is hamilton smiling on that ten dollar bill?

since the 1930s or thereabouts ( we could include the 20s and il duce just as a comparison to pennsylvania avenue...he turned out to be mostly windage...the pennsylvania business is still under deliberation...and we will get to that soon ) a good deal of the cachet of being a "party member" has faded and "official party business" has been rendered ominous ( although it is difficult to take the democrats seriously a lot of the time )...still i was somewhat nonplussed when i found that they had something they wanted to talk over with me...

turns out it was the "official 2018 democratic party survey" ( clearly they do not read this blog...i am not a democrat even though i have voted for them...i have never pulled the straight party lever...voted green in 2016 in fact...or, perhaps, they don't really care about my opinions...in their survey or here in the electron stream...that this may be the case is clear to me and i am hoping to show you why )..it has some biting questions about trumpy which are probably germane...it had some about the republican party as well...but that was assassinated in 2016...someone should let them know the game has changed a bit...i don't think it will be me...

it had a friendly, chatty cover letter from tom perez, the chair of the committee about the need to rebuild, organize ( best of luck ), modernize, and win! which also had two boldface sections giving me the lowdown on what it would cost me to become a party member and ( probably ) not have my meticulously filled out survey filed in the wastebasket upon receipt with no cash...

just to be sure i understood the deeper meaning of the survey it too had a boldface section detailing the costs of my membership and it provided a variety of ways to remit the "party dues"...they wanted to make it as simple and as thoughtless a process as they possibly could...i am, after all, simply a "voter"...a necessity in the charade of public service...but only to a point..i may join them but having expectations of some kind of return should be discouraged...

there was a neighborly little message to the postal workers who handled the envelope to move it along because my views were vital...and "oh yeah, there might be some cash in here"...there was a friendly reminder on the envelope telling me i could save the dnc some money if i used my own envelope and stamp to mail the survey ( and cash )..i am supposing i could hold onto the post-paid one as a souvenir of my importance...and, come to think of it...there was a short message at the end asking me if maybe i could afford to kick in an extra three buck to "defray the cost of processing the survey"...well...as a grossly underemployed ( and, trust me, there will be a torrent of blog posts on that little adventure when the time is right...catch me in december, if not before...i have information to impart ) worker i am disinclined to expend any resources on what i can only see as a losing proposition...i have no faith in the democrats doing much of anything than lining their own pockets...they may not be as arrogantly obvious about their kleptocratic bent as trumpy is but that doesn't mean the are not as venal...they are just quieter about it...much the same way nixon was quieter about obstructing justice and suborning perjury...in all this old al hamilton is beaming down from wherever it is that arrogant fucks go when the shuffle off...his system of disenfranchisement is humming along...and his portrait is engraved on some of that lovely cash... they are all on the same bus in whoretown...always have been...where is the lake of fire?

reactive change and economic extraction

"the form was still the same but the animating health and vigour were fled. the industry of the people was discouraged and exhausted by a long series of oppression." gibbon. the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire________________________ "in rome's late republic, as in any plutocracy, it was a disgrace to be poor and an honor to be rich. the rich, who lived parasitically off the labor of others, were hailed as men of quality and worth; while the impecunious, who struggled along on the paltry earnings of their own hard labor, were considered vulgar and deficient." michael parenti. the assassination of julius caesar: a people's history of ancient rome______________"plebs urbana sordes urbis et faecem est" cicero__________________________comparisons with rome are probably built on shaky ground...however, if you spend much time looking into the history of the late republic and the empire and its demise you cannot help but find some unmistakable parallels...expansionist, but willing to rule through the fiction of local sovereign dependent on rome...experts at the tactic of divide and rule that they had mastered through domestic experimentation with their own populace ( a hint: the cicero quote roughly translates as "the common people are city dirt and filth"...parenti has rome's number and cicero worshiped wealth and power )..politicians here grudgingly submit to the "voters" and pay lip service to their "constituents" but they serve a distinctly different class...the framers of the constitution wrote openly about "empire" and while they may have been thinking in terms of a westward expansion across the continent the term expanded with it...

and from the fasces in congress ( which, by the way, date from well before the advent of twentieth century fascism...congress was not declaring solidarity with mussolini or his heirs...although the current denizen of the white house may be misinterpreting this )...

to the neo-classical kitsch sprinkled around whoretown they and their successors clearly saw themselves as heirs to roman exceptionalism...and they prove it consistently by their approach to a social system with distinct class lines and a one-way flow of class warfare that would gratify even cicero...

that economists could be confused about ( if not oblivious to ) the cause of an increasingly precipitous divergence in the material wealth of the haves and have nots is not surprising...those justifiers of greed have a habit of overlooking inconvenient facts and should be dismissed for the class toadies they are...anyone who works for an hourly wage is attuned to the causes and they all relate back to the extractive greed of the oligarchs who run the politicians...not only are wages diminished to the point of penury, the concept of "full-time" employment is on life support at best...why? no full-time employment = no benefits...none of the costs to capital associated with administering the social support like health insurance that bring no direct profit to the corporate entity burdened with them...a savings that goes straight to he bottom line and ceos love a bottom line that allows stockholder dividends and justifies their obscene salaries and options...what does a "worker" ( or, better still, "associate" or "contractor" ) matter in that...not much...and all this leads to a dysfunctional social system that holds wealth as the ultimate ethical good and has people amassing huge debt in an effort to live up to that ethic by , at least, putting on a display of wealth that has the bonus effect ( in the elite's view ) of creating new money for the oligarch that own the debt...win/win...you get to look wealthy...they get to be wealthy...this ethic of wealth may also help to explain why so many chase after that elusive ( and we will get to just how elusive in a moment ) "mega millions" lottery win...the one this week had odds against wining of something on the order of 260 million to 1...that didn't stop the inveterate players even though actuary tables tell us that these are things with better odds than winning the lottery: dying in a vending machine accident 1 in 112 million, dying in an airline terrorist attack 1 in 21 million ( even though that does not seem to have happened since 11 september 2001 ), dying from bee, hornet, or wasp stings 1 in 6.1 million, being struck by lightening 1 in 1 million, dying in a bathtub accident 1 in 840,000, dying in an auto accident 1 in 6700..still millions gamble on ( of course, most drive every day as well )...all this focus on an ethic of wealth leaves the impression on many ( since they are not wealthy and stand little chance of ever being so...rather they will remain the "impecunious who struggled along on the paltry earnings of their own hard labor"..it is an extractive system and if you have something then the oligarchical elite does not...they frown on this...they would like to have it all...even if it kills you )that some undefined element is "wrong"...that the system is broken some how and needs to be fixed...that perception, along with the worship of wealth ethic is why...

this fucking clown is president..the ethic says he is wealthy so he must be both smart and good...he can show us the way to fix it, right? wrong...he is the problem incarnate...his whole maga fiction is based on a system of class extortion he benefits from..the reality is the system was always rigged to favor wealth from 1789 or before...there were simply less greed riven times which offered the possibility of something of a better life...francis fukyama's "end of history" and that miserable harpy thatcher and her tina, and that dotard reagan meant that mercantile capitalism had won and greed was unleashed...and with that we all became its targets...the issues are not external...they are internal...things will become unsustainable...they will come unglued...we will reach tainter's collapse because there is never enough to satisfy greed that has become a systemic need...if the climate doesn't get us first.

you're telling me?

“war is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.” george orwell. 1984_______________________________today's new york times book review section reviews three books under the banner headline" barely afloat in america"...that rubric covers, "give people money: how a universal basic income would end poverty, revolutionize work, and remake the world", "squeezed: why our families can't afford america", and "the war on normal people: the truth about america's disappearing jobs and why universal basic income is our future"...this seems to be a nest of utopians in these trumpist times..i cannot deny that there is a concerted effort to drive the general population into debt penury...there is a war on, if not in exactly orwellian terms then one with the same end...to deny the polity of any comfort...to keep them on edge...worried..harried..unable to think clearly about the political mechanism used to control them because of the stress of every existence...worrying about a sitter...or a new water pump...or the price of a gallon of milk/gasoline...or the looming "back to school" income drain...or health care costs...or "what if" there is some catastrophic expense..if you are thinking about all that you don't have time to educate yourself about what the political slime is up to much less formulate plans to somehow resist..that "too intelligent stuff orwell is on about...i cant help but think that Ms. quart( squeezed ) ms. lowrey ( give people money ) and mr. yang ( the war on normal people) must have written these as primers for those members of the elite that have any concern over the mass of us...everyone who works for an hourly wage already knows what's going on ...they don't need to be tutored about the concerted actions of the elite to debase their lives or the need for money to access goods and services...they have a wealth of empirical knowledge...enough even to satisfy david hume that they know of what the speak..they need a breathing space to think about what they can do in response...a space a guaranteed universal income might provide...which is why it doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being enacted...it would be labeled "debilitating charity" by the faux calivinist fucks that run things and be subject to "shattering to pieces" with every smear tactic that politicians ( read bought whores ) can muster and, given the tenor of these trumpist times those would be many and foul...antonio gramsci's "prison notebooks" and the assessment of the intricacies of hegemonic culture and how it invades, pervades, and controls our daily life...the depths of its indoctrination...might serve as a better start to resistance than pipe dreams from the liberal left.

cash as a criminal enterprise

a few months ago someone stole my debit card numbers from some woefully unprotected website data breach and began making unauthorized charges against my checking account...i disputed the charges, got a provisional refund ( which became permanent when the "investigation" corroborated by disputation ) and i got a new card with new numbers...at this point i basically reverted to a cash economy...i would use my card only on a few chosen sites which have at least passable security and patronized the atm at my institution when i was making local purchases ( groceries, gasoline, etc )...for reasons which are and will remain entirely my own, i pulled a small amount of cash out of an account to deposit in a checking account at another bank...we are not talking thousands of dollars here...not even close...amount seems to have little bearing in this story however...i went to the bank i n question to make the deposit and the teller said. " i will need your id for the cash deposit please"...what? wait...i have to identify myself to make a cash deposit? ( beyond the necessary deposit slip i mean )...since when...admittedly i have had direct deposit of wages and i have been depositing paper checks and not much in the way of cash, however when did this level of surveillance become the standard procedure? i have no doubt this is to monitor money laundering...the scum in government are venal. corrupt, and make their actions legal through legislation, not ethics...so it is natural they, in their egomania and self-absorption, would presume everyone else is up to criminal no good...what's good for the kleptocrats is a reflection of the general public, right? this is why, when i take my water bill and the exact change in cash to city hall the clerk checks every twenty to be sure i am not pulling a fast one on the municipality...given the recent ethical and legal history of city hall here this is both insulting and fucking laughable at the same instant...so i am being surveilled on multiple levels by multiple entities from...facebook to the nsa...and, no doubt, there is at least a remote possibility something beyond a robot may scan this post because i used the words "criminal" and "kleptocrats" as well as "money laundering" and "surveillance"...just to be sure..let me say trump is the biggest ( and most unstable ) crook in the swamp that is whoretown..and let me post this:

fuck these people...where i the lake of fire?

the constitution is the counter-revolution

the constitution is about limiting rights, not guaranteeing them…the framers of the document were, in the end, frightened by the polity’s internalization of the jeffersonian ideals of the declaration of independence and the spirit of radical democracy that was abroad…shay’s rebellion was a focus for them…not so much the rebellion itself which was easily suppressed but the aftermath in which the farmers of massachucetts sent their own representatives to the legislature and enacted debt forgiveness and began printing paper money…hamilton was outraged and had a tendency to drone on about it by name in the federalist papers…madison was more circumspect, however, when he speaks of protecting the rights of the minority ( read elite ) from “an interested and overbearing majority”, shay’s was on his mind…so how did they go about limiting the polity’s actual influence? they created a government of and by special interest in which the individual was scarcely recognized with the government as an allegedly neutral umpire…that may have been the intention, however, since wealth is power and power has always controlled the government the government has almost always ( let’s call the social legislation in the wake of the great depression an anomaly) made decisions that favored wealth…nothing too complex to grasp in that…the system reaps two fundamental benefits from this system ( and makes refinements as they go ) first, since the only way the individual can find a hearing on issues that are of import to them is through belonging to an interest group much of the time and energy that they might utilize in resistance to the systemic structures as a whole is expended in the internecine debates over what the “special interest” any given group actually is and how it should be presented to the government and to public opinion at large…after wearying battles over whether migrants should be termed “illegal aliens” or “undocumented workers” there is little energy left to question why we are having this debate in the first place…secondly, this leaves special interest groups “branded” …sugar tax vs. nanny state…prochoice/prolife…gun control/nra…coke/pepsi…ford/chevy…and struggling with one another for both public approval and for government attention ( which boils down to who gives them the most money usually )…more energy and animus that might be aimed at the system as a concept used in dividing ourselves to their benefit…alas humans are tribal…we like to be with people who look ;like us…talk like us…eat the same sorts of foods…call it culture…i doubt we will ever reach an easy, comfortable consensus…realistically we could aim for some tolerance…understanding that the tribal ways of others are as important to them as ours are to ourselves…get to know someone from a different tribe…you might find that human nature has at least as many universals as differences ( do they love their children? bet most do) and once we accomplish that difficult but rewarding task just maybe we can begin to see we’ve been played and that things don’t really have to be as they are.