Our ranks spread across the room. We are all facing the same direction, some are a little more coordinated than others and some are dripping a little body fluid. Technically this is the cardio room at Clyde's Gym of Resolve and we are all here proving that Americans are not afraid of hard sweaty work. At least not as long as it take place in a climate controlled room and there is parking space available conveniently near the front door. But there isn't any sense of common purpose or even much interaction between us, mostly people just dully pursue their own private goals without acknowledging those around them. And from where I'm sitting, on this stationary bike, I say, "Zombie is as Zombie does."

Cappy Rudyard:

$5,900,388

Is the amount Common Cause reports Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman received in health industry campaign contributions from 2000-2008.

$77,000

A year is how much his wife Hadassah received from a lobbying firm to consult on health care in just one year during that period. Prior to this, she also ran PR for drug companies like Hoffman-LaRoche and Pfizer, according to Salon.

Priceless

Is my forlorn hope that somehow the founders designed a system that can weather the craven cash-for-obstruction breach of the public trust that has paralyzed the national legislature:

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.

- Federalist Papers, No. 62

Free Market Squirrel:

Nice try, Cappy. That was how Madison and Hamilton justified the creation of a deliberative body called the "Senate" that would be isolated from the winds of public instability that buffet the House. What they don't seem to have predicted was that lawmakers like Joe Lieberman have a vested interest in maintaining the imbalance between rich corporate interests and poor people too busy scrambling to pay their medical bills. As George Bush put it, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." Which means that as dollars replace votes as the currency used to buy political influence in government, actual governing becomes increasingly impossible. As the forces of obstruction grow ever more dominant, the private sector emerges as the only agent of change. And that's when everyone will learn to love and accept the efficiencies of the market. Bwah-hah-hah-hah. Enjoy your last few years of freedom before you too learn to love your squirrelly capitalist overlords!

Horizontally Mobility

Of course there is little social mobility in a classless society like the United States. If there are no class differences then, by definition, it is not possible to move to a different class. In the United States, there do exist large differences in personal wealth and opportunity but these are based entirely on personal worthiness rather than social class. The point is well made in the following clip taken from The Ayn Rand Institute's annual presentation of, "Them that have - deserve more, and them that have little - deserve nothing."



ABOVE: A group of the most privileged, and therefore most virtuous, political elite meet to work out details of new social legislation.

You let me in and
I eat your brains.

Even if ignorance is bliss there is no excuse to wear it on ones sleeve as if it were the fashion of the week. We live in a wonderful country, but democracy is not a God given right. Government of the people, by the people, for the people is more precious than gold. But, friends, it is slipperier than greased lightning and disappears twice as fast if the people don't attend to it every minute. In our lifetime we, the people, have not attended to it. We have let our eyes be dazzled by visions of MTV. We have let our ears be clogged with fables of free markets and Homeland Security. We have occupied our minds with trivia and gossip about the decadent lifestyles of the rich and famous. And the only pity in our hearts has been reserved for the poor rich inheritors of inconcievable wealth. And while we were too busy, ladies and gentlemen, too busy eating, drinking and making merry to attend to the world our children will live in, our wonderful country has slid far down the slope into the Valley of the Shadow. We have grown accustomed to government of the people, for the corporate, by the corporate. We have learned to judge candidates, not by their character or voting history, but by the appearance of their genetilia and their position on abortion. We let the money changers run the temple and they stripped out the copper wiring and plumbing, we left Bonnie and Clyde guarding the bank and now we wonder where our money went!

Friends, I say it is time, and past time, to pull our collective heads out and take a good look around. Democracy isn't about choosing the wisest leader. Democracy is about what E. B. White once called, "the sneaking suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time." It's about putting all the facts in front of the people, letting them put their collective heads together and then abiding by the decision they make. When we let all the power fall into the hands of a few individuals, those few individuals are subject to all the influence the pressure peddlers can apply, and they will be influenced - they are only human. When we unbridled power fall into the hands of a few individuals, those few individuals are subject to greed, and arrogance, and pride, and all the temptations that humans are prey to - they are only human, you know.

I am here today to ask for your support for a candidate who, in life, was largely unmoved by the temptations of the spirit. A candidate who, as a zombie, is largely immune to the temptations of the flesh. A candidate who organized the Demons of Hell and has taken a leave of absence from heaven so he can be with us here. Just because that's the kind of guy he is. I mean, of course, Zombie Eugene Debs, candidate for President of the United States of America!!!!





ZED in '08

(T) (F) On 25 July 1554, Mary Tudor married Prince Felipe of Spain in Winchester Cathedral, bringing about a powerful political alliance between the two countries.

(T) (F) Virginia is to Texas as England is to Spain





Jenna Bush weds Virginia politician's son
Sat May 10, 2008

Alan Greenspan, one of acolytes in Ayn Rand's inner circle, and the man who created the 1987 stock market crash, less than two months after President Reagan gave him the keys to the Fed. After proving himself so quickly, it is little wonder that he stayed the course for the next twenty years.



3-D-Land News recently asked him about the economy after twenty years of free slashing and free burning of the market, by the highest bidder, for the highest bidder. He mumbled a terse, "Anti-depressants 'of little use'" before security threw us out out the lobby.

by Cappy Rudyard

Here at IMF,S we rarely make endorsements of a political kind. Sure, we will shill for just about any corporate fatcat who wants to fling a roll of flat green pieces of eight in a rubber band our way. And product placement? That’s a Red Lobster™ lobster claw up there to the left, we’ll have you know. We’re regular product placement skanks.

But politics is something we think carefully about. Slowly, deliberately, and carefully. So after great roiling cathartic tidal debates between the surrogates we hire to do our thinking for us while we labor to produce this blog, often in vain, I might add, we have come to a place where we are ready to finally endorse a candidate in the 1908 presidential election. And it should come as no surprise that the man who shivers our electoral timbers is:

Eugene V. Debs.

Named after Eugene Sey and Victor Hugo, Eugene Debs is a tireless advocate for women’s and children’s rights, a peace activist, and strong voice for worker’s rights. A true progressive, he has the stuff to stand up to the type of dirty tricks that are sure to be part of the general election. In the March 23, 1907 Appeal to Reason he quoted Ferdinand Lassalle, who:

“Once said that the war against capitalism was not a rose water affair. It is rather of the storm and tempest order. All kinds of attacks must be expected, and all kinds of wounds will be inflicted. You will be assailed within and without, spat upon by the very ones that you are doing your best to serve, and at certain crucial moments find yourself isolated, absolutely alone as if to compel surrender, but in those moments, if you have the nerve, you become supreme.”

It isn't that Debs needs your vote as much as we need Debs.

tip of the hat to:
http://www.dependablerenegade.com/dependable_renegade/