Poor and content

Is rich, and rich enough, said Iago -- but who is ever content or allowed to be in this consumer and corporate culture?

Poor and content is rich and rich enough,
But riches fineless is as poor as winter
To him that ever fears he shall be poor.
Good heaven, the souls of all my tribe defend
From jealousy!

Certainly not those with the most right to feel they have it all. According to a recent Fidelity Investments poll, More than four out of ten American millionaires say they do not feel rich. I certainly am one and yet I certainly don't. $7.5 million seems to be a threshold of some sort for feeling safe and secure but I have to smile at that level of innocence. The rich are nearly always insecure.

"The rich are in general slaves to fear and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel" - Tom Paine-

But whether I feel rich these days is not the real point. It's that, as our primordial Blogger said, the wealthy seek the protection of power and that usually involves suppressing the less than rich. What we see in the political market is selling that suppression while demanding libertarian license for those it favors.

For most Americans, the pleasure of having to put up with any part of their income being taxed at the top marginal rate is rare as a Ferrari in rural Louisiana or a Prius in Marbella, yet to the bias-for-hire folks like Lyin' Bill O'Reilly the income of the top few percent is arbitrarily close to the poverty line, even while $55,000 gross with a pension plan is a "lavish" life if one is a Wisconsin teacher and Union Member.

O'Reilly, of course makes about $10 million in salary and gets about $50K for speaking appearances. In other words he earns about as much as a Wisconsin teacher does in a year for an evening telling his minions Mrs. Jones of the Green Bay school system is a plutocrat who hardly has to work and a millstone around our privileged necks.

Hannity, I read recently, signed a hundred million dollar contract and while some union heads make a lot and maybe too much, they represent American workers and can be fired by American workers. Just who the hell does the Fox crew represent other than those who make that kind of money look like chump change -- the poor souls. We can't fire Fox and we can't fire the Koch Brothers or the Wall Street tycoons any more than we can get those trillion dollar corporations headquartered in the Caymans to trickle anything down to us.

As the man said, it's that 'content' part that's so elusive. I'm sure that folks like Cheney and the rest of the ascetics at Halliburton think that they don't have enough and of course no corporation would survive if it decided that filthy rich is rich enough. That's the basis of Capitalism and the basis of the need to set rules for it. It's all about perspective and somehow that stratospheric perspective has been brought down not only to the bourgeois bedroom communities of America, but to the Bayous of Louisiana and the farms of Illinois. It's a triumph of consumerism like selling million dollar homes to the unemployed; buy it and the dream will come. It will, my fellow Americans, It will come to the bank and the Repo man, but not for you.


The backbone of Consumerism and the almost tragic flaw of wealth is just that human weakness of always looking longingly upwards and believing that glittering life could be yours if only it weren't for regulation and taxes on the top 1% whose yacht tenders cost more than your house and whose corporations pay little or no taxes at all. All is advertising in our new world and all of advertising is an attempt to create dissatisfaction in everyone; no matter what their homes, cars, boats, clothes, jobs, bodies and anything else might be, if money can be spent on improving them, Mammon is going to make sure you hate each and every one of them in the hopes that you'll go into debt reaching for the brass ring they keep just beyond your grasp. But it's not just the fatuous expectation, it's the ability to make people act against their own interests, to make scapegoats of themselves, to turn against those who have less instead of those who are keeping you down: the ability to turn our private frustrations into the shackles the plutocracy needs us to wear.

Thanks but no thanks, and I'll take it, but I didn't.

Got another e-mail this morning about how the Supreme Court is "quietly reviewing" those claims that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii. "This may have some discrepancies" but it's "still interesting." says the serial offender who forwarded it to me.

Is it time to leave the country? Because we have no real way of returning America to a body of informed and rational citizens. Still, as a lover of understated humor, I have to enjoy the way a libelous fabrication "may have some discrepancies," including the discrepancy of not having any basis in fact. It does seem to me that the flat Earth some on the right believe in is floating on a huge sea of malicious lies and has an atmosphere of pure hypocrisy.

Take Senator John Ensign, Senator from the Silver State and one of those dedicated public servants who thinks we can change our "reckless spending" by curbing Federal earmarks, which constitute a rather tiny fraction of what the government actually spends or as I see it; whittling at the whiskers and calling it a close shave. But that's just the basic background hypocrisy of the GOP. Ensign has his own to account for, because while railing at "Obamacare" and promising to undo the health care reform bill we elected a president to promote, he's out there actively soliciting - and getting - a million taxpayer dollars from that Affordable Care Act he so despises to spend on health care in his state. Perhaps there's a discrepancy there somewhere too, but it's still interesting.

Is this another "thanks but no thanks" moment for Republicans? I mean one where you take the money and say you didn't and blame the other party while you pose as a cost cutter? Maybe, I can call it the Palin Precedent, maybe it's better to call them liars and greedy little power hungry bastards.

Oh and please spare me an example of where some Democrat did the same thing. That's not the point and it isn't the Democrats trying to assert dogmatic policies that have failed each and every time to bring prosperity and have each and every time produced recessions -- as if we could keep repeating the past until it becomes a better future. The question of whether to leave the country is the point and that question is fast becoming moot because the country is leaving us.

A year without America

Looks like you can't trust the Americans or their cheap products. A defect in a China Airlines Boeing 737 caused the massive fire that narrowly missed killing hundreds of people who were saved only because of the quick action of the well trained Chinese air crew. Although I 'm sure the responsible CEO will be taken out and shot immediately, the way they do in China, it's not enough. America as a whole should be punished. An embargo against all American products should be put in place until everyone can be sure that Greedy Americans have stopped putting profit ahead of safety.

Honey, I shrunk the dollar!

Early on, at the dawn of George Bush's struggle to become President, he made a point of sticking out his chin and insisting that he stood for a strong dollar. No doubt it was, like most of his statements, made because strong sounds good and dollar sounds American, but ever since, his administration has supported a weak dollar. In this one respect, they have had a measure of success. Every administration in at least the last 30 years has actively bought in the market to support our currency. Bush has not. The dollar continues to fall.

The US Dollar hit a new low against the Euro yesterday and it now takes more than two dollars to by a British pound. Weak sounds bad, of course and it's a word that Bush only likes to apply to his enemies, but the weak dollar may be behind whatever optimism prevails amongst the foreigners who own our debt and much of our assets. Bush cheerleaders persist in telling us that the economy is booming because the Dow keeps rising and it is booming because Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are getting tax cuts, but perhaps the only honestly healthy sign is that exports are up because American goods are now more competitive abroad. Americans still prefer anything foreign, but that's for reasons of snobbery and credulity. American Airplanes, tractors, soft drinks, weaponry and heavy equipment are selling much better than they did.

Foreigners are buying American securities too. Witness the record Dow Jones numbers last week. Some Americans will benefit, but since only about 3.8% of Americans have seen any real wage escalation, does this really make the DJIA an indicator of economic health? The homes that Americans have been borrowing against to finance an exuberant life style are now declining in value and are expected to continue in that direction, fuel costs are up and probably will continue to rise indefinitely and our growth rate is the lowest in five years. The promise that our military adventure in Iraq would generate a net profit, or at worst break even, is now believed only by those few in the White House bunker or perhaps in padded cells. The rest of us compare Iraq to a black hole. Yet "consumers" seem optimistic. Some still support Republican economic policy - in as much as one can be said to exist.

I'm not in the prophecy business and for no less of a reason that I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm still looking at all the corners we're promised we will soon be turning and I'm waiting for the Piper to be standing there, invoice in hand. I fear there will be a point at which the weak dollar will become too weak. Equities will be dumped, interest rates will climb, banks will foreclose, inflation will inflate.

Of course, and as usual, the very richest of the rich; the people for whom the game is rigged will benefit while the serfs will suffer. Perhaps it's only a question of when.

Fairness is unfair

Marie Antoinette never really did say "Well let them eat cake" but Mark Fowler, former head of the FCC evoked the spirit of arrogant royalty when he said "Well, let them have unfettered access to information" in response to the attempt to re-instate the "fairness doctrine" that once required broadcasters to provide air time for rebuttals to editorial content.

The fairness doctrine was eliminated in 1987, under the wise leadership of another George Bush and the excuse was that anything designed to protect the people from distortions and propaganda espoused by the few people who own the media was unwonted interference with corporate free speech. 20 years later, we have even fewer people in control of what we hear and more of them are ultra conservative corporations with an ever deeper involvement in the editorial policies of media outlets.

To Fowler, "unfettered access to information" would suffer if the fairness doctrine were to return and people like Bill O'Reilly had to listen to their lies being analyzed by someone not hand picked by Rupert Murdoch.

An anti-Fairness doctrine bill introduced by Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minnesota was beaten back by Senate Democrats this week despite arguments such as Coleman's assertion that "There is no limitation on the ability of anyone from any political persuasion to get their ideas set forth." Of course that sentiment ignores the 400 pound corporate gorilla that controls much of what people do hear and that is well insulated by its size, wealth and government support, from public accountability.

Of course the internet has done something to provide an alternative source of information, at least so far, as a free internet is an idea rapidly being undermined by telecommunications interests, but as it is now, several million blogs can hardly compete with the platform given to people like Limbaugh, or Coulter or Hannity or O'Reilly. It's not about freedom of speech, it's about freedom to profit from without responsibility to the country that provides that profit.