Baltimore is Another Wake-Up Call. America, stop Hitting the Snooze Button.

Over and over again, we get these wake-up calls. Over and over again, America listens for a little while, and then goes back to its usual state of willful ignorance. Rinse and repeat. STUPID.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this before: people are oppressed for so long and in so many ways, they can’t take it any more and lash out in blind rage. Baltimore today, Ferguson yesterday, and running back through history: Watts, Little Rock, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, all the way back to ancient Rome and its predecessors. An insular ruling class oppresses the masses, and eventually the masses revolt.

And there are always those who TELL the ruling class what is going on, pleading with them, exhorting them to change the arc of history, to learn from history, to not repeat the mistakes of history. So it was, and so it is. For example, here are the words of Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage, and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the US to third-world dictatorships, like China and others; plunged tens of millions of good, hardworking Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil-rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

Pretty clear, isn’t he? America can (and should) listen to him, wake up and take action. But no, America will probably just roll over, smack the s*** out of the snooze button on the alarm, and go back to sleep. Eventually, the wake-up call will be so loud, it can’t be ignored any longer.

By then, it’ll be too late. America will finally wake up, only to find out that it died in its sleep.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Reagan’s Teabagging followers are wrong: Government is GOOD for Business.

Latest example of Adam Smith’s wisdom: Chattanooga, Tennessee. Since the private sector wasn’t going to provide the requisite infrastructure to support 21st-century businesses, the local and Federal (but not state) governments did the job. And now businesses are clamoring to relocate to the city with some of the best Internet access in the country:

Chattanooga rolled out a fiber-optic network a few years ago that now offers speeds of up to 1000 Megabits per second, or 1 gigabit, for just $70 a month. A cheaper 100 Megabit plan costs $58 per month. Even the slower plan is still light-years ahead of the average U.S. connection speed, which stood at 9.8 megabits per second as of late last year, according to Akamai Technologies.

As federal officials find themselves at the center of controversy over net neutrality and the regulation of private Internet service providers like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), Chattanooga offers an alternative model for keeping people connected. A city-owned agency, the Electric Power Board, runs its own network, offering higher-speed service than any of its private-sector competitors can manage.

” People understand that high-speed Internet access is quickly becoming a national infrastructure issue just like the highways were in the 1950s,” Berke said. “If the private sector is unable to provide that kind of bandwidth because of the steep infrastructure investment, then just like highways in the 1950s, the government has to consider providing that support.”

The comparison to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway is appropriate. One might also consider the government’s essential role in providing electricity, water and flood control, and a host of other infrastructural necessities on which businesses rely.

Businesses need to make a profit. It’s what businesses do. No ethical (or rational) business would or could build something like public infrastructure. If a CEO were to propose building a, say, city-wide fiber network that would not make his or her company a profit, they would be (rightly) escorted to the door with their personal effects and never allowed back into the building. In fact, they could even be sued.

That is why governments are good for business: they provide an environment in which businesses can provide goods and services, and by so doing earn a profit. Anybody who thinks otherwise should try starting a business in a place with little or no government and see how they fare. Somalia comes to mind.

We should also note that the state government of Tennessee is full of Teapublicans and is a royal mess: they think that the Randians and Paulbots are correct about Reagan’s “government is the problem” crap. Indeed, the state is busily shooting itself in its supply-side foot. The Feds and Chattanooga locals pulled off their huge Internet success in SPITE of their Red State, not because of it.

(Teapublicans like to pretend that Adam Smith was somehow an Ayn Rand/Ron Paul/Rand Paul anti-government ideologue. But anyone who has actually READ his work knows that he was a lot smarter than that: he knew that some things that businesses wouldn’t build on their own were necessary for the people, society, and indeed businesses themselves to survive, thrive, and prosper.)

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Profits can kill. Profits can destroy. Profits can corrupt.

Regular readers know that Mr. Blunt and Cranky has had long careers in business and the arts, and is therefore not at all opposed to making money. Indeed, Adam Smith is frequently cited here: the man was a firm believer in a WELL-REGULATED free market. Because he was smart enough to see the harm that unchecked profits can cause.

Profits are not inherently bad: in the right measure, they can do a lot of good. But anything can be overdone: and the Teapublican “greed is good” mantra is an object lesson. Here, then, are three examples of the horrors that can be wrought by profits:

Number A: America’s profit-centered “health care” system kills lots of people. Including this writer’s only son. Yes, Aetna has death panels: people are denied care based on profit margins. That is why my son was kicked out of the hospital just a few hours after awakening from a coma. PROFITS CAN AND DO KILL. PROFITS KILLED MY KID.

Letter 2: American industry is constantly pushing for less (or no) regulation, in order to increase profit. Thence came disasters such as massive oil spills, poisoned rivers and aquifers, and destructive, deadly industrial accidents. Profits can and do destroy.

Thirdly: American politicos are taking bribes in record quantities to enhance the profitability of private businesses with taxpayer dollars. Yes, they call them “contributions”, but c’mon: these are bribes. Bribes that result in the theft of our hard-earned. Profits can and do corrupt.

Once again, Gentle Reader: your humble correspondent is not, repeat NOT opposed to profits. But not everything has a free-market solution. Some things are better divorced from a financial profit motive. Some things must be non-profit in order to succeed: things like health, education, public safety, and so on.

It’s long past time we put the final nail in the coffin of Reagan/Bush voodoo economics and its resulting death, destruction and corruption.

Reality is calling, America: better pick up the phone while we still can.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Economist Proves: Reagan’s Deregulation caused Today’s Income Inequality.

Finally, the root cause is revealed.  Plenty of talk has been talked on the topic, by experts, data wonks, and politicians. But nobody was able to say why the 1% started f***ing the rest of us to an even greater extent than hitherto, from the 80’s through the present day. Not until a few months ago, that is:

There are many gauges of the depth and breadth of economic inequality, and they often measure what middle-income working people have today against what they had prior to 1980 – that time when homes were affordable, along with doctor visits and college educations. Yet few of the astonishing charts and metrics that have captured this widening gulf explain how it all came about. So when economist William Lazonick pointed a finger at a very specific aspect of corporate behavior, people took note.

Lazonick’s 4,900-word piece, titled Profits Without Prosperity, focused on the 449 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 to 2012. Lazonick found that from the end of World War II until the late 1970s, corporations generally took a “retain-and-reinvest” approach to profits. That is, they kept their earnings and reinvested them – first and foremost in pay raises and job benefits for the employees who helped make the firms more competitive, but also in business expansion, research and new technologies.

But starting in the early 1980s, after the Securities and Exchange Commission removed limits on companies’ power to buy back their stock, these large, publicly traded companies began spending a portion of their net income on stock buybacks. The trend was exacerbated in the 1990s, when the compensation packages of corporate chief executives were linked directly to the stock value, and has accelerated in recent years – even though it’s been little noticed and rarely discussed as a prime driver of economic inequality.

THIS IS HUGE, Gentle Reader. Huge. It proves what everyone except Teapubbies and all the other “small government” and supply-side eedjits have known for decades: the Reagan Revolution was a huge mistake, a f***-up for the ages, even worse than when the Senate handed Rome to Caligula. The nation’s woeful retreat from its former stability to the shambles of the present day is, once and for all: The. Fault. Of. Reagan. Era. Republicans.

And the longer America keep electing these criminally idiotic, venal, fact-challenged, big-mouthed-but-walnut-brained f***wits, the worse it’s gonna get. We need to vote each and every “Republican” who is currently IN office OUT of said office. And that soon.

Maybe someday, when Repubs go back to the pre-Reagan days of ideological and political sanity; then, and ONLY then, can we allow them back into power. But frankly, friends, we can’t AFFORD these Teapublican nitwits any longer. They have cost us dearly, far too dearly, and done far too much damage to be trusted now.

Now you know who to blame. Time to do something about it.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

You are NOT a Conservative. Stop calling yourself one.

Unless you actually fit the definition of a “Conservative”:

noun
1: a person who believes in the value of established and traditional practices in politics and society : a person who is politically conservative.
2: a: one who adheres to traditional methods or views
b :a cautious or discreet person.

Sadly, most “conservative” Americans bear little or no resemblance to the agreed-upon meaning of the word. Some examples:

Number A: The “Reagan Revolution”. Helpful hint: there is no such thing as a “conservative revolutionary”. Real conservatives abominate the very idea of radical change. So all you NRA machine-gun nuts, anti-abortion screechers, morals policemen and theocrats are not one damned bit conservative.

Letter 2: Intentional ignorance is not at all “conservative”, because existing knowledge is something built up over history, and thus part of our intellectual tradition. People who pretend that facts are debatable are not conservative; they are radicalized f***wits.

Thirdly: real conservatives respect the Constitution and its amendments. They do not advocate sedition, the violent overthrow of the government, secession, or unconstitutional disenfranchisement and/or discrimination against women, LGBT citizens, or non-whites.

And shut up with the “words can mean something different to me than you” horses***. The word means what it means, and all the NeoCons are doing is rebranding themselves so that people won’t see them as the violent, hateful, extremist, treasonous scum that they are. By changing the meaning of the word, a’la Orwell, the Raging Righties in Their Tightie Whities are trying to (and succeeding at) conning the populace into supporting them as they slowly slice our government’s throat.It’s lying, propagandizing, anti-American crap.

The crowning irony of all this: it is the Liberals who are actually trying to stop the right-wing, libertarian, teabagging revolutionaries from burning down and blowing up our democracy. Yes. Liberals (along with the few true centrists and other antidisestablishmentarianists remaining) have become modern America’s true conservatives, because they fit the definition.

Ain’t that some f***ed-up s***? But not as f***ed as all the douchenozzles who lie when they call themselves “conservatives”.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Teapublicans are out to steal YOUR retirement insurance premiums.

Let’s call some spades, here, OK? Social Security is INSURANCE for which we are forced to pay premiums. Some of us have paid for this insurance for decades and have the right to expect that the seller will deliver the product we had no choice but to purchase. Sounds simple, yes? We pay, we should get what we pay for, like any other insurance (car, home, life) product.

But not according to “Republicans”: they are out to breach our contract and steal our money:

As one of its first orders of business upon convening Tuesday, the Republican House of Representatives approved a rule that will seriously undermine efforts to keep all of Social Security solvent.

The rule hampers an otherwise routine reallocation of Social Security payroll tax income from the old-age program to the disability program. Such a reallocation, in either direction, has taken place 11 times since 1968, according to Kathy Ruffing of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The most cynical aspect of this attack is that it comes from some lawmakers who were helped by Social Security in their own lives. The roster includes Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who received Social Security benefits during his college years, after his father’s untimely death, and now thinks that the nation can’t afford to keep paying them as currently scheduled.

Another is Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), the sponsor of the House rules change, whose father died when he was 2 and then was raised by a single mother on Social Security and veterans benefits. Now he talks about Social Security going “bankrupt,” which is flatly incorrect, and promotes a measure aimed at cutting benefits for all. This is known as climbing the ladder and pulling it up behind you.

Got it, folks? The Teapubbies are doing exactly what they said they would do if elected. They are out to wreck Social Security, pocket our premiums, and throw anyone who is retired or disabled onto the streets instead of giving you the insurance benefits you paid for.

F*** those people. And if you voted for a “Republican”, f*** you too.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Teapublicans, Communists, and Terrorists have a LOT in common:

Number A: They don’t care who they kill, so long as they get what they want. Teapublicans are responsible for deaths of women and children due to starvation, lack of medical care, or indistrial poisoning; Communists kill dissidents by the trainload; and Terrorists kill innocent people aplenty via cowardly acts of violence. So for all three of these groups, murder is one of their tools of choice.

Letter 2: They are blinded by their senseless “faith” and cannot see the real world and the facts on which it is built. Teapublicans cling to the fiction of Supply-Side economics even as it destroys the nation; Communists insist that Marxism-Leninism is the inevitable destiny of the world, even after almost every Marxist government has long-since collapsed; and Terrorists insist that their God/Sacred Cause wants them to kill us all and let Him/It sort us all out, when there is not a shred of evidence that their Deity (or Cause) does, in fact, exist. So for all three groups, living in a dream world is a defining characteristic, as is rejection of reality.

Thirdly: They keep on doing the same dumbass things over and over again, even though said dumbassery never, EVER works. Teapubbies keep on stealing our tax money and giving it to the 1%, even though the benefits never trickle down. Communists keep on oppressing their people, even though it never results in an egalitarian society. And Terrorists keep on murdering innocent people, even though all it does is unite the rest of the world against the terrorists. So for all three groups, they fit the old definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result.

So what ARE the differences between “Republicans”, Communists and Terrorists? Not much, really, unless you count wardrobe choices:



(Admit it: you thought the last one would be somebody in desert robes, didn’t you? Nope, it’s Timothy McVeigh, a home-grown terrorist.)

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Falling Gas Prices prove, yet again, that Repub Supply-Side Economics is Bulls***.

Falling gas prices have recently created a huge demand-side boost to our economy. Millions and millions of dollars worth of boost: serious money. The increase comes from families having a few hundred extra bucks a year to spend on things other than filling their tanks. That is the free market in action, folks: consumers consuming, and by so doing creating jobs where they spend that additional money.

Classic, common-sense, evidence-based economics. People making additional purchases with the money they are saving because of lower pump prices. Demand-side economic stimulus via the private sector. Somewhere in the Afterlife, Adam Smith is shouting “See? SEE, motherf***ers? Who’s the man? I toldjaso!”

And none, repeat NONE of those falling petrol prices had Thing One to do with tax breaks for millionaires. No, oil prices are falling because of supply and demand. Once again, class, all together: “supply AND demand”. But of course, “republicans” don’t care about anything but the supply side. Because that side has all the friggin’ millionaires and billionaires that can (and do) buy Teapubbie Senators and Congresscritters.

This blog has ofttimes posted about the complete and utter failure of supply-side “economics”, and the laughable Laffer Curve that it is based upon. (Click the links, Gentle Reader, lots of supporting data to be found if you folllow the breadcrumbs.)

Once again, all of the Post-Reaganista bulls*** has been exposed, in all of its fetid, malodorous splendor. The American economy used to grow, before these dark days, because sensible adults recognized that all sides and strata of the economy are interrelated, and that we needed to manage supply and demand, the rich and the poor, and everything in between. But because of the Voodoo Wing of the “Republican” Party (and by that we mean, “the entire f***ing GOP”) focusing ONLY on the supply side, we have naught but deficts, crumbling edifices, and corruption all around us.

The positive economic effects of falling prices for the consumer prove, once again, that the Teapublican party is, as usual, completely full of s***. Almost as full of it as the idiot voters who voted for them, or failed to vote against them. But hey, enjoy the cheap gasoline while it lasts; until the Teapubbies find yet another way to steal those extra dollars away from us, and hand it back to their supply-side patrons.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

The Torture Report proves, yet again, that Teapublicans are a load of cowards.

Here it is, if you can stand to read it: the report showed how the Bushistas, PNAC types, and “Republicans” in general shat themselves in terror after 9/11, resulting in idiot wars of choice and manifold panic-driven decisions, including the ones that involved torture.

Cowards they are, as has frequently been written on this very blog. But the Torture Report gives a horrifying view into the consequences of that cowardice, that fear, that wimpiness-concealed-by-bravado that characterizes modern Repubs. In their panic-stricken, fear-blinded, gutless, craven states of “mind”, the Bush/Cheney regime lashed out in a manner that was far beyond normal evil:
* People were tortured.
* People were tortured to death.
* The torture was completely f***ing useless, and in fact caused a lot of damage.
* Innocent people were dragooned and tortured.
* “Republicans” proposed, created and implemented these programs.
* “Republicans” STILL think we should be torturing people.

Since then, the GOP has continued to show its yellow bellies on repeated occasion: by making the Prexy keep Gitmo open (said Gitmo being full of tortured people); by not allowing the tortured people to have fair trials; and by trying to cover the whole sickening mess up, even after the world already knows what we did. Cowards, poltroons, pusillanimous dastards, faint-hearted, lily-livered scaredy-cats: that, friends, is what the GOP is composed of.

And the fact that the majority of American voters recently opted to bring in even more GOP “representatives” means that those voters are, what, themselves, exactly? Ponder that one, peeps.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Conservatives are Cowards. Liberals are Brave. Which Do YOU Want Working for You?

At least, that’s this writer’s take on it. If you look at what the Left and Right stand for, it seems pretty clear. If you listen to how they speak, it seems even more so. And when you look at how they behave, it seems irrefutable.

“Conservatives” are afraid of women, so they pass laws disempowering them.
“Conservatives” are afraid of LGBTQ people, so they pass laws disempowering them.
“Conservatives” are afraid of People of Color, so they pass laws disempowering them.
“Conservatives” are afraid of poor folk, so they pass laws disempowering them.
“Conservatives” are afraid of non-Christians, so they pass laws disempowering THEM.

And it doesn’t stop there.

“Conservatives” are afraid of free speech, so they pass laws taking away our free speech.
“Conservatives” are afraid of sex, so they pass LOTS of laws restricting it.
“Conservatives” are afraid of losing elections, so they rig elections and take away non-rich-white males’ voting rights.
“Conservatives” are afraid of their own government, so they buy themselves more guns than any person could ever use.
“Conservatives” are afraid of Ebola, so they want to force medical workers into solitary confinement just because they are scared.

On and on, and it never stops. “Republicans” are a bunch of wimps who, when it comes down to Fight or Flight, chose Flight 100% of the time. Big-talking wussies like Chris Christie and John McCain, who run and hide, cowering in the shadows if  ever they are called on their braggadocio.

Liberals behave, of course, in the exact opposite manner. They confront problems and deal with them. They are “Fighters”, not “Flighters”.

Next Tuesday, you have a choice: give control of the most powerful nation in the world to a load of scaredy-cat, bullying little wankers (Repubs), or a bunch of flawed but courageous Liberals (Democrats). It’s kind of a big deal, Gentle Reader. A pretty big and very consequential choice.

Choose the candidates with guts. Vote out the Wussie NeoConservative Caucus.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky