A very smart friend points me to two wonderful writings:

http://www.truth-out.org/the-year-living-dangerously67110

http://www.truth-out.org/where-liberals-go-feel-good67093.

Great stuff.

I respond:

"Wow, great stuff. Thanks for sending it. I especially like the line, "To name this power, to admit that it has a death grip on our political process, our systems of information, our artistic and religious expression, our education, and has successfully emasculated popular movements, including labor, is to admit that the only weapons we have left are acts of civil disobedience. " I think that's so right on. But civil disobedience is useless when half the country actually supports the insanity (and is armed).

This is exactly what I've been thinking about in the wake of Egypt. I think a similar uprising may be inevitable in this country within a couple decades, maybe less. I think one day people are gonna wake up without medicare, medicaid, social security, a job, savings, a home, and future prospects, and there'll be nothing to do but what the Egyptians are doing - get out and fight and burn stuff.

Maybe things will turn around, but at the rate at which the powerful are grabbing more power, it's hard to imagine realistic forces that could manage to be behind a turnaround, a la the Hedges piece. Liberals are hopeless in their approach, and especially their messaging, as you and I have talked about so many times.

I love what Hedges said mostly, but I think he missed the mark on a big point, and that is that in our case, this band of criminals and dunces was actually voted in. Yes, the Tea Partiers are evil to the point of almost meriting the term Fascist, but it's not really their fault. If you're stupid enough to think Rand Paul and Michelle Bachmann will actually make your life better, it's your own damn fault.

That's why I think Obama is such a monumental failure. He, as the leader of the opposition to this band of thugs, needs to explain to voters why voting for them is going to hurt their lives. When giving the SOTU about how the US needs to invest in all sorts of areas to compete with the world, he left out the most important line: "Of course Republicans aren't going to allow any building of new schools for your kids, police for your towns, projects to improve the environment, investment in technology that will make us less dependent on oil out of the MIddle East. They want to spend hundreds of billions too, but they just want to hand it over to rich people. So while we NEED desperately to invest in our future, the people you've voted in will never allow it. Investments are the changes we need to make your life better and our nation stronger, but until you vote the "all we care about is zillionaires" contingent out, your life, I'm afraid, won't get any better."

But of course he doesn't say anything of the sort, which makes him just one huge sickening hypocrite. Because he knows these realities, and yet he pretends all this "investment" talk actually matters, when in the current environment it's just pure hot air. Such nauseating hypocrisy. Who does he think he's fooling?

A friend sent me an article a prominent "centrist" Repbulican wrote wrote about how we need to cut all spending now because the deficit is the end of the world and the only priority, and asked me what I thought. I wrote back, "look, debt isn't a problem in a vacuum. It's what you do with the borrowed money that counts. If you could borrow infinite dollars at incredibly low interest rates, and you desperately needed to fix up your life so you could earn more in the future, wouldn't you do it? If just borrow like crazy and just feed it all to millionaires, then yes, you have a problem." Well just by ironic coincidence, I've now seen two interviews with giants of American business, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's right-hand man, and Jim Simons, CEO of Renaissance Technologies, the original and most successful "quant" fund (he's had like 30% plus annual returns and personally made over a billion dollars pretty much every year since 2001). And both these guys (Munger a Republican) said exactly the same thing. And both these guys are magnitudes smarter about business than anyone in government today.

Which gives me confidence that we're doing the exact, 180 degrees wrong thing in this country. Plus, it's incredible how fast it's going. Already, they've defunded Social Security. And the same for Medicare is very much underway. Obama is aiding and abetting, even leading the charge. I'd lay even odds that pretty soon he'll be apologizing for the health care law, saying "we should have done it better", (the definition of "better" now meaning whatever Paul Ryan wants, presumably making Medicare a subsidiary of Wellpoint).

The situation is pretty simple. We desperately need to turn around our deficit situation or the world will stop funding us at zero interest rates. And unless you want to leave old and poor people dying on the streets (the new vision for America brought to you by the Tea Party) the only way to do that is to increase taxes, especially on those whose lifestyle would hardly notice, to nationalize and yes, "ration" health care to force costs down to something manageable, and to invest like crazy in industries that have an economic future while we have low funding costs.

But with Obama pretending this band of Republicans actually have good ideas, we don't have a prayer.

And if you think things are bad now, wait till the world wakes up and figures out it's hopeless here, and penalizes us with a crashed dollar, $5 gas, and high interest rates.

That's when we become Egypt. Or should, anyway!"