Rudderless, And Zombies In The Crew

In Our Current Crisis, the hopey-changey Democratic leadership ran to assist the Banksters. Because politicians never like to make Big Money unhappy, even if the Banksters were caught red-handed in the functional equivalent of selling Blow by the metric ton, while having sex with twelve-year-old cheerleaders.

As a result, nothing has been done to address the nation's teensy unemployment issue. And for their part, the Rethugs are happy to do everything possible to obstruct the Obama administration -- their theory being that if they can make everything worse, and then blame it all on the awful evil secret Muslim Kenyan scary Negro leader...

Well (as 'Babs' Bush says,) it will work out "very well for them (chuckle)". And then the 'Real Americans' can "Take Back The Country". As if all this is all about a yacht-racing trophy or Superbowl championship, or something. You know how the Right be lovin' them sports metaphors.

Barron's online reports today:

The official unemployment rate held steady at 9.6%, but the so-called underemployment rate, which includes labor-force dropouts and part-timers who would rather have a full-time job, surged to 17.1% from 16.7%. John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics ... further adjusts the underemployment rate to count folks who have been out of the labor force a year, who don’t get counted among “discouraged workers” by the government. By his tally, true underemployment hit 22.5% in September, up from 22% in August, and a new high...

The country feels becalmed. Our elected leadership appears hesitant, gobsmacked, unable to comprehend the damage done by the Banksters, much less know what to do.

And wherever you turn, there are crew members, or passengers -- President Boner, or President Sessions; or a Pat Robertson or a Glenn Beck, or a Newt Gingrich or Rand Paul -- who suggest the Ship Of State would sail so much better if we cut down some of those cumbersome, pesky masts, and open the petcocks in the holds to allow seawater in.

This would lower operating costs for the Ship, and provided needed ballast (because the Ship Of State's been a little, uh, uppity since that New Captain With Such A Tan took the helm). After all, they say, it's what the original shipwrights who built Her intended. And people like Little Newt and Michelle Bachmann and Little Billy Kristol are never, ever wrong. Little Rupert Murdoch tells us so.

In today's New York Times Op-Ed Columnist section, Bob Herbert made the opening observation (and quoted by The Great Curmudgeon) that

We can go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threaten to blow Iran off the face of the planet. We can conduct a nonstop campaign of drone and helicopter attacks in Pakistan and run a network of secret prisons around the world. We are the mightiest nation mankind has ever seen.

But we can’t seem to build a railroad tunnel to carry commuters between New Jersey and New York.

The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It’s losing its soul. It’s speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough.

It's Okay If You're A Republican, though. And if you're part of the Ruling Classes © -- as long as events don't interrupt your lifestyle, you don't give a fuck what happens to a bunch of peasants.

And you don't give a good goddamn what happens to the United States; if the roads are bumpy or the lights flicker, you can call and complain: How dare those persons interrupt our lives! Don't they know who we are??

And if that doesn't magically make the roads smooth and the power dependable, you can just take an extended vacation at your property at Cap Nez, or in Passy, or Kensington Square or the Grünwald; and after a wonderful meal prepared by your cook, with friends who live as you do, you can think about having sex with the maid and the pool boy.

Just so you all get it: People like that are who we're all working for. They own us; we're here for their convenience -- or, so they believe...

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