ma·lev·o·lent? ?/m??l?v?l?nt/ –adjective
1. wishing evil or harm to another or others; showing ill will; ill-disposed; malicious: His failures made him malevolent toward those who were successful.
2. evil; harmful; injurious: a malevolent inclination to destroy the happiness of others.
3. Astrology . evil or malign in influence.

That is what fully 60% of the cuts made by our Galtian overlords this past week are.

Remember this one-the next time you get on a plane:

PASSENGERS fainted when a 5-foot hole opened in the roof of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 flying from Phoenix to Sacramento last week. The most frightening moment may have been when, as one passenger said, “You could look out and see blue sky.”

[But] on [that] very day … the House of Representatives passed a bill likely to make it more difficult to detect and prevent midair ruptures, metal fatigue and other serious flight risks.

The bill would cut $4 billion from the Federal Aviation Administration’s $37 billion budget. Representative John L. Mica, a Florida Republican who is the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, says the bill would streamline F.A.A. programs and promised the bill would “not negatively impact aviation safety.

After all-you must be just a leech on society if you don’t own your own Gulfstream.

H/T to Balloon-Juice.

I am a HUGE Jethro Tull fan. So much so-I am scheming to get to one of their performances when they tour the US this summer. So I found this unique video made with Ian Anderson and Astronaunt Cady Coleman to be pretty cool. She herself being an accomplished flautist.

Bonus points if you can name the song!

And while Yuri Gagarin was an astronaunt-he was still a commie astronaunt. How about a shout out for the Mercury astronauts too? It is what it was. After all-I spent the better part of my adult life prepared to help give the Russians a beating they would remember for generations. Old habits die hard.

That would be what Allen West seems to appear to thrive on doing.

Earlier this week-our boy Allen West once again showed his “Reader’s Digest” understanding of history when he decided to play the Churchill card:

Mr. Speaker: Will we be Chamberlain or will we be Churchill? Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1937 and 1940, will forever be known for his foreign policy approach of appeasement. Prime Minster Chamberlain, even with Germany’s increasing aggression in Europe, turned a blind eye to the impending danger and did not prepare his nation for war…

Some would argue that comparing World War II to the debate on the budget for Fiscal Year 2011 is not an appropriate comparison. However, I would argue that Winston Churchill was prepared to lead his country courageously, in the way that would ensure England’s future. Today we are also faced with the question of protecting America’s future…

The comnparison is inapt for a whole host of reasons-not the least of which is that when it came to financial adminstration, Churchill did not exactly excel. After all, during the period he was Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill-did not exactly fit  the “exceptional America” mold:

As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s he was an equally staunch and eloquent critic of arms budgets, particularly those of the Royal Navy. Motivated by a desire for funds to reduce taxes and increase social spending, as well as a sincere belief that no enemy could or would challenge Britain’s strategic position in the foreseeable future, Churchill campaigned vigorously for strategic complacency and against naval expenditure throughout his tenure as Chancellor. He promoted the formal assumption that any war was at least ten years away and he strenuously opposed Admiralty plans for warship construction, naval aviation development, and a Singapore naval base. The result was a seriously weakened Royal Navy in the following decade when Churchill demanded a more assertive British foreign policy.

Furthermore, as William Manchester pointed out in his writings on Churchill, he was responsible for one of the most disasterous economic moves to befall Great Britain in the 20th century-namely its return to the gold standard in 1925. This led to a disastorous set of events in 1926 that hampered Great Britain for a long time to come:

The effect of going back to gold, said Beaverbrook, was ‘making yet more difficult the selling of British goods abroad and so aggravating unemployment at home.’ Events soon proved Keynes and Beaverbrook right. English goods which had been priced at eighteen shillings in foreign markets now cost twenty – a full pound. This handicapped all British exporters; some became hopelessly crippled. The owners of British collieries could not compete with German and American coal if they charged higher rates. Their only alternative was to cut their miners’ wages. That was ominous. Coal mining, Britain’s basic industry, was also the most highly organized and politicized; Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour party, had been a Scottish miner. The miners’ union protested the drop in pay. The Trade Union Congress, or TUC, the English equivalent of America’s AFL-CIO, promised to back the miners all the way, and Labour MPs declared their solidarity with them. In July 1925, two days before the cuts were to go into effect, Baldwin temporized. The Treasury, he said, would subsidize the mine owners while a commission headed by Sir Herbert Samuel investigated the situation. The prime minister bought nine months of labour peace, but the cost – first estimated at UKP 10,000,000 but ultimately UKP 23,000,000 – was exorbitant. Churchill had agreed to the stopgap, but he protested, with the rest of the cabinet, when the prime minister proposed to extend it. Keynes was in the thick of things. He asked: ‘Why should coal miners suffer a lower standard of life than other classes labour? They may be lazy, good-for-nothing fellows who do not work so hard or so long as they ought to. But is there any evidence that they are more lazy or more good-for-nothing than other people?’ They were, he said, ‘victims of the economic juggernaut,’ pawns being sacrificed to bridge the gap, required by the return to gold, between $4.40 and $4.86. ‘The plight of coal miners,’ he concluded, ‘is the first – but not, unless we are very lucky, the, last – of the Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill’.

And of course our boy West ignores the fact that in 1940, Lend Lease had not started. The Neutrality act was drying up Britains cash reserves and it was only when FDR was able to provide a massive “stimulus”-Lend Lease- that Britian was able to start the road to break even. Read some alternate history sometime about what would have happened if the US had not come into the war when it did.

And it would serve Mr. West to remember that the British people bounced Sir Winston at the end of the war. Hopefully that will provide a precedent for our current period-and provide for an equally unceremonious defeat of idiots like West, sooner rather than later.

But it is true to form for West-who never lets the facts get in the way of a good sound bite-that teabaggers will like.

I suppose we should get the greetings and pleasantries out of the way first.

Paul Ryan, please DROP DEAD!

That’s how much I loathe his proposed and supposedly serious budget. None of his ideas are new, they are based on fuzzy math and proposals that don’t work. But the selfish throngs of the tea party as well as many journalists who should know better, are in love with Ryan and his plan because it promises “tough love”. After all to a teabagger- it’s not good government if it’s not abusive. It’s good governance BECAUSE someone is getting screwed. The alternative, that being generous and kind could have no downsides, is just incomprehensible to Ryan and the ignorant masses that support him and his fellow despot’s like minded conservatives.

The quick description of Ryan’s proposal can be summed up thusly:

Guess what, Andrew. Paul Ryan just released his very “serious” plan with massive tax cuts, huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, a repeal of the ACA with no replacement (throwing 30 million off insurance), and putting in place a system that will cost the most vulnerable more, do nothing to stem the cost of medical care, and still does nothing to help our long term financial condition. We’ve now seen the GOP plan, and Alan Grayson nailed it a couple years back. “Die quickly” is the Republican position……

Is this my “shared sacrifice,” and I’ll be told to eat a bag of salty dicks while they cut taxes for the Koch brothers and the rest of their fat cat donors and big business?

Yep-that’s exactly what Paul Ryan wants you to do. Your only choice is to decide if you want mustard on those salty dicks or not.

I’ll say one thing for the Tea Party, they have made selfishness completely fashionable these days. It used to be,  in the bad old days before GWB became President, that the GOP had to hide its real agenda of screwing the average citizen to support the rich corporate executives behind some sort of smoke screen, e.g. “The Contract with America” etc. Now they don’t even bother-they just come right out and say it straight: “We want to fuck you over and we don’t care if you don’t like it.” So long as our Galtian overlords can be assured of that their costs for existing in society are reduced to at or near zero-that would appear to be the only thing that matters.

There is nothing serious about what Ryan is proposing-except the consequences to all but the wealthiest Americans. Furthermore, by ignoring what put us in this mess-three wars funded off the books by government borrowing, which was necessitated by a completely unnecessary and unaffordable tax cut-Ryan proposes to shift the burden of the “cure” to a demographic least equipped to be able to pay the bill. His specific overlooking of any reduction in the defense budget or any of the parts of the security structure, and the almost religious acceptance of the idea that taxes cannot be raised under any circumstances means that he has deliberately chosen to increase the level of pain involved in the solution, and more importantly left the GOP with little room to compromise on a real plan that might stand a chance of working its way through labyrinth of the legislative process.

So if it doesn’t stand a chance of passing why are you worried about it?

Because the caliber of your average GOP legislator has changed. Now they elect lunatics and assholes like Allen West and Michelle Bachmann and  instead of shunting them to a well deserved place on the sidelines-they are given up front placement in the party. These people are so dedicated to the prospect of destroying anything that may be even remotely associated with improving American society as a whole, that they are willing to burn down the house in order to “save it”. Witness their rhetoric about a government shutdown.

Very well then, what of the specifics of Ryan’s plan?

Well first of all his math doesn’t really work. It’s based on some flawed and overly optimistic assumptions about job growth which quite simply are not being backed up by current trends in the economy. The plan assumes that tax cuts will set off a literally unprecedented boom. Most economists think that is the budgetary equivalent of smoking crack.  Automation, out sourcing, and improved productivity-as well as a large shift from a manufacturing based economy to a service sector based economy are all market forces that will push back against Paul Ryan’s trickle-down economics.

Another glaring omission of the Ryan plan is that he assumes revenues into the federal coffers will remain constant at 19% of GDP. The CBO and The Economist (hardly bastions of left wing sympathy) show pretty valid reasons why that cannot be the case. Especially when, thanks to the way Ryan structures the taxes-only the top 20% of Americans benefit. He ignores some of the great uncertainties-such as the toxic effects of wars without end on world energy prices and its effect in  upping the expenditures of the Pentagon. Because Ryan  adheres with religious faith to the idea that no new taxes can be levied-it makes his assumption that non-defense expenditures can be squeezed to 6% and eventually to 3.5% of GDP is a preposterous assumption-made more so because Ryan  never  tells us how he is going to do it. What Ryan’s plan really does is to create the same pre-conditions that raised the deficit in 2009-revenues dropped off precipitously as a result of the recession.

Then there is the worst part of his proposal and the one that potentially could affect me if it catches on. His treatment of Medicare. There is so much that is flawed with it-I am not even sure where to begin. I think I will start with Ezra Klein:

1) Ryan’s suggestion that Medicare and Medicaid can or should be held to the rate of inflation is absurd. His budget has no way of making that happen, save for draconian cuts in both (this goes far, far beyond “means-testing”). And you don’t have to take it from me. Alice Rivlin, an eminent budget expert and co-author of Ryan’s original Medicare proposal, will tell you the same thing. But those cuts are how he saves so much money going forward. They’re the assumptions that make the rest of the budget work. And they’re essentially no less ridiculous than predicting that unemployment under Ryan’s budget will drop to 2.8 percent.

2) The idea that conservatives believe the savings in Ryan’s plan are realistic while those in the Affordable Care Act aren’t boggles the mind. For one thing, Ryan includes the supposedly unrealistic savings from the Affordable Care Act; they can’t be realistic in Ryan’s budget but not realistic in the ACA. For another, the ACA’s savings are more modest, and the law has many, many more ways to attain them than simply saying “the government promises not to spend more than inflation, even if spending less means millions of seniors and disabled Americans will have no health care.” I spent a lot of time taking conservative arguments on the ACA’s half-dozen cost control mechanisms seriously — including in a conversation with, yes, Paul Ryan — so watching Ryan propose this budget is both frustrating and disillusioning.

3) I suspect Ryan capped Medicare and Medicaid at the rate of inflation rather than at GDP+1% because when he used GDP+1%, he couldn’t get the numbers to add up without including some tax increases. (Skippy-san comment: Which is why Rivilin won’t support the plan-something she has been very clear about, and Ryan has lied about).

Furthermore, Ryan wants to repeal the ACA-which would thus repeal two key parts of making private insurance type plans work for Medicare: A mandate for health insurance when you are younger ( in order to make preventive care available-and thus make you healthier going into your golden years) and the requirement for insurers to insure people with pre-existing conditions. Life happens-by the time most of us are 65 most of us are going to have something wrong with us that insurers won’t like.

There is no mechanism in his plan to prevent the worst abuses of insurance companies from being inflicted on seniors. There is not mechanism for cost control-and since it’s individuals dealing with companies, they can simply use a “divide and conquer strategy” to push up individual premium prices.  The thing that works with a large entity bargaining is the power of the dollars they bring to the table. With the right regulations in place it can work to keep the greed of insurance companies in check. Ryan’s plan is a gift to big pharma and big insurance by giving them a windfall-with no responsible action required on their part.

As Paul Krugman points out, the plan “does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs. The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care. “

Ryan specifically does not address defense spending, something that eats up 27% of the federal budget. You aren’t a serious deficit person if you don’t address this in your plan. He doesn’t even begin to imagine a world where US forces are not constantly at war-which is a pretty glaring omission. The US has it in its power to remove its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan this year-with direct savings because of that withdrawal. Even assuming we don’t do that-long term there needs to be a major strategic review of US aims with an eye towards some degree of global retrenchment. We can’t afford our “empire with no perks”.

Similarly, Ryan really does not address Social Security-except to say that folks under 55 can divert a portion of their payroll taxes to private plans. As I have noted previously, without a control over how this is done, it will drop a windfall of cash in the hands of the same jerks who gave us the financial crisis to begin with. It would have been better to leave Medicare alone and attack Social Security through a transition to a CPF type of arrangement. (Starting with people under 35 and working upward from there over time.)

Probably the worst thing about the Ryan plan is its overall cruelty and transference of the burden of life’s hardships to individuals who can least afford to be put in this position. Sure, the government needs to limit taxpayers’ exposure to Medicare cost inflation. I think this plan is a fundamentally immoral way to do it.  His Medicaid plan of block grants is simply deferred murder of the poor.

 I am not diminishing the need to do something about the deficit-but you cannot tax cut your way to Nirvana. There are other ways to accomplish Ryan’s goals-through a balance of well thought out spending changes, targeted tax increases,  and decreases and a realignment of the way money flows in this country. But our boy Paul is looking at none of those proven methods. We know why-he has selfish children to appease. But making rich people richer-while making the rest of us poorer is not the way to do it.

So Paul Ryan-please go jump off a cliff. And take your boy Allen West with you when do.

If you look to the left you will find that today is the 66th anniversary of the sinking of IJS Yamato by American aircraft and naval gunfire. A few years back I wrote this post about the movie made in Japan that talked about it.

Last night was Easter, but unless you have cable you would not know it from watching the TV over here. Only by watching American news did I know it was the holiest day of the Christian calendar.

The TV watching was OK though because they ran the TV debut of Otokotachi no Yamato (???????The men of Yamato). This is a movie that was released in 2005 and did a pretty good box office here in Japan. It tells the story of the crew of the World War II Japanese battleship Yamato. It was directed by Junya Sato and is based on the book by Jun Henmi.

So I exercised my rights as purchaser of the TV and said I wanted to watch the movie. S.O. fussed for a while then stomped off to the other room to use her laptop. (I am slowly but surely getting her to use her machine, rather than the desktop after I showed her that yes, she could use the laptop I gave her 3 years ago with the wireless network I installed.). She came back from time to time to fuss that I had the TV up too loud. I have to turn it up or I cannot break out individual words in Japanese because the actors speak so fast. S.O. hates that, but its my only hope to figure out what they are saying. That’s the difference between being proficient in a language vs being fluent. I’m the former with a big desire to become the latter. I have a long way to go.

To make the movie they built a 3/4 scale mock up of the real battleship. Go here to see what it looked like. The rest was done with computer graphics, especially the attack by American aircraft at the end of the movie. Its pretty graphic nonetheless and the battle scenes are not for the squeamish.

However, while it is a movie about the war, its not a war movie per se. Its a drama, about how individual Japanese dealt with the fact that deep down in their hearts, beginning in 1944 many realized that the war was going to end badly for Japan. Despite that, they served and manned up the great ship for her final mission in 1945. The movie starts some years later when the daughter of one of the Sailors, hunts up and old fisherman and persuades him to take her on the 15 hour voyage to the site of the wreck, so she can make peace with her father. As it turns out he is actually a survivor of the battle himself. The movie goes back and forth between conversation on the fishing boat and scenes of the young Sailors-both aboard the ship and home on shore leave in Japan. The transitions between the two are cleverly done.

The movie is very sad. It does not glorify the war at all-in fact it points out well the pointlessness of war. The characters all bear themselves as if they know what fate awaits them, but they do their duty regardless. They are portrayed as human beings with hopes and dreams, all of which were betrayed by a fate that tied them to a government that led them to destruction. Even the officers of the ship seem to know this and bear themselves as if they know it.

Look for yourself in the trailer.

A another video can be found here.

I’ve been wanting to see the movie since it came out 15 months ago. It got huge advertising on TV and in the train stations with big posters and hanging signs in the trains. I wanted to see it in a movie theatre, but its better I saw it this way. I could use my electronic dictionary for a lot of words. And drink beer………

One of the interesting things about living here in Japan has been to see the story of the Second World War told from the other side of the hill. While it is true that the Japanese really do try to diminish the war and its impact ( the S.O. hates talking about it and has no interest in going to see historical sights from the war-I had to beg her to go with me to the Arizona….), nonetheless in this case they told a good story. If you can watch this movie, I strongly recommend it.

Couple of trivia points. I learned that the hats of the Sailors had the old name of the Japanese Navy on it and were read from right to left. (The moniker literally translates to Larger Japan Empire Navy). Also, I never figured out the distinction of the uniforms. Some Sailors wore Navy uniforms, others were dressed in clothes that looked more like the Army. Despite the fact that they all had anchors on them. Don’t have an explanation, I just found it interesting.

There are probably those who see in the recent spate of World War II movies an plot to condition the public to a new militarism by Japan. I don’t buy that. What I can believe is that there is a desire on the part of some Japanese to better understand their history. Regardless of the motivation, I thought this movie was a story pretty well told. I give it a 6. (out of 10).

I’ll be writing about Paul Ryan this weekend-but the folks at Esquires blog have sized him pretty well:

We are in an age dominated on one side by the New Politics of Sadism. Hurtful policies are enacted, not because of any logical benefit they might bring, but specifically because they hurt people the Republicans want to hurt. The thoroughgoing abandonment of the notion of a political commonwealth, cheered on by degrees since the elevation of Ronald Reagan and whatever ideas people could cram into his empty head, has reached the point among American conservatives where it is now the kind of faith you find in the most unshakable of perversions. It manifests itself everywhere. It’s expressed politely by people like that intolerable foof, David Brooks, who’s never taken a position in his life that cost him so much as a dinner invitation. On the radio, and on cable news, it’s expressed crudely by people who are far more honest about their contempt for their fellow citizens.

And the sadism is running now through the institutions of government. We have made our peace with torture to the extent that support for it now is as much a litmus test for being a Republican as opposition to abortion is. (The Democrats, of course, choose to deplore it without condemning it.) The Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the recent Thompson V. Connick decision — delivered, fittingly enough, by Justice Clarence Thomas, the walking Freudian petri dish who once opined that he saw nothing wrong with chaining inmates to a post in the hot sun — pretty much advises a man who was stuck on death row for fourteen years because of egregious prosecutorial misconduct to stop wasting the Supreme Court’s time and be grateful his sorry ass wasn’t fried a decade ago.

And, in the Congress, there is Congressman Paul Ryan, who is angling right now to make a career out of political sadism.

Arrived back in Shopping Mall at 4AM last night-by bus.

Long story-and none of it good. Primarily it was a comedy of errors by people who were not prepared to deal with 47 angry and tired people when the aircraft weather diverted into southern Alabama.

I’m tired and grumpy today. Reason #126 why American airlines suck the big one.

That a member of the United States Senate would say this:

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Congress might need to explore the need to limit some forms of freedom of speech, in light of Tennessee pastor Terry Jones’ Quran burning, and how such actions result in enabling U.S. enemies.

“I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war,” Graham told CBS’ Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” Sunday.

“A great idea’ eh? Actually its the law of the land, moron.

I find what Graham said disturbing for a whole host of reasons. The problem is not that America has wacko preachers, who are so f*cked in the head they think burning Korans and holding mock trials of Mohammed to be the answer to what ails us-the problem is that a great number of Afghan people are so f*cked in the head that they have to riot and kill people ostensibly for the purpose of showing how upset they are about it. That’s who needs to be looked at-and more importantly why we still feel some sort of an obligation to lift a finger to defend such people, in an ongoing war that is never going to end.

At a time we think we are spending too much money-and we could save a great deal of money by leaving them to their Godforsaken country and their apostate religion.

Koran burning is obviously a disgusting act of disrespect and stupidity. But that very kind of act is what the First Amendment is designed to protect. I know because it has to be that way or the first amendment has no real meaning.  The Supreme Court just reaffirmed that interpretation in the Phelps case-and as reprehensible as Fred Phelps is, the court had no choice but to rule as they did.

And finally, don’t forget that history is replete with authoritarian moves that started as “wartime security measures.” Since this war is never going to end- liberties taken away by wartime are permanently taken away.

(Shakes head in disbelief.)

Well. thank God it’s April 2nd and I go back to being a heathen again.

And where I am right now is a good place to be a heathen-staying in a beach house on Emerald Isle NC with my Dad and my sister and her friends in an huge ocean front beach house. I am only here for the weekend(I am the driver to get my Dad back home for some appointments next week-in order to allow my sister to enjoy the week here). Interestingly enough the movie, On the Beach was playing when we turned the TV on. The irony is not lost on me.

So I may or may not post again this weekend-but I came across this article in Vanity Fair, and I just had to share it.

One of the biggest frustrations I have when I talk about how bad America’s growing income inequality is for the country-is a “so what” attitude among the less educated members of the tri-corner hat wearing brigade. They aspire to be like their wealthy overlords-without understanding that they are acting against their own self interests. They think its all about “wealth that has been earned”.

Except of course in many cases it hasn’t been-its been stolen through through legal and illegal means.

Joseph Stieglitz has documented many of the reason our ignorant fools tea party folks should care. And its a great rendition:

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret……………..

When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

The whole article is worth the time to read.

I have seen the light. I have decided to join the Tea Party and buy all the heavy caliber handguns I can get my hands on. I now know that rich corporations have nothing but my best interest at heart-and that I was wrong to insist that maybe the rest of us should share in their prosperity. I accept George Bush as the new patron saint of the GOP and vow to do what I can to find the birth certificate.

The crusades in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan were just expressions of the might of a quiet superpower backed into a corner. I now realize that the use of force on behalf of worthless Arabs is fully justified just because the President says it is. I now realize that all the world will love us when we invade their countries and will welcome us with open arms.

I apologize to Donald Rumsfeld for all the mean things I said about him over the years. I will joyfully fork over 36% of my retirement to my ex-wife and recognize that her sloth is somehow a blessing to us all. I will never lust after another woman just because she has big boobs and a nice ass. I will recognize the role of women and gays in our new diverse military structure and welcome the strength that diversity gives us.

Now if you will excuse me-I need to go write out a 1000 dollar check to Sarah PAC.