BASE Jump

I'm trying to give a shit about the "fiscal cliff" but the best I can come up with is a sort of vague irritation that my fellow lefties in D.C. are even considering "compromising" with the GOP on anything about this.

Because "compromise" for the wingtards (which is, functionally, what the modern GOP has become; a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right) means "What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger.

I am pondering a New Year's Message post about the State of the Nation as I see it, but I wanted to take a moment at this point and just marvel that here we are, still mired in the Great Recession, and the Usual Idiots are fulminating and bloviating about deficits and all butt-hurt about raising taxes on the Uberrich.

Yeah, THOSE fuckers;

"That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”

He recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere. A woman to Kay’s right wrinkled her nose: How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”

The unchanged and unchanging reality is that while there are probably several truly wealthy Americans who are deeply committed to this nation and its democracy that the vast majority have no structural reason to be so.

The Rich have always been able to afford their own Nation.

The rest of us need some semblance of a functional polity to have a decent, non-Hobbsean existence. We need police and firefighters and we need to know that they are relatively honest and devoted to our community as a whole and not to its oligarchs. We need a relatively square deal from the legal system and its arbiters; we need to believe that when we come before a judge that what will weigh will be the matters of our case and not our origins or the contents of our purse (although this is already well in doubt - you needn't look hard at the U.S. judicial system to recognize that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor).

We need a government that cares whether we eat clean food, drink clean water, and breathe clean air because we have neither the breadth of information nor the depth of wealth to fight back those who would befoul all three.

For the wealthy all this is a frippery. They don't need this "government"; they can purchase access to safety, to health, to cleanliness. They are free to roam the wide Earth in search of places to make their monies; we are, most of us, tied to where we live now. If that place goes to hell we are trapped in Hell; our plutocratic Lords can flit away as easily as a camel may leap through the eye of a needle.

So I gaze with scorn and loathing upon the gyrations of the Powers that Be along the Potomac now so fretfully aquiver over the notion that our domestic satrapy might be forced to wring another penny or three from their bulging moneybags.

Whilst in the streets the jobless stand in endless lines and below the overhangs and beneath the bridges the women and children stare with empty eyes at the pitiless rain that washes their future away before it.

Go over the "cliff", then, goddamn it.

Let us leap out into the unknown before we "compromise" so much as one more wretched cent to the grasping Midases we have already so wrenchingly enriched.