That’s how – and why – 15 people died.

There have been a raft of “investigations”, including one by the district USA Edward Tarver into potential criminal charges. Given the abundant evidence of malfeasance on the part of corporate executives, this should have been a slam dunk. It turned out, though, that corporations can get away with anything in 21st century America, including murder.

The company was the target of investigations by a trio of federal agencies — the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, OSHA and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms — that resulted in findings of dozens of “willful” safety violations and a $6 million fine in 2010 that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said was the largest ever levied to that point.

Only one potential government sanction remained and that was removed Tuesday when U.S. Attorney Edward J. Tarver announced his office would not seek criminal charges against the company or its executives for the carnage that ensued that night.

“There was insufficient evidence of intentional disregard or plain indifference to the requirements of OSHA’s general housekeeping standards to charge Imperial Sugar with a criminal violation,” Tarver said in a release.

How he reached that conclusion despite the acres of evidence and a whistleblower to the contrary may be explained in the usual way – protection of a local corporate power (and donor?) – but Tarver offers what sounds like a potentially honest alternative reason: the weakness of Congressionally devised labor laws.

Tarver also said the decision not to pursue a prosecution of Imperial or any of its executives was based in the lack of federal criminal laws “specifically addressed to the safety of workers within the sugar industry at the time of the Imperial Sugar explosion.”

It’s an interesting argument though it smacks immediately of buck-passing. It could be true given what conservative governments – Pubs and Dems both – have happily done to de-ball labor laws for the last 40 years. Anybody know?

True or not, the one thing that stands out is that, just like with the bankers who deliberately destroyed our economy to fill their own pockets and did so by breaking so many laws it would take an abacus to count them, after all Imperial’s illegal activities and the 15 people who died as a direct result of their disinterest in keeping them alive, nobody is going to go to jail behind this.

Again.

Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November or what compromises Congress strikes in the lame-duck session to keep the economy from automatic tax increases and spending cuts, 160 million American wage earners will probably see their tax bills jump after Jan. 1.

That is when the temporary payroll tax holiday ends. Its expiration means less income in families’ pocketbooks — the tax increase would be about $95 billion in 2013 alone — at a time when the economy is little better than it was when the White House reached a deal on the tax break last year.

You don’t matter. The “deficit” they created matters. It’s your job to pay it off. This was never a priority, it was just a temporary gimme for show.

Independent analysts say that the expiration of the tax cut could shave as much as a percentage point off economic output in 2013, and cost the economy as many as one million jobs. That is because the typical American family had $1,000 in additional income from the lower tax.

But there is still little desire to make an extension part of the negotiations that are under way to avert the huge tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts, known as the fiscal cliff, that will start in January without a deal.

Nope. Nobody on either side gives a shit.

Many Republicans vehemently opposed its passage last year, as it would divert money from the Social Security program. Many Democrats fervently supported it last year but show no such enthusiasm now. Nancy Pelosi of California, the top House Democrat, has told reporters she thinks it should expire.

So don’t ever get your hopes up. No matter what happens, you’re never gonna be on anybody’s gift list.

Video emerged on Tuesday showing supporters of Senator Scott P. Brown making tomahawk gestures with their arms and yelling Indian war whoops at supporters of Elizabeth Warren, his Democratic challenger, outside a pub on Saturday. The gestures were meant to mock Ms. Warren’s assertions, for which she has offered no documentation, that she has Native American ancestry.

Conservatives think making fun of one’s heritage is funny – as long as it isn’t their heritage. Also, fat people are funny, and invading countries because they’re supposed to have weapons they don’t actually have, that’s funny, stuff like that.

This may be difficult for you and you may not, at first blush, think starving children, for example, are all that amusing. You’ll have to teach yourself to remember that those children are not your problem and are most likely starving only because their parents are too lazy to take one of the many jobs our job creators have created in Sri Lanka and Honduras, places like that. Clearly those starving children are not our responsibility and that being the case, their distended bellies do look kind of comical, like turkey guts before the ax comes down.

You have to understand that Scott Brown doesn’t understand – or care that he doesn’t understand – that virtually no descendants of native New England tribes have “documentation” for the simple reason that we were decimated and then assimilated into the general population decades before anybody thought our names needed to be recorded. We were the first to be wiped out in the genocide (which conservatives find amusing all by itself) and the victors didn’t care to have the weapons of their victory (cholera, plague,  et al) or the victims publicized by name.

In fact, in conservative mythology, mentioning your heritage is inherently unfair since conservatives don’t have heritages. They have ancestors with bank accounts, one of which is meaningless without the other. Which means that any liberal who mentions his/her heritage in the midst of a campaign but doesn’t have a bank account that proceeds from it, must be making it up for some kind of election advantage, probably with the 100’s of 1000’s of voters who pretend to be tomahawk-chopping, headdress-wearing Indians. (New England tribes didn’t wear headdresses and called their tomahawks “adzes” but never mind the details; conservatives don’t.)

Ms. Warren has been saying for months — and repeats in a new ad — that her claims of Native American ancestry are based on family lore and that those who hired her did not even know about her background.

“Family lore” is all we’ve got, so it’s perfectly fair to attack Warren for not having ancestors smart enough to not be wiped out by Scott Brown’s ancestors. Losers in the new oligarchy don’t get to brag about it.

That’s why it’s so funny.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his party maintain that Washington policy plays a limited role in entrepreneurial success, and is often more of a hindrance than a help.

In pushing that theme this week, though, some of the speakers have left out part of the story.

In a convention floor speech Tuesday night, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin boasted that people rushed into her state in the Great Land Run of 1889 with only their own grit to thank, and no help from the federal government.

“And in 1897, eight years after the land run, a handful of adventurous pioneers risked their own money – not the federal government’s money – to drill Oklahoma’s first oil well, the Nellie Johnstone,” she told conventioneers.

However, Fallin’s characterization omitted major chunks of federal government involvement, including the Dawes Act of 1887 and other measures that forced Indian tribes onto reservations, freeing “open” surplus lands for white settlers. Oil later was found on some of that land. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided the method by which the land was distributed to settlers.

This is known as “history by omission”: not actually a lie, all you need do is leave out the part of the truth you’d rather people didn’t know. Of course the tricky part is understanding what parts should be left out and why – take for an instance, Gov Fallin’s little ruse.

Take that “we built it” theme. Sure, they’re lying about a selectively-edited phrase for political advantage. But why this particular phrase? Because the President was defending government’s role in building America’s infrastructure, educating its children, and improving its technology.

They don’t want those things anymore. The argument fell on deaf ears because GOP isn’t really the “party of business.” It’s the the party of mega-business, of globalized multinational corporations. Those corporations don’t need America any more. They don’t need its roads, they don’t need its technology, and they certainly don’t need its educated middle-class workforce.

Actually, they do need most of the things on that list – Eskow’s just being sarcastic – but they only want them when they themselves need them to increase profits, at which point they would like to have them done free. Which they usually are so you may be wondering what’s the big deal? Why all the drama?

What you need to remember is that in the NAO, only the oligarchy can be allowed an acknowledged responsibility for any positive development. Whatever they are not responsible for must either a) not exist or b) be bad. If the credit for a positive goes to any entity other than the oligarchy, it must be crushed ruthlessly.

Like the oligarchy, you don’t have to worry about re-writing history coming back on you as long as you make sure that your re-writes exonerate/glorify the corporate rich and denigrate everyone else.

See? Simple.

OK, so the arithmetic doesn’t make any sense. As our 1% bankers explained repeatedly during the mortgage crisis, this isn’t about mathematics. It’s about optimism, it’s about progress, and, ultimately, it’s about Faith.

Faith doesn’t require knowledge. In fact knowledge is very often an obstacle in the way of faith generation. In the case of many oligarchic beliefs which are at present the only glue holding what’s left or our economy together, facts (like the fact that there is no “there” in the latest round of Wall Street optimism) can be positively destructive. Believing in facts would no doubt result in runs on Wall Street stocks and securities that would make the Bear Stearns/Lehman/Merrill Lynch etc fiasco of ‘07-08 look like one of those summer days when the worst thing that happens to you is a mild case of sunburn.

In order to fit into the world of the NAO, you’re going to have to be able to pretend you believe that, for example, global warming is a hoax, because that is what the NAO has chosen to believe.

We’re currently experiencing the worst drought in 60 years, a siege of wildfires, and the hottest temperatures since records were kept.  But to Republicans in Congress, it’s all a big hoax. The chairman of a subcommittee that oversees issues related to climate change,  Representative John Shimkus of Illinois is —  you guessed it  — a climate-change denier.

At a 2009 hearing, Shimkus said not to worry about a fatally dyspeptic planet: the biblical signs have yet to properly align. “The earth will end only when God declares it to be over,” he said, and then he went on to quote Genesis at some length.  It’s worth repeating: This guy is the chairman.

On the same committee is an oil-company tool and 27-year veteran of Congress, Representative Joe L. Barton of Texas.  You may remember Barton as the politician who apologized to the head of BP in 2010 after the government dared to insist that the company pay for those whose livelihoods were ruined by the gulf oil spill.

Barton cited the Almighty in questioning energy from wind turbines. Careful, he warned, “wind is God’s way of balancing heat.”  Clean energy, he said,  “would slow the winds down” and thus could make it hotter. You never know.

“You can’t regulate God!” Barton barked at the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in the midst of discussion on measures to curb global warming.

There you go.

The New American Oligarchs find fundamentalist Xtians make excellent puppets. They are already trained to believe the impossible so it isn’t much of a jump from religion to meteorology or biology if that’s what’s needed. Consequently, you might find it helpful to begin attending one of these fundy “churches” to get a handle on how they do it. For example:

Jack Kingston of Georgia, a 20-year veteran of the House,  is an evolution denier, apparently because he can’t see the indent where his ancestors’ monkey tail used to be. “Where’s the missing link?” he said in 2011. “I just want to know what it is.” He serves on a committee that oversees education.

In his party, Kingston is in the mainstream. A Gallup poll in June found that 58 percent of Republicans believe God created humans in the present form just within the last 10,000 years —  a wealth of anthropological evidence to the contrary. [emphasis added]

OK, so you know you’re going to sound distinctly like an idiot denying and/or attacking scientific facts a 5th grader knows are true. You’re going to have to do it no matter how stupid you feel or how moronically ignorant it makes you look. It’s going to be embarrassing and people who aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid yet are going to give you pitying looks and shuffle away from you in supermarket checkout lines.

Suck it up. If you want to be a member of the NAO looking stupid is part of the entrance exam. Just remember 2 things:

1. You’ll be in the loop and reaping rewards for your stupidity while all those smartasses who know better will find themselves on breadlines. And:
2. The way things are going, Unbelievers are liable to be shot or otherwise eliminated from the mix very soon and you won’t have to stand for long being looked at like something old Southern families used to keep locked in the attic.

Nothing is perfect, there is pain attached to every pleasure. To get through it while the world is crashing around your ears, simply do what the fundies and bankers do: concentrate on the $$$. Nowadays stupidity is what makes you rich. You may not make it before the roof falls on your head but, hey, that’s the risk you take, right?

You see, the Founding Fathers began the confusion by using phrase like “commonwealth”, “equality”, and “nation”. It wasn’t their fault, of course. In those early days they had little understanding of the true nature of “society” as a mechanism for increasing corporate power and profits. They were then still laboring under the delusion that “democracy”, at least representative democracy, was meant to include everyone who owned property, even if all they owned was a few hard-scrabble acres on the edge of nowhere.

We are far more sophisticated now, and we know that only very large, very powerful property owners (ie, corporations) matter and that “democracy” was not a goal but a mistake that wasted valuable time and resources following a dead-end path to nowhere anybody rich wanted to be, a dangerous path that allowed decisions to be made on the basis of people’s needs rather than corporate requirements, thus threatening the end of life as we know it. There is no more frightening phrase than “Power to the People” but thankfully we’ve all been forced to surrender that nightmare.

We are now living in a more suitable and effective “society” where the “government” has been bought by corporate $$ and its decisions reflect corporate desires. The idea that a public exists, never mind that it has “needs” which must be taken into consideration, has gone pffft as it should and every ex-“public” function should now be looked at for its profit potential.

This transition has already begun. Our corporate-annexed Congress has successfully engineered the tax system to squeeze out all tax $$ aimed at “public” facilities, forcing them to privatize or die. National parks charge entrance fees, education costs have skyrocketed due to the loss of their tax base, forcing corporate partnerships (and the attendant control demanded by corporate “sponsors”), libraries are charging “use” fees, and local fire departments are refusing to put out fires on property whose owners haven’t paid their new Public Safety Tax. Soon police will be openly charging fees to investigate crimes and ignoring those which occur to the indigent, though this will be more a nuanced alteration than an actual change of behavior.

New frontiers are being established as well. For example, the concept of “public space” is being erased by an onslaught of advertising everywhere there is a bare wall or tree that can support a sign. Streets are little more than billboards even in smallish towns, and sound trucks roam as freely as deer once did. Local governments, spurred by local businesses, have begun to forbid “public assembly” much as the British used to in Colonial days. Spurred by low tax collections and the pervasive myth that private corporations do things cheaper (they don’t, of course, since they have to make a profit and govt-run services don’t), public parks are being sold off to private vendors, along with toll roads and services such as garbage collection and street cleaning.

To complete this transition merely requires eliminating the concept of “public” anything from the consciousness of the citizenry and replacing it with a cult of $$ worship. Fortunately, our best propagandists are working on this. Check Fox any day of the week.

Money is all that matters.

You can leapfrog over all the usual corporate bullshit and forget about kissing ass to climb the ladder. None of that is necessary any more. That was for a time when the honchos had to be sure the people they hired were slick enough to hide how greedy and unprincipled they were. Fortunately hiding is passé. Now we show our roots and let hair grow in tendrils like ivy from our nostrils.

OK maybe we don’t but the point is that we’ve accepted immoral greed as socially desirable, even admirable as long as that greed works. IOW, as long as we bring in the bucks, all is forgiven no matter what heinous crime we have committed to get them. We are proud of our greed now. We brag about it. We hold it up as an example of they way everybody should be (especially those damn Frenchies). We trumpet it around the world, selling it like a can of cola. We don’t apologize. We proselytize.

Even better, because profit is the only criteria we’ve decided to count, the legality of any money-making idea you might come up with isn’t an issue, either. Much. Though there are a couple of minor restrictions.

1. You can’t actually physically mug anyone. We’re still working on that and so far the rewards don’t seem like they’d match the risks anyway. After all, most of the cash is now in the hands of the rich so you’d have to mug them and that, of course, is off the table. Though the concept leads nicely into 2 & 3.
2. You’d be well-advised not to promote any money-making scheme that targets the rich. Remember that of all the illegal and unethical scams perpetrated during both Bush Administrations (the mortgage scam alone skimmed more than a $Trillion$ and still counting), the only – only – thief who went to jail was Bernie Madoff, the one scammer who who targeted the rich rather than the middle or upper-middle income classes exclusively. Lesson learned. Tempting as it may be, lay off.
3. Though illegal scams are generally welcomed by upper management and safe from any sort of “prosecution” however lame, there remains the possibility that an illegal scam could provoke unwanted public attention. Some citizens are beginning to realize the predatory nature of the New American Oligarchy and they could cause public relations problems if it dawns on them that what’s being done to them is wrong. As a rule of thumb, make sure that your scam’s worst possible return is 100 times the amount a severe backlash reaction or PR disaster would cost. The bean counters will then give the OK and your scam can proceed to make you millions.

None of these restrictions are all that odious and they shouldn’t prevent you from coming up with a nice rip-off scheme. From new ways to duck taxes to ways of claiming you own properties you don’t own, there are thousands of scams out there to choose from. Whether you institute an old but overlooked scam (shaving employee hours for example) or come up with something new and unique, many of the old obstacles are no longer in your way as long as you get a reputation for “bringing home the bacon”.

Have fun! And remember: If you’re not stealing, you’re not maximizing your potential profit.

The recent Supreme Court decision allowing the Constitutionality of Obama’s health care bill can be seen as a case in point. With no effort on your part and despite whatever qualms you may have about the way the bill tends to subvert, deny or delay actual treatment, you will be required to pay health insurance corpo’s a sizable chunk of your income for advising you that your illness isn’t covered. (That’s apparently in the Constitution somewhere.)

In this way you will be allowed to sacrifice not just your income but your health for the good of insurance corpo’s whose profits are not yet obscene enough to cause riots. Which seems to be their goal.

Don’t let yourselves be taken in by the appearance of unrestricted greed. Remember, they’re doing it for you, not to you.

One thing is certain, that the well-developed, well-integrated personality is the highest product of evolution, the fullest realization we know of in the universe. ~ Julian Huxley, “Transhumanism”

After six thousand years of Western civilization we are finally living in the time when that childish belief can be put to rest once and for all. For we, the humans – especially the American humans – of the 21st century have proved beyond all doubt that the highest product of human evolution – in fact the only product worth cultivation – is a well-developed, well-integrated sense of greed. We now understand that our highest evolutionary function, indeed our only important function as a species, is the making of money.

And for 99% of us, it is not even the making of money for ourselves. We are here to make others, a tiny sliver of exceptional humans, wealthier than any fabulous Arabian potentate of myth ever dreamed of being. This is, indeed, a marvelous time to be alive, a time when we can sacrifice our lives to the greater glory of superior beings larger than our puny selves, beings whose ability to…appropriate wealth by whatever means has shown them to be worthy of our renunciation of our own welfare in order to ensure their increasing riches.

It is clear that we recognize this reality for no other people in the history of the world have so voluntarily surrendered their own earned wealth to the bulging coffers of the elite. In any other society the…appropriation of what is rightfully ours would have caused disruptions, unrest, even revolution. But not here. In America we have acknowledged the superiority of the 1% and we allow them to take whatever they want not only without a murmur of protest but with gratitude, and all this because they promise that if we do, we will all, all 99% of us, become members of the 1%.

Someday.

Maybe.

OK, so the arithmetic doesn’t make any sense. As our 1% bankers explained repeatedly during the mortgage crisis, this isn’t about mathematics. It’s about optimism, it’s about progress, and, ultimately, it’s about Faith. They, the Masters of the Universe, are like Gods. So, do we believe in our Gods or don’t we? Do we have Faith in them or don’t we? If we refuse to have faith in their superiority, they have said they will destroy the Earth in their anger, just like the old Gods used to promise to do. Clearly it is best to have faith and we recognize that.

Besides, isn’t it a relief to have the responsibility of growing up taken away and put into the more able hands of the economic elite? We have become a small small people with small lives, small expectations, and even smaller hopes, and isn’t that the way it should be? The idea that humans could be more than living threshing machines, that we could aspire to our “fullest realization” has always been nothing more than a dream, an illusion that kept us pining for a condition we could never obtain. From Socrates to FDR, dangerous liberals have been fostering the concept of a humanity that could mature, could grow into a grace and intellectual attainment that would create true equality and even happiness right here on earth.

But that never was, could never be, more than a sickening illusion that has held us back from the days of the Greeks from realizing our real value as cogs in the great machine built and exploited by the 1% of us who are destined to rule. Now that we have stopped this enormous waste of energy in its tracks, we can end human evolution right here, freed at long last from the absurd effort to transform ourselves into something better or greater. That gig has already been taken by the 1% of the elite, and we are content that it should be so.

So let us raise our glasses (or our paper cups since many of us don’t have any actual glasses left) to this Brave New World.

It’s all we got.

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