The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
November 6th
WORKERS of the WORLD...
WAKE UP!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated by Acme Features
“We don’t only make the things you want, we make the
things you didn’t even know you want.”
- Larry the Cable Guy, Prilosec
Spokesman
Remember as I said
what Mr. Grady, up in Philadelphia, warned us bout? That... this side of the
Stephen King book you read or "Saw" movie you saw... there's no
happenstance more likely as to chill the blood as hearing some knock on your
door, followed by these words: "Sir, we're from the government, and we're
here to help you!"
Got problems? Republicans
will likely refer you to a cop if you’re white (if not, you’re shit outta luck); Democrats to a social worker or community organizer.
Lady in Bowling Green, in her 70s, late 70's by now, got told there was a ten
year waiting list for board and care for her blind, retarded… well, lets wake
up ourselve and use the wokeword
“special”… 50 year old boy back in '18, then wrote me, recently, sayin' that the gumment had
changed its mind owing to the statewide cuts in Medicaid; now there'd be a twelve
year wait (and under the Republican debt ceiling plan, it would be
sometime after 2050. Should have told
her to load up one barrel of the family shotgun for her boy, the other for
herself... but even Catfish manifest occasional Squeamish tendencies as argue
against the telling of certain ruthless and relentless truths in times when
impotence is mistaken for good intention, our Old James Crow-swilling Supremes
are Ruthless and the hope is not.
Probably it’s just
that I've gone Squeamish in my old age. But even conservative economists like
Milton Friedman and Alan Bloom disagreed among themselves, let alone with
liberals, on how far freedom, without justice, justifies the free market. "Weakening
belief in the justice of capitalism poses severe practical dangers for liberal
democratic societies," Bloom finally admitted on the doorstep to the Land
Beyond, leading some nine-ninety-niners, flat taxers and pre-MAGA flatter-earthers
to accuse him of stabbing liberty in the back and ignoring the slide into con-servative authoritarian America,
May Day has come and
gone, Labor Day too – not that it really matters since, half a century ago,
economist Louis Kelso published "The Capitalist Manifesto", as took
extreme exception to decisions by Roosevelt and the New Dealers to mitigate
effects of the Depression with social programs (spare change!) instead of
restructuring the economy... a folly that’s percolated down to present
Democratic policies on jobs and families (absent the make-work requirements and opportunities of the WPA, TVA and
other New Deal enterprises), posited against the conservative faith in
incarcerating our way out of the poor (if not poverty), by constructing more
private prisons financed by sheaves of Chinese IOUs. A relevant Don Jones Index has more to say
upon this, here.
"The nation
declared war on the effects of poverty," Kelso noted
(emphasis added, anticipating Thomas Piketty and, to
a degree, Elizabeth Warren), "rather than mounting an attack on poverty's
sole cause: lack of capital ownership. The decision to
concentrate on redistributing the fruits of production - income - can only
create a crippled, strife-ridden socialist prosperity... built on coercively
rigged wages and salaries, redistribution, welfare and debt." Or, as now, after the plague came and went,
the Russians invaded Ukraine and Saudis stabbed us in the back, the worser half of that.
Karl Marx, himself,
intended to tackle productive as opposed to unproductive labor in his projected
fourth volume of Kapital: "Theories of Surplus
Value" where, as critic Ian Gough maintains, his notes show a distinct
affection for a paleo-physiocratic view (as holds
services like cutting lawns and flipping burgers "unproductive" while
letting FIREmen and rentiers
off the hook). One almost wishes this smelly, panhandlin’
old Commie lived long enough to complete his opus - we would have, then, not
been vexed with the tinfoil-hat Marxist detour... its sour decline into socialism,
then liberalism, finally the inevitable termitistic neo-liberalism
of the Clinton-Obama-Biden wings of the Democrat Party-insect.
Want to disapperate a Commie? Tell him (or her) to google
Daniel Ortega’s mansion in Nicaragua.
Of late, I've become
aware of another Marx... beyond Karl, Groucho, Harpo and Chico... Karl's Afro-French son-in-law, Paul Lafargue.
His 1883 essay (completed in a French jail for having written other works, as
were decreed "incitements to pillage"… which charge might well be
applied to any glossy magazine advertising stuff Americans cannnot
afford to buy) argued that workers are to blame for overproduction...
oppressing poor capitalists, as must devour the fruits of their surplus
productivity through "unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles
and syphilitic debauches." (Not to mention
a hungersome hunger for the Prilosec after
debauching!) Only the three-hour day
would deliver beleaguered termites from the selfish workers' greed for work, Lafargue concluded, in this book he titled: "The Right
to be Lazy".
After all, the Fed is
frantically raising interest rates like a monkey on crank because... to put the
nature of the crisis in plain American English... too much money as a result of
people as kept working during the plague not going out and spending it chasing too
few chainsaw reactionary goods. The object
is to fight inflation. Inflation, as Don
Jones noted this week, shrugs.
Certainly there are
few traits... except, perhaps, liberalism... so despised and derided (and yet,
so practiced) in America today as sloth. Physical sloth, I hasten to add...
mental, moral and intellectual laziness and the pride taken in same being part
and parcel of organized Entropy's spiderweb as minimalizes the tax returns by screwing anybody earning
five figures or less down to the size of a postcard. We respect and celebrate mindless busyness and
simple, destructive solutions, runnin’ round like
roaches on a griddle. Feudalism, a system in which "everyone belonged to
someone, and everyone else belonged to the King," said cranky old Eugene
McCarthy, a while back, has a new application: "...in which everyone
belongs to a corporation and everyone else belongs to the Federal
Government." One
way or another.
Regrettably, Geno
neglected those whom neither corporations nor gumment
want anymore - those fated to occupy un-privatized prisons and
riverbeds and abandoned urban wastelands in ever increasing numbers, or those
too old, too sick or too differently-educated as the gumment’s
unemployment counters choose not to count. So the lady in Bowling Green should
at least understand that gumment has its reasons
for keeping her boy on its waiting lists as grow longer with the upstream flow
of time. Outright premeditated
murder of the sick or surplus having a potential for rousing the sheep out of
their slumber, the gumment vogue for dealing with
problems as are probably insoluble boil down to a variant of the “benign
neglect” of that former century.
Those who live by
rent, by wages and by profit, Adam Smith noted, "are
the three great, original and constituent orders of every civilized
society." Though calling their common interests "inseparable",
Smith additionally allowed that the landlords and financiers "...are the
only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labor nor
care," and predicted their estate would decline, owing to the "indolence,
which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation" as
would render them helpless in the face of "public regulation".
Too bad that ol’
Invisible Handjob didn’t draw out his own conclusions
to realize that a Fourth Order would manifest… or metastasize, as it did… the horde
as live by such public regulation as
most rentiers and financeers
are.resigned to supporting and, themselves, regulating
thanks to Citizens United (while checking the costs off their taxes).
"We enjoy all
the achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence
on this Earth easier in so many important ways. Yet we do not know exactly
what..." Czech Republic ex-President Vaclav Havel echoed Burt Bachrach, at a July 4th fete in Philadelphia back in the
day, "...to do with ourselves. Where to turn! Experts can explain anything in the objective world
to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the
post-modern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain."
That was before he kicked the bucket more’n a decade back; in his place over thisaway,
we’ve had a Chief Executive who told us “the truth is not the truth,” now
seemingly replaced by one as soldiers along to the Orwellian maxim that “all
animals (Americans) are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”
"When people go
through life being told by the mass media that the times in which they live are
worthless or narcissistic or passive, it becomes harder and harder for them to
believe their own lives have consequence," echoed symbolic historian Peter
Carroll in "It Seemed Like Nothing Happened"; setting down a few
cinderblocks as would form the foundation of Identification Principal in
anticipation of the plague days when nothing did happen (except a lot of frustration from those as had their
stimulus payoffs misfiled or appealed to be tested with tests that… for the
want of a q-tip… went untested.. He
suggests that them as need heroes where there are none in real life will turn
to movies and television and music, politics and sports (or, to marry the four
in some perverse union the neo-libs will demand reparations and special
bathrooms for, the sort of paid-patriotic spectacles currently under fire,
theatrics which Joseph Goebbels would’ve ridiculed as reducing the Peanut
Gallery from participants to spectators). Thank God for the occasional Charles
Barkley, as probably ruined his political future as a candidate for Alabama
Governor against Hank Junior by snarling "I am not a role model!" during one of his ubiquitous Nike
commercials:
"I am not paid
to be a role model. I am paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents
should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should
raise your kids."
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PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |