the defeatists!

We're all goin' done to Dixie...and Walmart

We are at a cultural moment when living in close proximity and having many close friends and a ceaseless embracing community are thought to be unalloyed goods. "Bowling alone" is our shorthand for personal despair and social disintegration. However, as I dare say you - like Jean-Paul Sartre - have noticed, people can be annoying. We need distance from, as much as we need association with, one another. Thoreau tried for both: he would walk from Walden Pond to Concord, hang out with his dear friends the Emersons and the Alcotts, and then retreat to his hovel to be fairly happily alone.

If on such occasions Thoreau was thinking in his reflective way that human beings are animals and that what we do is natural, then he did not consider his stroll into Concord a departure from nature but an exploration of a bit of it. And this is the way I feel about Walmart, which - big-box island in a blacktop sea - is a perfectly natural object, as much an environment as my woods.

Walmart is no Concord. And if Greg will pardon my saying so, he is no Emerson or Alcott, though possibly he is a better golfer than either. Then again, he is also not my dear friend... 

Crispin Sartwell  is  a friend of mine. We are supposedly both charter members of the Defeatists as well as my being an occasional commentator on his blog, Cheese it, the Cops. Crispy is a philosophy professor for Dickinson College, a former rock and roll critic, a retired environmental terrorist and a fairly interesting guy for a lot of reasons, including his part time job as a blackjack and three card monte dealer in an alley in back of Trump's in Atlantic City. He has kids, college looming and teaches philosophy at a private college. Cut the man some slack OK!

This is an interesting piece for a lot of reasons. Although some of the Defeatist-Malcontent collective and carp fishing gang professed confusion at what he was saying, I think he was being kind of cynically lyrical. Crispin appears to be going through a phase...I kind of like the idea of Walmart as our Walden, since except for pithy phrases here and there, I despise Walden...The Transcendentalists were smug, self-satisfied bourgeois Babbits who inflicted themselves on us ever since. Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau are not and never were Tinker, Evers and Chance. Or, Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg. The insufferable rightness of the Yankee ascendency irritates me -- concepts do have dates, citing another philosophical friend of mine, Mary Hunt.

 

However, it says a lot about the leveling experience of our current distribution of wealth. The wealthy are really wealthy and the middle-working-under classes are going shopping for Guatemalian Strawberries and Pride of Gwangzhou Blu-Ray players.

I picture Thoreau in a Lime Green UnderArmour  T-shirt with khaki shorts and Birkenstocks with anklets...with some bacon flavored tofu and Miller beer as well as the blu-ray and socks...they'd probably be white, with colored strips at the top of the ankle. He's also got a 20 pack of toilet paper, some duct tape and a couple of HelloKitty training bras...he nicked himself shaving, and uses too much Aqua Velva. He whitens his teeth, and sells real estate. He has a Blackberry. He goes by "HD" or "Davie" and takes antidepressants.

 

Alejandro is the guy with the sunglasses...in a radio studio in Seattle. Chuck, in this case, looks kinda like Thoreau...or, Crispin. 

 

Got a 5.0 Ford and a copy of Concluding Unscientific Postscript

  

 I just came to the conclusion that except for oddities and occasional fill-ins, I will probably never "work" for anyone except wife, cats and whim again, and I shockingly realized that I actually don't give a fuck. In fact, feel pretty good. It's been surreal, real, fun, occasionally real fun but mainly just tedium and putting up with a fine broth of idiots, assholes, and asslickers. Going to the cafe to join Rhett Miller and Soren Kierkegaard, Chris Hitchens, Brian Jones, Mr. Jennings and Socrates...

As Mr. Miller and the boys so eloquently put it ....

Gettin out of the house.
Im gonna go for a ride,
Cause I got me a five-o Ford
and the good Lord knows I tried
to make friends with you
and evrything went wrong.
Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.

Goin down to the tracks.
Im gonna hide out for a while.
Gonna have me some ranch-style beans
From a tin can hobo-style,
Forget your face,
If that can be done.
Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.

And youll find you a boyfriend
And he wont like my cat.
And youll try to
Pretend that you dont want me back.
Right now Im leavin So youd better say, So long. Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin 
Im goin Im gone.

Gonna find me a boat
And a brand new name.
Im gonna find some wall-eyed,
Weak-kneed European dame.
Shell be my wife
And youll only be a song.
Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.

And youll find you a boyfriend
And he wont like my cat.
And youll try to
Pretend that you dont want me back.
Right now Im leavin So youd better say, So long. Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin 
Im goin Im gone.

Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.

Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin 
Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.

Jesus.
Well, what do ya do about a string breakin 
Oh, nothin  

So, to steal a line from Graham Nash to Steven Stills back in the No Nukes Movie and you're looking for an executive like me, well, "Steven, if you need me, call. And Steven, don't call."

 

Alienation is a helluva drug

Last night I dreamt of you, Abbie Hoffman peddling your books, I gave five bucks to you, the other kids just gave you dirty looks.

 I said "I'm sorry it didn't work out quite the way you planned."

You said, "That's silly boy, the revolution is at
hand."

And if you got a ten spot brother, I got a dime,
These are desperate,
desperate times.

Last night I dreamt of you, Pepe Lopez strung out on a stage, It don't even look like you, smiling like sawed-off twenty gauge.
I still remember the
Telecaster down around your knees,
It's late November and I think I smell tequila on the
breeze.

And if you got the Cuervo honey, I got the lime,
These are desperate,
desperate times.
And if you got the shotgun honey, I got the crime,
These are
desperate, desperate times.--Rhett Miller

Crusader AXE has been too busy dealing with family issues to write or think or do anything really coherent of late. Mrs. AXE retired from Federal Service after 35 years of helping to make the state function, if not optimally, at least better than if she were not there. The afternoon of her last day, she got the diagnosis of colon cancer...so, by mid-month she was in the hospital for surgery, and there she remains. Friday will be three weeks...the words rehab facility were spoken last night. I am not exactly happy about this -- I have no complaints about the quality of her care for the most part, or the professionalism or kindness of the staff. I have concerns about the quantity of the staff...I think this is a problem nationwide, but probably more acute in Southern California because there are so goddamn many people... 

Things haven't gone well. They appear to be unable to actually get the bag to seal to Joyce's skin, which results in her constantly leaking. She remains in the hospital; her surgeon was there last evening and found himself helping try to get the illeostomy bag to work. They had had five iterations earlier, all failing. Which results in linking shit all over everything. On Tuesday,  I had had a brain fart when I left the Crossroads of Opportunity to go to the hostpital after getting home at 1130 Monday night  and had to stop in Target and buy her clothes to come home with. Well, that didn't work as planned...Had gotten her a stuffed animal for a comfort thing, and that got to come home tonight along with the socks she'd been wearing, all of it shit stained. Surgeon is confused since this is a "good stoma" since the hunk of intestine that's leaking into the bag is what he can do with what's available to him. For some reason, they can't seem to get the base of the bag to seal correctly with her skin, and as a result it leaks out the sides. Now, the surgeon does not want her coming home until they get this to the point where she has some faith in it, and the topic of nursing homes came up. I noticed that they do not seem to have a standard procedure, and are experimenting. They have 1 (ONE) colostomy nurse on staff and one brand of stuff with not all the possibilities covered. Anyway, the surgeon had them get some surgical adhesive from the emergency room -- if they can get that to work, and keep the base fully closed on the body, she'll be able to come home. If not, the word nursing home was used tonight. She would prefer that to having her small intestine leak all over her home, but she'd prefer to have the bag work and be able to come home. To finish healing, so she can go back in and have the ostomy reversed and go back to a normal set of solid waste disposal equipment.

I thought that I'm pretty much ok with this. After all, I'm a tough guy, it's not fun or easy, but I'm just lending moral support and helping her when I happen to be there. And, washing the stuffed big eyed Zebra she's got for company. I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that it's a lot harder on me than I thought. Just beat all the time. I go in there, help her get out of bed to use the commode and such stuff, and feel if not helpless at best incompetent. 

Did I mention that getting her to eat is hard? Today she had a hard boiled egg, a piece of toast, and two bottles of Boost Clinical Strength. Well, since whatever she eats is leaking out of her side all over her within an hour or two, she's probably not all that interested...So, at some point this will get resolved but I'm not feeling comfortable with how it's going. She's still in a lot of pain although a lot of it is from the irritation on her skin. They were using something as a binding agent that was largely alcohol. Great...the woman has inflamed skin caused by chemical burns and part of their solution is rubbing it with alcohol. Surgeon is getting incensed...wonder why? Shit. 

Medicine could stand to have some statistical process control and analysis. Got a call from a rep at one of three companies that manufacture and distribute colostomy supplies. There are drying agents, it turns out, that do not involve alcohol. If you have what are basically chemical burns over an area and they need to dry the skin to apply something, using an alcohol drying agent is a pretty bad idea. Unless you're trying to wring out a confession....the gal apologized for the hospital, saying that "a lot of times the product works first time but a lot of times it's a process of trial and error." Sure, let's look at new, non asbestos options for brake pads. Let's start with cheese....nothing is a better stopper than curdled milk products!" 

I've always been a fan of Tiberius Caesar, pre-Capri. I know that my friends IOZ and Captain Capitualtion probably prefer him at Capri, IOZ becuse of lifestyle appeal and Crispin because he just said screw government...but pre-Capri, he was kind of a Julian John Adams.  Grumpy old bastard following Augustus who just quietly went about making the state work. Would be welcome today -- I think that is where dictators come from, the inability of representative systems to work adequately. Or at all, over time. 

 

I don't care about gay marriage.  I'm not that concerned about using predator drones, Gitmo as we sweep up the ashes of the Bush administration, and so on.  I want the state to work. Jobs,food, schools, infrastructure...I want to turn the ignition on my car and not have the fucking thing blow up because there's no requirement to make a car that won't blow up when the car is started. I want to eat a cheeseburger assured that it's not made of horse or rancid meet. I want the ideal society of 1950s Eisenhower Republican America only with racial and gender equality. The curiously fucked up world that I was alienated by/against doesn't look bad at all as a baseline. 

Reading a book on my KIndle while visiting Mrs. AXE  called The Angry Buddhist. Involves California celebrity politics, dog murder, and various forms of madness. Poor protagonist is trying to use the Dharma to keep from ripping the head off a lot of people. It ultimately seems to have the theme that, well, make a list, motherfucker. And keep making it -- you'll never run out of vacuous, vicious and verminous assholes needing to have their heads ripped off. 

 One of my brothers sent out this note about Genesse Cream Ale going back to retro packaging. Upstate NY had some pretty good local beers. Utica Club, Genesse...Utica Club had talking Beer Steins in commercials when I was a kid -- Shultz and Dooley; Genny talked about the sparkling waters of Hemlock late. Far better than 'Gansett or, for that matter, Coors or Strohs. Of course, there had been the Haverly-Congress line, that I still recall a joke of my dad's after they closed down. He said that it happened because they sent a sample in to be tested in the State Lab regulating such stuff, and got an emergency call saying, "Shoot the horse, it's got diabetes..."Still remember the song for the singing beer mugs -- "Brew me no brew with artificial bubbles, those carbonated beers of today/Cause Utica Club'll still take the trouble to AGE BEER THE NATURAL WAY! Utica Club, UC!!"

 

Allen West climbs the shit pile of historical disgrace and crows about it

 

One of the benefits of the profound ignorance of a large swaithe of the American people lies in their inability to recognize irony. So, when a first term member of congress who is probably looking at being a one term member of Congress pulls something out not from the Karl Rove playbook but the Joe McCarthy playbook, people will miss it. Our political discourse has skipped self-satire and gone straight to slapstick. As Gibbs rule number 7 puts it, "when you lie, be specific."  Allan West, Congressman from Mesron and Florida, is now trying to win a redistricted, largely Democratic district by railing against the Democratic Progressive Caucus as "Communists' announcing that he's "heard that 80 member of congress are communists." You see, the American Communist party, the old Gus Hall powerhouse, has said that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is reasonably close to endorsing their goals. (In the spirit of full disclosure, this website endorsed Gus Hall for President in 2008. Mr Hall died in 2000)I'm not sure what those could be, since the Communist Party of the USA was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics which...no longer exists. Well, the language is degraded by more than West's blathering, but come on. Read something written by somebody not John Birch or J. Edgar Hoover that explains what Communism is as opposed to what you think it is...a vague threat to take your guns, your government health care, your government pension and your government roads, schools, infrastructure and pollute your precious body fluids while letting your children run wild having abortions and contraception and stuff. Dude, Democrats are to Communists in much the way that the Republicans are to the Freemen of Montana.

West also babbled that Barrack Obama is afraid to debate him. Really?  Loudmouthed first termer thinks that the President of the United States should get on a stage in South Florida and debate him?  Seriously, if the President has a few spare minutes to waste on West, he should devote it to shooting some hoops with his secret service detail or giving Bo a bath with the girls. Total lunacy... Seriously, the man is a deranged, meglomaniacal dweeb and needs to be kept in government cusody to protect himself and his loved ones from his next over the top appearance or action. 

Now, as I listened to the video (let's hold the musing on that trope for another time), I got the sense that a good number of Mr. West's constituents were laughing at him. It's possible that this is gem came out not so much as a Michelle Bachmann unsolicited bit of insanity as a response to poking the bear. West is not exactly known for reasoned discourse, a sense of balance or proportion and measured response to provocation. 

Now, the guy could have been court martialed for war crimes instead of being given a slap on the wrist and allowed to retire -- should have been court martialled for war crimes, since he fired a pistol at a prisoner of war in order to make him provide information -- and has disgraced the nation ever since. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in Army; he was in a command position in combat; and he ended up relieved of command and given the opportunity to retire -- which he took. I think West is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of an incredible magnitude and should be treated with respect for his service, compassion for his condition while being protected from himself and his demons. Well, Gulf I gave us Timothy McVie; Gulf 2 is giving us Allan West, Republican congressman from Florida. 

This is where the Republican leadership needs to step up, get West under control or expect a far rougher response than the sort given so far. This is pretty funny, actually. "Chellie is a Democrat, a farmer and a Lutheran but no, she is not a Communist," said Willy Ritch, spokesman for Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), also a vice chair of the caucus." 

(Note: In the spirit of full disclosure, and as a one-time student of Luther and the Protestant Reformation, I should point out that Luther had some commie-pinko-tendencies prior to the Peasants Revolt. The whole concept of grace in the Pauline-Augustinian-Luther tradition has  a pretty strong egalitarian twist to it. But in general, in Wisconsin, yeah equating Lutheran Deomocrats to Communists is like equating Allen West to Allen A' Dale, which I guess would make Boehner Robin Hood and Cantor Little John.)

As that great American political commentator Bugs Bunny would put it, "What a maroon!"

Civilized costs more than nasty, brutish and short...

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
Thomas Hobbes 

To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.
Thomas More

 

Can you say AN/PDR-27R?  ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO.

Those veterans among us have no problem with that, since it’s basic military phonetic alphabet and is the name of a pretty common piece of stuff that most were exposed to at one time or another. It’s the Geiger Counter used by the military in its various configurations over the years.  For a part of my career as a grunt, I had to use these things as a Chemical Operations type – NO LIGHT TOO BRIGHT/NO BLAST TOO FAST/SO UP YOUR ASS/WITH BUGS AND GAS! (Being the unofficial motto of the Army’s Chemical Corps.) Training people to use these things was part of the gig, and they’re frighteningly easy to use wrong; they’re reasonably delicate and fairly easy to contaminate or peg. Walk up to a hot source and check it with the meter on one of the lower scales, and bad things could happen. Open the shield to check for beta radiation, and pass it to close to a blade of grass, and you risked puncturing the shield. IF the numbers get high, you get out if you can.

While there are lots of emitters – particles that have become radioactive or are by their nature radioactive such as uranium – the primary ones monitored for in the field are GAMMA radiation, which is the most immediately deadly, Beta radiation which can be very hot but has a real limited range of its emissions, and then Alpha Radiation which is most dangerous if it gets inside the body. Think of barriers – lead is a great barrier for gamma; beta can be blocked by clothing and dust masks and goggles. Alpha is pretty insidious – the meters to detect its presence are specialized and primarily available to emergency reaction teams who would respond to a nuclear accident or a dirty bomb. IF it gets into the water table of the food chain, it can be a problem. If you inhale it or it gets into a cut, it can be a problem. Not quickly, but down the road a piece.

OK, welcome to the modern world. We have to deal with dirty water, dirty air, global climate change, extreme weather, decreasing availability of cheap energy, overcrowding, pandemics, potential famine, potential shortage of potable water…everything except the viral crop of right wing, isolationist, brain dead bigots that currently infect the US and indeed the entire civilized world. Thomas Hobbes and Thomas More weren’t exactly contemporaries, but I’ve come to believe of late that the Tea Party and their ilk, the Grover Norquist-Herman Cain-Joe Walsh axis of that world, mistook the two. They read Leviathan, and then they read Utopia and then got confused as to which one was supposed to reflect the good idea and which the bad. (This is kind of like confusing The Joy of Sex with The Joy of Cooking, but more dangerous to civil society.)Hobbes believed that in the absence of a strong central power, “Life is nasty, brutish, and short,” and advocated a very strong central government as essential to a civilized society. More described an ideal society – Utopia – where the absence of distractor and distinctions allowed for a classless and a rather bland society. But, he pointed out in the book itself that it was an intellectual exercise and in real life, he advocated a very strong central government. When that central government decided to execute him, his final speech was brief and to the point, saying in large part “I die the king's faithful servant, but God's first.”

There is a rhetorical tool called reduction ad absurdum that doesn’t work with these people. We’ve seen it several times this year in debates; the famous “Let him die!” crowd cheer in the Republican debate in response to Ron Paul’s brief hesitation in his response to Wolf Blitzer is the most distinct. I’ve had it happen in discussion with students who hold these beliefs; I first felt the change in argument when I said to one of the folks who was paying my salary by attending class on a mix of GI Bill and Pell Grants and Federally Guaranteed Loans that “Look, the government needs to be able to help people. No one wants to see beggars and kids starving…” The guy responded, “Who cares? That’s their problem.”

How do you argue with that sort of stuff? More, I think, encountered the same thing, as did Hobbes. More’s comment is more immediately apropos, since this was a student in a graduate business economics class –“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.” I’d like to think that I had the same thought and possibly did at the time, but it was probably punctuated with obscenities, curses and commands to get his ass off his head and back where it belonged. I kept quiet – you don’t get to curse students until you have tenure. But, I think Hobbes again adds clarity to the argument, about the role and responsibility of government. “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.”

OK, Brother AXE, how exactly do you get from Geiger counters to the Tea Party to Hobbes and More and beyond. Well, it’s relatively easy…all it takes is following More, being transformatively exposed to an engaged human life…

The discovery came in the midst of the largest federal effort to date to clean up uranium mines on the vast Indian reservation. A hearing in 2007 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform led to a multiagency effort to assess and clean up hundreds of structures on the reservation through a five-year plan that ends this year….Yet while some mines have been “surgically scraped” of contamination and are impressive showpieces for the E.P.A., others, like the Cameron site, are still contaminated. Officials at the E.P.A. and the Department of Energy attribute the delay to the complexity of prioritizing mine sites. Some say it is also about politics and money… “The government can’t afford it; that’s a big reason why it hasn’t stepped in and done more,” said Bob Darr, a spokesman for the Department of Energy. “The contamination problem is vast.” Leslie MacMillan, NY Times, April 1, 2012.

The article describes another moment in the timeline of exploitation and destruction of Native American culture and people by corporate and government greed and indifference. In this case, during the great uranium boom of the 1956-period, the government not only allowed but encouraged various people ranging from major mining interests to irresponsible nutjobs – not that the two are mutually exclusive – to seek deposits of uranium on reservation land in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado. When the boom died, the various mining interests left – and since then, it became obvious that they left a lot of junk behind poisoning the land. Hey, the Navajos have a lot of space, who cares? Well, that sort of lasiez-faire nonsense fails to consider the Navajo cultural and religious ties to the land. I am not an expert on Navajo religious beliefs, but their origin myth has a very strong tie not only to nature but to the very ground itself and what is beneath it. The Old Man of the story is as close to a god figure as we get here:

The Coyote of the east came where the people were and asked Old Man where he came from. Old Man told him from three worlds down below and also told Coyote how he came up, also saying “If you (Coyote) are a clever man, I will teach you all we know about our religion, etc.” So he taught him everything. 

Well, one thing Old Man did not teach Coyote was how politics work. In most cultures, including the western culture we supposedly represent, when you make a promise you fulfill it. The relationship between the US and the Navajo isn’t simple – no relationship between sovereign states where one is in fact subservient to the other can be simple. But, the role of the US in this equation is to protect the Navajo and to act as stewards so that they can maintain their way of life. Obviously, the great Uranium rush resulted in a lot of undocumented craziness in isolated backlands. Problem is, many of the reservations people live out in those backlands and are pastoral in existence…sheepherders. Sheep need to roam, and one might wonder if the reservation is huge enough to support a relatively large population in the high desert of the American Southwest. When you poison hunks of the land, it’s difficult to maintain and use. When you don’t tell people the hazards you are exposing them to, you risk exposing them to patterns of illness and sickness that they may not recognize or have the resources to care for.

The EPA has done a lot more than would be done without it, but these areas are environmental disasters. The Navajo don’t have the resources or the money or the expertise to handle 6-7-9=800 documented and undocumented hazmat sites. No one does, except the US. If you can identify the company that poisoned and failed to remediate the site and the company is still in business, you can take them to court if you’re either the Navajo or the US government and force them to remediate it. However, a lot of these diggings are anonymous or were dug by individuals 50 years ago and are no longer in business. I suspect it’s obvious – the US has a responsibility to fix this; someone needs to get incensed and question whether or not the senior member of the partnership of sovereigns in this case is fulfilling its responsibilities.

Of course, the Navajo people are American citizens. If the government of the United States allows and encourages Bob’s Radioactive Mining and Waste Creation service to dig up and contaminate my back yard, I have a valid claim for the US government to honor. If I get sick, I have a valid claim against Bob’s – who either goes bankrupt or has died – and against the US government.

So, the problem is money. Let’s turn briefly to another money issue.

 When the Army was made up of draftees and folks who “volunteered” to avoid being drafted, drawing down after a war wasn’t a problem. You pointed at the door and said who wants to go home first. However, after Vietnam, a lot of enlisted guys who become commissioned officers found themselves being told that they weren’t needed as officers; they could, however, stay on as NCOs. And, as a benefit, they could continue to serve in the active, individual reserve so that when they retired they could do so at whatever reserve officer rank they achieved. I know a lot of guys who were Staff Sergeants and Sergeant First Class and even a few Sergeant Majors and such who retired as…Lieutenant Colonels. In one case, the only person who could rate a SFC in my section was the Brigade Commander, because he was senior to everyone else. Weird. Most of these guys were great soldiers, but there was always some fear and resentment, no so much on their parts but on the part of the guys who were now
giving them orders.

Minor problem. Solved by 1981 or so; but the problem is greater when you have a volunteer force that you’ve used in the longest war in the Nation’s history and the Iraq war. These folks have been told they are heroes, that the nation is forever indebted to them. They are also literate and engaged human beings – they realize that they are facing a period of arbitrary eliminations and downsizings. They also are learning that the quality of life for those who remain on active duty will decrease significantly. This makes them unhappy.

As it should. It always has…you want to see a portrait of a lost soldier, check out Rome on DVD or Blue Ray and see what happens to soldiers who suddenly and without reasonable transition find themselves tossed into society. Read about what went on with the various paramilitary groups in Germany after World War I. One reason our friend Winston Churchill was able to find a small army and call it a police force, deploying it to Ireland to handle the Irish Revolution was because they had tons of veterans who had no way to make it as civilians after four years in the trenches and the Army was drawing down because of peace. So, the Black and Tans entered Irish history – it may seem a benign mixed drink of lager and stout here, but it Ireland it’s something else entirely.

 Now, I served through one peace dividend, the post Soviet Union-post Gulf I drawdown. Operations Temp became absolutely insane for units, particularly in the support base, Intelligence, Logistics and Maintenance for the Army. As a First Sergeant in a Corps Support Brigade in Germany, I was deploying people to Africa, Greece, the Balkans and Belarus on a monthly basis. It was slightly crazy. The OPTEMPO increased when Bosnia and Kosovo came into the picture; when I returned to Fort Lewis, I got another Company as First Sergeant, and went through the same stuff, deploying people to every place from Port Au Prince to Princeton. We were as an Army and as a military far busier during this period than we’d been during the Cold War.

However, since 9/11 the military has been on continuous insanity as an OPTEMPO. What I see in my
various wanderings is a force that is largely stressed by insecurity and craziness imposed by a chain of command and then further stressed when they hear that 70000 soldiers will go home this coming year, that standards for weight, PT, body art and so on are going to ratcheted up and that any screw-up will result in getting the boot. Posts are becoming overcrowded which will negatively impact both mission and quality of life. Benefits are being cut. The services are showing their loyalty to the nation and will continue to do so; but, they’d like something in return. Fulfillment of what is seen as promised –Old Veterans can smile cynically but it’s not because we don’t agree with them. It’s because we know. We’ve known since Socrates mustered out in Athens; Kipling said it for all of us --

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll…

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

Now, as a special disabled veteran and a retiree, I have a doctor at the local Army installation, in this case, the clinic at Fort Irwin. Now, Irwin in some ways reminds me of Fort Apache…the Army has done a tremendous amount to make it more livable, but the fact remains that you’re forty miles not from civilization but from the interstate. I make the drive when I need to see my doctor or when I need to pick up a prescription. When I was in to see my Doctor recently, she informed me that she was leaving because her husband was retiring from active duty in June and she had no idea what staff they’d have after she left but was sure they’d find some good ones. She also handed me a prescription for one of my medications, written for a civilian drug store, telling me that the Pharmacy wasn’t going to stock it or many other drugs that had been a normal item in their formulary. I was curious as to this, thinking that the drugs were things that were normally used by retirees and frankly, that made sense. I have had a number of conversations with the soldiers working in the pharmacy over the past couple of years as well as several with the senior officer in the Pharmacy, a Captain. I had to pick up something else, and got a chance to talk to a young sergeant with a close combat badge and a 10^th Mountain combat patch. She’s in her early 20s and would like to make this a career but said, “they’re throwing soldiers out and they’re cutting back support to the rest of us. What the hell, First Sergeant?” The Captain was very direct with me; when I said I’d leave her name out of this piece she said,  “I don’t care!! I’m getting ready to PCS and the command loves me because I always come in on budget. They know what I think, but it doesn’t matter. If I make the budget they’re happy with me.”

It takes a lot to bitch slap me with a piece of reality, but I’d never heard about the number one thing on an OER for a company grade officer being “come in at or according to plan.” That’s a civilian bean counter approach. But she told me that the particular thing I’m now getting through RiteAid  -- Androgel, I am seriously old although not as old as Gordon or Trowbridge, hehhehehe – is used by a lot of younger soldiers. The reason for the reduction in formulary –drugs carried in the pharmacy – is simple; her budget has been cut by 40% with minimal warning. Of course, the patient load is increasing.

I find this somewhat disturbing on several fronts. If it’s only retired old farts who need something, of course, send up to the pharmacy in town. The co-pay is unpleasant but I can live with it. But, a soldier on active duty, a spouse, a child who’s treatment is delayed while finding a way to Walmart (50 miles away) or waiting for a delivery through ExpressScripts is unconscionable. More than that, the feeling becomes more that they – the Army, the Nation, the People, the Congress, the Government – don’t care.

 So, when the House Armed Services Committee grill the Joint Chiefs wanting to know why the Army and the Marines aren’t looking for new tanks and a new generation of tanks in what is supposedly a time of austerity, you have to wonder. The Army says no thanks, we got lots of tanks and nobody to really fight with…with tanks. The Abrams and Bradley and to a lesser extent the Stryker are excellent platforms and weapon systems and WE HAVE ALL WE NEED. Then, the Budget Committee led by Paul Ryan who looks like a cross between a weasel, snake and Eddie Munster to me from some weird progressive sci-fi novel, ignore the Joint Chiefs and say in effect, “They’re lying to us!” as they flood more money into the defense budget, you have to wonder. I personally wouldn’t tell General’s Dempsey, Odierno, and Amos that they were lying to me unless we were playing poker. But Ryan felt comfortable with this gem. General Dempsey’s response would scare me if I was simpering chicken hawk like Ryan and his gang…

"We don't think the generals are giving us their true advice," Ryan had said, according to Politico. "We don't think the generals believe their budget is really the right budget."

Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took issue with those comments.

"There’s a difference between having someone say they don't believe what you said versus ... calling us, collectively, liars," the general told reporters on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal. "My response is: I stand by my testimony. This was very much a strategy-driven process to which we mapped the budget."

Lest someone say something along the lines of “you can’t have it both ways, Brother AXE!” I have to explain something – they’re not interested in improving quality of life for soldiers on the Hill; they’re interested in keeping the Defense Contractors happy. My own representative is Chairman Buck McKeon who is pretty much on the dole from Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The only reason they would be interested in maintaining the formulary in the Army Medical System is if Merck and Pfizer weighed in. Total BS – these are the guys who want more tanks, more systems that don’t require soldiers but cost a lot of money, more defense contractors doing things soldiers can and should do. Rachel Maddow made the comment on the Jon Stewart show that she didn’t think the Army needed people from KBR peeling potatoes; we could probably figure out some way to have soldiers do that. We don’t people from Cubic managing airspace or logistics. A lot of these people are great folks – lots of former military and retirees. But, they’re doing work that should be done by soldiers.

The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on  as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit. We may all be Travon Martin to some extent; we are also all General Dempsey being insulted and talked down to by Ryan who now claims that he misspoke. Yeah, he’s sorry if General Dempsey didn’t understand what he was saying…if General Dempsey was offended, he’s sorry that General Dempsey was offended.

"General Dempsey and I spoke after that, and I wanted to give that to him, which was that's not what I was attempting to say," Ryan said on CNN. "What I was attempting to say is that President Obama put out his budget number for the Pentagon first ... and then they began the strategy review to conform the budget to meet that number. We think it should have been the other way around."

We are all the early 20s spouse who’s told that while her husband is deployed to Afghanistan and she’s just taken her child to the emergency room at Fort Irwin for some condition that she’s going to have to drive in to beautiful to get the medication the kid needs; we’re all the poor pharmacy specialist who has to deliver this news to a scared and lonely woman. We’re all the school teacher who has to buy supplies for her room while trying to pay student loans and for a Master’s degree that she’s required to have but is also required to pay for. We’re all the Navajo farmer who just discovered that his sheep have been munching contaminated grass and have to be put down…

What we’re all not is Paul Ryan. What we’re all not is Buck McKeon. What we’re all not is Mitt Romney – we’re closer to Shamus on the trip to Canada. We’re not the Koch brothers. We’re not worrying about how many millions of dollars we can make in bonuses; we’re not wondering about how much money we need to put into the Cayman Islands this year. We’re not GE, with a 1000 people in their tax department figuring out how little tax they can pay; we’re not the head of Goldman Sachs mortified that the word has gotten out that we’ve financed a  human trafficking website…

There are things that we can do to solve our problems. First of all, we have to acknowledge that taxes are too low and the lowness is progressive. I have no problem with current tax rates so long as at the top end, they are flat above some limit. No deductions. Sorry. So if you’re Mitt Romney, you can claim standard deductions on some portion of your income – say the first million – but the $277M after that should be taxed at the full 35%. Capital Gains up to some limit can continue to be taxed at the current rate – say, up to $2M but above that, it should be taxed at the normal income tax rate. Have somebody rational calculate the shortfall and come up with strategies to overcome it. The SHORTFALL IS NOT SOME NUMBER THAT PAUL RYAN COMES UP WITH. IT NEEDS TO BE BASED ON WHAT WE ACTUALLY NEED TO DO SO THAT THE SOVERIEGN ENTITY CAN FULFILL ITS FUNCTION ACCORDING TO HOBBES.       

In Romney’s case, under my plan, assuming he’s able to deduct everything up 1 Million and all but a half million total  is capital gains, he’d still have well over $180 mil in income this year. I think they could get by, just fun. Failing to do something like this, and letting the Randian nutcases and economic libertarians/Austrian School reactionaries and malefactors of great wealth continue to get away with things will result in another Hobbesian diagnosed problem …

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

Well, what needs to happen to get there? That’s the next piece. I’ll have it posted in a few days. 

 

Educated Arrogance

Among the many abominations foisted on us is the merging of Lincoln's Birthday with Washington's and calling it President's Day. Frankly, we need more holidays, and Federal Holidays should be made mandatory paid holidays. Like in civilized countries – double time for workers and everybody else is off doing their thing. Now, celebrating Lincoln and Washington makes a lot of sense – but, Jerry Ford? Grover Cleveland? Warren G. Harding? John Tyler? James Buchanan? Seriously, give us back our holidays and make the bastards give them to workers…

There is method in my madness, by the way. Reduce work hours and you'll spur hiring to maintain productivity. It's a fairly simple idea and works very well especially when you're trying to maximize employment. If you have an idle assembly line, well, if you need a hundred employees to run it, and you cut the hours of 1000 employees enough to reduce productivity to where profit is affected, it will make economic sense to hire more workers. It probably does on a macro scale anyway – as Paul Krugman and other non-Friedmanesque economists keep saying, it's demand, stupid. No demand, no need for supply to keep up. No money, no demand…why is this hard?

I was wandering through various interweb sites this morning and discovered a number of things at places I don't always visit. Probably the best way to be exposed to new thought and new thinking is to just go out and look. I recommend Twitter for that – follow some of the links that are twittered and be prepared to be amazed, enlightened and generally entertained.

Spit on statistics -- it's what you measure and how, not the results

 

WILL WRESTLE YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW FOR A BUCK!--Homeless Guy's Sign, Trust Stop Near Barstow

So, the unemployment rate has dropped below 9% to 8.6%. Why is the AXE less than excited by this? The unemployment rate is based on the number of people who are considered to be in the workforce, so if you eliminate people from the workforce who are unemployed, the percentage employed is skewed to teh right. In other words,  So, most of the drop is due not to the imaginary job creators of Republcian lore, legend and myth, but due to people giving up after months of trying, running out of unemployment benefits and falling off the grid and under the bus. In other words, a historically low number of workers are doing less badly, while there's an increase in people who are literally just waiting to die. 

American governments at all levels continued to bleed workers, for one. And the decline in the unemployment rate had a down side: It fell partly because more workers got jobs, but also because about 315,000 workers dropped out of the labor force. That left the share of Americans actively participating in the work force at a historically depressed 64 percent, down from 64.2 percent in October.Even excluding these hundreds of thousands of dropouts, the country still had a backlog of more than 13 million unemployed workers, whose spells of unemployment averaged an all-time high of 40.9 weeks. “They say businesses are refusing to look at résumés from the unemployed,” said Esther Perry, 59, of Bedford, Mass., who participated in a recent report on unemployed workers put together by USAction, a liberal coalition. “What do you think my chances are? Once unemployment runs out, I don’t know what I will do.”

Do the Occupied folks stay in the Workforce? Probably not -- while they're doing their thing, exercising their constitutional rights and getting pepper sprayed and beaten and shot with rubber bullets and so on, they're not looking for work or, conversely, they are working, just not getting paid. See how much fun this is? Statistics measure what you measure -- basing policy decisions on them or making political decisions on them -- THE PRESIDENT"S CHANCES FOR RE-ECLECTION IMPROVE AS UNEMPLOYMENT DIPS! -- without asking some structural, almost existential questions about what these things mean is really stupid, and I'm sure we'll do it soon, 24/7 on cable news, blogs like this one and talk radio. 

So, here's the test -- who do you know who's unemployed and you don't understand why? When they get a job, assume that the unemployment rate may be going down. Whom do you know who hates their job -- trick question, the stats that I have seen are pretty straight and seem confirmed by reality, just about everybody hates their job. However, pick someone who's dramatically underpaid, overworked and unhappy...see when they get a raise. Or feel comfortable quitting their job to look for a new one. Then what's happening is an actual increase in employment, as opposed to an artifical decline in a rate.  

 

WSJ publishes realistic appraisal of recovery's failure; condemnation from Journal editorial page expected ASAP

Reading the Wall Street Journal's editorial page for insight into the economy, business or economics in general -- or just about anything else except the arcane study of the Right Wing elite and where Murdoch's head is at today -- is a very strange exercise. It's kind of like looking at a symposium on race relations and gender equitality chaired by an intern from World Net Daily where the participants are Louis Ferdinand Celine, Ian Paisley,  John Hagee, Michelle Bachmann, the Grand Mufti of Teheran, Dennis Duke and Clarence Thomas. They may have a lot to say, but it will be either ignorant or just plain batshit crazy, with a tinge of duplicity and lies. Which they all believe. 

Yet, despite the failure of the editorial board to resist the call of Malthus and the Malefactors of Great Wealth, the actual journalism remains on par with the Times and in terms of this economy, of the Financial Times. Today's electronic version has a marvelous piece that cuts to the heart of why the economy is sputtering, and why sustained programs far larger than the Obama stimulus or Jobs Bills are needed if we are ever to see any kind of recovery or, and this is important, sustain the wealth that does exist. 

Simply stated, the American people are now terrified of debt. This is not a bad thing, per se. In fact, in a lot of respects it's a good thing. In terms of traditional economics, the more savings, the more capital to borrow and invest. But, we have a global economy, and there are plenty of savings available for investment. There now is a definite supply problem -- there is an insufficient supply of demand.

The lousy pay for the middle and working classes was something they could ignore up to the financial crisis. Net worths were growing, although that was unsupportable. There doesn't appear to be any code of ethical behavior in terms of Wall Street or Real Estate during boom times. Well, there probably is one, but if the code of ethics is more than a few paragraphs on one side of a piece of paper, it exists primarily to be gamed. So, we borrowed. We paid more for homes than they could possibly be worth objectively -- which is a philosophical conundrum in a market economy, where a good is actually worth what some fool will pay for it -- and took out 10 year loans to buy cars. Credit card debt took off; the cost of education slammed past the international space station and we borrowed to pay for it. We wanted computers, cars, guitars, fast food, fine dining, vacations, fancy jeans for $150 a shot and so on. For 30 years, the US version of bread and circuses could be summed up by a librarian, in Greenwich, driving a Hummer H3 4X4 with the winch and the towing package and all the chrome in the world to work. In Greenwich Conneticut. Somebody would loan you the money and so...and, if you refinanced your home to tap into your equity -- the difference between what some fool had paid (you) and what somebody thought another fool would pay (the next fool) -- you could finance your Hummer with your house payment. After all, I had a mortgage broker tell me that a five year balloon mortgage was a great idea because nobody paid off their mortgages anymore. And, I had my realtor when I left the Shire and moved to the Crossroads of Opportunity tell me that my house would go up every year by about $100k in value. I took my mortgage business elsewhere since the mortgage guy pissed me off a lot. I thought my realtor had nice legs, so I just ignored that bit of hucksterism, just saying that there was no way that was sustainable. 

Well, of course it wasn't sustainable. Apres moi, c'est deluge. Loosely translated, life is both carnival and ponzi scheme, and the goal is to be dead when the music stops...or, you're screwed. Unless you can run the Ponzi Scheme. Like the Banks. The Hedge funds. I found it interesting that at the bottom of the page with the article that moved me to write, there was a piece about the economic uncertainty of the 1% and how unfair it was in particular that a family was about to lose it's unfinished 90000 square foot home for far less than they had paid for it. They needed the new digs because if they had a party with more than 400 people, it got crowded. 

Versailles (Seriously? Axe incredulity added. Why not Peckerwood Nirvana?)  was supposed to be done by now. The Siegels were supposed to be living their dream life—throwing charity balls and getting spa treatments downstairs after a long flight on their Gulfstream. The home was the culmination of David Siegel's Horatio Alger story, from TV repairman to chief executive and owner of America's largest time-share company, Westgate Resorts, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and $200 million in profits. Yet today, Versailles sits half-finished and up for sale. The privately owned Westgate Resorts was battered by the 2008 credit crunch and real-estate crash. It had about $1 billion in debt—much of it co-signed by the Siegels.

The banks that had loans on Versailles gave the Siegels an ultimatum: Either pay off the loans or sell the house. So it's now on the market for $75 million, or $100 million if the buyer wants it finished. As she stands on her deck in the Florida sun, Ms. Siegel wipes away her tears. "Maybe it will still work out," she says. "It always does, right?"

The Siegels' Versailles may be the nation's most extravagant monument to the debt-fueled, status-crazed real-estate binge of the past decade. Like many Americans, the Siegels borrowed too much, spent too much and bet that values could only go higher. Even in the age of excess, Versailles was excessive.

However, the author goes on to post the good news -- the still have their health, most of their money and they'll be able to get by in their little cottage of 26000 square feet. 

I actually feel a little sorry for these fools, by the way. They were encouraged by their financial success to think that they had earned this. The Time Shares they were selling were worth evey penny they got for them -- well, and since we base value, ECON 101class, on what? SIR! WHAT SOME GODDAMNED FOOL WILL PAY FOR IT! SIR!" They got caught the same way the builder who built my place and five of the same value got caught. He now owns four rental properties. But, he's funny about it -- at a Chamber Meeting, he put a sign on his table saying, "Will build houses for food..." while calling himself a goddamned idiot. 

Well, the Siegel's were insane to co-sign loans for their corporation. That indicates either really bad management or some serious underlying flaws. Steve Ballmer hasn't co-signed anything for Microsoft lately; Bill Gates and Paul Allen never co-signed anything after they actually got customers. That's the beauty of corporations. Even private corporations -- you have limited liability unless you do something stupid. 

However, the difference between the incredibly wealthy and the 99% is simple -- while their net worth
will fluctuate, and the Journal sees that as a bad thing -- even at it's worst they're still far better off than the folks in the 99%. If the head of the family has to shift from a chauffered Maybach to a AMG to get around, well, that's not exactly the end of the world. But, if that librarian gets her Hummer repossessed, it might be for her. 

Now, had the demand for the damn time shares stayed solid, we wouldn't be having this conversation. At some point, people back off and economize. We got involed in two very costly wars plus an exploding universe of homeland security and world-wide COIN and at the same time lowered taxes. Remember Tom Delay's plaintive 2003 pre-invasion cry that "  "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes." – "or W. saying, " Now, the American people have got to go about their business.  We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't -- where we don't conduct business, where people don't shop.  That's their intention. "

Well, we are a consumption driven economy. Without the demand for goods, there is no need for capital investment. Giving more tax cuts to the Seigels isn't going to produce a lot of American jobs unless you think Versailles is a good idea. And, you put American quarry workers to  work digging up the Italian marble. In order to increase demand, which will stabilzie the economy, we need to get people spending again. It is unreasonable to expect salaries to increase to the point where American workers can, as a rule, pay cash for everything. But, if people are put back to work at meaningful jobs that pay reasonable salaries, they will start to overcome their fear of debt, particularly if the debt load on homes goes away or goes down. 

How to do it? Well, keep the people who are employed employed. Do big things like fix roads, bridges, sewer and waterlines and so on with the requirement that if you get funding for your project, you'll buy American materials. Do soemthing big on mortgage debt for the country -- the worst places are in pockets although the entire country could stand the relief. Figure out some way to do it. 

Oh, this will all cost a lot of money. Raise the taxes to pay for it, over time. 10-20-30-60 year bonds...do the financing that way for the American renewal. Fund R&D; fund education. 

One of the things that I find interesting about the Occupy Movement is that so many of the folks
are recent college graduates working as barristas or clerks in Barnes and Noble or some other thing trying to find a way to survive and help each other survive. There are no jobs. They have a mountain of debt from college, which they went to based on some underlying American ideology that says something about good jobs, good education. They borrowed the money, their parents borrowed the money. They got the degree...and no one is interested in hiring them. There's nothing to hire them for...in places like South Africa, Greece and Western China, this results in riots and virtual insurgencies. How do you think movements as bizarre as Al Queida and Shining Path get going and maintained. There are young people who can't find work so they become disaffected and things go south. The basic undelying premise of the Occupy Movement is that things will get better if we demand redress of grievances -- no revolution required. These are all problems we can fix if we try so why are we waiting?...so fix them. 

Now, I started to lose my temper the other day at all this. "Why the fuck do I care? I'm sixty years old, and I have no children. 20 years after I'm gone, which will probably be in 40 years, nobody will know I existed. What the fuck do I care for?" Well, I felt a Koch Brother, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain trapse over my grave. I care because it's part of the human condition, the underpining of western philosophy and culture, and, ultimately, caring about others, the future, the past, right and wrong is all that separates us from the goddamned lizards.

Various_12_The Sermon On The Mount

It is not about winning...it's about the fight. 

What can you do? Bug your elected representatives, friends, family -- Obama is nothing but two things - - better than McCain would have been and better than any alternative. However, he was so busy being a statesman he forgot to be politician. He was so interested in Kum bah Ya that he forgot to drag people into the tent so they could sing. If McConnell had thought there was a price to be paid, he wouldn't have blocked everything. Now, they're stuck...so, we not only need to re-elect Obama, we need to have a fire-breathing dragon of a Democratic-progressive Congress. And, we need to make certain that the Senate is forced to change it's rules to limit personal privileges and crap like filabusters. I know that lots of people, including me, have at times sweated the potential tyranny of the majority in the Senate. Well, we need to ensure better Senators. We need to ensure better Supreme Court Justices. Why has no bill of impreachment been filed against Clarence Thomas? Of course the Republicans will block it, but make it clear. Make the goddamn choices stark, clear and accurate. 

For about 200 years as the British Constitution evolved, the House of Lords existed primarily to block things that the Commons wanted but the wealthy, the Aristocratic and the Clerical classes did not want. However, when it lost the power to stop things permanently, and became a debating club, things went fine. Increasing democracy is generally a good thing...if people are ready for it. Libya, probably not so much...West Virginia, we can take the risk. 

 

 

 

So, Eric, about that...seriously? Occupy is putting Americans against Americans?

I guess it is amazing to the the Cantor types that after 30 years of class warfare, the peasants are starting to wake up that hey, my life isn't better. My life sucks compared to my folks at my age. Hell, my life sucks compared to my grandparents and great grandparents -- they at least had chickens, didn't they...all I've got is an underwater mortgage, a Korean car and tons of student debt with no job and no liklihood of every getting a decent one. What the hell...

I have to admit that I've been watching this "occupy" thing with a certain degree of "Oh man, not again." I mentioned to Mrs AXE while we were watching the riot on Wall Street that being in these things were very scarey things indeed. Mrs. AXE was surprised that at one point in my life I might have been in a riot. She's only known me for 37 years, but I guess she doesn't listen. The use of the pepper spray that I've seen is stupid tactically, and the way the nightsticks are being used by the supervisors makes me wonder about what the hell is bothering those guys? I know the price of donuts has gone up, but come on...

Back to Cantor, my second least favorite human being in government after Mitch McConnell. Seeing Cantor at any time brings out my inner-Delta and makes me want to just squeeze his littel Greg Marmalard-y neck until his head pops like Belushi's mouth in Animal House. Absurd, really, but I suspect that he's just that kind of guy...or, he may have been the smirking asshole standing off to the side being Eddie Haskell. Who, of course, was really Greg Marmalard. Or, Eric Cantor. 

However, thinking about this, I have to say that I think that Cantor and the other folks concerned about mobs in the street and the guillotines being set up in the near future on the corners of Broadway and Wall don't get it, but viscerally fear the results of their mean-spirited, greedy and short sighted approach to doing business in government and in business. Eric Cantor is the poster boy for the Republican Mr. Jones of 2011, walking into the room with the pencil in his hand... 

 

About as unclear on the concept as we are...Part I

Is it impossible to get a cup of coffee-flavored coffee? You can get every other flavor except coffee-flavored coffee! They got mochachino, cappuchino, frappachino, Al Pacino, what the fuck? www.what the fuck.com! --Denis Leary

 

Starbucks has a new blend, Iced Coffee Blend. I guess they Blend it so it will make really good Iced Coffee when blended. Anyway, while I was waiting for Sonny the Anorexic 20 something to get me my Americano, she offered me a sample. In a plastic Starbucks Shotglass. Of Hot Iced Coffee Blend. Obviously, they are unclear on the concept...about as unclear as we are on the debt limit debate, the deficit and why the US can't afford not to borrow and build and grow the infrastructure, American industry and hope for the future. 

Now, the debt limit is about as artifical a piece of idiocy as we can expect from the Republicans. Greenspan, ole Al hisself, has said in the past that he doesn't understand why the government goes through this drill. The other developed nations don't do it. Most businesses do this -- they borrow short term and long term, and play with the floats to keep going. The problem is not the borrowing -- rather, the problem is when you can't borrow anymore. 

While those who claim we are no longer capable of paying off the debt and therefore should massively contract and give up on the dreams of economic justice, industrial democracy and the old "establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare" piece of the American ideology are dominating the debate, there are alternative visions. Those visions are better morally, poltically, economically and historically. Given mankind's ability to screw up sure things, I'm not sure that I can be too optimistic here, but I'll try. 

The market -- the money market, the bond market -- is eager to lend the US money by purchasing our debt through T-Bills. They -- the bond market, the Germans, the Chinese, the US Banking Industry -- are willing to do so because we're the best game in town historically and economically. The cost of this borrowing, the interest, is at historic lows. There's a reason for this, which should be almost like a Saint Paul falling off his horse on the road to Damascus moment to the Ayn Randian-Supply Side- Debit Hawks. The market, which they have raised to a level of sanctity exceeded only by the angelic choruses, the thrones and dominations and all the rest of that choir, isn't worried about the US debt. They see it as the preferred cost-benefit-risk investment. Since the whole "let the market decide" nonsense is based on the idea that the market is rational, well, the deficit hawks are disregarding their own ideology. 

So, from their point of view, the market is rational so long as it does what they think it should. Since it doesn't, they'll run around and compare the US economy to Bob's Burger Palace and Beer Emporium in Incest Hollow, Kentucky. There are problems with that, of course. Like it's a totally insane comparison. Or, comparing the US economy -- which is the basis for the debt -- to the Rand Paul household. 

Now, how do we screw this up? There are a number of ways. The first and the one that makes the world the most nervous, is the possibility of US default on debt. If you can't get the cash to meet current obligations, you ultimately are bankrupt. When you have to start stiffing your suppliers, things are bad; ask any government contractor and that's been happening around the edges for a while. When you start stiffing your lenders by not being able to stay current and having to decide whom you're going to pay, you're insolvent. Now, the market wants to let us borrow more -- we aren't Greece, we aren't Argentina, we aren't Russia. They know that and all these people who babble about American exceptionalism ought to remember it. We're still the greatest -- most prosperous, most inventive, most productive -- country in the world. 

So, the way we go insolvent is to artifically truncate our ability to meet current obligations -- not raise the debt limit as needed. Hell, establishing a debt limit is an artificial construct. It doesn't control anything. So, what happens if we aren't able to meet current obligations? What happens if we default? 

Well, things change. The world will become nervous about our stability and our reasonableness. There are concerns in Russia that Vladamir Putin is their version of Robert Mugabe. Since we are a Democratic Republic as opposed to a kleptocratic autocracy, our version of Mugabe will be John Boehner and Mitch McConnell reinforced by Rand Paul and ilk doing their Facism as 100% Americanism Fan Dance. Irrationality triumphs because they don't understand their own goddamned ideology, economic theory or how to act in the best interests of the country, or since they purport to believe in this stuff, their immortal souls...

Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal 

fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For
I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was
thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and
you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me
no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not
care for me.

...
Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one
of these least ones, you did not do for me. And
these will go off to eternal punishment, but the
righteous to eternal life.

(Mt. 26: 41-43; 45-46)

 

Obama is not much help here. He's been so busy triangulating the Republican position, the Progressive Democratic position and the public opinion that he can't do anything. He's done a lot of good things, but no great things because he lacks the willingness to be as dynamic a communicator with the bully pulpit of the presidency as he was in pursuit of it. While Madeline Albright's point was perhaps off, when she questioned why we needed the greatest military in the world if we were never going to use it she asked a question that someone ought to ask Barrack Obama...why exactly did you want to be president anyway? To slow the descent of the Republic into something worse? Or, to continue to make the country great...

When I was in college, we had dances on campus. These "mixers" were really mating rituals, where the various Catholic Girl's Schools sent busloads to Catholic West Point to see and be seen by the next generation of the rising Catholic middle class. We had beer, and there was music. Some of it was actually very good music -- a little known Boston band called JAY GEILS and HIS Rhythm Kings featuring Petey Wolfe or somebody like that I recall doing covers of various R&B stuff. 

The problem,as pointed out in Harry Potter and the Goblin of Fire is that girl's tend to travel to these things in herds while the men travelled in packs. Some male had to brave the herd, some member of the herd had to agree to brave the man and the process might start. The way this was done was with the question, "Would you like to dance?" Most of the time, the answer was yes. However, the fear of rejection was great...unfortunately, we were a bunch of drunken egocentric assholes in those days. (Based on my samples of our class population and my own experience, we still largely are egocentric assholes, of course who drink less.) And, what do you do when you risk everything and the answer is no? 

Well, one of my buddies had a way of either overcomming the resistance at best and at worst getting some of his own back. (We Irish are great at that. Starve us into economic slavery and disaspora, and we'll sing three choruses of The Wild Colonial Boy and burn down a pub. By good, showed the bastards...) When rejected, Franny would say " You don't want to dance? Then why'd ya come here?"

The "constitutional option" on the debt is something the Prez doesn't want to talk about which is insane. The 14th Amendment is very clear on this -- we're not in 2nd Amendment territory here, we're dealing with the fact of government and the requirements of governing...

Section 4.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. (AXE emphasis) But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

So, while I dislike admitting it if only on aesthetic grounds, Mitch McConnell actually has a pretty good idea. I'd like there to be a more blanket approach, where this becomes what it is, a business practice, maintaining liquidity and solvency. As for the phrase "authorized by law" the debt becomes authorized when the Congress passes an appropriation bill and the President signs it. If Congress doesn't want to incur any more debt, they should just go the hell home...if there are no more appropriations, then there will be no new debt, just the continuing cost of governing at the current level. ) Of course, same question -- if you don't want to dance, why'd ya come?

 Now, since I regard the Republican Leadership in Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary of our insect-alien overlords (GE, the Koch Brothers, Pfizer, Merck, Boeing, JP Morgan-Chase, BOA, Goldman Sachs, the Vatican, the Templars, the Illuminati), I keep waiting for the adult leadership to recognize that their minions are about to drive their economic interests off the cliff...the problem that I see is that they're so intellectually inbred of such bad genetic stock (Ron Paul is a harmless old coot/Cult Figure in Congress; Rand Paul is one of 100 with the power to delay if not stop just about anything...) that their hearing is not acute enough to hear the dog whistle. McConnell and Boehner are old stock and can still hear their Masters' voices, but the Tea Party and the Randians and Rick-Bachman-Pawlenty-Overdrive and the rest are deaf to reason, national interest and enlightened self interest.  Since the Democrats are only partially owned by the same interests, well, they can still hear. They snap back about some stuff, but they aren't idiots. The Tea Party/Boehner-McConnell Republicans appear to be lemmings; most of the Democrats appear to be sheep. And, the Shepard appears to be interested in playing basketball as opposed to doing what he went into the field for. 

Next Time, why Taxes are a good thing and why the Stimulus didn't work better than it did.