Blame America

America needs some fucking tough love right now. Listen to me, guys, somebody should've told you this a long time ago, or maybe they have been and you're just ... not ... listening. Take out the iPod earbuds and turn off the TV a minute. No, you can't just leave it on mute and watch it behind my back. I want to talk to you about something serious here. I think you have a problem. I think you've been acting like a goddamn lot of children.

You know how after you graduate college, you pretend for a little while that you're a real adult cuz you're out on your own, but really you have no goddamn idea what's going on, and you don't care because you want to do things your way, but "your way" is really just an excuse for being irresponsible and putting the blame on everybody else, and meanwhile your bills stack up and you end up paying a lot of your very hard-earned money on debt collectors and overdraft fees - but that's ok, cuz you're doing it your way, you're making your mistakes, you convince yourself that these mistakes are what it means to be free and there's a learning curve. It doesn't matter if debts and overdrafts are unfair, all you need to do is perfect your approach, and it'll all come together.

Come to find out it doesn't work like that.

It is exactly your blundering insistence on individuality that seals your goddamn doom. You know what's being done is unfair. (It's the same way with wars and the economy and rush hour traffic.) As long as you keep doing things your way, you'll be ok, it will be somebody else's problem, the trouble isn't you, it's all those goddamn other people who support the war or take the freeway home. Or it's the government's fault for letting banks get away with stuff. Eventually the government will catch on, right? - you'll keep voting and eventually you'll get a politician who'll be like, "Whelp, bout time to hold the banks accountable," and you won't have to pay overdraft fees again.

And that's exactly what happened - except increasingly now the so-called "middle class" is relying on paycheck advance - once a quaint feature of the topolganger lower class neighborhoods, now available in the common grounds of WalMart and internet banking. Which, as of this writing, isn't that popular a subject on the internet, despite outrageously high APR (120% at US Bank). Some US states made paycheck advance illegal; however, the point is that by sitting by and letting some nebulous "someone else" deal with it, we let "someone else" dictate the terms and conditions of our lives.

We act as though as long as we mind our own business, nothing is going to bother us. Having to think about politics or the economy isn't as important as doing our job and feeding our families. We just want to be left alone. That's all the American Dream has come down to: "Shut up and let me sleep."

9/11 was a rude awakening many people are still trying to out-maneuver. Terrorism - can't be bothered to examine the cause of it, must have some easy answer like "they hate us" (a sullen child's analysis if I've ever heard one). Here are a panel of experts (who made them experts? Who knows), I will copy down what they say, I will use it as a shortcut to absolve myself of responsibility. I cannot be held responsible for my country's foreign policy; it's just not up to me! I'm trying to work and have a family here, I'm upholding my part of the bargain by pursuing the American Dream, look what they have on sale for me today. ("Heart-shaped potholders? It's like they knooowwww me!!")

In reality, the system we allow to run rampant kills people abroad and enslaves them to corporate interests. We all know our government and our corporations are doing things that are downright abominable, things that would make our skin run cold if we could actually stand in the presence of the events. If we could watch an Afghani wedding party get blown up by a drone, it would fucking break us. Instead we hide from our complicity and make fucking excuses. "It's too hard, it's too much, I'm just one person, what am I supposed to do, I know it's wrong but what choice do I have, no one else is doing anything so I won't make any difference."

You fucking slimeballs. You've ingested all this stuff about how America is the best country in the world, and you parrot that, but you won't stand up against injustice? What kind of legacy do you think has been passed down to you? Cowardice? Helplessness? Apathy? Are these the values you stand for? Do you think you're doing your children, or your siblings, or your parents, your friends and coworkers any favors by standing on society's sidelines and shrugging like a sociopath? No wonder we can't look one another in the eyes. No wonder we snap at the fast food workers who get our orders wrong, or the retail worker whose been on her feet eight hours with a holiday line that never seems to move for her or you. You choose not to have empathy, because that might mean your little nugget of a head for once.

And you have no idea, not one goddamn clue, what's out there, do you?

Twilight Of The Moderates

Poor Evan Bayh. All he tried to do was to keep leftist extremists and the hard line right of the two parties from derailing the Congress. But they refused to work with him, so now he has to save America the only way he can- by going into business in the private sector and creating jobs. Well, a couple of them anyway.
That's his spin on his abrupt decision to quit his Senate seat. Reality is that he is full of shit.
Although there are a number of clueless pundits out there who mourn the loss of the moderates in Congress, truth is there is no such thing as a " middle" in the American political system. To have a middle, you have to have a right- wing and a left- wing. What we have in this nation is a right and then the extreme batshit right. As much as the crew at FOX News wants you to believe that Obama and the Democrats are socialists and the Republicans are the true blue defenders of flag, country, and apple pie, truth is both parties, in the end, are corporate parties. They aren't so much parties as two factions of the ruling class fighting over the rotting carcass of capitalism.
Sure, they have different ways of getting into power and they represent different markets of big business, but essentially they serve the same master- global capitalism.
The real role of " moderates" in a capitalist republic is to mediate between the two main factions ( either the two parties of the American system or the coalitions of parliaments) and get legislation passed that benefits both. Presently in America, this is not happening. One of the two factions- the Republicans- are no longer willing to share the loot and power with their competitors, the Democrats. Hence, the absolute gridlock in the Congress. The Republicans know the great weakness of their opponents is that while they are the party of outright capitalism, the Democrats have to make at least a token gesture to their ideology of community service. While doing this, they have to make sure that it does not inconvenience their corporate backers in the slightest. All the GOP has to do is block whatever bill the Obama administration tries to pass to make the Democrats seem ineffectual and weak to the voting public.
The irony is that if Obama and the Democrats did back a progressive measure like single- payer health care, which the majority of Americans are in favor of they would be unstoppable, even with the loss of the super- majority. But they are reigned in by the people they are beholden to first- their corporate backers. The people of the United States come in a very poor second.
So I am not really sure why anyone should feel bad that Evan Bayh, or any other moderate checks out of the Senate. They don't do anything for us, the citizens, and they aren't really all that bad off themselves.
Maybe his wife Susan can get Ev a cushy job at one of the insurance companies she worked for. Of course that didn't have anything to do with Bayh's support the Senate's version of the Health care Bill- the " reform" of mandated insurance without a public option. Moderates are the good guys, right? They wouldn't chuck their Senate seat for a higher paying position in a company they lobbied for- would they?
To quote the Geico man: "Does 10 pounds of flour make a really big biscuit? "