Category Archives: Politics

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When they finally saw how powerful the all-powerful Wizard really was, they were really surprised.

Two revelations in the last week about the economic statistics generated by the government revealed the breathtaking scope of the lies, damn lies and statistics that have been deployed to convince the American people that their economy is healthy when it is not. Scam number one, of course, is the claim that the president “manages” the economy. All you have to do is count the variables, and if you ever finish counting, you will see how preposterous this idea is. But the idea has been sold, and so every president — and all the minions who serve him — has to maintain the fiction that he’s in charge, and everything is swell. Continue reading →

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Nothing to worry about. It will all blow over. Yes, I’m sure.

The world is siding into a recession that has no visible bottom. Globalism — the genius plan for exploiting the world’s poorest people to get cheap gadgets for the world’s richest people — has failed. Consumerism — the genius idea that if you just offer people cheap gadgets and credit cards they will keep spending forever and everything will be okay — has failed. Trickle-down economics — the theory that says all will be well so long as the very rich get very richer — has failed.  Quantitative easing — the notion that if you create money from nothing and give it to large corporations so they can buy other large corporations, prosperity will ensue — has failed.

And worse than any of these things, Bernie Sanders is closer to the presidency of the United States than he has ever been.  Continue reading →

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Being lazy is easy. Doing nothing about everything is a difficult profession aka politics.

The highest achievement possible for the typical American politician is a Zen-like state in which he or she appears to be in vigorous motion doing important things,when in fact he/she is completely still, doing nothing. This became the ultimate goal of politics shortly after the Reagan Revolution convinced all Republicans, most Democrats, and most people, that government action is not a solution for anything but is in fact the problem. 

Despite the enormity of the fraud involved in demonizing all government action while benefiting greatly from most of it, one cannot help but admire the artistry of those who maintain the illusion of trying to help people while not doing anything of the kind. Continue reading →

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“1871 Ten Commandments” by silicon_press_uk is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

A couple hundred years ago, when Charlton Heston came down off Mount Ararat with the Ten Commandments inscribed on two stone tablets, he told the crowd of extras waiting for him at the foot of Rodeo Drive — I’m paraphrasing from memory here so a few details may not be quite right —  he said “Actually I have 11 commandments but the laser printer malfunctioned and we couldn’t get the last one on the tablets. But here it is. Number 11: Do not badmouth Israel.”

Today, just about the only commandments Americans take seriously are Number 9, the one about murder, and Number 11. Nobody breaks a sweat about swearing or adultery or working on the Sabbath, but if you say anything snide about Netanyahu you better be ready for a public stoning.

Just ask Ilhan Omar, the newly elected Congresswoman from Minneapolis. She had the temerity to observe in public that the Israel lobby gets whatever it wants from the Congress because it showers money on Congresscritters. She has further had the gall to suggest that it is not proper for the American government to require loyalty to Israel as a condition of serving on a Congressional committee or holding a public job. For these remarks she has been branded as anti-Semite and widely and hysterically condemned, mostly by her fellow Democrats.   Continue reading →

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When last we heard, the caravans of rabid child rapists and their drug-dealing mothers were almost at our southern border, to which our gallant troops had rushed to make a last desperate defense of the homeland against this pestilential invasion. That was, what? six months ago? Just before the election, as I recall. Time to get an update on the migration invasions.

Here’s one the Trumpits haven’t blown about: thousands of desperate people — 6,000 every per day at just one crossing point in Yuma, Arizona —  swarming across our southern border in search of help. These people represent an existential threat to the US economy, yet the troops already deployed to the border have not been used to stop them.

But wait, there’s more. An organized caravan of migrants on a 600-mile trek across our northern border, all of them intent on wrecking our economy and soaking up free socialistic benefits. Where, you might ask, is the wall that could put a stop to this? Continue reading →

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Staging wars to distract people from the foibles of a president can be funny (as the 1998 movie showed) but they did it on a movie set, not in an actual country.

Collapsing empires are often presided over by emperors who are both evil and insane. We don’t know why this is so, it just is. But on the other hand, as the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled, People of the Lie) observed, “It is well that evil is so stupid.” And we can be thankful that the entire Trump administration is so epically dumb that it cannot do all the damage to the world that it wants to do. Case in point: their Keystone Kops maneuvers to impose their imperial will on Venezuela.

Why Venezuela? Simple. The country sits astride the largest reserves of undeveloped crude oil in the world — an estimated 300 billion barrels. Yes, that’s more than Saudi Arabia claims, and almost 10 times estimated US reserves. So once again, God has played a cruel joke by putting our oil under someone else’s country, but there’s more about Venezuela that irritates the hell out of American imperialists.

For one thing, Venezuela is persistently, maddeningly socialist. Hugo Chavez, good friend to Fidel Castro, served as president for 14 years, during which time he won eight elections and referenda, won approval of a new constitution that guaranteed unprecedented rights and freedoms to the people (71% of the voters approved it) and became the most popular head of state in the Western Hemisphere if not the world. Continue reading →

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Mark it down in your diary that in the first month of 2019 we all saw with our own eyes that the two leading democratic governments in the world — the United States and the United Kingdom — were in the thrall of an unprecedented seizure, unable to act, sliding toward irrevocable division, chaos and ruin. A third democracy — France — was spiraling through the smoke of widespread violence and nascent rebellion toward a very hard landing indeed. And there were many others, such as Venezuela, disintegrating before our eyes.

The government of the United States has been hamstrung by a partial shutdown that has lasted longer than any other such political gambit in history. (The Donald is fond of saying he is doing something “for the first time in history,” but for him all history begins with him — for him, this is the year 72 A.D., or “after Donald.”) But really, never in the history of our republic has the government been crippled for so long, never so many people deprived of their livelihood, over a policy dispute that is supposed to be settled by voting. Continue reading →

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Have you seen this man? If so, please call your local employment agency at once.

Bloomberg News has its collective hair on fire over a crisis in American enterprise, and it’s not the staggering stock market or the idiotic trade war or the shuttered government. It’s a persistent and growing lack of labor for those American businesses that are still able to actually make and/or sell products. “The shortfall is being driven,” says Bloomberg, “by a shrinking supply of manual and low-pay service workers  as the labor force becomes more educated and less able to take on such jobs.” You see what education does for you.

What kind of jobs are we talking about? Construction, manufacturing, truck driving, food services, nursing and anything else that is “physically demanding.” One staffing executive — obviously an oligarch who knows how to address the lower classes with delicacy — calls it “an acute shortage of talent in the blue collar space.” Continue reading →

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The Clintonistas, the Putinites and others would like to think this is how the 2016 election played out. But no.

Fresh waves of hysteria have arisen about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as a result of new reports on its dimensions prepared for the US Senate and released this week. “Reports show Russia mounted sweeping effort to sow divisions,” fulminated Politico. [Emphasis added.] Other headlines — too many to read, let alone link to — screamed about “millions” of posts on “every major social network,” an effort that “shows the sophistication of the disinformation campaign.” The cunning devils “focused intensely on African Americans as they sought to deliver a victory for Trump.”

The mainstream media should have used, and provided its readers with, brown paper bags for fighting off hyperventilation.

But here’s an interesting thing about all those news stories, and indeed about the reports they are discussing. The weasel words used to characterize the Russian efforts are all about intentions: it was a “sweeping” effort, it was intense, it “sought” victory for Trump. You may read all these stories, and both these reports, from stem to stern and you will not find any evidence presented that the Russians succeeded. Because there isn’t any. Continue reading →