December 1, 2015

Being of the older persuasion, I'll probably vote for Mrs. Clinton

Giving her any time or money is out of the question, but I don't see anything wrong with voting for the lesser of two evils if there's a Plan B.

If the Sanders campaign is the start of a mass movement on left, then there is a Plan B. We can and should merge with other elements of the left with the purpose of undermining the [i\status quo of free trade, an unregulated and crooked financial industry, the curtailing of civil liberties militarized police and resource wars in the Middle East. The goal will be to castrate the oligarchy and establish stronger democracy than ever before. We will have no patience for the democracy is dysfunctional, that's why American is a republic meme. That may have made sense in 1787, when many of the founding fathers owned slaves and most of the others didn't challenge their right to own slaves, but today it is nothing more than an hollow slogan for a decaying aristocracy that is now fooling itself into think they can codify their right to own the planet and ride roughshod over the rest of us with a few free trade deals. To paraphrase one of their own criminal masterminds, a free trade deal is just a piece of paper. There is no reason for us to abide by laws passed by bought congressmen or signed into law by a bought president or reviewed by bought judges. These people have no moral right to govern us.

The very word aristocracy means rule by the best, but throughout history no class that ever claimed that mantle has anything more than a gaggle of corrupt, decadent sonsofbitches looking out for their own self interest at the expense of the common people. No aristocracy ever ended well for the aristocrats. The aristocracy of industrialists and financiers at the end of the age of fossil fuels will fare no better.

Rule by the best? Isn't that a hoot? The best who crashed the world economy, not just in 2008 but multiple times, started one war after another and polluted the entire planet making money on carbon emissions? If they're the best, then I'm a retired kamikaze pilot. I, for one, am convinced that workers on the factory floor in Detroit could design, build and market a better car than the dummies in the penthouse suites at Ford (Found On Road Dead) or GM (Gallons per Mile.

The only legitimate government is democracy. The safety, health and welfare the people as a whole are a government's only legitimate concern. We don't need to complicate the equation any longer by mistaking artificial persons, who are made out of legal documents, with real people who are made out of flesh and blood. The resources of the world belong to all of us. The bounty of the earth belong to all of us. The Earth itself belongs to all of us, every grain of land and drop in the seas and all that is on it and all that is under it and all that flies or blows or shines over it.

This is the new world order by our decree.

November 29, 2015

That's also a Venusian feature

Life evolved a little differently on Venus. Due to the heat of the planet's surface (approx 450° C), the most complex life that evolved is reptilian. A reptile's cold blood takes less time to warm up and but enough energy into the animal to get it mobile at the start of the day, and because of the density of Venus' atmosphere the night aren't too cool, either, warm blooded animals never evolved on that planet.

Venusians also have copper-based hemoglobin. You may be familiar with this from American pop culture in that Vulcanians such as Mr. Spock have green blood because the hemogobin is copper based. As we all know, the planet Vulcan doesn't really exist. The creators of Star Trek simply borrowed the idea from what they knew Venusian biology.

What isn't known to most of us Earthlings is that Venusians have a very unusual color spectrum which causes them to see green as blue, and therefore they think their blood is blue. Venusians raised in what we think of as a right wing ideology think that having blue blood is something special and superior to all other intelligent beings in the solar system. Of course, that's just delusional thinking, but it does explain a of European history, as the royal families of Europe are actually Venusians who see their green blood as blue and think we red-blooded people of Earth should bow down to them. Some witnesses to the execution of Marie Antoinette claimed the guillotine was stained green when her head fell into the basket, but Habsburg relatives in Austria as well as her Bourbon brothers-in-laws, who later ruled as Louis XVIII and Charles X, insisted her blood was blue.

There is also evidence that the Bolshevik executioners of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 were shocked to see the splattering of green blood as the family lay dying. Also executed with the Romanovs were the family doctor and some servants, but their blood was red. Once again, surviving members of the Russian nobility insisted that the spilled blood was blue.

As it turns out. by the end of the nineteenth century, many of the royal families of Europe did not have pure green blood. This is because all English monarchs since 1066 are the descendants of William the Conqueror, who was the illegitimate son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, and Herleva of Falaise, the daughter of a common red-blooded tanner. During the nineteenth century, the children of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, a descendant of William, and Prince Albert, who was of more purely Venusian stock, maried into other European royal families, including the Hohenzollerns in Prussia and the Romanovs of Russia. Consequently, the proud "blue blooded" ruling monarchs of three of the ruling parties in World War I were the descendants of a French tanner born in the late tenth century, a time when Europe was the mud pit of the world.

Europe's sorry state from the Roman Empire was due largely to the influence of the Venusian nobility. The Roman emperors themselves were Venusians, which explains why the Roman empire was and continues to be overrated as in its governing institutions. Since Venusians are cold blooded and Earth isn't anywhere near as warm as a cold day on Venus, Venusian over generations tend to lose their intellectual capacity. The Roman Empire was built and kept together not by its rulers, who were as inept as they were bloody, but by well trained red-blooded soldiers and by brilliaint engineers, also culled from the common people. The Venusian rulers of Rome, mentally diseased from the lack of heat in their new planetary environment, could only provide the idea of expansion of power through bloody wars; the common people of Rome went along because the Venusians went easier on them as the Venusians got a fresh supply of newly-conquered people to beat, torture and tax. Starting as early as the first century AD, Rome began experiencing the effects of the degeneration of Venusian intellect due to living on a planet to which they were not adapted in the person of such bloody emperors as Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. The empire fell in the West after a string of emperors who were so inept that they couldn't defend the empire from invasions by uncivilized but red-blooded and quick barbarians and adopt a debauched lifestyle at the same time.

November 25, 2015

Dr King died when I was 16 and was already a hero to me

It wasn't unusual for young people in their mid-teens growing up during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement to be more politically aware than they are now. In those days, watching Walter Cronkite every evening for half an hour left one more informed about national and international events than watching CNN all day does now.

Martin Luther King did, in fact, make white people uncomfortable. He had no use for white supremacy and said so. However, he was a man whose life's work was to unite people of good will together to work for justice. Justice is simply not compatible with any system of rigid hierarchy, including white supremacy. White supremacy was the idea underpinning not only the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but European imperialism through the mid-twentieth century and the neocolonialism of US foreign policy as manifested by the Vietnam War and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq; it goes a long ways to explain why invading Afghanistan morphed from a quest to apprehend Osama bin Laden into America's longest war.

Dr. King had a deceptively calm and comforting manner that didn't scare some white people as much as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver.

I recommend this thread, but please clink on the link in Bravenak's OP and read the entire article, which is quite good and gives a much better understanding of Dr. King in the context of his time and why the author of the article feels Dr. King would take the stands on today's issues that he ascribes to him.

November 24, 2015

A Small Quibble with Killer Mike

Killer Mike, the rapper, introduced Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders by saying "I have no time . . . to relive the Reagan years; I have no desire to elect our own Margaret Thatcher."

The comment comparing Hillary Clinton to Margaret Thatcher can be dismissed as campaign hyperbole, and that's all I'll say about that for now. As for reliving the Reagan years, I have just one small quibble with that.

We should recognize Reagan as a consequential president, but by no means a great one. Even though his predicessor spent four years just trying to get a handle on what he was doing, Jimmy Carter left America in much better shape than Reagan left it. It has gotten steadily worse ever since.

It's not a point of reliving the Reagan years, it's continuing to live them. We've been living the Reagan years since the election of 1980 and it's long past time to put an end to them.

Every president since Reagan has been a Reaganite to a considerable degree. Reagan may have been a wiser Reaganite in the sense that after his first big tax cut in his first year as president he adjusted taxes upward several times, but the economy was structurally weaker as a result of supply-side policies. Income inequality didn't begin with Reagan, but it was badly exacerbated under him and Bush the Preppy, who also had to eat his words and raise taxes. Under Bill Clinton, tax cuts were more judiciously targeted at the middle class, but the foolishness of cutting taxes for the rich was not rolled back. Income inequality slowed, but did not reverse. For that reason, Clinton's tenure in the White House should not be regarding as either a ringing success or an abject failure. Nevertheless, there were several bad marks against Clinton and the Republican Congress with which he was saddled after his first two years in office. The worst of these were welfare reform, financial industry reform and NAFTA. The first of these made the plight of the poor in American even more dire and the second was a means to corrupt both the banking industry and politicians, allowing bankers and politicians to get richer at the expense of the public. The third put a big hit on American manufacturing and cost middle-class Americans well paying jobs which still haven't returned, and probably won't ever without a major change in US trade policy.

What might have seemed like a major event during Clinton's presidency was his impeachment in 1999, but this was merely a distracting side show of no real consequence other than the time and money wasted. Essentially, President Clinton was impeached for getting a blow job in the oval office from a White House intern. Tacky, yes; impeachable, no. The two articles of impeachment were so weak that neither received a simple majority vote in the Senate, let alone the two-thirds vote required to remove him from office.

After Clinton came Bush the Frat Boy. What can be said about him other than he was the worst president ever? Caught napping on September 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, Bush invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to bring criminal mastermind Osama bin Laden to justice, but his real intention was to invade Iraq, overthrow the Iraqi government on the pretense that it was complicit in the September 11 attacks, had illegally stockpiled a biochemical arsenal and was building a nuclear weapons. Although there was talk about democratizing Iraq after the invasion, the real purpose was to secure Iraq's oil fields for western oil companies. A Reaganite ideologue with no grounding in reality, Bush would not raise taxes to pay for the war, thus blowing a big hole in future budgets. The initial debts obligated for the war were about $2 trillion. It is estimated that when the last check goes to pay the last benefit to a veteran's surviving spouse, the war will have cost Americans $6 trillion. These expenses, combined with tax cuts for the rich who didn't need them that still haven't been repealed and the cost of a second war in Afghanistan that still hasn't ended, will make it very difficult to recover from from what is now 35 long, long years of Reaganomics. In addition, Bush eroded civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism and instituted a program of torture supported with legal opinions from White House lawyers basically saying that as long the administration refuses to call torture torture then it's perfectly legal. Finally, the Bush administration's laissez-faire approach to Wall Street crime resulted in the crash of the World Economy in the final months of Bush's tenure. Naturally, income inequality grew by leaps and bounds under Bush and in the last year of his term the American economy was hemorrhaging jobs at an alarming rate.

Many of us, including your most humble hare, thought that wen we voted for Barack Obama we were voting for a new, post-Reagan era of American politics, but were sadly disappointed after President Obama took office. Obama has several feathers in his cap: the Affordable Care Act is an excellent start toward real health care reform, the goal being a single payer system and the elimination of private insurance companies as an unnecessary and inefficient middle man; the end of the Iraq war has stopped a great deal of fiscal bleeding; and President Obama's preference for a diplomatic solution to an international crisis over sending in the Marines with no exit strategy have prevented wars before they start, much to the chagrin of his Republican opposition, saving American taxpayers untold money and saving the lives of an unknown number of combat troops. He also gets kudos for ending the Bush torture program, although with demerits for failing to prosecute Bush war crimes. More seriously, the administration's failure to prosecute crooked Wall Street bankers is without excuse and even worse than the failure to prosecute war criminals, as Wall Street's criminals still continue to commit crimes and acts that should be crimes no different than what they did to crash the world economy in 2008. Obama has put before a Congress a horrible trade deal that not only will further erode what's left of the American middle class through job losses and even provide a strong ISDS that oligarchs can run to any time they think the mean ol' government is regulating them and depriving them of expected profits. Do corporations now have a right to profits? What would Adam Smith say? The other two deals not yet ready to be presented to Congress are apparently worse. TISA, the last of the terrible trio, would deprive formerly sovereign nations of the right to nationalize industries that grow too troublesome in regards to public health or worker safety.

Income inequality continues to plague the American economy at an an unacceptable level. Some of this is the result of the unprecedented and frankly racist opposition from the Republicans toward President Obama, but not all of it. No Republican made Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, pursue Wall Street criminal armed with only kid gloves. There is no escaping the conclusion that such favorable treatment is in return for generous campaign support for some of Wall Street's worst actors, especially Goldman Sachs. No Republican made President Obama negotiate TPP, TTIP or TISA. No Republican made President Obama appoint a Wall Street hack like Tim Geithner Treasury Secretary nor, when Geithner announced he was leaving office, made President Obama think out loud about appointing Larry Summers, Wall Street hack emeritus, as his successor. When Summers asked the President to withdraw his name from consideration for Treasury Secretary, Obama settled on Jack Lew, who isn't really much of an improvement over Summers or Geithner.

The next president will be Hillary Clinton. My disdain for Mrs. Clinton is no secret here. She is beholden to Wall Street and it is naive to think she's going to do what needs to be done, if anything at all, to rein in the excesses of Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd. She has received large donations from Wall Street banks on behalf of her campaign organization and the Clinton Foundation; she has received exorbitant six-figure speaking fees from them, and she and some of her supporters expect us to believe that there's no cozy relationship between Mrs. Clinton and Wall Street. I'll believe that there isn't when she nationalizes JPMorganChase or Goldman Sachs.

Meanwhile, I will vote for and give support to Bernie Sanders. He says we need a revolution. And we do. That's what it will take to end the Reagan years.

No matter who wins the election, it will be up to us, the common American people, to put an end to the Reagan years. If the system is so corrupt that we can't end it at the ballot box, then we'll do in the streets. The politicians who beg for our vote but take money from Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Health Insurance or Big Oil and, once safely elected, change their allegiance from the People to artificial persons. These crooked politicians should not be so naive to think that we will give deference to them, the laws they pass, the judges they appoint, the trade deals they negotiate or the wars they start and tell us it's for our own good because they are smarter than we we are, even if it doesn't always look that way. They have more money. Doesn't that prove that they are smarter?

No. It just proves that they're better at stealing our money, buying our politicians and destroying our democracy.

November 11, 2015

I don't want a way for artificial persons to make an end run around democatic governments

and cry to an unelected panel of corporate shysters when they don't realize expected profits (a benefit it could reasonably have expected to accrue to it . . . is being nullified or impaired as a result of the application of a measure of another Party that is not inconsistent with this Agreement). That is the gist of Chapter 28.

The other matters can be addressed without this horsepucky. What would Adam Smith say about a corporation suing for "expected" profits? There must be an earthquake in the vicinity of his resting place.

A corporation is not a human being. It has a charter from the state, not a birth certificate. It has what rights we give them. It is not entitled to human rights.

If a corporation wants a profit, it has every right to manufacture a safe product and put it on the market at a reasonable price in competition with other similar manufactured goods made in the market or even some that are as radically different as a solar panel is to a barrel of oil that accomplish the same thing.

By a safe product, I mean one that that doesn't harm the end user if used as directed, either as an individual or as a member of society or the biosphere. Yes, that means the state has the right to ban the use of tobacco products or even petroleum products, and that the poisoners at Philip Morris or the polluters at ExxonMobil should not be able to have a a private system of justice at its disposal in order to seek a more favorable judgment than one it might get in a real court.

I also don't think it proper for politicians who are guilty of taking bribes generous campaign contributions from corporate officers and high ranking corporate employees, even acting in the fictitious name of the corporation itself, to pass judgment on a radical document that upsets the world's political and legal order by granting artificial persons the right to realize expected profits, something that no reasonable person would expect to find in a state of nature. The majority of our congressmen, who punitively represent us, are bought and paid for by the very legal entities who stand to benefit from a document which they negotiated among themselves. If that sounds corrupt, there's a good reason for it.

Yes, I am calling for mass civil disobedience in response to the passage of the TPP and its sinister sister trade deals, TTIP and TISA. I think that would be the just and proper response. Moreover, I call for civil disobedience worldwide and maintain that very few will benefit from these deals and most of us will just be fucked over.

Having said that, there is a little matter I need some help me with. I have read parts of the TPP and perused over others, so I may have missed something that you seem to think is there. So persuade me that I'm all wet. Here's your assignment:

Thank you in advance.

November 5, 2015

!!

Up to now I haven't said that I won't vote for Mrs. Clinton; nor have I said that I will. I'll keep my final decision to myself.

Who wins this elections is less important than what we do afterwards. America has become an oligarchy, and oligarchies never end well for either the oligarchs or those they oppress. We will have to take matters into our own hands to wrest power from the oligarchs and restore democratic government. Who is elected will make no difference in that respect.

The word aristocracy means government by the best. Isn't that a hoot? Slave owners and serf drivers were never the best humanity had to offer and, by definition, were unfit to rule other men. I expect no more of industrialists and financiers who have rigged the system in there favor. We've seen what they have to offer us: a capitalist system without a middle class; a polluted world that never gets cleaned up. Nothing can make that a vision of a sustainable society. If the oligarchs who run a corporation want to do the right thing, they are helpless. To do so would put their corporation at a competitive disadvantage. That is the one thing they cannot do, that they can never do.

What is the one thing we cannot do? We cannot allow them to destroy life on this planet. We know that the many oligarchs have known for decades that climate change is not a hoax. For them to continue to drill for oil and mine for coal without taking into consideration what they doing to not just to our way of life but to life itself is an unimaginable, unspeakable crime against humanity.

It doesn't matter if the name for this system is neoliberalism, supply-side economics, trickle-down or Reaganomics. It must be put out of its misery before it fosters more misery to working people of the world, to all that live on the earth, drink its water and breath its air.

You and I, not the candidates of our choice, are the man on the white horse.

Power to the people.