Right Wing Jerks

Hillaryite Senator McCaskill shoots from her hip, hits her foot

Paul Samuelson, serving as advisor to Presidents Kennedy and LBJ, was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He said the ultimate goal of economic science is to improve the living conditions of people in their everyday life. That goal should be an easy one to put into practice in a modern economy, but it is immediately beset with problems in the twenty-first century.

The call to take down the South Carolina capitol’s Confederate flag by the governor, Nikki Haley, has been met with a lot of praise for her political courage from the “left” and the right. But this praise is at best premature. All indications are that the act was a craven genuflection to corporate interests and her own political ambition, and not an act of conscience.
Let’s look at the chain of events leading up to Haley’s announcement.

The poor are usually out of earshot and positioned out of sight in our bunker-like society; in other words, not on our immediate radar. It seems to be “shock and awe” or celebrity gazing. The former is reserved for things like mass killings or overblown pandemics. The latter is daily splashed on all news outlets: check-stand displays of yellow rags, magazine covers, billboards, TV news, and internet ads that overshadow, intercept, and sometimes annoyingly drive out, all your targeted interfaces.

Donald Trump, the bombastic builder of Trump towers and Trump gambling casinos is moving from his reality TV show to the theater of presidential elections. If he survives the first three months of mass media drubbing him and his notorious affliction of ‘leaving no impulsive opinion behind,’ he’s going to be trouble for the other fifteen or so Republican presidential candidates.

0ne needs a wicked sense of humor these days to fully appreciate the present moment in American history, as a supposedly free country debates which police state practices to adopt, while ignoring any thought that maybe the United States should not be a police state at all.

Is there a chargeable offense in Western jurisprudence, some level of murder, depraved indifference, or, perhaps, reckless disregard of human life (See NY law) that can be ascribed to so-called public servants who inflict undue harm, even death, due to their decision making?  Much power and control is in their hands, much potential for abuse, and too much self-serving behavior.

It is Memorial Day again. Some will celebrate. Some will drink too much. Some will march in parades. Some will rally around the flag. Some will go shopping. Some will mourn. I am among the mourners.
I mourn mostly for those we have killed — and I mourn for those we haven’t killed yet, but will in the days ahead. I mourn for all of the mothers and fathers who put their children to bed at night and wonder if this will be the night that they are killed by a drone attack.

The dangerous underfunding of US infrastructure was underscored by a fatal train derailment on May 12th. The tragedy did not deter the House Appropriations Committee from voting to slash Amtrak funding the very next day. There are ways Congress could fund its massive infrastructure bill without raising taxes. But the conservative-controlled Congress seems to have other plans for the nation’s profitable public assets.

The G-7 annual summit is scheduled this June 7th-8th to be held at Schloss Elmau in Upper Bavaria.
“The Chancellor would like to use the G7 summit to push ahead with two UN projects: firstly, a worldwide climate agreement and secondly an agenda for sustainable development.”1