WI Koch-Quisling Scott Walker and our new FL Pontius Pilate, Rick Scott (is that mild enough for you folks who think invective is Not Nice?) are just the latest, sorta visible focuses for a slowly rising tide of righteous anger, that may get frittered away by those of us headed for serfdom if we don't get our act together.
I wonder, as a mostly armchair politicologist, how we keep that righteous anger from dissipating, like the grounding out of a lightning strike after all that atmospheric work of building up a huge charge. So far, the Wrongs Party and kleptocrats have done great, positioning lightning rods of misdirection and manipulation, to dissipate gently all that usable energy, or at least direct it away from their palaces and private islands to strike ACORNs and abortionists and a few sacrificial goats.
What's needed is an answer to the same problem people in Cairo and Tunisia and Libya have: How to develop leaders and an effective agenda and actions, without raising up the too-often-problem with folks of the liberal and/or progressive persuasion, that descent into particularization and Balkanization and the herding-cats dead end that the moribund Dem Party in FL (and elsewhere) and even us progressives, too often seems to have wandered into. * Otherwise, we will continue to have our energies sapped by just continuing in Brownian motion...
Scott and KochWalker are "succeeding" because they are focused, driven, organized and of course evil. (The little inroads the Union Opposition has made, a recall and that Prosser thing, however heartening, must give the Kochs not much more than a tiny bit of annoyance -- over the long haul, on the road to the Huge Haul that is their goal, these are just a couple of little potholes.) I bet good-hearted people can do the first three as well as Skeletor and the Demon Duo from Wichita has done, and do the right thing by all of us. But where's the centralizing of effort and intent that it takes to counter the Gekkos?
It's pretty obvious that that Rich Snot Scott Carpetbagger studied the various states, as part of his "corporate and investor due diligence," in finding a place with a sick, mean, Wrong Party-dominated legislature, and corrupt kleptocracy already in place, and of course with no recall legislation or constitutional remedy. (Is anyone working, at least, on voter initiatives, the only FL tool and a weak one at that, to undercut what these Gordon Gekko bastards are doing? Rude aside: Koch Industries, Inc. is a company bounded only by our capabilities.... Not by any law or rule or notion of decency.)
Speaking of righteous anger, I expanded on the letter that Kossak Leap Year dropped in comments to my little rant the other day, http://dailykos.com/... and Pam and Jessica passed out a bunch of copies at the rally I mentioned here in St. Pete, one of a few that have gotten a little media attention. Maybe it will go somewhere?
PALACE OF THE GOVERNOR
LORD SKELETOR
Dear Disabled Kids:
You all need to quit whining and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like I did! It worked out quite well for me! I just used my brain to figure out scams to steal $4 billion in Medicare money! And to steal a bunch of publicly owned hospitals, and now by making you all get drug tested at my wife’s Acordia clinics, and soon that’s where you will have to go for medical treatment too!
And once my Commission on Review of Taxpayer Funded Hospital Districts coughs up the report I told it to generate, there will be an end to those Socialist publicly owned hospitals! My party and I are trying to dismantle Medicaid and Medicare, though, because there are not enough opportunities for privatized ripoffs there. And of course we intend to steal the rest of the money that currently goes into the Social Security Trust Fund, that’s just wasted on weak old people when it could be buying caviar and private jets, and if you want a safety net, you will have to take your chances in the stock market. So you'll have to find some other taxpayer-funded program, or a really nice church group, to lazybones off of, in order to be able to bathe in filthy Welfare lucre.
Which reminds me, I have a golf appointment or something to get to, and a secret meeting with the lobbyists and heads of Florida’s Public Utilities on how to squeeze more rates out of the citizen consumer, and a very private conference with Stu Sternberg on how to make the taxpayers pony up another half a billion for a new Stadium for the Rays. Got to get back the $80 million I spent to buy the Governor’s office,
And a bunch more Executive Orders to sign, out of the stack my people have been writing up over the last ten months so I could hit the ground running and make my kill before the sap voters catch on to what they got by electing me in our wonderful spoils system!
Boo me all you want, suckers! I got you by the jugular.
Love,
Governor Rick Scott
Thanks for the inspiration, Leap Year. I'm hopeful but not believing that there will be a little Tiny Tim hoisted on Jim Cratchett's shoulder, exclaiming "God bless us, every one!" as Rich Scrooge carves the prime roast goose for the impoverished Cratchitt family...
Here's another little anecdote to give people a flavor of what is really happening as these cancers invade our weary body politic.
A woman I know worked, used to work, for the Pinellas County Health Department. Until a week and a half ago. It seems two guys from Skeletor's staff, dressed like Men in Black and never seen there before, though the managers showed fearful foreknowledge that they might appear with a hint of sulfur, showed up at her office, and proceeded to do 10-15-minute "desk audit" interviews with the staff. They then closeted with the managers for a few minutes, and emerged to announce that my friend and about a third of the rest of the employees were fired on the spot. FL is a "right to work"/right to be fired arbitrarily state, and these folks have no union to stand for them, so she is suddenly without health insurance (can't afford COBRA), which she very much needs, and shortly without a place to live. Oh, and the Men in Black announced that the workloads of the fire-ees would be "absorbed" by the remaining staff, already overworked. Public Health Departments being notably short on budget and staff, as compared to public need, already.
I lived through the Reagan Revolution at EPA, and this assault by the pre-chosen Men in Black is horribly familiar -- it happened in 1980, too, to many federal agencies, guided by the Heritage Foundation's "Mandate for Leadership (sic)."
And this is reportedly happening all over the Sunshine State, where Skeletor was booed by most of the fans in Tropicana Field, as he ceremoniously tossed the first pitch at the Opening Day festivities for our Tampa Bay Rays. He then sat through the rest of the game in the well-appointed, well-sound-insulated Franchise Owners' Skybox, presumably to discuss how to extract public money from the state's and municipalities' taxpayers, or via municipal bonding capacity, to give these Hamptons-dweling Carpetbagger Owners the billion-dollar New Stadium they have angled for over the last five years.
And one wonders, humans being as collectively stupid as they are, whether Skeletor's minions will figure out a smart way to play this one among many cuts-to-"protect"-the-budget-so-there-can-be-more-tax-reductions-for-business-and-the-rich. They can do like the sugar and coffee marketeers did and do, and the gasoline supply chain: hit The People with a large price increase, or huge budget cut, and then, after the intense reaction gets muted by news cycling, and the wonderful human resilience and strength kick in and start to adjust to the latest horror, "restore" a fraction of what was taken, and give a languid aristocratic wave to the crowd. And move on to the next pre-planned hatchet job.
It's time to focus on a few simple things. There is enough real wealth to go around, if we concentrate on stopping the giant sucking vampire squid machinery that is Hoovering it all up and concentrating it in that collection bag called the Oligarchy. Our leadership is not serving the interest of the vast majority of us, the people who create the wealth. Tax breaks to business do not create jobs. Bumping along with an increasingly ugly, wealth-concentrating, Bubble-vulnerable, humaneness-destroying economy, with all the pressures to cement in place all the regulatory-capturing, "ruleoflaw"-hijacking, piracy-and-leverage "opportunity" that creates ever more Bubble Dollars and ever fewer opportunities to just work and maintain a family and pay for the infrastructure and sustaining institutions we all benefit from, is not only not "acceptable." It's meekly accepting a death sentence for our culture and nation and families from the doctors of greed who tell us the cancer is incurable.
The Rulers, the Kleptocrats, the guys who run the MIC, all get what they want by concentrating on the tenets of "More-ism," which are that "In the end, there can be only One," and "The One who dies with all the toys, wins." And you can bet that those folks are also working busily at supporting all the bioresearch now under way to provide themselves with longer, possibly undying, lives. While they get us arguing about "rationing" and "death panels" and all the rest.
So it behooves anyone who wants to be able to continue to grizzle about their Rights, and lay claim to special, or equal, treatment because of their status or membership in some abused group or other, to remember the joke about the CEO and the cookies: A CEO, a Tea-Partier, and a union member are sitting at a table with a plate of 12 cookies. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the Tea Partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie."
Let's not just dissipate and ground-out the building charge of righteous anger and energy that needs to be directed to the Gekkos and Louis XIVs and Whig Parliaments that are killing us. Focus, people! Concentrate! Organize! Get driven by centering on ensuring that the wealth we create gets used first to meet the basic needs of all of us!