A republic, if you can keep it

Has our government been completely taken over?  Are our elected officials - regardless of their stunning incompetence - merely puppets for some other group of power brokers?  A few months ago, I would have - in fact I did - dismiss these sorts of statements as crackpot conspiracies, but watching how the financial bailout has unfolded, I have to wonder.

Most of you have probably read an article or email that stated that if the amount of money in the financial bailout was divided up equally among US citizens (or taxpayers, or sometimes among all people in the US), each person would receive a large amount of money.  The actual figure would vary, but it was usually a high 5 or low 6 figure number.  I remember thinking that in most of those scenarios, my household would have been able to pay off our mortgage and still have enough cash for some substantial landscaping.

A coworker forwarded this article to me today that provides an interesting read.  It explains how Wall Street brokers have stolen money from every American taxpayer, and used the useful idiots (useful to them at least) in Washington DC to legally do it.  With America now strapped with that much debt, Americans cannot be truly free.  Not only is this a huge money grab, but it is a enormous reduction of our liberty.  A person who is strapped with debt is little more than an indentured servant.  An indentured servant, while not technically a slave, is NOT a free person.  Because of our elected officials, we are all now indentured (which by the way is a violation of the 13th amendment, but who’s keeping track of Constitutional violations anymore?), and many generations of Americans will be born into this servitude.

But ultimately, who is responsible for this mess?  Since our leaders are democratically elected, who is to blame, if not ourselves?  On the other hand, many people did try to tell their congressmen that they were opposed to the bailout, yet the reports were that both the congressional switchboard and email servers were shut down.  I don’t know if that’s true or not.  I do know it was impossible to get through.  It’s tough to know who is to blame, but it appears that most people are sick of Washington elitism and simply don’t know what to do to fix the problem.

We are not in uncharted waters here.  This sort of government corruption has happened many times throughout history, and there is one way that has been successful in resolving this.  Thomas Jefferson called it refreshing the tree of liberty with its natural manure.  That has been shown to work sometimes, not always though, and it comes with a steep price.  I don’t think that Americans are willing to pay it, now or ever.  We have become too lazy and spoiled.  I know I would rather exhaust all other avenues, but what are those avenues?  Also, while persuing those avenues, we make it harder & harder to ever refresh the tree of liberty.

So what will we do?  Will we reach a breaking point, or will we as a nation go quietly into the night?  We are currently on course to go quietly into the night, is there anything that can change us from that course?

I usually don’t really get into parody songs, but the “Banking Queen” song that Rush has been playing just cracks me up.  Like everything, it is on youtube, and the person who posted it was nice enough to add the lyrics.

Great stuff there.  BTW, the “banking queen” is Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA, and yes, he is gay.

So says this AP story.

Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line (note from Ben, this warming trend ended in 1998). Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

That’s right, 2008 is going to be a cooler year, and that is evidence that the planet is warming up, apparently at an alarming rate.  Apparently anything is now possible (quick, someone try dividing by 0).  More from the article:

“The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over,” [Obama] said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.”

and

“We’re out of time,” Stanford University biologist Terry Root said. “Things are going extinct.”

Sounds pretty serious and dire, doesn’t it.  So if we are going to kill all living things on the planet, and it sounds like the planet itself, we better make fixing this our number 1 priority. After reading those parts of the article , I got a good laugh from this part.

Complicating everything is the worldwide financial meltdown. Frank Maisano, a Washington energy specialist and spokesman who represents coal-fired utilities and refineries, sees the poor economy as “a huge factor” that could stop everything. That’s because global warming efforts are aimed at restricting coal power, which is cheap. That would likely mean higher utility bills and more damage to ailing economies that depend on coal production, he said.

Yep, MMGW is here and ready to kill off all life right now, but economic woes may keep us from doing anything to stop it.  The way I read that is, it’s fine to waste money on global warming initiatives when there is plenty of money to waste, but when money tightens up, it falls by the wayside.  Things that fall by the wayside during financial hard times are non-essential things you can live without.  What does that say about global warming?