Tis the season

The gas fireplace works!

It only took me 3.5 years to turn it on.

Amazing. No wood required. I love it.

This could be me

The Atlantic has an article about Americans who are still feeling the after effects of the 2008 financial crash 10 years later.

I’m not in the same dire straits as the family profiled here but only because I got the f#%^ out of NJ before the value of my house plummeted any further and used the proceeds to buy a foreclosed property in Pittsburgh. So my misfortune prompted me to benefit from someone else’s.

But I did experience a prolonged period of unemployment as did many of the hundreds of thousands of scientists who lost their careers in service to shareholder value. I struggled for several years on consulting work, contracting work, part time jobs all without benefits, at a period of time when the medical costs for a family member meant that I drained every cent of my savings to pay for insurance and deductibles.

This also coincided with the a long bull market and my 401k was converted to an IRA and languished in ultra safe investments. I couldn’t afford to lose another penny.

Now my life has somewhat stabilized. I have a good job with benefits but it’s in a different field and I have to work my way up from the bottom on an entry level salary with not that many years left to save for retirement. I’m very lucky that I don’t have a mortgage or any debt. But I go on vacations in my dreams. I buy my clothes at H&M and the Gap but only with 40% off. I look forward to Christmas but I buy only for my closest family members. The days of my nice middle class life are permanently gone.

That’s what 2008 did to me. And it is still having a profound effect on my former coworkers and friends who still can’t find suitable work at a decent salary but are doing adjunct work or contracting work or just sitting at home, staring at the walls, with a rising sense of fear, uncertainty and dread.

The tax reform bill is going to impact us particularly hard. We are not ready to retire but we have a long way to go to rebuild our lives and at this point, retirement will be like vacations, in our dreams only.

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This sums up the tax bill fiasco:

Here’s what I don’t think MAGA voters understand: they think they’re going to get a tax cut in 2019. And they very well might. There’s a spoonful of sugar initially.

But it’s going to be offset by a rise in State and Local taxes over time as our local governments scramble to plug the holes left by a $1.5 trillion dollar federal deficit.

This was the plan all along. Anti-government forces do not care about the needs of ordinary people. They think that government’s only purpose is to fight wars on our behalf and that’s it. They have never made any secret of this.

The rest? Well, that’s up to you. If your state wants nice things, like bridges that don’t collapse when you drive over them, you’ll have to cough that up yourself.

And anyway, it’s so much easier to catch your dinner when you separate your prey from the herd. These tax cuts are going to lead to further deterioration of our ability to negotiate bulk discounts. Like CHIP!

We should just hang up a sign that says “Welcome to Bangladesh!” because to the people on whose behalf this bill was passed, that’s what the rest of us look like. Dirty, uneducated, piece work employees who don’t deserve the measly salary they get because they weren’t virtuous enough to be rich.

“The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.”

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On a more cheerful note, Vince Guraldi wrote the best Christmas album ever. It always fills me with Christmas cheer. Let’s get this party started.

Racing to pass the Ugly Tax Reform bill before the s{}% hits the fan.

In case you haven’t heard, Flynn is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation and:

Game, set, match.

Donald may soon be out of the White House.

Therefore, the Republicans have only a short period of time to pass the tax bill before they have to turn on Donald.

And the $1 trillion additional deficit is not a bug. It’s a feature! The next step is to gut Medicare and Social Security, so says Marco Rubio.

Update: WaPo posts on the plan to gut Medicare and Social Security after the Tax Reform bill passes. Is that what Trump voters sent Donald to Washington to do??

So, to all of you elderly Fox News lovers who didn’t vote for Hillary last year because you thought that the GOP would *never* touch social security, this is what you get for your lack of interest in anything but scary Muslims and sex and missing white women.

The rest of us do not deserve this.

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Read The New Yorker today. Start at the top.

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I failed to catch this yesterday about Democratic lawmakers offering an amendment to make corporations accountable:

Sooooo, there’s that.

No one can say they didn’t know when this abomination screws us.

They are unworthy of us

Dear Trump voter.

The people who run our country right now are completely unworthy of us.

So much bad juju hit the fan yesterday that shows how corrupt, compromised and callous they are that it would be very difficult to deny it anymore. Unless you live in Fox News Land. Seriously, you’ve got to shut that shit off because it looks like Donald Trump might be indicted shortly for obstruction of justice. I’ve heard that he’s going to blow a gasket if he’s not completely exonerated by Christmas. Consider the gasket blown.

There’s almost too much to cover that happened yesterday. And most ordinary citizens can do nothing about it. All the senators and representatives who might be able to do something are either outnumbered or in the wrong state. Our fate is entirely in the hands of the Republicans.

Donald and the Republicans lied to you. They lied on a massive scale. Just before they were to vote on that “Tax Reform” package last night the Joint Congressional Taskforce charged with running the numbers came back to say that the bill would add a trillion dollars to the deficit. Steve Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury told every one for weeks now that he had 100 people running the numbers to find out just how good the bill would be to the country. It turns out he was lying. A treasury insider in the group that was supposed to be doing the work said no such effort was going on. That triggered the Inspector General of the Treasury to start an investigation. So there’s a lot of lying about these numbers. And they HAVE to lie because they are so bad and will affect so many middle and working class people in profoundly negative ways.

But that wasn’t everything that happened yesterday. No, not even close. It turns out that last summer, Trump told members of the Senate Intelligence committee to drop the Russia investigation. And here’s where it is necessary to apply a litmus test. Ask yourself, could Obama harangue the Senate committee investigating about Benghazi and get away with it?

Then there is Rex Tillerson getting ready to resign as Secretary of State. Check this out (why YES! It is CNN. But foreign news sources are reporting the same thing. So either they’re all wrong or Donald is wrong. We must entertain the notion that Donald is wrong):

My theory is that Donald likes to stir the pot to make his base afraid because studies show that his supporters are more likely to be fearful people. (It’s all about your amygdala. Conservatives have differently sized and proportioned amygdalas. There’s likely nothing you can do about it except be aware of it, like being tone deaf. It can’t be changed. Trump supporters are always going to be susceptible.) So keeping Trump voters focused on their mortality means they will take their eyes off of everything else and that drives them towards politicians that present themselves as bigger than life and the ones more likely to provide security. They’re using that psychology to achieve other goals but they project security. It’s just a pose but the small evil group that runs things and to which no one we know belongs have made manipulating the psychology of the Trump base into an art form. So if you suddenly find yourself terrified of nuclear war with North Korea and attacks by Muslims, it’s very likely that the manipulators are pushing your buttons. The rest of us have rational fears, like falling into a river because the rotting bridge wasn’t maintained due to budget cuts.

Betsy de Vos is resigning as Secretary of Education. We are already replacing the guy who resigned at HHS. The rats are abandoning the ship. There’s something going down. And to add more weirdness to this pileup, the FBI is creating a new unit to investigate and stop foreign governments from messing with our election systems. Election systems sounds oddly like they are referring to voting machines and state election operations. But we don’t know exactly what they’re referring to because the FBI isn’t talking. I’d keep an eye on this because I think it’s the sleeper in the whole pile of bad news. Something significant is going on behind the scenes. Something big.

That was just yesterday.

Meanwhile, a Depression era historian says that what is going on now with massive transfers of wealth from the masses to the already wealthy, combined with the obsessive worship of business, is what lead to the Great Depression. Trickle down economics have been tried for more than a hundred years with disastrous consequences. By now, the wealthy and corporations that are demanding these transfers of wealth know that it doesn’t work abc that disaster looms but they’re doing it anyway. It’s the short term gratification of thrill seekers who are living for Today and putting the lives of everyone else at risk. Enjoy the market while you can. There will be a reckoning when the great multitude of citizens are crushed by the rise in state and local taxes they will have to pay to patch the streets and educate their kids and they won’t be paying for other consumer goods because no one forced any kind of accountability for job creation and rising wages in the tax reform bill that eventually passes. That means less money to spend, fewer goods being bought, a deflationary spiral, recession or depression. It is going to get ugly. We know this because it has happened before. This is not rocket surgery.

Don’t let history repeat itself.

Of course, if you think you have enough wealth and whatever happens is going to happen to other people, who were not as virtuous and thrifty as you, and not you so you don’t need to worry, well, we have a different problem altogether.