Last night I was watching a movie called Idiocracy, where Luke Wilson wakes up 500 years into the future after an experiment the Army has done on him. After what the movie called the 'Great Garbage Avalanche of 2550' Owen gets out of the box the Army had put him in, to find that not only is he now the smartest person on the planet, but that everyone now living on earth, are literally stupider than dirt.
What I found so hysterical about the movie, is that it really wasn't too far off as to where our civilization is moving towards, whereby we as country have yet to figure out the handwriting on the wall, that 'both parties' are playing us for the fools we are and are using the same divisive 'decoys' - racism, religion, class warfare, fear and above all, both parties are protecting Wall Street/the Banks and the top 1 percent of the elite who now own 90 percent of our nation's wealth. Sigh.
It is like watching a really really stupid never ending ping pong game and this clip of the movie, will give you an idea of why, as 'we' continue to prop up the same group of 'Elite' powers that be, it is us, the suckers of last resort, that will continue to pay the price over and over again:
In the movie, the President is now a WW Champion (African American who sings like James Brown) - the nation, for entertainment watches Gladiator type games where people get eviscerated with huge machines that look like those hideous trucks with huge wheels 'some' people still drive around in our nation, and 'Starbucks' is now in the year 2550, a place for 'peep shows and sex' where you can get a latte light (god only knows what particular sex act that is) and Gatorade is the only thing people drink, not water. One of the funniest segments was on 'Fox News' of the future, The Fox News Channel is specifically targeted within Idiocracy for its sensationalist news coverage. Fox News in the future is presented by naked bodybuilders, mocking the way in which Fox has abandoned the conventions of serious news broadcasters. But Fox News 'demanded' that this segment of the film not be allowed to be released on Utube or anywhere else. Wonder why? I don't, it was as close to the truth as the film could get. But I digress, and I think you get the idea.
The Glenn Greenwald column points out this same 'Idiocracy' we are now living, as both parties, continue to 'suck' the citizens into this 'black whole vortex' where instead of realizing finally (Duhhhhhhhhhh) that they 'only ones' that are making out in this 'deal' we call a Democracy are the ones that rule our nation.
The Tea Party movement (despite it's overt racism, which is disgusting and vile) came directly out as a result of how Wall Street/the Banks got away with the biggest scam ever perpetuated on our nation: It was a heist, and it resulted in an Economic Pearl Harbor, from which we may never recover from, and that is exactly why it was so monumentally important for President Obama to have actually provided the bold leadership we so desperately needed when he took office.
That crisis presented a huge opportunity for Obama and the Democrats to bring about real change in Washington -- the central promise of his campaign -- by capitalizing on (and becoming the voice of) populist anger and using it to wrestle away control from Wall Street and other financial and corporate elites who control Washington. Had they done so, they would have been champions of populist rage rather than its prime targets. But, as John Judis argues in his excellent New Republic piece, they completely squandered that opportunity. Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes. How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers -- and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding -- possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works? It can't.
There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.
snip....
And as Mr. Greenwald points out, it is not just Fox News, or Glen Beck, or Rush, or the Republicans that are using 'race and economic class warfare' as the 'decoys' that our 'corrupt leaders' hope to hell that above all we keep fighting about, instead of noticing what it really going on:
Cowardly and opportunistic Democratic politicians have only added to this inflammatory brew. When the execrable, desperate Harry Reid isn't feeding this majoritarian paranoia by demanding that the Park51 community center move, he's seeking to capitalize on it through explicit advocacy of ethnic-based voting in order to salvage his worthless political career. The American Right has no hope of recovering from its Bush-era implosion except by aggressively exploiting ethnic and racial resentments -- the most telling statement of the last year was probably Glenn Beck's pronouncement on Fox that Obama is a "racist" who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" -- but many career Democratic politicians, such as Reid, are so disliked that their only hope for staying in power is to milk those same divisions to their own advantage, often by conflating justifiable, substantive opposition to Democratic rule with the ugly bigotry fueled by the Beck/Palin/Limbaugh circus. An incumbent Party which has presided over extreme economic suffering has little to offer other than dredging up fear -- much of it well-grounded -- in the alternative (you may despise what we're doing in power, but look at those hateful, bigoted freaks over there).
http://www.salon.com/...
Like I said, 'Idiocracy' Both parties, throwing on, day in and day out every single scuzzy 'decoy' in order to keep we the people, from actually seeing the truth and demanding that both parties deal with the nations' top priorities: Jobs, the Corporate takeover of our government and nation, the Regulatory Capture and total destruction and corruption of our key financial sectors, (with no meaningful prosecutions to date), filibuster reform, financial campaign reform and an end to DADT, the Endless Wars, and the growing homelessness spurred on by the insane amount of foreclosures and job loses, which of course comes right back to the Economic Pearl Harbor, that was nothing more that a coup de etat
It is idiotic to believe that the Financial Reform Bill was anything other than a complete capitulation to Wall St./and the Banks:
Obama’s aides claimed they were only making necessary compromises, placating the Republicans and centrist Democrats they needed to pass the law. And they did stand firm on creating a strong Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But by midsummer of 2010 the Volcker rule that Obama finally backed was so full of exemptions—allowing banks to invest substantially in hedge and equity funds—that even Volcker expressed dismay. The fundamental structure of Wall Street had hardly changed. On the contrary, the new law effectively anointed the existing banking elite, possibly making them even more powerful. The major firms got to keep the biggest part of their derivatives business in interest-rate and foreign-exchange swaps. (JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley control more than 95 percent, or about $200 trillion worth, of that market.)
The Obama administration also did little to use its bully pulpit to reorient pay packages at the big financial houses, where bonuses still often run in the tens of millions of dollars. Critics make the case that changing this pay structure would do more than punish those who helped spur the meltdown. It might also encourage some of America’s greatest minds to stay away from financial engineering, which contributes little of substance to the economy, and instead consider real engineering. Nor has the Justice Department launched prosecutions as it did after the S&L crisis, or during the insider-trading scandals of the ’80s, when Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were led off in handcuffs. (One problem this time around, lawyers say, is that virtually everyone was complicit in the subprime-mortgage scam.) Most significantly, Barack Obama, in contrast to FDR in the depths of the Depression, has failed as yet to restore confidence in the economy. A recent Associated Press poll showed him at his lowest point ever on that issue, with just 41 percent of Americans approving of his performance. It was little surprise last week when Republican House leader John Boehner, sensing blood in the water—and a possible speakership in his future—attacked the president’s economic team and called for the resignations of Geithner and Summers. (Both budget chief Peter Orszag and Romer had already announced over the summer they were leaving.)
Obama was clearly not pushing very hard to be FDR or even his trust-busting relative Teddy Roosevelt. Now it looks like grim growth and unemployment numbers could extend all the way into 2012. Distracting himself with health care and other issues, Obama may have politically maneuvered himself out of the only major remedy that could bring unemployment down and growth up enough to assure his re-election: another giant fiscal stimulus. Today, after engendering Tea Party and centrist Democratic resistance to more government spending by pushing his health-care plan, the question is whether he has the political capital he may well need, in the end, to save his presidency. And after a two-year fight over financial reform, one other question still lingers: has Wall Street come out the big winner yet again?
http://www.newsweek.com/...
Before anyone goes on one of those 'you're just a hater rants towards me,' or 'you just don't understand what Poor President Obama was up against,' or 'Obama is just getting bad advice,' or 'It's all the Republican's fault for their obstructionist actions,' spare me that 'bebop, with you please? President Obama must be held accountable for his decisions and his actions, not his 'words and speeches.'
And if I have learned one thing about our President it is this: It is not what he says, it is what he does not say, that leaves our own party fractured and in tatters.
Let me give you another example from Dean Baker, a well known liberal economist 'elite crowd' that is spewing the same bullshit 'Idiocracy' that is going on in this recent article:
This threat comes not just from the Republican Party, but from the top levels of the Democratic Party as well. Rep. Steny Hoyer, the majority leader in the House, explicitly called for raising the retirement age to 70 in a speech earlier this summer. Erskine Bowles, the co-chairman of the deficit commission appointed by President Obama, also explicitly said that cuts to Social Security would be on the agenda of the deficit commission. Of course, former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, the Republican that President Obama appointed as the other co-chair of the commission, never misses an opportunity to say that he wants to cut Social Security.
It has become quite fashionable in elite policy circles to call for Social Security cuts like raising the retirement age. In fact, support for cutting Social Security is almost a requirement for being accepted as a serious person in places like the Washington Post opinion pages and other centers of elite opinion.
This is really bad policy. Thanks to the incompetent economic management of these same elites, the huge cohort of baby boomers at the edge of retirement will have little other than their Social Security to support them in retirement. The typical older baby boomer (ages 55 to 64) has about $180,000 in accumulated wealth, counting equity in their home. This would be roughly enough to pay off the mortgage on the median house, leaving them nothing other than their Social Security to live on in retirement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Excuse me Mr. Baker, but I guess you didn't get the 'memo' that most baby boomers have already completely lost whatever they had in equity in their homes, that they were relying on as part of their retirement, due to the housing bubble, the Wall St./Banking Heist and the continued 'cover up' of the hidden toxic debt that Geithner and Bernanke are still hiding, which is exactly why the Banks are not lending and why the Corporations are not hiring. It is called: A TOTAL TRAIN WRECK, and we are being fully manipulated by 'all members of the elite' in both parties, that are now, literally working together to go directly after cutting Social Security and Medicare. So pretending that these baby boomers are still relying on the equity in their homes, in addition to their small Social Security is complete and utter bullshit. At this point, most Americans will only be able to depend on their Social Security, and Greenspan, Bernanke, Bush, Paulson and Geithner, et all, has left many baby boomers with absolutely no equity whatsoever thanks to the 'endless bubble' that was just, you know, 'an accident.'
This is why the Cat Food Commission as appointed by President Obama is so insane, and outrageous.
Sometimes, I get this picture in my mind, that Mitch McConnell, Tan Man Boehner, Harry Reid and Howard Dean are all having lunch in some undisclosed location, sharing a 100 year old bottle of one malt scotch, laughing their asses off, and deciding 'who's turn it is to ratchet up the 'No Mosque Near the World Trade Center Outrage,' or who's turn it is to 'talk about the various pluses of getting our so called 'entitlements' under control. If you think this sounds like a fantasy, or too crazy to even consider, then consider this:
If you had come to my desk at the Volunteer offices in Portland, Oregon for the election of President Obama, in October of 2008, and said to me, 'You know I heard it through a very valuable source, who works with Obama's team, that he is planning on a long term reduction plan to cut Social Security and Medicare.'
I would have looked at the person, and told them in no under certain terms, that not only were they spreading lies, but that they were as crazy as a shit house rat if they believed that.
But who's really crazy here? Who is really being played as 'fools' here by the 'Ruling Elite Oligarchy,' and who is not to say, that all along they have been working in concert with one another, since it would appear that those who are continually suffering day after day in our nation, are the American Middle Class and those being thrown into poverty in astounding and rising numbers. The Ruling Elite are laughing all the way to the Bank, sucking the Government 'tit' and loving it!!!
In a more perfect world, I would love it if every serious Democrat would refuse or even take a pledge to never write another diary on Glen Beck, or Rush, or Sarah Palin, or Religion, race, and all the other 'decoy' and wedge issues and would take an actual pledge, to demand that we discuss the most important issues:
The Corporate take over of our nation.
Bringing a meaningful Jobs Program Summit nationally to the White House.
Ending the endless 'corrupt' wars that the MIC is sucking us dry with.
Specific prosecution of those Banks/Wall St/Lenders/Investment Houses, the Captured Regulators and the SEC enablers to full justice of the law.
The Ending of DADT, which is wayyyyyyyy overdue.
A meaningful and fair 'National Foreclosure Program' that gives amnesty or at least a fair shake to those who lost their homes and jobs because of the Great Heist.
Demanding that the House and the Senate 'get busy' fixing the Fake Health Care Reform bill (after most of us have already seen the outrageous rate hikes and prescription costs in our bills). That bullshit 'we'll fix it later on' is running mighty thin these days.
We are truly living in a state of 'Idiocracy,' if we don't wise up pretty damn quickly and stop discussing the decoys and demand day in and day out, that our Senators, House Members and our President concentrate on those issues that are and should be the only 'top priorities in our nation.' And we all know exactly what those issues are, don't we?
Meanwhile, 'Welcome to Costco, I love you.'
Thanks as always.
(PS this movie was produced by the guy that did Office Space, and now apparently Idiocracy is turning into the same cult status)...mainly because it' so close to the fucking truth it's pitiful, yet hysterically stupid at the same time, if you can dig it.
B.
UPDATE: If 'We' want new and better Democrats (including a better Democratic President, in our own President Obama, as is being consistently encouraged on DailyKos, then we are going to have to fight for this, and this should never mean the 'silencing' of those voices and fellow Democrats and Americans who believe in our right to dissent, but also to demand that all voices have the right and the duty to to be respectfully heard and allowed with tolerance and encouragement.
FDR told activists in his own party,
"I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."
What has changed so drastically in our own party, that we cannot understand and agree with our supposedly 'Biggest Tent' ideology, that this quote by FDR, has been forgotten or worse, lost its true meaning in the exchange and growth of our own party?
Ms. B.