Democrat Derangement Syndrome

Buncha Rich Fuckin' Sociopaths Sittin' Around Talkin' - Howard Lutnick on the All In podcast

"What I've learned at the Federal Reserve is a new language which is called 'Fed-speak'. You soon learn to mumble with great incoherence."  -- Alan Greenspan

As a rule, Democrats suck.*  No question about it.  Once the party of  Franklin Roosevelt, whose bold leadership out of the Great Depression 100 years ago set the stage for an era of reforming presidents of both parties and America's greatest period of prosperity and expanding equality, it is now the party of Third Way donor-fellating technocrats whose wannabe Republicanism-Lite™ in a dark, seemingly unending era of raging inequality and misery is popular only amongst themselves, Never Trumper Republicans and certain 24 hour news channels.  Their heads-up-their-asses approach to politics bears great responsibility for where we have found ourselves in 2025.  Happy?  Now can we talk?

I was watching a segment on Status Coup the other day in which it was promised that Jordan (Chariton) , the founder and main presenter of the Left of Progressive news outlet "GOES NUCLEAR on SLEAZEBALL Trumper Hinting at Sabotaging Social Security".  The occasion for it was remarks that Trump's Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick made on the Venture Capitalism podcast All-In concerning his lack of concern about the controlled chaos inflicted on the Social Security Administration by Elon Musk's DOGE coup:

Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month, my mother-in-law — who's 94 — she wouldn't call and complain.  She'd just think something I messed up and she’d get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

Never mind that the Trump administration is busily removing the channels for said complaining by cutting out the SSA's customer service phone number entirely as they prepare to make AI bots the only public face of the Agency.  Do we really have to say that by definition those who need Social Security the most-- for whom the program was conceived as a way of keeping the elderly and unable to work off the streets and able to keep food in the larders as the name implies-- are those who can least afford to miss a single payment?  Chariton did not disappoint, removing his trademark nerd glasses to accurately proclaim Lutnick a "rich fucking sociopath."   Chariton's assessment of the plan that Lutnick was purposely under-representing for his former Wall Street cronies sounds about right: "Pretty clear cut: let's just fuck up this program as much as we can, get the masses so disgruntled, so desperate, and then, hey!  Maybe J.P. Morgan can help us with Social Security.  Maybe McKinsey... the vulture capitalist consultants that Pete Buttigieg [worked for], maybe the private sector can do this better than us since we've fucking taken a chainsaw to it. And that's before they start cutting the benefits-- and I assure you that's coming too-- under waste, fraud and abuse."  All of this in spite of Trump's repeated promise on the campaign trail (to a MAGA constituency that is assuredly heavily dependent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as Chariton reminded us) that his administration was not going to touch the entitlements.

Of course no Status Coup rant would be complete without a reminder that the Democrats are hardly better.  Chariton reminded us of the tinkering and the threats to tinker with Social Security of the most recent crop of Democratic presidents.  But there was no mention of the inconvenient fact that the most recent, Joe Biden, who as a Senator pioneered third wave Democratic advocacy for ruthless "serious" trimming of entitlements in the name of deficit reduction, seemingly found Jesus as president on Social Security by boosting payments to the Social Security Trust Fund out of which come monies that cover  annual shortfalls between the amount paid into Social Security by those still in the labor force and those paid out to retirees and those on disability, which in 2023 was $41.4 Billion.  The total amount in the Trust Fund is around $2.8 trillion dollars, enough to cover shortfalls of similar magnitude until 2035.  To complete the picture, the money that goes into Social Security via employer's FICA payments on behalf of their employees is a progressive tax on worker's wages which is capped at incomes of $168,600.  Above this, the tax is the same regardless of the income of the contributor: currently $20.9K per year.  Should the Trust Fund deplete, based on annual contributions, Social Security will still pay 85% of benefits; however, as Bernie Sanders has been touring the country pointing out, the shortfall could more easily be filled by removing the cap on incomes for social security contributions.  "Tax the rich"

The Sociopath Lutnick, a former Democratic donor-type skeeve pre-Obama who oozed his skeeviness rightward over supposed unhappiness with Democratic identity politics during the previous Trump admnistration and provided resources for Trump's latest win, epitomizes the counterpart trajectory to Status Coup's guest in the segment, Steve Grumbine, a former Reagan Republican whose exposure to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) supposedly turned him into a progressive; a "Real Progressive" as the non-profit that he founded of that name avers.

Grumbine comes in hot following Chariton's rant to talk about how Bernie saying all we have to do to cover the Social Security shortfall is tax the wealthy is basically feeding into the same message as Lutnick et al—i.e., that there’s a shortfall that needs to be dealt with (contra Bernie by cutting benefits)-- when according to Modern Monetary Theory the government can just print money whenever it wants to, so Social Security is never in true jeopardy, shortfall or not.  In support of Grumbine's assertion, Chariton plays a clip of Alan Greenspan, the libertarian, partisan, Randian, antiregulatory free-market fundamentalist and former Head of the Federal Reserve from the Reagan to Bush Younger administrations (and as administrator of monetary policy arguably the engineer of the 2008 Financial Crisis due to policies that made unregulated exotic speculation consequenceless for the financial masters of the universe).  Responding to questions from Paul Ryan in a congressional hearing about the shortfall, Greenspan, hardly a proponent of MMT, nevertheless magically parrots Grumbine's assertion that it’s not a question of will the money be there because the government can print money whenever it needs to, but rather “the question is, how do you set up a system which assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase?  So it’s not a question of security, it’s a question of the structure of a financial system which assures that the real resources are created for retirement as distinct from the cash.  The cash itself is nice to have but it’s got to be in the context of the real resources being created at the time those benefits are paid “ (video cuts off here.)  All of which Chariton interprets as there is no insolvency issue, we have enough money to pay out social security "into infinity and beyond."  And Grumbine goes further to explain the gobbledygook from Greenspan about what the real question is as consistent with MMT's advocacy of deficit spending;  and avers that the Social Security system as conceived and currently operating is a concession to capitalists in that above a certain income you pay the same as everyone else so it hurts less to pay the more you make over that cap , whereas at the bottom of the scale it’s taking a bite out of your ability to live day to day.  So while Greenspan is matter of factly saying that the real problem of retirement is not coming up with the cash to pay Social Security, it’s coming up with the things that that cash buys—in other words a problem for business—Grumbine is saying the government could not tax anybody for Social Security—and it could still then turn around and pay everyone say $5000 a month regardless of how much you made over the course of your career and then the problem would be ensuring that there were enough resources for folks to spend that money on. 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Trump administration is not about to fix Social Security with Modern Monetary Theory, and furthermore that in the only alternate universe that was possible in the November branch of alternate universes, a Kamala Harris administration would not be dismantling social benefits, laying off Federal employees, wrecking government to give cover to nefarious plans to privatize to Elon Musk every service the government provides with our taxes.  If the Social Security Trust Fund is essentially a spreadsheet as Grumbine says, is it not reasonable to expect that anyone trying to preserve Social Security and prevent the massive social misery we appear to be headed for in this country might as well wring digits to "save" it from the hoarded wealth of billionaires?  Would anyone other than the less than 2000 billionaires in this country complain?  It is far too late to carp on this, but the reflexive "Them Too-ing" of Democrats on the part of the "enlightened left" absolutely contributed to the havoc we are now experiencing, which will only get worse.   We can certainly expect the abstainers of the left, the Third Party purity voters to continue moaning as a way of excusing themselves for shirking from the prevention of Trump's victory.  It certainly will not fix things if any proportion of them suddenly saw the light.  But I wouldn't mind.  

~~~~~

* Though there are exceptions.  And, to my main argument, far more exceptions to the rule in the Democratic caucus than in the GOP.

This is America

Arguably also #2

Trump has revoked the legal status of half a million immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba,  Haiti and Nicaragua who were granted permission to migrate under the auspices of  a sponsorship program introduced by the Biden administration in 2022 as a pathway to citizenship for those seeking asylum from acknowledged crises.  Beneficiaries of the program have been encouraged to self-deport and are  "required" to download a governmental app to inform the administration of their intent to do so.  And there are hints that Ukrainians are next.  Trump's administration is persecuting and seeking to deport or otherwise disappear legal citizens (Mahmoud Khalil most famously) whose opinions they don't like, and have used the pretext of the 1798 Alien Enemies act to round up non-criminal Venezuelans (men and women) for deportation and imprisonment in El Salvador which has agreed to take them-- the act's first invocation by a sitting administration ever in peacetime.  They have also sought to loosen prohibitions on torture and the use of black sites for those designated as enemy combatants, with an ambition to outdo the illegal activities of the Bush administration that at least had the context of the Iraq War to use as a cover for their thuggery.  And without yet waging war they are dropping bombs and killing civilians in Yemen (and coordinating the attacks via IM threads on private 3rd party apps that they accidentally share with journalists).  They are dismantling the Department of Education, cancelling foreign and domestic aid, antagonizing neighbors, infiltrating cultural institutions, hacking the few benefits American workers and taxpayers get from paying taxes and now have their sights on Social Security, Amtrak and the Post Office.

Some have wishfully called the unparalleled fascism that the Trump administration has unleashed on the country in its first two months following the playbook of the supremacist Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 Un-American.  The sad fact is that it could not be more American if it came with baseball cards and apple pie.  The country that brought you chattel slavery, Jim Crow, colonial settler genocide, trickle down economics, global anti-democratic mayhem in the name of the corporate class, planetary imbalance-- an acknowledged inspiration for both Hitler and settler colonial genocidal zionists in Israel-- now brings you Trump.  The empty protestations of impotent Democrats like Biden and Obama to the contrary, Violence and Stupidity is who we are. There is a certain class of lout that America has attracted and exalted and produced in abundance over the years, and comb-over Trump and his implanted South African partner in crime with implants Elon Musk are the apotheosis.

I know this is not what those who invoke American ideals in contrast to what we're witnessing from Washington are talking about when they use the phrase un-American to describe what Trump and Musk and their evil minions are doing.  True enough, there is a strain in American culture, a never realized but often invoked strain, that hints at government of, for and by the people.  A land of the free, a home of the brave and just and good.  Simple folk who believe in doing for yourself and letting your neighbor be but taking care of folks when times is tough or they ain't got the wherewithal to take keer of theirselves.  We don't go in for this here authoritarian stuff, least wise from those we send to Washington.  Shucks, we don't know much about book learning and such, but we'd never think of putting down folks who do.  We're not the kind to shy away from facing the cold hard facts of life if it's what we've got to do to make the world safe and life good for all good people everywhere.  Sure, we have differences, but we don't let them come between us, and we'll fight for your right to disagree with us about anything as long as you're not hurting no one with it.  Why, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round.   There's plenty of room for everybody!  Burning books and jailing folks for having opinions contrary to our own and blaming people who don't look like us or act like us or believe like us for our problems is for fraidy cats.  That's not us!  That's not who we are!  Right, Neighbor?

Yes and No.

No Daylight, Kid

Trump they wouldn't believe.  Harris they wouldn't disbelieve.  But while Trump has already demonstrated his capacity to do the damage to our society that his most ardent and deeply pocketed supporters said he was going to do, we have recently learned that there was a good explanation for Harris's troubling remonstrations about how different a Harris administration would be from the Biden era that no one was particularly crushed to see about to come to an end.

As reported in the upcoming chronicle of the 2024 election, “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, as excerpted at The Hill:

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both understood the importance of being seen as the bigger change agent.  For Trump, that meant continuing to promise an antidote to the Biden-Harris years.  For Harris, there was more flexibility to define her brand of change.  ... [Biden] would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win. But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us. “No daylight” was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush.

The day before Harris’s first interview ... [V]eteran Democratic communications strategist Stephanie Cutter launched into a proposed preamble — a list of all the items that made Harris proud of her work with Biden.  “Wait, wait, wait!” said Sean Clegg, a longtime Harris adviser who was regarded with suspicion by the Biden holdovers running the campaign. “Let’s not do this. Let’s not go down memory lane.”   That was the last time he was invited to media prep. 

Whether she won or lost the election, he thought, she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him — especially during a debate that would be watched by millions of Americans. To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him.  “No daylight, kid,” Biden said.

Nothing about this surprises me.  In fact, this was my assumption -- my hope-- going into election day-- that Harris's mannered insistence that nothing would fundamentally change except the face at the top of the ticket was not the truth but a condition of Joe Biden's surrender to the tide that burned to replace him only after it was too late.  It beggared belief that Kamala Harris was Joe Biden's DEI clone.  There was so much to object to about Joe Biden, apart from his deteriorating mind, that the sheer fact of a switch at the top of the ticket practically screamed relief from the collision course that the geezer rematch was guaranteeing us to be heading for.  By the point at which Joe Biden was nudged aside, the election seemed destined for the worst possible by far of two abysmal outcomes.  Of course Kamala Harris represented a fresh start.  I will confess I could not be dissuaded from my optimism about what a Harris win would mean, especially in light of the alternative.  Not even by Harris herself.  And my solitude at the end of the branch of suspended disbelief in the lack of daylight between Harris and the president who reportedly-- his self-serving ministrations about minimizing daylight between them notwithstanding--kept his vice president at arms' length  set the foundation for an especially steep fall and crash when the polls closed.

Is there a lesson in this? 

Yes, both for candidates who want to win and for those who vote as an act of  seeking power for their cause within a very confining charade of democracy, but is it now too late to learn it?

On Being Good

Sam Seder the host of the progressively disposed webcast Majority Report recently went on the Jubilee YouTube channel to participate in an event called Surrounded, in which according to some labyrinthine rules I did not hang around long enough to figure out, he sequentially debated a set of premises of his own construction with a series of conservative Gen Z fashion victims, all of whom in spite of the diverse mix of races, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations seemed united in opposition to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (and sometimes Accessibility) known colloquially as DEI.  DEI was itself one of the topics -- specifically "Trump's attacks on DEI hide his real goal which is to give corporations more power."-- which gave rise to the clip perhaps most widely shared in which a young latino gay gentleman with a man bun confidently asserts incorrectly that government agencies get tax breaks from the government for making DEI hires.  (Spoiler: Government agencies are not taxed by the government that creates and funds them from taxes.)   The young man's certitude and wrongness were  exceptional but emblematic of the caliber of opponent and quality of argument that Seder was up against.

Some of the combatants were better armed.  For instance debating  the proposition that "Unless you're a billionaire,  religious fundamentalist, or xenophobic nationalist, voting for Trump was a mistake.", Seder faced a young fundamentalist who had a point of view about the basis on which morality should be formed. His argument went along the lines of: 

If you don't have a foundation for your beliefs it's not morality, it's a preference.  A humanist foundation which seeks the least harm for the most people is considered consequentialist or utilitarian, not moral.  In that light, to a non fundamentalist, the belief that killing is wrong is merely a preference-- there's no basis for a difference with those who would say killing is right.  If society tomorrow said trans folks don't deserve rights, a moral relativist should be ok with that.  Take relativism to its logical end, however and you have low reproductive birth rates, a reproductive dead end (two men together can't reproduce). Religion prioritizes the nuclear family.   Gay people have no justification for being gay outside of "it just feels good".  Are pedophiles, like gay people, "born that way"?  To prevent them from acting on their urges we create duties.  Religion provides those duties and obligations to behave according to religious morality.  Life isn't about freedom and exercising what you want.  The leftist view  in contrast is only about "It makes me feel good."  

Seder admits that he was slow in cottoning to the argument being put before him, and for this reason feels this may be the one segment that he did not rise to.  (His argument amounted to: Religion having a number of differing viewpoints, no one of them should have the right to corner what god is telling us is right or wrong.   No one has a corner on religious truth.  The reason we have a democracy is because we don't want a king.  Kings came from the idea that their authority comes directly from god.)  Seder ultimately condeded  (to the extent that you can consider  a point that is utterly consistent with the premise being debated a concession) that religious fundamentalism won with Trump.  To which the fundamentalist boasted:  Sorry we're going to have more kids, less abortion, more families, stable family households, better education.  If liberal rights were rolled back, Gay people should be straight anyway.  Women should submit to their husbands. It doesn't mean they're slaves (which has become a bad thing  since the end of the civil war apparently, even to rightwing American Christian fundamentalists).  Seder: I don't want to live under a theocracy,  you on the other hand are at home in the Trump universe.  To which the young fundamentalist could only beam.

I don't want to debate necessarily, but for lack of a better idea, I am a little inspired to try to amplify why what is good for fundamentalists only, and particularly American conservative Christian fundamentalists, is objectively less good-- much much much less good-- than what is good for me and I assume for Sam Seder.  Sam may have hit on this but if he did it was not in any of the segments I could stomach watching.  

The fundamentalist world view is too stunted and provincial to see this, but morality, even their own is a betrayal of preference.  For the fundamentalist, the preference is for dictated standards of behavior.  For whatever reason, the fundamentalist prefers to attribute morality to an authority, and particularly an authority that theoretically metes out consequences for misbehavior.  By and large, the fundamentalist adheres to this morality both in fear of consequences of being found to fall short of adherence to the morality and occasionally due to a shared preference for whatever the authority's perceived preference may be, but the fundamentalist always projects and models his behavior as though he strictly adheres to the morality.  When morality is dictated to you, it is hoped that you will adhere to it, but it is expected that you will broadcast the sincere desire for others-- specifically, those outside the fundamentalist tribe--to be forced to comply with it (which could arguably be the primary motivation of fundamentalists to adopt such a petty and unforgiving world view to begin with).  The preference is to avoid eternal consequences (or short-term social ones) of being discovered by God, or worse, by one's fellow fundamentalists to stray from the dictated code, but especially to be perceived as being faithful to it.  A flawed human being can aver that their morality is from God, but truthfully, their morality is at best a preference to be seen as being faithful to the morality of their God.

Disbelieving in the authority of a pretty distasteful tradition (and I'm speaking in particular of the experience I've had of the American conservative Christian Fundamentalist tradition), it would be immoral of me to "base" my "morality" on the authority of a "god" or even to pretend to respect a tradition so at odds with what I consider to be the rightest to the best of my ability way to behave in this one life I'm given (by parent humans).  For starters, it would be immoral of me to yield my moral sense (to pretend to feel any duty or obligation) to a racist, xenophobic, nationalist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, lookist, ableist, liberty-for-me-bondage-for-thee tribalist selfish asshole of a god.  But it isn't because of a hatred for the god (there is no such entity, thank the heavenly void) but rather a fundamental (pardon the pun) disagreement about the best way for people to behave toward each other and toward the planet we find ourselves on.   Sam Seder's opponent may have been "sorry" about the imposition of his extremely tiny stultified notion of morality on those who rue the victory of his kind in the last election.  If my morality ever wins, it would mean that his kind would have to suffer the agony of universal healthcare and social security for all at every age.  They would need to deal with a state that assists a woman in realizing whatever choice she makes of whether or not and when to reproduce, either through safe and legal abortion if the time is not right or in tools to raise her child when she feels the time is right.  They would have to cope with a society in which work is done as a communal project to meet the needs of everyone,  even the least capable of working, and not for the profit and benefit of a tiny self-selected elite. They would need to deal with a society that lives and lets live, loves and lets love, is and lets be however a person feels they need to be.  True, they might be prevented from ever attaining billions in wealth or dominion over planet raping corporations, but they could very well find consolation as thriving citizens of a world in which needs are met with such little resistance and to such an extent that poverty does not exist, crimes are rare, inequality is not a thing and the best things in life are free.   Never in the history of this capitalism enthralled society has such a morality prevailed, regardless of fundamentalist claims (and blames) to the contrary.  Some day void willing.

Pet Names

On a completely different topic, here’s an interesting bit from the OED:

Dog

I.1.a.

Old English–

A domesticated carnivorous mammal, Canis familiaris (or C. lupus familiaris), which typically has a long snout, an acute sense of smell, non-retractile claws, and a barking, howling, or whining voice*, widely kept as a pet or for hunting, herding livestock, guarding, or other utilitarian purposes.

Etymology: Origin unknown.

The word belongs to a set of words of uncertain or phonologically problematic etymology with a stem-final geminated g in Old English which is not due to West Germanic consonant gemination and therefore does not undergo assibilation. These words form both a morphological and a semantic group, as they are usually Old English weak masculine nouns and denote animals; compare FROG n.1, HOG n.1, PIG n.1, STAG n.1, Old English sugga (see HAYSUGGE n.), Old English wicga (see EARWIG n.), and perhaps TEG n.1 It has been suggested that these words show expressive gemination, perhaps due to their being originally hypocoristic forms. (For discussion see R. M. Hogg†‘Two Geminate Consonants in Old English’ in J. Anderson Lang. Form & Ling. Variation (1982) 187–202.) For some of the words, substratal influence has also been considered (compare PIG n.1). Because attestation of these words in Old English is generally rare and confined to glossaries and onomastic evidence (as in the case of DOG n.1), if they are attested at all, and also because there is often a better-attested synonym (in this case, HOUND n.1), it seems likely that the words were stylistically marked in Old English, i.e. considered non-literary or informal.

It never occurred to me that the origin of "dog" could be a mystery; furthermore, that it might be part of a morphological and semantic group with frog, hog, pig, stag, haysugge (hedge-sparrow), earwig and teg (second year sheep) among who knows how many others. Are these other -g ending critters in the same category?: bug, slug, nag  

The commonality seems to hinge on the non-literary or informal quality they share -- they appear to be less well attested than their counterparts "Hound", "Boar", "Buck", etc.  The terminal "g" that they have in common has a tendency to double in length (geminate) in other forms.  As the evidence for the origin of  words in this class is either scant or associated with proper names in the literature,  the suggestion is that the final g may have been a way of forming informal or pet names for the commonly encountered animals (hypocoristic means having to do with pet names).   If I'm understanding it correctly, the animal may have been a hound, but fondness for it inspired proto-English speakers to dispense with formalities and call it a "doggie" which we inherited as the common English name for it, right?  How cute!

What does it mean?  I don’t know, but it’s interesting, isn't it?  Mind blown for the day.  

~~~~

* "... whining voice..." Rather subjective, is it not?  Cat people, am I right?

† No pun intended?

Quibbles

Francis Bacon

The other day, out of curiosity, I was googling "2024 Vote Regret" and I found 2 vote regretters.  Both of them regretted their votes ...  for Kamala Harris!   To be fair one of the regretters was that jackass on ESPN Stephen A Smith I think his name is and he was basically being a contrary dick on Bill Maher.  The other was Charlamagne Tha God and he was retroactively regretting endorsing Kamala Harris as VP in 2020.  But my point is, there is really no satisfaction to be gotten from seeking regret from anyone who didn’t vote for Harris, because they don’t seem to exist.  There are a few Trump regretters by now to be sure.  But trying to get people to admit that had Harris won we would not be in the position we're in is something like saying the moon would be green if it had grass growing on it.  My conclusion—and I’m not talking about dyed in the wool democrats or dupes but about smart people whose primary goal was avoiding what we’ve got now—we’ll never get the credit we deserve or any gratification for having tried to make the worst outcome of the 2024 election not happen, no matter how hard we seek.  (The silver lining: the whole fucking shithole of a country appears about to be ready to come crashing down around us now.  And I hope it does.  And when we wrest the charred remains from the bloated motherfuckers who are engaged in destroying it for their own superfluous gain right now, let's do it right next time-- for all of us.)  (And Fuck Them!)

***

Black Pill by Elle Reeve presents up close journalism about the sorts of internet denizens that our government's (hence our) violator Elon Musk fancies himself to be-- the edgy troll.  Insightful and adventuresome-- I'll miss reading it when I'm done with it.  Specifically, it concludes things about free speech absolutism that have been on my mind quite a bit lately—namely that it mostly serves nazis and racists who laugh behind the backs of useful idiot free speech advocates on the left.  I don’t know what to do about it, and Elle Reeve hasn’t yet said what to do about it if she has an opinion about that.  It’s sort of a black pilled predicament that the ones whose odious speech is most tenderly catered to are the ones basically advocating for surrender to the racist and misogynist and fascist notions that already hold sway in why things suck.  Meanwhile speech and thought of the left is actively and openly being banned by those aggressively pushing the freedom to be fascist.  Speech has consequences.  It gets people killed.  It undoes centuries of struggle.  Discuss.

###

Talking to a friend in my age range who was laid off a couple of years ago and who, after a futile two year search for someone-- anyone-- willing to take a chance on hiring a 60-something job candidate in his field, is cresting on adopting a stance that he is now permanently involuntarily unemployed, I am definitely of the opinion that even a “good job” is taken out of necessity, not desire.  The work I’m trying to force myself to get back to (yet writing this instead)-- I wouldn’t do it if I wasn't afraid of starving myself and my family.  My friend is not happy about the lack of agency he feels he has in his economic life, but it does not escape either of our attention that he and I are both the age that people not too long ago used to retire at anyway and in spite of everything in this stingy culture that is sending him the contradictory message that his unemployability makes him less than human, being outside the proletariat truly has its perks.  I think my friend, being no longer an exploited value producer is in the natural state.  We’re trained to feel that the natural state is wrong.  But the natural state is the right state to be in if you can get there.  It’s just that the voices that encourage it are few and far between.  Society is set up to thwart the natural state.  Like almost everything about capitalism, the attitude of society to the natural state -- fear!-- is expressed as a lie.  We can’t bring ourselves to say we fear people living in a natural state because that way lies the end of capitalism.  Instead we say the natural state is deficient. Capitalism is deficient.

%%%

Privatization is not just an idea about how to reform the manner in which government provides service to its citizens.  It is the looting of our common treasury without our permission.  It is looting that makes the looting that Fox News is eager to warn us about when well-felt anger manifests itself among the people of the city after the latest outrage of indignity perpetrated on them by the constabulary look like mutual aid.  The object of privatization is to make the purview of government not the provision of a common good from the pool of our collective tribute, but rather to afford scoundrels who by hook or by crook find themselves "elected" to higher office  the opportunity to entitle their already bloated capitalistic patrons and cronies who got and keep them there to abscond with our treasury for their own profit, leaving them to see fit how poorly or even whether the once public now private service they have been gifted dominion over is delivered.  The beneficiaries of privatization are thieves twice over, for they steal not only our treasury-- the money that we who are not the beneficiaries of the wealth protection industry are coerced to supply for it for nothing in return-- but also the money that they then charge us for whatever it is our tax dollars have been granted them to retail or to rent to us. In spite of the clever sounding justifications that think tanks have been bribed to come up with, privatization is not "a cool thing to try", it is a crime committed by both the privatizers and the recipients of these corrupt officials' largesse with our money that should uniquely be punishable by public execution of both the privatizers and their profiteers.  Even murderers can be reformed.   Privatizers and their profiteers are irredeemable.  But seeing that they get their desserts (and we ours) is up to us.

Look closely- It's not an ad for a pickle.  It's dead-scalp Elon Musk.

Non-Alignment Pact

 Happy Valentine's Day from Pere Ubu!