DAMN THE DEMOCRATS

DAMN THE DEMOCRATS

Damn the Democratic Party and every single Democrat, starting with me !!! We Democrats gave the country to George Bush and Dick Cheney and their mob of retards, both in 2000 and 2004, just handed it to them. Now just look at the horrors, what it cost us and the entire world. Now we have another fine candidate, not the best, but still a Democrat, someone who can run the country responsibly, and now we seem dead set on handing it back to the same venal bastards who did this to us. Republicans may not know anything else, but they surely know how to take crippled and dangerous candidates and snatch elections from the far superior candidates we put up. Or more to the point, we know how to lose elections that only fools could lose.

Democrats once were the party of the people, of red necks, like me, working people and surely the poor and everyone decent and sensible. The Republicans used to be the Party of the Rich and Powerful, the arrogant, the Yankee party, people who bought elections if they won them. Democrats also used to fight, because there were things worth fighting for, like the rights of all human beings, for women and children, the poor, working people and people of color. And we fought like hell. We knew it was a matter of fighting or starving and dying, and so we fought.

Now we have this hoity-toity bunch with not a drop of fight in them. Words, clever words, professorial words, but not one ounce of fight. Nor one ounce of common sense, not one word that resonates with the people I grew up with, the people I worked with in the steel mill and the oil fields, on the ranches and farms and crabbing boats, the people down at the union hall and the pool hall and the bowling alley. These dumb bastards have lost the people. They don't know how to talk to the very people they are supposed to serve. Instead they talk to themselves, as if the world were composed of Ivy League puritans.

Damn, I hate this sorry excuse for a party. Almost as much as I fear the other ... well, not that much but a lot. I hate and will hate forever Al Gore and Ralph Nader, who, against all odds put this vicious and stupid mob in office, as I hate John Kerry, who was too busy being right to fight, too gentile to do the gutting that had to be done. As I suppose I should hate Adali Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Dukakas, and maybe especially Jimmy Carter who managed against all odds to get Ronald Reagan elected, who then started us down this wretched track. Still, I have reserved a soft spot for Stevenson and Humphrey. There was some excuse for their losing, none for the rest. And they were both serious politicians, who understood that you have to fight or die, or worse watch your people die.

Yeah, I wanted Hillary, with Billl in the wings, not because I like either of them --- that is not the point --- but because I knew they would never take a knife to a gunfight, except as back-up. But instead we have a candidate who will make a far better president, as would have John Kerry, as would have Hubert Humphrey, as surely would have Adlai Stevenson. We have a candidate for whom the entire world is rooting and who could only lose this election if he really put his heart and soul into losing, as he apparently has done. The Republicans, knowing this, didn't even try to put up a winning candidate; they were just going to pass on this one. Never could they have imagined they could beat Barak Obama, not this time, not after these damages to everything in sight. So they paid off an old debt, ran a ringer as they did with another damaged war hero, another good man, just tossed him in to be eaten by the wolves. If nothing else, the Republicans know how to use war heroes, use them, but never stand among them.

Not knowing and not even suspecting that the wolves would not have the stomach for it, that they would just wimper and walk off, that this damaged old hero might just win against all odds. But he is not running against Bill Clinton, who ate war heros for breakfast.

Damn it, this is a fight, not a college debate. Sure, we will have the college crowd, the intellectuals, if they care enough to vote, but last time I looked, like yesterday, most of America was not that priveleged. And these folks do vote. Often wrong ... if we let them. And if we let them, then it is our fault, not theirs. They are just ignorant, not dumb, just ignorant; we do not have that excuse. We know what needs to be done; we are just too spineless to do it ... perhaps too far removed now to reach our own people.

Thank God the Republicans have not yet found their Adoph Hitler ... not yet. Well, maybe they did and just stuck him in the Naval Observatory. Just imagine if Cheney had been as eloquent as Hitler, or even as Reagan. No. Let's not.

This is serous stuff, folks. Scary stuff.

-Karl-

This note to my sons...

This note to my sons, but assume it might be of some value to others.

I am reminded by articles in yesterday's L.A. Times of both the dangers and opportunities in today's job market. Bottom line is this. Not in your lifetime and barely in mine have we seen anything even approximating what we are seeing today. This is reality check time. The notion that one can have and deserves to have their personal, perfect career, that is no longer part of any reality, if indeed it ever was more than a myth imparted on naive students by mindless and/or irresponsible teachers. In today's world you have to take what you can get and take it quick. Even imperfect jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate. It is going downhill fast, and it is not coming back for a very long time. I have been saying this for months, if not years now, and there is only increasing evidence I am right.

One article points out what I have been saying about government jobs. The scary part is that now everyone who reads the L.A. Times knows what I have said. And the rush for those jobs is surely already on. The subtitle to the article is "L.A. is home to a variety of high-earning --- and often recession-proof --- government jobs." I expect the same is true for San Francisco.

As anyone who has worked in Washington knows, government jobs, especially in the regulatory areas, are the pathway to much more lucrative industrial jobs. Or once were. But now those government jobs are beginning to look like keepers.

I urge you not to develop your careers based on your own necessarily limited experience. You have never seen times like this and surely not times like those ahead. You have to go back a good deal farther for meaningful reference to today's economic dynamics.

One small story, if you will. I was trained to find oil in an era when that was about as fine a job as you could get. It paid well and it took you to exotic places, something that sounded great to me. And geologists were cool. That was up to about the time I was a junior in Penn State's College of Mineral Industries (learning there, by the way, that oil was not a mineral). Then suddenly we were awash in oil, thanks to those cool geologists a few years ahead of me. When I got my degree and licence to go find oil, there were no jobs anywhere. The industry was dead. So I became a soldier and did ice instead. And did pretty well, but never as the petroleum geologist I was trained and intended to be. Ever thereafter I took whatever I could get. And had all the fun and high adventure I could have wanted. But not chasing oil and seldom in the company of the geologists I once so admired.

Never project the future from the past, at least not from any past you know. The future will do its own thing, and you may not like where it goes. But you can survive if you are crafty and agile. That's how how we all came to be, as descendants of crafty and agile critters, right up to our own parents. The rest died.

Plus a bit of vision, which is simply connecting the dots.

Oh, and never think you can fall back on MacDonalds or Walmart. Those jobs are going faster than all the rest. I talked recently to a MacDonald's manager who said they were no longer giving those jobs to kids, only to heads of families, as a matter of conscience. That is where you get the real economic news, off the street, off real streets, not Wall Street. As the truly smart people on Wall Street understand.

-K-

The Limits of Power

Keep an eye peeled for Andrew J. Bacevich's new book: The Limits of Power, in case you missed Bill Moyers' interview. It ain't a pretty picture, but it is real, all too real. We have some serious fixing to do. This book is a good place to start. Here is my plan:

• Impeach Cheney. Then Bush. Then try Lynn Cheney for crimes against humanity. Bush might just get off on grounds of mental incompetence. But not the Cheneys.
  
• Reinstate the draft. This nation was never intended and surely not suited to have an army of professional mercenaries. And restrict the National Guard to guard the nation. And the Reserves to be there in reserve, not sent over and over again on weird missions into wierd places. If there is any killing to be done, then we should all share that burden. Killing is serious stuff, best handled by well-trained amateurs, not by paid professionals.
• Then beef up those professionals. So they can tell the amateurs how to do it.
  
• Tax the shit out of the tax-dodging, non-working rich.
  
• Eliminate corporate taxes, which are just a way the non-working rich avoid taxes.
• Eliminate corporate rights as citizens and as shields for criminal behavior. So that the justice system can get at the criminals.
• Outlaw lobbying by non-citizens, which would include corporations.
  
• Free all non-dangerous prisoners. It makes no sense for taxpayers to feed and house them. Instead, find useful and legal work for them. Check out the prison systems that are into job training. Some of these people might also make good soldiers. I served with a bunch of guys whose only other option was prison. Most of them turned out ot be reasonably good killers.
• Make some kind of deal with Raul Castro to take back Guantanamo. One that works for us. That thing is just too crazy for words. Maybe for some luxury hotels in Havana. To rehab our wounded. When I was a kid, Atlantic City worked well for that. You need an upbeat place for that sort of work.
  
• Eliminate sales taxes, which are the most aggregious and regressive of all taxes, hitting the working poor harder than anyone else.
  
• Require all ear-marked taxes (e.g., gaming to schools; gas taxes to highways) go where they are intended and no place else.
  
• Tear down all the fences between Mexico and and the U.S. They are both dumb and useless.
  
• Create a decent work permit system for all people wanting to work here, based on whether they are really needed, i.e., not just displacing American workers to profit corporations.
  
• Legalize and regulate recreational drugs. And wean our people off them. As we did with cigarettes. As we led the world in doing. That would kill the Mexican gangs, among others.
  
• Give every illegal who is not a criminal one and only one chance to sign up for citizenship. That would require they pass an English language test, for their own good. Then catch and kill the rest, focusing first on the Canucks and the Irish and the Russians.
  
• Make fluency in one foreign language a requirement for high school graduation, as it was for me.
  
• Make some modicum of knowledge of American history and institutions a requirement for high school graduation, as it was for me. That would include some grasp of why we separated religion and government, as well as the weird way our government is run by our people and why, like no other, it is designed to be inefficient and why we should worry when it ceases to be so.
• Honor the Second Amendment, perhaps the strongest vote of confidence in our people in the whole document.
  
• Make some modicum of knowledge of the world a requirement for high school graduation. And/or one year of service in a foreign country.
  
• Restrict imports not to exceed exports, to each and every nation, like every intelligent nation does.
  
• Balance the budget.
• Open the 1002 and put the Inupiat in charge of industrial regulation within their homelands and waters. Including the OCS.
• Build a gasline from Prudhoe Bay up the Mackenzie to Chicago, the short and only way it can ever be done. Imperial Oil has the plans on file to do that.
  
• Outlaw all advertising that is deceptive or dangerous to the well-being of our citizens. That would include all pharmaceuticals and all professional services and all alcoholic beverages. In short, go back to where we once were.
  
• Beef up the regulatory agencies so they can protect the public, as they once did.
  
• Rebuild and intelligently reconfigure the nation's infrastructure.
• Make education available to everyone who can handle it.
• Forgive and preclude all future educational loans. Replace them with grants coupled with public service.
  
• Make medical care available to all who need it. Follow the Dutch model, where they spend far less than we do and get far greater benefits. E.g. babies are born at home, not in disease-laden hospitals. Pregnancy and birth are not medical conditions but normal human functions for which the female body was cleverly designed. And drugs only where needed, not as prescribed by the drug companies.
  
• Rebuild our military so it can do the job it was designed to do, protect us from foreign aggression. Rip out all the parts that do other stuff. It is still a damned good military, bloodied but good. The best in the world and the best in human history. But it needs help, help from the citizens it serves and relies on.
  
• Starting from scratch, build an American intelligence system that works, so we cease to be blind-sided as we have been since we disbanded the OSS. Why in God's name are we spending money on monstrous agencies that miss such things as the fall of Iran, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian invasion of Georgia, and the likely results of invading Iraq? Not to mention knowing where Osama bin Laden is and how to kill the bastard. Build it, as Bill Donovan built the OSS, on people from the places we need to understand, blood-thirsty professors and the like with funny accents.
• We can still kick the shit out of Russia, by the way, and we should make that abundantly clear. And that we will damned well do it if they do not get their silly, obsolescent tanks the hell out of Georgia. Then wrap NATO around them and explain to the Gemans and the French that they have a problem only we can fix. Or they can try it on their own. And we just step back and let Putin take them, as he clearly intends to do.
  

There is other stuff to do, of course, but this should keep us busy for awhile. And help us rebuild the economy. It is well past time we got into construction. We used to be pretty good at that.

I trust you noted that this fits no preconceived philosophical model. I would just call it the American Model, or maybe the Guns and Roses Model, or perhaps the Straight Down the Middle Model. You name it. Let's just do it.

-Karl-