Next point of business, please...

Now that he's confirmed, let's just hurry up and get the postmortem behind us.

Kavanaugh's chief qualifications for the Court are that he will be dependably pro-corporate and pro-plutocrat.  Born to wealth, power, and privilege, he never will find anything in the Constitution that might threaten the prerogatives of his class; and he'll vote to expand those prerogatives whenever the opportunity arises.  He might not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but he'll happily approve states legislating it into irrelevance.  After all, if some high school drunk knocks up one of his daughters, she won't have any trouble securing a safe, medical abortion.

Had Democrats genuinely wanted to stop Kavanaugh because of his moral failures, Feinstein's office could have had a quiet word with the White House Counsel while Kavanaugh was just a name on a list — but they said nothing.  It was only after he was nominated that Blasey-Ford's story –and her name– were leaked to the press.  Once her name was public, she had no choice but to testify.  Republicans may have been the ravening beasts, but Democrats were the ones who tossed her into the arena.  Throughout the entire sorry spectacle, Blasey-Ford was the only individual who behaved well .

Clearly, women will be better off if Democrats capture the House next month, and the same is true for anybody who is not part of the so-called "one percent" — but those who want the kinds of change that genuinely will make a difference have to do more.  We have to grab the Democratic Party by the neck and shake out the corporatists, the neoliberals, and the rest of the entrenched leadership.  When Bill Clinton and his "New Democrats" moved the Party to the right, they abandoned its principles.  It's time for real Democrats to take our Party back.

Tax Policy

I've been trying to figure out what kinds of tax policy are endorsed, respectively, by Obama and Romney.  It's not easy.  Yes, we know Obama wants the two top income tax brackets and the capital gains tax back where they were under Clinton, but those ideas are not policy — they're talking points.  They have as much chance of making it through Congress as a squirrel fart has of making it through a hurricane.  We also can look back to some Obama proposals when he and Boehner were trying to strike a "grand bargain," but those ideas were contingent on Boehner accepting some elements that he had no way of getting past the House he allegedly leads.

Romney is even harder to nail down.  He maintains he can lower everybody's taxes by plugging "tax loopholes," but he refuses to identify any of those "loopholes"  — better known as subsidies, tax credits, and tax deductions.  Personally, I think we would be better off if all the credits and deductions in our convoluted tax code were eliminated, and subsidies limited to R&D — albeit I think a lot of it has to be done gradually.

The biggest "loophole" of all is the mortgage interest deduction.  At this time, it applies to interest on loans of up to one million dollars, which means it is regressive.  The greatest advantages go to those who finance the most expensive homes — which means that people like you and me, who don't live in $125 million dollar homes, get a lot less out of the deduction than our more affluent non-neighbors do.  Renters get nothing.

Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction would depress property values, because without that deduction, home buyers could not afford the payments on more expensive homes.  Even homes sold out of foreclosure would cost their buyers more.  The solution is to drop the cap on mortgage interest deductions gradually, so that property values could adjust gradually.  Needless to say, this won't happen.

Representative democracy in conjunction with capitalism doesn't work too well.  The people who want to lead us feed us bullshit.  The plutocrats control the flow of money, power, and ideas.  I don't suppose it bothers too many of us with consistent sources of income and decent health insurance all that much, but it bothers me.

The current Republican credo is "leave every child (except mine) behind, so long as I get to hang onto my current comfort level."  It just might work this November, but it still makes me sick.

The Occupation

I don't believe the media really does not understand what it is the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd and their cousins around the country are demanding. Maybe news types are so accustomed to "specific" recommendations like Perry's call to drill for oil and gas in National Wildlife Refuges or Cain's idea for an immensely regressive national sales tax (more on that in a later post) that a simple idea like "Stop the goddamned plutocratic parasites from sucking our blood" is beyond their comprehension.

No, it's not beyond their comprehension. They just don't like to think about such a scary idea because the media are owned and controlled by goddamned plutocratic parasites. So who is left to explain the Occupation's simple, straightforward message to the long-deluded segment of the 99% who haven't quite caught on?

Simple. Those of us who do understand have to make every effort to explain, face to face, to those who don't. Most people catch on immediately, even those who never heard the word "plutocrat" before. Do not leave the task to organizations like MoveOn.org, which are working hard to co-opt a populist movement on behalf of Obama and the Democrats. The Democrats — especially since Clinton — have done just as much to advance the parasitic/plutocratic agenda as the Republicans.

Screw the Democrats. It's time for us to do it ourselves.

Hey, what happened?

While I've been calming down from that last post — not to mention the consummation of that Faustian bargain I mentioned — it seems many others have been getting a bit more excited. Today's market plunge may be just more of the "volatility" which indicates that nobody knows what the hell is going on. On the other hand, it just may be that investors finally have figured out that austerity is not likely to be good for their investments.

After all, the corporate world has been sitting on its money and spending bupkes for the past couple of years, and plutocrats tossing their loose change around at Bergdoff-Goodman and Tiffany do not an economy make. When the United States joined Europe in the cult of what Krugman calls "the confidence fairy," it appears many Wall Streeters decided it was time to listen to the economists rather than the Koch brothers.

Then, of course, there's the SUPER-COMMITTEE, whoopie doo! Since the Republicans already have sworn that no tax increase supporters nor loophole closers will be appointed to their six, one supposes they are assuming at least one of the Democratic appointees will be an Obamesque anilinguist (and one assumes that we all can assume they are correct in that assumption. And, okay, I haven't calmed down all that much.)

I know I swore off making predictions a while back, and hence I will refrain — but I just can't see anything good coming out of any of this.

Army of World Capitalism

Since Robert Gates recently called for reductions in defense spending, an interesting and, to many, surprising statistic has been in the press — the fact that the United States military is larger than all the other armies in the world, combined. Some even are daring to ask why. Why is our Department of Defense so large, what is it defending, and what is it defending against?

Thirty years ago, we could be told it was defending us from "the Communist threat." These days, it's hard to justify such a force to "protect" us from Cuba, North Korea and (maybe) Vietnam. China's system, over the years, has "developed" into fascism, and they're hardly likely to try to destroy us while we owe them so much money.

Right now we have roughly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan "defending" us from a few hundred "terrorists," most of whom are in Pakistan. There are close to another 50,000 still in Iraq — but they're not (ahem!) "combat" troops. We have troops deployed in over 150 countries around the world, and some questions are in order:

• Why are there as many troops in Germany as in Iraq? Are the Nazis making a comeback?
• Why almost 10,000 troops in the UK? Are we expecting another blitz?
• Why do we need another 10,000 in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar if Iraq is "at peace?"
• From what threat are nearly 33,000 US troops defending Japan?
• With all those troops in Japan, what's the need for another 28,000 in South Korea? Foot soldiers would not be especially effective against North Korean nukes.
  

Let's not forget the Navy, which has ships sailing around every body of water in the world big enough to hold them. In brief, why does the United States need a worldwide military presence?

To me, the answer if fairly obvious. Multinational corporations have a worldwide presence, and the United States seems to be stuck with the task of defending them (and their profitability) worldwide. Which leads to another question: why us? There are plenty of European and Asian and Middle Eastern plutocrats profiting from World Capitalism, and even some Latin Americans and Africans getting into the mix. Upholding the world plutocracy is expensive! Why can't some of those other countries pick up some of the expense?

Notice that I'm not calling for the plutocrats to pay for their own protection from popular uprisings, sticky fingered premiers and prime ministers with a penchant for nationalization, and those who want to replace the current monopolists with new monopolists. I know that's impossible.

The plutocrats don't pay — they just take. It follows that I'm not expecting anybody in the US government to make a serious effort to block raising the debt ceiling. Where would their corporate patrons go for their "defense?"

Terminology: the "Democrat Party"

One of the simplest ways to distinguish a rational conservative from a doctrinaire, rabidly politicized right winger is by the way they refer to the "enemy." Reasonable and respectful conservatives (who value good manners) refer to their adversaries as the "Democratic Party." For the others, the locution, inevitably, is the "Democrat Party." Since the 1940s, the noun to adjective transformation has been regarded as less-than-subtle-but-still-deniable slur by most observers — although when used by George W. Bush, it was widely regarded as an indication of semi-literacy. Much the same can be said for its use by Sarah Palin — but when used by John Boehner and Charles Grassley, idiocy is not a sufficiently viable excuse.

Far be it from me to maintain that the Democratic Party — much less the Republican Party — might in any way be truly small-d "democratic." They both could change their names to "the Plutocrat Party," thereby clearing up any remaining confusion and better satisfying truth-in-advertising regulations. Nevertheless, I have a suggestion for such Democrats who have adopted the term "Teabaggers," as well as others who still refrain from references to gay sexual tomfoolery in their policy statements.

I suggest the term, 'Publicans. I doubt that most rank-and-file right-wingers will associate the word with the owners and hosts of British taverns, since few are familiar with British English (and even some of their leaders continue to struggle with American English.) On the other hand, a great many social conservatives, at least, will know the word from their Bibles — where "publicans" refers to private contractors employed by the Roman Empire "who erected or maintained public buildings, supplied armies overseas, or collected certain taxes, particularly those supplying fluctuating amounts of revenue to the state." (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2008)

It fits. Dick Cheney and his sock puppet W went a long way towards the further privatization of war, not content with the vast size of the military-industrial complex they inherited from earlier administrations. Think of Xe (Blackwater). Think of Halliburton. Think of the privatized toll roads in states like Texas and Indiana. Think of the proposals to privatize Social Security.

Rome, you may recall, came to depend on an outsourced military — while entertaining the plebeian population with gladiatorial combat and FOX news — only to fall into chaos.

Okay, they didn't have FOX news, but I think you get the idea. Rome — replete with corruption, greed, and extreme sports — inevitably fell.

(Well, at least Rome provided bread along with the circuses. The 'Publicans think that's just a waste of good privatized wealth.)

The Naughts

Everybody seems to agree that the past decade has been pretty crappy. Some like to blame the Bush administration, but I don't. Granted, Bush and his cronies were incompetent and corrupt, but they were just the culmination (I hope) of a process that started with Reagan in 1981.

How anybody ever managed to believe in supply-side economics and monetarism is beyond me, but when you consider how many people believe the world is less than 6,000 years old, I guess making the jump to supply-side is not that difficult. Anyway, I don't think that political leaders ever bothered to believe any economic theory at all. Starting with Reagan, they were just corporatists — dancing at the ends of strings in the hands of lobbyists and bankers.

The result is our current plutocracy — a system that neither the Obama administration nor any significant portion of Congress seems at all inclined to unwind. The fact that the events of the past 10 years have demonstrated, over and over, that the "magic of the market" is entirely mythical makes no difference to those in power. They feel obliged to keep spouting the same anti-regulatory, anti-tax nonsense — and for good reason.

They're bought and paid for.

Don't expect much to change. Health reform won't be allowed to infringe on the profit margins of hospitals, insurance companies, or pharmaceutical manufacturers. If our troops ever are withdrawn from Afghanistan (or even Iraq), there will be new places to invade for the benefit of military contractors. Somewhere on Wall Street, the next bubble is taking shape, and nothing will be done to break up the banks that are "too big to fail."

I'm guessing the "naughts" will go on a while longer. There's nothing in sight to bring them to an end.

Too much goddamned money

Back during the first term of the Reagan Administration, I remember a conversation I had with a physicist who recently had immigrated from Communist Poland. He was enjoying a much higher standard of living over here, and was very happy to be living in the United States. "Back in Poland," he observed, "the government owns all the big businesses."

"Here," I replied, "the big businesses own the government."

It was still an overstatement back then. The Reagan Revolution was in its infancy, and although Reaganauts were happily slashing government's regulatory powers (anybody remember the savings and loan crisis?) and school lunches*, it would be another 25 years before the revolution was complete. (Yes, this includes participation by the Clinton Administration.)

Today, we are told, voters are clamoring for change. More than anything, they want government that is more responsive to their wants and needs. Let's have a look at one example.

According to a CBS News poll conducted in September, a majority of Americans support a single-payer system of national health insurance. Nevertheless, no viable Democratic candidate (sorry, Dennis) has proposed single-payer as a solution to our health care problems. And why not? Isn't this a democracy?

Nope. Sorry, but it isn't.

If you'd had a few competent teachers, you would know that the USofA is a republic. From time to time in our history, it is a democratic republic, in that those who govern are genuinely representative of the people. At other times, it is a plutocratic republic: those who govern represent monied interests. The plutocrats ruled during the Gilded Age, when Mark Twain remarked that we had "the best Congress money can buy." They rule again today.

The blatant abuse of power by Bush/Cheney is just the icing on the cake. The Reagan Revolution, which delivered this country into the hands of the plutocrats, was complete before George W. Bush was sworn in. What we experienced over the past seven years was just the first unabashed use of that power, with emphasis on the transfer of more and more wealth to the super-rich.

As ordinary Americans, our biggest problem is that some people just have too much goddamned money. They use it to buy political power, and they use that power to accumulate even more money -- at the expense of ordinary Americans.

The only hope for those of us in the "lower classes" is the fact that the plutocrats are not a unified block. Now that the poor have been drained dry and the middle classes are buried in debt, they are beginning to turn on each other.

John Edwards has positioned himself as a doughty David fighting the Goliath of corporate power. This makes sense, because Edwards and his most generous contributors are tort lawyers, who earned their own fortunes by suing corporations. As corporate interests become more and more powerful, they pay for legislation ("tort reform") that makes it harder for tort lawyers to sue, and much harder for them to win large settlements.

Understandably, the Edwards campaign has not received much play in the corporate media, and his chances of winning the presidential nomination are slight (although still far better than those of Dennis Kucinich, the real populist and people's representative to whom I apologized above.) Personally, I don't care what motivates the Edwards campaign -- I still see him as the best chance to undo some of the damage done over the past few decades.

Both Clinton and Obama are running to the alleged "center," and both their campaign staffs are full of neo-liberals from the Bill Clinton White House. Frankly, I don't see much difference between them. Right now, I suppose I'm hoping for a minor miracle -- but I'm not holding my breath.

If you'd like to explore who's paying for whom, try WhiteHouseForSale.org.