Letâ(TM)s all blame Obama for everything bad that has ever happened to any American, anywhere in the world.

Now that weâ(TM)ve got that out of the way, can we please pull together and try to solve this countryâ(TM)s problems?

Thank you,

- Robin

A sadly amusing article from National Journal that begins, "Hello! Thank you for calling Air Health Care, the airline that works like the health care system. My name is Cynthia. How can I give you travel care today?"

As one who has had a number of similar experiences with our health care non-system, I can tell you that there is way too much underlying truth to this parody. I am profoundly unhappy with the health care bills recently passed by Congress, but one thing is clear: our current health care system is broken and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. And no, I do not believe parroting the "free market will save us" line will solve anything. Free market health care, in its current incarnation, is a major FAIL.

Article also appears at Roblimo.com

Back in August, 2008, I wrote an essay titled Voting For a One-Term President. At the time we didn't know whether Barack Obama or John McCain would be our next president. My contention was that we had so many contentious problems that neither contender could successfully contend with all of them.

I haven't changed my mind. I don't think Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012. But I suspect this would be true if John McCain or Hillary Clinton or Mike Huckabee or Ralph the Wonder Dog had become president instead of Obama.

Our country's problems are too severe, and have been building far too long, for any one person to solve in four years. Indeed, I don't believe they can be solved within four decades unless a majority of elected officials from both major political parties decide to work together instead of playing stupid "gotya" games with each other all the time. Yes, I know your political party is straight and clean and tells the truth, and that the other one is full of corrupt liars. Well, too damn bad. You'd better figure out a way to work with those corrupt liars whose policies are (in your opinion) sure to ruin our country.

But you -- and most of our political leaders -- are not going to start doing that by 2012 unless we get attacked by space aliens or a major plague kills off 60% of our population or we have some other equivalent disaster. So I don't expect Obama to be re-elected in 2012.

I have no idea whether his replacement will be a Republican, a Democrat or someone nominated by a political party that hasn't formed yet. I have no idea whether our next president will be a "liberal" or "conservative" or "libertarian" or "socialist." A lot will depend on what happens to the economy between now and then.

And, you know, it's even barely possibly that enough people will be back to work by 2012 that Obama will be re-elected. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. And if you are, I strongly recommend that you resume breathing, because you have no more idea than I have what will happen in the world (and in American politics) between now and then.

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This essay also appears @ Roblimo.com

The Ponzi scheme prosecutions we've been reading about lately are unfair, and I blame the Democrats, or "Dumbocrats" as some call them, for treating business people as criminals when all they were trying to do was maximize profits.

Here's why:

For many years, starting with Ronald Reagan, all patriots have worked not only to "starve the beast" of government in order to stave off socialism and go back to the time when we all lived like Thomas Jefferson in the full glow of personal responsibility outlined in the Sacred U.S. Constitution, aided only by our slaves, but also to "deregulate" our financiers and corporate executives.Starting in the 1930s, our government passed many evil regulations that kept brave entrepreneurs from maximizing their profits. By the time Reagan (bless his holy name) became President, many of our nation's leading financial executives were only able to afford three or four houses, one or two yachts, and often could only support three or four ex-wives and two or three mistresses.

Reagan and the other Republicans came to the aid of our beleaguered financiers by lifting many onerous regulations from their shoulders while, at the same time, cutting taxes and raising government expenditures, thereby putting our country into greater debt than it had ever been in before, which forced cutbacks in enforcement by those once charged with regulating (what the teabaggies call "hobbling") our Great Financial System.Naturally, this deregulation proved to be a boon to many speculators. A few overreached, perhaps just a tad, and brought about a savings and loan crash. But not to worry! Our taxes bailed everyone out -- except the small investors, but who cares about them? I mean, do a bunch of old people in Florida really matter to anyone?

The example of the S&L debacle excited financiers so much that they funded a lot of "institutes" with names like Cato and American Enterprise and even a "Club for Growth," and had these "institutes" pour out studies and articles and op-eds that proved government was always evil, while anything Private Industry did was pure, unadulterated Good. Greed was Good, yesiree Robert!And Republicans bought into this in a big way. More deregulation! Why, a Republican Congress even managed to repeal the depression-era bank anti-speculation regulations and -- get this -- made derivative trading legal even though for many decades it had been prohibited under anti-gambling laws.

Ah, the sweet breath of freedom!

CEO salaries jumped and new financial schemes abounded. Brokers bought bigger yachts (for themselves, not for their customers), real estate mavens borrowed more money than they had ever been allowed to borrow before, and some of them (Donald Trump was a prime example) managed to have some of their companies go broke (thereby stiffing investors) while other companies they controlled prospered. What a boon for capitalism!

Naturally, there were silly people who still squawked about fiscal sanity and how all this was undermining our Judeo-Christion belief in hard work and rewarding labor and thrift. These sillies were obviously socialists or communists, and the various Institutes and their media stooges (who, but this time numbered far more than the original three) talked incessantly about the Wonders of the Free Market and how we would all benefit if we moved most of this country's blue-collar jobs overseas -- and some of our more lucrative white-collar jobs, as well.

Greed is Good! Capitalism Rules! Bigger yachts. More mistresses. More layoffs -- but don't worry, Wal~Mart and Target and Home Despot have lots of $8/hour jobs. Not quite as much as you *used* to make, but that's okay. The world is flat, and corporate profits are more important than small-timers who can't afford health insurance, decent housing, and other, similar luxuries.

In fact, with profit as the *only* measure of a company's or investor's success, why not skip the part about actually making things or selling goods and services or actually using investment clients' money to buy stocks, the way fuddy-duddies like Warren Buffett did? Why not just take the clients' money and SPEND it? And, meanwhile, keep promising new investors solid profits and endless growth from now unto eternity?

Is this not the holy grail of deregulated capitalism, American-style? To cut the payroll to zero or next to it? To make profits of nearly 100% on all money taken in while giving nothing back in return, all the while producing no useful goods or services because doing so would create overhead, thereby lowering the Holy Profit Margin?

So you had derivatives, securitized debt, and even more flagrant financial scams all over the place. Happy, happy, happy. Donald Trump even thought about buying a better toupee (but obviously decided against it). Mistresses got bigger breast enlargements than ever. The yachts got HUMONGOUS. A presidential candidate who was married to an Arizona heiress literally forgot how many homes he and his wife owned, and told us it took $5 million to belong to the middle class.

But while life was full of joy for the people who count in America, those sneaky communist Democrats somehow managed to grab control of Congress in 2006, and started looking into some of the stranger financial goings-on in our once-proud country.

Now, there had been a few scandals already that were so flagrant even Republicans couldn't hush them up. Remember Enron? And MCI? Ponzi schemes!

Also, please do not think all Democrats wore halos. Plenty of them were just as corrupt as their Republicans counterparts, which was very sad. I mean, we *expect* Republicans to steal and help their henchmen steal, and to do nasty corporate welfare deals like the Medicare Advantage insurance company giveaway and the "Welfare for Big Pharma" Medicare prescription plan. Democrats are supposed to be different. They're supposed to work to make our country better, and we have a right to be disappointed when they act as venal as Republicans, just as we have a right to get angry at Republicans who dare to have sex -- unless it is strictly for procreation, in the missionary position, with a spouse who doesn't enjoy it much.

So, anyway: after all those "Greed is Good" and "Private Industry Good, Government Bad," years, we started to see actual enforcement of some of the anti-fraud laws the Republicans hadn't yet been able to repeal.

We've had a few show trials of small fry like Madoff and Diamond. We haven't arrested Goldman Sachs or Citi or B of A execs, and probably never will -- even though any one of them has arguably done more harm to more Americans than all the recently-busted Ponzers put together.

The big question is, "What do we do now?" Do we keep listening to the bamboozlers who got us into this mess and seem to think we'll be happy if they throw us a Ken Lay or Bernie Madoff now and then? Or do we think seriously about who this country is for, what our government should and should not do, and what regulations we need to keep things fair?

I have looked at countries that tried to have true communism. Not one of them has succeeded. They all ended up as nasty dictatorships. I have also looked at countries where there is little or no government (Somalia is an obvious example), and have decided that extreme libertarianism *in actual practice* is no better than communism.

We need to come up with a new system. I don't know what it is. But, then, I'm a small-time schlump who lives in a Florida trailer park, not an award-winning academic thinker or cabinet member or economist or any of that. In theory, people who have all kinds of big-time credentials should be coming up with ways to compromise between the worst aspects of human economic behavior (unbridled "profit at all costs" greed) and the best parts of capitalism ("hey, if I work hard to build my company, I'll get rich -- so I'm going to work 20 hour days until I do").

So far, I see zero evidence that our "leaders" have any good ideas. The right-wingers have become pure noise, meant in the sense of "signal to noise ratio," and their extreme leftist counterparts aren't much better.

We need a lot more signal and a lot less noise.

I'll do my part if you'll do yours. We may not agree all the time. Handling disagreements peacefully and reaching useful compromises is a hallmark of democracies and well-run republics, while (theoretical) communist and libertarian countries tend to settle their internal debates with violence.

Let's not go the Somalian or N. Korean directions, okay?

Thank you, fellow Americans, for listening.

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This article also appears at Roblimo.com

This is a screed I originally posted on an Indian friend's Facebook wall: Don't worry about the US [on the pollution front]. We're down from using 40% of the world's resources (and generating 40% of the pollution) to under 30% -- and dropping. Our richie-riches are determined to keep us "competitive" in the world labor markets, which seems to mean they expect the majority of us to live in dirt-floored shacks, same as the rural poor in China and India. At the rate our working people's incomes are dropping, we will hardly be able to afford any carbon dioxide production at all within a few decades, and we'll be shipping our brightest University grads to India, not the other way around.

One thing to note is that the U.S. has a lot of really old industrial infrastructure. I know of textile mills in the state of Massachusetts running 100 and 150 year old machinery that has been modernized but is still dreadfully inefficient by today's standards. In contrast, Germany and Japan have hardly any factories built before 1946 because we bombed their previous ones in WWII. India, Vietnam, and other countries that had hardly any industry before the 1970s have even newer plants, on average.

And then there's technology leapfrogging, the phenomenon of jumping over old technology on purpose and going straight for the latest. Telephones are a prime example. The U.S. and other long-industrialized nations put in copper phone wires almost everywhere 75 or 100 years ago, then started switching to microwaves and satcom for long distance 50 years ago, and are now switching to fiberoptics and cellular systems. Countries now building out their telecomm infrastructure for the first time are going straight to fiber and cellular without the evolutionary steps.

In other words, they're using resource-efficient commo technology from the start instead of mining and manufacturing endless kilometers of copper wire first.

The same idea can and should apply to power generation. The U.S. has many 100 year old coal-fired electrical plants that still work well enough that, pollution (and mining damage) aside, there is no economically justifiable reason to replace them. And we have enough coal to power the U.S. for hundreds of years, so our government and power industry spend endless money on patchwork cleanups for coal-fired plants, while India can get right to the business of building clean, 21st century generating facilities.

Technology leapfrogging can and does happen in many other fields, too. The Tata Nano can be built cheaply in large part because it stands on the back of generation of (primarily) American, European, and Japanese auto and production engineering. Meanwhile, the big American car companies are still using some plants that -- while heavily modernized over the years -- were built in the 1920s and 1930s and are nowhere near as efficient as a brand-new Tata plant but are so expensive to replace that they go on being modified and patched up apparently forever. And the old auto plants that *have* closed become huge eyesores, too expensive to use for anything else, often too expensive to tear down so we can use that land for something else. So they sit there, rotting, a blight on the landscape, testimony to our country's former greatness.

The final indignity: I lost my job at the end of last year, and my chance of finding an equivalent one at my age (57) is essentially zero. This means I had to give up my mortgaged house because I could no longer afford the payments on it. The bank that held our mortgage went broke and was absorbed by a larger bank, which also went broke and got absorbed by an even larger one. Finally, nearly a year later, they are getting around to the legal foreclosure and title transfer process. But as part of that process, they have representatives call us several times a week to ask if there is any way we can start making at least partial payments and to threaten us with a severe drop in our credit rating -- which has already happened anyway, because of my job loss, so the threats are essentially meaningless.

Now, guess where those annoying calls come from? That's right. India. Wells Fargo Bank, which is still in business (and has manged to absorb other, even weaker, banks) only because of massive cash infusions from the U.S. government, is hiring Indians to harass Americans who have lost their jobs and can no longer pay their bills.

I'm sure those Indian debt collectors are glad to have their jobs, and are happily spending their paychecks on cellular phones, furniture, flats and houses, computers, clothes, motorcycles and perhaps even Tata Nanos.

Meanwhile, Americans like me, who have essentially been cast aside as unwanted surplus by American businesses, are buying hardly anything. We are, therefore, accounting for a lower percentage of global pollution than we did even a few years ago. At the same time, the Indian collector and his family are busily *increasing* their resource use and pollution production.

If I was in my 20s instead of in my 50s, I would move to one of the rising countries. But I'm not, so I stay here, watching my savings and my economic impact (and carbon footprint) dwindle every month.

This is why India and other rising countries need to do more, not less, than the U.S. to stop pollution and use resources more efficiently.

I have a simple approach to fixing our health care system that will piss off both Republicans and Democrats, not to mention insurance, hospital, pharma, and other health care executives whose huge incomes are dependent on major profits from the current system. Trial lawyers won't like it, either. Therefore, treat this as a fantasy -- but one that, if it came true, would save money and provide better medical care to Americans of all income levels.

Item One: Encourage Health Insurance Competition

This is a Republican idea, and a good one. Health insurance companies should not only be allowed but encouraged to sell their policies across state lines. And, as long as they don't turn down people with pre-existing conditions or sell insurance that has unrealistic deductibles (no more than, say, $2000 per year per policy) or copay provisions (perhaps capped at 20% of all bills up to $5000 or $10,000, with 100% coverage beyond those levels), they should not be forced to cover routine medical care. In other words, I'm talking about a shift -- entirely voluntary, only for those who want it -- from today's typical all-inclusive, HMO-type plans to old-fashioned major medical and hospitalization coverage. This would create a simple health insurance option that would keep people from going bankrupt because of medical emergencies. Let the free market dictate exact rates -- again, within broad limits, with perhaps a 3:1 maximum rate difference based on age and other risk factors.

The free enterprise component will piss off serious socialists. Fine. Let them be angry. And they will be, even though I believe we should subsidize health insurance premiums for people who can't otherwise afford to pay them. With tax dollars. Naturally, we'll put the subsidized insurance plans out for public bid. The least-expensive insurance companies (that meet basic plan standards) get the contracts. Less-efficient insurers don't. And, as an additional measure to keep quality high, Members of Congress, their staffs, and other federal employees will be insured under the same low-bid plans available to the rest of us.

Note that I am not stopping any insurance company from offering higher-priced plans with more than the minimum mandated benefit levels. Individuals and employers who want to pay more -- and hopefully get more services in return -- should be free to do so.

Item Two: Encourage More Non-Profit Routine Health Care Delivery

There are many low-cost alternatives to the mainstream medical system, such as this non-profit group where I live in Manatee County, Florida, that make routine doctor visits and prescription drugs affordable for even the poorest patients. Our local Gulf Coast Discount Medical Plan is not free. It's just a lot less expensive than any other local health care option we've found. Those who run to a doctor every time they sneeze pay every single time, which discourages excess use. Prescriptions are heavily discounted, too, but like doctor visits, they are not free. Once again, excess use is discouraged.

Gulf Coast has a sliding-scale fee structure. For those who can't afford even the lowest sliding-scale rate, let's have government subsidies, paid out of our taxes. On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with someone spending an hour or two cleaning bathrooms or picking up litter in the parking lot in return for a doctor visit or prescription. Or making phone calls to remind patients of their appointments. Or something. Anything. Naturally, it is only right to waive the service requirement for people who are so disabled or decrepit that they can't do much of anything, but I suspect that in the spirit of voluntarism many church groups and individuals would step up and do "their" service for them. (I surely would.)

As a personnel recruitment aid, perhaps we could offer partial or full tuition reimbursement for doctors, nurses and administrators who agree to spend a set number of years as salaried clinic employees. I also suspect that a large number of experienced doctors and nurses who are tired of dealing with insurance company forms and the other hassles that have become part of our current medical non-system would be drawn to this kind of practice.

If nothing else, a good system of non-profit clinics can help keep patients who don't belong in emergency rooms out of them. Yes, I've heard the Yowler yammer about how anyone who is seriously ill can go to the ER and get "free" treatment, but that treatment is not free. It's subsidized by the rest of us through higher hospital charges. Real, budgeted subsidies to non-profit clinics would not only be more honest than the current system, but would be easier to track and control.

Once again, I am not forcing anyone to do anything. If your local clinics (and I see no reason why there can't be many competing ones) don't suit your needs, and you can afford to go to a fee-for-service provider, go ahead. I also don't see why there can't be for-profit clinics competing with the non-profit ones either on price or by offering shorter wait times, free marijuana (sort-of kidding about this one) or other perqs to their patients. Choice is good, right?

Item Three: Tort Reform

Malpractice judgments are a tiny fraction of total medical expenses, and without public-spirited lawyers who often allow the damaged parties to keep 50%, even 60% or 70%, of court-awarded malpractice judgments, we would have nothing but drunk barber-surgeons in filthy hospitals. Let's give all those heroic lawyers plaques for having performed their valuable public service, and let them keep on suing for-profit physicians' groups, medical labs, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies that don't participate in discount medical plans or otherwise make their services available, at least part of the time, to people unable to pay full tab for their services.

Patients harmed by medical care gone awry should still be able to collect some reasonable amount, surely enough to cover additional treatment they might require, plus compensation for lost income and general suffering, but let's have compensation set by competent boards made up of carefully-selected doctors and citizens, not random juries. And let's put a severe cap on the amount of punitive damages any one patient can get. And while we're at it, let's severely limit legal fees in class-action lawsuits, which all too often leave the actual damaged parties with little or nothing while the lawyers end up with millions.

Come to think of it, why limit tort reform to health care? I live in Florida, where defending against groundless lawsuits routinely bankrupts small businesses. Our entire civil litigation system is as nutsy as our current health care system. But for the moment, on the medical front, let's just take malpractice matters out of the court system for all doctors and others who accept any public funding for their services, and require patients who use doctors and other services that accept government money to sign away at least part of their "right" to sue if their toes start aching six years after they got their gall bladders removed. Once again, freedom-loving doctors and patients are 100% free to opt out of all this and stick with the current way of doing things.

Item Four: A Public Option If and Where One is Needed

What if, in some parts of the U.S., there are no low-cost non-profit medical clinics or private, for-profit companies willing to go into the discount medical care business? Why not allow government-sponsored health care in underserved areas? Said areas might be remote rural counties and they might be poverty-stricken inner city neighborhoods. Would even the nastiest, Glenn Beck-ist Republicans really deny medical treatment to Indians on remote reservations or children born in the worst parts of Detroit? Well... yes. They would. So let's ignore them. They're going to complain no matter what. We should let them yowl while the rest of us work not only to make our country's health care system better, but work in every way we can to promote the general welfare and make life in America better for everyone, rich or poor.

That's the Whole Plan

Socialists, libertarians, and trial lawyers will all line up to make sure this plan never happens. So will everyone at the top of the health care income hierarchy. In a lot of ways, my plan is closer to the Republican Small Health Bill (pdf) than to current Democratic proposals, even though it contains a "public option" provision that will raise as many Republican hackles as its free-choice provisions will raise among the most liberal Democrats. Still, my modest proposal would serve more people better than any alternative yet advanced by a major political party, while preserving more personal freedom for both doctors and patients than any other proposal I have seen so far.

Common sense is in short supply in this country, though, so whatever "health reform" we get will almost certainly be expensive, bloated, stupid, and designed to preserve health care industry profits more than to provide the most medical care, to the greatest number of people, at the lowest possible cost.

That (sigh) is 21st Century America for you. We haven't descended totally into Idiocracy yet, but we're working on it as hard as we can.

I am not a tenured economics professor or a Wall Street executive. I'm a common working stiff, laid off and trying to battle my way back to a decent income through self-employment. I'm in better shape than most other laid-off working people I know because my wife and I both have valuable skills and (barely) enough business acumen that our little start-up is doing rather well. But most of our friends and family are not doing so well. Even those who have replaced the jobs they have lost (and at least half of them have lost jobs in the last year) are earning lots less than they once did. And, last I looked, unemployment and underemployment are going up, not down. Economists and government mouthpieces talk about a "jobless recovery." To me, there is no such thing. A recovery, to people like me, is all about jobs. Nothing else matters. The fact that some high-rollers and speculators are doing better than they were last year has absolutely nothing to do with the American economy in which most of us live, which looks like it is going to stink for many years to come, if not for the rest of our lives.

I'll start with my own situation. My wife and I have watched our income drop by over 80%. For every five dollars we took in last year, we have taken in one dollar this year. Our house -- modest by six-figure income standards -- is gone to foreclosure. We are now living in a tiny mobile home. Don't get me wrong: it's a nice mobile home in a pleasant community, and we like it a lot. But this means we are not spending money on rehab work, as we constantly were on our old place, which means we do not spend much (hardly anything) on home improvement materials or yard care supplies. So our income drop trickles through the economy, same as millions of others' lost incomes. We eat out less (sorry, restaurant people), our plans to replace my ancient Jeep this year obviously went away (sorry, car people), and my plan to get some major dental work done is gone (sorry, dentists). I sold my sailboat and replaced it with a kayak. Our utility bills have dropped by 75%, and our property tax bill is down 90%. Our once-substantial charitable donations and financial help to less-fortunate family members have stopped.

Really, the only substantial purchase we expect to make in the near future is one more video camera for our business, along with a few accessories for it. Beyond that, nothing. And even though our income is creeping up, it is unlikely to exceed 1/3 of my previous salary within the next five years -- if ever -- and we expect to use any surplus to pay down debt and to build a financial cushion, not to buy anything beyond the the absolute minimum we need to get by day-to-day.

So our time as "consumers" is over. No big. We're 57, the kids are grown, and we already own most of the possessions a sane person might want. We're some of the most fortunate layoff victims we know.

Now let's talk about Bill, up in Tampa. He went from home ownership to living in a room in a friend's house. His wife is gone. He's semi-survived on a series of small-money temporary jobs. If I want to see him, I need to drive to Tampa, because his car is so junky he's scared to make the hour-long drive to Bradenton. His clothes have gotten, quite frankly, ragged enough that it's hard for him to put up the middle-class appearance he needs to look credible in the IT field. Basically, Bill is on the skids -- and sliding. He has some wing-ding eBay things going on, but I doubt that they're going to generate much income. Health insurance? Nope. Maybe/hopefully he can get Medicaid -- and then he'll need to find a doctor who will accept Florida's pitiful Medicaid payment rate.

Essentially, we as as society have told Bill he is human surplus. We no longer need or want him.

Then there's my young friend Scott; married, two kids, one on the way. Wife works part-time at Starbucks. Scott dumped a low-pay retail job without notice to start a supposedly much better one, but that job fell through. For the last five months he's been doing sporadic temp work. He's supposed to start a five-month gig next week doing tech support for a tax prep service. By the time that job ends he hopes to have his programming skills (mostly Visual Basic, C# and Java) honed to the point where he can get some sort of entry-level job in that field. Yes, I know. Programming is now an overcrowded field, and IT work is migrating to India and other low-cost countries so Scott will probably never make as much as American programmers once did. But what else is he going to do? Almost *any* work that isn't tied to geography is moving overseas. The Wall Streeters and speculators love this because they can make higher profits, but for the Scotts of the world it means a recession that may never end.

I can go on and on like this... about the relative in Baltimore who lost a half-decent warehouse job when his employers decided to use a "labor contractor" that employs no one but Spanish-speakers for minimum wage, and (wink wink) isn't picky about Social Security or other I.D. checks. And the woman with a bachelors degree and 15 years of useful customer service and law enforcement experience who has applied for over 150 jobs without a single nibble in return, and we're talking jobs in every field from what she's trained to do down to entry-level store security and other retail work.

And when a newly-refurbished Outback Steakhouse in Sarasota needed to hire 67 people, they had 1050 applicants. For no-benefit, mostly part-time work at or near minimum wage. That's scary. It didn't make the manage or Outback execs happy, either. They're not stupid, and they know that if that many people are looking for low-end jobs, it means fewer people who can afford to eat at Outback, even though CEO Joe Smith says the company is trying to keep many menu items below $10 despite higher food costs so that even people with small incomes can come to his restaurants for special occasions. And he's talking about people who once would have eaten at Maison Hoity-Toit. Those who once ate at Outback are probably now reduced to McDonalds.

So the richies have recovered from the recession. I'm glad to hear it. I hope they pop many bottles of domestic champagne to celebrate, and buy lots of American-made cars and yachts and hot tubs and expensive research reports from American economists saying everything is just fine, our country is doing well, don't you worry 'bout a thing -- and what we really need to do to spur economic activity is deregulate all financial scamming and never, never tax investment income or inheritances at rates as high as we currently tax working income.

(Funny note we never hear: if we taxed all investment and inheritance income over $100K/year at the same rate we tax a $100K/year worker's salary, and took out the same amount of FICA/SS tax, Social Security and Medicare would be on a sound financial footing, with plenty left over for universal health coverage...)

The tire industry is now moving en masse to China. More manufacturing jobs lost here, to go with the millions that already seem to be gone forever. I mentioned that I plan to buy a video camera. It will be a Japanese product. There are no (as in -0-) American-made, commercial-quality video cameras on the market in my price range. And if I am forced to buy a new computer, even if I choose an "American" Dell or HP, hardly anycomponents in it will be made here.

Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Something like half a million of us still lose our jobs every month. Some find jobs, too, but the new jobs almost always seem to pay less than the old ones -- and have crappier benefits, assuming they have any at all.

This is not a recession. It's an acceleration of a general economic shift that has been going on for several decades, in which the top few per cent of our society does better and the rest of us do worse. Baseballer Derek Jeter builds a 30,000 square foot mansion in Tampa while the local unemployment rate and the number of homeless people rise toward the sky. Union jobs go away. Wal~Mart and McDonalds keep hiring. American politicians talk about renewable energy sources and "green jobs," but China is starting to pump out solar cells like crazy.

We bailed out the bankers and the investment crowd, but we have no WPA-style program or CCC to employ any of the millions of Americans who desperately need work.

In other words, traditional Republicans (richies) have been bailed, and the rest of us haven't. For us, I'm afraid, the recession is just starting, and isn't likely to end for a long time -- assuming it ever does.

I know, we thought we could vote for change, and many of us did. But in the end, most of what we got was the same old same old with slightly different people talking from the podiums, and a new crop of Yowlers calling the current crop of corporate-bought politicians "socialists" instead of figuring out what's really going on.

What should we do next? I have no idea. Do you?

See more of my writing and videos at roblimo.com

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Right now, most terrorists worldwide are Muslims. Not that long ago, the biggest terrorist scourge was the Irish Republican Army. Japan and Chine have had terrorist incidents unrelated to either of these, and the U.S. has had its share of home-grown Christian and right-wing political terrorists in the past few decades, and once suffered a spate of terrorist activities by left-wingers.

The problem with talking about Islamic terrorists as if every Muslim in the world wants to kill all Americans is that this simply isn't true. One nut-case Muslim U.S. Army officer killing fellow soldiers is no indication that all Muslim soldiers are disloyal or murderous any more than Timothy McVeigh's actions meant that all disgruntled white Christian veterans were potential federal building bombers or that every bearded environmentalist was a potential Unabomber.

We have seen people convicted of statutory rape who claim they were not criminals because they were following Mormon doctrine, but most Mormons, including all the Mormons I've ever known personally, are law-abiding citizens.

War is, by definition, something you fight against an entire group or class of people, usually one that calls itself a "country" or "nation." Law enforcement is the art of finding the bad people within a country or group and targeting them -- and them only -- for punishment.

I have met plenty of peaceful, hospitable Muslims both here and abroad. I have met plenty of peaceful, non-murderous anti-abortion activists, plenty of peaceful, albeit disgruntled, veterans, and plenty of peaceful Christians. I've met Jews who didn't want to kill or oppress every Palestinian, and I've known Palestinians who didn't want to kill Jews.

Whether in the U.S. or Afghanistan, most people pretty much want to get through the day without trouble. Very few of us, no matter what our religious or political beliefs, have any desire to massacre our coworkers, neighbors or even the people down the street who play their music too loud when we're trying to sleep.

  I'd like to point out that the military strategy proposed by most of our smarter generals for Afghanistan is essentially law enforcement, not war in the traditional sense. They advocated rooting out and killing or arresting the nasty people there, while turning the rest of the population into law-abiding citizens -- once they have well-enforced laws by which to abide.

This was the strategy behind the famous "surge" in Iraq, and it seemed to work better than any previous strategies we tried there. Yelling, "All Muslims are evil! Kill them!" may be good for talk-radio ratings, but it's no way to get Muslims to stop being terrorists. If anything, it has the opposite effect.

Muslim terrorists on trial? In public? In New York? Excellent! This may be crappy military strategy, but it's great law enforcement strategy and great PR, because it shows the rest of the world how we decide who is a criminal and who isn't, thereby giving the lie to every statement by a radical Islamist that "America is at war with all Muslims."

Our system of law enforcement is flawed in many ways, but it is far better, fairer, and more effective than its counterparts in most dictatorships. We need to let the rest of the world see it in action.

Of course, after the wheels of justice have turned, we ought to execute the lawbreakers who have attacked our country and our fellow citizens. This, too, is fair. I am not advocating appeasement or surrender here. Rather, I am advocating liberty and justice for all, a traditional American set of ideals we sometimes forget to practice in the heat of the moment.

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See more of my writing and videos at roblimo.com

Need a snazzy promo or instructional video? Check out my screencast samples.

So here I am, reading newspapers online and preparing for another day of boring video editing, and a noise out front captures my ears. It is the sound of socialism in action -- in the form of a county-owned street cleaning truck coming up our street.

Socializing health care would obviously be an evil move. Just ask any recipient of Social(ist) Security or Medicare around here, and they'll tell you in detail why only the "Greatest Generation" deserves government help with living expenses and medical care. But age-discriminating welfare and medical treatment are not the only bits of government socialism against which we must fight if we want to return America to the way it was when Our Founders walked the land.

Do you think Samuel Adams advocated socialist, government-paid street cleaning? No way! He lived in cities full of horse poop and liked it. George Washington never spoke out in favor of public sewer systems. Thomas Jefferson didn't talk about taxpayer-supported ambulance service.

Fellow Americans, government takes away far too many of our rights. Back in the good old days we had the right to buy tainted meat, take drugs that had opium as their main ingredient, and to live on garbage-strewn, poop-littered dirt roads that didn't have sidewalks.

Sidewalks are another bit of socialism. Believe me, Our Founders didn't write the need for them into the Constitution for good reason.

And let's not forget traffic signals. They are yet another way the government tries to take away our rights and regulate our everyday behavior.

It is time for all right-thinking Americans to band together to reclaim our country. We must protest socialist streetcleaning and waste removal. We must lay down in front of socialized ambulances and fire trucks. We must fight against socialist public-option health care, socialist police, socialist schools, socialist roads and sidewalks, socialist food and drug regulations, and all the other ways government intrudes in our lives.

We must take back America. To arms, fellow citizens! To arms!!!

read more of my mutterings @ roblimo.com

I don't actually have anything to say. Kathleen is due any day, and I'm looking forward to a few weeks of staying home, getting poor sleep, and changing diapers.
But mostly I'm testing to see if journal saving works properly.

We've made some significant updates to the submission/journal system. Visiting Submissions and Journals yields a new form that allows stuff like tags to the data types. There are a number of annoying bugs, but for the most part the dust is starting to settle. More notes will be coming, but this journal entry is really just me putting the final test on the new Journal form.

I've lurked at /. without posting for ages, mostly because I just don't have the time to interact like I used to.

But I've been clicking through the old RSS feed more and more lately, and when I saw the PAX Plague thread today, I came over to comment, since I'm kind of affected by the whole damn thing. I thought I'd take a look around since I haven't been here in awhile, and I saw that there are freaking ACHIEVEMENTS associated with our accounts. It's silly, and I'm sure it's been here forever, but I thought it was awesome and I was delighted when I read it.

I didn't realize how much I missed Slashdot until I spent some time here today, and I bet that anyone who joined in the last 2 years doesn't even give a shit about my stupid comments or anything, but it felt good to come back here, and feel safely among my people again.

I am sick and tired of Socialist Firefighters and how they have taken away my liberty.

You think I'm kidding? I'm serious as a heart attack. I just got a $137.44 tax bill for firefighting services. This is unconstitutional and unfair. It's unconstitutional because nowhere in the constitution does it say government should provide firefighting services. It's unfair because I don't smoke in bed or use unventilated kerosene heaters or overload electrical circuits or do anything else that's likely to set my little place on fire. I'm so fire-safe that I light my charcoal grill with paper in a chimney, not with dangerous lighter fluid. So why, in the name of God and Ron Paul, am I forced to pay for my neighbors' carelessness?

Mind you, if a neighbor's house catches on fire, I'll run over with my fire extinguishers (I have two of them, ready to use) and my garden hose and try to put it out. We Americans are like that: neighborly and helpful. But we do not want firefighting service shoved down our throats, especially if it's controlled by government bureaucrats instead of honest, profit-making American businesses.

Not just socialism. Tyranny, too

Imagine a government bureaucrat coming onto your property whenever he or she wants and telling you how many people you can have over at any given time. Fire inspectors do this all over America, day in and day out. Worse, they can force honest business owners to spend thousands of dollars on sprinkler systems, smoke detectors, and emergency exits. They can do this to churches, too. Imagine that! A uniformed government official has the power to shut down a church because it is so popular that it attracts standing-room-only crowds. This is anti-Christian. It is against the First Amendment. It is Tyranny.

We must stop the evil of socialist firefighting and go back to the days when a fire victim would negotiate with private fire companies to put out fires on his or her property. Yes, once upon a time, America had private firefighting companies that competed with one another for business. The father of our country himself, George Washington, belonged to a private volunteer fire company. I say, if competing, privately-run fire companies were good enough for George Washington, they should be good enough for us.

We must hold town hall meetings. We must confront our local, state, and federal officials about the horror of socialist firefighting and tell them why it is evil and must be stopped, even though the firefighters' unions and the profiteers who make firefighting equipment will spend millions to lobby in favor of gouging taxpayers -- and increasing their tyrannical hold on us -- a little more every year.

To the barricades, brothers and sisters! And don't forget your teabags!

See more of my commentaries (along with videos and other natterings) at Roblimo.com

Officially, as of July, 2009, 9.4% of the U.S. working population -- about 15 million people -- didn't have jobs. One in three of those unemployed people -- about 5 million of them -- had been out of work for 27 weeks or more, which is a long time to go without a paycheck. Another 8.8 million are "involuntary" part- time workers, and 2.3 million were considered "marginally attached to the labor force," which basically means they have given up looking for on-the-books jobs.

These figures come from a Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary issued on August 9. 2009.

What these figures don't tell you is that a lot of unemployed and underemployed people have maxed their credit cards, lost their homes to foreclosure, run up medical bills they can't pay because they lost their health insurance along with their jobs or are otherwise in deep financial shit.

None of us ("us" because I'm one of these people) are going to buy a new car this year or next year. Or, probably, the year after next or the year after that. Even if we all find work tomorrow, our credit is shot. No legitimate bank or other financial institution is going to loan us money to buy a car or to make any other major purchase. Sure, there will be "credit" available to us in the form of "rent to own" schemes and other high-interest ripoffs, but I don't think a lot of us are going to go that route. We are going to be very careful with our money for many years to come.

Lots of 'Good Jobs' Will Never Come Back

A whole lot of us aren't ever going to make as much money in the future as we did before the current economic situation began. Government bailouts and 'cash for clunkers' programs aside, American employment in the car-building industry is way down, and the laid-off car factory workers who are finding jobs at all are working for a lot less money than they were five or six years ago. Ditto laid-off journalists and people in lots of other businesses that are shrinking and probably won't grow again in our lifetimes.

Think about furniture builders and furniture salespeople. If those of us with shrunken incomes don't buy furniture (and I assure you, new furniture is not a priority for someone struggling to pay bills and find affordable health insurance), then furniture factories and retailers lay off even more people than they already have. That means even fewer people who can afford a restaurant meal and a movie ticket, which means more layoffs, which means a bunch of peope will hold onto old computers instead of getting new ones. And so on.

Meanwhile, those of us who mange to get our hands on any money at all are saving frantically. Whoopee-doo. We Americans got castigated for being spendthrifts instead of savers only a few years ago, and now that we're saving money we're delaying "the recovery."

The thing is, most of us do not want to go back to our old spending habits. We have learned, the hard way, that a seemingly secure job can evaporate and leave us worrying about paying bills that only a week before our layoffs didn't seem very large. So we are being very conservative with our money. We're not financially scarred as badly as our depression-survivor parents or grandparents, but we are learning that we really don't have to replace our 42" HDTVs with 52" HDTVs to feel good about ourselves.

Fabulous Furry Freak Brother Freewheelin' Franklin may have said, "dope will get you through times of money better than money will get you through times of no dope," but money will get you through rough times a lot better than furniture, clothes, HDTVs, computers (especially if they run Vista) and even memories of live concerts you went to before they all cost $50+ per seat, not counting Ticketron "service charges" and other crazy add-on fees.

This new financial conservatism is not infecting only the laid-off legions whose incomes may be permanently downsized, but their families and friends. You never know where the Layoff Lightning will strike next. Indeed, just before I started typing this paragraph, I learned that an IT news operation where several friends work is being sold.

Resumes are being dusted off -- and considering the lack of jobs in journalism right now, so are aluminum can collection bags and "will work for food" signs.

Get Ready for Downsizing

If you haven't already downsized (or haven't been forcibly downsized yet) you may want to consider it.

American homes have gotten much larger in the last few decades, especially here in Florida. Many newer suburban homes are literally twice as large as the ones commonly built around here in the 1960s and 1970s. If you own one of these oversized dwellings, you may want to consider renting out part of it. A lot of single people and childless couples can't afford apartments now, and will be happy to live in one or two of your rooms and even share a bathroom. Sure, your kids may have to double up instead of each having his or her own space, but kids managed to share rooms (heck, whole families have managed to share single rooms) for thousands of years.

You have a fuel hog car. Can't afford something newer and more efficient? Drive less. Every mile you don't drive is money you don't spend on gas and maintenance. And if you have two cars, use the more fuel-efficient of the two for longer trips. You may even want to consider selling one of your two cars and making do with one. Believe it or not, 100 years ago most Americans didn't have cars at all, and managed to survive.

Used clothes, appliances, and furniture: I've found that church-run thrift shops almost always offer better deals than the better-known Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. And used appliances cost between 1/4 and 1/2 of new ones. My wife and I have a "stacked" washer and dryer unit we bought for about 25% of what a similar new one runs.

Mobile homes: We live in one. We beefed up the insulation to the point where our monthly electric bill -- and we use electricity for heat, A/C, cooking, and everything else -- stays under $90 per month. We also have monster tie-downs and a roofover, along with new "140 mph" windows and other anti-hurricane safeguards. What we don't have is much square footage, as in about 640 total as opposed to 1400+ in the house we gave up when I lost my job. No problem. We live in Florida, and our outdoor patio space is at least as large as our indoor space, so we don't feel cramped.

Making Do With Half as Much. Or One-fourth as Much

We accept the fact that our income for the rest of our lives will be somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 as much as it was during my peak earning years. Instead of a trailerable 15' sailboat, a car-top kayak will have to do. Restaurant meals are now once-in-a-while luxuries, not something to be enjoyed two or three time a week. And so on.

Our current income is much closer to the federally-set poverty level (for two people) of $14,570 than to the six-figure level. But we aren't poor. We are just frugal.

I suspect that this is going to be the new American way. Some will strive and struggle to get ahead and will stress themselves out, while a whole lot of people are going to accept having less "stuff" than they used to.

Adjusting to this new reality is not going to be easy for everyone, but it's the way things are going to be for a long, long time. So we might as well get used to it.

See more of my commentaries (along with videos and other natterings) at Roblimo.com

I swear, these modern "family values" people are too silly for words. Take that Mark Sanford guy, for example. He claims to be some sort of conservative, but when it comes to marriage he obviously has some new-fangled, heretical beliefs. I mean, what's the traditional, 100% God-sanctioned method of dealing with lust? You marry her, right? If you already have a wife, no problem. The new honey becomes your Junior Wife and the one you already had is now Senior Wife.

This worked for countless Jews -- and pagans, too -- for thousands of years. Nobody whined about it, nobody tried to pass laws defining marriage as this or that because everyone knew what marriage was: a guy grabbing off all the women he could afford.

Liberals (I think most of them call themselves 'Rebublicons') who complain about a powerful man wanting more than one wife are just plain stupid. They don't realize that when they do things God's way, life goes better. There are, like rules to follow. Don't eat pork; don't light candles between sunset Friday and sunset Saturday; don't lust after your neighbor's goat, wife or other possessions; be good to your slaves... it's all written down for you sillies to read. You can even find it on the Internet.

So marry Maria already, Mark. She has two kids, you have four. You buy some bunk beds, the women take turns sleeping with you and sleeping in a guest room, you pick up a little extra food each week at the grocery store. No big deal. Your lust is fulfilled, everybody's happy.

See how easy life is when you do things God's way? :)