This Just In: Your Government Can No Longer Protect You from Breast Cancer

The ultimate price of a corrupted government arrived on Friday: the Supreme Court decrees your government no longer has the right to protect you from breast cancer.

From now on, you’re on your own.

Supreme Court strikes down Chevron, curtailing power of federal agencies

Thanks to judges on the take that bottled water you’re drinking can cause you lumps and your government can’t do a damn thing about it.

Except, of course, let Big Pharma charge you your life savings for chemo.

Thanks to judges willing to stoop for the troops any time someone sticks a buck in their g-string, that toy you picked up at Walmart can now contain enough lead to cause your baby mental retardation – and your government can’t do a damn thing to stop them.

A lifetime spent caring for a special needs child because a judge spread his legs.

https://www.theverge.com/24188365/chevron-scotus-net-neutrality-dmca-visa-fcc-ftc-epa

Thanks to corruption that sweetener in your soda can give you Alzheimer’s – and there is nothing you can do about it. Nor can your government. But don’t worry – the billionaires paying off SCOTUS will make a fortune on that cut-rate shithole they’ll will stick you in when you can’t remember your name. And bankrupt your beleaguered spouse in the bargain.

Hope you’re not overly attached to your house.

Thanks to judges willing to spread their robes for any crook who stuffs cash down their crotch, your government is also no longer allowed to protect you from any sleaze that wants to save a buck or two by growing your lettuce in a field regularly doused with raw sewage.

Enjoy that salad.

Thanks to judges with no character or honor, polluters can now destroy your family’s farmland and your government can’t stop them. They can now fill the rivers you fish in with poison, slop your soy and wheat fields with industrial filth and destroy the beaches and waters your business relies on, and your government do anything to can’t stop them.

Small business owner? Rancher? Farmer? Kiss your land’s value goodbye – you don’t exist, only billionaires do.

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-ruling

So thanks to judges willing to slut for any crook who tickles their nads with a Benjamin, the Home Depot can now sell you cheap toxic flooring from China guaranteed to give your family multiple sclerosis, lupus and IBS – and your government is powerless to stop them.

Because the Supreme Court of the United States wants the people and the government powerless.

And any crook who wants to harm the American people to get away with it, even to poisoning children.

So forget life and liberty; the corrupt judges of the Supreme Court – a group of people who have sworn to God to protect the American people – have chosen instead to subject women to breast cancer, children to lead poisoning and farmers to filth.

They have chosen to make government of the people, by the people and for the people into the government of the United States shall be powerless to protect the people, the government of the United States shall be impotent before those who destroy its resources, and the government of the United States shall cower, cringe and wimper before any criminal who buys a judge..

So remember, again, as you take that sip of bottled water: your government is no longer allowed to stop it from giving you breast cancer.

Remember as your child puts that toy in his mouth: your government is no longer allowed to make sure it isn’t full of lead.

Remember as you take that supplement: your government is no longer allowed to make sure it isn’t going to give you Alzheimer’s disease.

As you contemplate the thousand things that can make you sick remember: your government can no longer protect you or your family from any of them. After all, a bribe is more important than your breasts.

Cheers.

P.S. Two of the biggest contributors to this decision were the following:

https://www.kochind.com

https://www.crowholdings.com/team/

You may want to reach out to them and ask them why they think the government should have no power to protect the people from breast cancer, lead poisoning and Alzheimer’s disease. Or having their farms, ranches, and businesses destroyed by crooked polluters.

About Us

Or you may simply wish to divest from, or refuse to invest in, enterprises that spend money influencing the courts to deny their government to ability to protect you from cancer.

The DNC, The Mainstream Media, and the Train Wreck

I wrote this in March 2017, after the election of the latest DNC chair.

Funny how little has changed.

The DNC, The Mainstream Media, and the Train Wreck

I watched the election of the new DNC chair a few weeks ago, cringing the way you do when you see the train bearing down on the car stuck on the tracks but can’t do anything to stop it. When I finally took my hands away from my eyes I winced the way you do when you’re staring at the plume of smoke rising from the wreck. And then I watched the mainstream media cover this coronation with their expected earnest approval, and…sigh.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/tom-perez-profile/index.html

The Democratic Party has it right on any number of things. Their devotion to the truth that hatred and bigotry is wrong is commendable, and their emphatic embrace of civil liberties is righteous. They understand the importance of both healthcare and education, and that’s reassuring.

But on the matter of the economy, both the hierarchy of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media seem determined not to get it. Don’t get me wrong – I believe they want the middle class and working people of this country to be okay, just not if it involves the terrifying specter of standing up to Goldman Sachs, or any sacrifice of their own power and position. If it could just sort of happen without them having to take any real risk that’d be great, but if not, they’d rather talk about anything else. And so they do.

They talk about problems and suggest solutions that go absolutely nowhere. They point at bad things and frown and pontificate. They gabble like turkeys and cluck like chickens, and seem completely incapable of doing a single useful thing. And this was true the entire time they had maximum political power; I suppose now that they’re the minority they have an excuse, but – sigh.

And apparently they learned nothing from the election. After spending fourteen months trying to cram Hillary Clinton down the people’s throats despite the outraged protests of those who wanted real change – after blatantly eighty-sixing the one guy who was willing to take on the power structure – after being presented with incontrovertible proof that the people are sick and tired of the status quo – they select as the party’s new leader an establishment factotum, Tom Perez.

Since the election a great deal has been written and said about the future of the Democratic Party and the Left in general. There seems to be a sharp dichotomy between those who think the Party ought to move further to the Left and those who think it ought to move to the center. The Party hierarchy has predictably chosen the allegedly center route. Personally, I think neither camp is right.

The issue really isn’t further Left or center, and the very fact the choice is being parsed this way only shows how little the Party understands the people these days. (And those who believe that the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote indicates the party has some kind of mandate are deluded; her popular vote victory only indicates more people than not were frightened of Donald Trump as president.)

For forty years the people of this country have had political corruption shut them out of any real say in what actually happens in this country. They’ve seen the media substitute a kind of puppet show for the voices of real people. And they’ve seen multinational and transnational corporations vacuum up the wealth and income that was once theirs like a Hoover on steroids.

They want their government back. They want the free press back. And they want the orgy of corporate greed that has left them in constant terror of penury stopped – preferably without an orgy of ill-conceived regulations slapped together in a hurry without any real thought of their consequence, and preferably without an orgy of government spending that simply throws money at a problem (and a slew of bureaucrats and special interest groups in the bargain).

The hierarchy of the Democratic Party has zero intention of actually doing any of this, of course, and if you doubt that all you really need to listen to is Mr. Perez’ first statement as DNC chair: our first priority must be to send the message that you vote for a Democrat if you want a good job.

Note the wording: “send the message.”

Not we must create policies that deal firmly and courageously with the pattern of economic predation that is destroying the middle class. Not the well-being of the majority of the American people is more important than our own well-feathered nests. Not we are determined to root out the causes of your misery and change them.

No, it was we’re going to do what we always do: ask for your money so we can talk a good game and do absolutely nothing to fix the problem.

What the DNC really should have offered was an apology, one that would sound something like this:

We the Democratic Party wish to apologize to every working man and woman in America for abandoning you to the wolves these past forty years, for our shameful cowardice in being more interested in protecting our careers than serving you and taking on the powers that have destroyed your wealth and income. We apologize for throwing the Democratic Primary to the candidate we favored and completely ignoring your wishes as the people. And we apologize for using our chums in the media to force a choice on you that wasn’t yours.

We apologize for spending so much time sucking up to special interests and lobbyists and ignoring your problems. We apologize for selling out, again and again, to Wall Street and Greed Incorporated. We apologize for dismissing anyone who didn’t agree with us as ignorant, crazy, mean, or unenlightened. We apologize for thinking that talking is a substitute for doing.

We apologize for all the harm we have done you by sitting in our little self-satisfied circle and ignoring your needs, and we swear to you from this moment on you come first, not us. We swear we will fight with matchless courage against any power that seeks to harm you, that we will do, not simply talk, and that from this day forward we will make in action the well-being of the common people our first and main priority.

Every night I go to sleep and dream I wake to that. Were that it were so, I could stop cringing at the wreck.

THE ECONOMY AS A MYTHICAL FIGURE

After the economic crash of 2008 South Park ran an episode I found particularly hilarious. It involved the various denizens of the town treating the economy as if it was some remote and peevish god who, in a fit of petulance, smote the people for some imagined transgression.

The episode was funny for the same reason anything succeeds in being funny: it was basically the truth.

Three thousand years ago the most mysterious matters to us were agriculture and medicine; we had little understanding of either and yet were entirely dependent upon them for our lives, and so naturally they became a matter of magical thinking, flawed quasi-religious dogma, and flat-out superstition.

Three thousand years later we’ve mastered agriculture to the point of being able to create square watermelons and medicine to the point of being able to re-wire genes for blue eyes. It’s now economics we approach with blind faith in dogma, superstitious awe, and unreasoned terror.

We got into the mess we’re in now some fifty years ago by thinking just this way: that the economy was some peevish deity to be placated with sacrifices and supplicated with feverish, half-baked doctrine held to fanatically.

Don’t believe me? Strike up a conversation with an adherent of so-called free market economics.

If you listen carefully, you’ll notice a weird resemblance between what you’re hearing and the ravings of a religious fanatic: an insistence on magical “proof” of certain axioms, an insistence on propositions that defy logic, and that staple of all true believers: the more you point out holes in their theories, the more vehemently they deny them.

Free-market economics (sometimes called corporate libertarianism) consists of the following beliefs:

That commerce never needs to be regulated because anyone committing a crime within said marketplace will magically be booted out by “market forces;”

That all generation of profit – absolutely all generation of profit – automatically benefits everyone;

That government should always and automatically do what business wants because the interests of business are always identical to the interests of the people;

And that economic growth can, in and of itself, solve all of mankind’s problems.

You can sit with a devotee of this theory for hours and point to hundreds of examples that disprove this theory, and they won’t budge; it’s like arguing about the divinity of the Virgin Mary with a devout Catholic.

If you listen very hard, the undercurrent you’ll hear in their voices is a shrill it has to be true! It must be true! I need it to be true!

I have come to believe their need for it to be true is based on a simple premise: they don’t know what else to do except believe this. It has to be true because admitting that it isn’t involves having no idea whatsoever what we should do instead. And that is even scarier than clinging to something provably untrue.

That covers people who actually believe in this bizarre theory. They’re egged on and supported, of course, by people who have little interest in economic theory but a major interest in getting rich under the comfortable provisions of the theory.

The simple truth is, any economy – local, national, or global – is not some remote deity or autonomous construct or even a thing, at all; it’s simply the aggregate of the actions of every person involved in it as they affect money, business, employment, and consumption. All an economy is is the combined actions of a group of people.

I think it’s this we most don’t want to understand; that the economy is simply us, and how we behave about money.

Few subjects are so fraught with emotion as our relationship with money. Not only is money survival – in the form of food, housing, medical care, utilities, and clothing – it’s comfort and security and safety and status and so many other things dear to the human heart. And I think we are all privately uneasy with this truth, that life is and must be in part about acquiring these things, and acquiring them is so often an ugly business.

There are so many things we do not yet understand about economics. To what extent is it a zero sum game – meaning that for one person to win, is it always necessary for someone to lose? (And if it is, does that mean human life is destined to always be a savage jungle, that we are all morally doomed?)

Are we awful for wanting the things we want? Does our desire for things mean we are defective in spirit?

We know, deep down inside, that those at the top live lives we’ve dreamed of; we know that if we lived in such palatial quarters, waited on hand and foot, we’d fight like hell to keep what we had. We know our dreams and they are seldom of a sunlit glade or a homespun cottage; they are so often of wealth, power, and fame.

Thus when we examine any matter of this thing called an economy we do not wish to see it all that clearly; we are blinded and paralyzed by our own complicity in what’s wrong, shamed by our own desires, and both defiant and guilty when we examine the matter of what causes what.

And this needs to change.

What Kind of Leader Do You Want?

Time again to pick a leader.

Time again to try to put aside the babbling voices of bought-and-paid-for pundits and decide who will stand up for the people of this nation.  Time again to think of the future.  Time again to find someone who will not simply talk a good game on ensuring your future, but actually do it.

And time again, apparently, to watch the corporate titans of this land race to install a leader they can bend to their will.  A leader who will, when asked to, quietly maintain the status quo.

Corporate power has become a gale force wind that for forty years has decimated everything in its path – your wages, your savings, your healthcare, your voice.  It has bent your government to its will, reduced your free press to a billboard for its interests, and slowly but steadily eroded your power.  It has changed the United States of America to the United Corporation of America, an institution in which you are not a stockholder.

Whom do you trust to stand up to that power?

We’ve been deprived of true leadership for so long we no longer remember what it sounds like.

It sounds like this: whatever is oppressing you, I will stand up to it.  Whatever is harming you, I will make it stop.  Whoever cheats you, lies to you, steals from you, I will put a end to it.

The job of a leader is to have the courage you don’t.  It’s to fight the fights you can’t.  It’s to sacrifice their comfort for yours, and not give in to whatever threatens you, no matter how big its claws are.  A leader’s job is to have your back no matter how difficult that might be.

If you can’t do that, you have no business leading.

So what do you want?

Another leader whose personal best is to tell you everything you want to hear, then quietly capitulate once again to those powers while telling you that’s all they can do?

Another ineffectual “centrist” who will talk a good game on your economic well-being and then secure their war chest by selling you out?  Another blandly likeable drone whose idea of victory is letting it get only a little worse?  Who will tell you that standing up to that which has taken everything from you is radical, unrealistic, or even dangerous?

Standing up to bully is always a radical idea to a coward.  The thing is, leadership requires exactly that courage.  A real leader is not afraid of a bully.

Or in bed with one.

You cannot stand up to a power you’re in bed with.  You can’t be supported by corporate power and fight it.  You can’t hitch your wagon to the very thing destroying the middle class and then oppose it.

Wall Street has grown fat by keeping wages low, by ballooning the cost of medical care, by making the cost of a college education ten years of indenture.  It has turned your children’s schools into a factory for fat contracts and done the same to our military.  It’s taken your pension and your savings and it’s kept its tax rate low by raising yours.  It’s skyrocketed the cost of living while making sure you live hand-to-mouth.

And to keep the gravy train rolling it has hand-picked leaders either too stupid or too cowardly to ever say no.

Think of this nation’s economy as a tree bent all the way to the ground by that gale force wind.  To bend it back straight and true what do you need?  A timid breeze or a force as strong as that gale – one that will blow against it with equal power and force it upright again?

That wind isn’t going anywhere; the only question is how much more it will be allowed to destroy, and who will stand against it, and bring it into alignment with the needs and the rights of the people again.

The leader you pick will be the one standing against that gale.  That requires the courage of a lion and a backbone of steel.  It requires someone who does not believe victory is only letting the hole get a little deeper, but pulling you out of it entirely – and bending that tree back to a straight and even keel again.

Choose wisely, and choose well.