Jack Rabbit
Jack Rabbit's JournalAmazing what happens when corporate whores are driven into splinter party status
We still remember energy deregulation here. Who was to blame? Corporate whores in the state legislature. Today, the GOP doesn't hold enough seats in either house the state legislature to sustain a gubernatorial veto by themselves. If corporate big shots come to Sacramento looking for whore in the state legislature, they have to buy a Democrat. The Koch brothers don't come to these parts looking for some too often.
The thought for the day is that capitalism really wasn't such a bad thing back in the days when it existed, before it was replaced by corporate fascism, something that goes hand-in-hand with that dreaded institutional disease, corporate elephantiasis. Today, it easier for corporations suffering from elephantiasis to strangle upstart competition in the crib than compete with it. Without competition, corporations do nothing that justifies their existence, like innovate and keep their prices reasonable. There was a time, before corporate elephantiasis became a pandemic, that corporations would have been tripping over each other to solve environmental problems. Now, they deny there is a problem ("climate change is a hoax, so is peak oil and America only needs to tap its own energy resources to become energy independent forever"
. This followed a period where the problem was minimized. Remember when Donald Hodel, a corporate whore who became both Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Interior in the eighties? He said the solution to global warming was more sunscreen and hats with broader brims. Remember that matinee idol who became a corporate whore who appointed Mr. Hodel Secretary of Energy in 1982 and Secretary of the Interior in 1985. Yeah, that's right, him. The Sally Stanford of corporate whores. Remember when, while successfully running for President in 1980, he said that trees cause more pollution than automobiles?
Now the elephantiasis sufferers' favorite corporate whore is Jim Inhofe. He says "Problem? What problem? Environmental pollution is a scientific impossibility." Of course, Inhofe not only disbelieves climate science, but he doesn't believe in evolution, either. He's got a better reason not to believe in evolution than most people who don't. After two or three million years of human evolution, Inhofe is still an ape.
Another favorite corporate whore is Mitch McConnell. Like Inhofe and many other corporate whores, he can be found in the House of the Senate. Unlike Inhofe, McConnell is a firm believer in evolution. He not only believes that man evolved from a more primitive animal that also became monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas, but he thinks we're still evolving. He says that corporations are people. Not only are corporations people, but those that suffer from corporate elephantiasis are the highest form of human being yet evolved. A real Nietzschean Übermensch. They should have rights that we mere homo sapiens don't. Like the right to rule over the rest of us and the right to collect the wages on our labor for us, because they are wiser and would know better how to use our money than we do. McConnell is consulting the scientists at a Koch funded think tank to understand how, if corporations with elephantiasis are such smart people, how they crashed the world economy in 2008.
Cowan is full of baloney
If the last fifty years demonstrate anything, it is that the third way program is a failure. Deregulation, austerity and a government catering to the whims of the rich, to include tax cuts, brought on the world wide economic collapse of 2008, from which we are still suffering mainly because the trends of Reagan/Bush/Clintion/Frat Boy have not been adequately reversed.
First, we must revoke the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. They don't need the extra cash and, after mismanaging the world economy, they certainly don't deserve it. Whoever said these people are rich because they're smarter than the rest of us must be one of their paid stooges. It is difficult to believe that if the common autoworker was asked to design a car that he would like to drive to work that it wouldn't look anything like an SUV. But that is what they auto executives foisted on the American consumer. Instead of Henry Ford's "America can have any color car it wants, as long as it's black," the auto executives of the late twentieth century proclaimed that America could have any kind of car it wanted, as long as it guzzled gas. Then they wondered why we fell in love with Japanese cars. It shouldn't have taken an Ivy League-educated scion of America's best families to figure out what was going on, but they were the only ones couldn't figure it out. We should get our money back. Tax 'em. Get the money out of their pockets and put it to better use, like building schools and roads like we used to do. That's better than bribing politicians or putting billions into public relations to convince Americans that climate change is a hoax.
Second, we need to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy. Let the oil executives and the coal barons whine. They've had their way long enough, and all we have to show for it is dirty air and undrinkable water. Pretty soon, we'll have even more undrinkable water, right after the polar ice caps melt.
Third, we need to re-regulate industry and the financial markets. We've had decades of deregulation and the only thing it's proved is that there is no such thing self-policing markets. All the bankers and industrialists want is more freedom to steal our savings, cut our wages and pollute the environment. I don't know who they think is going to buy their useless, tacky products after they've reduced the human race to serfdom. Am I the only one who thinks there's something wrong with not paying workers adequate wages, getting them to go on public assistance to make ends meet and then electing politicians who will cut or eliminate that same public assistance, like Mr. Cowan suggests?
Let's look at some realities that Mr. Cowan doesn't see. We don't have too big to fail banks and industries; what we have is billionaires too big for their breeches. We don't have a problem with funding the social safety net, we have a problem subsidizing unsustainable businesses.
Finally, I see no reason to raise a white flag and meekly approve the TPP/TTIP. This is no time to give up on democracy. Why? Because the common man is one hell of a lot smarter than the common billionaire or a corporate shill like Mr. Cowan, that's why.
I don't mean this in a good way, but . . .
. . . Karl Rove is a real professional. Of course, his profession makes him an occupational liar. For lurking Freepers who think I'm just being partisan, so is James Carville. In addition to political campaign consultants, who are just a special class of public relations agents, prime examples of occupational liars are salesmen, lawyers and politicians (who, perhaps not coincidentally, usually start out as lawyers).
The point is that the Rover is an exceptionally good occupational liar, or EGOL. After all, he made Bush the Frat Boy into an attractive enough candidate to get him within stealing distance of two national elections. That was no easy task.
The first part of being an EGOL is to know what sells and what's an what doesn't. The Monica Lewinsky caper was never a good selling point in the first place. How many of us knew that President Clinton (another EGOL) was just asking for trouble when he said "I didn't have sex with that woman" instead of "On the advise of an attorney, I have nothing to say about that topic"? The problem with the matter of Mr. Clinton and she and his fellow consenting adult, Ms. Lewinsky, did together, was that nobody cared except ESAPPs (exceptionally stupid and partisan politicians). Fifteen years later, the only people who still care are ESAPPs like Senator Paul.
Another reason the Lewinsky caper doesn't sell is that there are better examples of politicians who don't level with the American people than Bill Clinton or even Chris Christie. For example, Richard ("I am not a crook" Nixon, George W. (Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction) Bush and his sidekick, former Vice Premier Cheney were much bigger liars than Clinton, and lied about matters of greater consequence than a tacky blow job.
What are the Republicans to do in 2016? One might think that they could point to President Obama. but they can't do that. It's not that President Obama hasn't lied to us. This is the same president who tells us that mass surveillance of American citizens saves lives and isn't a violation of the Fourth Amendment and that the TPP and TTIP will create jobs. Unfortunately, any Republican president will say the same thing and it won't be any more truthful than saying he threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. All they can do is holler "Benghazi," but that is even less attractive as a selling point that what down in the Oval Office closet in the nineties. Well, no one ever accused Darrell Issa of being an EGOL. It's a rare man who can be both an EGOL and an ESAPP at the same time.
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Sacramento Valley, California
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 45,984
