LET ME PLEASE guarantee you that so many of “us people” are far removed, in our earnest thinkings and doings, from the wing-nutted $800 toilet seat ilk who legislate and regulate us while deregulating themselves with carte blanche consistency.  What the heck does our present democracy provide in ACTUAL recourse anymore?  We follow the laws because mostly they work and that’s what unincarcerated citizenry do, it’s the one choice, but we’re talking and reading and trying to vote our informed consciences. But information is rough-cut lumber, ye sand it and sand it and it’s exhausting getting to the fine grains beneath.  But…still under that surface is another band of whatchacallit, and another, and it’s a sorrow we appear to be stuck with for the time being.  We’re being tracked, stacked, hijacked, fleeced, decreased, diseased and disenfranchised with every new day.  For sake of some notion that CEOs, Big Gov, etc., somehow rate a 550+ to 1 ratio of income over the country’s labor force.  50-51-52-53-54-55% of the people’s earnings goes upwards into spooky coffers of doom and other venerated meshuga.  Fed mucks with state coffers…so state mucks with local coffers…so local mucks with your wallet…& your wallet…until you can’t afford a wallet and history repeats itself in the worst ways and there appears to be no relief from the take?  Every term, a new tax levy, a couple hundred dollars here, a few hundrd dollars there, how come?, why not?, what, you don’t love the police, the fireman, your school?, your roads?, your legislators?, this big, beautiful stadium?, the space program?, we robbed Peter so you gota pay Paul!  & I, for one, don’t have a clue why it’s been such a landslide, when there are people all around us who agree that thieves are in the temple and they call themselves council.  …Nobody (NOBODY?) has the wherewithal to overcome the machine; …nobody?  No endeavored people with vastly higher intellects and the time to stagger through the political science fiction can pinpoint the goof that has this thing so off-balance that there’s no looking up except to wonder what…freaking… happened?  Everybody from the highest middle to the top has his or her price and it was to pound the flesh from the folk and enough’s no-how-never-gona-be enough, back up the truck, bury your head in bitches bouillon and get on with something 4-5 Star…muthafckerz?  And the people & places outdoors and the people & places indoors and literature and sport and art and gastronomy and music-loving bourgeoisie are just fine with this…apparently?  Or just absolutely staggered by their mortality coupled with an immortal fear of bad shit in the hands of the most fucked-up?  I think that’s it.  But if that’s the case, then we’re no longer a united country.  If this is true then the big tomatoes don’t love the small tomatoes, so that null-&-voids any previous promises made by far more logical people during far less populated/harried times.  That also makes the big tomatoes very obviously the bad guys…and America really, really abhors the bad guy.  So come-on!  Listen to the screams!  It’s only a quagmire if left unchecked.  It’s a muthafckr now, but there are hoards of really decent people all around.  Right here on this forum even.  We’re being punked…and it is taking tole, exacting every mile off any hope for life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness outside the golden gooses’ gilded gates.  Kathryn, it ain’t us you’re reading about, really.  Come, meet the people, you’d like em, but they’re just a bit scragglier than a coupla decades ago.  Yeah, we’re getting our just deserts for having had a little fun, …we’re beginning to learn a little what it’s like to be on the butt end of the Eastern Bloc or even sorta Third Worldish…with a spoon full o sugar.  & it coulda been another way, & it ain’t me, and it ain’t you, …it’s FUBAR.  It’s hang Ol Glory upside down in the fading sun and pray………FUBAR. 

http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/pay/index.cfm\

http://www.theindependent.com/stories/030406/opi_hahn04.shtml

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
 
Thomas Jefferson

What a guy.  What a history.  What a worthy piece of theory.  What do we know now that we didn’t already know then?   Not a lot.  & still the rain….