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Politics

El Gobierno Quiere Ayudarte! Thanks, Dear Government, but…

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So this morning city and neighborhood organizers threw a donuts-and-press party to kick off the first of the heavy-duty locking gates they intend to install across the alleys in Richistan and Lower Richistan. These will be grand — in theory — for the folks who can afford to live in those areas. The intent is to fence the local drug-addicted bums away from people’s backyards, theoretically cutting crime and, as a practical matter, much enhancing aesthetics.

When I first heard about this scheme — it was proposed a couple years ago — I was all for it. It sounded like it would cut the risk of crime and get at least some of the two-legged vermin out of our hair. But now I’ve had time to think it over. And what do I think?

Bad idea.

This is a scheme that on the surface sounds great but that is fraught with unintended consequences.

Its biggest drawback? The plan doesn’t address the underlying problem: hordes of drug-addicted transients. Until the matter of homeless mentally ill and drug addicts is resolved, no stop-gap program like gates across the alleys is going to stop bums from roaming our neighborhoods and burgling our homes and cars.

While our City Parents talk on one side of their collective mouth in claiming they want to help our neighborhood fend off the present onslaught of drug-addicted vagrants, many of whom are merely thieving but a few of whom have committed acts of violence and sexual molestation, on the other side they blithely import the undesirable residents by allowing them to ride the Blightrail for free, dumping them at the end of the line, the intersection of Gangbanger’s Way and Conduit of Blight, and providing a 24-hour meth clinic for their convenience. We have a homeless camp right next to a middle-school playground. Over the neighbors’ vociferous objections, they allowed a hugely profitable fundamentalist television church to buy a private home in the ’hood, pave over the yard, convert the property to a “church,” and use it to dispense free food handouts to the bums. This, when the City specifically requests churches not to give out food to the homeless, because government and charitable agencies already do so and also provide needed social services.

Blocking the wandering drug addicts from sleeping in the alleys and using the alleys as their toilets will not make the drug addicts go away. It will not provide shelter for the homeless. It will not provide effective drug treatment or healthcare for them. It will not provide jobs for them. It will just keep them out from behind the yards of our more affluent neighbors.

When the bums can’t get into the alleys, where will they go?

Well, I’ll tellya where they’ll go. I know from experience, because I spent 15 years in the historic Encanto District, where the homeless drug-addict presence makes ours look, by comparison, as nothing.

Into the locals’ front yards. That’s where they’ll go. Into the side yards. Into any car that is not parked inside a locked garage. Into any garage or workshed that is not locked.

Our house had a flange wall that extended from the front elevation, spanning the distance from the east side of the house to the lot line. From the street, this wall looked like part of the structure’s living space. It had a solid wood-plank door that fit into its arched opening, just like the house’s solid wood-plank front door. Being young and careless (not to say “dumb as posts”), we never locked this door. We could have installed a padlock on the back side of the thing, but that would have involved having to hire a craftsman to do it, which would have entailed not only installing hardware on a door that wasn’t intended for such a thing, but also installing said hardware on a solid masonry wall, unlike any wall that has ever been built in the 21st century.

So not being the brightest rhinestones on the cowboy vest, we just let it be.

The bums found it. They quietly slipped in, closed the door behind them, and made themselves to home. A couple of transients set up camp in our side yard. How long they resided there, I do not know. They were quiet, and besides, our television was on the other side of the house, and so we never heard them moving around out there. It wasn’t until I went out there to do some damnfool thing — probably clean up weeds — that I discovered their gear. They apparently had been there for awhile.

One our neighbors bounced out to her car early one morning, jumped in, turned on the ignition, and started to back out of the driveway on her way to work. That was when she noticed the guy sleeping in the back seat.

He was really pissed at her husband for waking him up and demanding that he get out of the car.

If our son and our neighbor’s son were to play outdoors at all, either I or our neighbor’s full-time housekeeper had to stand there and watch them every minute that they were outside. It was unsafe to let them play outdoors at all, especially in our front yards.

One of our neighbors was making cookies for her family while they watched the television one evening. She would put a pan of cookies into the oven, trot out to the family room and watch the TV for 10 or 15 minutes, and then when that batch was done would walk back into the kitchen and put in a new batch. (In those old houses, kitchens were separate rooms, not an extension of a secondary living-room.)

Some guy was watching her from the alley and noticed that she was going in and out with some regularity. He also noticed she’d set her purse on the kitchen counter. So while she was in with her family watching the boob tube, he crossed the back yard, came on into the kitchen, grabbed her purse, and strolled off with it.

Got that? You could not leave a door unlocked even if five people were in the house and moving around! The cops found her purse in a garbage can, but they never did find her cash or her credit cards.

That was Encanto. It’s not that bad here. Yet. I will admit, the child molester who vaulted the family’s back wall and had a little fun with their two small girls was a bit…heh…beyond the pale. But at this point that is still an extraordinary event, not something that happens on a routine basis. In Encanto, this kind of shit happened once or twice a week. It was a constant thing.

We had alleys, too. We had cozy oleander hedges lining those alleys. And we had lots of drug addicts, alcoholics (remember those?), and neglected mentally ill sleeping in them. But we also had them sleeping in our front yards, our side yards, and our vehicles. And I figure that’s what we’ll get when we lock the bums out of our alleys.

Same for the coyotes. See that pipe-like thing at the top of the gate? That’s a coyote barrier: it spins when the animal tries to climb over it.

The coyotes, which are madly being evicted from the horse properties now being converted into farms of ticky-tacky McMansionettes, den in the alleys. If they can’t get into the alleys, they will nest in the hedges and decorative brush in people’s front yards.

How obvious is this?

For city slickers, not very. Evidently.

The hilarious thing is, the flatland touristers who have invaded these parts live in as much terror of coyotes as they do of bums. They are stupidly, brainlessly afraid of coyotes! Which is about as inane as it gets. Tell them that a coyote will not eat your child. They don’t believe you. Suggest to them that if they don’t want their damn stray cat to get eaten, they should keep it inside: they don’t believe you. Plus of course they think they have a God-given right to let their damn cat run loose. Tell them that they shouldn’t leave their dog out in the backyard alone all the time anyway, and they get miffed. Letting their dog howl at the moon, the sun, and every passing sparrow is another of their God-given rights. Point out that the coyotes kill roof rats, moles, and gophers, and they just look at you blankly.

So…you get the picture of why they haven’t thought about whatever unintended consequences might devolve from this project.

Then we have the fact that at the outset the city is going to install these gates only in Lower and Upper Richistan. This, of course, is not just because the squeaky wheel gets the grease but that the palms that have the grease know which other palms to grease…

The Richistans are just to the east of the ’hood, where the Funny Farm resides. The ’hood forms a transitional zone between Lower Richistan and Conduit of Blight Boulevard. Lower Richistan itself is a kind of transitional zone — between the very wealthy, old-money Old Phoenix Upper Richistan and us…folks.

Think about that. Yes.

What will happen when they shut off the alleys in the Richistans is that the bums will flow into our part of the neighborhood. Of course. This means we will get twice as many bums as we already have. Which is as many as we need, thankyouverymuch.

They plan to install gates in Sunnyslope, too, an adjacent low-rent area that has an even worse transient problem than we do. This, of course, is ridiculous: there, the bums are already breaking into vacant houses and commercial properties (of which there are a-plenty) and squatting there. Sunnyslope is overrun with transients, some of them true drug addicts and some just people who are down on their luck or mentally ill and unable to care for themselves.

The situation will not get better very soon. As we speak, there’s a five-year wait for Section 8 housing in Phoenix. So you understand: we have a lot of poor people sleeping on the streets. And Sunnyslope is one of several local epicenters for this phenomenon.

Locking the bums out of the alleys in Sunnyslope will push them down into our area. So our part of the ’hood will get those folks as well as the ones evicted from the Richistans.

When asked about this, a City spokesman said they were planning to do a “study” of the “metrics” resulting from this experiment. Right. Like they studied what would happen when they installed a lightrail boondoggle and let people get on without having to pay a fare. Right.

Glad I installed my own gate! This, you may recall, I had to put in after some of the locals decided the old garbage-can niche in the back wall made a great public loo. It works really well and adds an extra layer of security along the alleyway. Prowlers can’t reach the gate into the yard. And since it’s not easy to climb that swimming-pool gate, passing bums can’t walk up to the wall and peer into the yard.

It’ll be at least two years but more likely something like 6 or 8 years before the city gets around to installing gates over here. By then I’ll be 80 years old and probably won’t care much.

We Need a Party of Common Sense!

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Hmmm…interesting election results. It looks like Americans are just about evenly divided on political issues, doesn’t it? Apparently Trump et al. have succeeded in annoying some folks enough to turn against the Republicans, but it’s far from a serious majority.

What worries me (among many things…) is that these results and the original Trumpite victory are just not getting the message across to Democrats. We have two parties who think God (in whatever form She chooses to take) is on their side — each party thinks it has the moral high ground. And neither side seems to be registering that they need to rein in their most extreme impulses and drive in the middle lane. So…I don’t see things getting any better. All that will result from salting the House with Democrats is that nothing will get done in any direction.

To celebrate the possibility that now the Democrats are in control of the House, they could indeed do in the Orange-Haired One, is to crow in mistaken triumph. Yes, he’s a bad fellow. No, he should never have been allowed to set foot in the White House. But impeaching a President of the United States is not, never has been, and never will be a good thing. No matter how incompetent or crooked the man (or woman) may be, removing a sitting President will guarantee resentment, rage, and chaos.

Let’s imagine the House finds, grâce à Mr. Mueller’s excellent work, that Mr. Trump is the creep, crook, and tyrant some of us think he is. Let us go so far as to imagine they not only prove this amazing revelation, they use it to remove the man from office. Then what?

Then we end up with Mike Pence as President. The man who cannot trust himself to go to a business dinner at a restaurant without taking his wife along to act as chaperone.

In the meantime, the hateful rhetoric continues unabated. Faux Gnus is probably right: nothing much will get done from here on out. Meanwhile, The New Yorker rants ecstatically that the elections were a “rebuke” to Trump…gimme a break. Daily life is a rebuke to Trump…BFD. The man is still in power, he will continue so for at least two and quite probably six more years, and he and his Russian pals will have two to six more years in which to foment hate. The Democrats, imagining that they’ve triumphed, will continue on their own benighted way, enraging everyone who stands to the right of, say, Harry Truman. Whaddayabet they install Nancy Pelosi as speaker?

We need a third party: the Party of Common Sense. So far, it doesn’t look like we’re about to get one of those.

Doggy Update: Death Refuses to Have Her

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So Cassie the Beleaguered Corgi seemed better after mid-morning. She kinda sprang back. Along about 2:00 p.m., we had an appointment with a vet at the clinic where my son takes his dog. My, that was a refreshing drive: only took about 10 minutes to get there, as opposed to the 40-minute drive required to arrive in MarvelVet’s precincts.

I explained my questions and misgivings to this vet. She allowed as to how these were reasonable questions and thought that indeed there was some ambiguity in the various indications. All in all, though, she agreed with MarvelVet that what ails the dog is probably Valley fever.

However, on this check-up Cassie seemed significantly better. Whereas MarvelVet was alarmed because he could hear the congestion in her little chest, today no such sounds were audible. Her temperature was down to normal. Her cough has been better most of the day. She only wheezed once at the vet’s office.

She (vet) also said the fluconazole should have few bothersome side effects in dogs. She thinks Cassie has been dragging because of the ailment, not because of the cure. And she suggested testing her again in three or four weeks, by which time she suspects the titre will change from negative to positive.

Hm.

The incubation period for Valley fever is 7 to 28 days after exposure. If you believe this is a new infection, that would make sense: this summer we had several dust storms that blew into the hood. Because we’re in the rain shadow of the North Mountains, we do tend to be protected from so-called “haboobs,” a stupid sell-newspapers name for dust storms, but this year they were pretty fierce. So…yeah…maybe she picked this up over the summer.

But the truth is, if you live in Arizona’s low desert, you’re exposed just by virtue of living here. You can harbor the fungus for a long time without ever noticing. The if something happens to dent your immune system, voilà! You notice…  And 12 years of doggy age — some 70 years± of human years — most surely is enough to dent your immune system. WhatEVER,,,the likelihood of her having picked it up over the past decade or so is extremely high.

So this vet: she’s from Trinidad. I liked her a lot. She spent a lot of time examining the pooch and chatting with the human, and it was clear she really knew what she was talking about. Yeah: I was impressed.

She and her husband, an IT dude, are so revolted by the political situation in our country that they’re seriously thinking of moving back.

And therein lies the brain drain issue: they’re only two of the many young professionals I know who speak of leaving the country. Permanently. If we haven’t stupided down America enough, the present administration is busily delivering the coup de grâce: when all the bright young men and women leave, we’ll have only a few smart old people left to keep the nation on track. And once they’re gone? Bye-bye American Republic, hello Banana Republic.

But as for the dog? She seems much better right this minute. She drags in the morning, but by mid-day perks up. There’s hope that she may still have a year or three of the good life. Or maybe even…greatness…

 

Crabby as a cat…

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Grrrrrrrr! This is one of those can’t touch it without causing it to go T-W-A-A-A–N-G!-!-! days.

Mostly I’ve been too damn lazy to touch anything, thank God. Didn’t make it out for the wee-hours doggy-walk: sucked in to the hilariously lurid news reporting on our national politics. Sat glued to the digital screen until it was way too hot to take the dogs (or me) outside.

This: it’s just too good. Too, too, TOO good:

Uh huh… 😀 Our role model

Except really, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Not a chance!

And how lovely: if enough weren’t enough, my touchpad has stopped working. I’ll have to go get the mouse, put in new batteries, and find something that it can squirchle around on. Never. A. Fuckin’. Dull. Moment.

Naturally, that thing doesn’t work, either. So….I guess I’m without a computer just now.

Well…nooo…lookee here. Now the damn touchpad lash-up is working. Sort of. In a half-assed way. Better than not at all. I guess.

Oh, god!!!! I have SO had it!

After diddling the entire morning away, I decided I should shift around and get something done. How’s about I deposit this stack of checks from Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff?

It’s a task I tend to put off until the stack gets so high it can no longer be ignored. I hate depositing checks electronically. It is a ditzy hassle, every damn inch of the damn way.

So I ditz around and ditz around and ditz around: scan the checks, crop the checks, store the checks to disk as jpegs under distinctive filenames, make a record of each check and its amount and where it comes from so as to be able to explain to WonderAccountant what on earth those random cryptic figures represent and then upload the front of each check and upload the back of each check and print out the receipt and staple each check to its receipt and file it away in a CE Desk file folder and what a gigantic fuckin PITA!!!!!!!!!

Almost as much of a PITA as driving through the wackshit traffic to the credit union, halfway to San Diego, and depositing them in person.

Today I got the best of both fucking experiences.

When I uploaded the first check to the credit union’s site, I got back a message reminding me that it’s a crime to deposit the same check twice, and no, they would not accept any more checks from me.

WTF?

No, it was NOT a duplicate check! The thing had been sitting on my desk for the past two weeks, waiting for the whole pile to accrue. If I’d already deposited it…well, cf “print out the receipt and staple etc. etc. et-endless-cetera”!

Furious, I now gathered the mound of checks and set out through the murderous heat, humidity, and traffic for the credit union. There, hearing this story, the teller remarked, “Oh, yeah. That happens…sometimes it thinks checks are duplicates.”

Oh, thank you so much. I just LOVE having my time wasted and my patience tried!

So, after this, to cut down on the aggravation factor I guess I’ll just have to drive all incoming paper checks up to the credit union in person. What a fuckin’ waste of gasoline and time!! About the best I can do to ameliorate that is plan to coordinate with Costco trips, and do my Costco shopping in the store up on the I-17, which is not my least favorite outlet, but still is far from my favorite.

Pisseth me off.

But I was already crabby, for reasons that are unclear. The weather, I expect. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s allergenic as hell. My ears are plugged like drums, I can’t sing without choking on gook in my throat, and believe me, nothing constructive is getting done.

About all I’m good for is watching our Honored Leader twist in the breeze.

Speaking of the which, it looks like a helluva storm is blowing in…here as it is blowing into Washington. Towering clouds all around, closing in from every direction.

I give up. I’m going to take a nap.

Report from Damage Control Central

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A week from Digital Hell has left the Fat Lady barely treading water. God, but I do hate computerized time sucks. The background noise from Washington doesn’t help…

Two half-days — i.e., a total of a full eight-hour day — have been consumed on the phone with Apple techs. Can’t complain too much about that: it’s mighty nice that Apple has techs and allows them to spend uncounted numbers of hours helping customers to fix this, that, and the other snafu. I’ve lost track of the details — makes my head hurt to think too hard about this stuff. But the upshot was that after one of the techs decided that nothing would do but what we must re-install the Sierra OS on the MacBook (even though I told him that would cause a huge fuck-up), we got…yes, a huge fuck-up.

The current surviving upshot of that is that though the MacBook can read and store to DropBox, the iMac no longer connects to DropBox. When I inquired of DB techs how that might be fixed, I got a pages-long email filled with arcane instructions, not the first word of which do I understand. Truly: whatever it is they have in mind that I’m gonna do…I have NO idea.

So now I’m paying a hefty fee for DropBox’s storage and can access it only with one computer. The thing is, the iMac has an external hard drive permanently installed, to which Apple’s nifty Time Machine constantly backs up data. So that means the iMac should keep an up-to-date back-up of DropBox.

Except…now it’s not. Because it can’t “see” DropBox anymore.

So to keep that backed up, I have to schlep the Macbook into the back office and hook it up to an external drive and manually run Time Machine. This doesn’t take long, but it’s an effin’ PITA and I don’t think I should have to do that when it was working fine before.

Meanwhile, however, WordPress is about to pull the Number of All Numbers on its users. The WP that we know and love — and that operates all our blogs — is about to be dumped in the trash, to be replaced with a radically new system called Gutenberg.

This, obviously is going to represent a gigantic new learning curve.

Those of us who are sick of the brain clutter occasioned by the glories of computer technology do not welcome said development. And those of us who have had experience with earlier seismic upheavals know what to expect: If entire sites don’t crash (which they probably will), at best data will be lost. Probably lots of data.

Funny about Money has been online since 20 and ought-7. And y’know, I don’t really want to lose all that history.

Sure, I know: the nature of the Web is ephemeral. But damn it all! Writing this stuff and tracking down images and doing the research for some of the more solid pieces is work. Why should some tribe of computer jocks take it upon themselves to steal my work so that they can amuse themselves with fun new code?

By way of preserving the stuff for posterity, such as it is, I decided I would back up FaM not through BackupBuddy (whose product I suspect will be unintelligible once the program that generated the content goes away) but by copying it to Word and then, at my leisure, formatting it for print. And eventually printing it out and stashing it in a closet, where one day after I croak over my kid will find it and can, if he so pleases, feed it into his backyard firepit.

At least I will’ve tried…

This sounds like a much bigger job than it is. In fact, it only takes about a half-hour to copy out a year’s worth of blog content. But since we’re talking 11 years, that’s still ample time suck, thankyouverymuch. But at this point I only have one year’s worth of posts left to dump into Wyrd files. This at least will keep what content is left in a form that can’t be magically “disappeared” by the upcoming change.

And when I say “what content is left,” I kid you not. At one point along the line, either WordPress or Big Scoots, my current web host, unilaterally decided to delete all the images in SIX YEARS’ worth of posts! Yes. Without asking my permission, without so much as telling me. So everything predating the first quarter of 2013 is absent most of the images I inserted. Isn’t that super?

At any rate, at least the copy is still there.

Apple’s substitution of iPhoto with the irritating and practically useless Photos program effectively ditched images that were made before the current operating system superseded the far more user-friendly OS of yore. They may not have been erased, but they’re hidden in the system so deep I’ll be damned if I can find them. So even if I wanted to take the time to track down the deleted WordPress images and use them to decorate the rescued posts, it would be a daunting and probably impossible task.

One of the things I did learn to do, thanks to that fiasco, was to save images that go into current blog posts separately from Photos, but copying them to a folder on…yeah…DropBox.

How can I do without these hassles? Let me count the ways…

All of this has interfered with my usual routine little hobby activities. Thank God there’s no paying work in-house!!! Didn’t get this week’s installment of Ella’s story written until the last minute. Whatever went online this week was not proofread and frankly I have no idea whether it makes any sense. I have not uploaded today’s installment of “Asked,” either, not because it isn’t there but because I’m effin’ All Computered Out.

{sigh}

Meanwhile, the Circus in the White House has gotten pretty entertaining, hasn’t it? The sleaze has been outed. Now…will our honored elected representatives get off their collective duff and do their job?

Really: even if Trump is indicted and/or impeached, that might be worse than what we’ve got. We then would end up with Pence as President. And Mr. Pence is, unlike our present Great Leader, decidedly not a clownish dunce. Mr. Pence is an accomplished politician who knows how to get things done. Unfortunately, he also is a doctrinaire fanatic, and so the things he’d like to get done are not necessarily things that are good for the rest of us.

This, I suppose, is the way the world ends…

There could be hope, though…check it out:

Let’s Say Something Personal-Financey

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Over the years, Funny about Money has wandered away from its original subject: at the outset and for the first half or more of its lifetime, it was a personal-finance blog. A good 98 percent of what I wrote about had to do with money.

But there are only so many ways you can say “get a decent education; get a job; get out of debt and stay out of debt; live frugally; build retirement savings; invest savings; build an emergency fund; live on a budget.” After you’ve said those a million times, you tire.

Okay, admittedly: the story about saving money by washing your clothes without laundry detergent — that one was pretty good. Actually got me in the national media. And the one about using olive oil to condition your hair: all-time favorite, got a zillion views before anyone ever heard of “social media.” But still…. How many wacksh!t penny-pinching ideas can one person come up with? 😀

So Funny has evolved away from “personal finance” toward plain old “personal.” It has become a kind of online journal, a five-finger exercise to start a writing or editing day.

Yesterday as I began downloading posts by way of back-up — don’tcha just know this new “Gutenberg” thing WordPress is about to foist on us will erase a LOT of archived content! — this fact floated into consciousness: really, I should write more about money matters.

These days money seems to me much tangled in politics. Unless you’re describing ways to mix up home-made laundry detergent, you cannot talk about money without some political inflection. And given the political place our country has taken itself, that is a tedious subject.

Interestingly, The Economist’s columnist “Bagehot” holds forth this week about the glum mood of Britons. In doing so, he exactly describes the political and economic mood in the U.S. “It is hard to look at British politics these days without worrying that this is a country in decline…. Today Britain is a shadow of its former self: inward-looking and anxiety-ridden, stagnant and expensive, split down the middle and fearful of the future…. Productivity growth has been nugatory. Real wages have been falling for a decade. A growing population is trapped in a cut-throat gig economy. The next generation fears that it will be worse off than the baby-boomers.”

Where have we seen that of late?

Bagehot speculates that “Most of Britain’s problems are internally generated….” But I would suggest that what he describes reflects an international dysphoria. It’s not just the Brits who sense that we’re cruising toward Hell on a skateboard. This fear — these falling wages, these “side gigs” that are no longer opportunistic schemes to supplement our salaries but now form many citizens’ only source of income, these obscene medical and health insurance bills, this junk merchandise imported from countries where workers earn 90 cents a day, that college tuition that straps a graduate to an entire lifetime of debt, this sense that our children and their children will never live as well as we have, this spreading drug addiction, these people sleeping on the sidewalks and begging on the street corners, this prison population that is the largest in the world — this fear has brought us the likes of Donald Trump.

And, IMHO, it — this fear — leads us to miss the point.

The problem is that money is politics and politics is money. He who has enough billions of dollars, as we saw in 2016, can afford to buy a presidency. And who has those billions of dollars?

Big, big business. Megacorporations.

Those megacorporations have been quietly taking over the running not only of our country but of every country in the so-called “developed” world for at least a generation. When you have companies that can observe your every move (did you know that Google tracks you everywhere you carry your smartphone?) and record your every word and block you from public forums if you say things the company decides it doesn’t like and manipulate your choices of everything from the food on your plate to the reading material on your tablet, what you have is a kind of shadow government.

That shadow government has nothing to do with the truths we hold to be self-evident. It has everything to do with maximizing profit and with controlling the sheeple who pay into the profit. It is, IMHO, one of the reasons we have seen our public schools dumbed down into the sub-basement: when young adults know nothing of history and civics and literature and jurisprudence and ethics, they can easily be tricked into voting for interests that actively operate against their welfare.

So…we Yanks suffer from financial and political angst, same as the Brits do? You bet.

Financial angst and political angst are manifestations of a shared loss of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Shadow government is actively taking over representative government. Angst, indeed. When we get government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, the man and woman in the street lose financially. Shadow government is not good for your pocketbook.

When private corporations own your country — and, for that matter, the world — you do not tell them what to do. They tell you what to do. They control you through your pocketbook, and they control you through the products and services they allow you to access. They choke off representation of the people — unions are crushed, monopoly replaces competition, education is degraded, productive leadership is replaced with circuses, class differences are aggravated, schism is fostered, hatred and hostility replace discourse.

These are not accidents, my friends.

Mark my words: Money is politics; politics money.