The Show Must Go On

The “Stimulus” Package is now in its final form. All in all, people like you and me are going to get, “on average 13 dollars more a week”. $400 bucks a year. Not starting till June.

I don’t make very much and yesterday I had nearly $200 taken out by State and Federal.

Woo. Hoo.

Thomas Edsall has an interesting piece on the Huffington Post about a group of Americans will however get a nice big old slice of the pie, the upper-middle class.

“The "compromise" legislation includes $70 billion, or just under 10 percent of the whole package, to be used expressly to take care of these affluent people.

In fact, these lucky men and women make so much money that they fall into the ever-expanding grasp of the alternative minimum tax (AMT). The AMT was originally designed in 1969 to prevent the nation's millionaires and billionaires from using tax loopholes to pay zero income tax. That year, 155 very wealthy taxpayers paid no federal tax whatsoever. This year, if the law remains as it is currently crafted, the AMT would, through bracket creep, apply to as many as 25 million taxpayers, including those making in the $85,000 to $250,000 range, depending on how many deductions they claim (the more deductions, the more likely the AMT comes into play).”

On the political front, Edsall outlines that this is a notorious swing vote, once Republican but now “essential” to democratic victory. Their play to the center to get moderates is how they have won every last major election. Play to the middle, “Woo moderates”.

Fucking amateurs. I don’t do “wooing” anywhere but the bedroom.

This of course is why the Modern democratic party of course is so capital T-Timid Appeasers. Lest That very small percentage of wealthy assholes get mad and go to the other guys.

When, dear god, will Democrats stop this ass-backwards strategy. It started with Clinton, the center wins and so forth. Nearly half of all Americans don’t vote. What percentage of those do you think would vote democrat if they were halfway interested(and were able to, with either much easier online or mail votes, and a national holiday, like maybe the 4^th of July).

Obama to be fair has been better in this regard. But still, when it comes to Change, it’s still not going proportionally to those who really need it. If anything, he’s still propping up our hopelessly retarded economic system.

You can argue all day that giving money to those who don’t “need” it in the traditional sense is a really ineffective way of creating stimulus. You are right. But you still won’t win.

The fucked truth is that the “upper-middle class” are the backbone of our consumer economy. Their spending employs the rest of us, from auto manufactures to McDonalds workers. Who do you think pays for the few schools, roads, and government beinifits that most of us actually see. Let me give you a hint, they don’t fly in corporate jets.

It’s the regular, Realtors and Doctors and Lawyers and Business Executives. The ones who play by the rules, and like it that way.

These are the ones that make just enough to keep them “living the American Dream”, but they now find themselves losing their homes, their jobs and their minds. In pockets of Suburbia all across America, every day, every single lost job, portfolio hit or Elvish news conference by Tim Geithner causes a Fear to grow. The Fear that this fragile life we carved out for ourselves, is hanging on by a thread. That the wind could just blow one day and knock it all down.

And if that were to happen, these people would lose their damn minds. I’m serious, they are so plugged into this system that, absent it, they would be crazed monkeys, paranoid(perhaps rightfully so) that they will now be the targets of those who have even less.

This is all kind of a rant on my part but the point is this, the upper-middle-class, are the glue that holds this whole fucking pyramid together. They are the curtain that those who run the show hide behind. And without them, there is no show.

And, for now, the show must go on.

Perhaps the most disturbing(yet sadly unsurprising) nationally underreported story, there is a scandal unfolding in Pennsylvania that takes “Prison-industrial complex to a new plateau”.

“For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.”

They got millions to send poor, “at-risk” kids straight to a Soviet work camp. Only to have them there graduate from con-high school to surely come back and re-enroll in adult con-college. Hookin the while they are young.

I really don’t advocate violence, but I got one word, Flogging.

Aliens?

And finally,

Pamela Anderson is living with her electrician boyfriend in a trailer.

I’s sure it’s a fabulous double wide. Props to Pam Anderson, can’t take the trailer park out that girl.