oops. Sorry for that editing job.

“running for pol office is a hobby for Mitt now that he’s done the REAL dirty work of running businesses into the ground”

He could possibly redeem himself if he destroys Goldman Sachs. One never knows what grudges the .00000001% have with each other.

In this he is arguably smarter than Obama, who should have destroyed Goldman Sachs when he had the chance. He wouldn’t do it for the reasons progressives want him to do it, he would do it to clear cut a big space for market competition.

Lloyd Blankfein was on TV talking about how it may be time to break up the banks. Maybe Blankey is wondering if he is going to be back out on the market.

He could possibly redeem himself if he destroys Goldman Sachs.

One never knows what grudges the .00000001% have with each other.

The R-Party racist right is surely its ugliest part, but what’s really destroying the US is the stratospheric reckless, merit-less entitlement of a relatively small minority that currently controls both political parties.

This, Mitt Romney has in spades and it can’t be talked out of existence.

There is no “moderate center” here.

Yes, IF.

Although liberals like to pat themselves on the back for how smart they are, it’s long been clear that the Republican Party has them strategically out gunned on every level.

The Obama camp no doubt thinks it can capture the middle if it cuts off its left flank. FAT CHANCE that will happen with the remaining liberal culture warriors insulting everyone from “the racist working class in PA and Ohio” to Sarah Palin’s real Americans in small towns everywhere.

I hope it’s Ron Paul and not Rick Perry.

The “liberal” punditocracy has done a good job selling the “humanitarian intervention” line since Clinton’s war in Bosnia. The Libyan war was ostensibly sold to the D-Party base by Harvard IR specialist Samantha Power, alongside the bright shiny idea that there were “democratic revolutions” occurring spontaneously all over the mid-east.

(Which there may be, in which case, Cass Sunstein’s new wife will do her level best to f*ck it up).

For some reason, the actual actions of the US in the mid-east hasn’t completely penetrated the liberal ideological fog machine. How a nation that engages in torture and kills civilians with predator drones can also engage in “humanitarian intervention” I’m not twisted enough to figure out.

“Liberal intervention” or “humanitarian intervention” as developed out of Clinton’s war in Bosnia was merely the D-Party refashioning of neo-conservatism to sell unprovoked wars of aggression to its liberal base. This is point of connection is perhaps clearest in the work of self described “liberal,” Paul Berman.

Needless to say, this whole “humanitarian intervention” line of rationalization needs to be debunked and the discredited US predator state needs to disengage from ALL military action.

In our spare time we should be reading Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism.” If you move some of the pieces around– substitute Arabs for Jews, substitute the neo-colonial neo-liberal police state for Stalinism, etc– we have a match.

And, as opposed to two totalitarian governments, this one is all us.

No time so waste doing smack with Bam in the Oval Office when Goldman Sachs awaits just through the revolving door.

Sorry, Obummer. Time’s up.

Actually I thought the scariest part was this:

“Geithner recounted for colleagues what his teenage daughter told him: If you were in Iraq, people would at least understand you were trying to help the country.”

Indicative of how just *how* thoroughly unhinged from reality the oligarchical class really is.

The House, like the filibuster, is a tool. The problem is the Democratic Party.

The problem is also Matty and Ezra, who spent 2 years convincing you–and succeeding!– that the problem is the tools and not the Democratic Party.

But, like I said, Matty and Ezra are going to make fine Republicans some day.

Question:

Should we give the D-Party “retroactive immunity” for helping out the effing Big Government?

“We are neck deep in the big Muddy, and all we care about is dropped calls!”

Financial “journalists” care about dropped calls. Not only is it a good way to force ATT-Verizon to lower the cost of their calling plans, but if they keep on talking about Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and MA Bell’s sclerotic Evil Empire, then maybe we’ll ignore the vampire squid suckers jammed directly in the Fed-Treasury, sucking the big bucks out of the Tea Bagger pocket on the sly.

I know AT&T-Verizon is a bunch of pikers. They wish they were in the financial sector. All they get is retroactive immunity for helping out the effing Big Government.

(Not that that was a good idea).

I guess my “third party” is still in Greece–they are shutting it down:

“ATHENS, Greece — They blockade highway toll booths to give drivers free passage. They cover subway ticket machines with plastic bags so commuters can’t pay. Even doctors are joining in, preventing patients from paying fees at state hospitals.

Some call it civil disobedience. Others a freeloading spirit. Either way, Greece’s “I Won’t Pay” movement has sparked heated debate in a nation reeling from a debt crisis that’s forced the government to take drastic austerity measures – including higher taxes, wage and pension cuts, and price spikes in public services.

What started as a small pressure group of residents outside Athens angered by higher highway tolls has grown into a movement affecting ever more sectors of society – one that many say is being hijacked by left-wing parties keen to ride popular discontent.”

(My, how unconscionable).

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/02/22/general-eu-greece-i-won-apos-t-pay_8319311.html
“I Won’t Pay” movement grips debt-ridden Greece”

“In one of their frequent occupations of the toll booths on the northern outskirts of Athens recently, protesters wore brightly colored vests with “total disobedience” emblazoned across their backs, and chanted: “We won’t pay for their crisis!”"

Also, where’s my “Third Party”?

“But if Gingrich couldn’t control his hard-line freshman class of 73 members in 1995 — he jokingly referred to them then as “a third party” — it’s hard to imagine how the kinder, gentler Boehner will control his 87 freshmen, many of them lacking government or legislative experience, let alone the gene for compromise.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/opinion/27rich.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
Frank Rich, “Why wouldn’t the Tea Party shut it down?”

Here we go. Can’t swing a deat cat without running into more and more Big Government. From today’s news, and straight from the US Treasury itself:

“Geithner takes a leap. He wants US banks to take the lead in these countries’ financial development. His words are worth quoting at length:

“I don’t have any enthusiasm for…trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the broader world…It’s the same thing for Microsoft or anything else. We want US firms to benefit from that…Now, financial firms are different because of the risk, but you can contain that through regulation.”

There are three serious problems with this view. First, Geithner ignores everything that we know about the pattern of financial development around the world. It is very rare for financial systems to develop without major crises. In fact, experience in recent decades confirms what should have been obvious from previous centuries: as countries grow and accumulate savings, they become increasingly prone to financial collapse. Given Geithner’s extensive international crisis-fighting experience at the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, and the New York Federal Reserve, his current naiveté on this point is simply stunning.

Second, Geithner assumes that risks at the largest US firms can be contained through regulation, when all our knowledge points directly to the contrary. Even the strongest supporters of the Dodd-Frank reform legislation emphasize that it only went part way towards reducing the incentives for major financial institutions to take big risks.”

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/johnson17/English
Simon Johnson, “Geithner’s Gamble”

Still MORE taxes for Tea Baggers when international bubbles burst and the US banks fail. Bailing out the global casino is definitely Big Government.

I think we need to expand the public’s grasp of what exactly “Big Government” really consists in.

Big Government is not just expanding Medicaid eligibility “at the expense of taxpayers,” Big Government is also the legislative creation of privatized tollbooths with toll costs that bear little relationship to the cost of doing business.

Populist Repugnants like to talk about “lowering costs” when it comes to heathcare reform, but they have no conceptual grasp on how the government assists private enterprise in inflating the costs that THEY then pay–which is probably more than they pay in taxes:

“What have been lost are the Progressive Era’s two great reforms. First, minimizing the economy’s free lunch of unearned income (e.g., monopolistic privilege and privatization of the public domain in contrast to one’s own labor and enterprise) by taxing absentee property rent and asset-price (“capital”) gains, by keeping natural monopolies in the public domain, and by anti-trust regulation. The aim of progressive economic justice was to prevent exploitation – e.g., charging more than the technologically necessary costs of production and reasonable profits warranted. This aim had a fortuitous byproduct that made the Progressive Era reforms seem likely to conquer the world in a Darwinian evolutionary manner: Minimization of the free lunch of unearned income enabled economies such as the United States to out-compete others that didn’t enact progressive fiscal and financial policy….

We have entered the most oppressive rentier epoch since feudal European times. Instead of providing basic infrastructure services at cost or subsidized rates to lower the national cost structure and thus make it more affordable – and internationally competitive – the economy is being turned into a collection of tollbooths.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson05202009.html
Michael Hudson “The Tollbooth Economy”

Of course, one of the problems is that the costs of healthcare are hidden from the public by layers and layers of extra-governmental bureaucracy. Including the portion of their total compensation that is paid by their employers, washing the costs of everything through healthcare financing companies, and–not least of all– the resulting insanity making dance of negotiation between healthcare providers and the healthcare financing companies that has providers assigning huge price tags to procedures (and prescription drugs) knowing the financing companies will negotiate them down, but which uninsured individuals are forced to pay.

Now that’s another tollbooth, one that compels the healthy into “buying insurance,” thereby funding the very same healthcare financing companies that are driving the insanity in the first place–in order to engage in non-productive rent extraction.

That’s the unbound capitalist state in action. ie., the real meaning of “Big Government” today.

Of course, healthcare financing companies–DON’T call it “insurance”–are pikers in comparison to those finance corporations with their vampire suckers jammed right into the Federal Reserve-US Treasury, which Hudson discusses as well:

“A second Progressive Era aim was to steer the financial sector so as to fund capital formation. Industrial credit was best achieved in Germany and Central Europe in the decades prior to World War I. But the Allied victory led to the dominance of Anglo-American banking practice, based on loans against property or income streams already in place. Today’s bank credit has become decoupled from capital formation, taking the form mainly of mortgage credit (80 per cent), and loans secured by corporate stock (for mergers, acquisitions and corporate raids) as well as for speculation. The effect is to spur asset-price inflation on credit, in ways that benefit the few at the expense of the economy at large.”

It’s killing us on EVERY front, and the government IS doing it.