State of the Union February 12, 2013

“We have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and we can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is stronger.” Mr. O. 

Gun Violence, Newtown, Hadiya Pendelton, Gabrielle Giffords, Sandy Hook elementary, an Aurora Colorado movie theater, Oak Creek, Blacksburg (Virginia Tech): this is a pimp list to make a clap and cry movie soundtrack.  It left me screaming at the TV, "drug war, drug war."   You cannot fix human nature, but you can manipulate macroeconomic motivations through the variables governments can control.  Comprehensive background checks are ‘at least look I tried’ legislation.  Mental health issues leap to the assumption that it takes mental illness to murder.  Nope, sane people murder innocent people all the time.  Quit pretending to put reality in a box so you can live in fantasyland.  If the federal government could mandate states and corporations to share data maybe the “gun-purchaser” database we have now could function to cross reference felony and mental-illness records. 

The fact is nothing is going to stop someone without such a record giving or unwittingly selling a firearm to some asshole on the free market.  Nothing, nothing ever in America will change the economy of firearms already in the populace.  We made that bed, now we are lying in it.  Putting pictures of dead five-year and fifteen-year olds and college freshmen up on billboards-of-thought ignore the bigger picture.  It is like a church showing an image of a fetus or a baby burning in hell for lack of baptism and ignoring the people in the pews; it is fraught with unasked questions.  

Immigration reform now is just Republican congressmen pandering to a Hispanic voting block to make sure brown America does not default Democrat for generations to vote with the same statistical rates that black America does now.  The Eucharist cannot save you Republicans.  Even the Pope quit.  Catholic Mexicans are more concerned with civil rights and economic freedom than dogma.  Spending eighteen billion a year to guard a border with a wrecked economy that Central Americans are less likely to want to cross anyway is not a sign of a secure border.  It is a sign of an unsustainable panic-expenditure.  (Obama won 71 percent of Hispanics polled over Romney.) 

To bilingual-Rubio, we rejected your party’s game plan.  Was Romney making the preceding speech to America; nah I don’t think so.  We see through the trickle-down bullshit.  Shut the fuck up about Solyndra.  Not every renewable-energy investment is going to succeed, but if you ignore the macro-level trends, in messages from other non-white Republicans who were given the token job of delivering minority-party state of the union responses and fucked it up, Bobby Jindal will be reminding Republicans why they are considered the stupid party again. 

Where was something about getting rid of the Senate filibuster bullshit that causes so much legislative constipation?  Congress is all in one room.  Call that chamber out on the bullshit and relate your own hypocrisy as an ex-Senator of how both parties are guilty.  You want a standing ovation from the people listening who really matter, try that one.  

On spending a billion dollars on creating manufacturing hubs for America, sure great ah huh, I wanted to hear the ‘there will be no toys for Christmas this year speech.”  What about the god-damn sequester because of the dysfunction?  None of these pet-projects or initiatives mean shit if you cannot address the family-problems at dinner.   

Yall is a bunch of cousins, brothers, sisters and uncles staring at ya plates forking up potatoes and caviar not talking about a damn thing but the weather.  And yall argue about that shit too.  Nah it’s just hot, God knows, scientists are wrong.  This won’t cause any new debt.  We got money honey.  I found a twenty under the sofa.  We’re good.  (Yeah I made a Vandals reference.)  Nah, Republicans need to learn science and Democrats need to learn math.  They both need to leave religion at home, and both study history, this is public school.  That should be the bumper sticker for the new Congress.  

Offense against cyber-attacks on companies and our governments, who is the enemy; China, anonymous, some fucker in Michigan, Tehran, who?  How do you know?  How do you hold a court case?  Do you pull an Iraq and just go in blowing shit up and asking question later? Can you even stop when you do not even know the name of your enemy?  I guess we should try, do something, but that something scares the hell out of me.  

Physical terrorism, religious terrorism, cyber terrorism, we are all trying to stab the gullets of ghosts.  We are freaked the fuck out as a world.  If we can’t build a tank or a bomber to blow it up, we are clueless.  All we end up doing is upping our defense budget to build more tanks and planes while the unused ones sit in fields and hangers, just in case.   

Bringing thirty-thousand troops home and military project cuts, that makes sense.  We are fighting enemies that are not going to go away because their weapon is money fueled by opium, extortion, to a degree oil through Iran and Saudi Arabia (yeah the 9/11 hijackers came from?  Oh yeah that’s right, but shush, shush on the economic take-a blind eye politics.)  We are droning our way into brothers and sisters of deceased into a congregation of conversion for our ghostly enemy.  How about we fight the economic war in the poorest countries and start with drugs and energy independence? 

There was token service about partly being on the way of stabilizing, (read not reducing) our debt.  The sequester date (March first) sits like the elephant with the donkey’s ass in the room.  Compromise will probably be made for political expediency.  For what, post pone, kick the math next week.  Vomit, bulimia, Uggh!   

Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to nine dollars per hour and linking it to inflation.  That is actually a good idea.  It is long overdue and if with a phase-up plan, it has legs.  Poor and lower-middle class people spend what they make.  So as far as economic stimulus goes federal minimum wage gives assurance to states that they can remain competitive on a national level.  There is the issue of global economics, but the truth is these are the jobs at Wal-Mart and Burger King for the most part.  Those are jobs of the American consumer that cannot be exported going to giant corporations that make billions.  The “mom & pop” is already more likely to pay more than minimum wage because they are less likely to be corporate assholes treating humans like a CAFO lot.   

Sure those wages would probably see a bump, but going down that road ignores math again.  Look at higher corporate pay as a percentage of average workers in this country and you see the root of the misconception that trickle-down economics has latched its fangs into the level of fear in America.  We are taught to hate each other and blame each other.  That if we raised the minimum wage panic will ensue and corporations will not be able to afford to hire anyone and there will be massive lay-offs.  That is the bullshit about why Woody Guthrie started singing about the power of private labor unions.  Wake the fuck up and don’t give into fear and study a bit of macroeconomic theory America. 

The Affordable Health Care Act is only partially enacted.  The taxes it creates have barely even been filed.  The individual mandate and federal subsidies to assist people in acquiring health insurance are not yet in effect.  The health care exchanges the act creates are a ‘what the hell are you talking about’ to most Americans.  The fifty-employee threshold is a real problematic issue.  So to assess the act is totally premature.  I will say this; the federal government has a responsibility to create a digital infrastructure to assist small businesses complying with the act that has not occurred.  One of the reasons is the obstructionism of Republican state governors sabotaging planning another is the inability for the federal government to plan for the needs of small businesses, the two are entwined. 

One of the reasons healthcare costs are down is because our insane healthcare cost growth rate had to come down in the economic downturn.  Middleclass people are choosing to just not go to the doctor as often to make budgets work, while they are earning less in a shit-economy.  Digital improvements like the advancement of tablets and smartphones as transitional platforms to where we need to be are also helping, but would help more if we could connect the whole. 

Single-payer, just have the balls to say single-payer mother fucker.  That is where we need to go.  The digital infrastructure to make single-payer viable is the asset we should be focusing our spending on because it is the greatest cost-saving investment America can make for its future of Baby-Boomers pushing the Seniors off the limited hospital beds available and into the grave in a morbid game of duck-duck-goose.    

Change the agriculture bills to subsidize local farmers with a digital infrastructure to help them get their products to market and use their approximate logistical domestic advantage of location to compete in America’s supermarkets.  Create nonprofit grants and a digital system to assist average citizens to pre-pay for a portion of local farmer’s crop and pick-it up through a system of farmer’s markets and leased-space distribution hubs. 

If you can make apples, spinach, broccoli, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, onions, celery and bell peppers less expensive by reconsidering the subsidies that favor Monsanto and the chain of garbage that corrals humans into fast-food drive-troughs, you might just find healthcare costs going down on a systemic level.  (Nah, that shit requires math and science bitch.  We ain’t bout dat.  This Big Mac tastes good.  This Coca Cola tastes good.  Sprinkle that salt.  Mmm ammonia-bathed!) 

Energy evolution, yeah you right Obama, global warming is real.  The droughts, the nor’easters, the hurricanes, the wildfires, the record average high temperatures over the past fifteen years are facts of science.  How can you ask a country that thinks God is going to save them from not seeing the effects of what we do to the air and ground-water when so many of them think there is an interactive Father in the clouds and a devil underneath the rock?   

Talk about high speed rail, wind-farms, the smart-grid, and improving infrastructure and bridges that takes cash you don’t have  for projects in a back log?  Bridges and roads are stimulants.  What you need are long-term cost reductions.  Creating energy security trusts to syphon profits from fossil-fuel based energies into renewables (federal oil and gas leases to biofuels?), maybe.  It’s a start if it’s not just token lip-service.  Doubling wind and solar by 2020 is a modest goal.  Try using a multiple of quadrupling or higher.  The numbers are so low now as a percentage of total energy production.  They have to be less then ten percent overall.  

We want to give every four-year old kid a great preschool?  I agree, it probably pays for itself by a significant multiple in reduced costs in other government services and increased economic growth down the line.  Mandating four-year olds to go to public preschool is probably where we should start if we are serious now that educational science has highlighted the impact of early education with years of empirical data.   

Did you address defined-benefit government retirement; shit no.  Did you address a federal digital web-based infrastructure to connect all classrooms with common thresholds of competent tools?  No, didn’t hear that just rhetoric, yeah Congress loves kids, especially dead ones shot in schools to be used as marketing campaigns.   

The kindergarteners in Connecticut are just as important as the fifth graders and tenth graders and thirty-year olds shot in the street.  They spout propaganda of ‘oh she had her whole life ahead of her,’ wah wah wah, then what?  She gets to be past fifteen, twenty-eight and then she’s part of the system and nobody gives a shit.  Think about where that extended thought goes?   

This is what preachers and politicians do when they attempt to guide us with emotional vulnerable propaganda rather than empirical facts.  In every instance of education, gun violence, immigration and energy, we must turn to a fact-based form of government.  (Math for Democrats and science for Republicans, history for both of them and leave religion at home.) 

The prostituted bullet-riddled kindergartens, Jesus brigades, un-mathematically-sound pensions and bonded debts of this nation are killing us with our eyes open.  We are watching ourselves take a match, light our pants on fire and scream like hell a minute later about why our flesh is burning?  This Republicat-Democran dysfunction must end and math and science, dare I say ration, must take hold.  Mr. Obama-Mr. Rubio, for the most part, what I hear from you is a one-party system.  

The state of our union is in flames.  It is stronger, but we are still burning.  It is not on sizzling because Obama got re-elected.  I dare say it would be worse if he had not.  Sage Francis is asking, “I am at the fire.  Where are you?”   

What is going to happen to our stock market by 2025 should concern us all.  What is happening to our planet takes a level of cohesion among governments that may not be possible or economically feasible.  We can look at our smart-grid.  We can look at our deficits, but first we must look at our internal minds.  This is the battleground for ration to take hold.  If we cannot slay this one-party propaganda, how our representatives are elected to sit in that room and the powers they have to self-sabotage our nation, nothing else matters.  

“The American people don't expect government to solve every problem. They don't expect those of us in this chamber to agree on every issue. But they do expect us to put the nation's interests before party. They do expect us to forge reasonable compromise where we can, for they know that America moves forward only when we do so together and that the responsibility of improving this union remains the task of us all.”  “The greatest nation on Earth -- the greatest nation on Earth cannot keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next. We can't do it.” Mr. O.