Working for someone else, fingers to the bone with no expectation of decent wages or a foothold on the ladder, is back in vogue here in America.   Even your big deal congresspersons will tell you that.  There are no greater patriots than the country's laborers, and the very, very finest--the finest patriots of all--are those who have no use for unions. The best patriot/workers understand that in America it's All for One and None for All.

And this, too:  If God wanted you to be healthy, wealthy and wise, he would have given you better parents.  It's a practice near to sin to get the taxpayers to take care of you and yours.  The taxpayers have a hard enough time taking care of the rich.

The rich have earned our blind, gushing loyalty (How, you ask? By being rich, you ninny).

You? You haven't.

Yes.  Well.  You'll pardon me for bringing this up, O ye sensitive ones who hate having to hear about the bad old days vs. the good old days, but didn't we goddamn settle this already?

Child coal mine workers, 1900s

I bring this up because Nate Silver says there's a 60% chance the Republicans will take the senate.  Nate seems to know what he's talking about but he doesn't say why the Republicans deserve to take the Senate.  That's for the rest of us to chew over.  So I'm chewing:

How many workers see something in the Republicans that tells them life will be better when the GOP/Tea Party takes over Congress?  What is it they see?

How many women see something in the GOP that the rest of us don't?  Enough to take them over the top?  What is it they see?

When the Republicans win will they finally get busy and deliver on sustainable jobs? Affordable, ethical health care?  Bridges?  Roads? Pollution? Kids?  Or will a comfortable win tell them all they need to know about the sterling virtues of capitalism and the ready acceptance of an oligarchy?

Paul Krugman:

America’s nascent oligarchy may not yet be fully formed — but one of our two main political parties already seems committed to defending the oligarchy’s interests.

Despite the frantic efforts of some Republicans to pretend otherwise, most people realize that today’s G.O.P. favors the interests of the rich over those of ordinary families. I suspect, however, that fewer people realize the extent to which the party favors returns on wealth over wages and salaries. And the dominance of income from capital, which can be inherited, over wages — the dominance of wealth over work — is what patrimonial capitalism is all about.

We've been here before.  Millions of Americans took FDR's words to heart and worked tirelessly for decades to insure that these most obvious, common-sense American rights should come to pass.  Many of them did come to pass, but now they're in jeopardy.  Now the Republicans (and, yes, some bloody Democrats) are working tirelessly to undo it all.

Millions of us see clearly what's happening again and are trying to stop it, but there are millions of distinctly separate Americans who think it's high time we give up on that old FDR course and head in another direction.  The direction they want to take us in is the same direction we were headed when all hell broke loose in 1929 and it all came crashing down.

It looks like the oligarchs might just get away with it.  So what is it they're seeing in this new, same-old plan--the plan that caused the stock market crash in 1929 and led us into a devastating long-term depression--that makes them think it's going to work this time?

The answer is, it doesn't have to.  America is the place to make money; any idiot knows you wouldn't want to keep it here.  Whatever happens to us won't happen to them.

Some setup, huh?  Makes you wonder if we shouldn't have stuck with that Democracy thing and at least given it a try.

(Cross-posted on Dagblog, Alan Colmes' Liberaland, and Political Carnival.  Featured on Crooks and Liars Blog Round Up)

If you read the papers or check out the blogosphere every day, it's a given that you'll read something so foolish it'll take the place of the most foolish thing you read the day before. There are guaranteed foolish things I naturally shy away from--the blabbings of O'Reilly or Limbaugh or Coulter, for instance.

But sometimes I'm just reading the good, old-fashioned news when I'm grabbed by something so insanely wrong, I have to wonder if the world is going topsy-turvy faster than I can take a breath.

Yesterday was one of those days.

The headline read, "Army Stops Retirement Pay for Alaskans in WWII Force". A grabber if I ever saw one. The AP story in the New York Times started this way:

ANCHORAGE (AP) — The Army has decided to cut off retirement pay for veterans of a militia formed to guard the territory of Alaska from the threat of Japanese attack during World War II.

The change means 26 surviving members of the Alaska Territorial Guard — most in their 80s and long retired — will lose up to $557 in monthly retirement pay, a state veterans officer said this week. The payments end Feb. 1.

Now, I failed every math class I ever took, but over the years I've been able to learn the basics of a calculator. My calculator tells me that $557 a month for 26 veterans comes to $173,784 a year.

So let's say all those old gents are 80 years old, and by some miracle all 26 of them make it to 90. My calculator tells me that, at the end of that 10-year span, the government would have had to shell out a rounded-off $1,740,000.

1.7 million dollars. About the cost of annual swanky country club memberships for 10 CEOs.

But here's the next line in the story: Applications for retirement pay from 37 others have been suspended. Oh, my. So now we have (wait a minute, I'm checking it on my calculator) 63 veterans. Okay! Now we're talking real money. The government would have to lay out a whopping $422,000 a year for those old geezers, and an astronomical $4,220,000 over that anticipated 10-year span.

It could be that we can't afford that. It is a lot of money. So I went looking for ways the government spends $4 million dollars. I admit I didn't search too hard, and didn't find much, because, apparently, $4,000,000 is a drop in the bucket. But I did find where they spent a minimum of 10 times that much, more or less, in one year on Public Relations:

The report, from the House Committee on Government Reform (such tired words), was published in January, 2005 and begins this way:

Recently, questions have been raised about the use of taxpayer dollars to fund public relations campaigns. The Government Accountability Office has found that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Department of Health and Human Services engaged in illegal “covert propaganda” by hiring a public relations firm to produce and disseminate fabricated video news reports. Investigative reporters have disclosed that the Department of Education paid a journalist to promote the No Child Left Behind Act in television and radio appearances and that the Department of Health and Human Services had a contract with a syndicated columnist who promoted the President’s marriage initiative. At the request of Democratic Leader Pelosi, Democratic Whip Hoyer, and Reps. Waxman, Dingell, Obey, Rangel, Miller, Slaughter, Thompson, and DeLauro, this report examines federal spending on public relations contracts. It finds that federal spending for public relations has more than doubled under the Bush Administration. While not all public relations spending is illegal or inappropriate, this rapid rise in public relations contracts at a time of growing budget deficits raises questions about the priorities of the Administration. Specifically, the report finds: • In 2004, the Bush Administration spent over $88 million on contracts with public relations agencies. • The value of federal contracts with public relations agencies has increased significantly over the last four years. In 2000, the last year of the Clinton Administration, the federal government spent $39 million on contracts with major public relations agencies. By 2004, the value of these PR contracts had grown by almost $50 million, an increase of 128%. • An increasing number of PR contracts are being awarded without full and open competition. During the last year of the Clinton Administration, less than 20% of PR contracts were awarded without full and open competition. By 2004, over 40% of PR contracts, worth $37 million in total, were awarded on a noncompetitive basis. • The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services spent over $94 million on contracts with public relations agencies over the last four years, the most of any federal agency. The three public relations agencies that received the most in federal contracts over the last four years are Ketchum Communications ($97 million), Matthews Media Group ($52 million), and Fleishmann Hillard ($41 million).

Wow! A little more than pocket change there. So how about this? What if the government took a new tack and steered the course toward honesty and fair play? Toward shunning scoundrels and praising humble heroes? Toward (never can say this enough) working for the common good? Wouldn't we all become the greatest Public Relations force this country has ever seen? And wouldn't it be priceless and string-free?

It could work. They could start by slapping the hands of anybody who would even think of taking those tiny pensions away from that small band of elders who--let it be said--served our country without taking a penny in return.

Ramona