It Doesn't Really Matter, Does It?

It doesn't really matter if the current resident of the White House shits all over the Constitution.

After all, the Constitution is just ink and paper, and ink fades and paper burns.

It doesn't really matter if we have soldiers scattered all over the world and occasionally some of them die for no good reason.

Most of them are poor or working class blacks and browns and whites, and honestly, they have no place in the new Silicon Valley/Wall Street economy, except, maybe, at Wal Mart. And frankly, they're probably better off dead.

It doesn't really matter if the Republicans figure out a way to give huge tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires while taking away health care from poor people.

Fuck poor people! What have they ever done for the GOP? Other than vote for them, that is.

It doesn't really matter that the Russians helped rig our election so that a completely unqualified GOON was elected.

In a democracy, you generally get the government you deserve. Half the people don't bother to vote and the other half contains a very large percentage of imbeciles. It's a wonder we didn't end up here sooner.

It doesn't really matter that multi-starred generals have demeaned themselves to work for this GOON, even to lie for him. Or that the GOON has placed racists, liars, grifters, and fools in very important positions. Or even that the GOON seems dead set on starting a nuclear war.

The sun will still rise and set. The earth will still turn. The planet got along very well without us for billions of years, and will do so again, if necessary.

Chinese Lightbulbs

Everything falls apart, eventually.

That is a given.

For proof look no further than your bathroom mirror. What stares back at you now as compared to what stared back at you last week, or last year, or 10 years ago?

With time, and the proper medication, we can expect and accept that sort of decay....

However, when things fall apart long before they should, long before they once did, well, that's a horse of a different color.

As a society, we seem to be on an endless quest to find cheaper ways to do things.

Cheaper is not always better, the Wal Mart family's fortune to the contrary.

Cheaper usually involves lower wages, lax safety and environmental standards, poorer quality, compromises all along the line.

It is cheaper to pollute. It is cheaper to let infrastructure decay. It is cheaper to incarcerate.

In the short run.

It is always cheaper and easier to do nothing.

One thing we can be sure of: somewhere, someone is making a killing off of cheaper.

And that profit is used to buy a Congress full of short-sighted grifters, libertarian nihilists, religious hypocrites, corporate toadies, and just plain, run of the mill imbeciles.

And once that bought and paid for Congress convinces us that we as a nation can't afford to do the things that once made us great, well, heaven help us all.

If they are allowed to, it only takes a handful of very rich folks to impoverish a multitude of regular folks.

Everything falls apart.

Aiding And Abetting The Enemy

Since the Republican debates just won't go away--not unlike a particularly nasty venereal disease--and since the level of the debates has been, to be kind, abysmally low, I thought I'd help them out by coming up with a line of questions that should liven things up a little.

I think we can all agree that money is our one true God here in the good old USA. And the Walton family (of Wal Mart fame) has been the biggest capitalist success story of the past 40 years. (If old Sam Walton were still alive he would be worth 3 or 4 times as much as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. As it is, his immediate heirs are all worth $20 billion or more each.)

The Walton's business strategy has been a ridiculously simple one: continue to demand that your suppliers lower their costs year after year. That means breaking unions, cutting workers, and ultimately shipping millions of jobs overseas. Until everything is made in China. Along the way, the Wal Mart economics of scale drive their competition to either do the same or go out of business.

It's the kind of unfettered free market approach that makes guys at business schools go all giddy and weak in the knees and Republicans everywhere break into spontaneous applause. Break the unions? Yeah! Drive down labor costs? Yeah!! Move all manufacturing off-shore to a place without any environmental regulations, and a billion cheap, disposable workers with no rights? Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!!!

So here's my first question for Newt and Rick and Michelle and Willard Mitt and Ron and other Rick (and you too Jeb, hiding in the bushes): as red blooded American patriots, how can you defend the end result of the Walton's highly successful business strategy, which has been to transfer enormous amounts of America's wealth directly to the Chinese Communists?

'Cause that's where it ends up. Oh sure, there are a handful of Chinese millionaires and I'm sure that they're enjoying the fruits of capitalism to the fullest. Private jets, and Bentley's, and shopping sprees in Paris and New York. But the wealth of these new Chinese "capitalists" is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount in question.

And more importantly, they can only continue to prosper with the permission and under the guidance of their government. And that government is still a Communist one. A Communist one that is starting to flex its muscles around the world--usually in direct competition to American interests. They need oil and minerals--we need oil and minerals. And these are finite things. We continue to send billions and billions of dollars to our fiercest competitor. As a nation we get weaker while the Walton's get richer.

Here's my second question for our distinguished panel of Republican worthies: if you all truly love this country as much as you profess to, what are you prepared to do about this?

"The future Mr. Gittes. The future."

There's a moment near the end of the classic film noir Chinatown when the detective, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) confronts Noah Cross (John Huston). Cross is a very rich, very corrupt, and very powerful man (just before the film's climax his daughter remarks, "He owns the police."), and Gittes wants to know why he's done what he's done. How much better can he eat? What can he buy that he can't already afford? Cross replies, "The future, Mr. Gittes. The future."

I find myself thinking about the Noah Crosses of our world more and more these days. The Kochs and Waltons and Murdochs and all the other rapacious billionaires. They aren't content with all that they have, though their wealth is several magnitudes beyond Cross's wildest dreams. They want the future, too.

For the Kochs that means buying elections, and then using their bought and paid for politicians to destroy unions and strip away any environmental regulation that lessens their profits. Clean air, clean water, and a living wage just don't figure into their calculations.

For the Waltons it means forcing their suppliers to take their manufacturing overseas to the cheapest labor markets and undercutting any and all competition, so we ultimately have no choice but Wal Mart. It is a perfect business plan--if you don't care much about America.

For Murdoch it means gobbling up all the media outlets he can, so that his propaganda machine can spread its lies without fear of contradiction. Orwellian is the word that comes to mind.

Noah Cross was an old man. He didn't have much time left. But he still wanted control, if only from beyond the grave. And if that meant destroying another person's future, so be it.

The time has come for the rest of us to ask "how much is enough?" And then we have to have the common sense and courage to say "No" to Noah Cross's many spiritual heirs. The future cannot be exclusively theirs. The future belongs to all of us. Because if it doesn't, it won't be worth having.

How much better can they eat, and what can they buy that they can't already afford?