore?
So. Let's recap, lying to a Grand Jury about a private consensual affair is an outrageous violation of the Constitution worthy of impeachment. Using the office of the Presidency to orchestrate phony investigations into a political rival with somebody else's money is purely political.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 12, 2008 Gone with the Wind
As we sat around the dinner table celebrating a family birthday, the conversation turned to the stock market. My in-laws are retired and in their seventies; they, for the most part, just shook their heads. Then my mother-in-law, with a nervous certainty, remarked, "It'll come back, you wait and see." My first impulse was to remind her of some of the events that have already transpired to the contrary, but her tone quieted me.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 8, 2010 Mr. Weiner Goes to Hollywood
There is something sick, perverse and moldering about this sound-stage melodrama called legislation in the House of Representatives. The 9/11 aid was intentionally attached to a tax increase on offshore corporate profits. In short, this bill was crafted by the Democrats to lose.
SHARE Saturday, June 13, 2020 Don't Hate Me Because I'm Orange
In the face of Black Lives Matter. In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. In the aftermath of worldwide condemnation of Police brutality this is what the President cooks up in that little one burner stove he calls a mind. "He's got a scanner in his hand he's trying to hack the police radio codes!"
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, January 14, 2013 The Illusion of Freedom
There are no more Republicans and there are no more Democrats; they are merely stage props to create the illusion of an open political system. Mitt Romney was the bad cop and Barack Obama was the good cop, but still, a cop is a cop? It is nothing but an illusion to elicit your participation.
SHARE Friday, May 8, 2020 The Incredible Shrinking Orange Fuhrer
We are in hybrid times somewhere between 1984 and "Triumph of the Will." A bad acid trip through the looking glass so terrible you begin to understand the reason for carpet bombing Germany. But ours is unique, a spaghetti western Fascist utopia where things don't fit quite right.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 5, 2012 The Director Of The Opponent's Fate
Just 69 days after being sworn in to office in 1981, an attempt was made on the life of Ronald Reagan. A lone gunman shot the President as he walked out the front door of the Washington D.C. Hilton hotel. I'll repeat; a lone gunman shot the President as he walked out the front door of the Washington D.C. Hilton hotel
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, January 29, 2010 Obama; A Heck of a Nice Guy...but
A heck of a nice guy that's what Barack Obama is. I have been accused of denigrating the President and accused of forgetting about the previous resident of the office. So, I will preface my remarks by saying that Barack Obama is a heck of a nice guy. Throughout his career he has been known for consensus building, seeking out the opinions of others and then deciding issues somewhere in the middle ground.
SHARE Wednesday, January 22, 2020 Hillary Calls Kettle Black
She had eight years to groom party functionaries and to network with big time donors and she did that. She had the chairman of the Party in her back pocket! There was only one special interest group she forgot to woo"the American people. Think fast, what was the Clinton Campaigns overriding concern for America?
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 29, 2008 A Piss Snow cone
How can I put this politely? For years I have been warned, "Dave, you're too negative!" Well, I can't help it; I've tried to change but it's no use. So let me describe the revised, sanitized, scrutinized, super-sized bailout bill as optimistically as I can. How about half a hammer? Or nothing for something? Or my favorite, a piss snow cone.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, September 6, 2010 It Can't Wait
We have in this administration a dysfunctional family that when its programs, plans and public offerings are not greeted with wild acclaim by the base the play's director blames the audience.
SHARE Friday, March 13, 2020 First Goes the Love
Come on everyone, turn that frown upside down! Eric Von Zipper meets Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in Beach Blanket Bonzo. Happy talk isn't going to work.
SHARE Tuesday, December 13, 2011 Twisted Main Street
Already, I've met some of the regulars. I have not yet become one of them, but I feel as if I will, that I must. There's Stan, he's in his early thirties and he buys and sells comic books online and he talks too much. He can't help himself; he's just trying to be friendly and trying to overcome his own loneliness.
SHARE Thursday, March 19, 2020 Welcome to Cheetonomics
It reminds me of H.G. Well's War of the Worlds, the orange Martian unfazed by Mueller rays, impervious to impeachment artillery is brought down by a virus. His machines grinding to a halt and his agenda dripping from the floorboards to the hatches of the ruined machines.
SHARE Tuesday, May 19, 2020 Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later
The House passed a three trillion-dollar stimulus package which Senate Republicans proclaim as dead on arrival. This is the bill to bailout state and local governments not because you want to but because you must. Who votes against themselves? What comes from this? This Kamikaze Republican plan to starve Main Street.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 10, 2011 The Fascist Moses
Let's kick Richard Nixon, its great fun; we all did it at parties back in the 1970s. But that was the previous generation and this generation has missed out on the fun, like Woodstock. Unbeknownst to this current generation there would have been hundreds of fistfights and stabbings at Woodstock had it not been for three little words, "f**k Richard Nixon!"
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, March 10, 2014 The Dark Night of Neoliberalism
This is the central tenet of neoliberalism: money is freedom, where money is all-powerful, where money rules. If a hurricane drowns your city, destroys your home and kills your entire family, it is only a maximum of opportunity. Human life means nothing under a limited government. Limited government should only concern itself with whether the traffic lights work,
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 7, 2011 The Success of Failure
Who gains from this? A wise man might ask, who gains from loss? Who gains from the cessation of prosperity? I asked a new acquaintance if she was aware that the Federal Reserve was lending money to member banks for 0.10 percent. "No," she answered, "what does that mean?"
SHARE Monday, March 9, 2020 The Days of Push Comes to Shove
To sit idly by as an Orange Jabba the Hut slowly dismantles the organs of a government creating a new government. A government not tied to facts or reality but tied to what the boss wants. The boss doesn't need to tell you what the boss wants, does he? A government of extremism unleashed in the tumult of exceeding unspoken expectations.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, November 9, 2009 The Weight of Visions
Soldiers in combat are, for all intents and purposes, insane. This sense of insanity is fostered by the military as a callous behind which the soldiers can exhibit a macho bravado.An emotional dam to hide away the lifetime of religious and societal teachings that are replaced by the warrior mentality. The warrior who kills today and prays and who will ask God almighty to spare his life so that he may kill again tomorrow.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 10, 2020 The Trump Memorial
Then he created the Trump Memorial, one point seven miles of fencing to prevent his eyes from seeing the truth laid bare before him. "I'll make it all go away with fences and cops! I'll dominate Lafayette Park!" Living in an ersatz America at the intersection of White Privilege Avenue and Beatdown Boulevard. "It's not fair!" He cries. "The Russia investigation and impeachment with his favorite "Witch hunt" sound bite
(15 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 31, 2012 Text Book Racism
This wasn't your head on fill in the swimming pools type of racism but a more subtle economic racism. Of course, since blacks couldn't be hired into better paying jobs it was more difficult for them to be able to afford to educate their children.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, January 1, 2010 The Clock is Ticking
It is human nature to flirt with danger; the lure of fun today when we should be working lures millions to skip school or to buy a bass boat or take a vacation that we can't really afford. So why should we be surprised at the failure of Copenhagen? The world leaders sat in the collective principal's office and decided not to punish themselves and instead promised to do better in the future.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 27, 2014 Mike Tyson - Modern Intellectual
I'd seen enough of People Magazine and returned the dog-eared copy to the dog-eared pile, finding something a little more in tune with my testosterone fueled machismo. Road and Track Magazine had a lead article featuring, a side by side comparison of the new Bentley versus the new Rolls Royce. Now, for a man using rent money to pay for a tooth extraction, this was important and useful information.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 7, 2010 It Can't Happen Here
Frank Zappa first posed the question sarcastically by saying, "It can't happen here." He was arguing with the myth of American exceptionalism. In the song the line is repeated over and over,
"It can't happen here
It can't happen here
I'm telling you, my dear
That it can't happen here
Because I been checkin' it out, baby
I checked it out a couple a times"
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 11, 2020 Through the Worm Hole
Whenever I get depressed about the state of the world, I turn on Wall Street TV. The death toll from the coronavirus passes ten thousand, and Wall Street soars. Oh, boy! It's not as bad as it could be! It's gonna be alright. We can all go back to work and everything going to be just like it was!
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 12, 2010 The Army of the Lost
Our own dumpster dilemma at the industrial park where I live attracts old tires, scrap wood, and paint cans. Vandals broke the combination lock off the gate and since then, hell's a poppin! Last month left inside the gate was a new futon, a desk and a dresser. When you sleep on a love seat as I do a futon can look mighty attractive but I had nowhere to put it. Neither did the original owners, behind it was a like new mattress.
SHARE Saturday, May 21, 2011 Cry Havoc
If you play chess you understand that the goal is to control the center of the board. You do this by a mixing the power of the different chess pieces. Some pieces are obvious and right out in front. Pawns are weak and obvious while others, such as the queen or bishop, are powerful and can strike from a distance. Your goal is to deceive your opponent into misunderstanding the power of your pieces.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 21, 2019 Extinction Level Event
2020 is the year to make Republicans extinct. Mitch McConnell looks up from his tortoise shell and sees the meteor a comin. Devin Nunez could be the new monorail conductor at Disneyland Ted Cruz could join the space pirates as Gilligan on the SS Minnow. In 1932, The Republicans were repudiated and in 200 days we had a new economy, a new philosophy and a New Deal.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 30, 2013 The Lights of Perverted Science
It is such an explicit and exquisite term, perverted science, encapsulating and distilling knowledge without benefit, counterproductive, Mary-Shelly-Frankenstein knowledge. Nightmare technologies like nuclear weapons which once begun can never be ended. Our country is awash in genetically modified foods, fracking, drones, armed guards and RFI chips,
SHARE Saturday, December 22, 2012 Rockets Red Glare
Strange the President should think such a thing, especially since Osama Bin Laden was never charged in connection with the events of 9/11. Bin Laden was charged in connection with a series of US embassy attacks in 1998 in North Africa.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 1, 2008 The World You'll Come to Know
I was talking to my son yesterday about the economy and politics in general. He's twenty-three, self-employed, and ambitious. Even as a child he was ambitious. "Dad," he'd say, "can I borrow the lawnmower?" Then he'd come back at sundown with $150.00. He never cared for cartoons, video games, or school but his one weakness was the Three Stooges
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 21, 2009 Another Earth Day
Poison pet food, toxic baby formula, sweat shops, child labor, forced labor, falling living standards and environmental degradation, the thread of greed runs through it all. It makes Earth Day like world prostitute day; we celebrate them today but go back to screwing them tomorrow. The problems are addressed but never resolved.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 24, 2010 Another Great Day for Democracy
Good Journalism tells the story, bad journalism omits important pieces of the story, while reprehensible journalism creates a new story out of whole cloth. While Reuters, CNN and the LA Times were wasting their space telling us of incidences of violence and the reason for all the tumult the New York Times took a different approach.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 16, 2010 The Sausage Factory
From the very beginning of the mortgage crisis there has been this narrative repeated over and over on all the financial networks, and by conservative pundits and even by the President of the United States, "People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway." It is a strategy designed to balance the blame on unequal partners.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, January 31, 2014 What is this, Family Guy?
Because of the length of this malaise, a generation grows up without knowledge of either prosperity or peace. How do they set goals with a future so nebulous without any reasonable hope of success? What are the good American jobs?
What is our plan for the future? Just drift aimlessly, judging the quality of our lives by the Dow Jones average?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 17, 2009 Cooking in a Coffee Pot
The one thing to remember about the homeless is that they never have a day off. They are homeless every day; it's easy to forget and difficult to understand, but the homeless face the world without a buttress. They are toe-to-toe with the heat and the humidity, the rain, the mud, and the bugs.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 14, 2008 What FDR Gave Us
Both of my parents lived through the Great Depression. My father was born in 1920, and my mother was born in 1926. My father was raised in a small industrial town, my mother in inner city Chicago. Those of you familiar with Chicago's waterfront might be surprised to learn that children once played in the empty shell of what now is the Museum of Science and Industry.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, April 6, 2012 We Who Are Dead
It is Easter weekend, a metaphor for the rebirth of new life arising from death. It is a good time to reflect upon our lives and upon how we live. It is also the six month anniversary for the Occupy movement. I saw this article posted by ABC News correspondent Christine Amanpour the other day entitled, "The Next Cuban Revolution?"
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 27, 2019 Goodfellas
This isn't a Presidential administration, this is a crime syndicate. This wasn't a campaign"it was a scam. The scam worked, assisted by the worst Democratic nominee in a generation. Hilary Clinton evoked ire on the right and slumber on the left. The intelligence community could see what was going on. The incoming Trump administration was warned that Mike Flynn was compromised.
SHARE Friday, March 27, 2020 Living in Metropolis
Can we at this point believe that the Oaf even understands what it is that he said? This is the barometric question for all societies, who lives and who dies. American values dictate E pluribus Unum, from many one. The Marines leave no one behind, George fishes Harry Bailey out of the drink and loses his hearing in one ear.
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 5, 2009 Stray Cats
I watch the sun go down reluctantly. This world offers little, and I have little to offer in return. I have lost everything, so as the birds sing at daylight's demise, I hear no music. The world has lost its music for me. It is just an endless grind with a police siren in the distance.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, February 11, 2019 On the Beach
A media encapsulation so vast that the Big Brother we want is the Big Brother we get. A Christianity which is pro-war and anti-poor. A generation of Eloi which hears of war but knows not of it. Sound bites of war, sound bites of sound bites. Sound bites regurgitated and taped together and euphemistically called music.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 17, 2019 The World has Gone Dark
One word, one spark, one promise one cry. A face, a religion or a people wronged all made whole in hate. From rocks and spears to knives and swords to guns to missiles to bombs and atoms we shall be victorious, righteous and pure once we slay all the evils doers and their children
(12 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 7, 2019 Wanna See Me Moonwalk?
There is a Trump fatigue, rabbit punches of lies, lies and more lies. Buffered by a wall of false equivalencies, do you know what Obama did? Do you know what Hillary did? Well yeah, but that has nothing to do with anything unless you have a time machine. Do you know what Hadrian did? Do you know what kind of SOB Ramses the 2nd was?
(9 comments) SHARE Monday, September 20, 2010 Republicans are Bums!
The keystone of Republican politics is the tax cut. Tax cuts Republicans argue stimulate growth and employment so much so that the tax cuts pay for themselves. Look around, is the economy thumping, are jobs plentiful? The Bush tax cuts have cost us nearly three trillion dollars.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 20, 2020 Angry Earth
Godzilla stomped across our movie screens in the 1950s breathing fire while destroying Tokyo and its mass transit system. Godzilla was spawned of nuclear radiation released by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 2, 2014 Hain't We Got All the Fools?
Michael Brown its aledged was jaywalking, prompting an altercation with a white policeman, which led to his death. So what has changed in America? An unarmed black man is killed by police and almost automatically, almost reflexively, the American public assumes, he must have done something to deserve being killed.
SHARE Friday, April 3, 2020 A Possession of the World
The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank opened its doors yesterday to a mile-long line of cars. Offering fifty pounds of food, no questions asked. Note to self: the asteroid is coming, get to food bank early. If you've never been in a needful situation like this, set your imagination on crazy.
SHARE Tuesday, August 16, 2011 Room 101
File this one under some people will believe anything, after over a week of market volatility caused by manufactured crisis's the news media tells a worried public, "Its alright now, you can go back to sleep. There will be no recession, move along, nothing to see here."
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 22, 2012 Craigslist -- Explained
I found this on Craigslist the other day, posted in the writing jobs section. I was struck by what it saying superficially versus what is was actually trying to say. My own comments are in the block quotes
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 27, 2010 A Gravy Train with Biscuit Wheels
The bankers are aware that growing numbers of Americans, either through situation or design, want nothing to do with their industry. The FDIC came up with a new program, which I call "Free Crack", to entice less affluent Americans back into the banks. The program was to encourage the banks to make loans of up to $1,000 while keeping the interest rate below 36 percent. God bless their little black hearts!
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 26, 2010 Dead Leaves
It's a paralysis, a weakening as one by one the leaves wither and fall from the trees. I see an illness with a thousand different symptoms that strikes us all differently but has only one deadly result. Even the businesses that remain open have a hard time seeing a future.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, August 3, 2012 How Can We Live, Without Our Lives?
Officially, that excludes those working part time and those workers considered discouraged workers. Unofficially, there is another category, those of the disappeared. Millions of Americans disappeared from the economy no longer receiving benefits, no longer considered to be in the workforce.
SHARE Friday, September 3, 2010 Labor Day and the Easter Bunny
Labor Day is scarier than Halloween, colder than New Year's and as somber as Christmas. It is a horror show of injustice, of massacre and counter massacre, depravity and cruelty all in a search for a living wage. The workers made outrageous demands, an eight-hour day, a forty-hour week.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 11, 2011 Carnival of Capitalistic Anarchy
This is your government punishing the victim instead of the criminals. Banks and lending institutions are chartered and licensed and not one home mortgage was ever given to the public that was not approved of by the lender. The lender then takes these loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and says, please give us face value for these loans.
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 11, 2013 Economy of Mass Destruction
Very simply -- every worker in the United States competes directly with third world production. Quite simply -- it can't be done. If a manufacturer can pay an industrial worker $5.00 per day, without health care or environmental costs and without a dime of penalty, our economy is doomed.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 26, 2010 Tightening the Screws
The waves have become muted in an oil-soaked tide, moving in slow motion. They wash over us and leave us polluted and muted as well. The oil spill in the Gulf is a metaphor for our American society. We shake our fists and shout with fervent, moral outrage
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, December 31, 2010 Once Upon a Time
Julian Assuage, Bradley Manning become nails of truth sticking up only to be hammered down. Any and all that dare speak the truth can expect the same treatment, "In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are f*cked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely."
(9 comments) SHARE Monday, March 4, 2019 The End
You get Gawd to protect you because we won't. This is where it began, the paternalistic belief that if farmers suffered crop failures it was wrong to interfere. It would strip the farmers of their self-reliance if they were assisted. There have always been poor, hasn't there?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 29, 2017 Are You a Nazi?
The normalization of brutality, the slow steady drip of media which advocates rather than reports. The creating of good guys and bad guys and good guys are always good and bad guys are always bad. Always trying to take something away from us, enemies always trying to ruin our fun. Take our jobs and cheat us out of our money. They don't look like us, they dress in funny clothes.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 31, 2011 The Guiding Principle
I was reading Noam Chomsky the other day, "The guiding principle (for American government) is that as long as the public is under control, everything is fine," he said. "(The traditional argument is) the powerful should gain ends by any possible means. As long as the public is kept under control, public will doesn't matter."
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 7, 2011 Dante's Slope
I no longer have a sense of normality, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. None of my employers have tried to cheat me out of my time; no one has made the type of demands on me that conventional employers have made. No one has been disappointed in my work or made any complaints about either the caliber or quality.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 14, 2009 It All Gets Real
Are Americans just more criminally bent? Or is it a collective madness brought on by a society that talks one way and acts another.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 21, 2011 In Every Age
Recently the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, warned that New York could face riots in the streets if something were not done about the employment situation. This was a story with media legs, ABC glossed over it while the Wall Street Journal pooh poohed it. CNN took the story and turned it into a story about partisan politics.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, October 10, 2011 Freedom Plaza DC; Breaking News
Freedom Plaza - Organiser Kevin Zeese anounces Federal Officials in Washington agree to a four month extention of Freedom Plaza protest permit. Officials also stated the the Freedom Plaza protestors must make accomodations for other scheduled events in the park.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 29, 2020 A Hobo's Fatalism
It's the not knowing, isn't it? Never knowing what's going to happen next. The empty streets and end of the world gasoline prices, empty shelves and augmented store hours. There's no joy in Mudville only a determination to grit our teeth and get on with it because we have no other choice.
SHARE Thursday, April 9, 2020 Now, I'm Not a Doctor
It was flailing, something to make headlines. Something good on the six o'clock news. "Our wonder weapons are smashing their cities!" A distraction, something to change the subject, oblivious that people were dying for the purpose of creating a better newscast.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 13, 2020 Gone to Bye Bye Land
They are partying down at the Fuhrer bunker as the last days approach. The markets rose on the employment numbers because they were not as bad as expected. How much worse could they be? How bad must they be to snap the market out of its stupor?
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 10, 2009 A Time of Shattering Realities
In Las Vegas there have been three murder-suicides in the past twelve days. These are acts of desperation that are happening in every city in America and yet it is treated as strictly local news.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, December 27, 2010 Are You Feeling Better?
You know what other year set sales records? 2008, as the worst Christmas season on record since the end of WW2. 2009 showed a 1 percent improvement over 08 so when they say that 2010 looks like a great year, what are they really saying to us?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 14, 2011 October 2011 - Why I will Be There
We are forced to take off our shoes and empty our pockets because they want you and me to think of all those other people in line with us as our potential enemies. They want to divide us and make us fear each other, because it is fear which is being used as a tool of government. Innocent people should not fear government, yet the police cars that were once blue or yellow are now jet black with dark tinted windows
SHARE Tuesday, February 4, 2020 Che was a Patriot
"The world must not only be interpreted; it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny." Che Guevara
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 13, 2010 What Else is There Left to Defend?
Tim thinks that because the heavy hand of government wishes to protect workers and the environment that he will outsource production to China. "Feeding my family is still higher on the food chain than employing Californians," said Keller, 34, the father of a 2-year-old.
Keller worries the state's environmental laws mean he "can't have a business or be competitive."
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 12, 2010 Three Days to Revolution
"If a modern state is to rest upon a firm foundation its citizens must not be allowed to starve. Some of them do. They do not die quickly. You can starve for a long time without dying." Leader of Children's Bureau of Philadelphia, 1931
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Mr. Wrong from Right
Then Mr. Tall, Dark and Corporate decides to repeal the forty one year old ban on deep water oil drilling put in place by Dick Nixon. Nixon had put the ban in place after a massive Santa Barbara California oil spill prompted Nixon to tell the nation that this type of accident must never be allowed to happen again.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 1, 2012 Under the Hammer
Sometimes you just don't know whether to laugh or cry, they don't even try to hide it anymore. It is like the US Army changing their name to Killco, the death and dying folks!
SHARE Thursday, April 2, 2020 The New Walter Mitty
Is it possible for an individual smart enough to manage a Jesus money farm with dozens of employees while at the same time being slow poke, you gotta see it to believe it stupid?
SHARE Monday, March 30, 2020 Are You Too Good for Locusts Now God?
First, it was a hoax. Then it was no problem, the numbers are going down. It's all going to magically go away. No problem, we got this. Miracle pills! We understand the social distancing problem thoroughly, all nine of us crammed up here on this little stage.
SHARE Thursday, June 30, 2011 Breakfast Food
For generations the back of cereal boxes had been the province of small children, full of puzzles and games and cartoons, but no more. "Catch All Your Family Memories at the Walmart Photo Center!" Beneath this rather curious headline are pictures of adults and children, preschoolers were in the majority of the photos with fishing tackle.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 9, 2011 Twilight's Last Gleaming
The crime is beyond rival, it opened an entire new field of warfare upon the earth. Or as the Roman maxim advises, "Who gains from this?" Did Islamic revolutionaries gain anything from the 9-11 attack? Did this attack in anyway advance their goals?
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, January 16, 2012 Dakota - Montana
What must the pioneers have thought when they found themselves here in this huge and empty land. You cannot fathom its scope without seeing it with your own eyes, this cold gigantic, barren and unforgiving land as far as the eye can see. Millions of acres of emptiness, this was dinosaur country.
(9 comments) SHARE Monday, February 2, 2009 I Come to Bury, Not to Praise
Blagojevich's guilt or innocence is really unimportant; it doesn't matter because this is a political assassination. Whether it is done with a gun or a knife is unimportant; all that matters is that it was done and done publicly. The Governor was arrested in his home at six thirty in the morning, less than three weeks after Barack Obama, a Senator from Illinois and from Chicago, won election as President of the United States
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, August 6, 2010 The Plan
Mama taught "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." I think the Republican strategy is "It's how you play the game that determines whether you win or lose." Could John McCain have enacted half of this agenda in eighteen months? All this and put Social Security and Medicaid in the butcher shop window?
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 31, 2010 The Ghosts of Detroit
But Ford was a wild bull; he resented suggestions, he resented oversight, and most of all he resented Leland. Ford quit the company that carried his name in 1902, and at the suggestion of Henry Leland the company was renamed in honor of the great explorer and founder of Detroit, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac.
SHARE Sunday, March 18, 2012 Oh the Horror
I read Greg Smith's earth shaking New York Time's Op Ed recently, "Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs" and I must say that I for one am shocked! Mr. Smith must have been either home schooled or led an otherwise sheltered life. When I was a young boy on one of those bright and lovely spring Saturday mornings I dressed in my smart khaki Boy Scout uniform and we good scouts all gathered at the local community house.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 3, 2009 Close to the Edge, A Country Without Pity
Your government doesn't care a whit about you! Ask Gov. Schwarzenegger if these things matter as he attempts to end public health care in California. Your government rejoices at the Chrysler and GM bankruptcy; Wall Street soars on news that another thirty thousand union auto workers will soon become unemployed and one hundred and fifty thousand dealership employees will also get the ax.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, April 19, 2010 The Alcohol Party
Over time rivers change their course, great trees grow and then fall away. To get elected Bill Clinton called himself a centrist Democrat which was in fact a Rockefeller Republican. The Republican Party answered by going further and further to the right until what we have in this country is two wings of one party, the Clinton Republicans and the Cheneyists.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, September 10, 2010 So Many Suckers So Few Bridges
I saw all of these people in the space of two minutes and it made me think of all the hats we eventually wear in this life and I guess that's what prompted the question of who I am now? I am detached from it all but at the same time some how more connected than I've ever been.
SHARE Friday, February 7, 2020 Part of the Plan
But gee! Why does Iowa get go first? They're not representative of the United States. They're too white! I'll let you in on a little secret"none of that matters. Iowa is a state in the mid-west that holds a caucus. They can't help their demographics; they can't help it they're a rural state. Going first doesn't mean you get a bigger slice of cake,
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 27, 2012 A War Upon Us
The largest level of debt among our people isn't from credit cards or from auto loans, it is from student loans. The average student loan debt is $22,500 but a $100,000 is a common figure, just for a Bachelor's degree. Counter intuitive isn't it, that while the media sells us the myth of personal irresponsibility the highest debt owed by Americans is for self improvement.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 12, 2010 New Money
I'm living in a garage and he's living in a friend's basement. The numbers are staggering yet the numbers are invisible. The number of Americans who lose their homes each month is equal to the number who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina.
Where is our presidential flyover? Where are our FEMA trailers?
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 20, 2014 25 Scandals more Important than Benghazi
7. Members of Congress are eligible for a pension at age 62 if they have completed at least five years of service. They are eligible for a pension at age 50 if they have completed 20 years of service, or at any age after completing 25 years of service.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 22, 2008 Calamity John
Oh boy, they're really mad now! First, in May, John McCain and the RNC challenge Barack Obama to go to Iraq to see for himself the facts on the ground. The RNC installs a clock on their website; "Obama has done shockingly little to educate himself firsthand about the war in Iraq. Instead, he displays an arrogant certainty gained on the campaign trail. ... Obama's failure to visit Iraq, listen and learn firsthand
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, November 26, 2010 The Rules of the Game
This is message control, the government controlling the message broadcast to the public. Most of the time it works and then sometimes there's, "Heck of a job there Brownie!" For a brief second you can see behind the curtain, that what is being presented as news is really nothing more than play acting.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 14, 2010 Pulling the String
Since 2008 when Hank Paulson went to the White House with a one-page outline of how to save America from economic Armageddon, his solution has been to turn on the money spigots and let the banks run naked through the sprinklers. Since that time the banks have had access to all the money they want and they get it virtually for free.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 30, 2010 Fahrenheit 298
"But you are wrong, Winston. The people don't want to hear the score; they want us to tell them the score. And do you know what the score is, Winston?"
"Lay it on me, Jim, I'm all ears!"
"The score is good!" he explained.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 4, 2010 Minimum Life
The ship of state is going down by the bow and the real issues are not being addressed by either party. These problems are deep seated and systemic they cannot be cured with a dash of frosting or a spoonful of sugar. The government is in deep, deep denial, they will not even acknowledge the problems let alone address them.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 24, 2010 Welcome to the Machine
This is what Fascism looks like, the corporations hold all the power and you don't have a friend in the world. Too many Americans confuse Fascism with totalitarianism and think that it involves steel helmeted soldiers in jackboots goose-stepping through the Town Square.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, October 4, 2010 The Vision Thing
Incomes were alleged to have risen 0.5 percent this month and that is a very good number indeed. Would anyone like to try and guess the largest contributing factor in that rise? Bloomberg- "Incomes were up 0.5 percent, the biggest advance this year, propelled by the resumption of extended and emergency unemployment benefits as wage gains cooled."
SHARE Friday, April 17, 2020 You Shall Have No Other Cheeto's Before Me!
Okay, it should be clear for all to see. In a sane country it would be obvious, in a sane country. The cheese has slipped from the cracker and hit the floor. The cracker itself has crumbled to dust and splinters and followed the laws of gravity. The orange ape is enraged and thrashing about his cage.
SHARE Tuesday, March 24, 2020 You're a Terrible Cheeto
The orange one was orange red, a two-tone President calling for unity as he balls out a reporter for asking a softball question he didn't like. He was asked to address the American People. You know, "The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself!" Outraged that anyone dare disrupt his corona virus infomercial.
SHARE Thursday, June 23, 2011 The Empire Strikes Back
In this "Brave New World" the Alpha's and Beta's, Gamma's and Delta's are fed a never ending stream of scorn for their neighbors. Politicians pour out innuendos and invectives towards enemy's de jour. The media indoctrinates the public to hate and to distrust Muslims, Blacks, Gay's, Hispanics, the poor, the unemployed and the foreclosed upon.
(12 comments) SHARE Friday, March 7, 2014 The Enemies of Delusion
The adherents of Free Trade have destroyed the economy, turning our cities into wastelands. These adherents of Neo-liberalism are Fascists, who believe themselves superior to the untermunchin population of 307 million. They practice economic terrorism against the American people, in nothing less, than a scorched earth policy.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 15, 2010 The Dirty Place
When we walked to school so we could smoke cigarettes and generally act disreputable, we walked past a bakery that offered fresh doughnuts for a dime or three for a quarter. The smell was heavenly as they baked for the day on those frosty mornings. The women inside spoke perfect English but they spoke to each other in Swedish or Norwegian. The three of them owned and ran the place.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 6, 2010 The Grand Game
Our government, since the end of World War Two, has played political chess with the globe, each side striving to control as many squares as possible. The purpose is to block or hedge the other fellow out, to block their path to oil or other minerals and to control their access to world markets.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 11, 2019 Arrest the President
We sit in the cooking pot and we don't feel the temperature rising. CNN published an article "What Progressives Should know about Trump Voters?" They praised the fine economy and the tax cuts but failed to ask the question hanging in the sky like Jupiter. "What's wrong with these people?"
SHARE Friday, May 18, 2012 Cashbook
Answer- " An initial public offering (IPO) is the first sale of stock by a company. Small companies looking to further the growth of their company often use an IPO as a way to generate the capital needed to expand. Although further expansion is a benefit to the company,
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 6, 2020 The State of the Union
89% of Americans own no stocks and therefore derive no direct benefit. A University of Chicago study found 51% of American Adults are one paycheck away from disaster. Twenty-seven million Americans have no health insurance
SHARE Saturday, March 21, 2020 Saving Private Cheeto
You know the orange one is pulling out all the stops, in this crisis confronting his administration. How can he convince the American people he's not incompetent in the face of clear incompetence?
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 23, 2009 The Last Republican
The message sent from Washington was loud and clear, we are the government and we have no interest in your wellbeing whatsoever. They did everything from declaring ketchup a vegetable so as to cheat hungry children out of a decent school lunch to opening up old growth forests to commercial logging at prices that didn't even cover the cost of the government-built roads.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 25, 2014 The New Minimum Wage
Working for a living has taken on whole new dimension; it’s working just to stay alive. To keep an old car running or the heat on, the rent paid with maybe enough left over for a pair of shoes. Always moving down never up, knowing that whatever work you’re doing could be gone tomorrow
SHARE Monday, November 1, 2010 DAMN LIBERAL!
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.
SHARE Thursday, February 14, 2019 Please" More Kitty Photos
How can a reality-based reality deal with a non-reality-based reality? The information age has become the mis-information age. Did you know"scientists in Israel are working on a pill to cure cancer and it will be available in two years! Far away place that most people are unfamiliar with, strange sounding laboratory no ones ever heard of"add fantastic claim here!
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, November 9, 2009 The Great Disconnect
Most radical politics are born of fear, fed on ignorance, which then graduates to intolerance. But key to any radical political movement is the scapegoat. It can't be any other way. When you try to paint reality with simplistic reasons for all that is wrong with the world, you must then refill it with simplistic villains responsible for all of the world's evils.
SHARE Friday, March 20, 2020 A Wartime Cheeto
A canvas of white linen, a polar bear in a white towel eating vanilla ice cream in a white bowl in a snowstorm. In the middle is Joe Biden, but he's invisible in the contrast of white on white. Tasteless, odorless and not Donald Trump.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 9, 2013 The Invisible Class
One million American men, not just unemployed or discouraged workers, but men no longer counted as in the labor force in a single year. Rather than fix the economy, they just said they fixed the economy and the media aped along.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 11, 2015 A Long Way Home
I reckon it was a long time ago; so far back most folks around today weren't even born yet. Well, there was this liberal politician and he had this plan to improve health care in America. The guy had...
SHARE Friday, February 1, 2019 Billionaires Need Not Apply
Schultz's campaign lurched from a standing start with a vanity book tour to cheers of; "Don't help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire a**hole!" It should be his campaign slogan VOTE Schultz, just another egotistical billionaire a**hole! But in all honesty, if you wanted to do something and you had a billion dollars in your back pocket and thought to yourself, I couldn't possibly do that! And then you saw Donald Trump
SHARE Sunday, April 19, 2020 Why Do They Call it a Stimulus?
Houston, I be gots a question. Why do they call it a stimulus if I have to pay bills with it? Are the little boats on the sides of cruise ship stimulus boats? I'm stimulated to write checks? Sounds more stimulating to my creditors than to me, but I am grateful for it and don't wish to sound unappreciative.
SHARE Thursday, May 28, 2020 A Hobo Child
He said when FDR said, "this generation has a rendezvous with destiny," he knew what that meant, and he knew it was directed at him. But he'd landed a job as an apprentice draftsman. He was learning a trade and the job was draft deferred they were building machine tools for the B-26 bomber.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 12, 2014 Not Cool Anymore
Skrillex anyone? I didn't think so. For the uninitiated, Skrillex is electronic dance music; imagine a train wreck put to techno. That's not really a criticism, but the opinion of a man far outside of his own era, hearing something meant only for younger ears to understand. Ditto: Lady Gaga (hurry 15 minutes) but someday"someday,
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Going to the Dogs
Let me set this straight from the beginning: there is a fundamental difference between the average American's life and a wealthy American's life. If the average American wants a new car or a lake house, they would save, sometimes for years, and dream of the possibilities. In their minds, they've lived there for years before ever making the down payment. If you're wealthy and you want something, you just buy it.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 18, 2010 Damn that Dick Nixon!
What is involved is the use of our resources of the sea and of the land in a more effective way and with more concern for preserving the beauty and the natural resources that are so important to any kind of society that we want for the future. The Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people."
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 28, 2014 Apes in Suits
I managed to sell some of my toys others just disappeared to where I know not. As I traveled the country, I saw your toys on the side of the road, for sale too. A jet ski, a bass boat, a riding tractor or a motorcycle, it didn't matter where; it was the same in Atlanta, Georgia or Astoria, Oregon.
SHARE Wednesday, September 24, 2014 Finding Zero
The same politicians who told us NAFTA and free trade were going to bring us new jobs are the very politicians, who now point and call Americans lazy. The old adage says death is the great equalizer, but I think its food. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote; "The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow." An empty refrigerator is more powerful than a college education.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 11, 2020 Three Days from Revolution
A Facebook Meme asked, do you like surprises? An obviously loaded question but I went to my mailbox the other day and got a surprise. A surprise letter in a plain white envelope and the return address said, Department of the Treasury Internal Revenue Service.
SHARE Saturday, October 15, 2011 The Breeze
Does having a finger stuck up your anus for a traffic ticket qualify as unreasonable? Does being X-rayed by untested technology to board an aircraft qualify as unreasonable? Does being tazered by police for the crime of talking back seem unreasonable? This is the nature of the fascist state, to control every aspect of your life with fear.
SHARE Friday, January 24, 2020 A Good Ten Cent Billionaire
It's easy to dismiss political rhetoric; it's easy to say, "Thank you, no." But when you're hungry and your kids are hungry and the other political parties might promise a chicken in every pot but these folks are serving it.
SHARE Thursday, December 18, 2008 Welcome to Our World (Satire)
Welcome, good evening, one and all, find a seat and make yourself comfortable. Take your shoes off and stay a while; a little business first, for those of you with cars there is no valet parking. Feel free to ask to ask questions of your neighbors. Those of you who lost your retirement in the Enron scandal please raise your hands so that the newcomers can find you.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 19, 2010 Bum
I once worked over twenty years straight without missing a paycheck. I thought that I was ahead of the curve and smarter than the average bear. I had a career where my head contained useful information. I was good with customers and thought my career was safe from technology and outsourcing. Obviously, I was wrong about that.
(10 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 12, 2014 The World Turned Upside Down
Winston Smith is a rank amateur in this made for TV reality, "You just don't invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests, this is an act of aggression that is completely trumped-up in terms of its pretext. It's really 19th century behaviour in the 21st century." ~ John Kerry
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, September 27, 2010 The WPA and Me
"Sometimes I get bored sitting in Washington," FDR said, "hearing certain people talk and talk about all that Government ought not to do -- people who got all they wanted from Government back in the days when the financial institutions and the railroads were being bailed out in 1933, bailed out by the Government.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 16, 2019 You'll Pay for This
Running in a squirrel cage with no way off or perhaps jumping from one burning ship to another. Looking for an extra twenty-five cents an hour. But"life is, isn't it? You get what you get, no do overs, no restarts. Pull yourself up by your own boot straps! Look at me I did it! So, to be the one in a hundred or one in a thousand who "make it" are they evidence that the system is working or evidence that it is not working?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 12, 2011 When the Levee Breaks
Justice is the determination of what it right and fair, of what is best for all. Law is the operation of public control and public order, it was the law which murdered Socrates. It was law which murdered Jesus Christ and Joan of Ark. It is the law which has legitimized every order given by every despot ever in power, for once in power law becomes the preferred tool for despotic public control.
SHARE Monday, February 3, 2020 How Does it Feel
We have come to one of those moments, like J.F.K or 9-11, like a new 9-11 bringing down the towers of justice metaphorically speaking this time. If you're like me, you just can't get it out of your head and it colors my day. The Chief Executive has escaped justice and is now above the law.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 28, 2010 The Weimar Solution
There has never been a question as to who were the aggressors in the Dearborn massacre. Henry Ford was the richest man in America so when Ford tells the Dearborn police to stop them, the police stop them.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, October 2, 2009 Dude, I Want My Party Back!
All politicians make promises on which they do not deliver; it is the nature of the beast. Sometimes they can't deliver. Sometimes the personal cost is too high to deliver. But as we roll towards Barack Obama's first year in office I find a disturbing trend. He addresses issues with strong pronouncements, then they go into committee meetings and negotiations and what emerges is as weak as chicken soup.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 27, 2010 Support Your Local Billionaire
Are you a ten dollar man? That's what local blue-collar jobs are paying these days, $10 per hour, and that's if you're lucky. Many are paying minimum wage or a dollar over minimum wage and it is effectively a starvation wage, a plantation wage. If you work a forty-hour week, which many do not, you probably earn less than $80 per week in discretionary income, and that's if you don't own an automobile.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, August 31, 2012 Portland is Like Algebra
We are out in the high desert headed for Boise, a haze now covers the moon, and it's a spatial filament letting off a warm and comforting glow, like a night light, which watches over us but doesn't listen.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 24, 2014 Now Just Look Surprised
Is it really any wonder why the suicide rate for older Americans is at record levels? Can they even be called suicides? The nation's food pantries report food demand has doubled in the last five years. How is this supposed to work again; if I succeed, it's because capitalism allowed me to succeed, but if I fail, it's all my fault? Capitalism takes all the credit; it takes everything" except responsibility?
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, November 23, 2009 What goes around comes around
There is only one thought that is important to remember: Anything we are willing to do to some third-world peasant to obtain information, we are just as willing to do to you. The cascading effect is all too clear all throughout history, be it hunting for witches or hunting for Al Qaeda. The Taser weapon was first introduced to the United States as an alternative to deadly force.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 31, 2011 A Normal Life
It has been one hell of a year for me as well; when it began I was living in a garage. Then I moved cross country from the warm and sunny South to the frozen North. I briefly visited Clear Lake Iowa where Buddy Holly's plane went down with the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valenzuela, I marched in the streets of the nation's capital and I watched the sunrise over Freedom Plaza.
SHARE Wednesday, May 12, 2010 The Days of Our Lives
Maybe if you closed your eyes to it you could see more of the real world. The city lights are bright and they blind us to what is going on up in the night sky. Perhaps we can't see the real world because of the phony light of this lie that is being shined in our eyes. It doesn't have to be this way; you can get off the Goebbels propaganda merry-go-round.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 16, 2011 Reverend President
The political narrative is set for the politicians to wrap themselves in the flag, for they are a part of something wonderful, and so are you, you get to watch. The President then pointed out the hero's, you can't tell a story in America without heroes, generally people who for the most part acted instinctively and whose furthest thought was of heroism.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 5, 2014 Facebook Fascism
So now let's be reasonable about this whole thing, if we're going to be chartering airliners to bring us the world's sick, why not pick up the refugee's? Just to fill the empty seats, since we're going to be in the neighborhood anyway, why not? Religious, political or economic, America is a land of plenty, come one, come all. Really it all makes sense; we've been thinking about these things all wrong.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 18, 2008 Scorched Earth
There comes a point, as the car careens out of control down the icy highway, when we are no longer the driver but just the person holding onto the wheel. We try to do what's right but the situation changes from instant to instant and it appears that our actions have little effect.
SHARE Sunday, December 15, 2013 A Future for Us All
You're fifty-five years old and looking for employment and as terms of maintaining your unemployment compensation, you must attend a job assessment. Why sure, all these years, you've been in the wrong career! The government needs to access you, n'est-ce pas ? This is all your fault, but government is willing to overlook your failures and correct your short comings, just fill out this form.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, January 3, 2011 Undisclosed Location
There are four directions and they are all equally well suited for a new start. A new start, I like the sound of that. Maybe someday we'll elect a President and that will be the policy, a new start. I've been so excited with the coming change that I wasn't sure what to write about. With the holidays there hasn't been much news to comment on.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, August 27, 2010 Not t*ts but Horns!
This is the time when the conman slipped up and told the marks what they think of them. The machine plans to crush you and to kill you. To humble your parents and to impoverish your children. You might as well throw your bodies on the gears they are going to rob you and punish you and then let you die in debt to the corporate master.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 13, 2009 Come to California to See Your Future
If you were to see this play enacted in a theater, you wouldn't believe it. California faces a budget deficit of $26.8 billion dollars in the 2010 state budget, draconian cuts, and, perhaps portends what's to come in the rest of America.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 21, 2010 In My Frozen Moment
A vision of your own life squeezed into a frozen instant, suspended, that you find out a lot about who you are. I don't know, maybe, we've all had some issue in our own traumatic past. Terrors and night terrors, that sleep with you in the night. Maybe, we all just want be special, that there has to be a reason why I'm here.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 22, 2015 The Petroleum Tax
The falling price of crude oil is proof positive enough, Obama's energy policy has got us moving down the right track" right? I mean, ain't it great? Cheap gas" goody! In exchange, we open up vast tracks of the American landscape to fracking. The argument goes: fracking done responsibly harms no one; while the other side warns of permanent environmental damage to our nation's aquifers.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, November 11, 2011 What This Country Needs
We have over 14 million unemployed in this country; the official unemployment rate is 9 percent. However, that is the U-3 number, which is the happy land figure, so take off your shoes and socks and play for a while in this imaginary hamburger storefront playground. The actual number for unemployment for October is 16.2 percent down from 16.5 percent from September and up from 15.9 percent a year ago.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 26, 2013 The War of Terror
So these voices from the past cry out to us in unison, all is not as it appears. We live in a historic age, with an explosion of media power and contraction of corporate ownership. We live in an historic age of near perpetual war, with the slyest cheaters still hiding, with accidents, near accidents, amazing spectacles and subtle slights of tongue.
SHARE Sunday, March 10, 2013 Somewhere Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
Now, take your average golden lunchbox millionaire earning around $ 400,000 annually. He or she gets that paycheck every week and glances at their gross weekly earnings of $ 7,692.30; they look quickly at their deductions and are outraged. But what they don't ever have to think about is "Oh, my god, how am I going to pay my bills!"
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 15, 2009 The Next Lost War
We are storming in without understanding what it is that we are breaking. We are eating a tiger, tail first. We haven't gotten to the part with meat and claws and teeth yet, and when we do it will be too late. “You break it, you own it.â€
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 2, 2010 It's All the Same Story
The free trade investment have dried up and over 50 percent of the NAFTA jobs have moved on to Asia leaving the Mexican population that is 70 percent urban without employment. Eighty percent of all of Mexico's exports go directly to the United States.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 14, 2014 Altered Perspectives
In his remarks of September 24th the President of the United States spoke before the United Nations General Assembly, an organization dedicated to world peace and ramped up his rhetoric for war. If you closed your eyes you could almost hear the nasal tang of George W. Bush, but that was a different political party with a different political philosophy, wasn't it? The Neocons are all gone now, aren't they?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 25, 2012 How This Democracy Of Ours Works
It was no different than the Godfather making you an offer that you couldn't refuse. The US speculators had no intention of building an alternate canal, only in making it look like they would build an alternate canal. They simply used their influence inside government circles to ruin the French plan and then forced them to sell it to the US at a bargain.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 13, 2012 The New Ground Zero
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, February 6, 2009 One Way or the Other
They drink the best whiskey and turn the heat all the way up. They come in in the morning when they choose and leave when they get tired. Both sides are playing politics while millions suffer, men, women and children, who through no fault of their own find their jobs gone and their futures dimmed.
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, February 5, 2010 All We Want are Jobs
Why is it that a government that can amass an army to invade another country in three months is so hapless in helping its own people? Why do so-called Christian groups such as Focus on the Family spend 2.5 million dollars for an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl when there are tens of thousands of families struggling to feed their children?
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 15, 2011 The Embers of Their Own Demise
Let the specters draw back the curtains and understand that we have turned a page. The illusion of freedom is fading fast, just as the illusion of Democratic government is fading fast. Rest yourself and brace yourself, for the storm ahead. Understand here, that the protestors in Zuccotti Park have won for us a great victory.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 16, 2009 Killing for Fun and Profit
Only in America could not thinking clearly and being suspicious and hostile be considered a symptom! Using that logic you could drug most of the society. But were this just a case of selling sugar pills to Granny and Boom Pa it could be forgiven. America's shelves are full of medicines and pseudo medicines and treatments and supplements that at best might help a little, and at worst might deplete your wallet. But Zyprexa kills
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 9, 2011 Last Thoughts on the Super Bowl
We grow up with it, we accept it as a normal course of events. We become conditioned to it and blind to its subtleties and numb to its eccentricities. From Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers we accept watching TV as a normal daily course of American living.
SHARE Saturday, May 24, 2014 The Beautiful Truth
Have you ever seen the sunrise on Montana? Ever see the splendor of the Cascades? We are lost and found in this, in an odyssey, on a road trip. It's the kind of times that grab you by the lapels and shake you like a rag doll, stripping away the old, varnishing the new.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 30, 2009 A Death in the Family
So, as we talk about the demise of America's big three automobile companies, let us remember that when they depart from us we will see their like no more. During the last ten years they have spent their profits on new factories in China and Russia, India and South Korea. They intend on being with us, just not on employing us.
SHARE Saturday, October 8, 2011 Day One
The crowds were large diverse and expectant, all are waiting for something. They are as diverse as a crowd can be yet they are united in the knowledge that something is very wrong in America.
SHARE Tuesday, March 22, 2011 Charlotte's Economy (A Fable)
"Because Wilbur, we GOP arachnids are social climbers; that is part of our philosophy of life, to rise as far as possible and to help others climb, too!"
"You want me to live in the rafters and spin a web, Charlotte?"
"No, Wilbur, not like me. You can rise as far as a pig can rise and that will always be far below where I will rise to, but it is still better than laying in the mud and the muck all day."
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 8, 2012 Out Here in the Streets
This year for the entire winter less than six inches of snow, what ever happened to tornado season? We have hurricanes in New England and droughts in Texas, isn't this the forecasted climate change which we were all warned about? What does your government say? The say nothing, they say nothing about climate change and talk instead about our energy needs.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 22, 2017 Bury Your Rifle
From the grassy knowle to the wreckage of the twin towers, the plan comes together. An attorney General, unfit to be a judge. A Martin Boreman type, if ever there was one. A clever organizer, a strict functionary, greasing the wheels of injustice,
SHARE Tuesday, April 23, 2013 A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Several years ago, I had a free trial of Photo Shop, and when the free trail ended I didn't think I'd done very well. Today I think differently, and it was a lot of fun to photo shop my ex's relatives in derogatory pictures. The trick is in the angles and smooth edges;
SHARE Thursday, April 22, 2010 To Winston Smith:
Either you are a thought criminal or you're not. Wages and industry have declined in America because of unions and regulations, not because third world workers' wages for a day's work wouldn't buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks! This is the way that millions are trained to think, al thanks to the miracle of television. If I told you that your media is no freer than it was in Joseph Goebbel's Germany or Joseph Stalin's Russia
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 23, 2019 Animal Crackers
The orange one, busy in his executive time lambasting the Media, Mueller and Saturday Night Live. While the leader of a hostile power makes an existential nuclear threat towards the United States and the Cheeto says"Nothing?
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, July 22, 2011 Drenched to the Bone
Before the collapse of the American economy in 07 the financial experts began to ask, could the Euro be the reserve currency of the future? Then the US created and led the world into a financial bolgia, the world's economies both sick and well were thrown in chaos and disarray. Germany began a financial stimulus program three times the size per capita as the Obama stimulus and lo and behold the German economy began to recover
SHARE Sunday, February 5, 2012 Sometimes
I am in Astoria Oregon sitting in a house overlooking the bay and it is a beautiful site to see. The town is picturesque, like a postcard and here at least, I've yet to see anyone dumpster diving or hand lettering signs to beg for food. I saw them all yesterday on the way up here,
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, January 14, 2011 Ain't That America
This is the most violent country on Earth! We shoot and maim and kill each other with reckless abandon. Hardly a day goes by without some innocent child being gunned down in a hail of bullets between rival gangs fighting over something utterly pointless.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, February 18, 2019 All We Need Do
The political disconnect, "A." is Socialism! That dirty word, "You'll be standing in line for shoes Comrade! Comrade Stalin will be on the video tube every night!" They have conferred professorships and academic chairs on the academic science of greed.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 21, 2009 A Most Oppressed Minority
Problem is, when your party is against support for higher education and against expansion of Pell grants, those ideas aren't always popular on campus. So, what do conservative students do to fight their oppression? They whine, cry and bemoan their poor treatment; it's all because the big leftist bogeyman has it in for them.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 4, 2009 The Coming Struggle, Why Your Guns Won't Save You
This lunatic mentality believes that somehow the government is afraid of you because you own a pump shotgun and a revolver. Maybe you own a lot of guns and have them buried in a secret location, waiting for the uprising, but no matter how many guns you have they'll always have more.
SHARE Friday, June 26, 2015 Police State
It was somewhere near the beginning of 1930 when Bonnie Parker first set eyes on Clyde Barrow in a romanticized version of love at first sight. Bonnie was married, but separated from her husband. She was an out-of-work seamstress; Clyde had been born poor and didn't know any different. He'd first been arrested at seventeen and sent to prison at twenty.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 27, 2010 Woodstock, Handmade
Carlos Santana did "Soul Sacrifice" at twenty; his drummer was nineteen. Alvin Lee was twenty-one, and his keyboard player was nineteen. Arlo Guthrie was twenty-two; Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were twenty-six years old. The list just goes on and on, young adults making music for young adults.
SHARE Saturday, November 6, 2010 Real Government
I've beat this drum so long you could call me Ringo but buying machines to look under people's clothes isn't a stimulus. Giving people tax credits to buy cars or homes isn't a stimulus, it's trickle down economics. I give you a tax cut to buy a new home and the benefits will trickle down to the rest of the economy.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 16, 2014 Fairy Tales
The general purpose of beginning a fairy tale with "Once upon a time" is to frame the story, to warn the readers in advance that the bounds of reality will be exceeded and bent beyond credibility. But as the ship of state drifts further from the shores of reality, the odd ends and accessories become the appendix of the body politic.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 7, 2020 A Moron in the Second Person
He's lived in the Elvis syndrome, where Elvis tells a joke, and everyone laughs not because its funny but because its Elvis. But Elvis thinks the joke is funny and that everyone marvels at his wit. Pampered and raised to believe he is a special person, he believes
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 11, 2009 Fixing the Leak
So, in actuality this is not about trade at all. You trade goods, but you exploit people. Mexico's economy has been built on the backs of the people's hard labor. Foreign-owned factories have surged from just 79 to almost a thousand. The goods are imported into Mexico under free trade agreements then assembled and shipped directly into the United States. This is only possible by keeping wages low in Mexico,
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, December 17, 2010 The Hard Season
Christmas is hard wired into us from childhood, a holiday centered on gift giving for children. Time off from school, with special events and treats all built on the anticipation of even more treats on a night filled with magic. It is only natural that we as children should become addicted to it, and intoxicated by it.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, February 20, 2009 The Howling Days of Madness
I really don't know what to make of our new President. I voted for him, but what other choice was there, really? Obama is very smart, but of course next to George Bush, Elmer Fudd comes across as Steven Hawking. Obama is so smart I never would have tried to sell him weed in high school; he's scary smart.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 10, 2011 We are the 99%
We marched through the city canyons of concrete columns, bureaucracy and statues of long forgotten dead generals. As we marched the car horns sounded in support and people on the sidewalk gave us the thumbs up sign. "Occupy Wall Street, occupy K Street, occupy everything and never give it back!"
SHARE Wednesday, December 21, 2011 On the Streets of Bedford Falls
But it's been a tough year. The plastics plant built by Sam Wainwright relocated to China, throwing half the town out of work. Bert the cop was killed in a gang fight over turf, not far from the old the Bedford Falls High School. The troubles have driven the more affluent families to place their children in the Potter's Christian Academy.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, September 30, 2011 I Am One
I gave him five bucks but what struck me most about this young man in his mid twenties was the fear that I saw in his eyes. He was a man afraid, afraid of his hunger, afraid of his own tiredness and afraid of his future. He is a young man lost in a nation of locked doors, so as I prepare myself for my trip to Washington D.C. part of this young man will go with me.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 13, 2009 The Future Without A Future
Remember when they told us free trade would bring jobs? Well it did, it brought jobs to Japan and South Korea and even tiny Taiwan who is, officially at least, at odds with Beijing. When it comes to import partners, the US lags behind an island slightly smaller than Maryland and Delaware.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 30, 2012 A Line Drive in the Box Score
My father was an amateur boxer and for years used to say, "When the champ trains himself, the champ is going to lose." Could that be the case? Could Romney be incapable of taking advice or of staying on the script? Something is going on here, for the second time in as many tries the Republicans have chosen a total incompetent as their Presidential nominee.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 11, 2012 Cody the Cardboard Cowboy
Then the boss enters and instantly, the atmosphere of the room changes. The boss looks haggard and worn down by the pressure, and from the looks of him, he's looking to take it out on some poor unfortunate who dares to swim against the tide. Attentively, we all take our seats as he put his briefcase on the table and takes out his battle orders.
(13 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 23, 2009 Where Do We Go When All Hope Is Gone?
The Democrats in Congress whined for two years about all that they would do if only they were in the majority. So, now there they are, and what do we get?
We get lame excuses, futile half measures, and right-wing rhetoric balled up as centrist humanitarianism. Under the Republicans, banks and big business got all their needs promptly attended to. What is different now?
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 13, 2008 Fractured Fairy Tales
Once upon a time, that's how fairy tales begin, isn't it? Don't we all want to believe? Our personal relationships and our family relationships are all based on telling the truth, aren't they? I had a cousin with emotional troubles who was incapable of telling the truth. If she was twenty minutes late she couldn't just say, "Sorry, I overslept."
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, February 1, 2013 Lady in Flames
How strange it is that our society can erupt with volcanic outrage at one crime while ignoring another more outrageous crime. Fox News and many of the mainstream media outlets are obsessed with dead-white-girl syndrome. Any young white woman who disappears or is murdered, is always great news copy. A young woman of any other ethnicity, lost or murdered is, well" not so much.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 12, 2011 Little Rambo
Last year the administration called this green shoots when all that it was, was springtime. The Bureau of Labor statistics announced new 244,000 jobs this month while down the street from me the local ice cream shop opened for the season. The grass has begun to grow and swimming pools are preparing to open for summer. Yet despite all of these new jobs the administration has created the unemployment number went up!
SHARE Monday, April 13, 2020 Skeleton Life
How's everyone doing? I'm much better, I'm not talking to myself anymore. Not until I get an apology anyway. Despite all my rage" Four walls, one couch, one fluffy ambivalent house cat. Daily phone calls and emails. I work in outside sales and since that involves meeting people, here I sit.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 29, 2015 The Capitalism Test
The US Congress recently voted to remove country of origin requirements from beef and poultry. Some would say it was just needless government regulation, others would answer, it's a sign that the meat packing industry will soon be evacuating the American landscape. Just like the auto industry, the steel industry and the electronics industry before.
SHARE Friday, June 27, 2014 Adventures in Job Hunting
Equity = again, you don't get paid or you get paid in Monopoly money. We're a well-funded start-up. You now own 10,000 shares of Fingerupmynose.com and if we all work very, very hard, we could be as big as the Huffington Post someday.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, November 14, 2011 That Dark Horizon
Last Friday night Kayvan Sabeghi was beaten bloody by police on the streets of Oakland California.
"They told me to move, but I was like; "Move to where?" Sabeghi later recalled. "There was nowhere to move. Then they lined up in front of me. I was talking to one of them, saying "why are you doing this?" when one of them moved forward and hit me in the arms and legs and back with his baton.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, January 16, 2012 And So I Go From Here
So as I leave out of here, I leave and go into the night casting off the dead weight like a balloonist seeking altitude and distance over comfort. I cast off a bunch of old music books, songs which I didn't play or had never learned.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, August 18, 2014 The Golden Shovel Days
The state was to fund a portion of their share with (charitable gambling) i.e. lottery games. The revenue was estimated at $34 million annually in 2012, rising each year after. But strangely, as soon as the deal was inked the revenue forecasts were revised down to $16 million in 2013. A further study estimated revenues 2013 -- 17 would fall to $1.7 million annually, a 95 percent reduction.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, March 3, 2014 Deadbeats
Perhaps being a deadbeat is a virus or something in our water, Florida and Nevada once led the nation in deadbeat home foreclosures and now has moved on to New York and New Jersey. Foreclosure filings surged 30% in New York City last year and sheriff’s sales in New Jersey are the highest since the new Great Depression began.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 29, 2010 Our Redeemer
Their goal was to create an image, a phony image tying their message with good old-fashioned patriotism. To say subliminally you're either with us or you're against us and we are loyal patriots so you are not. The aviator came to the podium as the crowd roared wildly and then Charles Lindbergh gave the speech that ruined his career and damaged the America First movement.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, October 1, 2010 What We're Looking For
These are the two competing philosophies of American governance, one side believes in government investing in long term projects to grow the economy and to improve the health, safety and lives of it's people. The other side believes in tax cuts they believe the government shouldn't invest in anything. They believe cutting taxes creates a vibrant economy,
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 15, 2009 No Ordinary Utensil
I don't think that there is any spectacle quite so moving or so sad than to see someone's possessions stacked in the yard in front of what used to be their home. It is odd, not just our own connection with our belongings, but our belongings' connections to us as well.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 5, 2013 One in Twelve
The numbers are shocking, except, they aren't numbers; they're flesh and blood human beings. There is no improvement in these numbers because the people in power don't give a damn about improving these numbers. In October of 2009, the Dow Jones industrial average was below 7000 today, it is above 13,000.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 9, 2014 A Country without Dreams
The space craft traveled 240,000 miles entering lunar orbit only to discover"Earth. "Earthrise" a photo taken of our blue world rising over the lunar landscape was published on the front page of every newspaper on the planet. For just an instant, all humanity could see itself in the mirror, stunned by its own reflection.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 11, 2013 We Don't Need Petitions
George W. Bush was elected twice under questionable circumstances. He left office the most reviled American President in history. He is a wanted war criminal and dares not leave the shores of the United States. Under these conditions, it was obvious no Republican candidate could replace George Bush. It was impossible. Out of the ether, as if delivered by UFO, enter Barack Obama, or as the press dubbed him, "No drama Obama."
SHARE Monday, February 21, 2011 Tyrants of the Dollar
A rancid plan to de-fund services for the American public in the name of fiscal restraint. Fiscal restraint after restoring the massively unfair and fiscally irresponsible Bush tax cuts. Selling the story to the mighty morphine power media, that it can't be helped and that the problem is domestic spending.
SHARE Monday, June 21, 2010 It's the New Deal! For banks!
Can you say economic recovery? Everyone is saying it around the country club, the congressional cloakroom, and it's even popular up at the White House. It's a term that's hip and now, and it's upbeat and positive and chock full of warm and fuzzy, but it is an absolute lie from alpha to zed.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 31, 2010 The Lessor People
I read these daunting headlines everyday and it makes me wonder how we can just turn away. Yet we do, we close our eyes tight and stick our fingers in our ears and shout; "It ain't so! It ain't so! It ain't so but it is! More homeowners are falling behind in their house payments.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 3, 2009 No Nation Can Long Endure Half Bankrupt
Mr. Obama's change so far has been to the right of Bill Clinton, "The Centrist." I wrote about the 6,500 American families losing their homes to foreclosure each day, and I got this as a response: "Houses are overvalued. Their prices must decline." Many people like this just don't know any better, after being raised in the Reagan revolution, but how is that response any different than George W. Bush's response to Katrina?
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, May 8, 2009 The Trickle Up Theory
The Obama administration might long be remembered as the administration that saved the banks but lost everything else, to have saved the ship's wheel but lost the ship. Mired in the plutocracy and unable to rise above insider politics, they serve only those that feed them.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 18, 2010 Before the Storm
We are one people, whether employed or unemployed, no matter what color or race, no matter whether young or old. Returning the economy to the people of this country and making it function on their behalf should supercede all that separates us. This is not a revolution but restitution, because this is your country and it's your government's sovereign obligation to protect you before the storm.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 26, 2009 The Dissolution
Our politics has undergone a tectonic shift; John Kennedy today would be viewed as too liberal politically, even in San Francisco. Richard Nixon would be thrown from the halls of the Republican Party as a flaming liberal. In their day Kennedy was a conservative Democrat and Richard Nixon a moderate Republican.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 22, 2010 Becoming One
Without Internet access writing becomes harder and harder to do. It's about a four-mile hike to the library up hill both ways because of the mid-nineties heat. Sometimes I feel as if I'm losing it and then sometimes I feel like I'm only beginning to get it. I made the hike the other day to check my E-mail and to reconnect with the world.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 7, 2010 Banjos Playing Through the Broken Glass
"My business is the third wave of outsourcing," Sai Ramakrishna Karutuni, the 44-year-old managing director of Karuturi Global, said at the company's dusty office in the western town of Gambella. "Everyone is investing in China for manufacturing; everyone is investing in India for services. Everybody needs to invest in Africa for food."
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 22, 2012 Fantasy Land
Unable to generate the "Hope and Change" meme this time around the Obama team has reverted to the use of fantasy and the make believe. Ripped from today's headlines: "Payroll Employment Rises 227,000 in February;
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 5, 2012 Hollowed Out
Turning now to our survey of households, both the unemployment rate, at 8.1 percent, and the number of unemployed persons, at 12.5 million, were little changed in April. Among the unemployed, 41.3 percent had been looking for work for 27 weeks or more.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 18, 2009 Whose War, What War?
The long delay has been seen by conservatives as an opportunity to call the President a weak, lazy, Nigerian-born Marxist, Communist, Socialist, hell bent on destroying America. When actually it has been a delay by the White House to make the President look thoughtful and contemplative before charging full bore into a continuation of the Bush/Cheney foreign policy.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 11, 2013 The Pill
Like a guitar amplifier, you can only plug in one or two guitars; after that, no matter how good the musicians play, what comes out becomes a jumble of noise.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 23, 2008 Betting Against America
There is an apex, an apogee, a point of no return, a point when many will throw up their hands. It is indeed difficult to ask for blind faith as a Bush administration appointee, and even more faith is required to believe a Bush appointee.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 18, 2011 Is Anyone at Home?
These things, these events leave scars and marks that Tide won't wash off. Like a death or a divorce, you carry them with you internally from then on. With upwards of ten million home foreclosures and maybe as many evictions it means that nearly of a third of our population has been displaced and scarred.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 15, 2014 Paging Bernie Madoff
The economic numbers were cooked? The fish catch numbers were cooked? The milk purity was cooked? And this is the second largest economy in the world and how they roll?
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 11, 2010 Laughing on the Outside
This new understanding undermines the old admiration of worldly success as such. We are beginning to abandon our tolerance of the abuse of power by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life."
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 21, 2019 Rubicon
Americans fear good government because they have never seen one. They fear Socialism because they fail to understand Americanism. We have a triumvirate to overcome, a mass media which frames and side steps issues, uneducated masses comfortable with the easy lie the slick contradiction or the personal attack and then there's tradition.
SHARE Monday, February 28, 2011 Matewan to Madison
Buried in the Governor's budget are plans to sell off state assets without competitive bidding, what about the free market? Why, after the union has agreed to spending cuts why must they give up their right to collective bargaining? I'll tell you why, because the free market commands it! And in doing so exposes the ruthless fact that there is no free market, there is only a slave market.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 29, 2010 Politicians and Space Mutants
I sometimes wonder if evil space mutants haven't taken over the White House. I mean Obama was such a good candidate and then as soon as he moves into the White House the space mutants hit him square between the eyes with their Reagan ray gun, Suddenly he's loonier than Reagan, crueler than Nixon and goofier than Bush.
(21 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2014 Drafted by Circumstance
Wow, that's tough talk, especially since declaration was illegal. In the eyes of the British Government, the Continental Congress was no more legitimate than the New Black Panther Party. In legal circles, our founding father's were nothing more than common criminals, rabble rousers and yes, terrorists.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 30, 2012 The Employment Wall
once you use up your unemployment benefits you are no longer unemployed having become a discouraged worker. Think about that for a moment, the difference between unemployed and discouraged. It gives the clear implication that it is the worker who has given up rather than the system having failed the worker.
SHARE Tuesday, April 20, 2010 The First National Bank of (Your Name Here)
The Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Be neither for the blue nor the green," meaning don't just blindly align yourself with one team or party because it is results that count. Or as Aurelius wrote, "That which is not good for the bee hive cannot be good for the bees."
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 20, 2010 The Space Between
Eugene Debs said, "It's better to vote for what you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don't want and get it!" That is where we are in the Democratic Party and in America as a whole, and the disorder found in our ranks is the same disorder found on the Republican side. Rather than pushing triangulation or political purity and closing ranks it is time instead to stand by our true principles and open our ranks.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, January 10, 2011 Eureka!
Science is a funny business, you start with a theory and then you go out and try to prove it. If you succeed, you are declared a genius by your peers, and then you set off to discover yet another new theory. Problem is all the good stuff is all ready taken, an apple falls and hits you on the head. Nope, its already been done.
SHARE Wednesday, December 8, 2010 Cold Christmas
It appears that this will be a bathrobe and sweater Christmas. The economy added only 39,000 jobs in November. The number of unemployed from October to November grew by 276,000 to a total of 15.1 million workers. The number of hours worked remains flat which indicates doing more with fewer workers. No holiday overtime and strangely, the retail trade lost 28,000 workers in November.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 12, 2010 Things That My Sisters Taught Me
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father says, "My oh my, but my son is talking strangely and I'm so concerned about his behavior. What's a Nigerian father to do? I know! I'll contact the American CIA. They'll know what to do!"
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 7, 2014 Space, the Final Frontier
"Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship"gee, I guess it didn't work out the way we thought, did it? But, back to the original question, why? To spy perhaps, to look obsessively for the things an obsessive state would look for? But the XB-37 is like the vegematic, "Wait, there's more! It's a spy plane! It's an unstoppable, hypersonic vehicle, capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear weapon
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 12, 2012 Battered Children
Loneliness is a crowded solitude,
darkness a cold blanket.
Tomorrows are but yesterdays revisited.
Life in neutral pastel suns fear losing the moon.
The coins in my pocket warn me of their own loneliness,
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 5, 2009 The CIA Wouldn't Lie to Us, Would They?
I guess that all depends on who they're talking to; they lie to suit their purpose and tell the truth when it fits their needs. If you were to ask a government official, "Are UFO's real?" they would smile a paternalistic smile and maybe even roll their eyes a little and say, "No Virginia, UFO's aren't real."
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 14, 2014 Monuments of Capitalism
These are the monuments of capitalism, glittering office towers with million dollar apartments. Doormen and security systems to protect them from the real fruits of capitalism: crime, ghettos and poverty. This is capitalism -- a belief that any child can be president, if they don't move the plant to Beijing or Shanghai first.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 11, 2008 Thinking Outside the Box
"A man who doesn't read the newspaper every day is uninformed, a man that does is misinformed." (Mark Twain)
SHARE Friday, July 16, 2010 The Test
Children will be forced into warehouses called schools with no art or music programs. Old textbooks, large classes filled with broken computers, dashed hopes and broken dreams. I'm sorry but that's not good enough. I'm not willing to accept that as our future.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 22, 2010 Why Don't They Like Us?
It smacks of political Kabuki Theater, of good guys and bad guys in white hats and black hats. Four months before the mid-term elections and I can hear it now, "Those Republicans cut off unemployment but we got it back for you." There is this paternalism in the administration and its adherents that the administration is doing so much for us and we just don't appreciate it.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 28, 2010 The Stall
But down here on the ground the rain doesn't fall. The saw's not cutting, the wrenches aren't turning. They aren't buy wood or varnish and they aren't buying carburetors and brake pads. They aren't buying cheeseburgers they aren't buying anything.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 17, 2012 The Show Must Go On
Florida as we know from our recent political experience is a must win state for any candidate serious about moving into the Pennsylvania Avenue address. Why would McCain go into a must win state and cut his own throat with a policy address at a campaign stump event. Did the McCain camp think these senior citizens would perhaps admire his candor?
SHARE Tuesday, July 28, 2009 Not Discouraged, Abandoned
I am one of those workers, but I do not consider myself a discouraged worker as much as an abandoned worker. I have four resumes, depending on what type of job I'm applying for. I check the want ads every day and apply for anything that I'm even remotely qualified to handle. What is discouraging is what is available out there to apply for. Do you speak Pashto? Neither do I,
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, July 2, 2012 No Road Back
Life becomes a matter of rather simple choices, when this poverty first fell upon me, I was in shock. Me? This can't happen to me, I've always been able to find work. I've always been that good employee. I've danced the Capitalist tune and said nothing as my benefits were cut. But hey, it all going to be alright isn't it?
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, May 21, 2010 The Way the Monster Operates
This is a misperception of what government is supposed to do. Their job is to make rules to protect people from the abuses of capitalism. Instead they have an incestuous relationship and change the rules in midstream to protect the corporations and if babies get sick or oil wells blow up or cities fall into ruins, they don't care a mote.
SHARE Friday, November 19, 2010 The Fires of Failure
So there are only two possible explanations left open to us, either complete ignorance or intentional exaggeration. We have become so accustomed to being lied to that in many cases we no longer question the truth nor will we accept it when we see it. If you listen to American news media we must have killed at least twenty million Al-Qaeda soldiers by now.
SHARE Monday, May 10, 2010 Fade to Black
I've seen corporate, union-busting bailouts and increased war spending with long-term plans for decades of fighting twilight struggles for a people who really deep down inside themselves hate our guts. I cannot look at a picture of Hamid Karzai without wanting to retch.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 18, 2011 The Master's Children
I was out meeting folks last week, seems that no matter where I go; while the accents may change the stories they tell stay the same. I met a man named Tom; he was an electrician and a sort of jack of all trades. He told me, "The more jobs you can do the more work you can get." I could relate to his feelings as they were mine as well.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 13, 2010 What These Things Cost
In 1903 two brothers from Ohio flew the first heavier-than-air powered aircraft and sixty-six years later men landed on the moon. That is an impressive time line, from traveling 120 feet down a beach to 238,837 miles to the lunar surface. Think of all the jobs and employment that opened up in those sixty-six years,
SHARE Wednesday, March 30, 2011 A Place of No Pity
How quickly we will remove the coat of humanity and dance a strip tease for the coins thrown at us. Our imagination empowers us while our lack of scruples debases us and our hubris is used to protect us with the armor of "we didn't know", or "how could we have expected" or "it was for the good of the company".
SHARE Tuesday, October 8, 2013 The Age of Artifice
But ask yourself, how can Wall Street soar while Main Street struggles? The question answers itself, if there is only one venue earning a profit; it's the only game in town. It's like a highway dinner, if you want a cup of coffee and a cheeseburger at 2 AM, that's where you go. It doesn't matter if the coffee's no good or the service is bad.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, January 19, 2009 Message in a Bottle
I'm too angry to sleep, too weary to hope. I'm too old for optimism and too young to stop fighting. I'd hit someone if only I knew who; I'd march if only I knew where to go. I support the new President and think that he will bring a new vitality to the nation, but my age and anger tells me that vitality is a show business term. That trickle down never reaches us, and political spin is just so much wind passed into our faces.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 1, 2008 A Single Lifetime
Surviving to over age 50 is no major accomplishment, in and of itself. It's only a chance to see things and experience things, and sadly, most of it for the worse. As a child, playing in the sun was not seen as a danger; the polar ice caps weren't melting, or at least we didn't know about it yet. Gasoline was .29 cents a gallon and seat belts were a novelty only required in the front seat.
SHARE Wednesday, February 23, 2011 The Battlefield
Our cities, our people left in heaps of smoking ruins as the bombers of free trade return to us day after day. When the all clear is sounded the leaders like totalitarian monarchs emerge from their bunkers to cash their checks while excoriating the wounded for not fighting harder.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 3, 2014 Casket? What Casket?
It was just your basic, wooden, Dracula or Old West, primitive pine box. After achieving the skeptical approval of Mr. Strong, I began cutting boards. "I don't believe I've ever had a student build one of those," he remarked. I took that as a compliment, how many thousands of magazine racks or night stands has this guy endured?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 23, 2009 Who Are These Democrats?
It is as if Obama began the health care debate with a first down on the fifty yard line and has been angling for field position to kick a field goal ever since.
SHARE Tuesday, December 18, 2012 The Brick Wall
The august and esteemed members of our elected government have created a financial incident, for the purpose of debasing you, as a person, as a mother or as a father, as an individual and as a human being.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 11, 2015 The Rube Goldberg Machine
The development of the automobile was a simple progression of technology. There's nothing wrong with the idea, but what happens when the tool controls the operator, when the tool becomes the master and the primary source of our nation's maladies?
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 30, 2010 As the Rain Tumbles Down
Truth is like the rain, it tumbles down upon us whether we like it or not. To those in shelters the truth becomes more abstract. To those in the face of a storm it is more personal; the wet and soaked to the bone have a stronger opinion of rain. You can tell them of the good the rain does and they will probably answer you with something they learned at the Dick Cheney Charm School of etiquette and courtesy.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 28, 2012 Wild Card
Stop for just a moment and imagine just how your life would be instantly changed, if the United States were to attack Iran and Iran were to respond in kind. A World War on top of the world's energy sector, Macho games and bravado aside, a situation like this would create world condition's, which would amount to a near economic Armageddon.
SHARE Tuesday, May 4, 2010 It's All the Same Story
The head of Goldman Sachs testifies before Congress and receives a tongue-lashing full of righteous indignation from millionaire Senators all heavily invested in the stock market. In 2007 Senator Bob Corker sold off hundreds of thousands of dollars in stocks to avoid any conflicts of interest just weeks before the stock market tanked.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 22, 2013 And Here We Are
Jack Lew is a former hedge fund manager for Citigroup and manager of its alternative investments unit, with oversight over Citigroup's subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Hong Kong and he's the new Treasury Secretary.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 11, 2014 Paddling the Crazyville River
Then there's astronaut Alan Bean, accidentally pointing his fake hand-held video camera at the fake sun and faking its instant failure. There are photographs available on the same Internet of all of the Apollo landing sites; taken from telescopes here on Earth, but guess what" they're all fake too.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 3, 2010 These Dreams
If you ask most working people about it they will answer, "What recovery?" The Wall Street players and bankers deluded themselves into believing that there was a recovery when all it really was was spring.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 26, 2010 The Winds of August
The back of summer was broken here last night. There was just a hint of coolness in the air and the wind was out of the North rather than the South. It doesn't mean that summer is over only that it is slowly yielding and giving way like it does every year.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 2, 2010 We Are America
Day one, Roosevelt issues a proclamation declaring a four-day bank holiday. FDR had just grabbed up the banking community up by the scrotum and asked, "How do you like me so far?" It prevented further bank runs but it also sent a shot across the bow that there was a new sheriff in town and the banks and Wall Street would play by the new rules or they wouldn't be allowed to play at all.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, July 4, 2011 What Would Ben Do?
Ray McGovern, retired CIA officer, was tackled and dragged to the ground by civil servants behaving like goons, for standing silently with his back to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she spoke. How far then are we from troops firing on American civilians?
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, July 9, 2010 False Hope, No Change
After several meetings, however, we have come to the sad conclusion that America's underworld has little to offer in solving America's unemployment crisis. This is due in part to corporate America having usurped all of our traditional rackets. What loan shark can compete today with a TitleMax or a Payday Lender?
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, September 24, 2010 Smoke Rings
Their intent is to create a false reality to tear off and start fresh with a clean sheet of paper because the economy has sucked for several years now. It's not getting better it's getting worse and as the leaves fall off the trees the job market will cool like a Wisconsin autumn. So their idea is to say that recession is over but now we're fighting off a new one.
SHARE Monday, February 20, 2012 Political Language
Obama is a right wing fascist, and yet the media describes him as a"liberal. The Republicans call him a "Socialist and even a Communist. Obama has made fools of the Nobel committee and fools of us all, but ask yourself; why is it they call this President further to the right than Ronald Reagan a liberal and a communist? Because it negates the left and moves the political goal posts even further to the right.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, December 9, 2011 In Plain Sight
From the outset of this crisis the government response has been reactive and not proactive. Look for example at the response to the banking crisis versus the American crisis. During the banking crisis there was no debate, there was only a dark urgency and somber necessity, we must, we must!
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 3, 2014 Falling Down
In a Depression, there is a disruption of credit or some other banking crisis. Due to high unemployment, there is also shortage of purchasing power, which only makes the situation worse. A recession is a cough; a Depression is choking to death on jaw breaker, a systemic failure of the economy. Hand wringing, prayer shawls or duct tape won't do the trick, something must be done, our economy has fallen and can't get up.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, June 28, 2013 Through Their Eyes
In 1965, cigarette advertising was banned on television; some apparently believing television was influential on the human mind. In a way, to a cynical mind, it might appear as a golden opportunity to judge television's drip on the populace.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, October 17, 2008 You Think I'm Rich, Don't You?
Poor Joe the plumber, plucked from obscurity and thrust into the national limelight, his life has now become an open book. After all, all he did was ask a question about tax policy. Little did he know the McCain campaign and Fox News would seize upon him and try to make him an icon.
SHARE Thursday, July 21, 2011 Last Space Shuttle Mission, a Tribute
Schoolteachers, engineers, doctors, researchers and scientists don't just fall from the sky. These people are investing in their own futures, unsure of their own success or potential yet they are willing to accept the challenge. Each generation makes that commitment and knowledge is multiplied.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 3, 2012 More Than Skin Deep
How do you love a country that won't love you back? Robert Moses is ninety two years old, he's a WW2 veteran with a heart condition and he too, is facing foreclosure. Who would have thunk it, a WW2 veteran trying to game the system by taking advantage of those poor unsuspecting bankers.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 24, 2014 The Goldstein Games
Are you paying too much for car insurance? Do you have trouble sleeping at night, is the stress killing you? Do you need to borrow money, does your home smell, are your hemorrhoids flaring?
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, August 10, 2012 No Place to Go
I am a child of history; I was a kid who sat in the corner listening to the stories of the garrulous old men reflecting on life, after having too much to drink. My parents both grew up poor during the last Great Depression and occasionally, something will occur which strikes one of those old memory chords.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 20, 2008 Will You Go Quietly?
Can we cut the crap here? Can we look dispassionately at the issue before us? This is a class struggle; it has always been a class struggle and it is always going to be a class struggle. We can cloak the issue of globalization in the mantle of altruism, that this is good for all concerned, but that is just not so. Globalism is good for the investment class and the ownership class and the banking class.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 25, 2010 What Will You Tell the Children?
To follow your orders and do what you're told to man your post till your finger fingers get cold. To protect all your betters till you're told to get lost, to worry about your own when the heat goes off. To be candlelight blind and thin blanket warm and macaroni fed with a soul that's half-dead. From the years, from the tears, from the almost and the nears.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 31, 2009 There's Just No Reason To Cry
As we scrimmaged over healthcare all the summer long, right wing pundits came up with the term "death panels." I thought to myself, damn, that's fiendishly clever. I had this vision of a futuristic “Logan's Run†type of thing going on, or instead of a draft board having to go in front of the “Death Panel.â€
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, June 25, 2010 The Public Option
The Federal government's $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers caused sales to rise by 29% in the worst market ever known. It made things look better than they really were. It gave a comforting illusion that things weren't so bad and times weren't so hard. The program is estimated to cost $12.6 billion for a four-month rise in new homes sales and that's not much bang for the buck.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 18, 2012 It Is All One Big Thing
Remember now, that China imports only to fuel her exports, importing raw materials to export finished goods. Much in the same way the British Empire once did it and the Americans once did it in that former American Century. In 2001, China exported $510 billion in goods and this year she will export Three Trillion Dollars in products. A six fold increase in only ten years.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 3, 2014 Never Played in the Rain
Sometimes freedom means allowing people to learn by sticking their fingers into the fan. This is our nature, Darwin was an optimist, there wouldn't be a warning sticker on the gas pump advising us not to take internally, if someone hadn't done it. Should you give your chainsaw to your eighty year old grandmother or a 300 horse power motorcycle to a teenager?
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 28, 2015 Living in the Clouds
You see, Rocket Man isn't the only one flying in the clouds. Do you know what they would call an African-American Superhero in the United States? Dead Man! The scene opens as terrorists have taken over a subway train. As the train emerges, speeding from a tunnel, Afro Man in grey tights flies to the rescue, saving the train from careening off of an overpass. A woman in the crowd below shouts, "He's stealing that train!
SHARE Tuesday, March 30, 2010 Eighteen Million, Out in the Road
RealtyTrac, the California-based authority on property trends and valuations, projects 4.5 million home foreclosures before the end of this year. That's 4.5 million homes, and with four people to a household that is eighteen million people. Eighteen million men, women and children put out into the road, people who must scramble to find shelter and scramble to find new schools for their children.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 28, 2011 The Broken Court of Dreams
The courts ruling is designed to strip from government the power to legislate. Cigarette warning labels are a violation of the tobacco company's free speech. Joe Camel ads on the back of a Captain Crunch box? Sure why not? Making food producers list the ingredients of their products or forcing manufactures to list how much sugar or how much fat is in their product?
SHARE Friday, November 2, 2012 The Song Remains the Same
Another thirty days has passed and the BLS this morning released its monthly jobs report. It's almost lost its thrill, settling into a monthly rehash of filtered numbers, take for instance, Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 171,000 this month, while the numbers of workers entering the workforce increased by 578,000 so from the get go, we're down 400,000 jobs.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, January 10, 2014 Obscenity
It seems safe to say, we've all heard about this alleged economic Recovery underway, a recovery where Wall Street flies and the homeless die, where children cry where the unemployed need not apply. This recovery, this austerity, takes on a Stalinized quality, of "promise zones" and five-year plans.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 18, 2014 25 Things the Wealthy Never Say
8. I encouraged my son to join the military for the educational benefits.
9. Put it back, we're almost out of food stamps.
SHARE Friday, August 19, 2011 And So It Has Begun
The more the Tea Party pushes, the lower their popularity numbers fall and Republicans in Congress are able to play a now you see them, now you don't game. When it suits them, the Tea Party members appear in the media as Republican statesmen while shaking the crazy stick on other more partisan media outlets
SHARE Tuesday, July 6, 2010 A Rose by Any Other Name
I see this same description in all the financial trades, "Worst global recession in decades as the fallout of the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression." Well, if it's the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression then what do you call this that we are in now? You can't have it both ways.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, October 8, 2012 Surrealistic Pillows
Why that's the most amazing thing since, well" ever! Just five weeks before a Presidential election, the economy suddenly takes off like a Shelby Cobra, as the number of unemployed drops by almost a half a million workers in just 30 days!
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 11, 2012 The Other Side
when the subject of Richard Nixon came up, his eyes kind of glossed over. He told me that he was born during the Reagan administration and it was one of those moments, sort of an epiphany for me. It occurred to me how vastly different this man's world experiences were from my own.
SHARE Monday, December 14, 2009 Once More Through the Slaughter House
Capitalism's loyalty is only to money. When you become more attractive as food than labor, the mob will turn on you, with knives, forks and barbecue sauce at the ready.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 30, 2009 The Next Wave
They are trying to pick the winner of the Kentucky Derby without understanding that what they are looking at is a sawhorse. This is not your father's recession, this is the twilight zone. Business will not just gradually improve until we'll all forget these difficult times. We are watching the deconstruction of our economy.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 17, 2009 2012, Agree to Agree
Much has been made of the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, the next Y2K. Anyone remember what happened on Y1K? Christians and just plain Joes gathered on hilltops with their arms raised and swaying in a religious rapture waiting for Jesus to come and save them.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 10, 2010 Finally, A Jobs Program
Last January when disaster struck in the form of a bombing at the Foroshgah-e-Borzorg Shopping Center in Afghanistan, the US government passed out grants to the store owners to restock their shelves. It was only around $300,000 for the eighty-one shopkeeper's inventory. Then they also gave a check to the shopping center's owner for another $280,000.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, February 18, 2013 Where Do They Go?
Wages rose at the ridiculously paltry rate of 0.5 percent, seasonally adjusted for three months and for the year; compensation rose only 1.9%. A desert sheik should run such a frugal household. At 1.9% wage growth, any plans for an economic recovery should be placed well off into the far distant future.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 3, 2010 No Ordinary Utensil
I don't think that there is any spectacle quite so moving or so sad than to see someone's possessions stacked in the yard in front of what used to be their home. It is odd, not just our own connection with our belongings, but our belongings' connections to us as well.
SHARE Thursday, August 14, 2014 Murder is Murder
There have been 31 fatalities directly related to a defective ignition switch which did not meet specs, before the first one was ever installed. At the very least, it's voluntary manslaughter. Given GM's paper trail of dodges and subterfuges, suggesting the problem was driver's heavy key rings or rental customers unfamiliar with the vehicle, it's nothing less than first degree murder.
SHARE Tuesday, September 23, 2008 Same As It Ever Was
Be afraid, be very afraid, the angel of economic calamity has visited disaster upon us and hovers over us still. The proposed trillion-dollar bailout is just that, a bail out, it does nothing to fix the hole in the boat. In 2007 when the so-called "credit crisis/ mortgage crisis" began, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and flooded the decks with cash and the situation was stabilized for six weeks.
SHARE Saturday, April 30, 2011 Epilogue;
Were those thousands of evolutionary eons productive if our society is no safer today than in the days of marauding Vikings or the Black Death? The germs and pillagers are this time from among our own. Where the doctors will only help you for a price? Where you are no safer inside the city walls than outside them, where you must watch your back as well as your front out of a fear of your own kinsman.
SHARE Tuesday, August 21, 2012 Kingfish
My voice will be the same as it has been. Patronage will not change it.
Fear will not change it. Persecution will not change it.
It cannot be changed while people suffer. The only way it can be changed is to make the lives of these people decent and respectable. No one will ever hear political opposition out of me when that is done. -- Huey P. Long
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 30, 2010 By The Numbers
The banking industry is puffed up full of bad paper and bad debt and rather than addressing the situation. The Fed gives them free money so that they can generate huge profits to hide the costs of all these bad debts. Its pumping up a tire with a leak, it works temporarily but fails to address the leak.
SHARE Saturday, October 8, 2011 A Plaza Called Freedom
The time is pivotal; will this thing now grow or wither away? There is a lot riding on this event and a lot of people have invested a lot of hope in this and we must trust and depend on each other despite our political differences.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, February 15, 2013 Praising Money Tonight in the House of the Lord
With that many rich folks all together in one room and all so orgasmic-ally delighted by the appearance of the President one must ask as a poor man, what's this mean to me? I mean, we're talking rich and poor here. Not just my poverty but that of all of us,
SHARE Thursday, January 27, 2011 Reagan's Ghost
The theme last night was, let's all make nice here in the sand box, after all, we're all Republican's here. It greatly reminded me of a Soviet People's Party Congress. Everyone applauds at the appropriate time, everyone stands and cheers for the new five year plan.
SHARE Sunday, November 10, 2013 Operation Shamu
Other measures under considerations are "no swim lists" and sun only privileges. Undercover swimmers, to be known as Water Marshals would patrol indistinguishable, from average American swimmers. The marshals would also be armed with a waterproof side arm, to be ready for any eventuality.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 11, 2010 My Kind of Loyalty
Totalitarian governments use laws to control the people; a benevolent democracy uses law to protect the freedom of the people. In ancient Athens a law was set aside if it was found to not serve justice. It was a crime to steal bread even if hungry, but it was also a crime not to give a hungry man bread if he asked for it.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 23, 2012 Fear Not the Apathy
There is a vibe, a feeling, reflected in the lens of my own life; you don't care so much about what you don't own. The American people get it and respond accordingly, as someone who doesn't own nor has any stake in the electoral process. Suddenly, Obama has become the Jon Lovitz' character who can't say no, "Gay marriage? Yeah, I'm for that, I was always for that!
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 22, 2014 Here in the Echo Chamber
The sons and daughters of the generation landing men on the moon are no longer looking to the sky. You can't hide this sort of thing; it's like when the repo men show up, while you're explaining to the neighbor about your business picking up.
SHARE Sunday, June 13, 2010 Mutiny on the Bounty-less
The Republican Party, at this point in our nation's life, is clearly insane. The problem is that we have a Democratic Party that is all too willing to meet the crazy Republicans halfway. The Republicans want to see how close they can sail the ship of state to the vortex while the Democrats offer only, "Not too close." But by the time you find out how close is too close, it is too late.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 17, 2010 Dispatches From the Front
That's what this looked like, like a scene from hurricane Katrina. A woman, maybe 60, with a daughter around 40 were rummaging through hundreds of boxes unceremoniously loaded and dumped three feet from the doors of the property, the house, the garage and the storage building around back.
SHARE Wednesday, January 14, 2009 The Verdict
The last Bush press conference was a doozy, riddled with angst, anger and unrequited appreciation. You could read it in his eyes, "Why don't they love me?" Suddenly he was the teenage boy again, called in front of his domineering father and trying to explain away all those things that couldn't be explained away.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 10, 2009 Raising Baby Bubba
These little minds are a fertile playground. Children run wild with imagination, but whether they are raised by me or by wolves like Romulus and Remus, there is still rule one. We are your parents, we are in charge and you will do as you are told or else.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 7, 2010 Is This It?
Is the curtain rising on the next act of the Greek tragedy? Two sales tax hikes in four months, from 19 percent to 21 percent and then from 21 to 23 percent, wage freezes and pension cuts on the way. Could you handle a ten percent cut in your earnings when added to additional taxes? But there is another and more important question: when an economy can't pay its bills, can cutting the economy raise the needed revenue?
SHARE Tuesday, April 27, 2010 Vichy America
It's like a sort of reverse evolution where mankind evolves back into a creature that moves on three legs while leaving one hand free to carry the Bible or a cell phone.
SHARE Thursday, October 23, 2008 Letting The Market Place Work
They tell us that we must let the marketplace work, we must never allow the heavy hand of government to impinge on our freedoms. While the rest of the industrial world has national healthcare, we in America have our freedom. Our freedom and forty-seven million people without healthcare.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 14, 2008 Down to Zero
The technocrats declare that being against outsourcing is like being against the weather. That outsourcing is somehow a force of nature, and therefore all resistance is futile. The beliefs of the bellicose, the rantings of the complacent, and the bluster of those secretly afraid, afraid that you will discover their secret, the secret that they have guarded so closely,
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 1, 2014 New Careers for the New America
the days of looking down our noses at local, street-corner, pharmaceutical, customer service representatives are over. There are still lots of other careers available, for the, shall we say" less adventurous?
SHARE Wednesday, February 11, 2015 A Long Way Home
I reckon it was a long time ago; so far back most folks around today weren't even born yet. Well, there was this liberal politician and he had this plan to improve health care in America. The guy had...
SHARE Saturday, December 18, 2010 The Hard Season
The cold, the wind, the snow, buffered by holiday cheer and Yule tidings. This is a hard season, it focuses on our past and our present. It marks time, we reflect on the Christmas past with joy, remorse and a sense of longing for things beyond our grasp.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 11, 2010 Field of Nightmares
So I don't fault the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they just make the pretzel dough and leave the twisting up to the politicians. This is a government however which will kill the messenger, so they must highlight good news. So it may be reported that even though the city of Chicago was reduced to ashes Mrs. O'Leary's cow escaped without injury and is resting comfortably.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 7, 2010 Extraordinary!
Boy oh boy, with all these extraordinary programs on tap good times will be right around the corner. Wait, who was it that said that? Prosperity is just around the corner! A chicken in every pot and a new car in every garage! What was that fellow's name again?
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, February 15, 2010 What Could Be Done
"This is a simplified, focused bill that addresses our core priority: putting millions of Americans back to work," Reid said.
A tax break for employers who hire new workers, yep, can't have too many tax breaks. An increase in highway spending, and an extension of the "Build America" bond program that Wall Street bond traders have been so anxious about. And, of course, number four. Drum roll please, more tax cuts! Ta da!
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, May 11, 2012 Walking
This is Obama's card check legislation moment revisited. Nearly four years ago, candidate Obama promised to support Card Check legislation enabling workers to more easily join labor unions in their workplace. Candidate Obama carefully crafted his message, "If it comes across my desk," he said, "I'll sign it." Once ensconced in the Obama White House, he did nothing to assist the legislation towards ever coming across his desk.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 1, 2013 We Don't Love Freedom Enough
Only there's little truth in it -- this is helicopters and Montag. And this time it's real! The narrative is quite simple: the police did a good job and what they did was right. The first responders and those on the scene were heroes and we must come together as a nation.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 19, 2011 Imagination Nation
We all know this story, you'd have to be pretty isolated not to know about this story for yourself. Not to know someone who has lost a home or a job. To have had their security and dignity ripped out from beneath themselves and to live in fear of the mailman or the telephone. To be beat upon by corporate bullies, to have $200 in bank fees turn into $2,000 in a few weeks.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, July 28, 2008 It's All your Fault
It is easy to be angry these days; it could be said that to be an American these days is to be angry. If you're not angry, maybe you need to stop watching American Idol, put down your cell phone, and look out your car window for a minute as you drive on your $4.00 a gallon gas. I have seen things that I thought I would never see.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 6, 2009 Money Owes No Allegiance
Money owes no allegiance; the imaginary jobless rate stands at 6.7% while the real number is closer to 10% now and headed towards 15%. The capitalists look at total US debt, like investors in GM stock, and ask, "Is this a viable entity?" The Fed lends to banks who then look at the American public saying, "Invest in them? Are you crazy? Those people are in the tank and we're not going in after them."
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 30, 2008 A Parellel Universe
The scientists toil in their laboratories and build billion-dollar super colliders under the Earth's crust looking for the secrets of the universe. The heirs of Einstein tell us with confidence that other universes exist, other dimensions where our rules and means of existence simply do not apply. It's fun to think about such things as a mental exercise, as cranial gymnastics,
SHARE Sunday, September 23, 2012 The Polish Daily News
I went to see the Christmas Story house and while we were in the neighborhood we visited Saint Theodosius Cathedral. Poor little Ralphie, his neighborhood falling into disrepair. When we arrived we saw the obligatory leg lamp in Ralphie's front window and an excavator climbing up the rubble pile of a demolished house next door.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 18, 2008 Its Only America Bleeding
To what do I owe the pleasure of this company? What is owed to me and to what account do I owe by the nature of my birth? Solemn allegiance and my blood poured out on foreign fields for the honor and glory of brass buttons and medal-resplendent generals?
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 29, 2012 The Security State
[I]t is much safer to be feared than loved when, of the two, one must be dispensed with. Because " love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 22, 2009 Moon Men
On July 20th when man first walked on the moon there was a surrealism felt worldwide, like something out of a science fiction movie as whole nations and their peoples surrounded TV sets and watched as Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. The world heaped praise on the United States for the greatest technological achievement of mankind. And unless you were there and watched it you can't really understand the world before it
SHARE Monday, November 1, 2010 No Bottom
Andrew Breitbart has been hired by ABC/ Disney as a commentator for their prime time election night coverage. I've all ready sent my E-mail to ABC describing their actions as despicable and showing a total contempt for democracy. Let's be straight about this, Brietbart is a pimp, he's a stooge, a paid political operative in the Waffen SS of right wing politics.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 18, 2009 Saving Tinkerbell
charlatans who strut the days in matinees of palisades and serpentine splendor that remains to remind us that all the world is a stage, but the play is all of fiction. Their names may change as fast as the facts, but never forget they run in packs, and sleep better knowing that their money's safely in the banks. So don't try to phone, don't try to call, don't you ring the doorbell and wait on the lawn, for they don't know you
SHARE Sunday, July 26, 2009 GM's Free Ride
It's a free ride, Clyde, whipped cream seat and a cherry headrest on the banana split boat. A gravy train with biscuit wheels, just sign the papers and have security remove the old codgers from out in front of the building. Just another 50,000 pensioners thrown onto the scrap heap, left to fend for themselves so that corporations can breathe the free air of Mexico and China.
SHARE Sunday, June 28, 2009 The Ghosts of Detroit (part 2)
Billy Durant announced to the world that he was founding a new car company and its models would be designed by one of the foremost auto racers in the world, Louis Chevrolet...It is policies that have put us where we are. The brains the hands and the spirit which changed the world are still there waiting to be tapped again.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 7, 2009 I'll Wait For You
I admit openly to being cynical, but why shouldn't I be? I've seen my industry devastated with the associated plant closings and suicides. I started two businesses myself;I've shuttered them both and because of that when I see a vacant storefront I don't just see an empty building, I see a devastated dream.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 4, 2010 The Un-risen Jesus
Every civilization on Earth, every man and every woman, lives under the sentence of death. We respond to that by developing beliefs in an afterlife. Ah, yes, we're all going to a better world when we leave this mortal coil. Who told you that? An medieval cult called the Perfects believed that this life was actually hell. So bring on the wine! Bring on the song! Bring on the virgins! Let's party like it's 1499!
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 25, 2009 Economics the Hard Way
My father used to lament the poor mathematical performance of his children, "They struggle to get a C in math, yet they always know to the penny how much allowance they are due." It was true enough and goes straight to the heart of the problem with numbers. We have a fundamental disconnect with the numbers that don't affect us directly.
SHARE Wednesday, February 22, 2012 A Government War
We are a sick society which is cutting itself out of self esteem issues. The idea that the banks were handed fourteen trillion dollars and made whole while millions of honest hard working Americans were backhanded revolts me, we already know how Mitt Romney's dog must have felt, we are treated no better.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 13, 2012 True Definitions
The decided legitimacy of a mandate on the general public declaring they must purchase a product from a private corporation under penalty of law. It doesn't sound very Socialist to me, millions of government tax dollars being filtered from public coffers to private hands?
SHARE Thursday, August 7, 2014 Doing Nothing, is Making Progress
Time marches on wearing combat boots, the war goes on forever as the defense department announces a new plan to fight and defeat ISIS. Is that Liberal or Conservative?
SHARE Monday, December 28, 2009 Cheerleading for Wall Street
I wonder what Mr. Schumer considers excessive? Would one million-dollar bonuses to the top, say, twenty-five bankers at Goldman Sachs be excessive? How about the top fifty? Or even the top one hundred bankers? How about the top nine hundred and seventy-three bankers? Goldman Sachs plans to issue bonuses in excess of one million dollars to nine hundred and seventy-three employees.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 24, 2012 In the Days of Warm Prosperity
But what if, what if hypothetically, we had a preventive model and the maladies of ill health were reduced in our young and then passed on into our adult population? What would happen to those pharmaceutical sales? Who would fill those hospital beds in those marble palaces? In the capitalist system, does Budweiser really want you to know when to say when, or would they rather you drink up?
SHARE Wednesday, July 24, 2013 A Shadow World
What are a people supposed to do, where are they supposed to go, when unable to afford even the simple basic necessities of life? Nearly 32 million Americans priced out of their own society and country by Neo-liberal economics. All nations have faced hard economic times, that part is understandable. Only, for the first time in modern human history the government's response to the crisis has been to close the door
SHARE Saturday, February 19, 2011 The Same Old Soap
Like a snipe hunt the American worker was left holding the bag with promises of, you just wait, a better job will be right along, you just keep holding the bag open. The President offers tax cuts for new product development and then sends a trade delegation to India. The public pays at the front door and at the back door too.
SHARE Saturday, December 19, 2009 Failure Is Not an Option, But It Is a Possibility
The waters of Democracy compromised lose their currents and channel themselves into wandering, meandering streams of personal power and privilege, ending in waste pools overgrown with silt and scum. These become the birthplace of radicalism and the burial site of conventional faith.
SHARE Monday, October 10, 2011 Mixed Messages
I make my rounds through the plaza to see all my friends both new and old. Andrea and Bert from the staff of the Old Elm Tree and the special Code Pink ladies from deep in the heart of Texas, they are all special. We are all special here. That is the lesson which I have gleaned. I have met so many really nice, really great and really special people.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 1, 2010 Brave Cincinnatus
It is a most useful corporate lie because as solitary agents we are weak and defenseless. I was asked the million dollar question by a person buried under the rubble of urban decay and it was a damn good question, "what do we do?" Well that question along with my dark mood made me think hard.
SHARE Monday, January 24, 2011 Obama in Camelot
When Paul Volker first took the job he had agreed to serve on the council for only two years but as the President announced his replacement yesterday he seemed to forget that fact. The President said the economy is "in a different place" from where it was during the financial crisis when Volker was brought on, and new ideas are needed to keep the momentum going.
SHARE Thursday, December 9, 2010 Boom-Town
The immediate problem is an under performing world economy. So why the rush towards austerity? When Herbert Hoover tried that policy during the last Great Depression it only made matters worse.
The 3 percent solution,
SHARE Wednesday, October 5, 2011 I Am In
The road passes beneath us, across one thousand miles littered with chain stores and sterile corporate fast food outlets. As we passed through Chicago at rush hour I was struck by how little this city ever really changes. It is a city of brownstones and of small alleyways, of gritty skylines filled with smokestacks and Catholic church steeples.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 9, 2010 Believe!
As a young child I ardently believed in Santa Claus. My older sister scoffed at my nonsense belief but I was undeterred, you see, I took my mother's warning to heart when she said, "That when you stop believing in Santa Claus Christmas won't be as special anymore."
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 9, 2019 Stalingrad, The Musical
Our Dear Leader shot down over Hanoi after playing my way or the highway with Little Rocket Man. It worked so well last time, shutting down the government. It worked so well with Nancy Pelosi he couldn't resist trying it one more time with Little Rocket Man.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, May 6, 2013 The Right to Belong
The propaganda networks will trumpet 165,000 "new" jobs and that's Winston Smith's way of telling you, everything is so much better now. Come out; come out where ever you are! Ollie, Ollie Ocean free!
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 21, 2010 Pathetic or Insane?
So here here we are beleaguered, bedeviled and beguiled, lost between the vicissitudes of fate and the patrimony of the state. Tasting only salt from what were once tears of joy and eating dirt from the path of hope and change. Barack Obama today dropped any illusions that he might be a populist or even a Democrat.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 27, 2012 This Is Your Life!
"Banking and financial conditions in the United States have improved significantly since the depths of the crisis." Or, things have gotten much better since we put the fire out. It has almost a Stan Laurel quality to it. Though this is my favorite line, "even in an extremely adverse hypothetical economic scenario," I'll bet he was up half the night coming up with that line.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 18, 2010 Reading the Mail
This is our country and we can do any damn thing in the world that we like. We can train monkeys to direct traffic or have Christmas in July if we want to. This is our God damn country and I get pretty God damned angry about it.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 10, 2011 Seasons of Wither
These are seasons of wither that are upon us, times of failure and abandonment and a loss of faith in the institutions which we once depended upon. George W. Bush destroyed the vestiges of the Reagan coalition. His coronation by the Supreme Court in 2000 signaled a fissure opening up under the foundation of our court system.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 22, 2012 When Prisoners Work the System Works
The prisoners were being relocated to safer areas of Germany to protect them from allied air raids or the prisoners were being moved to Japan in empty transports where more food was available. All slave masters can explain away their crimes except for one, how is it that you are paid for your work and they are not?
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 22, 2009 The Lost Children
The political spectrum has bent so far to the right you have Republican House and Senate members surviving only in their safe districts. Then you have the Blue Dogs who, when compared with Democrats of forty years ago, are in fact moderate Republicans. They live in political limbo. Neither fish nor fowl, they accept their committee chairmanships and mute what ought to be a Democratic majority.
SHARE Tuesday, November 3, 2009 Rogue Nation
But the allegations run even deeper than the CIA helping a war lord to move his product; it is claimed that the CIA were his partners. General Pao was still unhappy because even though he had his airline, he still had competition in the drug trade. Shackley used CIA assets to bomb and sabotage the competition until General Pao had obtained a monopoly in Laos in the heroin trade.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 4, 2010 With Friends Like These
By God, it's nice to be noticed. It is comforting to have someone say, "I feel your pain." It is, however, essential that the being noticed and the commiseration over the problems of the American people be done in the light of dignity. We are not pawns or kulaks, nor are we a peasant class to be cared for and overseen like a herd of sick livestock.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 10, 2009 What the Gupta Are They Thinking?
What kind of Gupta is this? We all make mistakes; it is, after all, normal to make mistakes. The Obama administration made a mistake in picking megachurch, megabuck, megabigot, religious leader Rick Warren to speak at the inaugural ceremonies.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 25, 2009 The Ghosts of Detroit
For the most part they have been forgotten; they are just empty, vacant memories like the empty, dilapidated homes which line her once proud streets. It was a land once ruled over by giants, captains of industry and labor and political thought.
SHARE Monday, September 14, 2009 The Godzilla Amendment
As the money poured into the I Love Godzilla Fan Club, the lizard was quick to buy into the political leadership and start his own political action committee (Zilpac). He used his burgeoning power along with automotive interests to defund mass transit projects, because giant rubber-suited lizards just hate mass transit.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 20, 2009 Do I Trust the President?
In politics nothing is said to the public by accident. It is true that people do mis-speak and misinterpret policy, but when the person who mis-speaks is the author of the policy then, as the expression goes, "Houston, we've got a problem."-
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, July 16, 2012 The Truth is" The Truth Is
I no longer travel in the warm orbits of the sun; instead I have become a dark solitary asteroid traveling through the empty voids of space. I have nothing and have been referred to as a transient. Imagine such a definition applied towards your own life.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, October 5, 2012 If the Price Is Right
This is how Capitalism operates -- surreptitiously and insidiously. Capitalism is the carrot on the stick to encourage the little burro to pull the wagon. Capitalism is a juicy promise which never quite meets the expectation; a meal which smells good but does not satisfy.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 20, 2008 The Great Divide
I had to attend class on Saturday, a poll workers class on provisional voting held at the government center over in Marietta. Marietta, Georgia is a very old and historic city. The Yankees once occupied her, and during World War II her Bell Bomber Plant churned out thousands of aircraft for the war effort.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 4, 2019 The Stanford Experiment
The expression "Know Thyself" comes to mind but how can we know what we can't see? How can we repair the cracked and broken pieces of the matrix as helpless as a kitten? There things we know and things we only think we know, assumptions of normal taken from random and fractured memories of our childhood.
SHARE Friday, September 13, 2013 Made for TV
We've witnessed a decade of financial mismanagement and fraud, along with a decade of military adventurism. As the corporate media explain, "gosh, we really thought there were WMDs; boy, is their egg on our face. Gosh, who would have thought Wall Street executives were crooked? Gosh, who could have known, mortgage lenders would game the system?"
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 9, 2010 Saving Tinkerbell
Why do they seek me out? Why do they haunt me so? Is it because I am also them? I am one of them with my membership card in my hand, with my dirty shoes and ragged clothes as proof true. Are these specters me? Do I run loose in my mind or does my mind run loose in my head? Am I haunting myself? Have the sinews and synapses allowed my brain to break free like a ship's cargo in a storm?
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 7, 2013 Pottersville
Why" here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You" you said" what'd you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken down that they"
SHARE Saturday, March 3, 2012 Getting from A to B
What Portland is, is passionate. It is a union city, an industrial city, a sea port and a railroad city. The rain has so far fallen only in mists and light rain which in no ways reminds me of the tropical downpours of my native South. I marched for a mile through this misting rain and did not get as wet as I have gotten running to a store from a car during a tropical down pour.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 30, 2008 The World They've Always Wanted
There is seeing and then there is sight; the things which we have seen help us to bring our sight into sharper focus. As a child I was of the generation whose fathers had fought in the Second World War. It became almost natural, as an adolescent, to ask, "What did you do in the war?" My father was a Navy pilot and one of his best friends was a sergeant in an infantry platoon.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, August 31, 2009 Losing Touch with a Good Friend
A mindless task on a hot summer day or an interminable trip would become a paradise where my mind could roam free from distractions. Free to go where it will with no limits placed upon it, until the phone rings. “Are you almost home? Do you want chicken or hamburgers for supper tonight?â€
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, December 20, 2013 Swimming Lessons
I recently watched the Ohio Jobs tutorial and certainly, I understand that such devices must be as generic and all-inclusive as possible. I'm not picking on Ohio specifically; each of the states have similar websites, with infomercial actors and actresses, portraying ordinary folks, just like you and me, only in new clothes and fresh haircuts.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, July 28, 2014 Painting by Numbers
224,000 new jobs in May and now, 288,000 in June, with unemployment falling to 6.1 percent! It's all good, isn't it? It's all good, proof positive, the participation rate now stands at 62.8 percent and that's great, isn't it? Last June, the participation rate stood at 63.5 percent.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." ~ George Orwell
SHARE Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Tomatoes Are Like Motorcycles
Across the vast wasteland of the American dreamscape there is one who dare not show his face. Considered meaner than the lowest child molester and kicker of small dogs, this is one who would pee in swimming pools just for spite. Republicans revile him while Democrats look at the floor and slowly shake their heads with unadulterated disgust. A virulent strain of villain who would dare propose protectionism.
SHARE Friday, October 8, 2010 Good Old Hamburger U
McDonald's will make its "virtual classroom" available and will expand it's literacy program for managers. In the classic Herman Melville novel "Moby Dick" what was Captain Ahab was in search of? Choose the product most closely related to the correct answer. A. Big Mac B. Napkins C. Fish Sandwich D. Happy Meal
SHARE Thursday, October 13, 2011 American Stories
The "Stop the Machine" rally was for me a huge success; it has restored my faith in the general goodness and wisdom of the people of this nation. I have met Americans of every age, race and station and they are good. They have put down the tools of their lives; they have left their jobs and their loved ones and traveled thousands of miles to come here to address their government.
SHARE Thursday, July 15, 2010 The Winds of Chance and the Hurricanes of Disaster
Hoover or Obama?
"While it will be necessary in public interest to further increase expenditures during the current fiscal year in aid to unemployment by speeding up construction work and aid to the affected, I can not emphasize too strongly the absolute necessity to defer any other plans for increase of Government expenditures."
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 10, 2009 Connecting the Dots
It seems I can't even watch TV news anymore, it just makes me too angry, the cluelessness of the government. I voted for change, not a slight alteration but for change. I sit here in this tiny berg of Powder Springs and I ask myself, "Why is it that I can see these things and these highly-paid experts and analysts don't?"
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 10, 2012 Civilian
I could almost smell the coffee and hear the voices, how many generations did Ernie serve up breakfast, to the shifts of working men, coming in and going out? Men and women who could afford to stop in at Ernie's earning good wages, union jobs and when their jobs went down, Ernie's went down too.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 4, 2010 What Castle Walls Do
Let's see, what is it that employed Americans have until April 15th to do each year? The IRS sends out 100 million tax refunds checks averaging $2,000, but oh yes, the economy is recovering because it created 162,000 jobs last month. Falsehoods, fallacies and media felicio, how can they lie to us so? Practice, I imagine, lots of practice, like a good dog taught to dance for its treat and to bark on command.
SHARE Monday, October 26, 2009 Iran has enough of its own problems without needing to blame the West
It was the recent suicide bombing in Iran that made my mind wander back to this trap. It is as if many Americans believe that Iran exists in a vacuum. That Iran doesn't have other problems or rivalries besides the United States and Israel. They pretend that Iran's leaders stay up late at night planing devilment for the west without ever looking over their own shoulders.
SHARE Tuesday, June 2, 2009 More of the Same Game
Obama ran for office promising change! He was going to change the way the government does business. He was going turn us away from neocon zealotry and given his first shot he appoints a candidate closer to Alito and Souter than anyone now on the court. Where is our champion? Where is an appointment that will turn the courts back towards the direction of Thurgood Marshall?
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, June 15, 2009 Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
The concept of no man is above the law in the United States is as dead as religious freedom in Nazi Germany. The executive branch is above the law, and the intelligence branch is above the law per our new President, the Democrat. Without legal constraints upon them what is left of democracy but to don the purple and put on circuses for the people?
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 11, 2010 Long Ago and Far Away
Their prosperity created more jobs than their numbers and because of the wise King the elderly went from the poorest demographic in the kingdom to one of the wealthiest. For generations the elderly venerated the memory of the wise King who had showered them with this wonderful proclamation. Few ever realized that their retirement program wasn't about helping the elderly; it was about helping the young and about creating jobs.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 29, 2009 One Hundred Days
At a time of falling wages and struggling families it would seem a tiny ray of hope for workers that somehow they could turn the tide. Just the threat of employees being able to organize would prompt employers to treat their workers better or face the consequences. But in one hundred days that hope is as dead as the turkeys at a Sarah Palin photo op.
SHARE Thursday, January 20, 2011 The Shadow
The Federal Reserve puts in place policies which directly benefit the investor class and then uses their failure to help the other 80 percent of the economy as a reason to keep those policies in place.
SHARE Sunday, October 5, 2008 The Terminator Cries Uncle
Yes, Governor Arnold cries for his Uncle to save him! He warns Treasury Secretary Paulson in his best Austrian accent, "You must help us, ve are close to running out of cash to fund day-to-day government operations and we are unable to access routine, short-term loans."
SHARE Tuesday, September 9, 2008 The Last Hurrah
There is a cancer in our economy and it is spreading rapidly. The administration's standard policy is to at first ignore it, then to deny it, then blame the victims for it, and then to claim that intervention won't be necessary just before it intervenes.
SHARE Saturday, August 8, 2009 Video Killed the Radio Star
Before the invention of the remote control, parents opted for the slave labor approach. “Go turn the sound up! Get up and move the antenna! A little to the left, there, let go! Go turn the sound down!†Child labor laws were completely ignored, even when it became obvious that the future of the children was in doubt. Would parents bother to bring children into the world if they could be replaced with a remote control?
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 22, 2010 Money for Nothing and Your Schools for Free
Reduce unemployment? Riddle me this, Batman, how does giving the banks free money help unemployment? We've been giving the banks free money for almost two years now and only bank profits have improved. So is the answer just to keep on doing it and hope for the best?
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 9, 2009 The Silence of the Wolves
I read the following line in an article about the new unemployment numbers: “At the same time, the report did underscore that the economy is on the mend and pulling out of the deepest recession since the 1930s.†Except that there was no recession in the 1930s; there was a full-blown depression. And rather than ignoring it or putting flowers over it the administration of that time responded to it.
SHARE Saturday, July 7, 2012 Stagnation
Terrible job numbers pour out over a holiday weekend news dump. 108,000 new workers joined the workforce, which by the governments own admission only added 80,000 jobs this month. That by itself would be pretty Goddamned awful but is instead the sunny side of the street. More than a quarter of those 80,000 jobs are temporary jobs.
SHARE Saturday, August 8, 2009 At My Nose
It is important, however, that we view these new rabble rousers like we would the first dry leaf of fall. They are a sign of what is coming down the road and a sign of how serious the Republican party and their clients, the healthcare industry, are about derailing all of this.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 25, 2009 Tomorrow a New World Begins
Now this same media and these same Republicans say that it's wrong to try and assist the people because "They," the people, were irresponsible! One company, A.I.G. (American Insurance Group), has already received $150 billion in taxpayer aid and today will ask the US taxpayer for an undetermined amount to cover a $60 billion loss in the fourth quarter of last year. But, you? You get five hundred bucks and Republican sneers.
SHARE Sunday, December 21, 2008 Ford's Legacy
Deep Throat is dead. The man who brought down a President by leaking information which otherwise would never have seen the light of day is gone. His passing should be remembered because he was the Paul Revere of his generation. He held up the light of truth in the steeple as he risked his career, his family, and if caught he might have been sentenced to more hard time than all the Watergate conspirators combined.
SHARE Thursday, April 16, 2009 Dispatches From the Front
That is America after all, kill or be killed. Ride on someone's back or let them ride on your back. Dignity is an option only available on the luxury models. Because I was self-employed and because I tried for too long to kick start the business, I have no unemployment benefits. I paid in for 27 years and when I need them I get bubkis! There is no aide. There is no government program; there is nothing.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, June 11, 2010 God, I Love a Parade
There is no recovery, only an illusion of recovery. You can shock the heart and pump the chest full of shots of adrenaline but it doesn't mean that the victim is going to get up off the table and walk away any time soon. It only means that the body is being manipulated. Free money and government purchases of bad assets do not a recovery make.
SHARE Thursday, October 25, 2012 Playing with Numbers
I don't have a dog in this fight; I could easily do fifteen hundred words on the deficiencies of either candidate. In the words of George Wallace, "There ain't a dimes worth of difference between them.
SHARE Thursday, August 21, 2008 The Happy Happy Joy Club
Being the youngest of three children I grew up cynical, it was only natural. After being used and manipulated a number of times by my siblings, I learned to read the fine print.
"Mom says we can have some cookies if you go get them."
"David! What are you doing in that cookie jar? You know better than that! You know that you have to ask first! Now get out of there!"
"But, Mom?"
"Don't but mom me, get out of there!"
SHARE Friday, November 22, 2013 Following the Curve
Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon struggled with the Vietnam War. It was Nixon who began secret wars in Cambodia and Laos. That's a first, secret wars, and Nixon's bombing of dams in North Vietnam, were war crimes under international law.
SHARE Friday, August 7, 2009 How Far Must Johnny March?
I guess Afghanistan reminds me a lot of Vietnam by the way that it grinds on and on with no end in site, without even any metrics as to what would constitute victory. There is a ruling clique ensconced in the capital with a president who struts in robes and sashes while his crooked family members loot the treasury.
SHARE Wednesday, June 24, 2009 Endless War, Empty Goals
The headlines could be from 2003, 2004, 2006 or 2008, and nothing changes.
"Rescuers Search Iraq Blast Site" "US Base Attacked in Afghanistan" "US to improve Afghan Training." If this were World War Two, the Yalta conference would have been two years ago and President Truman would be planning to meet in San Francisco soon to establish the UN.
SHARE Thursday, September 11, 2008 Remebering February 27
The day after Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany his deputy and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, "In conference with the Fuehrer we lay down the line for the fight against the red terror. For the moment we shall abstain from direct counter measures. The Bolshevik attempt at revolution must first burst into flame. At the proper moment we shall strike."
SHARE Sunday, April 18, 2010 Dispatches From the Front
They know instinctively like I know that there are winners and losers here, that for every old woman put out of her house some banker is smiling and calculating his profit. FDR saved over a million homes from foreclosure in a year. Obama's rescued a hundred and fifty thousand in 14 months but it's pretty obvious that if you leave the banks in charge they'll find a way to profit from it.
SHARE Friday, July 11, 2008 The Seething
People generally are passive and understanding, but as the pressure builds the passivity evaporates and what is left behind is a crystallized seething. A feeling that says, "I'm being screwed and I'm tired of it and you hide and watch what happens to the next person that tries it." President Bush made a You Tube appearance where he waved to onlookers as he stepped off Air Force One and they just stared back at him.
SHARE Monday, August 18, 2008 His Time is Short
"I am the Obergruppen Fuehrer for the state of Kalifornia! You will do what I say, ya? We must not be held back by this economy! There is only one course to follow! We must make an example of state workers! We will shoot a thousand a day until the economy gives in and turns around.!"
"Sir you can't shoot state workers!"
"Then fire them! Fire them all, the temporary workers, the interns, fire them all!"
SHARE Tuesday, January 27, 2009 Long Shadows
So lost and out of touch are these Ba'thist dead enders that they fail to realize that a New Deal sounds like a pretty good idea to millions of struggling Americans. But Obama's stimulus program is not another New Deal, it is merely patching the old tire and trying to get the wagon out of the ditch so we can go down the same old road again.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 12, 2009 What?
Americans are saving more because they are, in point of fact, terrified, and after listening to Mr. Geithner, their reasoning appears sound. We are in a depression and if we all save our money the depression only grows worse. Then the boss man lays off more workers and the fear is multiplied to the next level. I guess the Treasury plan is for us all to go back into the stock market and invest.
SHARE Wednesday, July 18, 2012 The Past Is Prologue
The message is sold to us far and wide that government is bad, as only the benevolent aspects of government are being trimmed while the tentacles of enforcement continue to expand until, government is bad. A self fulfilling prophesy of creeping enforcement, the Tazer gun was introduced as an alternative to lethal force and its use is now as common as songbirds in the trees.
SHARE Friday, August 1, 2008 Leased, Last, Lost
Chrysler announced the other day that they would discontinue their automotive lease program. When I first heard this I assumed that it was to due to credit-related issues and Chrysler being under new management. Then I heard that Ford and GM are mulling over the same idea, and it has nothing to do with credit.
SHARE Sunday, November 23, 2008 Five Million
The now famous or infamous Bill Ayers recently quoted Jerry Garcia, "What a long, strange trip it's been." Indeed, I'll second that. Barack Obama's victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park held many memories for me. I grew up in Chicago and up until now my most vivid memories of the park had been of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 4, 2008 All In the "McCain" Family
"Boy da way Glenn Miller played,"
"Songs I've heard on my I-pod today"
"Gee, those S&L's were great"
"Those were the days!"
"Didn't need no welfare state!"
"Enron contributions pulled the weight."
"Gee my Exxon stock did great!"
"Those were the days!"
"And you knew who Jews were then!"
"Girls was girls and Larry Craig just friends"
"Mr. we could use a man like W in there again (piano trill) Me!
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 5, 2008 Independence Day
There is nothing new under the sun, the murder of Caesar or the shots in Dallas. Conspiracies demand either victims or adherents. You're either with us or agin us, sound familiar? We must all hang together or certainly we shall all hang separately. Ah, but that's the point entirely! To hang you separately!
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 26, 2009 Coming Soon, to a Life Near You
It is like we are living in two parallel universes, the people in one and the government in the other. Hillary Clinton goes to India and tells its leaders Americans don't want protectionism. And then is blasted to bits by comments from the readers of Democratic Underground.