neo-SOCIALIST POWER-GRAB U.S.A.  (September 22, 2008)

Wow, and just when it was looking like the most public attention-grabbing issues of the campaign might turn out to be whether K-Mart shopping allegiances might be transferable to governors and whether or not the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee resembles a pig… (no one with enough money to do otherwise shops at K-Mart, you were tricked / and no I'd say she belongs more to the mutated muskrat/blind mole family-if that's your idea of a hot chick you'll not be doing my poultry shopping as Fred Mertz so famously said)

No, fortunately I guess, it's got better. We are faced, we are assured by very if allegedly learned men and women who get paid more in a month than we do in five years, with the utter and total financial collapse of the entire economy of the Western World! Immediately (as soon as you don't pay). You know, soup lines and starvation, dogs and cats living together, latté with domestic cream. You know, all like that, the worst imaginable. It will be awful.

I may be no economic genius but I know bullshit when I hear it.

These same geniuses who have implemented the Reagan Revolution for nearly 30 years, who have created an economic elite that could feed the world fifty times over if they weren't so preoccupied with limos and PAs and box seats and cars that cost five times as much as your house ("Our bathrooms are better than your homes," read the sign in Silent Movie ) is now feeling….well certainly not our miserable pain, but instead a heroic pain far greater than us regular people could ever feel, you see.

The Good News is that it's not immediately terminal! Oh no, for a mere $700 billion they may be able to right the ship, at least for awhile. It might take a little more later, of course-well it might-but that's just a good start isn't it. C'mon, save the world! Let's all get together now! Danger, danger!

It would be easier to consider the possibility that they're even substantially right except that (1) they're so desperate to get things going right away that they refuse to even consider the possibility of protecting homeowners who don't sport a stock portfolio, (2) they're outraged by the possibility that CEOs whose primary attribute has become firing thousands of workers should have their "compensation" limited in any way, and (3) they want the whole thing to be overseen by the hand picked flunky of all-time all-star corporate flunky George W. Bush.

Problems with this, ah, AHEM, abound. Bush's last great corporate power grab-Iraqi Oil-didn't go quite like he said it would, though as Mick Jagger wrote "one thing's for certain/things are good at Halliburton." Far from his best line, but passable shorthand for the most stable economic truth of these past decades of sin.

So, shall we up $700 billion to ensure that things stay nice and comfy, always improving is the only comfy, and improving only means mo' money, mo' money, mo' money for Haliburton…or should we even think about it?

After all, $700 billion is only…oh, roughly twice as much as every stock traded or held on Wall Street. So they want twice as much as they're worth to ensure that they won't be worth any less. Just so's you don't get confused, they are very upset and promise to do better. Just that they can't do it if we let anyone other than a George W. Bush flunky have any say in what gets done with the….well, with the initial payment of $700 billion by the American taxpayers. (They'll get back to us on future payments. Believe it. Don't worry about it.)

The American taxpayers, you know, those sad pathetic bastards whose dismal dreary existence has offended Corporate America to the point of stridently opposing even the most modest increase in the minimum wage. What could those losers possibly find to spend it on, anyway? [No, this is NOT a situation in which we'll protect their mortgage!] 

This is the most naked moment in American politics that I've ever witnessed.

So Corporate America has presided over the greatest redistribution of wealth since the Feudal System (well done!), over the mere and of course most recently past 28 years-by far the greatest middle class to far upper class transfer of wealth in the history of mankind-and now needs a mere double their own worth from the victims of their historic rip-off in order to keep the ball rolling. Time is of the essence, they assure us. IN FACT WE MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE, QUICK, SIGN HERE!

Well, gee, I don't know…should we give it to them? This is class war, pure and simple. And unless your economic value is best esimated in millions you're about to get screwed again.

Reagan, Socialism and Who Bought 120 Gucci Bags With Your Tax Return 

Marxism has long been a bad word in America, and I would say not entirely without reason. But not for as long as most of us believe (i.e. since Stalin made it up, right?) In fact communist and socialist parties were major forces on the political scene in the wake of the Great Depression (there was nothing great about it, though things were good for Haliburton), combatting racism and establishing trade unions.. Eventually FDR lifted so many of their ideas that they became all but irrelevant, and of course when it became clear what Stalin was doing and they became the devil's brood.

But I know that we'd all like to think clearly in this time of crisis and not be distracted by the likes of Stalin or Roosevelt. [Though it IS interesting how the international left holds Stalin in about the same level of disgust as does the American right Roosevelt, but I digress. What's wrong with Roosevelt!?? I never got it.]

Bush and Reagan and Dole and Mr. Clinton and that lot have long assured us that using our taxes to pay the hospital bills of the impoverished is evil socialism. That ensuring that every American family has a decent home is socialism. That giving a poor cancer patient the same medicine as a rich one is socialism. That refusing to spend millions of tax dollars promoting McDonald's in the Far East is socialism. That offering free psychological assistance to the veteran living under the bridge is just too much, socialism run amok. Oh the wayward impulses of the flock, thank heavens we good corporatists are here to lend some common sense! That offering a school lunch program featuring a vegetable other than catsup is a waste of our very precious resources, probably socialism or whatever, what time am I meeting… Corporations could not have been more conservative and bashful about sharing their money with us.

Now, we're informed by the same sources that spending $700 billion BILLION of OUR money to support THEM is required *right away and with as little reflection as possible* so we can save a bunch of mismanaged banks and shameless speculators.

Well how fucking many banks do you need, anyway. Isn't that stuff insured? Isn't that something we've paid for, and our parents paid for, and their parents all the way back to the FDIC initiation? What did they pay for?

When's the last time we got a bail out of a mom & pop grocer? Or a family farm. Oh, but that's different...those ways of life were unworthy of government protection.

It's a con game, my friends. And it's a socialist power grab in a sense worse than even the very worst socialist sense.

The primary socialist tenet is, I believe, that the government owns the means of production. We are now-as I have written before and repeatedly since 1992-in a situation in which the means of production own the government. [yes, production is a generous term for paper or hypothetical value but that's a different piece]

This is considerably worse than historical socialism (assuming that you consider that to be a bad thing [oh come on, think Sweden or France or Venezuela, not totalitarianism, Alabama!], a question that I assume many will revisit on this least auspicious occasion-I still say that bureaucracy botches everything and so it's a bad idea taken straight).

Historical socialism provides for the many, this inverted mess only for the very few at the expense of absolutely everyone else. There is no counter argument that could make sense to anyone this side of Forrest Gump. In its own way, the end of history.

Unless McCain makes a major and immediate break with the economic legacy of his party over the past half decade, his new campaign slogan should be "Work For Us, And Pay Us For It. You'll Benefit.."

Yeah, I'd like to see Obama show more balls on the issue, too.

Hell, even Malthus would have laughed at anyone tempted to fall for it and my sense is that he didn't laugh much.

Oh wait, Bush's stooge, Henry Paulson, just explained that limiting the number of tens of millions that corporate CEOs can compensate themselves with for firing everyone else might discourage companies from wanting to participate! They might not want to participate in an allegedly absolutely necessary bail-out of their company if the amount of money they can award themselves for dissolving the company is limited to a few million bucks?

Wow times are bad. There really is a major problem with our economy.

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