ALL IN A DAYS WORK

I know there are things of which we must not speak and I don't want to be a buzz kill, but it is getting where I cannot read the nets a single day without seeing things appearing more crazed. It reminds me of two movies. Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network (1976) and Michael Douglas (Bill Foster) and Robert Duvall (Sergeant Prendergast) Falling Down (1993)

First there is this article, a well known investment website with a lot of its content coming from it's readers. It shows the Share of Nation's Income Gains Going to To 1 Percent at Highest Level Since 1920's.

I know, historically speaking, that when graphs look like this, governments either turn to drastic socialism or to various kinds of totalitarianism

Then there is this madness. In order to explain our predicament, Shawn Hannity is reaching back fifty years to build an absurd narrative which completely overlooks the replacement of a Rooseveltian (Keynesianism) economic system with neoliberalism (laissez-faire Adam Smithism, RICO capitalism) that started with the administration of Jimmy Carter with deregulation and the enshrinement of Milton Friedman monetarists economics via Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve and continued apace, alarmingly so during the Clinton and the last Bush administration, and arrived where it always arrives - crises of capital accumulation, the falling rate of profit, and the inter-imperial competition.

This narrative is produced by Citizens United, the winner of the latest Supreme Court sweepstakes. The Supreme Court obviously wanted us to hear what Citizens United had to say. They wont have to plot a military coup on a Roosevelt this time, because this time they will make sure he never get in office.

It is not for nothing that Hannity is promoting this narrative. It is a perfect narrative for a population who now builds reality out of their own set of facts and for a rapacious globalized capitalism that gives that population its "facts". It doesn't help that I just completed reading a history of the Spanish Civil War.

And then there is this guy. Even though Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and is a Friedrich von Hayek disciple he is a darling of the left simply because there is no "organized left" left in this country and right wing libertarianism is all we have. The left doesn't agree with where Paul Craig Roberts ultimately wants to go, but they agree completely with him about where we are.

Roberts recognized Joe Stack as a suicide bomber with legitimate complaints. Roberts says in part

The latest Rasmussen Poll indicates that 79% of Americans are convinced that “their” government is totally unresponsive to them, their concerns, and their needs

Joseph Stack was sane. Like Palestinians. A suicide attack was the only weapon left to him. “Terrorist” is a term the government reserves for Muslims who do not like what Israel does to Palestinians and the U.S. government does to Muslim countries. But Stack experienced the same frustrations and emotions as Muslims who can’t take it any longer and strap on a suicide vest.

Now a former head of the most culpable bank is campaigning to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits in order to pay for the bailout. President Obama has obliged him by creating a “deficit commission.” The “deficit commission” will be used to gut Social Security

Joe Stack has become a hero and a martyr to a very high percentage of that number in the Rasmussen poll. Since there is no "organized left" in the country it is going to shape out to be a battle between the neoconservatives and the right wing libertarians.