America the Predator

America is a predator nation--an empire that lives off the lifeblood of other nations and also off the lifeblood of its own working people. As such, the same fate awaits our predatory empire as befell the other great predatory empires in history, including the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch and, of course of course, the Romans.

America has seven percent of the world's population and consumes twenty-five percent of the world's energy. For what purpose? In order to advance the cause of freedom and civilization throughout the rest of the world? Nah, mostly in order to buy cheap crap at the mall and drive giant vehicles and insure that our bright shiny objects are more expensive than the bright shiny objects owned by the Jones's.

We have exported our manufacturing jobs in order to minimize our labor costs. Any jobs that remain that require actual labor (in construction or meat processing for instance) we reserve for illegal aliens, again for the purpose of minimizing labor costs (low wages, no benefits). Working people in America the Predatory make less and less when compared to what our working-class parents made, and the gap between rich and poor widens every year. But no need to worry about that, because we must all unite around the three G's (god, guns, and gays).

Better to listen to some idiot demagogue somewhere (Beck, Palin, et al) than think too much about how our horizon of economic opportunity shrinks. Better to worry about the lifestyles of others than to fight against the plutocrats who own us heart, soul, and ass.

We are in thrall to an oligarchy that uses our petty differences to separate us from one another and thereby control and oppress us. We are slaves and whores to Wall Street and bankers and credit card companies and multinationals everywhere. We foul our own nests while the rich live in luxury and ease.

The Romans had a term for this, "panem et circenses". Bread and circuses. Give the people fast food and cheap entertainment and they'll leave the power-brokers alone to rape and pillage and enslave the rest of the world. We get reality television and they get wealth and power and sufficient private security to live the rest of their lives in a brilliant bubble of bling.

What a shallow, disappointing people we are. What fools and sycophants. We deserve everything that's about to happen to us, in particular the coming Republican takeover of congress. If you love the Great Recession--and hate that socialistic, secret-Muslim terrorist Obama (by the way that's a contradiction in terms, but never let logic interfere with prejudice, because then it's no longer prejudice)--then you're really gonna love what Boehner and Wall Street have in store for us (as Rushbo would say 'bend over and grab 'em').

The Republicans' War on America

Why do Republicans hate America? Mostly because they hate themselves and they project this hate outward onto their communities, their fellow citizens, and their country. It's Psychology 101, but psychodynamic simplicity does nothing to lessen the pure evil of its effect on our nation.

Right-wing politicians are busy fomenting hatred of Muslims by protesting the building of a Muslim community center in an old Burlington Coat Factory building in lower Manhattan. These politicians know fully well that this center is neither a mosque nor is it located on the "hallowed ground" of the World Trade Center. They also understand that televised scenes of Americans protesting Islam play right into the hands of the Muslim extremists who really do want to destroy America. So why do it?

Because it gives them short-term power and an opportunity to benefit in the midterm and 2012 elections. More importantly, they have learned through the years that there is not much downside in American politics to intolerance and hate.

The Republicans alienated black people through their "southern strategy" but built a massive coalition of mean white people that gave them electoral dominance for a generation. They are currently alienating Hispanics through race-baiting and xenophobia. Given that Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group why would they possibly want to do this (especially considering that many Hispanics are quite conservative on social issues like abortion and so would ordinarily be a natural constituency for Republicans)?

Because hate motivates voters more than "hope" or "change". Also, if they succeed in their efforts to overturn the 14th amendment they can dilute the demographic time bomb that awaits them.

Republicans are working feverishly to undermine and thereby destroy the fiscal health of America. Every time they have had power they have cut taxes on the rich while also exploding the defense budget. This has the effect of driving up the deficit and locking future generations into idiotic foreign military adventures. It distributes income upward to the rich while feeding the military-industrial complex.

Currently for instance the Republicans are fighting to the death over not letting the Bush tax cuts (that went almost exclusively to the top five percent of earners) expire as intended (by, among others, the Republican leadership when these tax cuts were enacted). Meanwhile they excoriate Democrats for any domestic spending that might stimulate the economy and provide jobs to working people because it might increase the deficit. This is utterly dissonant--how can they argue in one instance for fiscal irresponsibility while arguing in the other for fiscal restraint?

Easy--as Dick Cheney famously remarked "deficits don't matter". Republicans have learned that "fiscal discipline" is just a phrase to throw at voters and that acting on this legislatively is a no-win proposition. Let Democrats be the party of fiscal responsibility, Republicans just want to get elected so they can use their power to further damage America and then use that damage to campaign against profligate gay-marrying minority-loving tree-hugging SUV-hating Democrats. It's pettiness and xenophobia that win the day, not foresight and moral values.

Our nation is in ruins. Our infrastructure is crumbling but we spend trillions making war in other countries. Bankers have Americans strung out on more debt than can ever be paid off--we are serfs to Wall Street. We have polluted our planet and are now in the midst of catastrophic (and irreversible) climate change. Working people now try not to look past the next day, while the rich (the true constituency of the Republican party) complain about how hard it is to get good help.

This is exactly in keeping when the plan the Republicans put into place at the beginning of the Reagan era, and which they keep to faithfully to the present day. Ultimately though it is ourselves we have to blame for letting them do this to us.

The hatred of Republicans for America is pathological, but so is our enabling of it. We're like a codependent spouse who can't bring herself to leave a vicious, oppressive asshole. After all, some times he says he loves us, right?

America Takes A Massive Dump

In the Gulf of Mexico that is. The oil currently spilling from a deep water well into the Gulf is a massive disaster--gigantic and profound, difficult to get one's head around. The main thing each of us needs to remember and understand though is that each gallon, each barrel, each poisoned fish or shrimp or other form of aquatic life, belongs to us--to each and everyone of us.

Sure we can blame BP, and the deregulatory frenzy of three decades of Reaganism (I predict that Ronald Reagan will go down as the worst president in history--worse even than GW Bush-- the anti-FDR.), and these were certainly factors, but the main factor rests in the heart and the hearth of each and every American: our insatiable desire for cheap energy. Sure, our politicians have been corrupted by the massive amounts of money that the energy industry has poured into Washington and state houses from Maine to California, but all the politicians were doing was enabling the addiction of the American people to cheap oil-based crap. Big cars? Gotta have 'em. McMansions? How could one do without all that closet space? Cheap food and plastic stuff and beauty products and worthless mall stuff? Absolutely essential to the lifestyles of the superficial and financially incontinent (i.e. to all Americans).

British Petroleum can and must be held accountable for the profound sin against the earth and all its people that it has committed. But such accountability does nothing to expiate the sin that stains the soul of each and every American. We are the ones who enabled these rat bastards. And this latest outrage is merely one of many, and mainly distinguished by the fact that it succeeded in getting our attention. The fouling of our planet has been going on for a long time and with our consent (if also with our willful blindness). We are small evil people who are only beginning to pay for our perfidy.

Even if the current oil disaster could be cleaned up (and it cannot be) our earth has already been ruined for future generations. Our love of petroleum has fundamentally changed our environment and our climate and it's too late to turn it around , though we might be able to affect it a bit at the margins if we were willing to alter our lifestyles, which we are not.

We had an opportunity to change, back in the '70s. After the oil shocks of that decade the president (Jimmy Carter, who may have lacked the charisma of Reagan but at least understood policy) and the congress actually invested in alternative energy in order to try and wean us off oil, Middle East oil in particular. The American people fixed all that though--we elected Reagan and voted for less regulation and cheaper stuff and the right to put ourselves in thrall to banks--we gave control of our economy and our politics to the oligarchs ('business') who understand how to get things done. And boy did they get some stuff done.

Our planet has been ruined, irrevocably so. Those of us alive today may not notice it so much, but two or three generations from now I promise you our grandchildren will look back on those who are alive today with dismay and disgust. Those to whom we will hand over control of the earth will never have the opportunity to live the cheap and easy lifestyles we live today. They will know the truth about us that we refuse to admit to ourselves: we are pigs, selfish stupid pigs, snouts deep in the trough of worthless material ephemera.

And what of the Tea Party? Where are the tea baggers now? All across the Gulf States of the South (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), land of the Tea Bagger, home of the extreme right, where are the cries of "get out of our bidness, big guv'ment!"? No, all one hears from the Republican governors who run the South is "we need mo' o' that big guv'ment! Help us clean this mess up--we didn't have nothin' to do with it!"

What utter and complete hypocrites. What selfish liars. What perfect Americans.

Only The Left Can Solve The Problem Of Illegal Immigration

When it comes to the illegal immigration conundrum, the right and the left dance around one another in a celebration of self-fulfilled prophecy. Both sides huff and puff and bloviate and protest but at base each side understands the deal they have made with the devil (i.e. each other), because of which deal nothing substantive will change regarding illegal immigration because ultimately neither side wants it to.

The right loves to demagogue the immigration issue because it stirs up its racist xenophobic base. Conservative politicians are full throated in their calls for a "secure" border (i.e., a Berlin wall across the bottom of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California). But the plutocrats who finance the right need a porous border. They want nothing so much as plenty of continued illegal immigration because it gives them cheap labor for their meat factories and construction sites and restaurants and mansions. The right wing elite can never admit this to is base, but it doesn't really matter because the base is too full of fear to really care--it just wants to be able to vent its anti-immigrant hate in as public a manner as possible.

The left does not want any substantive action on illegal immigration because it cares about human rights. If the border were truly closed or laws passed and enforced limiting the ability of illegal immigrants to maintain themselves in this country then millions of poor people throughout the Americas would lose their one chance of making their lives better by moving north.

Both sides know that if you really wanted to stop illegal immigration you could do it with one single action: criminalize not just illegal aliens but, more importantly, those who hire them. Make it absolutely illegal to hire someone who is not in the country legally, and enforce it with substantial criminal and civil penalties (rather than the tiny fines and lax enforcement that exist currently). Then all the work currently being done by illegals would soon dry up and with it the impetus to cross into the country without permission.

But of course this will never happen because big business needs cheap labor in order to continue the obscene profits that the plutocrats rely on to fund their lavish lifestyles. The politicos who run the Republican Party and enable the tea baggers need the racist resentment the issue stirs up in order to keep the old mean white people showing up at the polls. If there's going to be any real movement on the issue it's going to have to come from the left.

As progressives I don't think that it requires that we give up our committment to human rights to also acknowledge that we have to do something substantive about illegal immigration (and something that involves more than amnesty but which is also about the rule of law). Working American pay a price for illegal immigration, a price that is increasingly difficult for us to bear and for which progressives must acknowledge some responsibility.

A vast pool of easily accessible illegal (which means, among other things, without legal protection) labor works to suppress wages and benefits for all of us. Of course this is most acute for unskilled workers, but the overall effect of illegal wages puts a downward pressure on wages for the entire economy, including wages for the skilled. Enabling the plutocrats to exploit the status of illegal immigrants for the purpose of lining their own pockets--to siphon off wages that would go to working Americans so that the corporate fat cats can vacation in the south of France every year--insults and degrades the ability of working people everywhere to make a better life for ourselves. Illegals are exploited, and working Americans are oppressed: it's a lose-lose situation for everyone but Wall Street.

The USA has long acted as a safety valve for Central and South America--in particular for Mexico. I'm not so sure anymore that we should or could continue to do this. Mexico is approaching failed state status. It is increasingly a nation divided between oligarchs and everyone else. A significant portion of the nation's economy (a fourth or more according to some estimates) consists of remittances sent back to Mexico from family members living in our country illegally--money that props up Mexico but will never be spent in the USA (where our own economy needs it). The government of Mexico is corrupt and incompetent to the core. The military and police have been bought by the drug cartels. Mexico is collapsing in on itself and my personal prediction is that there will be a revolution there within the next ten years.

By allowing the poor and dispossessed of Mexico to pour across our border and work here illegally we allow the corrupt oligarchs of Mexico to escape the consequences of their own behavior. We delay the inevitable--social revolution--and we do so at enormous cost to our own working people: we suppress our own wages; we stoke the fires of racism and xenophobia; and we see our civil liberties eroded as they have recently been in Arizona.

The wingnuts of the right will never initiate true immigration reform--they prefer rage and racism to solutions. It is up to the left to push for reform that includes sensitivity to human rights but which also acknowledges that we can no longer allow those who hire illegal immigrants to go unpunished. We must push for economic development in Latin America that actually helps workers rather than just enriches oligarchs--and we must prepare for the coming revolution in Mexico. We must push back against the plutocrats and demagogues who pleasure themselves with hatred for "the other" while caring not one whit for the working people in their own community.

And we must do all of these things immediately, because the longer we wait the greater the costs and the consequences of the devil's deal between the left and the right.

What's With All These Immigrants?

Baby Fatt's scared. Bad scared.

I live in New Mexico (land of mi chante), and I'm frightened about our unsecured border--the one we have with Arizona. What's with these Aryans from Arizona (Aryanzonans?)? Me skerred.

Have you ever been to Arizona? I have, and it sucks. The "Mexican food" is terrible (by the way, if the cops are going to start interrogating Mexicans are the food inspectors going to start showing up in Mexican restaurants and fining the cooks for authenticity?). The climate--don't believe what they all tell you about "but it's a dry heat"--is horrible for human beans. And the culture, as exemplified by Phoenix and personified by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, reminds one of a desert Munich circa 1932.

Arizona has passed a terribly racist, terribly xenophobic law--that allows police to question citizenship--out of ethnic resentment and class rage. I understand that the gringos of Arizona are bereft, alienated, and angry at the powers that be. But their problem is not immigrants--illegal, legal, or extraterrestrial--it is the America that has quashed their dreams in service to Wall Street, the nation that stagnated their wages while the elite get tax cuts. Arizonans should not be angry at immigrants, they should be angry at the oligarchy that has destroyed their aspirations and shackled them to a lifetime of service to various credit card companies.

Meanwhile the Aryans of Arizona have given their Gestapo the power to stop anyone who does not look quite 'merican enuff and ask them to show their papers. "Show me your papers"--isn't that the one line that unites every movie about the Nazis ever made? The people of Arizona are proud of this? WTF?!

New Mexico is mostly Hispanic. Hispanics are about 45 percent of the population; gringos about 41 percent; and the rest Native American, African American, and Asian (in that order). In other words, people who are less than pale are the minority in my beloved state--one of the reasons this is such a great place to live. And the Aryans of Arizona give their police the power to question mi compadres regarding their citizenship?

Many Hispanics from New Mexico have been here since the 16th century--a couple of hundred years before there even was a USA. And the Native Americans have been here for innumerable eons. The oldest continuously settled community in the USA is the Pueblo at Acoma--it's been here for nearly a thousand years. And now some "immigrant" from New Jersey or California thinks that the Pueblo di Mi Chante should be required to show their papers in Arizona? Gimme a break!

Time to just say "no!" to Arizona. Enough of these racist dolts and their shallow pseudo-patriotic worldview (by the way, where are you Tea Party--one would think that when a government oversteps its power the way the State of Arizona has the Tea Party would be the first to arise in libertarian rage and say not only 'no' but 'hell no'?). Time to give these idiots a taste of their own medicine.

Not only should we all boycott Arizona and any products made in Arizona, we should also confront any Arizonans seen outside their little fascist wonderland with the taunt "show me your papers!". Let the gringos of Arizona feel what it's like to have their citizenship and patriotism questioned--just because someone has a white face does not mean he or she is 'merican--let's examine their papers closely first. A failure of vigilance means that the terrorists win. I don't want that, do you?

I thought so. 'nuff of them Aryanzonans.

Tea Bagged!

Now the worm turns. Soon we'll see just how much government the tea baggers can really live without. The Bush economy is doing everything the extreme right could never get done at the ballot box. Good luck to all of us.

All over the country state and municipal governments are cutting budgets. Here in the land of mi chante schools are being closed (and class size increased in the ones remaining open), public employees are being laid off or involuntarily furloughed, services are being cut. The state is proposing closing half of its highway rest stops (tea baggers don't need no restrooms) and it will be fun seeing how tea baggers enjoy waiting in line all day to get a driver's license (or bass fishing license!) or to pay a traffic ticket. This is just the beginning, of course--if you want to see tea bag paradise just go to California, which may soon rival Mississippi in terms of standard of living as government there continues to shrink.

One suspects that the tea baggers are just as reliant upon government as the rest of us. After all, they transport themselves to their little rallies on taxpayer subsidized roadways; many of them are retired (or looking forward to retirement) and receive Social Security (i.e., the most socialized--and effective--government program in the history of humanity) and Medicare (best poster ever from a tea bag rally: 'Keep the government out of my Medicare!'); public employees pick up their trash and clean their streets, etc. So whence do they think comes the infrastructure that makes our economy possible--fat cats on Wall Street? Not, it's the government, acting in service to citizen-taxpayers, that's providing the services responsible for our quality of life.

If tea baggers had either courage or intellectual honesty they would eschew all government in order to live a life that is pure and unadulterated by the taint of big guv'ment. They would live far from any taxpayer subsidized municipality; return any government benefits (just shred those Social Security checks!); and bury all their own trash (who needs those taxpayer funded trash dumps?).

But of course they have neither courage nor honesty. All they have--the essence of their political being--is resentment: an inchoate rage in reaction to a world that is changing all around them (black people get to president? gay people get to marry? WTF?!) and over which they feel they have absolutely no control (it is only on this last point that they are correct). The true target of their anger is not the government--that's a mere surrogate--it's demographics. They cannot accept that their pale skins and old timey white bread views no longer constitute the majority in the diverse nation that the USA has become.

Get used to it tea baggers. It only gets worse from here. You are a shrinking minority and in a generation you'll be to the twenty first century what the Whigs were to the nineteenth. Meanwhile, beware answered prayers, and enjoy your time at the motor vehicle office.

Rielle Hunter Is The Perfect Woman

Have you read the interview with Rielle Hunter in GQ? Wow, she's like the perfect babe. First of all, she did the whole interview with no pants on (at least that's how it appears in the pictures). Secondly, she explicates her philosophy of male-female relationships, which is essentially that a woman's role is to put the man front and center, always defer to him, always walk two steps behind him, cool stuff like that. For instance, when asked about why she didn't put more pressure on John Edwards to tell the truth about their relationship, she said she wanted to be sensitive to his needs and not force him to do something he really did not want to do out of fear of possibly "emasculating" him (her word). What a sweetie!

Actually, what a bunch of bunkum. Rielle Hunter is an annoying fem-bot, a willing Stepford wife whose philosophy would return adult relationships to the Victorian era. She tries to dress up her retrograde worldview in all sort of new-age hooey but at its essence it's clear what sort of relationship she's been searching for all her life: she wants to be taken care of; she wants to have someone come into her life and make everything peachy-keen and, you know, less hard. She's willing to subvert her own identity in order to be personal assistant-concubine to the stars--she's willing to be something less than herself in exchange for a life of luxury and ease. Beware answered prayers, Rielle, at some point you may grow tired of your golden cage.

In her own wheezy breezy way the air-headed (great name for a band, BTW) Miss Hunter gives voice to what is an inchoate longing across great swaths of our society. What most people are seeking today--in relationships, in careers, in life--is to be taken care of, to be rescued from their misery and swept away to Happy Land. They chase a chimera, a will-o'-the wisp--they worship a popcorn fart--all the while wondering as to the cause of their unhappiness.

Let's be frank: life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbes). The modern era may have provided us with a bit more material comfort--and lengthened our lifespan by a small increment or two--but overall things are not much different than they were in Hobbes' time. Indeed, in some ways they may even be worse: people fly planes into buildings (on purpose!); shoot others at random; lie, cheat, and steal; and just generally do mean and evil things to each other, often for no discernible reason. And of course there's always nature, with a hurricane or tornado or other manifestation of global climate change, to remind us just how insignificant we really are in the big scheme of things. If we survive all of that we get to watch ourselves age into oblivion while fighting--with all due pain and suffering--various physical maladies.

In other words, our lives are circumscribed by brutality and chaos, so it's no wonder most people want to be rescued, but in seeking rescue they waste the only chance they have at real meaning: grace, relationships, and love. Out of a desperate desire for redemption at any cost too many people are willing to obliterate the only identity they will ever have. Rielle Hunter may very well be the poster child for the deluded, misguided, incompetent narcissism of the modern age.

Baby Fatt's been around the block a time or two (understatement), and let me tell you the wonderful world of middle-aged dating is nothing if not harsh. People today don't have baggage they have cargo containers full of bitter exes, sullen children, crappy credit scores, and a lifetime of PTSD issues. And whether you're gay or straight, seeking women or men (or whatever--once again, no one cares), most folks are seeking the same, sick sort of redemption through interpersonal relationships as Miss Hunter (from which behavior comes even more bitter exes, sullen children, crappy credit scores, and PTSD issues).

Thing is, even in this crazy "mixed up muddled up shook up world" (Kinks) there are still people who are grounded in reality and who want relationships that are mutually affirmative, positive, and constructive. Lots of folks are looking for someone who wants to help pull the wagon, not just someone who just wants to ride in the back eating bonbons--they seek a helpmate, companion, fuck buddy, and friend (who says the romance is dead?). You can find these people, you really can (I have--the exquisite Lady Eleanor, La Reyna De La Nuevo Mexico) you just have to let go of certain delusions of romance. You have to quit chasing clouds and rainbows. You have to be willing to be co-equal, which means asserting yourself and also allowing the other person to assert him or herself all the while being civil and respectful. Tough stuff, admittedly, but consider the alternative (which is death by loneliness).

With regard to emasculation, it has been my pleasure and opportunity to experience a lifetime of women--from two tough, strong grandmothers, to my mother and my sister, to serial paramours--who never had any compunction about "emasculating" me when it came to telling me the truth, and I am the better man for it. It's absurd for Rielle Hunter to think that she has to subsume her identity to the ego of her well-coifed out of a boyfriend just to find happiness. Both she and he could use a "heaping helping" (Henning, Flatt, Scruggs) of unvarnished truth.

John Edwards is a heel and a cad. He is the exact opposite of a gentleman, most especially he is the absolute antithesis of a "fine Southern gentleman" (the distinctive characteristic of which is a respect for women). I know progressives who supported him because at the time he seemed to speak with passion about the lives of working people and he had a compelling life story. It was all just a sham, a well-scripted commercial for an empty-suited pompadoured boor. He and Rielle Hunter seem made for each other--two desperate empty people struggling to scrape up a soul between them. I pity them, and I feel for their children.

What an ugly, thoroughly modern, cautionary tale. Put your pants back on, Rielle.