California

So California passed a budget finally. It amazes me how a few republicans who are really marginalized can hijack a state (or country). Insisting on their rejected policies and essentially ignore any facts out there to continue these really failed policies. I can see where former Communists/Trotskyites would love the republicans as they are now constituted.

Never surrender, never give up, never admit defeat. Never forget, never learn. Conservatives/ republicans seem to have the ability to enforce their policies on a country that has rejected them. They are willing to drive the country into a deep and lasting depression in order to maintain their ideological control. And don't forget, that is what they have right now: ideological control and they are not about to give it up:

'The plane's engine is on fire.
How about a cup of coffee?
No really the engine is burning.
How about a cup of tea?
You don't understand we're doomed.
Well then how about a martini?"
Shelley Berman

Social Security or How the Democrats Will Screw Us Again

Once again, almost like clockwork, the Democrats have managed to drag defeat from the jaws of victory.

Obama says that he needs a bi-partisan study group to "fix" social security. It does not need to be fixed, but those inside the beltway seem to think it does. Why do you suppose that is and why do you suppose that the "leaders" (scare quotes) of the Democratic party buy into that idea?

Glad you asked. Damned if I can completely figure it out. Well I do have an answer, but I really don't like it. It is that our rulers (note no ironic quotes) are in the same mental place as the patricians in the ancient Roman Republic at the end of that republic were.

They are on the whole not too bright, not too creative and in love with their own privileges. Their government is a combination of a plutocracy and a kelptacracy with a fair amount of incompetence thrown in. So in the end they will continue to steal from the poor. But what is more important to our country they will steal from the middle class and make them either poor or make them into people who are reasonably paranoid about losing what they have. Turning them (us?) into 21st century fascists. Kicking those who are worse off than we are to try to keep what little we have left after the super wealthy take theirs. Of course, the final result for the patricians was some pretty nasty personal endings once the various Caesars took power. In the end, for those folks the Caesars didn't even come from their own class.

I don't quite understand it, but I can see it. Why can't they?