A Few Thoughts to Ponder as the Abyss Takes Shape

Does it bother anyone else that the contours of the woebegone stimulus package are being shaped and shaved by the likes of Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine? Low on brain cells, big on the trickle-down, government-is-evil myths that got us here -- contemplating global economic insolvency and our own. All they need are a pair of fiddles.

Now consider what Chalmers Johnson has to say in The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon: How Taxpayers Finance Fantasy Wars. Taste:

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

... the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."

As for what not to do, check out Avedon Carol's take at The Sideshow, in a piece called Grassroots. Taste:

During the campaign, some activists were alarmed to discover that the Obama campaign was consolidating independent activist networks under his own umbrella and making them his own. Strangely, a lot of other activists were not alarmed at the possibility that a popular leader was thus setting up a situation where he was neutralizing his potential critics or opposition from the non-right-wing side.

You don't wait for the President of the United States to lead a grassroots movement. You don't wait for the powerful to tell you to ask them for what they want to give you.

Look, there is a lot to dislike in the stim package and they are the fault of Obama and the Depression Dogs and the idiotic idea that this "bipartisanship" thing is a higher goal than saving the damn country. Those are the things you should be phoning your reps to complain about if you want to "do something" that doesn't involve getting out of your chair.

Or you could start organizing a visible presence on the street - in front of the Capitol and White House, in front of newspaper buildings and broadcast network studios, or at the local offices of your representatives.

If Obama and his neo-liberal econ team don't wake up soon, I expect there'll be a growing number of "visible presences" on the streets of the good old U.S. of A. And they won't be well dressed. Or "post-partisan."