The Collapse of the Facade

What's going on in America? What happened to make the ruling class turn to open looting and murder, without trying to hide it?

Somehow, they realized that there were no consequences for their bad behavior. Like a child that tests the parents with a few infractions, the ruling class took more and more chances, and found out that they could get away with it.

Last year, the Congress handed over the Treasury to Wall Street. Obama and McCain both stopped their campaigns to go back to Washington, DC and vote for the bill that 95% of the American people opposed. Yet we are told that 99% of the people in this country voted for one of the two of them the next month. Wow. Talking about getting away with it!

Emboldened, this year, Congress passed a law forcing every American to directly hand over money to health insurance companies. Wow!

Cheney hunted with Scalia, while he had a case in front of the Supreme Court. They openly scoffed at people who protested. This was after the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to Bush, although Scalia and Thomas both should have recused themselves due to conflicts of interest.

Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?

They openly brag about a "jobless recovery", making it obvious to all but the braindead that the ruling class no longer even pretends to care about the working class.

America now openly invades other countries. They openly assassinate people. They openly kidnap and murder people. Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?

They put in computerized voting machines, even though people protested. So what? When Mike Connell was finally scheduled to testify about the stolen 2004 election, he died in a plane crash. Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?

Now Obama is putting a Raytheon executive in a high position at the Pentagon. Here is the change we can believe in. They are waiving the ethics rule. See the difference? The Bushies just broke the home rules. Obama waives them. But not the international rules. Nope. Obama is just as lawless as Bush when roaming the planet with the American military machine.

This is what happened in the USSR, in my opinion. After decades of pretending to have socialism, the ruling oligarchs found out that they could just grab the riches of the Soviet Union and divide it among themselves. There was protest, until Yeltsin turned tanks on the Russian White House and cemented the demise of the Soviet Union, for which he is still hailed as a "hero" by the US corporate media. Millions of people died and millions were impoverished, which is called "freedom" by our media.

We used to pretend to have democracy in this country, with elections and writing your congressman and a court system to turn to for justice and all that. While the forms still exist, the vast majority of Americans know that they are hollow. Most people don't even bother to vote, although there is great corporate pressure to do so. That will probably stop soon. All they have to do is program the computers to show a big turnout, thus "legitimizing" the system in the last way they cling to.

In the meantime, we the people slip more and more into poverty and oppression. And, really, what are we going to do about it?

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Avatar

I went to see Avatar yesterday.

Before I went, I read about US soldiers breaking down a door and killing 10 people in Afghanistan, including 8 children. The absolute horror of having massively armed terrorists breaking down your door in the middle of the night, and murdering your children, is something too terrible to contemplate, yet people in Iraq and Afghanistan have lived this nightmare for years now.

I then listened to NPR news, which was recycling the same manufactured terror of a wannabe that might have blown up a plane a week ago, if only he had had explosives and had been competent. Here we were a week later, still drumming up fake terror about what might have happened to Americans, while Americans were dishing out real terror to real people, unremarked upon, even by NPR, which then had a long commercial about how they provided "news" for intelligent people.

Then I went to see Avatar. Wow! There it is. The horrors that the US ruling class wreaks upon defenseless people, for the profit of the multinational corporations, from the viewpoint of those people. This is an incredible movie.

Weirdly enough, the National Guard had a long commercial before the movie, complete with the same music. Apparently, they have enough faith in the stupidity of American youth to totally miss the point of the movie to think that they'll get recruits!

An interesting part of the movie was when they (spoiler alert!!) destroyed the Home Tree. They made a point of saying that they needed to destroy the core columns. Hmmm. Then they showed the destruction of the Tree. Interestingly enough, although it started to look like the destruction of the WTCs, they didn't have the tree fall straight down in its own footprint, in a pile of splinters.

I wondered why. Then I realized.

This was a science fiction movie, but come on. You can't get too weird, or people will turn off.

Have a giant tree explode into splinters and fall into its own footprint at the speed of gravity?

That's just too unbelievable!

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Survival of the Fittest

ER nursing, like policing, exposes you to the worst of humanity. It doesn't take long to become jaded. It's actually a struggle to hold on to liberal ideals.

For instance, my feminism tells me that domestic violence is a horrible manifestation of patriarchal society, with defenseless women being preyed upon by their overbearing husbands.

My ER experience tells me that a lot of domestic violence is two drunks getting into a fight, with the weakest one getting hurt the most.

And that soon, they will be calling out to one another in slurred voices, "I looooove you". "I looove you, too."

It's hard to hold on to your ideals in this situation.

But there is one conclusion that every new employee draws that I vehemently argue with.

It never fails that after they have been working in the ER for a while, they announce that they have a new theory. What might that be?

Well, it's that we are messing with Mother Nature. People used to die if they were stupid, but now we save them and they reproduce, and there will be none but stupid people in the future.

For one, this is not a new theory. It's called eugenics, and it was invented right along with Darwin, although not by him.

Hitler gave it a bad name, but every new generation invents it. (See "Idiocracy" for a very funny example.) And I remember a comedian, talking about the people in San Francisco who heard that a tsunami was predicted and went down to the beach to watch. He called it "Nature's way of weeding out the stupid".

Actually, smart people were not the ones who survived in the past. We are the descendants of a very long line of people who survived disease. Some of each of our ancestors were the only ones out of multiple children in a family who survived to adulthood.

To this day, disease kills millions of people each year, far more than die in stupid accidents. And smart people, of course, can make careless mistakes that lead to death.

Disease actually kills more people than war. This is why the US war machine spends so much money on biological warfare. They even tried, in the late 1960s, to engineer a disease that would attack a person's immune system, so that any disease would kill them, stating that it would be perfected in 5 to 10 years. But of course, no such disease showed up, did it?

And, as a heretic, I feel solidarity with all the heretics burned at the stake in medieval Europe. To me, this was the ruling class weeding out the intelligent, leaving only those who were willing to either believe, or to submit to fear and pretend to believe, to reproduce.

Galileo was a famous victim of the Church, but there were countless (because not counted, like victims of the US today) others who died for being intelligent or rebellious.

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The Obama Doctrine

Liberals screamed in scorn when George W. Bush announced the "War on Terrorism".

They pointed out that terrorism is a tactic, not a country with an army that the US could go to war with.

But when Obama announces that we will fight evil(!) the silence is deafening.

Evil? Really? It's not even a tactic. It's a judgement. And we're now at war with it?

My judgement is that the country that spends the most on WMDs, that attacks other countries at will, that pollutes the Earth with depleted uranium and perchlorate and TCE, that maims and murders children and calls them collateral damage, that sends drones to assassinate people who have no means of self defense, that locks up millions of its own citizens and laughs about the rape that ensues in the cages:

If anyone should be judged "evil", that would be the best candidate.

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Amazing Speech by War Veteran

This veteran testified at the Winter Soldier hearings. I was quite impressed with him.

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Foreshadowing

Liberal Democrats who are paying attention are shocked and horrified by the actual existing Obama, as compared to the really great imaginary Obama. How could he have turned out so bad, when they hoped and believed that he would be so good?

He gives such exciting speeches. How could his actual performance be so flaccid?

I can't really criticize liberals who are now paying attention. They're better than the ones who are still dreamy-eyed reality deniers, wanting to give him more time, another chance.

Awake liberals are upset that Obama promised health care reform and is giving us insurance company forced tributes. He talked a tough talk about the need for single payer, or at least a public option, but it turns out that he was two-timing us with the insurance and drug companies all along.

He orates that "No one is above the law", but refuses to prosecute previous puppets of the ruling class who broke multiple US and international laws. Words clearly mean nothing to Obama but a pacifying mantra to recite to the clueless. And there are those, probably a majority, who listen to the words and don't pay attention to deeds.

He had the nerve to go onto 60 minutes and say "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cats on Wall Street".

Really? This is the man who suspended his campaign to run back to Washington and vote for the bailout? The one who has continued pumping trillions into the financial system? He actually goes onto TV and has the nerve to say he didn't plan to do what he's been doing for a year? He clearly believes that he can get away with bald faced lies, like Bush.

Oh, wait. He can. And did.

He appeared to acknowledge the importance of not destroying our ecosystem, but there was a secret plan to turn Copenhagen into Seattle, the Sequel, all along. Clearly, if you plan to turn the very air we breathe into chips in a gambling casino, you're not serious about climate change.

These betrayals were foreshadowed in the primaries, when his anti-NAFTA rhetroic to desperate unemployed MidWesterners were shown to be for their ears only. That should have been a big red flag.

He also lied about transparency in government, stopping the occupation of Iraq, and stopping torture as an American policy.

Of course, he was upfront about some things. He promised to increase the occupation of Afghanistan, attack Pakistan, and threaten Iran. These promises he has kept.

Sometimes you still hear liberals say that we have to stay with the Democrats for the sake of the Supreme Court. You know, to protect the right of abortion. The one that the Democrats just attacked more effectively than Republicans ever did. This argument should be getting old and unusable. To drag it out again, when the Dems are in control of the Congress and White House and could actually legislate good policy, instead of having the Supreme Court command it, shows pitiful desperation. They should be embarrassed to use that line.

I hope that those who swear to never vote Democrat again will remember this in 2012, when the Republicans will produce some totally repulsive candidate that will make decent people shudder. That's what they do! That's how they get you, again, Charley Brown! Don't fall for it.

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A Modest Prediction

It is a national scandal that well over two million Americans are in prison, with millions more in jails and on parole. Progressives have long decried the prison-industrial complex and demanded that it be reformed.

I predict that at some point the question will be taken up by Congress. Hearings will be held on the prison industry. Of course, the hearings will be open to the industry. How can you have hearings without the people who know about the problem? Prisoners won't be heard from, of course. They're locked in cages far from Congress.

I predict that prison reform advocates will only be heard shouting demands and slogans as they are dragged from the hearings and thrown into jail themselves. (Ironically).

The focus of the hearings will turn from reform to discussing ways to increase the prison population in order to create jobs. Prison guards will testify that the jobs pay well. Senators and congressmen will tell their constituents that the way to prosperity will be to have a prison in every town.

The final bill will propose that 3/4 of all American citizens should be put into prison, with the other 1/4 guarding them.

Liberals will scream!! No, we demand that only 1/2 of Americans be put into prison.

Congress will argue for weeks. The Democrats will offer amendments with different percentages, each time giving way more and more.

Eventually, it will come down to the wire. A few really radical people will argue that no bill would be better than the one that puts 3/4 of all Americans in prison. The rest of the "liberals" will argue that any bill is better than no bill and we really need prison reform now! Let's go with the actually existing bill and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We can tweek it later.

Over the top? I don't think so.

We are watching two precursors now.

If a country decides that their health care system is inadequate, they need to decide what should be done. Obama states that we can't throw our system away, we should build on it. OK. We have public health centers. We have a program that trains doctors in return for them serving underserved communities. Let's expand it. Let's have our health centers do more than vaccinations and STD care. Let's train more doctors to work in primary care in the centers.

At the very least, we could expand Medicare to cover everyone.

But no, we're going to expand the other system. The one in which people pay health insurance companies to pay their doctors. The one in which 30% of all the money they pay goes to processing claims, denying care and paying inflated salaries to executives. That system.

For the first time, every American will be forced to pay tribute to private corporations - a major change from any previous law.

And we get "liberals" telling us to support this insurance company giveaway because it's better than nothing! Just force by law subsidies to private insurance corporations and we'll tweek it later.

And the destruction of our planet by fossil fuel burning is being addressed this week by a United Nations conference in Copenhagen. National representatives of 182 countries showed up hoping for a cooperative agreement to face a global problem.

Instead, they are being faced with a demand that the UN structure be bypassed, that national sovereignty be overturned, that corporate dominance over the planet be finalized in political as well as economic treaties.

And what do liberals say? Gee, isn't any agreement better than nothing? Can't we just start with a WTO arranged corporate giveaway of our atmosphere and tweek it later?

This is American politics played out to its most ridiculous ends. Meekly accustomed to voting for one of two corporate sponsored candidates, unable to imagine any better world, Americans take the "lesser of two evils" mantra to heart, no matter where it takes them.

While we in the US may be screwed by the health care industry, others in the world are not so blind. I am hopeful that the developing countries will stand firm and reject what the rich countries are offering them, even when the superstar politicians fly in for their cameos on Friday.

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