The International Writers Magazine: Reality Check + Readers Responses

All Hail the Supper Committee • James Campion The Super Committee is in control. By now you know their names; if not, look them up -- six Republicans and six Democrats -- half of which represent the House and the other half, the Senate.

They are lawmakers, members of the United States congress. They have been tasked with pulling together what amounts to four years of wrangling over a federal budget. The democrats kicked it over to the Republicans, who then kicked it to...The Super Committee!
    The first of its kind; it is indeed a committee. And the super part? Well, that just puts the pressure on.
    Cost cutting. Revenue increasing. Debt reducing. Job creating.
    If the chosen few fail to cut at least $1.5 trillion from the current cost to run the business of government over a ten-year period by 11/23, then it triggers a draconian scourge upon both houses; slashing of entitlements, slicing of the military industrial complex. The bloat and gluttony of our federal system eviscerated.
    The Super Committee is in control.
    So why don't we hear more about this?
    Where is the public debate, so prevalent in the highly charged show biz flail-about congress staged during the fabricated Debt Ceiling Crisis? Where is the name calling, demagoguery, the desperate pleas to save our children and honor our forefathers? Where are the attack ads and lobbying fisticuffs? Threats? Grandstanding? Bitching like whining rat-faced jack-offs? Where is the politics? Oh, lord, the politics!
    This is it, folks. The big decision, the down-and-dirty face-the-facts, pay-the-piper, adults-in-the-room hard choices we've been promised. Ingenuity. Compromise. Steadfast determination to transform, manipulate, rescue our great nation from itself.
    The Super Committee is in control.
    Yet, on a daily bases we hear one dumb ass comment after the other from Herman Cain, a dim-witted pizza salesman lifted to the brink of Everyman Savior by the spectacularly naive; a private sector hero, the straight talkin' charmer, who ain't no politician, bub! Shit, Cain may make for great sound bites and appears fairly more serious, if not half as idiotic, as Donald Trump, but has as much chance of becoming president of the United States as the now seven or eight women who claim he treated them like speakeasy cocktail waitresses.
    Trust me; Herman Cain has no power, no fucking power to affect a scintilla of your life. The Super Committee, however, does.
    In fact, the guy who is actually president is not even in the country as I write this.
    That last sentence may be considered by some to be perspective. In Washington, they call it Tuesday.
    May this be a warning to those who yammer on incoherently about how the president and his "policies" and influence, whether it's this guy or the last guy, have a glint of the authority that rests in our legislative branch. It holds all the cards, bubba, and it makes the rules. Only Lincoln and maybe the half-mad Andrew Jackson before him ignored the might of the U.S. congress. Reagan was smart, he goosed around with congress. This is how the Gipper got things done, until the Iran-Contra gambit. Kind of left congress out of that wild ride, but soon he wised up, just in time to avoid impeachment. Nixon didn't care. He was gone in 14 months. Bill Clinton wagged his finger and became only the second president handed a writ of impeachment from congress.
    There have been a lot of head honchos over at the executive branch turned away with hat in hand. Pretty much all of them at one point or another. Large mouths and dead weight in the shadow of the Capitol Rotunda.
    Make no mistake; congress is the big daddy of this fancy republic. There was a Continental Congress long before its glorious body begged George Washington to figure-head all the hoopla. Those guys walked the long walk and have the statues to prove it. And they made sure that only the American people are more powerful than congress; they can send them packing and bring in a new crowd. The president? Ha! Even the Big Time ones like FDR had to play nice. Congress makes war. Congress makes law. Congress sets economic and social structures. Amendments? You got it; congress. And now, gulp! Congress has itself a Super Committee!
    Holy shit,
    The Super Committee is in control.
    Ask Newt Gingrich about the hefty weight of congress. He was Speak of the House once. He had a gavel and a Contract with America and he scared the living shit out of the president of the United States. After 1994, you would have thought Bill Clinton, thanks to a bleating soulless toad like Dick Morris, who was always for sale back in the 90's and now finds the time and the gall to write books about ideological integrity, was the second coming of Calvin Coolidge. Now Gingrich is running for president and can't get anyone who doesn't hate Mitt Romney to validate his parking.
    Ask Nancy Pelosi. She ran amok on Barack Obama's good name and outrageous poll numbers; slap-dashing pork and earmarks all over the big-deal American Recovery Act, until no one had a clue what the hell it was recovering and for what America. And then there is the National Health Care fiasco, which was lock-stock-and-barreled into law with about a third, if that, of what the president had campaigned on, proposed, and backed.
    Let me ask you this; you think all that neo-con bullshit the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal was whipping up would have gotten out of the dock if it weren't for congress handing them a blank check? Ask Hillary Clinton. That vote only cost her the presidency.
    And this congress?
    The 112th edition is a hell gate. Nothing that gets in has a hoot in Hades of getting out with a shred of decency left on it. These fuckers screwed the first responders of 9/11, booted veterans and held up the very integrity of the nation's credit on a whim. Only the most untouchable government body would roll up a massive bill and then force itself not to pay it on principle.
    As I write this, there is a report coming from Capitol Hill that frozen pizza is now legally considered a vegetable.
    Next up; whiskey is a vitamin.
    It is an insane asylum up there, and now they have erected some kind of interminable power vacuum that even trumps an already Napoleonic sense of command.
    The Super Committee is in control.
    Sort of.
    When the committee is done being super, whatever comes out of it will have to get through the very congress that stumble-bummed the damn thing into Super Committee in the first place, where it most assuredly will be masticated and spat out in a mutated gob of legalize.
    But that doesn't matter to congress. Even in failure there is the obligatory do-over, as already there are voices suggesting, nay, demanding that there will be no triggered draconian cut-a-thon. They'll just whip up a bill, pass it into law, and presto-change-o, we're back in business.
    But, hey; it never gets a chance without the Super Committee.
    The Super Committee is in control.

© James Campion November 18th 2011
realitycheck@jamescampion.com
http://www.jamescampion.com

READERS RESPONSES Nov 30th 2011

James,

You have it rather correct here. (AMERICAN YOUTH - MOVEMENT, FAD OR VOICE? 10/26/11) In fact, if this Occupy thing has no effect on motivating and activating kids then nothing will. Let's face it, in the 80's everyone was wrapped up in getting theirs. We had a nation full of Tony Montana Wannabee's who believed like Tony Montana that "The World Is Yours". Those folks are hard to mobilize against wealth and privilege when the people the left are trying to attract are hard at work amassing wealth and privilege. Then came the 90's and with jobs a-plenty and a stock market with no apparent ceiling to invest in, these kids were also trying to amass their fortune. Move into the 21st century and with low unemployment and easy home ownership, folks were once again trying to get theirs. These are hard people to convince that their friends and golfing buddies are all evil, greedy capitalists when they are doing the same thing.
    Jump to 2011, unemployment is 9.2% and those jobs have dried up leaving kids with all sorts of time on their hands and now the cries of evil, greedy capitalist can actually grab traction with the disaffected and easily gullible looking for a scapegoat. The kids who would in any other period in our history be hard at work trying to amass their own wealth and privilege are now collecting 99 weeks of unemployment and watching someone else making their fortune and they are pissed. They now have the time and motivation to pitch camp in a park and take a dump on a cop car in the name of equality and fairness. The time is now for the left to destroy capitalism. If they fail here, it is done for them.

Bill Roberts

I've got news for the OWS and Tea Party crowds. You are not the 99%. The true 99% are too busy trying to work, clean house, pay bills, and get their kids to school, to camp out in a park in NYC, or attend a debate, or to organize ourselves. The truth is that the real 99% all want basically the same thing. Good schools for their kids, good roads, a decent wage, and a chance at retiring some day to whatever makes us happy. We feel that there should be a safety net for us if something goes awry, but our work ethic says that it should be a temporary net, not a life-long hammock. We don't want the environment ruined, but we recognize that our consumerism requires compromise. Unfortunately, we're too busy to engage properly in the political discussions that affect us the most, so we swallow sound bytes, and believe as we are told that there are fundamental differences between us that cannot be overcome. Republicans, Democrats, whites, blacks, Christians, Muslims, pick your demographic pair. The differences are not as dire as we are led to believe, but they are cultivated to maintain the stagnancy of the system, and the hierarchy of its leadership. Imagine if we voted as a block, one that stood for common sense, compassion with limits, and fiscal responsibility; a wonderful dream to work towards. Unfortunately, I have to let the dog out and get to bed, I have work tomorrow...

KS Green

None of your advice is going to matter to the Occupy Youth when they have completely NO understanding of the difference between Capitalism (Open a store, if no one wants what you're selling, close your store) and Crony Capitalism or "Crapitalism" as John Stossel calls it (Open a store, if no one wants what you're selling but it fits nicely into The Government's paternalistic agenda du jour, your store gets propped up with taxpayer money until it's no longer politically expedient or you go bankrupt, your store goes the way of the hula hoop along with untold millions of our tax dollars). Until they understand that distinction and that they really should be "occupying" 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., they're just a bunch of mindless puppets whipped into an eat-the-rich froth by Obama/Biden Inc. And you can thank that bastion of the left, our wonderful education system, for churning out such incoherent dumbasses.

Ken Eustace

Mr. Campion:

I agree that petitions and lobbying mean much more than protests and parades. However, in this instance the Occupy Wall Streeters have changed the conversation. The newsies and talking heads and to some lesser extent the legislators have started talking more about joblessness than about the national debt.  Protests can bring about real change by raising public awareness.  Dr Martin Luther King Jr. would probably agree with me on this.

J. Young

I am ready to march in rural Western North Carolina, as I cannot afford to go to NYC. Even thought I am okay financially (so far anyway) the majority of those I know and care about here are so far underwater that they are focused on having food and heat this winter. These people were office managers, carpenters, builders, contractors, artists, store owners, teachers...you know, "regular folks".
    Who'll join me? It's not like most of us have anything else to do right now...lol

Madeleine Watt

What is the average AGE readership of your stuff old man?
    I LIKE THE MESSAGE. Not sure if any jobless 22 year-old is listening.
What I want to say is .... take the job that is "beneath you", pay some taxes,  then complain...and I will listen.

Tom Carlson

Hey James - What happens when the Anarchists decide to join the Party?

jbb

The root reason for the "Occupy er's" and the "99% er's". Gaze upon it if you dare. Maybe this will help make the danger of Fiat money clear. Imagine you and me are sitting across from each other. We create enough money to represent all of the world's wealth. Each one of us has one SUPER Dollar in front of him. You own half of everything and so do I. I'm the government though. I get bribed into creating a Central Bank. You're not doing what I want you to be doing, so I print up myself eight more SUPER Dollars to manipulate you with. All of a sudden your SUPER Dollar only represents one tenth of the wealth of the world! That isn't the only thing though. You need to get busy and get to work because YOU'VE BEEN STIFFED with the bill for the money I PRINTED UP to get YOU TO DO what I WANTED. That to me represents what has been happening to the economy, and us, and why so many of our occupations just can't keep up with the fake money presses.

StokeyBob

James - the cause and solution to the world's problems can only be found in the individual human heart. Not in legislation, not in protesting, not in using the system to your own advantage.  I've said this before: when we individuals transform greed, anger and foolishness within our own hearts and lives first, without laying blame elsewhere, we will ultimately realize the kind of harmony, peace and quality of life envisioned by people around the world, both personally and as a society at large.  All it takes is one person, one by one, doing his or her human revolution.

Elizabeth Vengen Esq.
                                                               
Penn State - Institution Defeats Humanity Again
James Campion
Big Time College Sport is a cesspool, and Big Time College Football is its bilge pump.

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