What Catfood Commission Debt Deal COSTS Y-O-U/Why You Should Say "NO!!!!!" LOUDLY! (A Stolen Thurber Story With a Clue For All Time)

If you don't study this chart for a few quiet moments, you do not care what Congress and the President have decided to do with your future. (And, no, these people are not your friends.)

[Welcome to Pottersville2 Welcomes All Contributions As Strikes Against Fascists. Woody Guthrie had a sign on his guitar that said "This machine kills fascists" . This blog is another machine in that fight.]

The compromise reached between Congress and President Obama last week requires $1 trillion in cuts from federal budget discretionary programs and an agreement to identify another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction by Thanksgiving. But there is no agreement yet on closing tax breaks for the highest income Americans or ending tax subsidies that pad the bottom line of the most profitable companies — special tax breaks that were declared off the table by Republicans in the recent round of negotiations. Our chart details the choices still to be made.

Do you understand the tasks assigned to the newly appointed so-called (and illegal in my judgment) Super Congress Committee (AKA The Catfood II Commission)? These are the people who will take the political heat off your representatives for getting rid of all your (already paid-for-by-your-FICA-taxes) programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Disability, and any other programs they can think of, in order to finally pay for the Empire's Wars (present and future) and Tax Breaks for the Wealthy/Politically Connected (present and future), which were all brought to US by borrowed money (lots of it from the Chinese!). I can't think of any other way to get the point across any better than to coin terms that embrace this new reality for the 320 million people who live in the USA(!) and will pay for this political/criminally inspired "legal theft" for the rest of their lives (and their childrens' and grandchildrens' and great-grandchildrens' lives). And if you think this hasn't been in the works since the Cheney/Bush Disaster Duo decided to wage "unfunded" (then) wars and a Terror Campaign Against the American Way of Life, then you are still not putting two and two together well enough (mathematically challenged). Jane Hamsher has a nice dissection of this dirty business at her place. I urge you to go read it. You will be wiser as a result. I guarantee it. I know I am, and I thought I understood how bad a bargain this was already. Here are a few of the main arguments:

There are no good choices for this commission. It is designed to protect members of Congress from the electoral repercussions of cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, something that 82% of the country vehemently opposes. A full 60% of the country think the wars are responsible for the deficit, but the money for war will not be touched. The committee exists solely to impose the will of a small minority of oligarchical elites on the nation, and rob millions of Americans of the retirement insurance they have been faithfully and honorably been paying into their entire adult lives. The fact that the committee exists at all represents the breakdown of the social contract. . . . The US government is the largest contractor in the world. Lockheed Martin: $16.7 billion in 2010. Boeing: $10.5 billion. Hewlett-Packard: $2.3 billion. IBM: $1.8 billion. These companies spend millions each year bribing elected officials for for pennies on the dollar in exchange for these contracts. They do not want to be the one on the chopping block. Appointing the Chair of the DSCC to the committee — whose job is collecting campaign contributions on behalf of Senate Democrats — is like putting up a “for sale” sign. The Democratic House appointees will be meaningless. With three Democratic “grand bargain” Senate appointees, there is already a strong majority in favor of cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

. . . None of these 6 Senators is up for reelection soon (Kyl is retiring), and the House members are in safe districts (notice no Paul Ryan). That exacerbates the anti-democratic nature of . . . above.

The only thing these committee members are going to respond to is is their fellow members of Congress who are up for reelection. They need to start telling them that they will be the ones will who bear the burden of whatever decision the committee makes, but they’re all in the throes of an austerity fit. They need to hear from you.

Rise up and let them know that this will NEVER gain your approval, because if they don't hear from you NOW, you will feel their actions every day until you are in the throes of your death fit. (An Aside before we get back to business - Stolen without permission from Down With Tyranny (sorry!) who lifted it from Keith Olberman's posting of his recitation of the Thurber story at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in June of 2011 (with the permission of Thurber's daughter, Rosemary). Read it. You'll probably steal it too.)

The Peacelike Mongoose

In cobra country a mongoose was born one day who didn't want to fight cobras or anything else. The word spread from mongoose to mongoose that there was a mongoose who didn't want to fight cobras. If he didn't want to fight anything else, it was his own business, but it was the duty of every mongoose to kill cobras or be killed by cobras. "Why?" asked the peacelike mongoose, and the word went around that the strange new mongoose was not only pro-cobra and anti-mongoose but intellectually curious and against the ideals and traditions of mongoosism. "He is crazy," cried the young mongoose's father. "He is sick," said his mother. "He is a coward," shouted his brothers. "He is a mongoosexual," whispered his sisters. Strangers who had never laid eyes on the peacelike mongoose remembered that they had seen him crawling on his stomach, or trying on cobra hoods, or plotting the violent overthrow of Mongoosia. "I am trying to use reason and intelligence," said the strange new mongoose. "Reason is six-sevenths of treason," said one of his neighbors. "Intelligence is what the enemy uses," said another. Finally, the rumor spread that the mongoose had venom in his sting, like a cobra, and he was tried, convicted by a show of paws, and condemned to banishment. MORAL: Ashes to ashes, and clay to clay, if the enemy doesn't get you your own folks may.

More than worth it. S

Life In An Age Of Looting "Some will rob you with a sixgun and some with a fountain pen" Phil Rockstroh As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience manic upswings and panicked swoons, the financial elite (and their political operatives) are arrayed in a defensive posture, even as they continue their global-wide, full-spectrum offensive vis-à-vie The Shock Doctrine. Concurrently, corporate mass media types fret over the reversal of fortune and trumpet the triumphs of the self-serving agendas of Wall Street and corporate swindlers . . . even as they term a feller, in ill-gotten possession of a flat screen television, fleeing through the streets of North London, a mindless thug. According to the through-the-looking-glass cosmology of mass media elitists, when a poor person commits a crime of opportunity, his actions are a threat to all we hold dear and sacred, but, when the hyper-wealthy of the entrenched looter class abscond with billions, those criminals are referred to as our financial leaders. Regardless of the propaganda of "free market" fantasists, the great unspeakable in regard to capitalism is its wealth, by and large, is generated for a ruthless, privileged few by the creation of bubbles, and, when those bubbles burst, the resultant economic catastrophe inflicts a vastly disproportionate amount of harm upon those - the laboring and middle classes - who generate grossly inequitable amounts of capital for the elitist of the fraudster class . . . by having the life force drained from them by the vampiric set-up of the gamed system. Woody Guthrie summed up the situation in these two (unfortunately) ageless stanzas: "Yes, as through this world I've wandered I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a sixgun, And some with a fountain pen. "And as through your life you travel, Yes, as through your life you roam, You won't never see an outlaw Drive a family from their home." - excerpt from Pretty Boy Floyd. Although, at present, U.S. bank vaults contain little tangible loot for a Pretty Boy Floyd-type outlaw to boost. How would it be possible for an old school bank robber such as Floyd to make-off with a haul of funneling electrons? Here's the lowdown: The Wall Street fraudsters of the swindler class want to refill their coffers and line their pockets (that is, offshore accounts) with Social Security and Medicare funds. That's the nature of the unfolding scam, folks. Oligarchic rule has always been a system defined by legalized looting that leaves a wasteland of want, deprivation, and unfocused rage in its wake. Consequently, in the U.K. (and beyond): When poor people's hopes dry up, cities become a tinderbox of dead dreams, and we should not be stricken with shock and consternation when these degraded places are set aflame, nor should we be surprised when the bribed, debt-beholden and commercial media propaganda-bamboozled middle class (who helped create the wasteland with their arid complicity) cry out (predictably) for police state tactics to quell the fiery insurrection.

And the police are coming to quell the middle class riots too. Get organized! _________________________