The Plasticene Error.

They shake with hate for things they've never seen.

Devoid of love in this age, the Plasticene,

Oppressed by Dow and dreams of Mr. Clean.

Driven mad by rides from Lyft and Uber

Their bags are Glad, the air they breathe is scuba;

A conscience has become a long-lost feature

Of those convinced they're god's most favored creature.

Some strayed, most stayed, imprisoned by possessions 

Though disasters came in waves of quick succession;

The houses of the poor were thereby forfeit

While Corporations showed a steady profit.

Along the corridors of power they come and go

And quail in fear of tweets from Trumpashenko;

Nothing is sacred, least of all the rule of Law

Except for John's, of course, which has one fatal flaw:

The Mississippi Bubble he ostensibly blew

Ravaged every nation, just like our "Flu";

It fractured every Nation's citizens' trust,

Exposed paper fortunes' sparkle as so much fairy dust.

But nevermind, that's just how Capitalism works,

Handing sacred duties over to conniving jerks;

Whose spindly arms stretch like sorry vegetation

Toward the despoiler of men: Bane to his own Nation.

Instead of competition, rampant monopoly;

But never guilty, they just cop a plea,

"We weren't, you know, the people who designed it,

We're forced to use the system just as we find it".

If that should mean we're all turning Japanese

With banking systems bringing nations to their knees,

Living through serial Lost generations,

Is but a small price to pay

For the Rich's permanent vacations.

The Age of Reason, at one time it was seven.

When childish minds still think they'll go to heaven.

Now despite billions in public funds deployed

to educate them, 

They're un- and underemployed.

A glorious future is what we promised youth

Never telling them what's closer to the truth:

Take out a student loan at rates usurious,

And your future will be hopeless and financially injurious.

He looks, devoid of wisdom, from atop his gilded throne

Down on his own base with face of Revlon'd stone

His only duty now being to compel

Their gratitude for his playing the role of William Tell.

To those poor sods who trusted him, he said,

  "Take this polished apple and place it on your head".

And while those more wary soon began to shiver,

He aimed the Covid arrow he'd taken from his quiver.

This is how he planned to inspire daze of glory

Though the outcome might be astonishing or gory,

Like other ruses pulled from the bag of Capitalism's tricks,

 All the rewards would be his, while you take all the risks.

2

His followers so low, they call themselves the base:

The dregs, the low. The avatars of race

As the one and only attribute 

Needed for your  place

Of elevated privilege/

rank, 

As noxious weeds,

A wan, pale complexion 

is all anyone really needs.

White is right and right is Might

The pallid insist, well wrapped in spite.

But the Spanish flu came a century ago

Following mankind's biggest imbroglio, 

When every Nation that was ruled by Divine Rights

Plunged the entire world into its Darkest of Nights.

Mechanized slaughter of heartbreaking proportion

Helped kindle the appetite for financial extortion.

So they signed the famous Treaty of Versailles

(Watch the series, you'll see just why)

It was just a cease-fire, 

not an end to War/

Reparations

Used for Preparations

To even the Score, by getting

 Your citizens ready by whetting

Their lust for carnage, while preening their feathers

Strutting themselves in front of vanity's mirrors. To Justify

Another globalized village's rampage of rape, slaughter and pillage.

 

3

And this is the group, we're all led to believe

That'll insure the world a lasting reprieve,

From the very evil it served on a plate

to a world now being stoked by vitriol and Hate

Thinly cloaked in assertions to, "Make America Great".

But instead of "Great", to no one's Surprise,

Has risen a raft of conspiracies and lies

To mow down their enemies with a deadly disease,

Thinning out their ranks, ignoring their pleas

Mocking their request to, "Wear a mask" ... 

"Please?"

Yet in this atmosphere of Climate denial, 

This rancor, spleen and bewildering bile

Is really just a logical extension

Of negating every step of Global Warming prevention ...

It's but a ratcheting up of the White Reign of Terror

Snow-blinding everyone to the rampaging weather,

For which the sop, "We're all in this Together,"

Is thrown like a bone to a junkyard cur.

But despite millions now claiming they've finally awakened,

Their trust in Capitalism remains unshakened;

Growth and jobs is the demanded remedy

Which ignores they are inflicting the globe with a malady 

From which now nor ever will there be a vaccine: 

The economic system of The Plasticene. 

 

 

 

 

Breaking News: "Sole Superpower" means We have an obligation to NO ONE.

Don't you love insincere bromides like the one I just read in the San Francisco Chronicle: "We share an obligation to each other"?, or "We're all in this together"? Lol. It's as though the entire thrust of Western Civilization since the Reagan era can be put into reverse by stating exactly the opposite of everything that has been drummed into our heads since it became Mourning in America. Oh wait, that's the 2020 vision of Trumpashenko's Amerika, a nation of squirming MAGAts feeding off the  pawed-over leftovers scraped into the garbage bins of the Keptocracy. They (still) call it Trickle Down economics, to give the Reagan/Bush Morning in America euphemism its dew. It was the cynical name given to the program used to start the USA off on its world Victory tour de Force of destroying every non-capitalist country in existence by preaching that, "We share an obligation to no one".

Least of all to a communist country that we watched being bled dry by Nazi aggression while we spent the country's savings on developing a technology that had nothing to do with stopping that aggression (atomic bombs made zero contribution to the defeat of the Nazi's ... contrarily, had the USA spent even a fraction of the money that went into nuclear fission on additional conventional air power and conventional ordnance, or other conventional weapons' systems, we can see today what the results would have been. It was the carpet bombing B-52's and the resultant firestorms they ignited that brought the Third Reich (as it would have Japan) its crushing defeat; VE Day, that celebrated the defeat of the most technologically, scientifically advanced nation in the world, needed not a single atom to be split to bring it about. The specious Truman argument that he had to use the bomb to save American lives was a complete fabrication; the truth is that we used the bomb because he had to justify all the American lives that had already been sacrificed by the Federal government's obsession with nuclear Power; all those men killed while we twiddled our thumbs spending billions of dollars separating protons from their atoms' core while GI goes to his death. What's another coupla hundred thousand dead soldiers when we can have the ultimate weapon? As you watch the virus numbers go up, and see all over the country the unrepentant heartless nonchalance with which the hundreds of thousands of deaths of their fellow citizens are simply shrugged off, it's far easier to imagine the monstrous calculations that were made out of the glare public scrutiny then: TOP SECRET. The blame for All of those soldiers' deaths could be laid at the Fuehrer's feet, so we might as well play mad scientist in the shadow of that mountain of corpses. Listen to the scientists? Sure. But trust the scientists? They used a War to advance their own agenda, insisting the War would be lost otherwise. That was a Lie. History has proved as much. They weren't the ones dying in the front lines, they were instead using the lives of the Nation's combatants as a shield. So you can see why there's so much hesitancy to trust them now; maybe that's why conspiracy theorists are having such a heyday. Why wouldn't scientists do so now when the citizenry itself gives them Carte Blanche? They don't care, they've become Bolsonaro'd).

The core concept behind Trickle Down economics is that the well-heeled, the opulent, the people who have used this country to carve a fortune out for themselves owe the rest of the country, never mind the world, absolutely nothing. If you can manage to scrape a crumb or two from my discarded scraps, or manage to eke out a drop from the trickle of fluid running down my leg to slake your parched throat with, well, whatever. As long as you don't get in the way of the servants, I guess you can be tolerated. And as long as you don't start to think I'm therefore obliged to you in any way, I guess I'll refrain from kicking you in the face for licking my well-heeled boots.  

But if economics can trickle down, so can values and attitudes, and if the richest families in the history of the world would rather give you the finger than raise one to help anyone outside their immediate family, then the peasants, with nothing but their paltry Warmart paystubs, can hardly be expected to feel that they have any obligation to help anyone outside of their immediate families. 

Family values means exactly that. It is only you and your family that matters. You can break any law, fabricate any scam, perpetrate any villainy, so long as you do it for your "family". That's how we can have the most popular TV show be "The Soprano's", about a murderous thug America idolized for a decade because he was only running a family. 

The United States, or any other country, I suppose, apparently has no obligation to any other country. It's the hinge Climate Change denial swings from, even as we castigate China for not living up to their obligation to keep what the US President has claimed is a 99% harmless virus from spreading to the rest of the world. Huh? No American citizen, as preached from the pulpits of the rabid religionists making up the staunchest of Trumpashenko's supporters, more than from any secular source, have any obligation to help anyone, empathize with anyone, nor feel obliged to even inconvenience themselves for anyone. It is just not the Great America's Way. We did not attain Sole Superpower Status by feeling OBligated. And as the healthcare workers of America continue to be demeaned, ignored, mocked, derided and killed by a virus they are working to save US from, it is only a matter of time before they realize that no, they DON'T need to feel obliged to give their lives and work their asses off to help save the lives of your grandparents and parents when not only won't you even wear a strip of cloth across your obnoxious face to help save theirs, you mock and ridicule, and physically attack those that do.  We share an obligation, but "share", in this "America will never be a Socialist" country,  is just not in our vocabulary; it is anathema to our Ruling Class's worldview (Musk, Gates, Ellison, Zuckerburg, Kushner, Rockefeller, Bezos, Murdock, the Koch bros, the Waltons, etc, etc ... these MAGAts didn't get obscenely rich by "sharing", they don't even feel obligated to pay their own workers, contractors, or vendors a living wage).

To paraphrase my favorite Wizard,

 " ... and remember my sentimental friend, Greatness is not judged by how well you think of yourself; but by how well you are thought of by others." 

And not since the days of slavery has America's Democracy been thought so little of as now. 

 

The MAGAts ask, "When You Barb Aryans, Don't We Bleed?"

 

Following the scorched earth policies of Saddam Hussein and the fleeing Armenis who are burning their own homes to the ground rather than see an Azeri live in them, the US President continues to deliberately spread, together with his bilious lies, the corona virus far and wide among his own followers, knowing that they  will then, (being concentrated in the middle of the country), spread the virus all over the rest of the United States. You can watch the infection numbers climb, like a trail of slime, in his burbling wake.

The military call it collateral damage when they purposely deliver carnage to innocents, and it is a euphemism then, and it is one now, as the lethal consequences of the Furor's actions are known in advance, yet the actions are taken regardless. That is not collateral damage, that is diabolically planned murder. Mayhem delivered with a shrug of the shoulders; "Hey, it's not my fault. They're the ones who got in the way." Much like the incumbent's Partietags, which he prefers to call "Rallies": a convening of the gullible to allow the Furor to bask in their shouts of approval while culling their ranks by bringing them a virus, via his dozens of infected "Secret Service" agents, used to spread the microbe from which, he has fully-briefed knowledge, his base supporters have zero immunity. 

Following the same advise as Reagan/Bush did in the eighties, the current President is in the thrall of what its adherents still refer to as a moral majority, but one that is now comprised of religiously-addled cultists who think of themselves as chosen people. Which they are: chosen by their Furor to carry a deadly virus to the rest of the country, after first infecting those near and dear to them. As it turns out, the deplorables, now that they have shown themselves to be far more deserving of that moniker than anyone believed they were when Mrs. Clinton called them that, would not only still support the President after he shot someone dead on Fifth Ave, but as it turns out, they would continue their rabid support of their own little (well big fat, to be more accurate), Jim Jones suicide cult leader, even as he  jeers at their own elders for inconveniently living too long. Yet not even that has proven to be a step too far.

But getting back to their self-reverence/reference as the moral majority, the term doesn't apply: they are neither moral, nor are they a majority ... nor should any of their actions be confused with religion, as they are not only devoid of any religious feeling or sentiment, but contrarily, are fueled by their most avid vice: Greed. A deadly sin they worship like the Israelites who built a golden calf to worship even as the hapless Moses was up on the mount talking to, you know, the deity, who apparently had no idea the people Moses was to deliver his Commandments to would rather he brought them Gold, which they then, as now, unabashedly worshiped more than any faceless supernatural.

Moses was predictably upset. 

Not the least of reasons being that Moses knew the all-knowing knew, even as he handed him the tablets, that Moses would smash them to pieces in anger against the false idol Baal's hindquarters, so yahweh was just laughing up his sleeve at him. A LOL at it all, as the "faithful" preferred Baal.

Not much has changed.

Even as they call themselves the moral majority, they not only worship Greed as their god, but in what is the West's favorite form of navel worship, a season of Lint where no earthly pleasure need ever be foregone, but they also deride anyone who thought there was anything else on the face of the earth, or in the high heavens for that matter, that could not have a price tag or a bar code slapped onto it to mark its value.

Nowadays you can stay up into the wee hours during your lockdown nightmare and watch the servants of god promise their congregation, that never congregates anywhere other than on the airwaves, their souls' salvation by promising, in return for a hefty monetary remittance, to rain down upon them all the earthly riches their hearts desire. Paganism in wolf's clothing. Just send them your hard-earned cash, scads of it, to these modern-day Elmer Gantry snake-oil salesmen, and you will be blessed with earthly happiness. Which, somehow, reserves a place in the firmament when you shuffle off this mortal coil. (Speaking of 'mortal', such blasphemy was considered a mortal sin by religious people when I was taught Christ's sermons as a young 'un). 

No longer are these christians interested in anything as mundane as christian charity; gone are the hypocritical claims of any drop of compassionate conservatism for anything but their own comfort. While during the AIDS epidemic they railed against helping the sinners who were defying the Word of god, their true colors, as shown by their ardent embrace of the Almighty Dollar as the only thing of value, are highlighted by the deification of this avatar of Greed; they even profanely hail it as the Second coming. 

But there's a bible in every hotel room. The book they use to hold their tired carcasses up as the font of divine wisdom can be read, and interpreted, by anyone. There is no Governor Winthrop to exile the Anne Hutchinson's of the world to the wilderness for daring to have their own opinion of written words; but words mean what they mean, no matter what tome their buried in, and the stance of these Greed-as-god apostates are nowhere repudiated as forcibly as in their own bible ... time and again ... by the very man who they purport to love (the few times that word is allowed in their vocabulary. Mostly they are embarrassed to use it, as it has no place in their hell and brimstone rants, now turned into brick and mortar, as in Banks, the real temples singled out for their brand of "worship". Because, you know, Christ was such a fan of money exchangers in the temple).

                                                                Naked Greed

 

 Leaves no room for Grace. They are diametrically opposed to each other.

Religion used to claim the ability to confer grace onto its adherents. Now, however, the Furor they have let loose on the world and which they wish to continue to mock it with, evinces not a drop of grace, grace being the last word even his most ardent of followers would associate with the lumbering lump of bilious vindictiveness currently spewing his venom throughout the Twittersphere.  

Mankind lying together ...

... is an abomination.

While AIDS was the epidemic of the day, they referred time and again to Leviticus, to homos as abominations (an appellation they soon used to refer to Obama, cleverly changing it to "Obamanation", feeling themselves quite astute for such grammar-school-level mendacity. But as Thomas Mann  opined in The Magic Mountain, "“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”). An abomination is what mankind lying together is referred to ... an abomination being an aberration, a shock, an effrontery ... but it is not actually called out in the bible as being actually Evil. 

Greed, however, the mantle which, since Reagan, the Republican Party has wrapped itself in, even as they claim themselves to be a so-called moral majority, is time and again, in the very tome they wish to use to deprive Palestinians of their Homeland and cudgel "the gays" with, referred to not only as Evil, but as the source of ALL Evil, which is what the Love of Money, the very definition of Greed, is; yet it is the only love that the current crop of apostate christians ever discusses with unfeigned fervor, the only divine substance they consider worth pursuing, even unto their destruction. Yet their book is specific, no minced words here, no reference to it as an abomination, but called out for what it is: the love of money is the source of all Evil. Not money itslef, which cannot be evil as it has no will (and therefore no capacity for evil), no soul. It is brought into being as a means of exchange. It is only the love of money, a purely human capacity, that is referred to in their bible as Evil. (and homosexuality, unlike prostitution, has nothing to do with money. And since it is the love of money, not the love of your fellow man, that is  the source of ALL evil - not some of it, ALL of it - means that homosexuality, which is never associated with the love of money, is not, per the bible, evil; thus the "moral" stance against it by embracers of greed is but a sham, raising a cloud of dust to obscure the perfidy of their own apostasy, desecrating everything that actual lovers of Christ hold sacred).

The evangelical religion, however, is evil. And it is these evil bastards, evil by their OWN Words, cited right out of the bible in their belts, having bounced their Baal into the Offal Office to enable their embrace of the Vice they "worship" (they know not the meaning of the word), Greed, who are now doing their best to spread a virus throughout the country that will kill, despite the much-ballyhooed vaccine, (What do they care how many get killed? The vaccine will make its purveyors Rich, and it is the love of money, not of god or their fellow man that inspires their devotion) millions of their own countrymen, displaying their transparent scorched-earth policy that is far more monstrous than anything any of the so-called serial "enemies" that they have concocted over the last three generations, and is fueled by nothing more than their own rancor and avarice. It is not as though they have any plan for the country's future other than its demolition. No economic plan, no foreign affairs outlook, no Health Insurance plan, no rebuilding of infrastructure, nor any energy plan that doesn't entail poisoning the entire globe; nothing. Destruction of everything that gets in the way of their accumulation of Money is their only goal. Their entire platform consists of taking a wrecking ball to anything any "Libtard" ever held dear, and replacing the carnage with ... nothing. (Unless you call fracking everything to hell, regardless of the consequences, to excavate a product that can't even fetch a price high enough to cover the costs of obtaining it (to judge by the almighty Free Market) a plan).

And this desecration is what evangelicals call Religion. But neither Eve, nor angelicals would ever have had anything to do with these greedy, avaricious, sons and daughters of Satan. As they cast aspersions onto the rest of mankind, they defile the very word of god, which is how they refer to the bible, by callously dragging it through the mud, twisting its words to fit their own selfish, worldly aims; its most venerated maxims, to honor god (of which holding Greed up as a virtue is the exact opposite), and to love thy neighbor as thyself, are derided as Liberal Hogwash.

Little wonder that the word hypocrisy is never heard anymore. It has become the ruling mantra of the anything-but-religious right.  And it is built into its ethos of untrammeled amassing of obscene stockpiles of Wealth.

The Welfare of Warfare.

 

Somehow our long nightmare of four years has supposedly ended. That's because we as a nation , well, I suppose as most nations are, are inward-looking. We don't care about the countries we've invaded never mind about how their citizens are faring, so the long, as in almost a generation long, nightmare we plunged them into was never mentioned once during this longer-than-ever, presidential contest. 

But our Nation differs from every other country's, because ours is a pick and choose type of xenophobia. We want to go into self-imposed isolation and tariff wars only after we've spent a decade and a half using foreign venues to test the efficacy of our latest murder machines and assassination technologies. Trump-a-dump admittedly dropped a big one in Iraq, supplied Death-for-profits to bone Sawdi Arabia in their merciless war against the poorest nation on earth, and sent missiles screaming into Syria to win praise from his Zionist supporters, but compared to the level of warfare, one that included an Assassination Tuesday during the Obama administration to decide who the targets of the week were, at least his worst damage was reserved for his fellow countrymen, as it is in most countries. 

I believe Glenn Greenwald is the only journalist who acknowledged that fact, or at least tacitly, as he suggested that the GW regime was far worse than the Trump Circus, a sentiment I am completely on board with, (but dare not mention to the Freedom of the Press stalwarts on the left who will scream you down for such a suggestion). 

Which ideas, when they are harbored by twenty-somethings, is perfectly understandable, but when they come from those who barely reacted to the twin invasions of the early years of this century with nothing but a shrug of the shoulders, and a determination to follow the President's advise and Go Shopping, the silence about the international crimes of GW is, for me, far more disturbing ... as it was then ... during both of the Iraq Wars ... which they all too easily signed up for, with but the flimsiest of justifications necessary to gain their acquiescence.

And now, as the military budget continues to swell, even as the size of the economy that is necessary to support it continues to contract, the burden of military expenditure, more and more dependent on, not big corporate taxation, the very beneficiaries of War profiteering, but, having slashed their tax liabilities, paying the costs of welfare for Warfare becomes an increasingly heavy burden of taxation on every other taxpayer in the country. The growth of the military far exceeds that of the wage earners whose checks are garnished on a weekly basis to pad the bottom line of the Corporations that provide the Wehrmacht with its deadly arsenal as though they are producing new delights for Toys R US and who then use the embarrassing inflow of booty to buy lobbyists to take the burden for paying for those wars, that benefitted none of the rest of us (in fact the first of which was directly responsible for the attack on the WTC in 2001), and put them squarely on wage earners' already burdened down-to-breaking shoulders. Their increases in wages over the last generation or two, pale in comparison to the percentage increases heaped onto the military. Yet year after year we increase that amount, despite the fact that we now spend annually on militarization (to fight that frightening nemesis of little, backwards, Afghanistan; a country whose own budget is also largely extracted from the pockets of the US taxpayer) what it used to take a generation to spend ... as though we are always at War against an enemy hurling its air force across our borders, or bombing the bejesus out of our allies' cities. Yet no one wonders why the only profitable enterprises are those directly attached to the  military's procurements: the more money the Pentagon shovels into the coffers of MacDonald's and KFC, the more that smaller enterprises go bankrupt until one day only MacDonald's and KFC are left standing, and that's when prices really start to skyrocket. The main reason for this is that the largest procurement they have made since the Reagan/Bush era has been the mind of the polity, which they have convinced that without War against communism whatever, Capitalism crumbles, as War is the only means of income redistribution the religious community, and therefore their flocks, the number one supporter of murdering people in other countries, will tolerate. And without income redistribution, the monopolization of the entire business sector continues until everything is owned by IBM. Or one of the other monopolized entities that can't function without annual infusions from the Central Government.

And given that there was never a whisper raised about spending trillions to keep and feed people in barracks while throwing them bodily out of SRO's to starve in the streets, this situation will not change appreciably under the Biden presidency. Socialism will be available only for those willing to kill for their room and board. Everyone else must work to pay for their keep.

Instead, similar to in the 90's when the Corporate leaders were insisting we help China develop so we would have an enemy worth our mettle, once the inauguration has ended, and the excitement of victory dies down, given our lack of hot wars anywhere in the world, the insanity of allocating resources to "defense", a defense that is offensive, it is bound to happen that even in the USA!USA!, someone might notice that we are throwing all of our best minds and all of our profits, into an enterprise that marches gun-toting citizens around in bootcamps to play soldier while looking down its nose at civilian culture, which it for the most part holds in more contempt than any civilians in other countries do, making it far more dangerous to us than them thar ferrinners are, even though it is supposedly the Iraqi's, Iranian, Syrians and Afghans, the Bosnians and Chinese, Serbs and Russians, Mexicans and Guatemalans, Venezuelans and Somalis, Cubans and Canadians, Vietnamese and Libyans, Palestinians and Kurds, who are our enemies ... somehow. 

Enduring Freedom.

Because it is largely Israel, as the Neo-Cons so adroitly demonstrated, that decides that for us, and then let's our "leaders" know, who then obliges them by setting the propaganda machine, run all but entirely by "people of faith", in motion to manufacture consent. A fairly easy task in the USA! USA! As GW, with Pat Robertson as his vitriolic war-monger, Christ with a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other, was so adept at demonstrating. NO one hates tolerance and embraces murderous rampages through other people's countries like the religious, railing venomously against gay marriage while spitting their bloodlust into the microphone, spreading god's Love using depleted uranium bullets and phosphorous bombs as god's messengers from on high: it's the only sexual excitement that is allowed to them. Displacement indeed.

So while the US takes a deep breath and thanks the lord the years of chaos have ended, they ended four years ago for the rest of the world, because the American's troops weren't on the march for the first time in the 21'st Century. So for them, for whom we care not a jot, the chaos may now be ready to start all over again. An assessment I sure hope is wrong; but hope doesn't get too far against the onerous weight and crushing embrace of American Arms.

 

  

It's not What is Snot: I'm so Phlegmatic I live in the Attic.

The dark daze of summer represented the pride that goes before the fall. As Eta ravages Central America and Corona savages the US, which reported >120,000 new cases in a single day yesterday, it's hard not to read statements like, "It's been 100 years since a Dutch physicist discovered superconductivity, but now recent discoveries show we're closer than ever to developing potentially world-changing technology" without cringing.

You'd think we'd have had enough of "world-changing technology", as we reel from the deadly impacts of the repercussions that our world-changing technologies have already unleashed. Central America is hopelessly swamped, Vegas endures its 200'th day without rain (but no worries there ... real estate sales are up 11%) and yet another hurricane threatens landfall in the southeastern US. So pardon me if I register a rise in anxiety when I hear another threat of world-changing technology being loosed onto a benighted humanity ... not to mention onto the dwindling number of other species that continue to be ground into the dust under our mega-wheeled ATV's, the Jackboot being so old-school and not delivering quite sufficient amounts of the Alpha-male surge of adrenalin needed to feed our insatiable lust for dominance and destruction. Not content with the millions of miles of paved roads crushing all life underneath its poisonous asphalt, we've turned motorized "hiking" into a sport whose advocates have not the least concern for the deadly effects their motorized ramblings have on the delicate balance of life in the harsh terrains and environments where it is a miracle living creatures are able to eke out a marginal existence. Mash 'em into the dirt ... Who cares? I'm having Fun!

As the electoral circus continues to monopolize the airwaves, one thing has become abundantly clear, the election in 2016 of the Killer Clown from the Empire State was no fluke. There is a growing realization among a large part of the electorate that they are disenfranchised, their voices ignored, if not falling on deaf ears entirely. Denizens of petrochemical civilization, these petroleurs are in continual denial of how important oil is to their everyday lives, refusing to even consider the possibility that our fundamentally unsustainable economic model, one needing increasingly large inputs of energy resources to  maintain, might be at the root of our problems. Instead they fall for shibboleths like the "Space Cadets' Force", Mission to Mars, or Landings on the Moon, all of which are designed to enhance the profitability of the petrochemical  and microelectronics industries (Made in China), not to help any  of the non-college-certified population so addled by their Cult Leader they prefer to blame the very people all these projects ladle money over, while ignoring the fact that none of them were lobbying for any of these boondoggles that have been handed to them on a platter by the Killer Clown from the Empire State.

But why are they so focused on the Democratic party as their bane? I was born in 1952, the year "I like Ike" was apparently reason enough to ensconce a Republican in the White House. That GOP stalwart then commandeered DOD funds to construct the interstate highway system, setting in motion the monopolization of the US business environment that is ongoing to this day. Using the same justification as Hitler used to build the Autobahn, despite the fact that that was exactly the reason, or one of the major ones, that Hitler lost the War, given the insatiable need for petroleum reserves such a strategy leaves your entire defense industry hinged upon, the victor of that War, led by one of the generals who had his boots on the ground at the end of the day, (so knew that an Interstate Highway system was absolutely unnecessary in order to defeat an enemy that DID have one), he used it to allocate Defense Funds for commercial purposes with the result that MAcDonalds and IHOP replaced all the small Mom-and_Pop eateries that once catered to travelers, causing a destruction in the  restaurant business that hadn't been matched until the destruction the Corona virus has wreaked on it during the current Republican's reign. The same is true of the hospitality industry. Resulting generations later in the AirBNB pastiche we're left with now as the only escape from the nose-bleed fares of the monopolized industry where Holiday Inn, OMNI, Hyatt, and a handful of other Corporations control the-now monopolized hotel industry ... one that had also been far more mom and pop before that. 

President Eisenhower also cemented into Power what is now referred to as the Deep State, but which he then monikored the Military-Industrial Complex. Now, though, the GOP uses the Deep State imprimatur whenever they wish to disparage the control that the Military Industrial Complex has over the nation's decision-making processes, as they don't dare even whisper any criticism of the Pentagon, as their constituents are complete devotees of increasingly pervasive militarization of all aspects of US life. But the Pentagon is exactly what sits at the center of the Military Industrial Empire of the United States .. it is, for all intents and purposes, the nexus of the Deep State.

The next Republican President was Richard Nixon. Nixon had to pay the price of Eisenhower's getting the US involved in Vietnam. To assuage the electorate and convince  them he really "cared" about their well-being, Nixon would propose an ambitious and expensive pollution-fighting agenda to Congress, with the signing of his first significant environmental bill, the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969. He would go on to sign, on January 1, 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),  as “a demonstration of his personal concern for environmental quality”. This bill mandated a detailed report on the environmental impact of all large projects involving federal funding or permitting, allowing the threat of private lawsuits to ensure compliance. "The tasks that need doing", he averred,  "call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air, and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry, and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.” 

Nixon signed two more significant bills: one created a commission on national population growth; the other,  the Water Quality Improvement Act, made oil companies fully liable for spills.

 Nixon subsequently held an elaborate ceremony and signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 into law.

He also created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other key elements of the nation’s modern environmental regime. In his second environmental address he proposed greater EPA authority over pesticide regulation, more money for sewage-treatment centers, and funding for states to develop environmentally friendly land-use programs.

Next, Nixon visited one of the nation’s greatest foes, Communist China, to "normalize" relations, this went hand-in-hand with another top Nixon goal: to advance détente with the Soviet Communists. 

Perhaps that's what inspired him to sign the Endangered Species Act of 1973,  which added protection for threatened species and allowed federal jurisdiction over critical habitats.

All of which led to lasting, material improvements to the quality of air, water, and land.

All of which led to lasting increases in costs for industry. Soooo ....

There was no, nor has there since been, any fiercer foe to all of these Nixon-signed laws than the next Republican President, Ronald Reagan. Our first Celebrity President, he used his Hollywood image to help hand over the reigns of the Empire to the by then, far more powerful Corporate bosses. He helped George Bush Sr. destroy the Savings and Loan industry, ravaged unions, cratered to Wall St. by abetting the hollowing out of the American industrial base, leaving in his wake The Rust Belt, all facilitated by Corporate raiders and con men Milken the system by establishing Greed as an American virtue and the monetization of everything under the sun. He doubled the national debt, as well as the annual budget deficit, in order to ladle cash onto the military which used it to create the DarpaNet, the nascent beginning of the Internet, which has been the largest single source of job destruction and loss of State Sovereignty in our history, aiding and abetting the monopolization of every industry in the country, instilling, as he did, a rabid fear of communism to justify his build-up of both mountains of debt and mountains of arms to "defeat" it, while simultaneously pouring American's pension savings in to Communist China, enriching the vast communist Chinese population, endearing them to their Communist leadership, all at the expense of his own constituents.

Then, as though that weren't enough damage for one administration, he surreptitiously  funneled American taxpayer dollars in to Saudi Arabia, funding the creation of the Wahhabi-schooled fanaticism of the Mujahadeen, establishing links with the vicious Pakistani ISI to funnel these "Freedom Fighters", who would later become the Taliban, who subsequently housed Al-Qaeda in their midst, into Afghanistan to fight our battle against communism for us. 

His VP then became our next Republican President, and he embroiled us further in War, setting the stage, via his administration's Kuwaiti involvement, using his Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, to position Halliburton to test the feasibility of horizontal drilling, to pilfer Iraq's oil reserves as Kuwait's own Bergen field was sliding down the wrong side of the peak oil production curve.

The next Republican president not only presided over the firs Attack on the American homeland by a foreign threat (the Timothy McVeigh terrorist attack being the first openly terrorist attack by the Republicans on the US federal government) but then proceeded to instigate two unprovoked multi-trillion dollar attacks on foreign nations. Having cut taxes to satisfy his constituency, and then starting two Wars in less than two years, he was instrumental in fostering an environment of fraud, defalcation, and rehypothecation, using the housing market and Wall St (via many of the same mechanisms they used to fuel Enron's fraud-fueled rise) to blow an economic bubble filled with the hot air of false promises and underhanded financial tricks, learned from "Poppy", that resulted in the collapse of the entire globalized economy into what was deemed the Great Recession (never before in all of Capitalism's century's-old history, has there ever been a "Great Recession" ... it was always just called what it was: a depression), but which was in fact, as our current economic catastrophe is, a depression. Depressions being a feature of all Capitalist economies, but one that Republicans would prefer to pretend aren't ... just like the Corona depression now.

So the surprise that Trump is the worst thing that could happen to his own constituents, as the election of every other Republican President has been, is rather, well, surprising. 

And is, in my estimation, still caused by the same reason: the determined refusal to acknowledge that our modern mode of existence, specifically our adamant clenching of the steering wheel of the very vehicles that are driving us into extinction in order to live a life dedicated to the expansion of our own girth (to judge by the obesity of not only our own adult selves, but of our catered-to chauffeured  offspring) isn't just unsustainable, it's a Death cult, leaving in its wake a path strewn with millions of leaking fractured wells, miles of unusable roads, dredged sand banks, plastic gyres, cancer alley, landscapes ravaged by winds, flooded by torrential downpours, blown to bits by hurricane-force winds, and burned to a crisp by uncontrollable raging infernos.

Yet despite all this, the only reference to oil made during the entirety of the so-called election, has been the leading candidate's denial that he would ban fracking. Because in this, our overarching, militarily threatening Empire, the one that's willing to spend an exponentially greater amount of its limited resources on constructing a vast War Machine and nuclear arsenal (that will never be used) in order to enable our much-vaunted military to fight three Wars in three theaters simultaneously (that's how destructive our USA! freedom is on the prospects of everyone else, apparently), the one that's based on the continued supply of petroleum and its products, the largest burner of all forms of fuels to provide its citizens with the mirage of effortless existence, the one boasting of a Free Press, one that is free to ignore as assiduously as any politician, any question relating to a plan to guide us into a future for our country, there s a complete cone of silence around the issue of how, besides simply eliminating an enormous swath of the electorate from engaging in any meaningful way in the economic life of the country, we can better organize existence (starting with not throwing trillions down the drain of military welfare programs) so as to not leave a burnt-out husk as the only legacy of  our "Freedom".

That's why the election is indeed, as our Jim Jones of a leader insists, a fraud. And being the Queen of Fraud, he is quite understandably perplexed that anyone would not consider him its rightful Furor. Like his mentor Putin, he derides democracy even though if it were not for Democracy, the likes of him and his wayward band of thugs, would never have even gotten near to the halls of Power. But that attitude is perfectly consistent with a bankrupt's trashing of the very system that would allow him to pull one scam after the other and leave every one that trusted him holding nothing but a handful of worthless IOU's.

But blaming it on the Democrats is really not consistent with the facts. The GOP and its ham-handed approach to ... well, everything, leaves the Democrats, time and again, in the position they're in now should they win: how to fix this mess without collapsing the system and then being blamed for what was the inescapable denouement of Republican leadership. Obama had to jettison all his ideas of "Change" (as vague as they were) in order to save an economy ravaged by the Bush/Cheney-enabled piratisation of the economy, handing it over, as they did, to be run by the Neo-Con Deep State, although still calling it the Military Industrial complex. Joe Biden certainly isn't the great Hope Obama was forced to abandon, but at least he knows we are in the grips of a potentially catastrophic phenomenon that is leaving other country's economies practically unscathed while it has plunged our own, through purposeful mismanagement, into the abyss.

And Hope, what remains at the bottom of the Panderer's Box, now that the evil of Pandemic has been allowed, no, encouraged, (propelling pandemic numbers to new highs by parading around the country to Partietags that were, each and every one of them, SuperSpreader events (we wouldn't be at > 120,000 new infections a day otherwise)) to spread undeterred, might be all we'll have left once the Furor's died down.