Go here and just start clicking on stuff. Pretty amazing compilation of data. If you look at this stuff for awhile, it's virtually impossible to not "get it," meaning that every thing these conniving fuckers do is based on pleasing their real bosses -- corporate zillionaires, old money elites, a few nouveau billionaires needing a place to launder drug money, international banking cartels fronted by some little "John Smith's First Statewide Bank and Trust" type of nondescript single-branch mall-based bank.
They seem to have three main reasons to toss all that money in Congress' direction:
- Friendly revisions to the federal tax code that further reduce the investment class' tax liability from a lousy 15 percent they're paying now down as close to zero as possible. I doubt the greedy fuckos will be satisfied until the feds pay
them instead of the other way round.
- A favorable regulatory environment is maybe the top prize. They can save money in any number of ways if they can stay under the oversight radar. This has never been easier or more profitable than under the current regime, but there's always more money to be made by doing things even cheaper. So whether it's screwing employees out of the pensions or reducing their benefits packages to near zero, disposing of toxics as cheaply as possible -- which usually means hiring a couple of guys with a van equipped with a lift gate, loading a few 55 gallon drums into the van and then watching all those disposal problems drive away forever.
- Corporados increasingly need a get out of jail free card. CEOs are actually doing time, which is definitely not the way god intended thins to work. So the third big reason for bribing congress is creating an ad hoc insurance policy against prosecution and prison. And since the corporate boards these days are more like the A-list of Al Capone's inner circle than a respectable groups of honest businessmen, these bribers know they're going to do all kinds of illegal or quasi-legal stuff in the course of their congressional employee's term.
Might as well invest heavily in prison protection. Can't make any money from a cell, except that $.22 a day the prison/industrial complex has decided to pay their slaves to pitch stocks, act like telemarketers pitching everything from time shares to those coupon books that promise two dinners for the price of one.
I think those are the main reasons, but there may be a few more I'm completely unaware of.
No matter what else, though, it's impossible to look at their money source and voting records and not get the point. It's unusual to find a pol with a voting history that doesn't correlate closely with the interests of whoever's giving them the most money during any given election cycle.
And the goddamn hypocrites are still yammering on about how this is the world's longest running democracy and how citizen participation is key to preserving the American way of life.
Translation: You're living in a rapidly declining failed state with pretensions of empire and no real way to enforce it. The world hates the US and is becoming quite active in creating or supporting policies specifically designed to fuck this country over. Using the Euro rather than the dollar as the currency of record for buying oil in the Middle East is one of the biggest raised middle fingers in the history of US foreign policy failures.
The economy's shot and the debt load's too heavy to enable any significant improvement for many years -- possibly never. In any case, the Bushies have succeeded beyond even Norquist's dreams in not only destroying the few remaining scraps of the social safety net, but impoverishing the country to the point where even enlightened, well-intentioned leadership in DC won't be able to resurrect those programs, much less add new ones.
So say goodbye to any possibility of an enlightened health care system in this country. We're probably too stupid to deserve one anyway, but it would have been nice to have the option.
Anybody who claims the Bushies are complete fuck-ups and that everything they touched turned to merde is missing the entire point. They didn't stage their right wing coup to improve this country or the lives of its people. The exact opposite was the objective, and they've done a pretty good job of it. You'll notice that everything they touch does in fact turn to merde... But not for them or their cronies and war profiteers and corporate criminals and the rest of the crooked to the core ruling class bastards whose only loyalty is to money and whose sole bit of dogma is: "All for us, and fuck anybody who doesn't like it."
And that's exactly what America looks like today: A nation at the brink of civil war because nobody has figured out who the real enemy is. A country so polarized that it's easier than ever to get involved in a fist fight if you want to.
A workforce that's finally had its faith in the American system destroyed such that all they can do is lie awake every night and hope and pray and whimper that they'll still have that shitty little job without benefits at the end of the week. Wage slavery combined with debt slavery makes for a highly insecure population. So not only are they underpaid and overworked, they're scared shitless that even that hideous existence will be taken away and shipped to the latest fad country for cheap labor. Then what... Farther into debt slavery because the cards are all that's standing between this nouveau broke guy and a shopping cart and cardboard refrigerator box under a prime local overpass conveniently close to schools and shopping and in one of the homeless community's safest neighborhoods.
Yup... USA! USA! USA! We're Number One!
Well, I don't know about number one, but we're definitely in the running for the top spot in the "fastest slide from solvency to poverty to bankruptcy in the history of the industrialized world." Now that's worth striving for. Not that there's fuck all else we stand a chance of winning these days, except world's most obscenely bloated war department. I think we're looking pretty good there, too.
wp
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