Some things never change

I woke up this morning worried.

Mostly because my Bride's employer is talking about layoffs. Again. And since she's not just the only regular income at this point but - even more critically - our medical benefit provider that's a little scary.

So, like hanging, the possibility of sudden poverty concentrates my mind wonderfully.

That said, I can't help shaking my head at two fucking haven't-we-done-this-before irritating national news items.

The "big" news item is the now-traditional GQP woody over using the ridiculous "debt ceiling" gimmick to screw the rest of the country out of the New Deal.

I'll spare you my usual "now pay attention" lecture on the why of the New Deal. Suffice to say that the U.S. public, monstrous fool that it is, has no idea what the gutting of Medicare and Social Security would look like because it's been almost a century, but, hint...it looked like this:

You think we have a "homeless problem" now? Yeah...just wait for the New Hoovervilles. Maybe we can call them "McCarthy Manors" to bring the conversation up to date.

The fact that anyone not some sort of lunatic Republican (but I repeat myself) has to argue against the idea that the federal budget needs to be reduced by impoverishing and sickening regular people and not by raising the top marginal rate back to where it was in the Eisenhower Administration and mothballing a couple of carrier air groups just goes to show how utterly fucked our supposed national conversation about this whole business is.

No Republican should be able to even begin to make that nitwit argument without getting pied in the face. That they don't - that the "argument" is actually listened to for more than a nanosecond - tells me that we're pretty fucked already.

So there's that.

The other, national-but-sort-of-local thing is the ridiculous posturing over the murder-by-cop of the latest poor bastard to have been found guilty and executed for the crime of Driving While Black.

Specifically...that somehow what completely exonerates the entire history and existing society of the United States is that the murder cops were all Black themselves.

Okay, now I get that about 99.8% of the American public knows about history what a goat knows about calculus, but the entire notion of one group working for another group (and killing others in theor own group) is as old as...well, Rome, for one. 

Those Black coppers are no different from some Gallic foederatus carrying a sword for the legions against his Belgae or Suebi neighbor. In return for their own protection the foreign mercenaries can and will happily ruin and kill their own; it's one of those deeply human fucked-up things that people do.

This kind of ties in to the nonsense about "critical race theory" being some sort of commie propaganda instead of explaining exactly how - in a nation where a group of people were once defined as 3/5ths of a human because of their skin color - you can end up with that group of people as a largely dispossessed and disenfranchised target of the weight of social, economic, and political punishment but still used as foederati by their masters?

I'd like to think that the people pushing that bullshit know better and are just blowing smoke.

With these knuckleheads it's hard to tell.

And - since we're on this subject - can we just stop with the whole "let's take cops who already think like an occupying army and make them into some sort of Rambo-fantasy outfit designed to occupy fucking Fallujah" thing?

Beyond the stupid idea of WANTING soldier-cops the entire notion that somehow making more and more dangerously-soldierly cops is somehow "keeping us safe"...who fucking thinks that?

The copaganda We the People suck up every day makes it difficult to recognize that, as I said three years ago, these cops AREN'T some sort of "thin blue line" between us and anarchy.

WE are the line. We're, by and large, good citizens and good people. If we weren't no number of soldier-cops could hold us back short of nuking the place from space. 

The cops?

No.

Cops by and large don't "solve" crimes - clearance rates for most city police departments, in every crime category, are embarrassingly low - and they, in the current drive-by-policing-mode of most big departments, don't "prevent" crimes, either.

They largely do what they're designed to do; keep the smelly poor away from the nice white people who pay their salaries, and defend property.

And that's fine, if that's what you want, and many, possibly most Americans either do want that or don't care enough to make a fuss about it.

But that's how our country is, by and large. 

If we don't like it, we need to do the hard work to change it. If we don't want to do that, we should at least have the honesty to tell the poor and dark people who are going to take the pounding that it sucks to be them and then let them decide whether it's worth dying on their feet rather than living on their knees.

I know.

That's pretty bleak.

But I'm feeling pretty bleak this morning, so there it is.

Ceiling

Sigh.

As Driftglass reminds us at the link above, these assholes have been doing this little "locked out of the toilet but I'm busting to piss - on YOU!" debt ceiling dance for thirty years or more.

It's always the same; starve the grannies or we shoot the hostage.

The "reporting" is always the same, too; "conscienceless terrorist holds global economy hostage, but claims to be noble patriot; opinions differ!".

It's always pointless to remind everyone that the GQP is full of shit - if they want to "balance the budget" it's perfectly legit - MORE than legit - to do it on the wallets of billionaires and defense contractors than on granny's grocery budget.

But even if that fact was clearly presented the whole nonsensical farrago is never even remotely close to the truth...because these assholes could give a shit about the budget. 

Proof? The only Trump "accomplishment" - the ridiculously named "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" - blew a massive, WW2-size hole in the federal budget. And, since it gave tax cuts to fatcats, the Republicans were juuuuust fine with that.

The bottom line with these nimrods is that they want to go back to the pre-New Deal nation of their wet dreams, where the poor were really poor and desperate and the fear of starvation kept the smelly proles silent and afraid.

And I remind you that it WAS a dream - for them - and a nightmare for everyone else. It was never a real thing. It's the usual Republican lie about the "good old days".

The "good old days" were pretty shitty for probably about 60% of the people in this country.

Financial "panics" impoverishing working people. Predatory cartels and trusts. Lethal jobs paying shit. Hopeless poverty once you were too old or too broken to work even those awful jobs.

The pre-Deal U.S. was as often as not a contentious snakepit of class and racial hatred, the only time in U.S. history that an actual socialist party got more than a derisively tiny handful of votes...because so many Americans were furiously angry at (imagine!) the fear of starvation and destitution. The examples of Soviet communism and European fascism were looming threats to the American Experiment.

That wily old plutocrat FDR didn't come up with Social Security because he was a hairy-handed Man of the People.

It was because he was a wily plutocrat and knew that if you imiserated the proles hard enough pretty soon they would decide that it was worth their while to try and put you in the barber chair for a close trim from the national razor.

The modern GQP is a lot of things. But "wily" is not even remotely among them.

So we're going to go through this idiotic piss-dance again.

Driftglass has another bit of wisdom about that:

You can be a good American.

(in the sense of believing in the genuine promise of the United States - equal justice under law)

Or a good Republican.

But not both.