Fix The Wages!

Reading the classics is always rewarding. Just the other day I was reading 'I Claudius' and I read a really great line. It was where Claudius had just told Augustus power-mad, homicidal widow Livia that he wasn't allowed into the Senate session where Augustus was declared a god. Livia replied:

"They wont let me in because I'm an old woman and you because you're a fool but I always thought that the Senate was composed of nothing but old women and fools."

Now Graves probably lifted this line from Suetonius but this is the age of Dolores Kearns Goodwin so like, who gives a rat? The important point is when you compare this 2,000 year old remark with our current US Senate the premise of the statement still works.

Now dont be distracted thinking I might be some kind of sexist and that I'm referring to the likes of Barbara Boxer when I repeat a quote that describes some Senators as 'old women'. Nothing could be further from the truth. California's Trotskyite, mustachioed, dwarf (4' 9") Senator is not an old woman; she is an insane fool. The 'climate fixing' bill she is pushing will leave the non-Senatorial segment of the population of this country in grinding poverty for the rest of their lives when it passes.

'Old Women' is more apt in the case of those Senators, take Richard Lugar for example, who have neutered themselves in the face of the New Change Revolution and are eager to lend their bi-partisan imprimatur to leftist outrages like the one mentioned above. Didn't he vote for that Lilly Dinglehammer bill that opens up the last two centuries of employment to the litigation vultures in the name of gender pay equity? But as soon as the public caught on to the giant Congressional trillion-dollar stimulus swindle Lugar got cold feet and ran the other way, discovering a long-buried conservative streak in his trembling RINO heart. In fact I think I should apologize to regular old women, some of whom have more guts than anybody, that I had the nerve to use their proud appellation to refer to this sniveling girlie-man. Blame Livia, ladies, not me.

Meanwhile, below decks, Nancy and The Gang are beating the drum at a faster pace and whipping the hapless House Democrats, many only there as a result of Gerrymandering and ACORN phony ballots, to row at ramming speed toward the moribund wreckage of the US economy. While the Senators riot in alternating waves of panic and confusion up on the deck and Michele peels the seemingly detached BHO another grape in the Presidential Party Pad above the fray the direction is being determined by the completely ruthless Pelosi.

The extent of the Senate's ambitions was to propose the odiferous Uriah Heep of American politics, the slimy Tom Daschle, to be Commissar Of Health Care and Czar of HHS. What surer guarantee of fat consultancies and jobs for useless relatives of the Senatorial Class could there be? They didn't even notice that there was a giant conflict of interest caused by Daschle's $83,000 a month-type 'consultancies' with giant health-care conglomerates. They were genuinely shocked and outraged that anyone could question this guy's probity just because he 'forgot' to pay taxes on a few of his $83k paychecks (was he paid monthly or weekly?) and the chauffeur-driven limo that was thrown in for good measure. The overpaid and parasitic nature of the job itself would be bad enough to disqualify him in most people's eyes, let alone the unpunished tax evasion.

But what did he do wrong ask the Inside The Beltwanians? Isn't that what everyone in Washington dreams of? Its like people in Hollywood dream of getting $20 mil for six weeks of work on the set; with the screaming and the tantrums thrown in for free. Dont executives in every industry dream of the Big Bonus, the giant goose-egg of cash laid in their bank accounts regardless of company or personal performance?

But the Big O has the solution. Government wage controls. Its true, some people who read this blog before the election might be confused by my former conservative views but since then I've got my mind right. If the Lilly Dinglehammer Bill can open up all wages to de facto government control then lets do just that. Obama mentioned a $500,000 cap on all executive compensation and I'm backing him to the hilt! Lets strip those leftist foundations who avoided parking all their assets with Madoff of every penny in the name of equity. Lets level the morons who sucked up all this leftist rhetoric in college and thought that it applied to somebody else. At least poor people have the excuse that they're ignorant of the results of socializing the economy but that point is harder to make when you've got an MBA from Rutgers or Princeton.

"Listen, Meryl, bubbalah, I'd love to pay you 5 mill for your next flick, honest! But its against the law. Since you're in three films this year I can only offer you $165 thou..."

Those Hollywood dummies were the most fervent Bush-haters, the most zealous leftists, the most heartfelt Obama-enthusiasts and now Hollywood lays trembling in the path of a money-hungry State and Federal monster that will move to sack 'the Stars' obscene wealth in the name of equity like Alaric and the Visigoths looted the degenerate, wealthy ancient Romans. Lets use the $4.5 mil we dont pay to Meryl to help The Children.

This is just the beginning. A legislative wave of destruction more powerful than the tsunami that devastated Thailand and Sumatra is on the way to Obama's desk for his compliant signature. The Senate is currently 'fixing' the stimulus swindle by removing a couple of high-profile trivialities and larding it with a couplehundredbillion dollars more much-needed 'programs' and subsidies to those stumbling fools in left-wing advocacy groups and legal consultancies too slow-moving to get a line in the House bill. These shameless boneheads are presenting a picture of the most churlish selfishness and incompetence in a national emergency that could be conceived of; behaving as we always knew the Democrats would when they grabbed power. The snappy-suited doofus in the Oval Office is in on the swindle.

Thats ACORN-Democracy you chumps. And now its too late.

A Bag Of hammers

"You boys are just dumber than a bag of hammers!" When George Clooney said that he wasnt talking about his fellow Democrats but the remark would have been very suitable if he had. Two weeks into the New Age Of Change the Democrats and their hapless leader have proven that without the political cover given them by George W Bush they stand revealed to one and all as a corrupt clique of totally selfish, incompetent socialist hacks.

It seems that to Nancy Pelosi economic stimulus is achieved by borrowing or printing a trillion bucks and handing it out to every Demo interest group in the country. There is not a single thing in this bill that that will do anything to effect the economy except the trillion-dollar price tag which will destroy the currency. The ugly reality of the greed and arrogance of the Pelosiites was such a shock that it completely unified the Republicans in the House and caused the bill to be passed without a single Republican vote. The public support for this monstrosity is melting away and the anger for its failure will be directed at the Democrats.

Meanwhile Obama goes out of his way to castigate Rush Limbaugh, a private citizen, in much stronger terms than Bush used against the New York Times when it undermined our country's war against the terrorists. The result of this was to define Rush as the leading expounder of the conservative agenda. When every word he says turns out to be true its not smart for Obama to focus attention on Rush. This bill is indefensible. Everyone, including the Dems, knows it. Limbaugh saying it at a critical moment focused the opposition to it. The mainstream media has so weakened itself that the storyline cant be controlled in the way that it was during the election. And now the truth has been revealed to the Republican politicians...the Dems mean to use ACORN and their pet unions to make their power permanent. If the Repubs dont fight they will be completely locked out of the system forever.

Now the Dems are intoning the mantra that CEO salaries and bonuses should come under government control. Good, I'm all for it. These same CEOs and executives that backed these socialists so enthusiastically and connived with these same hack politicians for subsidies, favorable regulations and fat-cat contracts have to put the tricolor cockade in their hats and yell "Vive la revolution!" with a smile on their face. Jeffery Katzenburg deserves to have his pay set at $400,000 a year...about a thousandth of his current income...to reward him for his heartfelt support for the New Age.

Keep in mind that the Card Check Bill ( the Worker Freedom Act or some such Orwellian title) just was amended to include a provision that deadlocked labor disputes will be 'arbitrated' by a government board with the power to determine 'fair wages and conditions'. In Europe these boards have traditionally been packed with leftist zealots with zero experience working at a real job. Not such fiery Marxists that the larger, well-connected employers wont be able to reach out to them with a more ancient form of materialism than that envisioned by Marx, mind you, but still pretty harshly anti-business. So the principle of the government setting compensation in the name of equity is pretty much a given amongst our new masters. They'll raise worker salaries until the companies break and have to go crawling to the government for subsidies to protect all those jobs. Back door nationalization.

Obama also wandered into exciting new ground with his remark that businesses should forget about making a profit for a while for patriotic reasons. So losing money has now become virtuous. That'll jump-start the economy. That and a 99.9% pay cut ought to motivate those pesky CEOs to go out and create some jobs.

Now that he actually has a job where he's responsible for something meaningful we see that our current Illiniosian, except for his jug ears and long legs, is very unlike that other President from Illinios to whom he wants to be compared. We now have to settle down to a government run by some of the most deluded and egotistical people that any nation has ever been cursed with. They've studied history and economics with Ward Churchill and apes of his ilk and the century of socialist failure is unknown to them. How did a group of people so intellectually inadequate ever achieve power in a once-great nation? This is the fault of a completely ignorant electorate, a people no longer worthy to be citizens of a democracy. Now they'll be serfs in a tyranny run by a pack of dummies.

Reply To Mickey Edwards

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

That is one of the quotes from an LA Times Op-Ed piece written by long-time Reagan associate and alleged conservative Mickey Edwards warning us that Ronald Reagan would have been with the McLame/Bush faction of the GOP in its total subservience to the corrupt, incompetent Stalinists who have bilked the gullible idiots who compose the American electorate into handing them total power. Presumably Edwards believes that Reagan would be standing tall with the excreble McLame, Arlen Spectacle, Olympia Snowjob and Lindsay Grahamnesty in sheparding through a giant, trillion-dollar 'stimulus package' composed completely of government handouts to the people whose incompetence and greed have caused this economic crisis and to people who pay no income taxes and who are eagerly standing by their mailboxes waiting for the next government stimulus check to arrive. Why he included Rove, the idiot who, with his political partner W Bush (also mysteriously included), refused to oppose the Stalinists even as they were trying to throw him and W in prison on trumped-up charges in that list of actual conservatives I'll never know. Even Gingrich has been seen on TV in an ad featuring him and the horrible Nancy Pelosi pleading for more onerous government action to fix the climate; hilarious now that the whole Global Warming fraud is becoming increasingly discredited.

"...a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power."
Wouldn't that be the Democrats? Didn't the Republicans show that being in power for eight years wasn't enough to advance a single one of the items that were supposedly on their 'compassionate conservative' agenda? Wasn't it shown that our ideas and leaders could be reviled by a media solidly controlled by the Stalinists without any response? Is that a total pursuit of power? When Dead Kennedy and the NEA wrote a bill that federalized education, No Child's Left Behind, didn't the cringing, spineless liberal in the White House rush to sign it and then sit quietly while the country raged at its disastrous results and blamed them on him and the Republicans?

Is Edwards, a former friend and close adviser to RWR, suggesting that there be NO opposition to whats going on? Is he suggesting that supply-siders are unpatriotic negativists who would stand in the way of measures that would prevent national collapse? Edwards and the rest of us are about to experience what a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power is really like. We just witnessed a prosecution conducted against the Bush Administration by a prosecutor who already knew that the people that he was investigating hadn't leaked the name of a supposedly 'secret' CIA employee and that that employee wasn't covered by the statute against leaking the names of secret agents in the first place. The party that Edwards accuses of being built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power sat meekly by while this was going on and never spoke an unkind word against the lying maggot(Armitage) who, along with her lying, bigmouthed half-wit of a husband, leaked Valerie Plame's name in the first place or his political mentor, the incompetent, egotistical and self-promoting Colin Powell. Colin Powell, a liberal bureaucrat who these days sounds as staunchly Republican in his scorn for conservatives who dare criticize the leftward trend the country has taken as Mickey Edwards.

Edwards informs us with justifiable pride that he goes back all the way with Reagan..before he was governor of California... without referring to the 1976 primary challenge to Gerald Ford in which Reagan was vilified using the same verbiage that Edwards himself is directing towards Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Reagan was described by the Gerald Ford Republicans, along with the media and the Democrats, as a hate-filled, irrational extremist. I haven't heard any overblown or even exaggerated rhetoric from Limbaugh unless you consider his analysis that the government cant spend its way to prosperity and that redistribution of wealth is damaging to society is somehow hateful. Coulter, who indulges in rhetorical excess as a comedic device, would be considered a mild milquetoast if she was a leftist directing the same level of sarcasm towards Republicans on Huffpo or any similar site where Republicans (liberal Republicans included) are routinely vilified as Neo-Nazi, climate-wrecking baby-killers.

"This is the difference between ideological advocacy and holding public office: Having accepted partial responsibility for the nation's well-being, one assumes an obligation that goes beyond bumper-sticker slogans. Certitude is the enemy of wisdom, and in office, it is wisdom, not certitude, that is required."

If certitude is the enemy of wisdom surely Edwards should direct his remarks not to the confused and powerless remnants of the Republican Party but to the arrogant and truly certain of their moral and intellectual rightness Democrats who have taken control in what is now a de facto one party socialist state. The media, the arts, the educational establishment, the federal, local and state governments, the labor unions and increasingly the fatheads who run major corporations are of one mind in this economic crisis; handing out huge subsidies, vastly increasing regulations and government control and raising more steeply progressive taxes are the way out of this problem. It is the road to bankruptcy and poverty. It is the road to tyranny. The Democrats, devoid of opposition and ready to direct the power of the state at anyone foolish enough to protest at the direction in which they are taking the country, will show Edwards the difference between Reagan's ideological advocacy, so easily abandoned in the desire to accommodate and compromise with the opposition party who held solid majorities in both houses of Congress at the time, and the ideological advocacy of the Stalinists now in complete and total control of all three branches of the government.

So dont worry Mr. Edwards. Limbaugh and Coulter will soon be muzzled and Rove and Bush will be faced with showtrials and prosecutors enough to make the most fastidious advocates of comity, like yourself, as happy as clams. The subsidy and stimulus checks will flow like manna from heaven in an unbroken wave. ACORN will create enough phony ballots to control the outcome of any future election without worrying about nosy reporters or punctilious officials. The 'election' of that vile piece of human garbage Al Franken has proven that the law is no longer a factor when it inhibits the installation of Democrats in positions of power. The holy policies of the sainted FDR will be invoked, updated, made even more onerous and legislated into the federal, state and local codes. McLame and the other liberal Republican suck-ups will be co-opted and indulged to prove that a legal opposition exists. The fools in the electorate who were stupid enough to hand 100% of the government over to this claque of greedy parasites in the hopes that a stream of goodies would follow will soon discover that cutting carbon emissions means they lose their car and sit freezing in the dark, that raising taxes means that they lose their job and suppressing conservative voices means that they lose their birthright of freedom and any future hope of prosperity. It also means that the currency becomes as worthless as the rhetoric from the government and that their pensions and life savings are equally worthless.

Enjoy the New Age Of Change Mr. Edwards and make sure you tell the maid keep that photo of you and The Gipper on the mantlepiece nice and shiny so we can all recognize what a wise and non-ideological conservative you are.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/
la-oe-edwards24-2009jan24,0,3344794.story

MonoPartisanship

Its Sunday and I have free-lance work to do so here I am at 8:00am watching Chris Wallace interview Nancy Pelosi. I should watch my DVD boxed set of old episodes of Capitan Kangaroo instead of upsetting myself watching Western Civilization collapse. Thank you, you granola-eating hippies in San Francisco, for sending us this gift to American democracy, this steely-eyed, plastic-faced harridan of a Pelosi.

The amazing thing is that people can listen to what she's saying and think that we're headed for anything but economic collapse. The twisted thinking is so completely and manifestly wrong that the disastrous consequences are easy to see. These are people who think that increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit payout is a tax cut. Pelosi states that the most expensive budget item in the Bush budget was the anemic tax cut which preceded a curious rise in revenues. But cause and effect are not going to cut much ice with people who ignore the lack of relationship between carbon dioxide levels and temperature and are poised to destroy any remaining industry that hasn't yet been completely crippled by their predatory worker's unions by enacting the same cap and trade carbon tax scheme that was such a failure in Europe. This in the middle of a decline in global temperatures; ignore the arctic temperatures, our oft-changed computer models are all you need to know.

Do you like driving your car? Well, this being a beautiful Sunday morning with temperatures in the 70's, you wont have to even put on your slippers to walk outside and gaze fondly at the Global Warming Gas Belching Menace that the Democrats are going to rip from your driveway, you climate criminal! Take the old flivver for a spin with the windows down, no phone calls, and just revel in the feeling of being able to go wherever you like, whenever you like unlike what it will be like on the smelly, unmaintained, crowded public bus which is what lies in your future once the National Resources Defense Council is done writing our pollution laws.

But thats OK. Its not like you'll have a job to go to. Hyper-inflation will allow you to afford your fixed-rate mortgage, even pay it off from the weekly Economic Stimulus payout that will be placed in your account at The Government Bank by the US Treasury's reliable computer, adjusting it for the 35% inflation that occurs every week, of course. If you're not feeling tip-top you can go line up for free Prozac and Zanex at the Government Hospital if you can stand the screaming of the untended 'patients' in the filthy, moldering wards and the blood-caked nightmare of the emergency room. For those that cant stomach that there will be dispensaries for medical marijuana produced by the Department Of Agriculture and included in your 'free medical care'. This is tricky. The Department Of Agriculture will have amazing success raising indoor cloned sensi buds but not so much success with less important crops like wheat and corn so the munchies that are caused by the medical use of marijuana might not have anything around to satisfy them. Meat and any form of transfat will be illegal of course. Cows cause global warming, you see.

So the barbarians have taken over the capital. They are dreaming dreams of instituting the Depression-curing policies of The Sacred Franklin. Except we wont be as gauche as they were in the 30's and insist that people in government make-work jobs actually work. Well, at least the sun is shining. If I didnt have to work on 'Superhero Squad' I'd be laying out on my hammock reading a book. Next week.

The Empty Suit vs. The Cong

The lefties have dreamed of this day since their nightmares came true in 1980. A brief window of opportunity opened in 1992 when they controlled the Congress and the White House but Tom Foley and Robert Byrd couldn't get it together with the lying egomaniac in the Oval Office. THE AGENDA was not only not moved forward but the Gingrich counterrevolution of 1994 effectively put the socialization of America on hold...politically. Meanwhile the cultural corrosion continued and now, when a majority of the country either get their political news from 'The Daily Show' or SNL , there has been an election which has placed an angry, ruthless band of radicals in power during a time of great fear and anxiety. This clique who runs Congress are as without scruple as they are without any trace of ability to manage an economy and they are hungry for power with a burning, decades-long hunger. They will trample Obama and his refried Clintonians with a blizzard of bad legislation and underhanded political chicanery that will overwhelm the feckless empty suit that is Barak Obama. He'll be signing his little heart out on bills that will rip the guts out of the American economy. A sensible person perceiving the coming debacle can only work to abandon all attachment to material goods and learn to smile in adversity.

Bureaucratic Poetry

Some historical crisis have had their balladeers. Woody Guthrie for the Depression. Marat for the French Revolution. Eisenstein for the Russian. But the minstrel of this final collapse of the West is a faceless analyst buried in a London newspaper article about the increase in the top income tax rate in Britain from 45% to 61%. He blythely made the following statement:

"Those in this income bracket tend to plan their tax affairs more thoroughly, so they will be exploring ways to legitimately mitigate these higher charges."

The swansong of economic collapse. Atlas is shrugging all over the place. Social Democracy has gone into Chapter 11. The people responsible for the reorganization have no reverence for or allegiance to free enterprise or even freedom itself. But the problem is that free enterprise is entirely responsible for the current standard of living and that free enterprise can't exist without effective political freedom.

Will the crop of geniuses that are now firmly in charge be able to turn to the powerful interest groups who created this mess and say no to them? Will they tell AARP that the state is broke and that the Social Security recipients are faced with a default? Will they stand firm and tell the Public Employee Unions that the money has run out? Will they tell huge corporations that the days of protection and subsidies are over? Will they tell the ecologists that a prosperous economy is built on cheap energy and that nuclear and coal are back on the table? Will they end all government involvement in subsidizing college students and tell professors that tenure doesn't protect them from layoffs? Will they abandon the bankrupt Medicare-Medicaid system? The crowd of parasites is endless and in one way or another includes us all. Will the Current Leaders turn to each and every one of these angry and deserving entitlistas and loudly and firmly yell, "Enough!"

They'll be forced to do just that by the time this is done...and more. The Welfare State is collapsing. It was always unsustainable. There were people in the nineteen thirties who looked at the beginning of the trend and were able to see its end. Others took a lesson from the collapse of the Second World-- the crumbling of the Communist East. People might think that China is somehow immune to this current chaos, by the way, but that is not true. Giant top-down statist systems are all in equal trouble. Economic planning is the problem, but is universally seen by the Ivy League educated elites in business and government and certainly by the bloodthirsty commies in Beijing as the solution. Wealth is seen as a function of agreements and subparagraphs, adjustments in interest rates and careful planning. Risk, initiative, creativity and enterprise are scorned, even in the private sector. If you can't calculate something using statistical analysis it is anarchic and unsupportable. But risk, initiative, creativity and enterprise are just the factors that create wealth. 61% tax rates and economic planning boards that are packed with fanatical anti-business ecologically obsessed ex-academics are the stuff of poverty.

'Our New Happy Life' said Orwell and he had it right, right down to interactive TV. The adjustment to grinding poverty will no doubt be accompanied by a wave of social unrest that will neccesitate some 'temporary emergency measures' that will include your TV watching you back. Most people wont care. Legal drugs and free video games will keep most people happy. The few 'conservative' malcontents can be easily ignored as the Flat-Earthers are today. The only opposition groups will be rival political gangs with the bureaucracies conducting purges against each other in an all-out war for power.

Happily, I'm old. I've lived a hand-to-mouth existence in the film industry so even though there were some very fat years there were plenty of lean ones to teach me some humility and toughen me up a bit. I need very little. The world can go to hell in a handbasket and I'll try to accept my own part of the general misfortune with as much grace and courage as I can muster. If you read back posts on my blog you will know that I have been expecting this for a couple of years, although the reality is daunting and frightening. Bring on the Change, Barry.

7.4 Trillion Reasons

The Fed is poised to 'lend' an additional $7.4 trillion to financial institutions on top of the $2.8 trillion they've already 'leant' to the banks since the beginning of this crisis a few weeks ago. The gross national product of this country is $13 trillion. Obama and the Dems are heading to DC to hand some pathetically tiny $200 billion or so 'stimulus package' to the peasants. Meanwhile every Blue State in the country is collapsing in a sea of red ink and will surely be bailed out by the munificent Big Brother. The Feds have still got some of that Fan-Fred $700 bil that they're handing out to cover the phony mortagages. The line at the bailout door grows daily. With all this stimulation and two-buck gas we should be in a howling boom, our phones ringing off the hook from calls from desperate employers trying to lure us from our current jobs with higher pay.

Its nice to know that the government has an extra ten or fifteen trillion bucks on hand to help us all through these tough times. Its must be those foreign investors clamoring to grab a piece of the coming Obama Boom lending us the money to stand behind these 'loans' to the banks who were impoverished by the government removing all qualifying criteria from lending. So we all received dozens of credit card offers, whether we had a job or not. Lets party! After all we all have hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity from these frame and drywall shacks we were clever enough to buy. A country of millionaires...on paper. Real Estate never goes down, you see.

OOPS! a slight miscalculation. Meanwhile every parasite and overpaid public official have sat back, content that they had enough political juice to protect their 'right' to a cushy livetime job, followed by a fat pension; the social security recipients just had to snivel in front of the TV cameras in phony interviews set up by AARP and big new 'benefits' are added to their 'entitlements': rural corporations grow fat off ethanol subsidies and the waste ground is covered by non-functioning windmills and broken solar panels, all collecting a hefty subsidy check. The list of recipients is endless and probably includes everyone in the country and a whole bunch of foreigners. As government grows its so easy to hide favors and handouts in the thousand-paged appropriation bills and after all, we all win!

Now the 401k's are headed for worthlessness, the fat government and union pension plans are holding 'paper' assets that aren't worth the paper their written on--bonds issued by the state and municipal governments that their improvident wage and benefit demands have bankrupted. WHAT?! Those pensions are a right! Aren't they?

Is this the first time that socialism has been achieved by putting the entire free economy in receivership. Everything collapses and the government takes over and runs it according to a Five-Year-Plan. That'll work. Good times ahead.
But where are they getting all this money? It must be all the cash that was accumulating in the 'Social Security Trust Fund' in Algore's lock-box. Ummm...I guess they put all those 'contributions' into the general fund ; anyway Social Security is about to take on millions of new recipients as soon as they pass 'Immigration Reform'. Just ship the abuelos north and put'em on the dole...there's plenty of money!

With all this money floating around why aren't we all rich? Because money is a reflection of the ability of the economy to produce wealth. The ability of this economy to produce wealth is shrinking as the inexorable demands of the recipients of subsidies are expanding enormously.

The corollaries of socialism are poverty and inflation and we are seeing it happen before our eyes. We are also seeing the electorates turning to Big Brother in the hope that they will get something for nothing. I grew up in Las Vegas among hustlers and cheats. The working definition of a sucker in that world is someone who wants something for nothing. That's a good definition in any world. Its also a good definition of the average voter.

Another thing that happens to suckers, or chumps as they are also known, is that there is a moment when they realize that they've been hornswoggled. Conservatives dream that that will be the day that the herd turns to Milton Freedman and FA Hayek and demands rational reforms. Don't bet on it. Tyranny and mob violence are much more likely. Democracy got us into this mess by empowering interest groups to grab control of the system and milk it. Democracy will not get the demands of all these disparate groups under control. Scarce resources will have to be allocated by fiat. Period. Thats Change We Can Believe In!

Last days Of Pomp-LA!

Ah. its November! It's nice to step outside and watch the tiny white flakes floating down... can Christmas, oops sorry, I used the 'C' word, Winter Break be far away? Of course these white flakes aren't exactly the same as the ones you might be experiencing in Denver or Cleveland; they come from the communities upwind who are being incinerated by giant brush fires which are enhanced by bone-dry sixty mile-an-hour winds blowing off the desert like the wind from a giant bellows.

Those of you who cant afford a California vacation are in luck. All you need is a trash can full of hay or dried yard clippings and two electric fans. Crank the old furnace up to 95 degrees, put some lighter fluid in the trash can, ignite it, use your dimmer switch to turn your lights down to about half-power and replace a couple of the white bulbs with red ones and turn the fans on full blast and you can pretend you're in Beverly Hills. If the smoke is thick enough you can pretend your wife is naomi Watts. This ultra-hot winter weather is sometimes described by the natives as 'earthquake weather' so you might want to hire a giant truck filled with cement to drive by your house a few times so you can really groove on the Cali experience as it shakes ominously. An illegal alien with a leaf blower outside your window at seven AM could enhance the realism.

Black soot is everywhere. Even with the windows shut it leaks in and creates little piles in the windowsills and around the doors. the cats come in from the hillside reeking of smoke as though they had just had lunch with kitty-cat Satan. For some reason the last few nights have been punctuated with coyote howls. Its like listening to a barbershop quartet that likes to eat raw cats and possums. The traveling band of coyotes that live on this hillside are back in our area so we round the cats up and shut them in early on these dim evenings. Its so dry that a half-hour after the sprinklers went off I stepped out into the back yard and it was so dry that I checked to see if they had malfunctioned by running another cycle...fifteen minutes after I did that it was bone-dry again.

A sure sign of impending doom is when the phone rings and my mother-in-law in London is on the other end asking if we're all right. That means that in the UK TV news is showing pictures of burning houses and people being evacuated. We've had fires a lot closer, one where we could see the tongues of flame leaping up over the ridge-line but the smoke from this latest batch is the worst we've ever had. So I'm sitting in my house with the windows shut and the AC on in mid-November.

Luckily our esteemed Mayor Viva-la-raza (Viaragosa) has had to stop performing gay marriages in his office temporarily and is ready to take action. Fortunately the large majority of this season's brushfires are outside the city limits as this particular mayor has screwed up everything he's touched and his active participation in the management of this emergency would easily cause half the city to be engulfed in flames. The clouds of smoke and soot have also put the kybosh on the angry anti-Prop 8 demonstrations. Yes the Neanderthals managed to pass a California Constitutional Amendment against gay marriage but before you guys start getting too upset you should remember that we are in the district of the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals which is about to be topped up by Obama and the sixty-dem Senate with an even more lawless and looney crowd of jurists who will be happy to show their contempt for the Morman and Born-Again scum that managed to convince the voters to pass this ballot measure. All conservative ballot measures are always unconstitutional. I voted against Prop 8, by the way, just in the interest of full disclosure. All the commercials were trying to scare me by saying that the schools will be forced to teach lids about homosexualty. If kids in California schools learn their Gay Studies lessons as well as their math and reading lessons this will be the butchest state in the union in no time. Now if there was a ballot measure that was against teaching these little geniuses that carbon emissions affect the climate, a really destructive lie, then I would vote for that.

A lot of things have been hidden under the cloud of smoke. Cali's deeping budget mess and the huge layoffs of Public Employees and giant tax increases are working their way forward silently and uncovered by the media who love a good car chase or a hillside full of celebrity mansions aflame but hate anything to do with budgets or appropriations. The Governator flies his private carbon-blasting jet from fire to fire, handing out emergency funds borrowed using California's DDD-junk bond credit status from the Red Chinese Army using the citizens of San Diego as collateral. It the state defaults everybody from La Jolla south to the border has to go live in China and work in smoke-belching factories adulterating wheat glutens and toothpaste with industrial chemicals 18 hrs a day for a dollar...or a Yuan, the dollar will soon be completely worthless. At least they'll have jobs.

I looked for a historical parallel for the New Age Of Obama and I decided that the reign of Charles The Silly in France was probably the most appropriate. The Black Death stalked the land as did the Black Prince and his army of thugs and murderers. Trade and commerce were at a standstill and the king's consort, the lovely Odette, threw huge banquets for the licentuos crowd of barons who actually ran the kingdom. Banquets where the king sat on the floor with the household hunting dogs howling for a bone to gnaw. Just like Obama will be with the New Age Senate. This is it America, its Chuck Schumer's way or the highway, with no gas and cameras that give you an automatic ticket every time you pass.

Apocalypse...Now?

In the beginning the French Revolution was a reaction to a fiscal crisis. The King called a special session of the legislature (a really special session, the Estates General hadn't met in over a century) to raise taxes to cover a deficit that was about to consume the entire government. The Ancien Regime ran at a dead loss. Pensioners, parasitic aristocrats, a growing and cancerous bureaucracy, huge interest payments on existing debt and the degenerate luxury of the royal court, all fixed expenses that could not be cut, were outstripping the expected revenue to the point where people who were looking at the numbers rationally were becoming very alarmed.

So the legislature came together with the word 'change' on every lip. But this wasn't a legislative problem. The harvest had failed and the price of bread was ruinous to the average person. Taxes and overregulation were strangling business. The powerful hereditary class of aristocrats had contempt for business and the vulgar nouveau riche who were making large amounts of money in the private sector. They moved to reign in and confiscate the obscene excess wealth of these upstarts, depressing the economy and inhibiting new enterprises. The France of Louis XVI wasn't anywhere near as robust and wealthy as the France of Louis XIV but the fixed outlays were much bigger. What was the result? Chaos and anarchy, followed by a one-man dictatorship.

Here we are two centuries later. Once again beset by immovable 'fixed costs'. The interest groups, local state and national who run the government look on any cut in the rate of growth as an assault on their human rights and the timid cronies they've maneuvered into positions of power are far more likely to resort to robbing the public than they are to anger their sponsors and allies. After all, everybody, from the poorest to the richest gets some kind of a subsidy.

If you're poor there are myriad agencies and benefits that you can access. Food Stamps, Medicaid, Housing subsidies, Earned Income Tax Credit, the list is endless. If you're middle class your children can attend formerly out-of-reach universities run by the beneficent state. Vast bureaucracies and agencies sprawl across the landscape staffed with the middle class in their millions. These folks bask in the knowledge that they have lifetime jobs with a nice fat retirement check awaiting them at fifty-five so they can hop in the Winnebago and drive aimlessly around on the Interstates annoying the children who moved thousands of miles away to get away from their parents.

The rich have become adept at paying their legislators to write subsidies into the giant omnibus budget bills that have become so popular wherever lawmakers meet to 'craft' a budget. Most legislators and their cronies are as moderate in their demands on the public purse as those presented to the trembling and unarmed Romans by the King of the Visigoths as he stood outside their gates with an army of warlike barbarians. The wrathful and 'entitled' politicians now stand inside the gates backed by a swelling army of Senior Citizens who expect their every whim to be catered to instantly, an education bureaucracy that swells like a pig's bladder, farmers wanting bigger payoffs, unions wanting cash to bail out the enterprises they've bankrupted with their unreasonable demands and every variety of idealist and do-gooder all needing more federal cash than last year to shepherd in the new Nirvana.

The Iron Rice Bowl. That is the ultimate distillation of socialism. You own your job as a right. You cant be fired, your pay goes up because its increases are automatically written into an agreement pegged to the 'cost of living'. Health care is a right. Being able to retire and collect a pension that allows you to live comfortably is a right. High real estate prices and bogus mortgages that you never have to pay off are a right. You have a right to cheap food and cheap energy. Smooth roads and adequate police and fire protection. The right to attend university if you can spell your name on the entry form. We've all got lots of expensive rights.

Meanwhile, the idealists have launched on a crusade to fix the weather. Even though global temperatures have been declining for more than a decade and there is absolutely no empirical data linking carbon dioxide with climate change the new crowd has already announced its enthusiastic commitment to the most expensive and inefficient technologies to generate electricity and their enthusiastic opposition to any form of energy that involves fire or radiation. Promethius was tortured by the Gods for giving mankind the gift of fire, now the Democrats are giving that earth-destroying present back with a sneer of contempt written on their New Age visages. The crippling increase in electric bills will be passed on the the herd either in higher rates or higher taxes to subsidize this idiocy. The New Jacobins have also hatched a scheme called 'Cap and Trade' which is like a game of Three Card Monty where businesses are charged taxes for any carbon or anything else that they emit into the atmosphere.

The right to own a private automobile, erroneously taken for granted in the minds of the moronic Voters For Change, is an illusion that will be revealed for the stupidity that it is when the Weather Police get rolling and cripple the oil companies. Soon GM will be like Uruguay Airlines under the socialist government there in the 1960's; tens of thousands of employees but not a single airplane. The government subsidized auto workers will be sitting in their idle auto plants collecting full wages and bennies from the hand of the taxpayer.

Like France in 1789 the problem is not how the system is being run or which faction is running the system, its the unsustainablity of the entire enterprise. Blue State governments and large cities, all run on a one-party basis by Democrats and dominated by the rapacious Public Employee Unions, have now reached bankruptcy. So has the UAW-destroyed automobile industry. Forcing the banks to make loans to welfare cases, cronies and seedy deadbeat speculators has destroyed the banking system. The final coup de gras was the ocean of computer-generated cash poured into the credit system to smoothe over the wreckage of sound business principles and ensure de facto government control of the financial system-- the condition that caused the crash in the first place.

But the biggest beneficiaries of the funny-money loans were the middle class who moved into overpriced six thousand square foot clapboard shacks and imagined they had a million dollars worth of equity after two years of ownership which would allow them to endlessly 'refinance' every time they maxed out their credit cards. Thats the greatest thing about all this government intervention...everybody wins! Sniveling about trivia like sound business practices and free trade or even esoterica like 'free speech' or 'property rights' is for the few remaining conservative crackpots. Rejecting the flaccid Keynsianism of the beady-eyed Bushites or the outright Marxism of the incoming pack of geniuses puts one on the outskirts of society with the Ron Paulians and other political outcasts. The system is seen as immutably rock-solid and permanent by the vast majority, who are upset that there has been a temporary downturn but look to the intervening hand of the state to set things right.

Its not going to happen. An economist named Dougherty from Chapman University made a very credible case on the radio yesterday for a $1.5 trillion deficit for this fiscal year just based on the things that have been implemented already or are being proposed for the lame-duck session of Congress that will usher in The New Age Of Change. He's living in a dream world if he thinks its going to be that low. If the Dems arent going to let the UAW take the hit for ruining the auto industry, or Fannie and Freddie for ruining the banking industry and tanking real estate prices are they going to let their beloved Public Employee Unions pay for the state and local governments that have been brought low by their greedy rapacity? Will they let California and New York default on their bonds? Joe The Plumber defaulting on his mortgage, credit card and car payments, his unemployed kids throwing up their hands and walking away from $200,000 worth of unpayable student loan debt is one thing, the State Of California walking away from the worthless paper the voters have been authorizing is quite another. Actually, they're the same thing. The Perestroika that Gorbachev has been urging on Obama has arrived already. Just like it did in the Good Old Soviet Union-- which most of the people surrounding Obama supported over Reagan before they switched their admiration over to the Islamonazis.

If California bonds are worthless that means all bonds are worthless unless the Feds buy them with more computer cash. That means that low-interest Federal bonds are effectively worthless as is the US Dollar. That wipes out the reserves and investments of every other country on earth. The statists now in charge of the planet do not have the intellectual wherewithal or the philosophical underpinning to deal with this. But they'll be too busy implementing the Law Of The Sea Treaty and the Kyoto Accords to worry about an economic meltdown until its too late. Its already too late. The dinosaurs are arguing about how many electric fans to set up to fend off the approaching asteroid and whether turning on so many fans will cause Global Warming.

On his deathbed Louis the XV was heard to mutter, "Apres moi, le deluge." Most thought he was referring to his idiot son who was about to become king in his place, and that was certainly part of it, but he was looking at the oncoming crackup and thanking God for taking him before the flood hit. As the poet William S Burroughs said, "I dont want to be around when this sh!thouse blows up!" Burroughs had the good sense to check out a few years ago, probably defaulting on huge debts to heroin dealers and sundry other tradesmen and leaving the rest of us on the bare surface of the Earth contemplating the media's idiot son about to be coronated and watching with trembling fear the expanding shadow of the oncoming meteorite.

The End Game

In my digital donkey-work FX job my only luxury is that I get to listen to music without being bothered from 4:30 pm to 3:30 am four days a week. I've really been plowing through my CD collection and borrowing music from others like mad and burning copies. I'm going over to my son's house after a quick trip into Burbank to connive for free-lance work and grab a bunch of his old ones. He's long since digitized his whole music collection so I can browse through the boxes in his garage and take what I want. One of my favorite rediscoveries amongst my own dust-covered CDs was the soundtrack to 'Repo Man', a punk-rock movie about how tough the Reagan Years were. Hey! Here's a catchy tune...

in a sluggish economy
inflation,recession
hits the land of the free
standing in unemployment lines
blame the government for hard times

we just get by
however we can
we all gotta duck
when the sh*t hits the fan

10 kids in a cadillac
stand in lines for welfare checks
let's all leach off the state
gee!the money's really great!

soup lines
free loaves of bread
5lb blocks of cheese
bags of groceries
social security
has run out on you and me
we do whatever we can
gotta duck when the sh*t hits the fan

Or when America's Chickens Come Home To Roost! And them rascals are roosting all over! But that's OK. We've elected a raft of Social Engineers who are going to rescue the economy and the whole country and make everything fair. How do I know? They've got computer models to prove it! The same kind of computer models that prove Global Warming even as the glaciers expand and threaten Bangor, Maine are now going to model and regulate all economic activity.

One time, in the midst of some monumental screw-up, Curly turned to Moe and said proudly, "This is so easy a moron could do it!" Moe replies, "So why dont you get one to help you?" Why not, indeed? Obama and the Democrats are getting more than one moron to help them. The fluorescent-glowing halls of government and the ivy-walled towers of academia are currently being combed for the most extreme morons available. Morons who reject free Trade and vow to tax businesses who think about going offshore into bankruptcy. Morons who reject the secret ballot in union elections. Morons who want to create a 'Cap And Trade' system to fix the weather that was implemented in Europe a few years ago. It was a policy so disastrous that even the Hegelian Euros were forced to abandon it as their economies went in the tank. But our economy is already in the tank.

Ahhh! The Enlightened Social Theories abound! The buggy-eyed totalitarian leftists are geared up like a bunch of speed-freaks who just filled a phony prescription for Desoxyn and are ravening to punish the ignorant proletarians for their decades-long rejection of extreme leftist candidates. They've been putting James Brown's 'The Big Payback' on a loop in their Ipods and dancing a happy ji...better just forget that word... dancing a happy dance. These power-hungry theorists are going to take the 'offensive speech' codes from the halls of academe and apply them to everybody they dont like. Hate speech, you know. Cant wait for that. William F Buckley once stated that he'd rather be governed by people picked at random from the phone book than the faculty of Harvard. Oops! Its too late to say you're sorry. If WFB was alive today he'd roll over in his grave. He would also be pilloried as a racist; everyone knows Harvard Faculty is a code-word for African Americans.

In the Age Of Enlightenment in the last half of the eighteenth century two great thinkers emerged; Adam Smith and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Both defined philosophies which had immense consequences in the development of our current society.

Adam Smith believed in the Invisible Hand of the market. He was the prophet of the Industrial Revolution and the Age Of Information. Societies that employed Smith's principals were the freest and most wealthy ever in the history of human civilization. The free-market economics of Smith led to a human race which had conquered hunger and disease, which sped from place to place with undreamed of rapidity, in which communications went from galloping speed to instantaneous speed-of-light realtime psychedelic blur-speed. A world in which childbirth didn't kill one in six mothers and childhood one in four children. A world in which women were free to have sex lives of their own without having to chain themselves to early marriage and endless childbearing. An Arcadia.

Jean Jacques Rousseau had a different idea. He believed that primitive societies were the most fair and happy. The reason for this was the 'Social Contract', a mutual and generally unspoken agreement that defined everyone's rights and responsibilities. In simple societies this was generally seen as being more fair. More complex societies are more often dominated by small cliques of greedy and power-hungry men who skew the social contract to their private benefit and to the detriment of the general public. Rousseau posited that if the most enlightened people in society would consciously write a social contract they could vastly improve the lot of the common man and realize the utopian dream of perfection and happiness.

As Smith's ideas generated the Industrial Revolution so Rousseau's generated the French and Russian Revolutions. The misery experienced by common people being taken from the land and yoked to the industrial harness was nothing compared to the brutality of these two revolutions. Both were attempts at social engineering on a scale never before envisioned. But when Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Juan Peron, Mugabe and myriad others tried to fashion their ideal societies by a 'Triumph Of The Will' these determinist crusades always ended in total destruction and disaster. Less brutal methods were tried in Western Europe after World War 2. Britain, which had won the war but had then gone on a binge where the government nationalized most heavy industry, still had a bleak poverty and rationing seven years after the war ended. Germany, which had been completely physically destroyed but whose government had been created by a bunch of free-marketeers, was undergoing a boom. But the Germans waded into the fever-swamp of socialism and stagnation as soon as the rebuilding was done. Soon the only brake on the socialism of Europe was the giant gravitational pull of America.

The failure of government planning is manifest. Countries which had it were always basket-cases. But rising above the statist soup there was always one beacon, one light to which every face hoping for freedom or economic well-being would turn; America. The word is magic in the world. People everywhere know more about America than they do about any other foreign country. America is the hope that you can live a decent, happy life without oppression or fear. The consumerist culture that flowed from America's economic freedom created a world market, laced together by the internet and instant communications overwhelmed the entire world. How did five percent of the worlds population outdistance the other ninety-five percent?

Freedom. Capitalism. Rule of law. That's how. None of which have any relevance to the claque of social engineers who will be flinging the mush-soft retarded bureaucrats of the Bush Administration out of their cushy sinecures in the vast structure of the federal government and putting their Soviet claws on the levers of power. Six weeks into this new session of Congress people will be stunned at what a monster they've bred. These dudes want a finger in every pie and if you dont like it you're an unpatriotic, racist, greedy, self-serving, corrupt Enemy Of The People. We didn't elect Jimmy Carter we've elected Hugo Chavez. As times get tough that will be apparent.

The application of only a few of these 'cures' for the economy will have the same effect that draining two pints of blood and branding with a hot iron had on Medieval fever patients. Extreme measures will be taken to exorcise the demons of unfairness and selfishness and make the system work for the little guy. The new social contract. The old social contract, the one that built this country is obsolete. Now we get a level of government planning that will take your breath away. The few hundred thousand miserable wretches who starved to death as a result of corn being diverted into ethanol will become a few hundred million as the global subsidies that basket-case economies like Egypt and Pakistan feed off of dry up instantly. the Saudi Arabia of food is about to cut its production drastically. Let the Saudi Arabia of oil deal with that.

So now we march, with our faces into the glowing sunrise, into the New Age Of Change. Soon our benefactors will be issuing us restive peasants a donative under the rubric of a 'tax refund' in the hope that we will spend it at Mattress City instead of buying stock in General Motors, therefore expanding the economy greatly. In fact, we're buying General Motors whether we like it or not, or at least our pals in DC are going to buy it on our behalf. The sound of dominos hitting each other is deafening. I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio laying on the top of the upended Titanic, waiting for the plunge.

My wife tells me I'm an obsessive Right Wing Nut whose worm-eaten brain has been warped beyond repair by Talk Radio. Maybe she's right.