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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Mitt Romney: "Not one of us"


Dear Fred,

Thanks for your email.

You are right about the primacy of war and peace when choosing a president.

As I see it, however, war is no longer a crap shoot but "a sure thing": it is de rigueur for every commander-in-chief to conduct "his" own "little war."

Those of us with basically liberal instincts give insufficient credit to American conservatives' ability to fuck things up. (We are, in fact, too kind...) 

Already, widespread refusal to pay sufficient tax has jeopardized the survival of "liberal democracy."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy (American Know-Nothings are so addled as to ignore the foundational truth that America is essentially an experiment in "liberal democracy.")

But "the ball" is in the Supremes' "court" and a Supreme Court whose "balance" is weighted by Romney appointees would zealously advance the cause of corporatocracy, just recently apotheosized by the Citizens United ruling. 

Do you know Bill Moyer's splendid quip? "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."

Romney is not only a corporatist, he is a transactional capitalist - a breed that prides itself on "making deals" rather than building actual value into The Common Good, or, to use the Preamble's phrase, "The General Welfare." 

Under aegis of globalization - and now with productive capacity increasingly the domain of robots, automata and self-refining software tools - I see little future for "brawny workers" and, going forward, less work for "brainy workers" as well.

As Scott Fitzgerald famously noted in conversation with Hemingway: "The rich are different from you and me."

The full quotation is found in Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy" (1926). 

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:F._Scott_Fitzgerald

I have created a blog entitled "Cassandra's Lament" - so named because we no longer need a Greek heroine to foretell what  "the rich boys" will do to us. They will make their own kind richer, and they will fuck the rest of us in the ass. (New Obama ad, made for Ohio - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgiuq2uR6LA)

In any event, the estrangement between "them" and "us" is intensifying.

And Little Richie Rich is "just the guy" to bring this estrangement to climax.

If Sketchy is elected -- and if he dismantles Obamacare as promised (for whatever an Etch-a-Sketch "promise" is worth) -- I think George Soros is right. 


Pax on both houses

Alan 


Living In The Bubble

***

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:F._Scott_Fitzgerald



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