Open Thread: Shows 80 and 81
Listen here. Comment below. Happy Holidays...

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Blogfest 2006 Update: First Guest
I chatted with Bartcop and he said to count him in for Blogfest 2006 to host or participate in a poker tournament! More details as I get them!

The Poorest People On Earth
I'm one of those people who can never seem to get the hang of money. It goes in and out of my hands faster than I am even aware of it sometimes. I never seem to have enough of it, even if I try to cut costs. After a time I simply stopped trying: money comes and goes for people like me. Whch is a problem because I have never earned a lot of money in my life, never more than $23,500 a year: as a matter of fact, on several occasions I've earned about half that. Some people can get by all right with that attitude if they're especially talented: I saw a biography on the great author Charles Dickens where he said the same thing of himself with regards to money. But he would have to have been a spendthrift's spendthrift to lose the kind of money he made over the years. I'm nowhere near as talented as he is but it doesn't always take great talent to make a lot of money. Just ask [insert your favorite mediocre celebrity or sports figure here].

Despite my poverty, I am for the most part a pretty happy guy, and handle big disasters well. For example, I spent this Christmas (2004) with my wife in the hospital, where she's been for the least three days while they tried to stabilize her high blood sugar rate and prepare her for her life as a diabetic. We played some Scrabble, watched some TV, talked to a couple of relatives on the phone, and generally shared each other's company. For some people, it would have been a disastrous Christmas, but for us it was one of the best Christmases we ever had. In fact, the only difference between being in the hospital over Christmas and staying home were that we get more TV channels at home. And this after I was unceremoniously let go from my job two days before. Am I worried? Of course I am, but I have enough experience with this to know that something will turn up. I am far too smart to be out of work for long.

On my show I call myself a poor person. What I mean by that is that I'm broke. In every other regard, I am very rich: I have a wife who loves me, I live, if not luxuriously, comfortably. I am in relatively decent health, and I do a lot of things I enjoy. Some of my relatives consider me a failure because I don't have a decent career, that I move from one dead-end job to the next. It's true, I have a problem with focus; I get bored with a job after a while. But I'm not really poor.

On the other hand, George W. Bush and his political and financial backers are among the poorest people on earth, despite their tremendous wealth. The kind of money they have, and more importantly the way they go about getting it, is a chain of slavery. Being never satisfied with the amount they have, and being fearful of others who want to displace them, they trap themselves in a vicious cycle of attack and defend. They can never rest, they can never be entirely secure. This is why they lock themselves up with toadies and yes-men, the very idea that they might be wrong about, or take responsibility for something frightens them to no end. Responsibility is when someone can blame you if something goes wrong. When you have power you are surrounded by people whose job it is to take the blame for your mistakes. If they're smart, that is writes the Prime Minister, and that's exactly the mindset we're dealing with when it comes to the GOP leadership. The cabinet members, the Congressional staffers, the soldiers and lackies at the bottom, part of their function is to take the blame for their superior's mistakes. It's an attitude you see in corporate boardrooms everywhere and is now headlining in our government.

And make no bones about it, they absolutely hate people like me, and like most of you reading this. The idea that we don't want to be like them, the idea that we don't even want to be involved in their high-level mind games just drives them mad. We want our government to protect us from people like that so that we can concentrate on more important things. This was the great victory of the New Deal: it gave people more power over their lives. Now that it is being dismantled, we're being forced to fight for ourselves against people who see us only as a means to increase their profit margins. This is part of the reason we're so bad at all this, we're not as interested as they are in gaining power. I know I'm certainly not. I'm simply not cut out for that kind of wealth, I doubt I ever will be. And millions of you out there are like that too, millions of people who have to work hard to earn what they have. And now we're finding we have to work harder for less money, while the cost of living continues to rise. We're not quite as bad off as those who live in real poverty in places like Mexico and Thailand and Bangladesh, but give the George W. Bushes of the world the opportunity and that's where we're headed.

Some of us understand this and are starting to fight back, and make no mistake, we have a long fight ahead of us. We didn't ask for it, we didn't want it. It was forced on us by people who have nothing better to do with their lives than to see how many of our lives they can screw up. I don't know if it's a fight we can win, but it's a fight we can't afford to lose.

Merry Christmas, You're Fired!
You'll notice the change in the banner on top and the union stuff on the right. That's because I was let go from work on Wednesday, three days before Christmas. I was at that job for just about a year, and was expecting to be laid off at the end of January anyway, but since I had some attendance problems (mainly because I had my own health issues to deal with and because I took some days off to take care of my wife, who has been having more serious health issues). I used up all of my medical leave and my unexcused absences. I was supposed to have been let go on the 10th, but the union managed to keep me at the job until the 22nd, and they considered that to be a small miracle in and of itself. It just goes to show how little power the union really had, though I don't doubt tha the union President fought hard on my behalf. A co-worker who used to live in Philadelphia told me that if that had happened in the union up there the worst that would have happened was for me to have been put on probation. As it is, I went a day and a half over my allotted time off, so they canned me. Hey, this is a red state, after all.

Siemens Tucker has what they call a "points" system as far as absences is concerned: you are allowed 8 "points" a year, that is, eight unexcused absences. Every day off, you are given a "point". When you go over eight, you are terminated. I was at 5.5 (you can get a half-point if you stay only six hours of a a shift) until late November, when I missed a day to take care of my wife, a day because I went to the auto repair place expecting a fifteen-to-twenty minute fix on my alternator that turned into a five and a half hour marathon, and two days because I had throat surgery. I guess I thought I still had some sick days coming, but I was wrong. Anyway, they gave me two points for those sick days and that put me at 9.5 points, enough to give me the boot.

Not too long ago, in fact they changed in summer of 2003, you were given 12 points, and at the beginning of the year everything reverted back to zero. The new system only gave you a point back an entire year after you used it, which is going from one ridiculous extreme to another. I mean, I know there were people who were abusing the 12-point system, but there are always better ways of dealing with these issues than screwing the system up for everyone else. Even eight points would have been acceptable if you got a point back after three months, but a year is kind of ridiculous. Unfortunately I had no power to change things, and nether, apparently, did the union.

You know, losing the job doesn't bother me. Seriously, it doesn't. Even though the pay and bennies were pretty good for that kind of unskilled labor, the truth of the matter is that it was a boring job in a badly organized plant filled with supervisors who were a combination of arrogance and incompetence. I never expected to make a career out of it, but I at least hope to leave on better terms. Now I'm uncertain about getting my unemployment benefits, if I have to I will bring not only my own medical records but my wife's as well, jist so they know that it wasn't a case of me taking days off to be lazy. I don't deny I took two or three days off because I was too stressed out to go to work, but there were at least as many days that I took off because my wife was in so much pain that I needed to be with her just in case something happened. We're all alone here, we have no family to watch over us, so we're operating without a net. But since I was expecting to lose my job at the end of January anyway, the loss of the job itself didn't bug me.

No, what bugs me is the complete and utter lack of, well, humanity, for want of a better word, by the company. They weren't concerned about my health and welfare, nor that of my wife. All that mattered to them was that I took a day and a half off more than I was allowed to, and that was that. See ya. I mean, never mind the fact that it's Christmas: frankly I think all that stuff is kind of over-rated. If it's wrong to fire you at Christmas over something trivial, it's wrong to do the same thing in May or August, especially true if they refuse to budge knowing you have some real issues to deal with. I betcha some corporate executive weasel had a good laugh over how they saved the company (which earns profits in the billions annually) a couple hundred bucks, meanwhile I have to fight with unemployment, because the state is strapped for cash and they're going to skim as many dubious people off unemployment as they possibly can. The plain truth of the matter is that they didn't have to let me go under those circumstances. Letting me stay on until the official layoff wouldn't have cost them anything, nor would it have cost them anything to change my status from terminated to laid off. This is something they did because they wanted to do. Period. And that says something about the kind of atmosphere that exists in the American workplace (especially in the red states).

And to top it all off, my wife went to the hospital on Tuesday for her pre-operation physical and wound up being admitted: it turns out she's diabetic, and she'll be in the hospital probably through Christmas. Sorry if this all is horribly depressing: It's a crappy ending to a crappy year, we can only hope it gets better in '05.

Open Thread: Show 79
Listen here. Comment below, commoners

Whatever
Just a few short notes here, it's been a slow, lazy day and I haven't accomplished a whole lot. I've been working on a new big post for a couple of days but I'm in no hurry to put it on the board. I have made a change, I downloaded the Firefox web browser and it's awesome, from now on it will be my primary browsing program. The download is one hundred percent free. If you haven't already switched, I recommend you do so. Firefox kicks IE's ass all over the place.

There will be a new show up later this evening, something a bit more positive than my last few rants. I'll have a lot of time off starting next Thursday, so there will likely be more posts on the blog. I'll also be looking for a new job, I already have some leads. It's my intention not to get another dead-end job: I want something that will actually keep me interested in what I'm doing, plus pay me a lot more. Last time I went job huntimg, I was very depressed and didn't really have my heart in it. This time is different. I'll also be doing more work towards writing the Blogfest business plan: I hope to have some investors lined up before March and recruit some staff members at meetups and places. I know about BloggerCon, my convention will be very different, more like a three-day party than a series of serious conferences.

In the meantime I'm just gonna nibble on leftovers during the day, watch some football (I saw a great game last night between the Falcons and Panthers, the Falcons won in overtime), and pretty much just chill. And that's what I recommend for you all. Seize the day.

Open Thread: Show 78
Listen here. Comment below. I double dare ya.

Open Thread: Show 77
Listen here. Comment below. Visit Sean's sites:

Tales From The Afternow
NewsReal with Sean Kennedy
Upcoming Events
Patrolling with Sean Kennedy (TV Show)
Book Projects

He's a busy sonofabitch, ain't he?

Oh yeah, and don't forget to drop in at Rant Radio

Blogfest 2006
Actually, that's the working title: I wanted to call it Blogapalooza but I'm not sure if I could get sued for it...if someone out there reading this knows anything about that, e-mail me and let me know. And the subtext will make it clear that this is primarily for lefty bloggers, though righty bloggers who act like rational humans will be welcome: be reminded that I will set those standards.

Anyway, what I have below is a rough draft of the Executive Summary to the business plan, which will take me a little while to write, probably a week or so, depending on how much free time I get. When the business plan is complete, I will put it on the site so that it can be downloaded. The draft below is to give you a better idea of what I have in mind for the convention.

Blogfest 2006
When: Spring of 2006, sometime between March 1 and May 31.

Where: Atlanta, Georgia

Premise
Bloggers are a diverse group who are only now beginning to understand who they are and how they are influencing the world around them. But rarely do we get to see the people behind the blogs. On the rare occasion that they detach themselves from their keyboards and thrust themselves into the public eye, they are doing often some sort of official blog or politicaally- related business, and don't have the time to meet and greet their fellow bloggers.

Blogfest, therefore, is designed as a place for left-wing bloggers to get together, meet their peers in a casual, social environment for the purpose of having some fun. The important thing to note is that nothing official will occur here: yes, I expect some networking to go on, and there will be people looking to plug an idea or sell a book, but no heads of organizations will be decided upon, no official policy decisions will be made.

Blogfest will take place over the course of three days, Friday through Sunday, with panels and events featuring "celebrity" guests (noteworthy bloggers or other important figures of the left). It will be in 2006 because it takes somewhat longer than a year to plan the first such event. It will be in the spring so as not to interfere with any other important political events. And it will be in Atlanta because of it's centralized location and excellent hotel availability.

Another major function of the convention will be the "Dealer's Room", where people can sell books, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other items, or for organizations to meet and recruit new members. The highlight of the convention will be an awards banquet, with categories to be determined, and which will be voted on by the attendees. There will also be a dance, maybe more than one depending on the attendance. The convention will support itself through admission sales and sales of booths for merchants.

In conclusion, let me say how important an event this could be for those of us on the left. Every chance we get to meet and know each other, to network with others or to get in touch with a political organization, only makes the ties between us us stronger. It could be a place where we can all let down our hair a little, once a year, and to remind ourselves that we're more than just faceless names typing to each other across the internet.

No Blog For You!
There hasn't been a post since Wednesday, I know: personal reasons are the main reason for that. There won't be any other posts today because my wife and I are going to celebrate our son's 18th birthday (which isn't until the 22nd, but it beats celebrating it just before Christmas).

Show 77 will be up tomorrow afternoon, it'll feature an interview with Rant Radio's Sean Kennedy, who is returning to duty after a lengthy absence. Meantime, enjoy the weekend, man!

Political Convention
I am currently working on a business plan for a liberal/progressve political convention to be held here in Atlanta, target time is the spring of 2006 (it takes about a year or so to set these things up). The purpose of this convention will be part socializing and part "strategizing". It will include traditional political convention fare such as panels, speakers, and videos, but also some social events, and of course people will be encouraged to have parties in their hotel rooms. Atlanta is a great city for a convention, too: yes it's a red state but this is a blue city and has some excellent hotels.

While some details of the convention can be handled long-distance, I'll need some people here in the Atlanta area to help out as far as staff is concerned. If you're interested, please e-mail me and let me know. More details on this as time goes by.

Open Thread: Show 76
Listen here. Comment below. Don't Work For Nothing!

Why Do We Work For Free?
I came across this article in the NY Times magazine about a company called BzzAgent:

Given that we are a nation of busy, overworked people who in poll after poll claim to be sick of advertisers jumping out at us from all directions, the number of people willing to help market products they had previously never heard of, for no money at all, is puzzling to say the least. BzzAgent, which has a particularly intense relationship with its fast-growing legions of volunteers, offers a rare and revealing case study of what happens when word-of-mouth theory meets consumer psychology in the real world. In finding thousands of takers, perfectly willing to use their own creativity and contacts to spread the good news about, for instance, Al Fresco sausage, it has turned commercial influence into an open-source project. It could be thought of as not just a marketing experiment but also a social experiment.

Now, I can understand why people want to volunteer time for a cause they believe in. I mean, I do this blog and the radio show for nothing because I believe in certain things and I want to make my voice heard. I can even understand people endorsing a product or working in a commercial for a product they may or may not use, or even like. Hey, you gotta make a living, right? And I don't necessarily have a problem with people who work for a company (or an advertising firm hired by a company) pretending to be consumers to spread the word about a product (the example from the article talked about how Sony had people going around asking others to take their picture and handed them a Sony Ericsson camera-phone to take the shot, a plug for the camera). Even people who talk about a store they like or a restaurant they go to do so because they really like it. I always plug the Avondale Pizza Cafe and the Chinese restaurant in Belvedere Plaza near where I live because they have good food, and also because they are all locally owned and run businesses as opposed to corporate franchises.

Advertising, as much as I sometimes despise the amounts of it we get, is very important: who can buy a product if they don't know anything about it, right? I happen to enjoy a well-made advertising campaign myself, and why we buy certain products or services says something important about our society (Hell, I advertise the blog and the show, I'm just not particularly good at it). Yes, I'm a liberal, but like all good liberals, I believe in capitalism: I just understand that the government needs to regulate industry's worst aspects.

But what I don't understand is why people freely give their own time skill to help a company market a product when they get nothing out of it at all. I thought it was bad enough that people wore T-Shirts that advertised a product or had nothing more than a product's logo on it, but here we have people spending their time to help a company make some more money:

During active stretches, [Karen] puts in between 5 and 10 hours a week talking up products and writing reports about her activities. (She has signed up for many campaigns, including a perfume, a line of jeans, and a gel to soothe skin below the eyes.) What, I asked her, if not the potential to get some free prizes for effort, made her bother to volunteer with BzzAgent? First, she told me, she gets the chance to sample new products shortly before they hit the stores, so she gets to feel a bit like an insider. Second, she has always liked to give people her opinion about what she's reading or what products she's using, and BzzAgent gives her more to talk about. Third, if she does like something, then telling other people is helpful to them. So participating is both a chance to weigh in and be heard, and also something close to an act of altruism.

How the writer can use a word like "altruism" to describe this is beyond me. Altruism is something you do unselfishly, but usually the targets of such feelings are family, or friends, or an organization that they believe in, like a political party. Not to a company whose interests sometimes run counter to your own interests. If I try hard enough, I think I can understand, in part, why someone might want to do these things. First of all, most of the people involved are teenagers looking for something to make their lives a little more interesting. They want to feel like they're a part of something greater than they are, which as a liberal I can certainly understand and respect. But to me this sets a bad precedent that can be taken advantage of. It's like that person at the workplace who always insists on doing things at work that aren't necessary, but don't get anything tangible for it. I do that sometimes, myself, because I'm one of those people who likes to finish what they start. Of course, my problem is that when I am finished, it takes me a bit to get worked up over the next project, and when you have a job like mine that's repetitive to begin with, you tend to lose a bit of enthusiasm for it.

Part of me says that I shouldn't worry to much about this sort of thing: I mean, it's just a few teenagers who want to feel empowered, and probably nothing more than that. But in these days when jobs are going overseas so that companies can pay working people less, when we are expected to just accept the fact that we are going to have to live with less than our parents had, or that a 50-60 hour work week should be the rule rather than the exception, I get a little cautious when I hear about these things. I also worry about people becoming living commercials, we get enough advertising thrown at us on a daily basis. We don't need to worry that if a friend tells us about a product or a service they like that they have ulterior motives.

Michael Moore Speaks For Me
I got the following from one of my mailing lists:

I think it's time to face the fact that we are in as much danger from the DLC creeps as we are from the Republicans. At least with the Republicans we know they are the enemy or, at least, our opponents. But with the DLC people, we are caught off-guard because we assume -- incorrectly as it turns out -- that they want what the rest of Democratic voters want, and that is not the case.

When people like Al From and Donna Brazile tell us Michael Moore is our enemy, it's time to wake up. Michael Moore is not the enemy; the over-paid consultants in the Democratic Party are the enemy. Win or lose the election, those guys collect $millions, so they do not have much incentive to win when their paychecks roll in no matter what.

So while the rest of us face darker futures because Bush won and his policies will harm average people, these alligator-shoe, hand-sewn-suit wearing ghouls will do just fine.

Let me add my own commentary to this:

Michael Moore started out just like most of us, a blue-collar working guy whose hometown of Flint, Michigan was devastated when General Motors decided it was better for their profit margin to close down their Flint plants and move them to Mexico, since Mexicans would do the same job for about five dollars a week. That, by the way, is exactly what's happening to me: just the other day I got to watch them tear down the assembly line where I used to work (more about this on show 76, coming later tonight) so they can ship it to Mexico; I'm working on another line until they run our of boxes there, then it's bye-bye. But unlike most people, Mike had the energy and the talent to do what most of us would like to do: let people know what was going on, and in a way we could all enjoy. His first documentary, Roger And Me, showed in detail the effect of the plant's closing on the every day citizens of Flint. I'll bet Al From and Donna Brazile have never even been there.

I'm not even going to get into the whole "well sometimes he exaggerates his points for comedic effect" bullshit: Moore speaks for me, he speaks for all of us working slobs who are getting screwed over by corporate greed. We are the ones who are going to pay the price for the Republican leadership's economic policies. We are the ones going out to fight the Bush administration's wars. We are the ones who are going to be sold into slavery by this so-called "ownership society". It doesn't matter if you come from a slave state or a free state, if you're poor and not politically connected, you're getting the shaft. All Moore is doing is letting us know this. But the highhorses in the DLC don't understand any of this, because they no longer have any connection to us. They collect their huge contributions from other highhorses and move on. They never have to worry about things like whether they have enough money to pay the rent or to buy groceries.

And the poor working slobs of the South, the slave staters who voted for Bush, they get treated no better by the Republican leadership than we working slobs in the free states get treated by these multimillion dollar DLC think tanks. The only difference between the free state blue-collar workers and the red state rednecks is that we know we're getting screwed over by our political leadership, and they're too blinded by ideology to figure it out. When the GOP uses Moore as a lightning rod, the slave state rednecks scream with them in chorus, and that's the true shame of it all. Because Moore speaks for them far more than the smartasses of the GOP leadership do, and certainly more than the privileged Bush family. I don't know how to change their minds, I'm not sure if it's even possible to change their minds, but I do know that Michael Moore is much more their friend than is Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, Dick Cheney or George W. Bush.

I mean, I can understand perfectly why the Republican leadership and their corporate backers trash Moore. They hate working people, just like they hate our soldiers. Oh, they're useful for photo-ops, but that's about it: when it comes to doing anything to help them out, well, sorry. It cuts into our profits, ya know. And for all the right's blathering about Moore, he is a monster of their own creation, a working slob like the rest of us forced into action as the result of corporate greed. If GM had tried to keep the plant in Flint open, if governmental policies made things better for working people, we would have never heard of Michael Moore. OK maybe he might have gone on to be a film-maker anyway, but it's doubtful his films would have taken the tone they have. It wouldn't have been necessary.

But what I don't understand is why some factions of the Democratic Party, particularly the DLC, have decided that they want to turn their backs on working people. Since 1932, the strength of the Democrats have always been the working class. Yes, it wasn't perfect, there was still no small amount of racism involved, and a tendency towards conformity, but things were so much better for working people like me back then. We could have a decent job making more than enough money to pay the bills, and have the time and "disposable income" to make that work meaningful. Even "slackers" like me, who didn't have a real idea about what kind of career we wanted could get along just fine working a 9-to-5 job. People like Moore, people like myself and most of you out there reading this, we were the ones the party leadership would listen to. Even some Republicans, the ones that weren't Commie-baiting anyway, stood up for us. Not any more, it seems.

The issues that Moore deals with are real issues. They affect the lives of every one of us, whether it means losing our job or getting called off to fight a war. Moore speaks for me more than the snake-oil salesmen in the GOP and their fawning wannabees in the DLC ever could. That's why, if Al From and his DLC pals manage to get control of the Democratic Party, then we won't need to leave the Democratic Party: it will have left us.

Stuff
Here's some stuff I picked up surfing other blogs today...

---

A first grade teacher in a Red State is explaining to her class that she is a Republican and how nice it is that there is a Republican president. She asks her students to raise their hands if they, too, are Republicans and support George Bush. Everyone in class raises their hands except one little girl.

"Mary," says the teacher with surprise, "why didn't you raise your hand?"

"Because I'm not a Republican," says Mary.

"Well, what are you?" asks the teacher.

"I'm a Democrat and proud of it," replies the little girl. The teacher cannot believe her ears.

"My goodness, Mary, why are you a Democrat?" she asks.

"Well, my momma and papa are Democrats, so I'm a Democrat, too."

"Well," says the teacher in an annoyed tone, "that's no reason for you to be a Democrat. You don't always have to be like your parents. What if your momma was a criminal and your papa was a criminal, too, what would you be then?"

Mary smiled. "Then we'd be Republicans."

---

There are seven sins in the world:

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Politics without principle.

-Ghandi

---

The election is over, the talking is done.
My side has lost, and your side has won.
Now let's all pull together, let bitterness pass.
I'll hug your elephant. You kiss my ass.

The Perfect Storm
This is excerpted from the sermon Living Under Fascism by Rev. Davidson Loehr of the First UU Church of Austin on November 7 2004, which I got via Daily Kos.

Our current descent into fascism came about through a kind of "Perfect Storm," a confluence of three unrelated but mutually supportive schools of thought.:

The first stream of thought was the imperialistic dream of the Project for the New American Century. I don't believe anyone can understand the past four years without reading the Project for the New American Century, published in September 2000 and authored by many who have been prominent players in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan, to name only a few. This report saw the fall of Communism as a call for America to become the military rulers of the world, to establish a new worldwide empire. They spelled out the military enhancements we would need, then noted, sadly, that these wonderful plans would take a long time, unless there could be a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor that would let the leaders turn America into a military and militarist country. There was no clear interest in religion in this report, and no clear concern with local economic policies.

A second powerful stream must be credited to Pat Robertson and his Christian Reconstructionists, or Dominionists. Long dismissed by most of us as a screwball, the Dominionist style of Christianity, which he has been preaching since the early 1980s, is now the most powerful religious voice in the Bush administration.

Katherine Yurica, who transcribed over 1300 pages of interviews from Pat Robertson's 700 Club shows in the 1980s has shown how Robertson and his chosen guests consistently, openly and passionately argued that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian Dominionists. Robertson is on record saying democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians. He also rails constantly against taxing the rich, against public education, social programs and welfare and prefers Deuteronomy 28 over the teachings of Jesus. He is clear that women must remain homebound as obedient servants of men, and that abortions, like homosexuals, should not be allowed. Robertson has also been clear that other kinds of Christians, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are enemies of Christ.

The third major component of this Perfect Storm has been the desire of very wealthy Americans and corporate CEOs for a plutocracy that will favor profits by the very rich and disempowerment of the vast majority of American workers, the destruction of worker's unions, and the alliance of government to help achieve these greedy goals. It is a condition some have called socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and which others recognize as a reincarnation of Social Darwinism. This strain of thought has been present throughout American history. Seventy years ago, they tried to finance a military coup [against] Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fortunately, they picked a general (Gen Smedley Butler) who really was a patriot; he refused, reported the scheme, and spoke and wrote about it. As Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie The Corporation, they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.

More importantly, Rev. Loehr lists what he believes we can expect in the immediate future:

• The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.


• Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.


• Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children's education to Christian schools.


• More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work.


• Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state's official stories.


• The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway.


• More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.


• More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.


• Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.


• Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.


• Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control as the New York Times, for instance.


• Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America's workers to a more desperate and powerless status.


• Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.


• Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.

Rev. Loehr points out that he is doubtful that these schemes can work, but, as are so many of us, he is uncertain. The powers that be are stronger than we are, but powerful people have fallen before. The question is how much of this will the overwhelming majority of Americans will tolerate. It is an unfortunate reality that many people will fight harder to enslave themselves under the guise of "freedom" than they will to free themselves if it means recognizing that they are a part of something larger. I'm reminded of the song America from West Side Story; in it, Anita argues, idealistically, that you are free to be anything you choose, while Bernardo responds, cynically, that you are free to wait tables and shine shoes. I'm kind of with Bernardo on this. Even though they were discussing the problems of American racism, the same argument can be applied to the American worker of whatever race, in the greater context of what President Teddy Roosevelt called the constant struggle between those who possess more than they have earned and those who have earned more than they possess.

Rev. Loehr conludes:

I don't know the next step. I'm not a political activist; I'm only a preacher. But whatever you do, whatever we do, I hope that we can Remember some very basic things that I think of as eternally true. One is that the vast majority of people are good decent people who mean and do as well as they know how. Very few people are evil, though some are. But we all live in families where some of our blood relatives support things we hate. I believe they mean well, and the way to rebuild broken bridges is through greater understanding, compassion, and a reality-based story that is more inclusive and empowering for the vast majority of us.

Those who want to live in a reality-based story rather than as serfs in an ideology designed to transfer power, possibility and hope to a small ruling elite have much long and hard work to do, individually and collectively. It will not be either easy or quick.

But we will do it. We will go forward in hope and in courage. Let us seek that better path, and find the courage to take it a step, by step, by step.

Amen.