The Insincerity of Referencing Future Generations

Politicians are quick to point out that their polices are designed to protect the next generation from the excesses of the current times. The Republicans point to the budget and scream that we are enslaving our children by running deficits. They will puff up their mighty indignation and point to a society that has gone off the rails in doing too much for too many who parenthetically ought to get off off their lazy asses and go to work. That the only employment available is minimum wage jobs that would take at least a sixty or seventy hour work week to maintain a substandard existence is of little concern to those well-to-do folks who benefit from all kinds of incentives to keep them wealthy. To think that some average Joe actually buys into this bull is truly amazing.

Romney just recently went to a white board and demonstrated how a fool with some polish can make the most outrageous assertions seem viable. Ryan, on the other hand, cherry picked the conservative Rand's writings to rationalize high military budgets, more tax decreases for the wealthy all the while gutting social programs. When compared to a street walkers who make no bones about what they are offering for money, Ryan looks like a duplicitous whore who would parade himself as an intellectual all the while taking money from the citizenry and giving nothing but a goofy smile and some allusion about the future generations. It is said he wanted to be a politician since a child. Well, Atwater (the man who mastered hate and lying politics in the modern age) and Rove must have schooled this neo con zealot in how to package bull in patriotic wrappings.

The fact that Ryan's fiscal plan is being questioned by even Reagan's budget director makes you wonder just how far a flimflam man can go before people truly understand just what the hell he is selling. That aside, there is another area where the current crop of Republicans are full of it. That is the environment.

When any of these clowns talk about the future the question should arise what kind of a land and water quality are they proposing to leave as their legacy. Sure, the troglodytes can contend that the burning of fossil fuels and releasing carbon into the air has nothing to do with climate, but that doesn't mean that it “ain't” happening. In his book, “The Fate of Species,” Guteri talks about tipping points. They being a point in time when the effects of a consequence cannot be reversed. That the earth has already gone under some major extinctions in the course of its long history should raise a caution flag. That many of the catastrophic events have come, in geological terms, quite fast should be reason enough to look at polices and practices that have dire consequences. Something to the effect that you can't use your drinking as a place to dump your sewage. That dire changes could come upon humanity at a faster pace than models suggest would surely get thinking people to look at the issue without the bias of moguls who profit from those elements that are causing the harm. The focus should not only be on this country but the world as a whole. The fact that the United States thwarted the Kyoto Accord speaks volumes to the ostrich-like policies and practices of this nation.

This high handed reference to future generations that the vast majority of neo-cons are wont to allude shows that they are little more than profligate, insincere liars. Their practices and polices as well as their laws and their court decisions will do little but leave this country and the world a vast barren land, under water, with only the roaches surviving the upheaval befalling this small planet. Funny thing is that the world will survive and will take on a composition that will eliminate the need for reality shows, and politicians who claim that their god has charted the way for a country and its fools to do whatever the hell it wants without an iota of concern for the fragile nature of this small planet.

By the by, the Democrats can stop feeding at the troughs of the bankers and other bastards whose only concern is how to acquire vast amount of capital. One noble gesture would be to transition this nation from a war state to a peace state.

The Madness of Neoconservatism

Richard Jenni, a brilliant though troubled and tortured comic, once observed that it is within a man's ego to look upon himself and see nothing but what is in his mind. An overweight sow can assume because he has plastered his eyebrow down with spit he strikes an image like a matinee idol. So it is with the Republicans politicians who parade their idiocy and think that they are astute. The country is awash in debt and the right wing revisionists point to public service workers and safety nets programs as the sole source of our economic difficulty. To hear this collection of troglodytes pontificate on a balance budget is to think that they know the way to fiscal solvency. Yet the facts remain clear. You can't spend treasure on unfunded wars, you can't cut taxes when you are increasing government spending on military systems of dubious and questionable value and you can't keep proposing policies that are responsible for the mess.

Now we have Romney selecting Paul Ryan, who somehow has been labeled an intellectual, and a budget genius when he proposed among other things to create a voucher program instead of Medicare. Paper is the last thing our health care system needs. The system is awash in paper. Fact is simplistic solutions which do little but create more confusion to an already confusing and bewildering system will never do anything to improve health care. Vouchers will do nothing but unleash a host of providers who will spend millions, if not billions, to scream out to potential subscribers the benefits of their programs probably with no entity verifying their claims. Of course, the ghouls of our healthcare industry ( that would be those giant corporations who sell insurance) are just waiting to scoop all those vouchers from unsuspecting senior citizens and giving them nothing but denials and a whole lot of paper work. We need to eliminate the ghouls who have somehow gotten their greedy dirty hands in the middle of the relationship between doctor and patient. We don't need someone sitting in an office in Hartford to determine what are medical necessities and we don't need them determining who should get coverage and we definitely don't need politicians sucking up to these guys for campaign contributions. Yet, we have a fool like the Senate Minority Leader telling us that our healthcare system is the best. It is obvious he doesn't have a clue of how to read world wide statistics. Facts, though, never got in the way of a fool's proclamation.

The question is how did the government programs that attempted to build a great society become the problem when all the fault lies with corrupt bankers, fool hardy and chicken hawk politicians, and conservatives who think that the only government necessary is government that gives them tax breaks and allows them to operate free of any restriction in their pursuit of capital. In this curious world, environmental protection is tantamount to a crime while pollution is touted as a cost of doing business. Conservatives claim unions are at fault when in fact they were responsible for the iconic middle class which has shrunk due to the absolute ignorance of those who can't grasp a fundamental law of economic. If you give the rich a tax break they buy rich people things which benefit a few, while a working person will buy a house and housing, of course, is a good indicator of a vibrant economy though that would assume you keep the thieves out of the equation.

So, here we go folks. The gauntlet has been dropped. The “necons” have secured the Republicans. They are back with their fear and saber rattling. They have all the answers. They will talk of job creators and a country that is strong and possesses all the greatness it always has. They will talk of god as if they have had a personal audience with the almighty. Bottom line, they are full of themselves to such a degree that they cannot see the forest because of the trees. They have, in fact, been calling the shots along with the thieves on Wall Street for a long time. Industry has dominated the landscape forever while the public sector and the blue collar workers who once occupied a sliver of a middle class have faded because of a hostile environment created by two bit snake oil salesmen who have charmed the electorate with guile and deceit all the while waving a flag and singing patriotic tunes. This country is in a decline and I fear Romney, the newly anointed pied piper, is tooting a tune that is nothing more than a call to the masses to follow him as he leads them to the precipice, where, if perchance, he convinces them, they will, like lemmings, fall into the abyss of inane conservatism. The truth is the true conservatives have long opted out of the fray for the crazies are in control.

The Economy of Crap

 So the new growth rate was a rather paltry 1.5% which when compared to home prices and personal income was a downer. As an uneducated student of economics, I looked at the explanation given by the talking heads and asked, WTF are they talking about. Let see, we are stagnating because a) people are saving b) were not running out and buying new crap. Hmmm, does this make sense. It wasn't too long ago we got into a shit because people were spending too much and not saving, relying on credit cards to fuel the insatiable consumerism created by the constant bullshit that bombards every American on any electronic device 24/7. The depth and extant of this pernicious need to consume smothers the world in junk, for if there is one constant among all the crap we buy it will all become junk. To base an economy on junk is little more than an attempt to squander resources in the pursuit of an illusion that the present is more important than the future, or to think only in terms of the immediate effects, something like a child consuming too much ice cream. If the world is ever going to get off the hamster wheel, things will have to be recalculated using measures that will fully account for all the variables going into a product. For example, when we calculate the value of a new product, we need to include the cost of disposing of the shit that it comes in, and for the matter, the cost of producing all the crap it is wrapped up in. To look at new consumer goods as the be all and end all of prosperity is to deny what the hell it cost to produce and to junk it. We are so fixed on this madness that we can't see the consequences of the practices that need to be addressed before we have the “new” product in our hand. That brings us to a point, is it better for someone to save or to spend? I would argue that it is better someone save for the building up of capital makes it possible to buy more durable goods. Of course, that position can only be proven if the people who safeguard the monies aren't a collection of thieves. Alas, we need some regulations, well no, we need to arrest and convict those who betray the public trust and make it hard for the rest of them to steal, something like the steel doors in a bank, but only tighter for scurrilous pin stripped bankers. To be frank, I don't know a lot about economics but what I know is that buying shit shouldn't be the basis or the measure of how well we are doing. If the modern grid were to fail, let's face we would all be in a shit. Our towering cities and suburban enclaves would fail on a scale that only a doomsday author could fully detail. Our foothold on the world was demonstrated at Fukijima. In one horrific storm, that modern shell of comfort was destroyed. Somehow, we need to refocus our energies and our models to reflect a positive move forward. It is absurd to base our economy on merely production and waste. Funny thing, since most of the junk we buy comes from China, perhaps we need to understand the value of permanence and to appreciate that if something lasts it isn't bad. We don't need all this crap, we need stuff that lasts. So as the summer rends its way through the dog days and the candidates continue to babble and the reporters talk of numbers that really don't mean anything to anyone but to the people who calculate them, we need to ask what the hell does it all mean. I would think that, for me, it is time to save and to hold off buying useless stuff I don't need. If that is impacting the economy then it is the economy and how it is measured that is at fault not me.