RANDOM ELECTRONS, LIGHTNING BOLTS OF IDEAS, UPDATES AND RANTS FROM THE PUBLISHER:
MARCH 8, 2010- - - CARDBOARD BOX, USA: The Illinois political scene is so screwed up that the in-power Democratic machine forced off their own Lt. Governor nominee, who spent $2 million of his own money to campaign to victory, because state leaders did not like the rumors of his personal past (no criminal record). With a vacancy, the party is moving toward eliminating the position, which is currently vacant because the past Lt. Governor Quinn is now acting governor because the former Democratic governor, Blagovich, is pending a federal corruption trial and was impeached by the Democratic legislature. Any candidate will say anyrhing to get re-elected, including Quinn, who one week before the hotly contested primary, pledged to city and village mayors that he would not cut state tax revenue sharing as part of his new budget. Now, after winning the nomination, Quinn floats the idea of stripping $200 million from cities. The state is bloating rotting corpse in a river rapids of red ink. The state universities have not been paid $750 million in state payments this year. Chicago has underfunded pensions in excess of $18 billion. The state's underfunded pensions exceed $20 million. There are no more public property to sell, no more money to borrow because the state and local governments have no way to pay their creditors back. The state unilaterally cut 21% of the amounts owed to Medicaid providers. A normal person would be sent to debtor's prison if the country had one, or forced into bankruptcy and a financial whipping outside the wood shed. But none of this phases the candidates, who continue to run mindless, nonsensical campaigns of cheery optimism.. Why are so many people run for office now. State unemployment and underemployment is more than 25%. Government jobs pay better than private sector jobs, with no accountability. And those fat sweet six figure politican pensions are vested upon election.
JANUARY 31, 2010 - - - ROBOVILLE: The Illinois primary is two days away. The robo calls are filling up our answering machines. The daily onslaught of telephone messages has gone beyond the nagging stage. Everyone we have talked to hates them. But now on the eve of the election, the attack ads are getting vicious: calling opponents unethical, corrupt, unqualified and smear artists. Back and forth the taunts and allegations. For what? Membership in the same unethical, corrupt, unqualified political system. Sample ballots came out with a half dozen candidates for state wide office for each party. Illinois is bankrupt financially and morally. But the candidates are pouring millions of dollars of campaign money and personal loans to get the seedy job of allegedly representing the people in government affairs. But the only national affairs that grab the headlines are the personal sexual transgressions of the power elite, the missing stimulus money and the total lack of any accountability. The reason why so many people are candidates in this cesspool is that a career in politics pays . . . pays well. Even bankrupt states like Illinois will give lawmakers and elected officials six figure pensions when they leave office - - - before age 65, before a person retires, in a cumulative windfall that is eating up the vast majority of every state, county and local budget. The onslaught of robo calls is turning off the electorate - - - which is exactly what helps incumbents retain power.
JANUARY 24, 2010 - - -SEPTIC TANKVILLE: The gagging smell of corruption fills the air like the worst smog alerts of the smoke stack 1960s. The Illinois primary has taken its turn to starving wolves fighting among themselves over the rotting corpse of the State of Illinois. Illinois is officially bankrupt. It cannot pay its current operating expenses. Current payables are long overdue, and there may be a growing $5.5 billion cash deficit. There is no balanced budget. There is an estimated $80 billion shortfall in pension obligations. Agencies and universities are not getting paid their grant and capital dollars. This giant municipal ponzi scheme is about to collapse under the weight of political fraud and dishonesty. Yet, there are dozens of individuals screaming at the top of their lungs to become part of this Titanic voyage into the Damned. They are spending millions of dollars to get positions which pay only 1/10th or less in salary. It is the power and the perks of the ruling class, as set forth with a six figure public pension for life, no matter one's age. It is something you cannot get in the private sector: to the victor goes the gross spoils of ransacking the treasury. At least the Huns, Mongols and Vandals were up front when they sacked European villages and Rome.
JANUARY 10, 2010 - - - ROBOVILLE: The local candidates are piling on robotic telephone political messages for the February primary. An entire answering machine filled with the long winded drivel of people no one has heard of and for whom most voters could care less about. The primaries are heavily contested because many of these candidates appear to have no steady job prospects. Politics pays in more ways than one. Robocalls is an expensive means to the end. Candidates are getting desperate: one called his opponent a pedophile. That's beyond political speech; that's slander per se. But it does not matter. The political system has gotten so sleazy and dirty a normal person is offended by the prospect of even being tangentally involved in it. this makes incumbents happy because it makes their position easier to get campaign donations and to keep their power base through political favors.
AUGUST 2, 2009 - - - MALIBU CORNFIELD, IL: It was been a hectic summer, busy with work trips. Last weekend there was a trip to the former hog capitol of the world, through the back roads of Northern Illinois. As we sojourned through the small towns of the Midwest, I found it odd that in the past 5 years, crop prices have more than doubled, but in the mean time, the small town centers continued to die and fade away. Only a few towns hanging to the sentiment of the past, like Dixon, the Boyhood Home of Ronald Reagan, maintain an overt sense of community. However, the birthplace of Reagan, Tampico, was a ghost town. Any stimulus will never hit the vast majority of middle America, especially the small farm towns of the Midwest.
MAY 30, 2009 - - - DETROIT: General Motors, 100, the American industial icon, died today. The preliminary autopsy results are that GM died of unionitis, mismanagement, government interference secondary to chronic obsese debt loads. GM was fathered by William C. Durant, who gathered together a group of small automobile companies in 1908-1909. But by 1910, Durant was forced out because of large bank trust debt during a weak sales market. He later secretly bought GM stock to regain control briefly, but lost the company for good when the new vehicle market collapsed. GM was once described as the Heartbeat of America; what was good for General Motors was good for the United States. As part of the foundation of the heavy industrial base of the US, it supplied the key components of American security during the World Wars and present international deployments. In the end, the American industrial philosophy was so outsourced to the rest of the world that higher homeland costs would soon lead to massive stroke and bleeding of red ink. In massive infusions of taxpayer dollars for life support could not stem the bleeding, or revive GM. It is clear that the plug on the old free market capitalism machine was pulled, and the old GM quietly passed into the pages of history.
MARCH 15, 2009 - - - THE IDES OF MARCH: The economic collapse of the Free World occurred around the time the Cubs did the historically impossible: clinched another divisional title. nature is all about balance. Good things are balanced out by Bad things. So the nature and extent of the global collapse will have to mean that there will have to be some balanced bounce back; something so monumental to make the Pain worth it. A Cubs World Series, perhaps? Beware the Ides of March. And the pundits of spring training.
SEPTEMBER 20, 2008- - - CHICAGO: CUBS WIN!
JULY 13, 2008 - - - COMEBACK CITY: The Chicago Cubs blow a 7 run lead to the lowly Giants. New acquisition Rich Harden mows down the opposing team like the ground crew on the outfield grass. Harden was 31-0 when his team gave him a four run lead. Welcome to the Cubs, Rich. History and baseball and trends and suspense all have a weird cosmic vortex at Clark and Addison. The Cubs scrap an 11th inning win which puts the team five and one-half (5.5) games ahead in the Central Division standings. This is a record lead for the Cubs since divisional play was instituted by the league. Repeat, this is a RECORD lead for the Cubs. The die-hard dread meters are overloading at this point of the season.
JUNE 23, 2008 - - - FLASHBACK: I gained entry to see the show by presenting my ticket, which was wrapped around a bar of soap. It was August 6, 1985. A national celebrity was coming to the suburban dive to do a Show. This was the height of the comedy club era, where waiters, dishwashers, homemakers and students thought they were as funny as the people on the television show cases. But on that night, in a crowded room that barely had a soap box stage, he arrived. He was a small, short, thin, frail and pale man in a gruffy pepper beard and ponytail. His entrance was as fast and jittery like a panicked squirrel; the true signs of an extremely introverted person. Most entertainers are secret introverts. He was an American comic: a master of language, meaning, observation and satire. He came from the character and skit comedy of the 1950s and breached through to the dark side: pushing the boundaries of taboo subjects like religion and obscenity. In the end, it did not matter that he was a celebrity or a cause celeb; he was a performer, a humorist cut from the cloth of Mark Twain but tailored to the strife and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. You could tell that he respected and worked at his craft as he weaved observation to observation, language nuance to language absurdity. Young comedians often today use vile language to pull guttural laughter from their audience, but George Carlin never had to; his use of language was the bait on the hook to catch you with his observational humor. With Carlin's passing, America is left with a very few original comedy masters.
JUNE 22, 2008 - - - AT THE CROSSROADS OF HELL AND HIGHWATER: While America's political leaders oil their loins by mandating that 30 percent of the US food crops be diverted to 3 percent of the energy supply (ethanol) at an additional cost of $5 billion tax payer dollars (plus hyper inflation of food prices on the general consumer), the entire first layer of the State of Iowa is relocating to the silty floodplains of Baton Rouge. While global politicians are salivating about the prospects of diverting $1 trillion in the name of the scam of carbon foot print taxation (global warming, the first non-theological, non-scientific religion), mad men across the globe are trying to acquire nuclear weapons so they can print their names in the last history textbook of mankind. The gulf between the reality of the average person's life and that of their so-called elected representatives is as wide as the Grand Canyon, no, wider than the Gulf of Mexico. So much so that the sun soaked leaders on their yachts cannot see the shores of Common Sense. When gasoline prices have skyrocketed to $4 per gallon, Congressional reaction was to blame the oil companies. But at the same time, the federal, state and local governments are reaping a huge windfall from sales taxes on expensive oil. In Chicago, 20 percent of the pump price of gasoline is taxes. That is a higher profit margin than the gasoline retailers. Instead of becoming a domestic producer of its own oil, the United States is allowing the world to hold it for oil ransom. New petrostates like Russia and Brazil continue to drill for new oil. The new petrostates are acquiring wealth faster than the US Treasury can print $20 bills. In turn, the U.S. dollar continues to fall because it is not the monetary beacon of the past. Oil and oil futures contracts have become the new international default currency. U.S. leadership is brain dead to the current realities of what is happening to the American economy because they are so far removed from it that they are clueless. America has slowly lapsed into an ancient form of neglectful governance, a feudal system of an elitist and arrogant ruling class, which represents only self interests over public policy or public trust. In this election year, the only solution offered is to spend more tax dollars. But as noted above, the criminal waste is so high and the incompetence levels so strong, why believe anything anyone says to you? The whole American system is backwards: instead of the people telling the government how to much money to spend on public welfare and defense, it is the government that extracts as much money it deems necessary from the people under the threat of lien and forfeiture. For example, a person who buys a home with a 30 year mortgage will pay in real estate taxes the full value of that home in less than 25 year to the government agencies. When a prorated real estate tax bill is larger than your mortgage payment, there is a problem within the system. And this is on top of increasing sales taxes. In Cook County, Illinois, local sales taxes will increase next month to 10 to 11.5 percent on most goods. Ten percent of a person's purchasing power (with the dollar also declining in value) is lost. These are the practical burdens facing middle class Americans. These burdens will not change because the incumbent leadership has created these burdens for the leadership's own benefit.
