I ain't much of a writah, but I knows me some shit when it hits the fan. Dese mutha fuckas up here in Washington knows the deal, because they ain't takin' no chance on dis new shit in Florida.

America's march backwards continues with this morning's report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which reports that:

(1) Real average weekly earnings fell by half of a percent from July to August after seasonal adjustment, with a 0.1 percent increase in
average hourly earnings more than offset by a 0.6 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).

(2) Average weekly earnings rose by 2.7 percent from August 2004 to August 2005. but again that increase was more than offset by inflation, for a net decrease of 1.1 percent in real wages.

(3) Unadjusted figures showed average weekly earnings of $545.70 in August 2005, compared with $535.57 a year earlier.

According to this week's The Economist magazine, the US is one of a very few industrialized countries experiencing a drop in real wages--what you can afford to buy.

Diminishing real wages, cutbacks in environmental protection, reduction of oversight of stock trading and corporate reporting, diminishing numbers of unionized workers, increasing college tuition, increasing cost of college textbooks, astronomical growth in health care costs, no public transportation tof any value outside a few major cities, gas prices making it increasingly hard for the poor to own a car, dismantlement of federal welfare programs, strident insistence that Social Security begin the process of privatization....

Good news for nostalgia buffs, 19th century, here we come!

As al-Qaeda, teaming up with Sunni insurgents, have declared all-out war on the Shiites in Iraq, it is time for U.S. troops to come home.

I forget what elder taught me that old redneck maxim from my youth, the one that goes "If'n ya toss a rock inta a pack of yappin mutts, the one hollars loudest be the one ya smacked!"

Speaking of Katrina & New Orleans, check out this great insight from "The State and the Flood," by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama]  http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/flood.html
"Can levees and pumps and disaster management really be privatized? Not only can they be; they must be if we want to avoid ever more apocalypses of this sort.  William Buckley used to poke fun at libertarians and their plans for privatizing garbage collection, but this disaster shows that much more than this ought to be in private hands. It is not a trivial issue; our survival may depend on it."

Say, do you suppose the Dutch floodgates which manage to keep out the Sea, are privatized? Is that why they work so much better than the New Orleans levees?  I think not.  I really, really think not.

I think Rockwell and his fellow believers, including all the folks at the Any Rand Institute, see what they want to see, that they find in all human events what they expect to find, simply because they would decline to see anything else.  My personal wish for them is
that they get to experience at least 10 years of living on the absolute edge of society, without any means to advance, without any means to aid those whom they love, in the midst of a society where affluence and wealth are continually jammed down their throats, and where people like Rockwell and the Any Randers tend to shift the blame to the character of the people involved.

One of the reasons yours truly didn't mind being "fired" from the local Southern Baptist Institute Of Mind Control was that more often than not, someone's demented mindset kept getting in the way of the truth.

How long are the American people going to put up with this?

It is amazing to watch what I view as "my country" disappear into a haze of propaganda, fundamentalist vitriol, and radical economic fundamentalism that equates any tax with theft and finds no government to be the best government (yet claims to eschew anarchy).

I can't help but think about when this process started.  And it did start somewhere.  We may never know for certain exactly where and when, but if we could achieve omniscience for a moment, we'd spot it.

From readings, it seems that the invisible part of this process--the seed money, the initial recruitment of articulate lunatics to play the front men, etc.)--began shortly after the 1964 election in which Goldwater went down in flames.

But the visible part, the part that really began the repositioning of this country from one in which there was at least some effort to act together as a society to one one in which government was inherently and irredeemably bad, while personal greed and blind short term self interest is viewed as the highest calling of mankind, really started with Reagan.

A confrontation this morning between an East Texas church and a New Orleans evacuee centered around a sign out in front of Woodland Hills Baptist Church on Old Jacksonville Road in Tyler, Texas:

The sign reads:
"THE BIG EASY IS THE MODERN DAY SODDOM AND GAMORRAH"

Attempts to sidestep federal accountability for needless deaths of American citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by calling it "the blame game" and pretending it's politics as usual totally miss the point.  Roughly 50 percent of Americans did not vote; however, nearly 100 percent of Americans have seen the photos and crying reporters describing the scores of dead elderly and children on the street.   They are outraged, and their outrage grows daily at an administration whose only expeditious action takes place when it's for political reasons, not to save citizens' lives.

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