Pollywogs!

So I’ve been thinking a lot recently. I guess that is normal, but instead of water off a ducks back it seems I feel pretty disturbed. I’ve also tried specifically not thinking, but that is surprisingly difficult to do. So, to help me more than for your own enjoyment or elucidation, here are a couple things that have been bothering me lately…

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On the distribution of wealth. Or, George Bush is a fucking dickhead and not only needs impeached, but he needs tried for his crimes.

“In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.

Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.”

Perhaps the idea behind this is that the wealth will trickle down. We’ve seen how well this works. Wealth trickles down to us, and then the rich take it right back to bail out investment banks who were specifically separated by law from consumer banks due to a gigantic fuck up in the past to prevent their failures from impacting the public. A tidy arraignment.

The disconnect is so severe, and the need for a change in attitude so pressing, it makes me just want to leave the fucking country behind and let it burn.

“Four of the biggest U.S. investment banks — Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. — will pay out about $49.6 billion US in compensation this year. Of that, bonuses are traditionally estimated to represent 60 per cent, or almost $30 billion US.

But that might not sit well with investors who held onto investment bank stocks this year — and watched them plunge by as much as 45 per cent. Investment houses have been slammed by the credit crisis and top executives this last week said they’ve yet to see a bottom.”

Yes. That is right, the executive compensation for a company where the stock dived from $160 a share to $2 a share is avery healthy quarter billion over the past decade, thank you. Coincidentally not much less than the entire company was sold for just after he got out.

Corporate fucking welfare. Let us change the dialog. Put the good of the people first, not the good of the elite few. Fuck corporate welfare…

“The current financial crisis may determine much more than which political party occupies the White House in 2009 — it could (and may already have) remake the zeitgeist. The Great Depression of the 1930s spawned the New Deal. Will the Great Credit Crunch of today potentially restructure how government, the financial markets and the general welfare intersect?

Only if we really want it to. New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has been telling us for years that the policy pendulum is finally swinging in the other direction. Liberalism is no longer a dirty word, he thunders; it’s high time for government to get back in the business of governing. He might be right. As we review the wreckage created by Wall Street’s finest minds, it is tempting to entertain the possibility that the impulse to deregulate and privatize and “trust” markets to be their own best guardian — that epochal re-imagining of government launched by Ronald Reagan — has finally run its course.”

This is probably the article I would have written about this mess if I had talent and ability.

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Do you remember when the cocksuckers in the Bush Administration said “No one could have predicted the strength of the insurgency” when trying to excuse away their supremely criminal and intentional negligence when it came to Iraq (and 9/11 incidentally)? Guess what. No only did someone predict it (besides the millions and millions of people around the world who protested before the Iraq war), that someone was THE FUCKING ARMY THEMSELVES.

“Iraq presents far from ideal conditions for achieving strategic goals. Saddam Hussein is the culmination of a violent political culture that is rooted in a tortured history. Ethnic, tribal, and religious schisms could produce civil war or fracture the state after Saddam is deposed. The Iraqi Army may be useful as a symbol of national unity, but it will take extensive reeducation and reorganization to operate in a more democratic state. Years of sanctions have debilitated the economy and created a society dependent on the UN Oil for Food Program. Rebuilding Iraq will require a considerable commitment of American resources, but the longer U.S. presence is maintained, the more likely violent resistance will develop.

The monograph concludes by developing and describing a phased array of tasks that must be accomplished to create and sustain a viable state. The 135 tasks are organized into 21 categories, and rated as “essential,” “critical,” or “important” for the commander of coalition military forces. They are then projected across four phases of transition— Security, Stabilize, Build Institutions, and Handover/ Redeploy—to reflect which governmental, nongovernmental, and international organizations will be involved in execution during each phase.”

Just like the Bush Administration listens to the generals on the ground (until they disagree and are fired/resign), the Bush Administration listens to intelligence until the point that it says something they do not want to hear. At which point they lie and continue doing what they were planning on doing the whole time.

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Jack who? Oh, that happened more than two days ago, right down the memory hole…

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The FCC, a tool of the Bush administration and the elite, just like everything else they have touched, corrupted and putrescent.

“It appears that a critical mass of FCC grunts are sick of what they experience as a super-politicized work life in which just about anything that they want to do has to get the go-ahead from the top, that being Kevin Martin. “Nothing happens in the Commission without the approval of the Chairman’s office,” my source told me. “It is incredible. We have become so political.”

Do you have any sense of the logic of these directives from the Chair? I asked. “Nope,” came the reply. “It seems as random as he got up this morning and ate his breakfast and just decided to do it.”

Why are FCC employees upset about this? Not because they disagree with Kevin Martin’s perspective on this or that FCC issue, but because, according to my source, he and his top subordinates demand that staff skip proper procedures and leapfrog various rules, even Congressional mandated rules, on a day-to-day level.

…The most formidable whistle blower I’ve encountered is former FCC attorney and now law professor Adam Candeub. Two years ago Candeub straight out told the press that a report arguing that locally owned TV stations broadcast more local news “was stopped in its tracks because it was not the way the agency wanted to go.” The study’s conclusions obviously implied that retaining some of the FCC’s media ownership caps might help those local TV stations survive.”

What happens when all of the decent and honest people are forced out of the government? Oh wait, I’ve read that book before…

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You could say I’m feeling a little discouraged. I’m feeling a little disappointed. I’m feeling the same rage and hatred against ignorance, willful negligence and reckless greed and avarice that I felt as a young child, tempered with the adults knowledge that all I am directly opposed by a titanic inertia. Hope, broken. Dreams, smashed. Yes, what they sing is true: despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage.

I guess in time I’ll come to accept the fact that this generation is not the generation that will change things? That this generation is not the one that is going to wake from our pacified slumber and realize that by merely deciding it will be so, we could change existence for the better?

Until we’ve made that conscious choice as a people (and by people I mean humans the world over), we’re treading water here. As much as I hesitate to sound New Age, I recognize that for mankind to continue to thrive and improve we are going to have to change the way we operate in a fundamental fashion. Until we put the thoughts into words, the words into possibility, it simply exists as a dream does, ethereal and insubstantial.

The analogy of the human people and their (rather, our) societies as an individual growing up comes back to me, over and over. We are just now shaking off the nightmare of our childhood, and yet we still have so very far to go to become mature and responsible. We show moments of greatness and then relapse into our infantile ways. We truly are at a crux, our potential paths leading down so many different roads; the future, ahead and unknown…

You grab the low fruit while considering how to get at the high fruit. We need some immediate and basic corrections. Obama will do for now (hopefully quite well) as there are so many obvious problems that need corrected he should keep quite busy grabbing that low fruit over the next four years. I hope he does very well. However, I fear that Bush has taken a chainsaw to the apple tree…as gin-stained tears run down my nose, will I learn to love Big Brother?