We Don't have the LUXury of Time

In Praise of Folly

According to Mandeville, in The Fable of the Bees: What is laid to the charge of luxury besides, is, that it increases Avarice and Rapine; and when They are the reigning vices, Offices of the greatest trust are bought and sold; the Ministers that should serve the public, both great and small, corrupted, and the country is every moment in danger of being betrayed to the highest bidders. Thus none of the famous States and Empires the world has thus far witnessed ever came to ruin without that destruction being principally owing to the bad politics, neglect, or mismanagement by the rulers.

I found that interesting, as what it suggest is exactly the same dynamic as the Wiemar Republic, wherein Von Hindenburg was accused of doing exactly that by none of other then Hitler. Remember him? Assassination attempts against his life were considered to be treasonous. A monster who was rolling over an entire continent with tanks and whose pilots were strafing defenseless women and children with his Brave Luftwaffe.

So what is treasonous when the government that's been voted in by a minority of voters is intent on debauching their own population? Is it not then treasonous to support them, traitorous not to rebel? When the winner of the Presidential election not only admits, but brags that the elections were rigged, is there really any need for the circus of the Russian investigations? The man they are investigating exclaims outright that his election was rigged. If it were the Russians that tried to rig it, it doesn't exactly matter, especially as we had initiated sanctions against them, and sanctions imposed by one regime against another sovereign State is an act of War. So Russians meddling in the election should have been simply taken for granted, the lack of precautions against such encroachment by a candidate who was to become Commander-in-Chief, a good reason not to elect them.

And that the FBI should be monitoring the activity of a treasonous presidential candidate, one who repeatedly, without a shred of evidence, accused the Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces during WARTIME of creating the force he was sending our troops to die fighting, is treasonous. As one of Putin's comrades stated, "Well, you couldn't expect Putin not to do anything when a citizen is accusing him of being a War Criminal". Yet, apparently, Obama and our intelligence services were expected to sit back and simply accept these traitorous accusations during a time of a hot war from a candidate who was to take up the reins to win that war should he be elected; of accusations that the Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces was a War Criminal, which the accusation that "Obama created ISIS", repeated by Trump over and over again during the campaign, amounts to, with
complete Sangfroid. This from the same man who has the stupidity to accuse members of Congress of Treason simply for not giving him a standing ovation for spouting lies and half-truths.

Even Nixon never sank so low as to accuse LBJ of creating the Viet Cong; can you imagine Reagan accusing Carter of fomenting the Iranian uprising (yet not a soul chastises Reagan for what he did purposely do: created the mujaheddin, just as Bush, as in GW, funded the Taliban, and enjoyed the best relations with the Bin Ladens, his father having bought said friendship by pouring billions in oil and arms deals into the coffers of rich Saudis for more than twelve years). (BTW ... Trump, as I'm sure it comes as no surprise, has close to zero imagination. Everything he slimes the airwaves with is picked up somewhere else and used to his benefit. From reading The Saker, and other Russian sites during the election, it was quite clear to me, before any mention of the Russians was made in the media (around February 2016, picking up in vitriolic content as either Obama or Hillary Clinton came up ... Killary is THEIR invention, for example, the Trumplestitltskins just did what comes naturally to them: they simply stole it)). The FBI would have been remiss if it were NOT investigating any candidate with known ties to the oligarchs of Russia (they are oligarchs by virtue of being the elite rich in an oligarchy. In an oligarchy, there are no private oligarchs who aren't in cahoots with the government (otherwise, it wouldn't be an Oligarchy), else they'd be where several of them landed after Putin's ascension to power: in Jail)).

And why were they thrown in jail? For treasonous activities against the State. But when treasonous activities are more often than not pursued by politicians and other government officials and employees who are already being paid higher salaries than workers in the private sector, with pensions guaranteed (which none of them are in the private sector), and healthcare bestowed with no cost to the recipients, who expect, and therefore legislate, that those in the private sector who the same politicians have striven mightily to make sure they deny benefits to, are stuck with the bill for theirs, then to whom is one's loyalty owed?

Looking at all the legislation and policies pushed by the current administration, it is  hard to account for the continued loyalty of its core constituents. However, what isn't hard to notice is that every policy actually enacted is a direct attack on them. And by direct attack, I don't mean casting aspersions. I mean deadly attacks. Attacks, such as stripping them of health insurance, just as you promised, that results in real casualties. Especially when simultaneously one is gutting environmental protections, funding and encouraging the stripping of America's energy assets, but not to enable the so-called US Energy Independence Sarah what's-her-name was screeching about not very long ago, but to ship US vital resources to the rest of the world, as though we're Nigeria or Saudi Arabia, with no other choice but to sell our seed corn to the highest bidder and hope we can somehow come up with a scheme to enable us to buy some of the resultant bounty derived therefrom. The upshot of which will be the same as it was from shipping US oil to the rest of the world: Depletion. Leaving the country unable to pay via its industry for all the imports we now need from the ROW in the form of finished goods (much of which is pure junk, discarded as thoughtlessly as a State Dept. employee).

But depriving his constituents of health insurance wasn't enough. Poisoning them with gasses from industry and half a billion internal combustion engines, whose fuel efficiency standards his administration has gutted, isn't enough either. He must strap onto their backs the enormous debt incurred to ensure his offspring and his cronies access to America's public-financed but privately-run business' reins while paying nothing but pennies for it. The Jeffrey Sachs economic model for Russia now being used to the same purpose domestically. Because the Business of America is the business of international war-mongering. And war-mongering sucks up energy resources as greedily as private enterprise sucks on the government teat. That's why as we ship out US energy resources from one port, we must even more frantically import them at another, as the US, similar to all major energy exporters except two (can you guess which two?) cannot produce the requisite energy to drive its economy, so it must IMport those hydrocarbons.

If one looks at the warnings about the looming debt crisis from pre-2008, that this dependency on
energy imports was mushrooming out of control (since the main one, Oil, was priced at $149/bbl, yet not earning enough in exports to even come close to paying off the debt thus accrued) the figures were daunting. Presented as catastrophic by many of the same parties who have just voted to increase that debt for no believable reason except to decrease the tax liabilities for the only entities who have the wherewithal to actually pay for the same, are the same parties who refused to create a nickel of stimulus when the economy was in actual need of it, preferring instead as his No. 1 priority (remember that, Mitch McConnell actually Stated it), being to make Obama a one-term president (speaking of treason, is this not treasonous? Though you'll hear not a whisper from that dreaded FAke News outlet of CNN, McConnell literally and purposely created the conditions that led to the "Horrible" state of the economy pre-Trumplestiltskin, yet in none of the debates in which Trump trashed the unemployment and growth rates, does Clinton say a peep about McConnell's outrageous statement ... so outrageous, that I, a mere denizen, remember, yet, Clinton, a Presidential candidate for more than a decade, failed to point out (... so really, Rachel Madcow ...  Her loss is the Russians' fault?)).

The reason being that so many baby boomers were destined to retire in the coming decade. That coming decade is here, and all the gov't-stoked demand created by the economic stimulus of Social Security checks going out is providing exactly that stimulus to the economy the GOP tax-break-for-the-rich is carping about its needing. Yet not One economist, including the self-satisfied Paulyanna Krugman, countered GOP contentions for a need of a stimulus only a tax-break for the Aristocracy would provide, by pointing out that the Federal Gov't borrowing they insist is needed to goose the economy is being added year after year by the steady increase in the very Social Security outlays they claimed not 10 years ago would bring down the economic system by overburdening it with debt. How then is it even remotely possible to save that system by the onerous burden of yet MORE debt? And whereas SocSec checks get spent locally, flowing into the economy, Taxcuts to the those already shoveling dollars out of the economy as soon as they flow into their bank accounts only removes dollars from the US economic system and siphons them nowhere so much as into the Communist
economy of China. The last avatar of an economic system that the US citizenry was squeezed for decades in order to extinguish, its upper class is now using that same citizenry's dollars to enrich itself and an intractable Communist Regime while impoverishing the rest of their countrymen. (I do not blame the Red Party, the GOP, our own homegrown Red Menace, for this, it is the Democrats who pretend they are for the working people, yet whenever Republicans pull yet another heist, the most simple, obvious rebuttals that their public fiscal penury at home, is in stark contrast to their private fiscal liberality overseas, is never brought up).

In all this, the most alarming failure of all our institutions is Journalism, the first one (having destroyed Public Television and morphed it into Corporate television) that was completely privatized, the only owners of it, Corporations; the only revenue it produces, sourced from other Corporations. Yet even as we're treated (via Big Pharm's ads, for example) to a daily bombardment of the horrific side-effects of the products they shamelessly peddle, the far more grim side-effects of running a global economy that's geared toward fulfilling the needs of an ever-shrinking minority never gets an airing. The siphoning of labor's output into the design, manufacture and procurement of weapons of mass destruction on a monumental scale, one never before attained in the history of the world, while drugging the population to such an outrageously careless extent that deaths from opiate overdoses exceed those from automobile and gun accidents combined, never discussed. The two most deadly economic entities, that had been vying for first place in accidental deaths for more than a decade, were overtaken by deaths from doctor-prescribed medications in a time span of but a few years (and lest we forget, the entire purported reason for mandating a prescription in the first place was to "protect" us from exactly what the AMA has inflicted on us instead; what good does it do for the FDA to assure that a drug is safe and effective when those responsible for prescribing it are more concerned about their livelihoods then their patients' lives?).

But far from taking the dark shadow cast over truth by the privatization of every News outlet in the country, pretending that "social Media" will fill the void left by elimination of the public press and professional journalism, every other public responsibility goes on being privatized, as though it went off so splendidly, why not do it everywhere? Such that the only thing left public is the responsibility to clean up the mess left by those despoiling everything in sight (and much that isn't, such as the very air we breathe, which in time, actually beComes visible, as in Beijing. That's the advantage of harnessing yourself to a Communist regime: their citizens can just choke on your fumes, and the Communist Party, the only Party allowed, will make sure that anyone complaining about it will be swiftly swept into a "Re-education" camp and silenced. Thirty millions dying from respiratory illnesses? So what? That's no big deal. If there's one thing the minions can be counted on for, it's that they'll dutifully reproduce, educate, and rear 30 millions more and hand them right over to you, no questions asked, no compensation demanded).

And yet, were Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, whose quote opened this post, to be taken seriously, things are not perhaps so bad as they seem. He flatters himself at the end of his Fable with the assertion that he has demonstrated that "neither the friendly qualities and kind affections that are natural to Man, nor the real virtues of which we are capable of acquiring by reason and self-denial, are the foundation of Society, what we call Evil in this world is the grand principle that makes us sociable creatures, the solid basis, the life and support of all trades and employments without exception. It is there we must look for the true origin of all Arts and Sciences, for the moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled if not totally dissolved, resulting in the seeming paradox that private vices by the dexterous  management of a skillful politician may be turned into Public Benefits."

The problem with this being:

1) The skillful politicians have been routed because hysteria has become the only acceptable means of discourse, so that

2) There are no Private vices, as they have all been made public by a media that has degenerated to the level of The National Enquirer, therefore

3) The politicians that rise to prominence are those best at manipulating the media and whose vices are not turned into Public Benefits, because the public they should benefit are so besotted with their Evangelical mission of eliminating vice in others that their leaders can boast that they could stand in the middle of Fifth Ave and open fire on his own constituents and those not shot dead would dutifully scurry off to the polls to vote for the murderer, even knowing it would result in the elimination of even something so basic as Healthcare coverage for themselves and their own family.

Yet this is what the 21'st century ushered in with its promise for "Compassionate Conservatism", elevating "Good" to the oval office, intent on destroying everything that makes life worth living, raising the Cult of Death to pre-eminence, decrying to all dissenters that they are either with them or against them. Let the bombs fall where they may.