Bullshit

Thanks Congress, for passing the Bush tax cuts.

This is all that should be said on the matter:

“We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy, but we can’t have both.”- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

Perspective

1. Almost 3 million people were evicted from their homes in 2009.

2. Congress and the bastard Obama are extending a tax cut for the richest of the very rich.

Things to keep in mind as Chrismas comes closer.

I am not being facetious or cute right now:

Seriously ask yourself, what would Jesus do?

Would Jesus try to help those 2.8 million? Or would he extend the most irresponsible, un-democratic and useless tax cut in American history?

Of course moderates are tripping over themselves to defend our elitist President. Apparently it is a 'reasonable' deal for Americans. We will see how that will pan out.

These tax cuts have not created jobs, do not promote investment, and they do not boost the economy. If they did we would have had a net job gain during the Bush II administration instead of a net job losses. Instead, what we will get is more of the same. More inequality and more suffering for those of us who aren't millionaires.

How Obama sleeps at night is anybody's guess.

E-mail with a Conservative

(Hopefully he doesn't mind, but I am posting this e-mail response that I wrote to my good friend's Dad. I am a very big fan of him because we can talk about politics without him yelling at me.)

Mr. S------,

I don't know if you knew this, but I am not a reasonable person. There is probably an idea that you have of how 'left-wing' I am, but I think it might be mistaken. I am not a Democrat and most days I question if I am a liberal or not. The both of us, I am assuming, will probably agree on over half of possible policy issues.

To respond to your e-mail:

This article and this article will explain better than I can why the "left" (in quotes because I believe there is no Left in America, but a Phantom Left) is upset with that bastard Obama.

I agree with you about:

1. Health care reform was a disaster because it does nothing to lower costs and forces people to pay into a private industry that makes money off of denying people care. Buying across state lines would have been a better idea than Obamacare, although I think conservatives should take another look at single-payer, which, for whatever reason, has not been included in the debate at all. It is more cost effective, especially when we look at long-term healthcare cost projections.

2. The auto industry did not deserve to be bailed out. It has been making terrible cars for years and those companies should have been allowed to fail.

3. The stimulus was a disaster. Like government contracts in Iraq, no one has been tracking where all of this money has been going and to what effect it is being used. In essence, it was a robbery of public funds funneled to private hands. Obama was continuing another failed policy of Bush.

4. Offshore drilling accounts for something like 1% of all oil drilling on the planet. Banning it, or not banning it, means essentially nothing in terms of where the world is getting energy.

5. The EPA is a sham, barely funded with no real political power. I am surprised it still exists.

6. Farm subsidies are not on the Tea Party agenda because it affects them too much.

7. Half of the discretionary budget goes to the Defense Department. With over 800 military bases we have overreached. It is the biggest contributor on the deficit and is such a golden cow to politicians that no one is talking about it - with the exception of the two most honest men in the House: Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. If you haven't had a chance to read Andrew Bacevich, he is a great historian, a veteran and a wonderful writer who does research on military overreach.

I don't agree about drilling 'everywhere' for coal, oil and gas because it doesn't seem like a good long term solution to the energy crisis. We reached peak oil in this country decades ago and drilling for gas and coal can affect water and air quality. I think we should rely on nuclear power plants until we can find a sustainable energy solution with wind and especially solar power. Engineers have been making great strides in how they harness solar energy and I think we should invest in that.

(The following quotes were from the e-mail he sent).


"I would deregulate almost all industries and allow only for oversite to ensure a reasonable degree of safety."

What are your thoughts about the financial sector ruining the economy? Obama's tepid financial reform essentially does nothing to prevent us from another crisis and it is because of Regan and Clinton's irresponsible deregulation of the industry that allowed something like 2009 to happen in the first place.

 "I would make government as small as possible to get out of the way for American citizens to pursue life, liberty and happiness."

Then Republicans should both be supporting a Ron Paul instead of a Sarah Palin or a Mitt Romney or a Mike Huckabee. But they aren't. Why?

The elephant in the room of this e-mail is corporate money, yet another aspect of modern political life that I never hear about from conservative thinkers. The greatest threat to liberty and happiness on this planet comes from companies that put profits before people. I can go into detail more, if you want; I think it's a fair statement to say that ExxonMobil and GE have more power than the US government. They certainly influence Washington more than the voter can.

Truthfully, I believe that political persuasions are a circle and not a line. People on the "left" and people on the "right" agree about issues in the country (jobs, education and public health) far more than they recognize. You and I just come from different views in political philosophies, perhaps.

Let me know if there is anything I said that I could clarify on in more detail, or statements that you made that I did not sufficiently cover.

Believe me, please, when I say that I distrust, even perhaps despise, the government. Even though I am interested in the ins-and-outs of political power and politicians, I firmly believe that there are systemic problems with how Washington functions that neither political party addresses.

I hope this finds you well sir.

-(my name)

On the Extension of the Bush Tax Cuts.

ARGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Political as the Personal

I have been thinking a lot lately about my  self-identity. There is a shift, I am trying to force, from being a selfish person to a more social, political one. This means a reorganization of ethics.

I had a chance to talk to a Democrat a couple of weeks ago. He was the friend of a friend and we ended up talking for a while about politics and society. When I mentioned my disappointment with the Obama administration's escalation of the war in Afghanistan there was this... scoff. It's hard to describe the sound he made, but it was something between condescension and pity. As if I didn't really understand the Very Serious Matter of butchering innocent civilians for some vague, shifting geopolitical goal. He proceeded not to take me seriously for the rest of the conversation.

Of all of the people that I have respected, admired and have tried to emulate in my life I think I gravitate towards the men and women who have the capacity for empathy. Not power. Not money. Not even talent - but the ability to teach others to open up their emotional landscape to include the six billion other human beings around them.

So when I talk about single payer, I am not thinking about policy; I am thinking about other people's suffering. When I talk about Afghanistan, I am trying my best to imagine what it is like for my neighborhood to be bombed by American planes. When I talk about the financial crisis, I think about evictions and livelihood's being ruined. And so on and so forth.

This is the crux of what I am trying to get at:

It drives me fucking insane when people openly talk about not caring about politics. Not even openly, but proudly, as if it is a positive thing that they are ignoring the power structures and economic forces that affect billions of other human beings.

It may be from a point of privilege that I have the leisure to spend hours of my week reading political articles in addition to living a daily life. But it is also arrogant and, I think, ethically deformed to assign yourself to willful ignorance over the suffering and pain of the people around you. Financial regulation, health-care reform and stopping the war in Afghanistan matter because people's lives matter. It matters when a family gets evicted from their home. It matters when people become bankrupt over hospital bills. It matters when a marine gets their body blown apart from an IED. And it also matters when a mother in Afghanistan, a country that I have never been and will probably never go to, dies because of what my country decides to do.

Per Usual

Chris Hedges talks to a doctor about universal health care.

That is all.

Attack of the Hedges

Yes, that's right:

Another Hedges link.

Going to go watch it... NOW.

EDIT: Just finished watching it and... wow... best video about his new book yet!

Here are some great quotes:

"Let's remember that Fox is a non-reality based belief system; it is about catering to emotional consistency, not to truth."

"We have a choice, you can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning." (on the question of why someone should be a radical)

"...the capacity to rebel, the capacity to stand up and have the moral autonomy to say no ...  let's not be naive, you're not rewarded in this kind of a system for virtue, probably in any kind of a system... that is the price for having a life worth living."

"...if you don't have anger and courage then hope is not a possibility."

Article of the Day

Where is the liberal/progressive/Democratic/decent-person/common-sense outrage over how completely idiotic this nation is for still being in Afghanistan?

Read this.

I have been trying my best not to be too disillusioned lately. I can feel that old familiar sting of cynicism more or less wash over me when I think about these things too much. Because, really, it is a question of efficacy. How can I affect the world so that it is a place of more general well-being?

Frustrating, yes?

Last Post Redundant

Because of Noam Chomsky not fucking around.

Where's the Class Warfare?

I just finished the first chapter of Chris Hedge's new book. Before I talk about it, here are some links from the past couple of days.

Joan Walsh writes here about the failure of the Democrats to fight for the rights of the people who elect them. Also great in that article (about midway down, read the bullet points) is that she addresses rising inequality in this country.

Since, alas, Russ Feingold is gone, the search for another senator who doesn't bend over for special interests continues. Even though Bernie Sanders will always have my heart (also Patrick Leahy is awesome - really wish I lived in Vermont), Jim Webb looks like a Democrat who actually has balls. I posted recently about Sirota's wonderful exclamation to the Blue Dog Democrats who betrayed the public option and voted against extending unemployment insurance. Maybe there should be a purging of these 'liberals' from the party? The Left has to take back the anger that historically belongs to them. What happened?

Democrats, like their Republican counterparts (if you can even call them that, doesn't it feel like they don't have any real differences?), have betrayed the working class. And now, the middle class as well. They are subservient and will only pay attention to the banking class. Well? Where is the revolt? The blood and the guns? The Revolution?

Where are these so-called Progressives? Environmental groups have still struggled to condemn the Obama administration for the Gulf disaster. Liberal legal groups are not talking about habeas corpus not being reinstated. We still have extraordinary rendition. We still have two illegal occupations. We still have lobbyists with this insane amount of influence. Capitalism has failed yet we still go day-to-day pretending that it hasn't. People are losing their homes. No one is finding decent work. What the hell?

Hedge's dissects these questions and proclaims that the Liberal Class is Dead. Those old institutions (the universities, labor unions, the media, the arts, the Democrats) that used to promote civil rights, woman's rights, economic rights are gone. They have all sold out to corporate money and now, well, now we have no one who is fighting for us. That is how the Tea Party got to co-opt the rage over the bailouts. An extremists right-wing group got to take all of the political capital from the past two years because we have no liberal voice in this country who could articulate the underclass's frustrations.

Instead, in the saddest irony imaginable, we elected candidates who are fighting this phantom 'Socialism' that Obama has been supporting. The anger of the unemployed has been stolen from the Left by Republicans, from the same fucking billionaires who ruined the country.

I can't articulate my frustration and rage. It seems like most of the Tea Party cannot either, which is why they have voted for their own destruction. We, America the Sinking Ship, are about to enter another era of tax-cuts for the Masters and starvation for the Serfs.

Social Security will be attacked. Obama, the corporate bitch that he is, will vote for the Bush Tax Cuts in exchange for something small and negligible. In the same way that financial reform, health-care reform and the stimulus failed by not going far enough, he will sell us out the same way the Democrats have sold us out for the past thirty years.

(Caveat: right now I wish I lived in France because they seem to actually have a fucking class consciousness. I would rather be rioting in the streets that sitting in my apartment impotently writing in some stupid blog no one reads. But what are my options? How do I protest? How do I affect real change? How do I fight for real democracy? Real justice? Real ethics?)

As always, I have no answers.

To end on a lighter note, our friend Tom Tomorrow has another dissection of modern politics.

Article of the Day

Chris Hedges, once again,writes about things that I am not seeing anywhere else. It mentions two things.

First, why is no one in the supposedly libertarian Tea Party talking about the biggest source of waste in the budget: the military. Last time I checked it was around 600 billion, right?

Second, why are we still talking about capitalism as if it is a viable model for how the world should run? How many times does it have to fail before we realize that it should be abandoned?

Socialism is not a dirty word. Socialism's main goals is economic equality. Why are so many Americans against this? Is it because they cannot distinguish between Communism and Socialism?

Article of the Day

David Sirota writes a fantastic article about the Democratic Party betraying their purpose and their never-ending desire to be a watered down version of the Republicans.

I agree Mr. Sirota! To all of the conservative Democrats and corporate pawns: Go Fuck Yourself.

Articles of the Day and a Lament

Robert Scheer has a lovely short article about the main failure of the Obama administration and Amy Goodman writes about the corrupt media.

My sister sent me a great cartoon about historical perspectives and tax rates. It might be a re-blog.

But hey, let us have a moment of silence for America. While we do so we can think about the unemployed and we can think about those in severe poverty. We can think of people in their twenties, like myself, who are college educated and can find nothing. Or the uninsured who will go bankrupt because of health care or bad mortgages. Maybe the elderly who might see their social security gutted or privatized. Austerity is a good euphemism - but what it is really saying when we use this word is, essentially, pain. Pain for those that didn't have the privilege of being rich. Pain for those with the wrong upbringing or the wrong skin tone. Pain for the sick. Pain for the weak. Pain for those that this country has turned its back to. Everyone that voted for the Republicans to take control, yet again, of Congress have the blood of the underclass on their hands. The underclass even voted for them, thinking that, for some reason, they will listen to them.

They won't.

If the Democrats, traditionally the party of the middle and working class, don't listen to the poor masses then why do they think the Republicans will? Obama, in his moderate neo-Clinton capacity, will probably vote for whatever Congress gives him. I, for one, can't wait for the Bush tax cuts to be permanent; it'll be nice to have clear class divisions so that when the poor revolt from frustration and destitute then maybe they will take down the right people. Most likely not. Chances are we will keep voting for the Grand Ole' Party of Freedom and Capitalism until the last house is foreclosed and the last industrial job is lost. There are no liberals in this country. There is only fear and corruption and greed and ignorance.

I am a man without a Party. I am a man without a Country. I am lost in this un-Reality where the paupers vote for princes and where the rich will continue to consume and consume until everything is spent.

Fuck you America.

Article of the Week

Scott Tucker writes why the two-party system is complete bullshit.

Read it here.

Article of the Day

This blog might as well be a giant link for Chris Hedges.

Read his latest column.

Article of the Day

Charles Ferguson, the guy who directed "No End in Sight" - the best documentary about Iraq, recently released a new film about the financial crisis. He wrote this amazing article in Salon today talking about the Obama administration's failure to regulate the financiail interests that destroyed the economy.

Before I go to work I am going to be watching this.

Article of the Day

From n+1 - the best article I've read about racism in America in a long, long time.

David Cross? Still has it.

Yet MORE EVIDENCE that the only thing those poor Tea Party bastards are going to accomplish is give power back to the party that destroyed the economy and lost them their jobs. Not that the Democrats are going to save them, but talk about the worse of the two evils. It'll be a fun election to watch. And by fun I mean horrible.

Did two nifty things today. First, I bought the new Chris Hedges book; it looks amazing. Second, my beautiful girlfriend and I watched the David Cross stand-up from 2009. Half-way through Cross makes this excellent point. Isn't it duplicitous that the same people who hate America right now flip their lid when some one criticizes the same country? He explains it better in this clip. It starts around minute one.

Do you have three minutes to spare? Then watch the video.

No Class Warfare?

I'm starting to get jealous of the French. Sarkozy is done for, it seems.

Back in the Anglophone world things aren't looking too bright. David Cameron is about to cut half a million jobs. Obama seems to be sitting in the White House waiting for the Tea Party wave to crash. Chris Hedges, as always, puts things into perspective, writing that the liberal class made this mess themselves.

The collective experiment with free-market capitalism has failed. I agree with the researchers who wrote The Spirit Level that the root of all of this turmoil and societal breakdown is inequality. The rich are getting richer and the poor and the middle class are struggling.

What happened?

The Despotic Right

Truthdig is your friend. Most of these links come from them.

The Tea Party 'movement' is a farce. It's just yet another partisan group trying to achieve political power and when they do they will do their best to suppress objective journalism. They are merely actors in a drama that already ended: the story of how capitalism cannibalized itself towards destruction.

When the Crash really happens the despotic right, backed by the super-rich and the religious right, will take power. Without a competent Democratic Party that can give economic power back to the masses, there will be no alternative for the dispossessed other then to rally behind some demagogue who promises whatever they want to hear.  This is the last dying breath of a nation. 

One of my favorite senators, Russ Feingold, is losing horribly in the polls because he does not take soft money. The discussion that can't be talked about enough is the compatibility between the democratic process and capitalism unbound. All of the anger right now is directed towards the State even though the State has become impotent. The anger should be directed towards the people hoarding the wealth.

Article of the Week

Frank Rich summons up everything I could hope to say about the Obama administration.

Just read this.

The Failures of Democrats

Here is a quote that has been floating around on the internet. I am not sure if Lincoln actually said this (I can't find a citation) even though I enjoy it quite a bit:

"The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. The banking powers are more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe. [As a most undesirable consequence of the war...] Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed."

Anyone who has been concerned with income inequality in this country knows that, even if Lincoln never said this, that the quote is remarkably prescient. In the news this week there have been a lot of stories about illegal foreclosures. Evidently people that don't even have a mortgage are finding themselves in court battling banks who are trying to evict them. Both Democrats and Republicans have done nothing to stop this. In fact, the Obama administration's new National Security Adviser used to be a lobbyist for the same firms that caused the housing crisis. (Also: Larry Summers, economic adviser to the administration and one of the architects of the stimulus pacakage, helped draft and pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in1999, which removed the limitations on the part of Glass-Steagall that would have protected the public from something as corrupt and convoluted as the derivatives scandal; how is this not big news?)

If anyone reading this is going to only look at one political article this week, it should be this one. For some background: I spent the better part of 2008 obsessed with the Obama campaign. I bought into the energy of the campaign. I volunteered. I advocated. I voted. The main reason why I voted for him in the primary instead of Hillary Clinton was that I thought his administration would finally severe the Democratic Party from its corporate donors. That we, as a country, would focus on alternative energy, infrastructure, transparent government and disentangling ourselves from the Middle East occupations. That it was an evolution of where we were going as a country, that we would finally grow up and accept the real problems that are facing the planet rather than exist in this tiny bubble of constant cynicism and corruption.

It's a humbling lesson in naivety that I thought that he would change, really change, the way the government operates. In his campaign, Obama promised a moratorium on foreclosures. Where are they? During the campaign he promised a transparent government. He promised reform on lobbyist's influence on government. Remember? End the war (he expanded it), stop domestic spying (he hasn't), reform NAFTA and GATT (he hasn't).

Obama extended the Patriot Act earlier this year. With no reforms. It's the same bill that Bush passed.

He has deported more undocumented workers than Bush. He has not reinstated habeas corpus. Extraordinary rendition has not ended. Neither have secret prisons and, I'm assuming, state sponsored torture. He has isolated labor (he supported Blanche Lincoln, an anti-Labor Democrat, during the primary) and he has isolated the teacher's unions. "Race to the Top" will fail, despite whatever trendy documentary comes out about school competition and charter schools (that take public money but have no accountability).
 
Finally, and all things considered (Republican obstructionism, the lack of a strong liberal presence with the Democratic Party), Obama increased troop levels in Afghanistan. We have been there for almost a decade. There is no victory because no one knows why we are there. That is the kicker.

What happened to protecting worker's rights? What happened to the war on poverty? What happened to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act that strives for full employment? How is privatizing social security even up for discussion? France is having riots right now because they want to lower the retirement age by two years! And yet we are letting these corporate interests infect electoral politics where reinstating financial regulation is considered a major Democratic accomplishment. Seriously?!

How is this possible? Obama, you are a Democrat! How can an administration go so far off base?  How is it that there is practically no one challenging this? Harry Reid is a disgrace. The majority of them keep voting for giving the military a blank check. All of the centre-right stuff that Obama keeps going for? They vote on these policies. They support them. There are two members of Congress I really respect. Poor Dennis Kucinich, who is marginalized in his own party and poor Russ Feingold, who is doing horrible in the polls. All the media can talk about is how the Tea Party thinks that Obama is a covert communist when, here in Reality,  he is barely a progressive. Nixon was more liberal.

There is a great Bill Maher quote when he was on Wolf Blitzer's show last year:

"Barack Obama is not a socialist -- he’s not even a liberal....this country needs a left wing. It doesn’t have it, and part of the reason is the media.”

For people that actually belief in and want social justice the Democratic Party is not a good home. The sad part is that there is no where else to go, honestly. There is no Left or Right. There is only Up and Down. People that have power and wealth and the rest of us. We don't live in a Republic (with representatives who work for the public) and we sure as hell don't have a Democracy. We live in an oligarchy. We are approaching a new, modern feudalism.

Democrats today are more conservative than Eisenhower Republicans. If liberals are going to support any group it should be the DSA or the Green Party. Even though it may seem impractical, at least we get to keep our ethics. Lately, I feel slightly ill supporting Democrats that have gone so far right it is hard to tell where they end and the Republicans begin. There are more then enough groups out there that more accurately encompass what we believe yet we are faced with only two options. We have a centre-right party that expands wars, protects Wall Street and takes corporate money. And then we have the Republicans.

Please Watch This, Please

This is a talk that Chris Hedges, who is fast becoming my hero, gave yesterday about his new book, "The Death of the Liberal Class."

Please, please watch it when you can:

Here.

Another great Tea Party article

I just finished reading this. It's a great compliment to the article I posted yesterday.

This article explores debt that Beck has to the ultra-right wing John Birch society. Towards the end it talks about the conflicts between extremists from the right and the civilized wing a la William Buckey. If only the Democrats had that problem. Where is our Tea Party? I can't be the only one sick of seeing Bill Clinton's pro-corpoate/military policies dominate the politcal scene.

Courtesy of my sister (like the last photo)

Great Article

This is from Newsweeek of all places - a superb article about the Tea Party and the Constitution.

David Cameron is cutting defence spending

If the UK Prime Minister is doing this, why can't we?

If Americans are serious about austerity measures, why not cut back on the 700 military bases throughout the globe?

Oh, Tom Tomorrow

From one of my favorite comic strips.

Quick Link

This is a great profile on one of the Koch brothers. These two billionaire brothers are bank-rolling most of the conservative think tanks in the country, including, most importantly, the "grassroots" Tea Party.

Tea Party Socialism

I just wanted to add this article from Truthdig.

"Small" government activists don't actually believe in small government. They love and cherish these farm subsidy programs - the New Deal program created alongside Social Security and Glass-Steagall - which, when you call a spade a spade, is welfare. The American government spends something like $20 billion a year for farms not to grow crops.

Tea party activists want to keep gay couples from full citizenship, keep victimless crimes illegal and make sure a woman can't get a safe abortion. What I don't understand is this: abortion, the issue that divides this country more than anything I can think of, is a philosophically libertarian issue. Making it illegal automatically makes it a government vs. individual issue; otherwise who would be enforcing its illegality?  Logically, and I hate it when people type in all caps, but,:

IF YOU WANT LIMITED GOVERNMENT, THEN YOU SUPPORT ABORTION RIGHTS.

I know I mentioned before my own inherent hypocrisy in the last post, but this seems to be kind of strange, yeah? I have not heard one Tea Party-er talk about this. They don't want government involved in health care, yet they demand government involvement in a medical procedure.

(Also, they are fine with spending 684 billion on the military budget, yet are worried about the solvency of Medicare. They hate the bailout of Wall Street, but are taking millions of dollars in contributions from the billionaire Koch brothers to finance their candidates.)

I am getting off track. The real question is: How can they mention reckless government spending without mentioning the military budget or farm subsidies?

Modern Inequality

This is a blog. I am going to post some interesting things that I find. Mostly political things.

I am probably a socialist, I think. I don't agree with Republicans or attend any Tea Parties, but I don't think I like the Democrats (corporate money, state secrecy, military expansionism). The closest party that I can identify with are the Greens.  Really though? I'm probably what this wikipedia article talks about.

I think that workers should own the companies that they work for. It's one of those ideas that makes the most sense but that no one really talks about.

I think corporations are fundamentally horrible. (I regonize the hypocrisy of this being on a Google owned site; it's nearly impossible to not be a hypocrite and have the views that I have. I am at the core, like most affluent people that think the way I do, filled with hypocrisy.)

I think that human health and happiness should be the focus, the endgame, for civilization. Instead we are continuing with this failed capitalist experiment, propping up  zombie financial institutions with public money. Corporate welfare should be illegal.

I think that most of socieities problems come from inequality. This is less of an opinion and more of a view of the facts.

I think we are entering into new terrain as a civilization and as a global society. We have done a terrible job trying to articulate exactly what we are trying to do as a species.

Really, it's about purpose. What are we here for? Consumption? Reproduction? Sustainability?

But why am I starting to write in this?

It is mostly to stop bothering my beautiful and understanding girlfriend with my apparently endless running commentary on all things political, economic and sociological. I love you LC.