Yes, many things are beyond repair. Certainly beyond repair by the duopoly, with its played-out corporate and military solutions. As the economy worsens, we'll see that actual solutions require something quite different indeed.
Excited about Obama?
Heh. Get real. Who's excited by tiny, superficial calibrations of Bushism?
As the Times piece makes clear, the last great stand Paul Wellstone took in the senate was to seek bankruptcy protections for those devastated by medical bills.
But taking his marching orders from MBNA, the sleazy, bought-and-sold Biden voted against Wellstone's amendment. That's all you need to know about Biden to find him sickening -- but if that doesn't do it for you, take a good, hard look at his Cheney-like support for destroying Iraq.
No: Edwards is a deceitful, corrupt putz who has set back the populist cause. He shamefully used his trophy-cancer wife for his own career, and quite nearly sank the party's electoral chances in the process. Imagine if he'd already been named Obama's running mate...
So, a big laff at the party-hearties here for their illusions.
And a big thanks to the National Enquirer for doing the journalism that America's useless MSM wouldn't and, apparently, can't. Those MSM job losses and closures can't come fast enough.
James is a delightful social critic and snazzy prose stylist but a terrible, terrible economist. In the years I've followed him, I've lost track of how many times he's predicted an imminent market crash or oil drought.
His problem is that he's blinded by schadenfreude. Dude really can't wait for it all to go to shit. But impotent rage is no model for analysis.
Yes, he's right about our need to abandon the "happy motoring" exurban living arrangement. But he's an amateur pissing in the wind when it comes to predicting collapse which he does with alarming regularity and certainty, later unashamedly professing disbelief that the idiotic culture hasn't hurried up and dissolved on schedule.
For heaven's sake, don't base a single assumption about anything that comes out of his lurid pen. It's no better than turning to L. Ron Hubbard for spiritual guidance. Read him for his other virtues -- the wit and the anger -- and take his doomsday stuff with a big grain of salt.
For less unhinged economics writing, try Nouriel Roubini, Michael Hudson or Calculated Risk instead. Each is a sharp critic of the present order, but with far more credibility than Kunstler.
You've heard the Adder and the bottomless pitt preach to you about kissing and making up. There'll be lots more of such stuff in the weeks and months ahead.
Be strong, instead.
Stand up for your principles and refuse to kowtow. The corporate party leadership and its tiresome hangers-on believe you've had enough of thinking for yourself. They believe you should be satisfied with the little ceremonial dance of the primaries. And now they expect you to shut up and do as they say, even if it means complete reversals and betrayals of what you thought you were fighting for all along.
One word: don't.
You know Bushism is wrong, whether practiced by Republicans or Democrats. You hate it, and you are right to oppose those in the party who advocate soul-destroying, future-sacrificing compromise as a way to amass power for power's sake.
Fuck 'em. Stand, instead, for what you believe in.
If you want change, you'll have to fight for it. You'll have to put your own party's feet to the fire. And you can start by questioning those who preach a sentimental and self-defeating "unity," "reconciliation," and the other blather of surrender.
Yes, it's a fight, my friends. Occasionally, it's a fight against allies, too.
If you shop at Wal-Mart, you might as well stop voting.
You can't fund GOP Amerika with your shopping dollars and expect ever to have anything but GOP rule. Like oil, finance and war, the mono-culture retail store happens to be one of the major right wing arteries.
That many Democrats can't understand that helps to explain why the party is so weak today (and I should hardly need mention that one of the candidates, let's call her Chug-A-Lug, is a former valued Wal-Mart insider).
I "trust" Mrs. Clinton to tell me whatever it is she thinks will get her elected.
I "trust" her to twist any and all facts that suit this end.
I "trust" her to run a murderous foreign policy little different to that of the neo-cons she supported in their invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I "trust" her to make that bizarre, I'm-gonna-eat-your-very-heart smile where she bears her fangs at the camera like a Stepford Wife who's been getting testosterone injections.
