Believe it or not dear readers, there are other people in this country - folks with a much broader audience than The Gadfly's congruous disciples - who are just as pessimistic about the future of America and representative democracy's long term survival - and arguably, even more so than The Gadfly is:
Charlie Pierce from Esquire Magazine:
...the story is basically the same -- simply, that there is no pile of money anywhere in the country, no matter how large or small, and no matter how vital to the people who were depending upon it, to which the grifters in the financial-services "industry" do not feel entitled as fuel for their unquenchable greed. They will destroy lives because they have contempt for those lives. They will wreck people because those people are wreckable, and they will do it laughing.
...realize what a surface sham this democracy has become for the people who need it the most.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/looting-pension-funds-092613
Pierce links to a Matt Taibbi article which basically affirms that which The Gadfly has known since the days the late
Great George Carlin told him so -- namely that Wall Street and the people who populate it and engineer it's monetary machinations -- are basically willfully raping the middle class in order to expand their own wealth and are intent on destroying every single local, state and federal program that has ever been designed that had the noble and moral goal of enhancing the overall quality of life for as many Americans who were willing to go along with the programs, work hard and play honestly by the rules. They want it all for themselves and fuck the rest of America. Great American patriots huh? Honorable businessmen huh? The fuck they are.
The Gadfly seriously would caution you before reading Taibbi's piece -- for if you are a person like The Gadfly who places fundamental value in time honored personal traits such as fairness, integrity, honesty, philanthropy, and humane compassion -- then beware, because when you read how the 1% elites have plundered the meager savings and benefits of the middle class over the past 30 or so years, and continue to do so today, just because they can and not because they need to, it will either make you cry or make you extremely and blood curdling enraged. Which, in The Gadfly's humble view, is not a bad thing per se -- for it is a simple and authentically normal human reaction to being made aware of great injustice and malicious cruelty.
Here's an excerpt from Taibbi's piece:
The state's workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. "When I asked, I was basically hammered," says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island's nine-member State Investment Commission. "I couldn't get any information about the actual costs."
This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.
Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926
In a nutshell, they are blind stealing middle class American's pensions and they are doing it brazenly, gleefully and without fear of repercussion.
The Gadfly does not exaggerate when he tells you dear reader that his entire body was shaking in profound rage after he read Taibbi's article to the extent that he re-read it a second time just to ensure that his eyes and cognitive faculties had not failed him and deceived him in to believing that his fellow countrymen could be such vile and intrinsically evil mother fuckers. But sadly - there it was.
Sigh . . . . The Gadfly is no longer joking when he states that if there is to be any meaningful change in America -- change that unequivocally reverses the toxic injury that Wall Street, and the overlords whom they service, have inflicted upon the country's democratic institutions and the American people -- a people who, lamentably, were looking to the money changers to safeguard
everybody's best interests only to be betrayed, then that change must resolutely consider the option of life imprisonment and the death penalty for the corporate crimes which underlie the economic carnage that they have wrought upon their fellow country men, and for which they are presently utilizing wealth and power to evade retributive justice.
Yes -- The Gadfly is fully aware that support for the death penalty is typically not an issue at the top of your average progressive's priorities list, however there comes a point when you realize that extraordinary circumstances, while envisaging the gravest of consequences if no action is taken at all, must be addressed with purposeful and extraordinary undertaking - for the message sent must be unambiguous that these crimes and this form of calculative corruption will not be tolerated an iota more. And the penalty is ultimate in nature.
That's all The Gadfly has to say on this matter for the time being. Think about it though dear readers and make up your own mind about things. Hopefully enough people will begin speaking out about this depravity and it will be a large and powerful enough collective voice for the elites to take notice and put the specter of fear in whatever manifestation that constitutes their rapacious souls.
----TFG
