And Here We Are
By David Glenn Cox

And so here we are, living in an environment Huxley or Orwell could forecast, but could never foretaste. It is the enormity of it and the stealthiness of it, which gets next to you. Shoving money through the slots, as the man with gun and uniform watches you from the corner of the grocery store on a Friday night. It requires the suspension of belief and the acceptance of an un-reality, as Barack Obama names a former cable industry lobbyist to head the Federal Communications Commission and the Republicans create a false flag issue out of Benghazi.

It is the one-party state creating a smoke screen, diverting attention from the real issues of domestic policy. Divide and conquer, always keep’em guessing, always leave’em laughing. Jack Lew is a former hedge fund manager for Citigroup and manager of its alternative investments unit, with oversight over Citigroup’s subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Hong Kong and he’s the new Treasury Secretary.

Sally Jewell worked for Mobil as an engineer in the oil fields of Oklahoma from 1978 to 1981. From there she moved on to banking at Security Pacific and West One Bank, before moving on to the Titanic disaster of modern banking, the ill-fated S.S. Washington Mutual. Jewell escaped the disaster by jumping ship as the iceberg approached, moving on to become the CEO of REI sporting goods. She’s the Secretary of the Interior now and her qualifications for the job are based solely on chairing several green committees, versus a twenty-plus-year career in oil, finance and banking. Who would a thunk it; an oil engineer with background in banking and the Republicans said what?

http://www.leftistreview.com/2013/05/21/and-here-we-are/davidcox/

By David Glenn Cox

“A nation is truly corrupt, when, after having, by degrees lost its character and liberty, it slides from democracy into aristocracy or monarchy; this is the death of the political body by decrepitude.” – Robespierre

Congratulations, if you’re an hourly worker in the United States you’ve earned a .02 cent per hour raise last month! (April) Now of course, after earning almost a whole extra dollar per week, tax and investment advice should be sought out immediately. If you work in information services for a living, your hours worked increased this month, by one tenth of an hour. 2,691,000 Americans work in the “information” category and I guess they’re lucky to be working that extra fractional hour, even if there are 9,000 less of them, working this month over last.

For everyone else, all 155 million of us American workers, hours worked in every category either fell or stayed the same. The propaganda networks will trumpet 165,000 “new” jobs and that’s Winston Smith’s way of telling you, everything is so much better now. Come out; come out where ever you are! Ollie, Ollie Ocean free! But under the veneer is another story entirely, a story that you will not see on TV or Radio.

While 165,000 new jobs were created last month, 210,000 workers joined the labor force.

The number of Americans working Part-Time, for economic reasons rose sharply by 278,000 in April, to nearly 8,000,000 people. Eight million people in this country that want a Full-Time job, but can’t find one.

Part-Time due to slack work or business conditions rose to 5,250,000.
The number of Americans who could only find part-time work last month declined by 49,000.

Workers marginally attached to labor force were up by 21,000 and discouraged workers are also up by 32,000 workers.

Nearly 2,000,000 Americans now work two or more part-time jobs, an increase of over 20,000 since last April.

So just where are all these “new” jobs? Well, they’re not in mining or logging and not in construction or manufacturing. They’re not in durable goods or non-durable goods; they’re not in wholesale trade or utilities and even our friends in “Information services” lost workers. The new jobs are to be found in private-service providing, 137,000 of 165,000 jobs are in the service industry.

Trade, Transport – 9,000
Retail – 13,000
Financial services – 19,000
Professional and business services – 50,000
Leisure and hospitality services – 36,000
Education & Health Services – 24,000
Other services – 4,000

Realty Trac reported this month, “The number of homes overall in foreclosure or bank-owned rose by 9 percent to 1.5 million properties nationally in the first quarter of 2013 compared to a year ago.” Another 11 million homes remain under water, which brings us to Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Margaret Thatcher was a Neoliberalist politician, same as Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Duh be you and Barack Obama. And Neoliberalist politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, believe just like Thatcher, that society, American society is only an artificial construct; they believe that it only exists because people say it does.

They believe we’re all just free individuals and we might be our brother’s keeper but definitely not yours. They believe the only rights which actually exist, are property rights; everything else, like society itself is an artificial construct. The Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta and the Constitution are all non-sense, to their way of thinking government owes nothing to the sick, the infirm or the dying.

From Wikipedia:

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By David Glenn Cox

We have reached a point in our lives, where from the summit of a high hill we can look back at the road which has delivered us here. Tis a tale of woe in a fairyland dream, sugar-coated pabulum, televised non-sense and unrealized dreams. It is hard to look back, almost painful, as yesterday weighs heavy in your pockets, so you try not to bring it along.

I have come full circle in this new reality, this new duality. This new America, where if we say we can’t see you, then you’re not there. Behind the façade you can see the shadows of agenda, a war on the post office, a war on public employees and educators. It is a complete and total deconstruction of society and of the world, which we once knew. As a young man, I’d wondered what it must have been like to have lived in the third Reich. Trapped as just some plain Joe, watching madness coming into season, what would your consciousness say when there was real money on the line?

Five years ago, I was of the middle class; today I’m of the missing class. There are fewer Americans working today than there were in December. During the same time period, the civilian labor force has fallen by over half a million workers. The official numbers of those unemployed also fell. But strangely, the numbers of persons in the Civilian Non-institutional Population rose by almost 600,000 since December. Do you see it; do you understand what it really means?

Not in Labor Force

Mar. 2012 – 88,288,000
Feb. 2013 – 90,100,000
Mar. 2013 – 90,483,000

The number of men 20 years and over, not in the labor force has grown by almost one million. One million American men, not just unemployed or discouraged workers, but men no longer counted as in the labor force in a single year. Rather than fix the economy, they just said they fixed the economy and the media aped along.

The average number of hours worked from March 2012 to March 2013 is virtually unchanged; there is no improvement anywhere to be seen. Retail trade employment lost 24,000 jobs in 31 days of March; clothing accessories stores lost 500 employees per day in March. Building materials and garden supply stores lost 10,000 people or 322 workers per day, for everyday of the month. It would seem reasonable to assume that if there were any and I do emphasize, any growth, to be seen in this economy, it would be reflected in garden supply store sales in the spring.

Appliance stores lost 6,000 employees last month, I guess we’re all buying our washers, driers and refrigerators on the Internet these days, but more likely, it’s Craigslist. But employment also fell in mining, manufacturing, wholesale trade, transportation, warehousing, information and financial services. Employment fell from the mine to the check-out line, in this all mighty consumer economy of ours. At a time when legitimate government would be trying to bolster the economy, this government terminated 3,000 Postal employees per week in March.

The unemployed are pushed through the sausage factory, where you don’t ask where it came from unless you want to go there yourself. Through the steam pipes, through the valves and dials, finally poured down the drain pipe of untreated effluent, the waste product of a collapsing economy, deposited into the invisible sea of the missing class.

Through years of electric propaganda Americans have reached a point where it is now patriotic to hate Americans. This is not to say we haven’t hated each other before, but in the past they were at least selective about it. In times past, we hated groups by race or creed, based on grandpa’s hatreds. Clownish playschool Neo-Nazis or robed Klansman, scary only in the way an unchained pit bull is scary. Today our enemies are school teachers, municipal workers, postal workers, Union workers or the poor. All to be disparaged in the press round the clock by the Corporate News Networks.

The city of Detroit is now in the hands of an unelected Overseer, appointed by the governor to institute policies the electorate find unpalatable. Who is to blame for this American city’s descent into ruins? Who is to blame for this catastrophe? According to the blogosphere, it was caused by unions, blacks and decades of democratic politicians. Collective amnesia, plug and play racism, as the paid horde shouts for Barabbas.

It is a strange psychosis where a people profess a love for their country and its Democratic processes, while despising its citizens. Call it cardboard cut-out patriotism or flag waving from behind the bars.

Consumer Price Index

Food at Home – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 1.2 % (Not seasonally adjusted)
Motor Fuels – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 3.3%
Electricity – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up .8%
Apparel – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 2.4%
Shelter – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 2.3%
Medical Care– Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 3.9%

Official Consumer Price Index rate of inflation – 2.07%

Average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees on non-farm payrolls

March 2012- $ 19.68
March 2013- $ 20.03

The average wage increase was .35 cents an hour, that’s average, now for retail workers it was .14 cents an hour and with an average work week of 33 hours their wages grew just $ 4.62 before taxes and maybe $2.50 after. There is no wage growth in this economy for anyone, regardless of what you do or who you are.

If you take the numbers listed by the bureau of Labor Statistics for duration of unemployment and add the numbers up, currently they stand at 15.68 million. If you do the same with last years numbers they total 15.9 million:

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The Lights of Perverted Science
By David Glenn Cox

During the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill said something which was quite radical for the time and largely went unnoticed, but in our modern 21st Century existence, perhaps it needs to be reconsidered.

“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

By “perverted science”, Churchill meant radar and proximity fuses. This was before the buzz bombs or the V-2. It is such an explicit and exquisite term, perverted science, encapsulating and distilling knowledge without benefit, counterproductive, Mary-Shelly-Frankenstein knowledge. Nightmare technologies like nuclear weapons which once begun can never be ended. Our country is awash in genetically modified foods, fracking, drones, armed guards and RFI chips, yet, when we look at these things in a rear view mirror to see a reversed image, we see something far more frightening, as the seeds perverted science can only prosper in the soils of perverted government. Other governments around the world have dismissed out of hand proposals for GMO crops, GMO foods, fracking and drone surveillance.

This is made possible by corporate control of the American media creating a false sense of reality and of normality. The media in the United States of America is nearly as censored and editorially controlled as was the German press under Joseph Goebbels during the Nazi era. It was way back in February, almost an eon ago to modern media outlets when Chris Dorner, a fired Los Angeles Policeman killed two fellow officers and wounded three others. Dorner left behind a manifesto on his Facebook page claiming to have been victimized by the authorities because he had reported a fellow officer for abusing a mentally ill suspect. Read the rest of this entry →

The Illusion of Freedom
By David Glenn Cox

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” — Frank Zappa

That time is nie upon us; John Boehner can no longer control his own party. The Republicans are splintered by tea party factions, the gun lobby and Bible thumpers. Barack Obama is the new crowned King / seat warmer / tragic figure head / corporate functionary. Barack Obama is no more a Democrat than Herbert Hoover gave lap dances. It all appears so muddled, the fiscal cliff and the budget negotiations, only it isn’t muddled at all. It’s all fixed up, just the way they wanted it fixed up, just the way they like it. Let confusion reign, they like it like that. Oh yeah, sure, first there was a public option, then there wasn’t, then there was, then, presto chango abracadabra, nothing. So what does the fiscal cliff deal mean? It means watch out; the devil is in the details

Everything which has been done to the American public over the past thirty years has been done intentionally.

“Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

There are no more Republicans and there are no more Democrats; they are merely stage props to create the illusion of an open political system. Mitt Romney was the bad cop and Barack Obama was the good cop, but still, a cop is a cop? It is nothing but an illusion to elicit your participation.

There are no more Republicans and there are no more Democrats; they are merely stage props to create the illusion of an open political system. Mitt Romney was the bad cop and Barack Obama was the good cop, but still, a cop is a cop? It is nothing but an illusion to elicit your participation.

There are no more Republicans and there are no more Democrats; they are merely stage props to create the illusion of an open political system. Mitt Romney was the bad cop and Barack Obama was the good cop, but still, a cop is a cop? It is nothing but an illusion to elicit your participation.

http://www.leftistreview.com/2013/01/13/the-illusion-of-freedom/davidcox/

Rockets Red Glare
By David Glenn Cox

It would seem we are a nation stumbling from tragedy to bloody tragedy; we are a nation of hurts. How can these things keep happening like this? Some of us shout about gun control, while others argue for more mental health treatment. Strangely, few point the finger at a third actor upon the stage.

There was a time when drunken nit wits would barge out on the field during a baseball game, to show their penis or their ass. Broadcasters decided not to show the nit wit dancing out on to the field and you know what, it stopped happening.

No telling, if even now, some mental case, some ersatz Travis Bickle isn’t trying on body armor in some cheap room. His heart filled with a lifetime of sorrow and hurt, his head formulating a plot to go out in a blaze of bloody glory. Each gunman dreaming of prime time gore and instant fame, as each, plots an even deeper outrage.

This is after all America; we love our violence, and can’t ever seem to get enough gore. Murder, death and violence becomes us, with the invasion of Iraq the cable news network ratings soared. It’s fun to watch people die on a high resolution big screen TV. It’s so interesting watching ghoulish reporters shoving a microphone into the face of a grieving relative asking, “How does it feel?”

CBS, Sunday “Revenge” a woman seeks revenge against the people who framed her father for a crime he didn’t commit. Fox Monday, “Bones” soon to air for its eight season centers around Temperance “Bones” Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who attempts to solve gory crimes through forensic anthropology. Monday ABC’s “Castle” pairs a best – selling mystery novelist, and NYPD detective Kate Beckett centering on the unsolved homicide of Beckett’s mother. CBS Monday, “Hawaii Five O” an elite police crime unit, fights evil doers in beautiful Hawaii.

Then there is this charmer from NBC, “Revolution.” A post- apocalyptic dystopian action- adventure series, “We lived in an electric world. We relied on it for everything. And then the power went out. Everything stopped working. We weren’t prepared. Fear and confusion led to panic. The lucky ones made it out of the cities. The government collapsed. Militias took over, controlling the food supply and stockpiling weapons.” Lovely, simply lovely, Americans just have to have their violence quotient; it makes me proud not to own a television.

NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles, Body of Proof, Person of Interest, Criminal Minds, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Law & Order – Special Victims Unit, Chicago Fire, CSI: New York and “Grimm” because fantasy violence is fun and desensitizing. For the weekend, there is what is called by the industry insiders, “Crime Time Saturday” ninety minutes of America’s favorites, CSI and Criminal Minds in reruns.

Then there are the programs like Cops, Dateline NBC, 60 Minutes which disguised as investigative journalism, promote a point of view based on slanted and biased interviews designed to tug at our emotional heart strings. This programming along with all the others focus on crime, murder and mayhem and it doesn’t cause our problems or these bloody events but it is, our reflection, it is our alter ego as Americans. This is what we enjoy; this is what many Americans consider entertainment.

The Lancet is one of the oldest peer- reviewed medical journals in the world. In 2004, The Lancet released its first study concerning the estimated number of excess deaths in Iraq. The first study estimated 98,000 excess Iraqi deaths with a 95% level of certainty. A second study, released in 2006, raised that number to 654,965 or 2.5% of the population. From the Lancet report, “Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.”

This is us, we in the United States of America allowed this massacre to happen. These fatalities didn’t bother us in the slightest and for many Americans it doesn’t bother us still. They asked for it, good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction – no, he didn’t, but what he did have was lots and lots of oil, which hungry and unscrupulous men wanted. They turned on a propaganda machine as the opening act of the war machine.

On May 15th of 2003, President Bush made his famous “Bring them on” remark, with the message being that war is so good, we can’t get enough murder and mayhem and want more. On October 11, 2011 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was informed of Muammar Gaddafi’s death in Libya, Clinton smiled and rubbed her hands together in satisfaction and remarked, “We came, we saw and he died.” Ain’t it great? Ain’t we special?

Operation Neptune Spear was carried out last May in what was described as a Central Intelligence led operation including Navy seals and the Army’s Special Operations Aviation Regiment and CIA operatives. Excuse me, but when did the CIA become a branch of the US military?

Daily Mail, May 2, 2012 – “President Obama has revealed that he felt a ‘deep-seated satisfaction’ when he saw a photo of Osama bin Laden’s dead body for the first time.

The President said that the sight of the bullet ridden corpse made him think of the families of those who died on 9/11 – but denied that he did a high five in his mind.”

Strange the President should think such a thing, especially since Osama Bin Laden was never charged in connection with the events of 9/11. Bin Laden was charged in connection with a series of US embassy attacks in 1998 in North Africa. We the American public were never allowed to see those photos or the DNA evidence proving that it was, in fact, Osama Bin Laden.

An unnamed U.S. senior defense official stated that only one of the five people killed in the attack were armed. The interior of the house was pitch dark, because CIA operatives had cut the power to the neighborhood. Matt Bissonnette, who participated in the raid, described it this way, “when bin Laden peered out at the Americans advancing on his third-floor room, the SEAL who fired upon him hit him on the right side of the head. Bin Laden stumbled into his bedroom, where the SEALs found him crumpled and twitching on the floor in a pool of body matter, with two women crying over his body. The other SEALs allegedly grabbed the women, moved them away and shot bin Laden repeatedly in the chest until he was dead.”

“So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: justice has been done.” ~ Barack Obama

Indeed, “We will be true to the values that make us who we are.” We will kill the wounded and the unarmed, we will violate accepted codes of international behavior and then when asked to provide proof of what they’ve done will answer, that’s none of your business. On April 26, 2012 in response to Freedom of Information requests from the news media, Judge James E. Boasberg ruled that the defense department was not required to release any of the evidence to the public.

This is who we are; this country of ours coolly operates concentration camps beyond our shores. We hold people indefinitely, without any charges of wrong doing. These prisoners have been as young as age 15 years of age and have been tortured, beaten and abused for years on end, before receiving long sentences at the hands of military tribunals.

Since 2004, the US military has been launching unmanned aerial drone missile attacks against the people of Pakistan. In 2008, Pakistan’s interior minister said, “A few militants are killed, but the majority of the victims are innocent citizens” A 2009, article by David Byman of the Brookings Institution reported, “drone strikes may have killed “10 or so civilians” for every “mid- and high-ranking [al Qaeda and Taliban] leader.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that between 391 to 780 civilians had been killed in these attacks and of that number 160 of the victims were children. It was also reported that since President Obama took office, at least 50 civilians were killed in follow up attacks when neighbors had gone to the aid of the victims. On June 12th of this year, Navi Pillay the UN high commissioner for human rights called for an investigation of the drone missile attacks repeatedly referring to the attacks as “indiscriminate.” Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, called on the Obama administration to justify its use of targeted assassinations rather than attempting to capture al Qaeda or Taliban suspects.

But wait – we are not at war with the people of Pakistan, we don’t have the right to launch even one missile, not one. Those murdered are not members of any government. At worst, they are aledged to be members of a criminal organization. At worst they are criminals, while at best, we ourselves are the criminals.

We live in a nation with a perverse and pervasive preoccupation with violence, then we act so surprised when we must face violence ourselves. Especially violence against the innocents, which can neither be justified nor put away in any case. We are a monster factory, and while taking away guns might seem like the obvious solution, especially since that program has worked so wonderfully with drugs and alcohol. The problem is much deeper than that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

It is a slippery slope and we have already lost our footing,

Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 3, 2012 – 13 Cleveland police officers who fired 137 rounds into car, killing 2, expected to be interviewed by investigators today.

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) Updated, November 27, 2012 – Andrew Lopez was lying on his back, wounded and unarmed when an Albuquerque police officer delivered the shot that killed him early one February morning in 2009. Alan Gomez was carrying a plastic spoon and reportedly walking away from officers when he was killed by police earlier this month. And an unarmed Christopher Torres was shot in the back three times at point blank range in April after police say he tried to grab his gun.

By David Glenn Cox

Does the Third Reich live on in American foreign policy?

As Russian artillery shells were raining down on Berlin, even after the German Fuehrer had committed suicide, the security state continued on. Through the ruins of the Berlin streets, roving bands of S.S. officers roamed, hunting down and executing on the spot anyone suspected of desertion or cowardess. The third Reich had less than forty eight hours to live; yet, the security state was alive and well and lives on with us today.

Many people fail to understand that though the third Reich was pounded into dust long ago, many of its tenets of government live on. As the Red army rolled into Poland, the Polish underground began to rise up against the German invaders in Warsaw. It was at that moment that Joseph Stalin called a halt to the Russian push towards Warsaw. It was in Stalin we see the afterbirth of modern politics and of the security state. Flash forward to Libya and Syria; American policy has a light touch. Let the combatants bloody and eliminate the strongest and most popular and who do you suppose will be waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces?

It is much safer to be feared than loved when, of the two, one must be dispensed with. Because … love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. – Niccolo Machiavelli

No man of prestige is without ambition. It is quaint to think of George Washington as a backwoodsman surveyor, but Washington was a blindly ambitious man. He married one of the wealthiest widows in Virginia and through those marriage vows became a wealthy man himself. Yes, it is entertaining to think of the founding fathers by their popular historical images. The French and Indian War cleared Colonial America’s borders of potential adversaries. Ambitious men asked, “What do we need a British crown for, when we might have our own?”

Read more on the Leftist Review.

By David Glenn Cox

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Today is Thanksgiving, a day to celebrate and to be thankful for all that we have been given; but it is not a memory wipe. It is a year which finds me living in my fourth state in a year but I am in a good place, I now have a home.

We are a good people, badly led and badly misled. We live in a beautiful and bounteous land in which millions upon millions of our own citizens can no longer earn enough to survive in it and yet, that is not considered a national crisis.

It has been 365 days which have seen no improvement in employment or in wages only a continued manipulation of the numbers. A year which has seen Barack Obama re-selected for a second term of office, but only because the alternative was so heinous as to be unthinkable. This is America’s twelfth thanksgiving at war, tens of thousands of our service people will spend this holiday overseas protecting Europe from a Soviet Union which no longer exists. Protecting corporate interests in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, United Arab Emirates and dozens of other countries, protecting America from the blow back we ourselves cause.

The United States of America has decided to build 183 F- 22 Raptor fighter planes at a projected cost of $66.7 billion. Originally, the plan was to build 750 of these state of the art aircraft which was scaled back to 381 copies in 2006 and now down to 183 aircraft. The Air Force warned that cutting back the number of aircraft produced increased the per unit cost. I suppose that is so, only, there aren’t any potential adversaries which would demand its capabilities, nor can the plane be exported like the B-2 bomber, it is a 21st century dreadnaught.

Meanwhile, funding continues of the F35 Joint Strike fighter which is expected to be the workhorse of the fighter command. Despite a down economy, despite twenty millions of Americans out of work Congress continued to allocate nearly half a billion dollars until 2010 for a second source engine program for this aircraft. How many times have you been down at the old used car lot and asked the salesman, “She’s a nice Ford pick up truck alright, but what if I need a new engine and Ford can’t supply one? Is there another engine available, from another manufacturer, off the shelf?”

Initial cost estimates of the F-35 Joint Strike fighter began at $89 million per copy in 2006 escalating to $207.6 million per copy in 2011. When the R&D is included the cost rise to $304.15 million for the 32 aircraft delivered. The Air Force estimates over the programs lifetime to cost the American tax payer to be over one trillion dollars. The old expression goes, “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” and the F-35 is an aircraft designed by a Pentagon committee. It does everything, for everybody and costs be damned, this is Buck Rogers stuff:

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The Song Remains the Same
By David Glenn Cox

Soon we shall hold the non-election, to decide between the two major non-candidates based on their positions on the non-issues. Lots and lots of amorphous talk, little about reality and none about sequestration. Hard talk is for after the election, looking at Greece and what austerity has done to her people; one can only hold our heads and weep for the future.

Another thirty days has passed and the BLS this morning released its monthly jobs report. It’s almost lost its thrill, settling into a monthly rehash of filtered numbers, take for instance, Total non-farm payroll employment increased by 171,000 this month, while the numbers of workers entering the workforce increased by 578,000 so from the get go, we’re down 400,000 jobs. In a calendar year the number of Americans employed, rose by just over three million while at the same time the number of Americans entering the workforce seeking a job increased by 3,714,000.

Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its jobs report and you can’t blame them, really, for trying to put the best face on it. Each month, the report lists the number of new jobs created without supplying context. The unemployment rate ticked up 0.1 this month which is referred to as;

“Total non-farm payroll employment increased by 171,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 7.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in professional and business services, health care, and retail trade.”

But unemployment was changed, it went up 0.1 percent, if the number had gone down 0.1 percent the administration would jolly well be shouting it from the rooftops, as proof positive, their economic policies were working. Most of this months job gains came as follows,

Professional and business service – 51,000
Health Care – 31,000
Services to buildings and dwellings – 13,000 (what a strange category)
Computers systems design – 7000
Retail trade – 36,000
Construction – 17,000

From the BLS report – “Mining lost 9,000 jobs in October, with most of the decline occurring in support activities for mining. Since May of this year, employment in mining has decreased by 17,000.

Employment in other major industries, including wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, information, financial activities, and government, showed little change over the month.”

“Little change,” four years of little change, but there is some change.

Self employed workers, unincorporated – October 2011, 873,000 and this October, 758,000

Part time for economic reasons – October 2011, 8,258,000 and this October, 8,344,000.

Could only find Part time work – October 2011, 2,488,000 and this October, 2,614,000.

The U-6 unemployment rate dropped from 16% last October to 14.6% this October.

Officially, the shiny official polished number of unemployed stands at 12,258,000 this month, officially this month, a population larger than every man, women and child in Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas / Fort Worth combined, are seeking a job in the United States, but that is not all, it couldn’t be? You see there is another sub set (read that, untermunchin) another population not counted as unemployed.
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Kingfish
By David Glenn Cox

How often the name of Jesus Christ is commonly bandied about, and for a fictional or faith based character, I suppose that’s all right. I mean, well, Jesus allegedly cast the money changers out of the temple and he healed a few lepers and cured a couple of cases of blindness. He was, after all, a carpenter by trade and a messiah only by a calling later in life. Jesus received much well deserved praise for siding with the poor, the uneducated, and the troubled. The common folk loved him for it. But the rich folk, as rich folk often do, perceive any such individual who avows a mission to assist the poor as a threat, and so, as the story goes they nailed him into the sky.

Funny thing about these religious messiah’s, they always want to help the poor but they always tell’em there’s a better world a waiting for them somewhere else, tomorrow, if you’ll only believe today. The Buddha traveled through the land and met with kings and potentates and told the poor people it was their desire which was the cause of their suffering. Politics has long been called the art of compromise, give and take or what’s commonly referred to as log rolling.

What if there was a politician who wouldn’t compromise on his principals? What if there was a politician who dedicated his life to aiding the poor and unfortunate. A politician who didn’t just rub spit and mud into the eyes of the blind, but instead built hospitals for the blind and trained doctors for the sick, schools for the children, night schools for the illiterate. What if there was a politician who cut taxes for the poor, abolished the poll tax and instituted a foreclosure moratorium, built a medical school, doubled the size of the state university and built a public hospital for the mentally ill? Not to mention, over nine thousand miles of paved roads, 111 bridges including three major bridges.

What would you call such a politician in America? He was called a scoundrel and a crook, a demagogue and a dictator.

“A man is not a dictator when he is given a commission from the people and carries it out.” – Huey Long

Everybody gather ’round
Loosen up your suspenders, hunker down on the ground
I’m a cracker, you are too. Gonna take good care of you
Who built the highway to Baton Rouge?
Who put up the hospital, built you schools?
Who looked after shit-kickers like you?
The Kingfish do

Who gave a party at the Roosevelt Hotel?
Invited whole north half of the state down there for free
People in the city had their eyes bugging out
‘Cause everyone looked just like me

Who took on the Standard Oil men and whipped their ass
Just like he promised he’d do?
Ain’t no Standard Oil men gonna run this state
Gonna be run by little folks like me and you

Here’s the Kingfish, the Kingfish
Friend of the working man
The Kingfish, the Kingfish
The Kingfish gonna save this land
– Randy Newman

More at The Leftist Review;

http://www.leftistreview.com/2012/08/20/kingfish/davidcox/