A quick tour of the blogs this morning left a bad taste in my mouth. Some Democrats are pulling out the demon rum card due to some booze-related problems with Republican office holders. That’s politics – it’s a cage fight where one must use whatever weapon that lands in the cage. Do those who are doing this understand their own behavior? I sincerely hope so. Carrie Nation was not a wholesome person.

What caught by eye were comments by Rusty Shackleford and the anonymous entity calling itself “Pogo Possum”, to wit:

PP: Progressives love to rail against any Republican who they deem to cross the line when alcohol is involved. But one of their own steps out of line, regardless of the severity, and they are indignant that anyone would pass moral judgment on one of their own. … If Bryce Bennett and Pam Walzer had been Republicans, the liberals in this blog would have been screaming for their heads.

RS: Progressives trying to control others/telling others how they should live their lives, ya gotta love it!

There it is. Do you see it? The post they are railing on was written by a Democrat. Yet they are lumping Democrats, progressives, and liberals all together. It’s distressing that they don’t know the difference, even more so that I don’t.

But I will give it a shot.

Democrat: A member of the other corporate party. We are only allowed two. Democrats espouse and detest populism and democracy all at once. Basically, they have no governing philosophy.

Liberal: There is some inherited philosophy present this group, but mostly they have long-since detached from philosophical groundings. They are not Keynesian – and yet they are (just like Republicans). They are not pacifists, nor welfare statists, nor populists. However, as used in American parlance, a “liberal” is a welfare statist, a fuzzy do-gooder, an incoherent rambler that cannot grasp the importance of strength and militarism and paternal discipline. It’s confusing to be and not be all at once. But that is the question.

Check out, however, those in politics who might actually identify with the term. Liberals started the Vietnam War, for instance, and Bill Clinton was anything but incoherent, fuzzy, or a do-gooder. Self-identified liberals fit in very nicely with our corporate-run culture in that they can seamlessly merge what appears to be common-man ideology with corporate solutions to problems. Hence, liberals give us health care “reform”, that protects the health insurance industry, and parade it as a progress.

So perhaps it is better simply to call liberals “Democratic corporatists.” Better yet, a liberal is a “clever corporatist”, or a “dishonest Republican”. After all, many liberals, like Max Baucus, Michael Bennet, Ken Salazar and Diane Feinstein could easily be “conservative” or “Republicans”, since those terms are also so muddled as to be meaningless.

This leaves Progressives: It’s kind of a catch-all for anything left over. Pwoggies don’t want to be Democrats, as it is so vapid a state as to be insulting. They don’t want to be “liberal” as they cannot identify with the behavior of those who self-identify as such.

So they go back in history to a time when “populism” was at the fore, and “progressives” fought for change in the wake of the abuses brought about by the huge concentrations of wealth spawned by industrialism. Progressives sought to break up monopolies, institute an income tax, direct-elect senators, and get us into foreign wars and rule us by sophisticated and of subtle persuasion, trickery and imagery ….

Hold it! What’s that about foreign wars, tricks and images? Sad, but true. George Creel, Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays were all self-identified “progressives.” They also gave us American entry into World War One, the idea of “manufactured” consent, and public relations as a substitute for political discourse. In that sense, we are still in the Progressive Era.

Why the trouble with labels? It is like struggling to get out of a straight jacket under water. The jacket is the two-party system that melds all competing philosophies into mere a mere publicity contest between two corporate factions. It is underwater because it is really hard to breathe free in the two-party system.

In the end, words mean nothing and everything. “Conservatism” is long dead, “liberalism” is a mushy bowl, and “progressive” is an ever-so-meek way of saying “fuck you” to Democrats.

So my suggestion for a new label for those of us who yearn for a means by which popular and justifiable yearnings, such as public health care and education and anti-militarism, can coalesce and have a meaningful presence in the public mind … we should call ourselves something else.

My suggestion is the “Fuck the Democrats” Party. Maybe a little blunt, but it does drive home the point that Democrats are the barrier to liberal progress. Anyone got something better?
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Eureka!!! We can be the “Fudds”, meaning what I said above, but printable.

I must offer an apology to the lowly minimum wage clerk I encountered last week at the Häagen-Dazs shop at Pearl Street Mall.

For those who do not know Boulder, Colorado, Pearl Street is a magical place. It used to be just a street, but cars are no longer allowed. It is a mall. I have experienced magic when we go there. We park our car on Walnut Street, which is regular pavement, and then walk a block to Pearl. The color of the pavement changes from gray to a pinkish hue, and bricks replace asphalt. I lift my foot from pavement to brick and back, and chant “prices go up, prices go down.”

It works. It is magic.

Anyway, I was looking for something sweet, actually wasting a little time before heading off to endure the grandparently torture of a baseball game among eight-year-old boys. (The best pitchers get hit hardest, as they actually land the ball in the vicinity of the plate.) I found myself on Pearl Street Mall. The Häagen-Dazs store beckoned, and I entered. Right away I was offered a taste of the new almond something-or-other flavor ice cream. It was OK, and the array of flavors was confusing, so I said just give me a little cup of that to go.

And I got a little three ounce up and headed to the register, and the clerk said $5.40 please, and I blurted out “Holy shit!” It just came out, and I was embarrassed, but added “I won’t be darkening these doors again.”

Which is true. But I must apologize to the poor clerk at the Häagen-Dazs store whose job it is to announce to customers that they’ve been seduced by forty-cent ice cream in a $5.00 cup. I imagine that goes on all day, though others probably have an expanded vocabularies and can put it better than me. But she did not flinch as the “holy shit!” left my lips, and I suspect under the veneer she learned to put forward in her two-day training seminar she thought to herself “Got that right.”

On a quest for a salty snack the other day, I came across some “Kettle-cooked hand-rubbed spice chips” by Lays. Since I know that anything mass produced will neither be kettle-cooked nor hand-rubbed, I knew that the only true word on the label was “chips.”

In 1981, a bartender bet a customer that he could change the behavior of everyone in the bar by putting a lime in his beer. He won the bet. To this day, thirty years later, people assume that Corona beer is meant to be imbibed with a lime by some ancient tradition or Hispanic ritual. In my experience, Corona without the lime is pretty bad. It’s just a good marketing strategy to move a bad product off them shelves.

I have long been fascinated by how our attitudes and ideas are influenced by marketing. Some time in my twenties, I stopped using deodorant. I don’t smell bad, no one has ever complained. I simply came to realize that the people who made deodorant were selling a false sense of security. And it seemed unnatural to clog up my pores with aluminum chlorohydrate.

As a runner, I often had problems with athlete’s foot and, ahem, fungus in other areas. I spent a lot of money over time on creams, but if I stopped using them, the fungus immediately returned. A kindly doctor gave me the remedy – a hair dryer applied to infected areas daily after showering. It’s free, and effective.

The point is that we have so much that we have to be cajoled and seduced into buying things we don’t need. We have long conquered hunger. We have machines to do most everything except those lowly tasks that we have exported to slave labor in places like China, the Philippines and Vietnam. We produce far more stuff than we need. The marketing dynamics involved in luring us to pay $50 for a branded shirt that can be had for a couple of bucks at the dollar store are intense, imbued in us as youngsters and carried through life.

I get all of that. We’re churning the pot, trying to redirect our hard-earned cash into corporates coffers. We’re consumers, not citizens. Our labor is for one purpose: To buy stuff. So the question I ask is redundant: Why don’t we just relax? We would do just as well working half as hard, and devoting the rest of our time to better pursuits, like reading and volunteer activity, exercise and just hanging out.

We can’t, however. We don’t get to keep the fruits of our labor. Worse than that, we bargain away future labor to 26.99% credit card interest to satisfy immediate impulses. I am so ashamed of us. We allow bankers to elbow their way into our paychecks now and for years to come so that we can have a new shirt, computer, shoes, all incredibly overpriced.

The people who work hardest are our convenience store clerks and gardeners, retail clerks and janitors. We hate our illegals, but do not like paying decent wages. Conservatives love to complain about the leaching class, not knowing that it is much further up the production line than they imagine.

The ultimate expression of the power of that elite leaching class is the slave – these days he is the factory worker who barely subsists on long tortuous hours. Vacation? Benefits? Get real. Slavery by any other name is still slavery, and the people who make our shoes and shirts, computers and baseballs are that – our slaves.

Slavery is the natural byproduct of unregulated markets. But this is 2010, and not 1860. We keep our slaves hidden from view. And call them employees or workers and talk about things like rungs on ladders and stuff. That’s nonsense, but seems to salve our consciences as we go about the business of consuming.

As a tax guy I sometimes encounter people on the edges of civilization who want to rejoin us. They are deeply in tax debt. They hide away as the debt builds up. Tax debt is almost as bad as credit card interest, but unlike the credit card companies, the government does offer a way out. It’s called “offer in compromise,” or “OIC.”

I’ve done a few of those, but I don’t seek them out. The process is long and hard, and if the taxpayers are young and have income potential, the IRS OIC people will indeed behave like credit card companies. They can be assholes, and will lock them into installment arrangements where interest and penalties continue to accrue while payments just barely eat away at the underlying burden. They are better off in the underground economy.

On the edges of this fray are sociopaths, the predators who dominate our society. These are the people who slap us around with their invisible hands. These are the “entrepreneurs” that right wing economists deeply admire. If you listen to talk radio at all, you will hear ads for companies that will settle your tax debt for “pennies on the dollar.” IRS warns people to stay away from these Shylocks, but when people are scared and overwhelmed, the promises have far more appeal than common sense should allow.

Imagine that you are walking in the woods, enjoying the smells and plants and solitude, and then suddenly you realize you are being watched, and see a set of cold eyes. The hair on your neck stands up, a shiver goes up your spine, and fight or flight sets in. You have been stalked, and are in grave danger. You may soon die.

These predators are many of our “entrepreneurs”. They are not inventors or innovators, basement scientists or garage mechanics. They are sociopaths – people without consciences, people whose only joy in life is the hunt. They stalk us. Their greatest joy, maybe their only joy, is fresh kill.

In the business world they are legion. We admire the hell out of them. Donald Trump is an icon who even pitches his cold-bloodedness on a TV show where he delights in firing people. We’re supposed to admire the coldness, the brutality of that world. But we’re not like that, 96% of us. We like to read about Trump (and Ted Bundy), but we don’t want to be them.

With tax outlaws who want to rejoin society, the predators came up with the “pennies on the dollar” radio pitch. They urge people in tax debt to call them. What they really want is $5,000. They promise nothing. Usually, when they are done, the poor schmuck who answered the ad is 1) still in tax debt, and 2) $5,000 deeper in other debt.

Because I knew someone in Montana who knew someone in a small Colorado town who knew someone who had not filed a tax return in four years, I am dealing now with an OIC client. We have filed all his returns, and attempted to isolate all of his tax debt in his corporation to give him the “fold-the-tent” option, leaving his family free and clear. It’s taken many hours, many long phone conversations. But we are nearly there.

Public liens have been filed against his corporation, and predators watch these filings closely, looking for prey. He started getting the phone calls. The sales pitches start, and they seek to undermine me, telling him that I am going about it all wrong and that they have the key to his salvation, the end to his worries and early-morning awakenings.

All they want is $5,000 on the OIC end, and another $10,000 in legal fees. They want it up front. They want him to sell assets or borrow on a credit card or get a loan from a family member – figure out some way to pay them.

I have warned him to stay away from these people, that they only want that one-time cash hit, and will in fact only make his problems worse.

He’s gone into hiding now. I am afraid he is going to swallow the hook and will soon be fresh kill. The only thing that might save him is that he might not be able to get that up-front money. That’s my hope.

I’m not a saint. I do bad things, but unlike sociopaths, I feel bad when I do bad things. I work for money. Like the guy who fixes my car or the one who just fixed our front doorway, I take pride in offering value for pay. We are not geniuses, none of us who do these things, accounting and mechanics and carpentry. We just learned to specialize as a means of paying our way.

But I get frustrated with it all at the same time. It is outrageous that H&R Block charges $160 for a 1040EZ. It is outrageous that people have to pay $20 to “e-file”a return, as IRS ought to make this free and accessible to everyone. It is outrageous that IRS does not offer a means by which ordinary people can approach them have have their tax returns prepared for them … at “taxpayer” expense. The whole notion that professional tax advice and service is roped off and reserved for private sector business models is perverse.

And it is outrageous that IRS does not remove the predators from the OIC process. They ought to draw people in by offering free help to get them caught up, waiving penalties and forgiving tax when it is apparent that, no matter the human failing involved, the tax will simply overwhelm the taxpayer.

Enough. Prey become dinner when they are not cautious, and have no one to blame. But I refuse to buy into the meme that predators are serving some useful purpose in interdependent human society. They only prosper because they pretend to be like regular people – they mimic us. But they are not like regular people, and a society that glorifies them is a sick society.

We are a sick society. We are unique that way. We breed sociopaths with our Atlas Shrugged mentality. I was not surprised to learn that 4% of us are like that. But I was surprised to learn that it is not so in other countries – usually less than 1%.

We are a unique country.

There is a company whose name used to be “Blackwater.” It is the ultimate expression of the American way – death merchants. The U.S. military has been turning more towards professional soldiers in the past couple of decades, and Blackwater is a company that hires mercenaries (usually with prior training at government expense) and rents them to the Pentagon.

Blackwater deservedly has an ugly public image as professional killers and looters of the public treasury. It’s founder, Eric Prince, is a rabid fundamentalist Christian who makes death an even more painful experience by lacing it with self-righteousness. The “Blackwater” brand was sullied even further by the publication of Jeremy Scahill’s book by that name.

Blackwater consulted a public relations firm about its image problem and decided to change its name. It is now “Xe.” It’s a good name, as it is unpronounceable and does not lodge in the memory the way “Blackwater”does. In this manner, Blackwater is trying to remove itself from the public mind so it can go on about its bloody business without the shackles of negative publicity.

In other news, James Dobson’s political lobby, Focus on the Family Action, has changed its name to Bglhmp.

That’s not true. I made that up. They are now “CitizenLink.”They are apparently trying to de-link from the Colorado Springs nutbase.

Given all that we have seen from Obama so far, it is amusing that so many Democrats and progressives still imagine that he is hiding his little liberal light under a bushel basket.

Elena Kagen is an unknown quantity, perfect for this bearded right winger. I cannot imagine that she harbors any progressive views, otherwise she would never darken his door. But here we go again – Democrats will defend her, she will be confirmed, and the Supreme Court will move even farther to the right.

It’s a brilliant system. Right wingers, no matter how extreme, have easy access to the court with Democrat support. It was not Bush that gave us Alito and Roberts so much as weaselly Democrats, who could not muster any opposition.

However, when it comes to appointment of a progressive voice to counter the extremists of the right who now run the court, the slightest obstacle, the slightest indication that there will be a fight makes them scurry like cock roaches when the light is turned on.

It is no accident. They are not cowards. They are not weak. They are simply not with us. They run for office masquerading as liberals to prevent liberals from holding office.

Elena Kagen, closet liberal. Yeah. Right. I have said on occasion that one reason to vote for Democrats is that they appoint slightly better judges. Kagen may indeed be better than Alito. We don’t know that. All we can do is hope, and that is all we can ever hope to get from Democrats -maybe, just maybe this person harbors some progressive views.

Don’t bet on it.