Saving our way to penury

many years ago, I worked for a 120 year old company producing industrial boilers. At it's apogee, it had over an 80% market share and a reputation for quality products.

Then came the accountants.

During the storm of leveraged buyouts in the late 1970's the profitable old company was bought by an accounting firm along with several related businesses by leveraging its assets. Within a very few years, it had a rapidly declining market share of 2% and a mountain of debt. In another few, it was gone and sold for scrap. Yes, I'm going to make a comparison between the fate of the boiler company and the fate of our nation.

Having been stripped of its reserves, the first of the fatal cost cutting practices so dear to the hearts of conservative accountants was maintenance of the aging production equipment. Soon, quality began to suffer. Advertising was curtailed: "we have to cut costs." The quality control department became overburdened with fixing problems caused by shabby construction caused by failing equipment. "We can't afford them. We need to be a 'leaner' company."

Bad welds, a dangerous thing, began to show up as welding inspectors, which for a short time I was, were eliminated. "we can't afford them." The problem of declining quality and the rising cost of redoing bad construction was blamed on the union although they were willing to bend over backwards to fix the problem and even volunteered for a wage freeze. Necessary design changes that had formerly been made in the quality control department in secret, were deemed "too expensive" although the dedicated guys in QC had been doing them by hand with parts bought at the hardware store and hand tools with their own money.

The quality control department was eliminated. "We can't afford them." We began shipping products that would not work. Field warranty repair costs skyrocketed. Our reputation nosedived.

People just short of retirement were fired to save on insurance and pension expenses "we couldn't afford." Management held the hard line on pricing. "People will spend more for our product because of the quality." Middle management was warned they'd be fired for showing that lower pricing would increase revenue.

Professional cost cutters and business school graduates with no knowledge of the equipment, its manufacture, its uses or the nature of the market were hired to fill the shoes of people who had led the company to its former heights. We had continuing optimistic reports from the new owners predicting that the cost cutting would soon turn things around.

Then came the bankruptcy, the sale, the quick demise, the economic collapse of the town surrounding the plant.

When I watch the antics of the far right, insisting, for instance, that we can't afford to stand up for equal pay for women, I can't help remembering. When we're given endless arguments about cost cutting and austerity being the way to prosperity, I remember. When we can't afford oversight, maintenance, pensions and health care and we deliberately neglect to do anything to improve revenue because it costs money, I remember.

Club Vulgus

Any perusal of comment sections on such public forums as CNN.com leads one to the inescapable conclusion that there is a vast sunless sea of people united by the conviction that their incomprehension results, not from some inability on their part, but from the stupidity of those they identify as a Liberal Elite. Being uninhibitedly glib in the facility of self promotion through Liberal bashing is a cheap initiation fee and all the dues they deed pay to belong to the only club that will have them as a member.

Reading this morning, for instance, of a rather uninteresting Van Gogh floral arrangement having been stolen from a Cairo museum and about suspects having been apprehended trying to flee Egypt, I encountered the predictable comments amongst which are:

"I am starting to think that Americans are the most entitled, dumb people on this planet. Are all Americans as dumb as this post implies? Or are you just the dumb liberals- who we always knew were dumb? If you are not happy with living in the USA then I will pay for you to move somewhere else. "

What an ugly picture! 50 million? covet much? Oh look, shiny baubles!!!! I MUST OWN THEM AT ALL COSTS!!!!"

More copy book comments followed in quick non-sequitur: about Republican lobbyists, the foolishness of art in general and other populist drivel scarcely worthy of having been scribbled on the walls of the worst toilet in Scotland, although I suspect the grammar, spelling and logic might be better in that venue. The rabble are only to happy to pay their dues.

Of course it is a most uninspiring painting and it's proposed value would have been more appropriate to the late 1980's when Japanese corporations were buying up Western art and Van Gogh in particular as part of a scheme to transfer money illegally between corporations. I doubt it could be sold at nearly that price today, yet still; one of the uncountable things that mystify the untaught crowd is art and it's monetary value. That which is not understood needs to be denounced as worthy of only fools -- and of course Liberals. If you want to belong to the Vulgus Indoctum after all, you need to pay your dues. I wonder if one could earn life membership by offering to finance the expulsion ( as a Liberal elitist parasite ) of anyone who might distinguish between Van Eyck and Van Dyke or perhaps have a nice little solution for Fermat's theorem. I might in fact, apply for the deportation so kindly offered, but that any of these folk-slingers could afford the sort of place in Monte Carlo I have in mind, I have serious doubts.

Drill until we drop

Perhaps a society such as ours has as finite a lifespan as the individuals it's composed of and I think I'm seeing the kind of memory loss and dementia in the American public that we associate with extreme old age. The aged body sometimes can't absorb sustenance very well and neither can the American public assimilate the things that make a capable and dynamic Democracy possible. a large part of our population, for instance, seems to think that the huge environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico means that we need to do more of what made it happen and in the same careless, unregulated way. Presumably a number of those live far inland and don't like seafood or care that the Earth is becoming less livable because these are still the "end times," but not all of them. Some just think that as long as their immediate, short term needs are met, the rest of the world can go to hell, and so it goes.

A recent poll shows that despite the total lack of evidence and the extreme unlikeliness of the scenario, nine or ten percent of Americans do believe Limbaugh's idiotic proposition that it was the "enviros" behind the drilling platform explosion, but the scary part is that 22% are "unsure." Amongst self-identified Conservatives, the number jumps to 44% who believe it was sabotage by liberals. The evidence to the contrary is out there, the evidence for it isn't out there, so either 31% are unable to assimilate it by reason of dementia or have no interest in the survival of the USA as we think we know it -- or Like many aged people, they've given up and are simply wandering in a senile, paranoid daze of denialism looking for their lost youth and vigor.

"Perhaps most surprisingly 21% of voters said the spill made them more likely to support offshore drilling,"

said Public Policy Polling director Tom Jensen. 55% of Americans polled after the disaster began, still supported offshore drilling, according to the same poll.

Am I pushing this too far? Is this really only more of what America has been doing since its beginning? We are, after all a nation that is happy to continue its war on drugs and embargoes on foreign countries that cause more harm than good; a nation that has had to struggle tooth and nail to overcome our vicious habits. Most of all we're a nation that always waits for a calamity before doing anything. What I'm afraid of is that this time the calamity we're waiting for won't come until we're a nation incapable of taking care of ourselves but a nation with a huge Army.

Tennessee Tea

Some people might give them credit for never giving up and of course, like congenital stupidity and genital herpes, the Republicans never really go away.

Yesterday's e-mail viral outbreak flared up with another version of a letter excoriating Barack Obama for such inexcusable acts of treason as not placing a flower at the World Trade Center crater with a sensitive enough wrist action and of course referencing that old groaner, the photo of him singing without his hand on his heart. Both these things and more, insisted the weeping and wailing writer are proof of his Christian hating Islamic faith and his mission to destroy all that is held dear by the pretend conservatives who hang upside down in belfries and eat bugs.

Not that such people actually write these things. Virtually all of the phony celebrity letters libeling and threatening Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton and the Obama family are written by the same, easily recognizable hand, although the attributions change from day to day. The faux outrage and breast beating pretend patriotism are always the same.

The letter I got was attributed to Sherry Hackett, the wife of the famous and raunchy comedian although she didn't write it nor likely did the others it's been "from" in the last 6 months. The person who forwarded it to me was crying for our country or so she says. Actually I think she welcomes any scurrilous and seditious screed that oozes from the Republican cesspool. I think it just hasn't sunk in that far from shoving things down America's throat, democracy has shoved change down theirs.

The desperation seems to call for deliberate denialism and cultivated delusion. If Obama takes off his shoes, that means he's a Muslim and not a Christian was a sentiment presented by a small townTennessee Tea Party organizer along with a picture of a shoeless president. Frankly I wish he were, but even so, it's a statement that could only be applauded by people not likely to be found at a Mensa meeting unless they're simply dishonest exploiters of the traditionally stupid.

For a group whose meetings sometimes draw dozens of people, God willin' and the creek don't rise, it can't be hard to avoid the leaders knowing that it's a tiny minority cult representing a fringe Right element, yet their solution to the problems posed by an electorate that emphatically rejected the Right in the last election is to go further right. The Washington Post quoted David Nance, the founder of the Gibson County Patriots, in Jackson, Tenn as saying

"This effort is to try to get the Republican Party to try to give us more conservative candidates"

and he believes it's working, yet his choice of Stephen Fincher, gospel singer and cotton farmer from Frog Jump, Tennessee for the State's 8th Congressional District seems to have little to do with stated Tea Party goals of reducing the cost of government and eliminating "entitlements" what with Fincher raking in a cool, conservative $200,000.00 per annum in farm subsidies and being financed by others riding the same gravy train. He's pulled down over $2.5 million since 1995. Of course that' just all tea in the harbor and doesn't seem to matter as much as the president with his shoes off or the stories about flag pins and tardy salutes, a too small flag on his campaign jet and the laying down of a flower at the WTC with insufficient wrist action as discussed in the letter Sherry Hackett didn't write.

The shame of it all really is that Barack Obama, with his continuing support of some unpopular Republican policies may be too conservative for Liberals and perhaps even for some centrists while this collection of Beverly Hillbillies wants to tell us he's a Muslim version of Pol Pot while selling a faux populist version of Corporatism.

It's more of a shame we don't seem to have any genuine conservative opinion worth reading these days, and of course if we'd had it earlier, we might not have needed it so badly now.

Guillotine! Guillotine!

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. They report, you decide.

One doesn't expect the spokesmen for conservative interests to be using the French Revolution as a model for future action. Of course I'm no kind of cynic and so all the calls for blood, all the evocations of victims carted off to some public square to be guillotined or of some Supreme Court Justice bleeding to death in his bathtub like Marat aren't at all hilarious to me when I watch Fox News.

"Whether it’s terrorism, international crises, domestic crime or, in this case, excessive corporate greed, some conservatives seem unable to see problems as anything other than a nail for which the only solution is a hammer."

says Think Progress. Fox's solution is a Krauthammer.

Charles Krauthammer, who like so many Fox denizens looks like he's overdone the Botox, told us all yesterday that we should hold public executions for AIG executives whose contracts include a bonus.

"Have it in Times Square, invite Madame DuFarge. You borrow a guillotine from the French and we could have a party. If that’s what it takes to maintain popular support, let’s do it."

Conservative Mort Kondrake just wants to boil them in oil.

Ok, so it's hyperbole although with paralyzed faces like these guys have, one has to make some guesses as to what they really mean. But inflammatory rhetoric in such times as these is like flicking your Bic with gasoline all over the floor. Put them together with Ann Coulter who has advocated poisoning judges and with Rush who would rather have the country collapse than accept any offense to his "principles" and we have not only an assemblage of rogues but a perfect example of people who are not conservatives any more than were the Parisian mobs cheering as heads rolled in the Place de la Concorde in 1793.

Past imperfect

Anna Quindlen writes in the current Newsweek about Loving V. Virginia, the mostly forgotten 1967 Supreme Court opinion that "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man" thereby ruling against the Racial Integrity act of 1924. Of course we consider a ban on interracial marriage a bit archaic today, even though the fundamentalists who told us that since God had "separated the races" we shouldn't allow them to mix are still here and telling us what God wants and damn the Constitution and its heretical equal protection clause. It's probably what they mean by "Judicial activism" when they complain about the Supreme Court of the 1960's, but of course our constitution was specifically designed to thwart the impositions of religious institutions; impositions that are still the backbone of Conservative culture.

Does anyone sane still think the purpose of our government is to enforce sectarian rules as interpreted by self appointed mullahs? Apparently so. Karl Rove sets forth in the same issue to tell us that in reconstituting the Republican party, the values traditional to people who traditionally oppose any concept of freedom other than their own freedom to impose rules, should absolutely never be compromised. Can we really separate the "conservative culture" he champions from the long standing tyrannical opposition to things as diverse and numerous as "Misogyny," Women's suffrage, the five day work week, segregation or Social Security? Can Republicans seriously consider themselves to be the "Party of Lincoln" when Lincoln was a Liberal willing to ignore biblical tolerance for slavery?

The Social Conservatism of Karl Rove, whether or not it's a smokescreen hiding the dragon of tyranny, is outmoded and has been abandoned by countries along with fundamentalist religiosity and bigotry toward social minorities. In fact it's obvious that much of the world has begin to recognize the freedom of people to define their own family relationships, make domestic contracts and partnerships as they see fit. So far, despite the Fallwellian demagoguery, nothing bad has happened and isn't likely to happen when we catch up with the Canadians, as eventually we will do.

Republicans should come across ( not necessarily be) as morally serious, says Rove, although Rove has long demonstrated that victory is the root of morality. What escapes him is that the Constitution of this country protects me against other people's moral seriousness when it comes to the rights it guarantees. What escapes him is that his vision of a reconstituted party is a party still attached to the losing side of history.

"We can't just dwell on the past" says Rove without any apparent sense of irony. "The Future is already here."

Indeed it is and I'm hoping that the conservative impulse toward clinging to that past is part of the past, and that Karl Rove and the other enemies of liberty and personal responsibility are not part of the future.

Right on the money

The coins of many countries have some sort of decoration or a motto around the rim. This descends from the days when coins had intrinsic worth and weren't mere tokens. The unscrupulous would shave the edges of gold and silver coins. When the latest series of "gold tone" Presidential Dollars was released however, the Religious Right, never known for superior cognitive function, raised holy hell and engorged their various web sites with rage and our in-boxes with viral e-mails excoriating the "liberals" for, as the ten Commandments command, taking God off the money or at least banishing him to the margins. Of course God isn't the name of God, but putting him on a dollar alongside a forbidden graven image is pretty close to taking his name (or names) in vain. Jesus made an issue of the inappropriateness of associating God with money and the money of his day had God written all over it.

Of course the motto wasn't taken off the money and it wasn't "hidden" as some of the more perspicacious idiots insisted, but these people are all about the cultivation and breeding of irrational anger and facts and reason are as carefully removed from their passionate fugues as weeds from a garden. What would irony aficionados like me do without that bottomless well of religious idiocy? I might have to stop writing and get a life.

God was on the money of England when we were a colony and on the Spanish Milled Dollar that was legal tender here at the time of the Revolution also asserted that the government and God were as one, or at least in cahoots. Our coins remained secular until the Civil War when it became politically advantageous to relate the Northern Cause to God's Cause even though God never said much about the evils of slavery. I will leave that to you to ponder over but isn't it ironic that it's mainly in the South where people want to continue that tradition while forgetting how it was used against them?

It's not that I give a damn about religious commandments. It doesn't bother me that so many hairy palmed and ignorant Fundies worship them like some mildewed stone idol and since I don't trust the government that issues the coins in the first place, I can just as easily mistrust the God of Coinage referred to on most, but not all, coins since 1864 and let them have their bone to gnaw.

So when Congress just had to take time off from our War to perpetuate all wars late last year; that war so dire that our birthright has to be sold in the name of security, to pass legislation making sure that God has to be there right next to the picture of the President on the coins we slip into the slots of Vegas or render unto those machines in the gas station mens room, I had to thank my god of irony for the gift.

Take that Jefferson! Take that Yahweh! Take that Jesus and all your Jewish, liberal, atheist, socialized medicine loving friends. You won't be turning over tables in our Republican temple.