It may be wise and worthwhile now to consider the political system that is enabling our problems today as a traveling crap game rigged and placed on a table on nearly every street corner in America, with a shell game, or three card monte or ponzi or pyramid scheme underway at all hours of the day.  Of course the authorities are bribed to look the other way and the lesser players, the shills and touts and pick pockets and petty thieves are all gathered around the suckers and the gullible, the small investors, innocent bystanders and unsuspecting marks gathered attendant to the scam like vultures around a dying man.  Naturally all of these hangers on receive their cuts but the real money goes to the sharks who run the game.
     There are three great malignancies in our society today that infect everything they touch - Big Oil, Wall Street and the "Public" servants who have abdicated their responsibilities to work exclusively for these first two interests as house slaves against the interests of the rest of us like foreign spies in the People's House.  OPEC based Big Oil and the big money bankers on Wall Street have tentacles in our society that reach everywhere from the energy that makes us go to our paychecks and the mortgages on our homes.  They affect and profit from everything we do.  They and all their subsidiaries are layered, stacked, interconnected, and wired through our economy like a double helix corrupting and milking for money everyone they touch. They've put a boa like hug and constriction on the middle class, and are caked and baked around their compliant standard bearers in Washington the way an eclair closes around a rich creamy filling. These three great ills that beset us are doing their best with their worst to destroy our prosperity and make certain the American Century just departed never has a chance to replicate in the new century just arrived.

  Briefly, the Three Shells operate as follows:
    The oil industry enacts a virtual stamp tax, an OPEC set surcharge on nearly every aspect of public and private life and yet congress unctuously grants them extraordinary regulatory latitude and enormous tax breaks worth hundred of billions of dollars and blocks anything that might limit oil's stranglehold around our economy's neck.
    As for Wall Street, you know something is seriously wrong with our financial system when the middle men are earning more money than the principles of any deal they participate in.  Banks were never meant to be a money sponge, yet have now insinuated themselves in everything and take a cut out of every dime lost or spent and now account for 41% of annual corporate profits.   That's like having a leak in the pipeline that cheats both sides in favor of  the energy poacher in between.
    Our political hacks, though we pay them well to do our business, spend most of their time trolling for dollars on their own, cheating us of their time, while accumulating countless chits that often work directly contrary to the duties for which we are paying them.  They evince none of the best tendencies of democracy or capitalism while performing as nearly perfect personifications of the worst. 
    Of course there are other power centers in the country as well but they are largely subsidiary.  Take the military-industrial complex.  This is the perfect nexus of the three shells, where the three entities come together for mutual fun and massive profit.  That's why a war like the most recent one in Iraq can acquire unbelievable momentum behind it even though there was no coherent reason to fight it.
     Now most people only lie defensively, when they regrettably lie at all, to protect some fault or failure they wish not to own up to.  Crooks lie proactive.  They are always lying, before and after, in advance of their scams and especially after them to deflect attention from themselves, preferably onto someone or something else who they blame for the problems they create. If you fail to realize they cheated you the first time they can cheat you over and over again like a scorpion sting.
     Our politicians are not only enablers but lookouts for the sting, using a myriad of devices to disguise their intentions while achieving their goals.  The result is that through tax code manipulation, give aways to the unneedy, and shameful, bribe-ridden, unnecessary deregulation, they have ensured that all the needed excess capital, all the profit, the cream, in the economy necessary to innovation, infrastructure revamping, small business start-ups and the simple well-being of its citizens can't be used for these things.  This is because, to put it crudely - if you regard your office as a position of barter and trade, as a means of personal enrichment and power rather than one of public service, then why not sell your soul whole to the highest bidders?  In a government and political system that is increasingly corrupted with money this has proven to be as much a winning political formula as an financially enriching one.  By the time their constituencies catch on to their highjinks and vote them out, they merely move across town and work the other side of the street as lobbyists or executives for the companies they once were in charge of (de)regulating.  Neat. Permanent employment.  No wonder they are willing to pay millions for jobs that pay thousands.
     But they could never do this without the backing of the Shell Game which disguises their insidious intentions from public view.  Therefore it is solely in defense of this unjustifiable, artificial pyramid scheme superimposed on our democracy and its once-free market economy, that these politicians and their handlers go to extraordinary and even ludicrous lengths to shield.   To them the rest, this governance business, is just window dressing, their salaries are mere antes, the pot is filled to the overflowing by campaign graft. To protect these foul purposes conservative politicians in the pockets of these twin peaks of evil will go to any length - fight unnecessary wars, pollute the planet, corrupt and cripple the good offices of government, shut down the government, rig elections and destroy the economy.  To achieve their nefarious ends they regularly employ a wide array of lies, bogus theories, misdirections, propaganda and shell games. They will even brazenly enlist disingenuous moral issues for this army of immoral purposes; family values, prayer, the Bible, a person's sexual orientation, race and religious beliefs, etc, as cover and bludgeon for their corrupt practices the way a cheap hooker uses jewelry and perfume to enhance their allure.  
     But rest assured, these most serious issues are just ornamental, as perhaps even those who believe in them have finally come to realize, entirely negotiable and unselfconsciously abandoned when necessary.  For when push comes to shove, only for tax cuts and giveaways to the very wealthiest among us, do these politicians reserve their heaviest artillery, government shut downs, both in 1994 and threatened recently, and endless filibusters and obstructionistic behavior, impeachments, red herrings, nihilism, duplicitous character assassination and even - like the slavery defenders before them - talk of states' rights and seccession.  Tax cuts and its near kin deregulation (needed or not) are the crown jewels of right wing theological excess and the crux of its power - and there are more than a few democratic straphangers on the gravy train as well. 
  
The Economically
Regressive Power
of Big Oil

     Let's examine a central thesis of the Shell Game to show how it's played.  Global warming denial is a core tenet of conservative philosophy today. To illustrate, if you or I should take license with the law and decide to throw our garbage over our back fence into our neighbor's yard to save ourselves the expense and trouble of proper disposal, see how long it takes for a citation to arrive, not of encomium but carrying a stiff fine.  But a theoretical exception exists where political influence and corruption are present.  What if your brother's the chief of police and your uncle the chief magistrate of your town?  Conceivably then you may be able to muscle your way through these legal niceties and make your neighbors do all your clean up for you. 
     Now imagine you are a giant, mindlessly large corporation (remember, according to the conservatives on the Supreme Court, legally they are people just like you and me) and throw your garbage into the atmosphere, pump it into the ground water or dispose of it in the ocean - which also, just as with real people, no small business could ever get away with without the full weight of the law descending upon them - into thousands and even millions of people's yards, contaminating drinking water and atmosphere. Of course you will currently be exempted from serious penalty.  We're told you are just too darn too wealthy to be able to afford proper waste disposal, even though you may be recording record profits and are even profiting from the waste you spew, we who suffer it must not only endure it's sickening, weather bending effects but your garbage up for you later. Sweet, because though according to the Court you are just people like me, in actuality you are far too powerful to regulate much less punish.  You are way too large to be held accountable to the rules the rest of us actual human people must adhere to every day under penalty of law.  
     But some ask prickly questions like: If you as a gigantic multinational corporation are given the same rights as private citizens why aren't you subjected to our responsibilities as well?  No person, that I know of, though god knows we may yet discover a few, are too big to be allowed to fail.  Meanwhile, these weird corporate/people persons, like pod people or the living dead, as infamous authors of all the pollution and waste, move to gated communities far away from the pollution they create and impose on the rest of us.
     It's a neat trick, the first part of the Shell Game.  The profit they make from the pollution, they use to move as far away from the effects of the health and environmental damage the pollution they create causes as they can; thereby using their affluence to avoid the effects of their own effluence.  Good for them, they have learned the old dog's adage to "not dirty their own cages".  They merely dirty everyone else's.  They can get away with this due to the second part of the Great Shell Game.  Using a tiny proportion of their wealth they control the political process and through their intermediaries ("our" representatives in Washington) prohibit and disable normal responsive governmental actions that would compel these dirty corporations to clean up their own messes or, better, upgrade and modernize their facilities to not pollute in the first place.  Clearly this last option would be the most cost effective and beneficial to everyone involved even, if they were smart enough to know it, the guilty corporations themselves.  But of course because of the corruption of our politicians cost effectiveness never occurs to them and the problems they sanction merely grow worse until they start to overwhelm us with their disastrous effects and become unmanageable and eventually - too big to fix.  Like the national debt and the banks.
     And of course environmentally we've seen all this before.  When in the sixties it was suddenly discovered - after some of our rivers actually caught on fire, a dead give away -  that many of our lakes and rivers were near mortally polluted it was the taxpayers who primarily had to pick up the tab for the clean up.  The culprits who actually profitted from the pollution, and generally the companies they ran as well, were long gone.  
     So take a wild guess.  Who do you expect to bear the brunt of the damage and pay the freight for any remedial efforts to reverse the ill effects of global warming visited upon us - if by then they will even be feasible - but the taxpayer?  Ironically the same ones who first bore the burden of the deleterious health and economic effects to begin with are charged with the cleanup as well. Funny how that works. It's like going to a seminar on how to protect yourselves from thieves given by the thieves themselves.  They immediately rob you.  Lesson one: don't go to seminars held by thieves.  This illustration also works with playing the stock market.
    Today's corrupt polluters, like their illustrious robber baron forbearers will be dead and buried in gilded tombs or at least living as fossils in Bermuda, by the time the harm they are causing has reached mighty enough proportions (perhaps when congressmen start catching on fire) for the bribe ridden congress to be shamed into massively expensive measures to rectify the crisis they could have easily averted with a little prevention.  And then they'll send us the bill for it.  Sound familiar?  This is Shell Game heaven on earth.

The New Galileos  

     Of course the polluters tied to Big Oil go to extraordinary lengths to buttress their divine right to pollute the world and profit from it.  They create junk think tanks and medical studies which spew forth pseudo scientific analysis and theory every bit as toxic as the particulate matter and carcinogens that billow from their smokestacks and pour from the drain pipes of the corporate polluters they have been hired handsomely to protect. It's a thin as paper smoke screen, of course, as the deniers are heavily outweighed by legions of legitimate scientists in far greater numbers whose analysis supports the reality of global warming.  Though actual scientists give their unvarnished and untainted opinions freely without necessity of additional, special emoluments by the very ones engaged in the polluting, the bought and paid for opinions are enough of a shell game sleight of mind to assuage those who don't want to know better.  
    These cerebral deceits are coordinated with even cruder attacks calibrated through talk TV and radio to propagandize the public. And even, astonishingly enough, with right leaning-wrong headed churches that  proselytize a reverse morality (the wealthy shall inherit the earth, the poor shall eat it, or words to that effect).  This somehow convinces those gullible enough to be easily propagandized and proselytized (unfortunately a generous minority of the population) to support the insupportable - unfettered, costless pollution by those powerful enough to subvert our system of government to get away with it, even when it works against their own interests.
     This is how the polluters of air and water become polluters of the airwaves and then of democracy itself.  They continue to spread their harm as in thought, word and deed their supporters support and propagate the bizarre and destructive theorem that science itself is not to be trusted, at least where it touches on their own sacred kine - chiefly climatology and anthropology, or global warming and creationism, respectively. But naturally such rampant and poisonous disrespect as this bleeds into other areas of science indiscriminately, discrediting innovation and education and forward thinking policies across a wide spectrum of national life from universities to journalism to government.  Professional economists and even the chairman of the Federal Reserve, are now under attack for refusing to support the inane and corrupt and failed policies certain politicians and their wealthy handlers have foist upon us for decades. Thus intelligence and education and even irrefutable facts are discredited as a sort of tyranny of ignorance takes hold of a subset of society.   
     This has led to stupefying, stifling stupidity of public discourse across the board and eventually elevated anarchists and idiots to positions of power in Washington which has provided even more cover for the crooks.  Amazingly, though these corrupt corporate-supported saboteurs eventually do harm to long term corporate profits, ignorant corporations continue to support them anyway, because their CEO's and Boards of Directors only know how to win one way, by cheating the system a week at a time and no position is ever too outlandish or destructive to avoid.  
    They are only able to work within a negatively posited structure. So instead of innovation and renewal, which they are incapable of, as these require real ingenuity, mental fiber and hard work, they continue to try to undercut the basis of innovation in society which allows them to compete only by leveling the field and limiting the advancement of others rather than trying to advance themselves. In a far more fundamental and profound way, this dumbing down of America decreases their (and our) ability to successfully compete with the rest of the world.  These corporations are like the dumb animal that chews off all its legs to free itself from the one foot that was actually caught in the trap, because the other three were easier to get at.
     After all if some scientists can't be trusted how can any scientists be trusted?  Aren't they all out of the same elitist educational pool system the political hacks they pay for contend are no good, though these are the same schools to which they send their kids?  If members of congress, for instance, pay no attention to "professionally trained economists"; and then decide to make a grandstand play and force the government to default on its debts and shut the government down, this chaos harms their owners.  By definition bought and paid for stupidity can't be relied on or always controlled.  Hiring such stooges is like keeping an untrained dog in your house, sooner or later it will mess your carpet and chew up the antique furnishings.  
     But, if they are right in decrying all this phony science and correct to despise universal health care coverage, shouldn't they take an even more highly principled plunge and reject their own bogus science based taxpayer funded health care and refer their medical care - all their tummy tucks, and brain and open heart surgeries - to the only ones in this country whose scientific opinions they profess to trust - preachers, lobbyists and radio and talk show hosts. These venerable polymaths profess to know everything (accept maybe math and, you know, all those other troublesome things found in books).  Yet somehow apparently, these simpletons and mouths serve as the true repositories of truth and scientific knowledge for a significant proportion of our society today.  Still some small voice of derisive laughter somewhere tells me that politicians might not be so cavalier and quickly  dismissive of the scientific method in general if they, while unsedated saw, say,  Rush Limbaugh coming at them with a scalpel in his hand for highly invasive surgery.
     And if these great propagandists and disinformation know so much about science and economics all of a sudden how come they know so little about everything else?    When was the last time Rush Limbaugh was ever actually correct about anything?  As I recall there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, banks can't be trusted to regulate themselves and Honolulu is not a foreign country.  And if other areas of science are so well respected how is it that only those touching on creation and weather went so far wrong?  Or if you still don't trust scientific integrity over the veracity of bought and paid politicians and mouthpieces, then why not let Rick Perry, a great closet scientist himself who sometimes thinks he is the new Galileo, certainly as good as any expert astrophysicist one would think, (some of whom by the way are actually rumored to believe in global warming), be put in charge of NASA's first manned mission to Mars?  How hard can it be?  After all you can almost see Houston from Austin, and can see Mars from Earth on a clear night, so why would putting a man on Mars be any harder than say, driving a golf ball from Houston to Tomball?

The Edselitis Economy

     So while our insanely corrupt politicians, I mean they are really slime dripping creatures, easily the worst in our history, argue about what planet Barack Obama may really have born on instead of pumping money into research and development and job creation so that we might actually be able to out compete our competitors; our insanely small minded and corrupt corporations and financial institutions pump money into bribes for politicians and for propagandizing the public so they may continue their regressive, non-competitive practices undisturbed.  These are losers on wheels.
     Speaking of which, wheels that is, a quite good example of how shamelessly perverse and corrupt these people (I mean corporations, particularly those aligned with large oil and big banks) are, even to their own destruction, was the great hew and cry sent up over congress mandating increased mileage standards for american automobiles.  Naturally, it's a shame that government would have to consider mandating this, since it's an obvious and necessary no-brainer that you might have hoped that the heads of our automotive companies might have even stumbled upon themselves.  No such luck, they were too lazy and stupid and corrupt to do something that sounded as difficult as building better cars.  Instead they were livid and outraged that anyone would dare dare them to excellence.  So they succeeded, if that's the word, as they and their indentured servants in congress backed them to the last empty tank of gas and rose up and defeated this infamous plot by some shadowy forces in this country trying to get them to do the right thing - those damn do-gooders - and actually build more competitive vehicles. But they won and so the next time the price of gas spiked (wow! who could have ever seen that coming?) American automakers lost another significant part of the auto market to overseas competitors and two of the corporations had to be bailed out by the taxpayers and the government they so loathe to avoid receivership.  Yipee, another great win for corporate America!  And these are the ones the Supreme Court thinks should have more control over our elections.
     Yet all these bogus taxpayer organizations and the corporate loving tea party, allegedly in the name of the taxpayers (though funded by Big Money which considers tax payers the enemy), support the same bribed pols who support the all the egregiously bad behavior and corrupt business practices that has made the corporate world infamous.  All of which works to the great obvious detriment of the taxpayers, workers and the general health and prosperity of the country.  And so in true Shell Game fashion the radical tea party types denounce the bailouts to banks and autos and hold culpable the adults who might have prevented the bailouts' necessity in favor of the politicians whose actions made them inevitable. Then they support the politicians  who want to unregulate these same corporate entities who just victimized them.  This is a little like supporting the designers of the collapsing bridge who are blaming the ones trying to repair it for the flaws in their own design which led to the collapse.  This is pure Shell Game gold!

The Debt Debt and the
Downsizing of America

     Supply side economics is the single greatest pillar of the Shell Game edifice and the greatest contributor to the inexcusable rise in the national debt. Those who are exclusively responsible for the debt are now loudest in bewailing the debt they created.  We literally owe them a great debt and, of course, that debt is debt itself.  After all, almost 80% of the aggregate debt in the entire history of the country has been accumulated in just three administrations - Presidents Reagan and the Two Bushes. That means that every republican in office over the last thirty years must have persistently voted for trillions of dollars of unforgivable, unnecessary, irretrievable, pointless and unsecured debt. 
     Yet in enviable Shell Game tradition, after having done so much to harm the nation already with their total malfeasance in office and having done so much to create our current deficit crisis, conservative leaders have suddenly reinvented themselves not just as born again deficit hawks but as pontificating born again deficit hawks.  The same ones then who engineered the ingrained shortfall in revenues which has made the increasing deficit burden as inevitable as it is inequitable, starving the nation and the government of its just revenues, now blame others and decry the very behavior in which they have been so long and injudiciously engaged as un-American.  And so it was.  And since they still insist on (and are willing to throw tantrums to achieve) the exact same policies which have put us in such a death grip of spiraling decline, so it still is.
     Yes, the wealth robbers are entirely unrepentant and so their pernicious scam simply continues forward on other levels.  Because now they say that overspending is the problem even though by one measure government spending is at its lowest ebb since, oh, the Eisenhower administration.  Off the top of your head what do you know of that still costs the same as it did in the 1950's, half a century ago?  It's a truly bizarre and belabored contention. But if you want to test this theory you're free to.  Why not start at your neighborhood car lot.  Take the money that would have brought you a shiny new cadillac in old Ike's day and see what kind of a run down, good for nothing old Rambler you can get with it today. OK, you probably need to start at the junk yard.  Actually if it's really being funded at 1950's levels it's astonishing that our government is running at all.  No Ramblers are. Or, for that matter try the same maneuver at your friendly gas station.  The money that would fill a tank then will barely get you around the block today.  If these criminal-minded politicians spent as much time trying to get oil companies and automakers to roll back their prices as they do coddling them and thereby encourage them to collude to raise prices as high as they want (it's a "free" market after all, isn't it?) even as they busied themselves incurring more government debt than any government in the history of the planet one might engender a touch more respect for them.
     Yet these politicians shamelessly and recklessly say that government can never have new revenues, ever again!  And some of these people say we should vote for them because of their great business acumen, though if they had really been that good at making money they probably wouldn't have put themselves up for sale and run for office to begin with.  For what business can run without revenues?  That is the essential point of business, isn't it?  What business can run solely on cutting itself, borrowing and downsizing?  Insolvency is all they know.  
    So this is what they emulate in office because this is the very way they think our economy should be treated, as a downsized worker.  Because many in the corporate world have in fact been earnestly busy downsizing our economy, closing plants, firing workers, cutting wages, destroying unions, attacking the middle class, stepping on the poor, outsourcing jobs and selling jobs and businesses to the lowest bidders overseas.  No wonder they think of themselves less as builders and creators than destroyers and dividers. They downsize corporations to diminish worker costs to the benefit of the front office the same way their minions in Washington are now downsizing benefits to the society at large in favor of the very richest at the top.  They are now truly Wall Street's children which has long since ceased being about an engine that creates new opportunities for wealth but more of a bulldozer only concerned about plundering the wealth already accumulated by others and cornering it for themselves, to the harm of everyone and the particular good of no one but bank and big money and the politicians in their pockets.
     Still like blind old men they mouth the old phony shibboleths and canards, playing on old prejudices to divide the country against itself (which only profits them) saying, inanely, that the poor and immigrants are to blame, siphoning money out of Washington via social programs.  Yet the poor are more poor than ever before, the deferential between richest and poorest continues to destructively expand, middle class progress is stagnant, the economy is on life support and only the very, very well to do, Big Oil, Wall Street and their Washington buddies have been making out like bandits at the massive expense and fatal detriment of the rest of us.  
    No wonder these downsizers of the American dream are in league with Wall Street bankers as they refuse to make loans to small business and invest in the American economy.  They are treating the economy and country like corporate raiders do, parasitically, like a once profitable and productive corporation they have infested and are dismantling and profitably selling off for parts.  Not surprisingly, under this reign of fiscal malfeasance and terror, since 1980 workers have seen a ten percent decline in wages while executive remuneration has quadrupled. 
     Yet, with finely honed Shell Game's strategy reasoning, these nightmares of the America dream, these succubi, blame and impede those who would seek to invest, to grow, to repair, to stimulate and protect our economy as being to blame for our slow recovery from the extended recession, this virtual depression, that these malefactors led us into.  And although these politicians are in bed incestuously with the very bankers who created our problems, they now not only refuse to do anything to reform the banks but try to keep others who would fix them from being able to. They say we and our economy are too weak to afford new taxes and new borrowing to stimulate our economy any more, and there is an element of truth to this, but only because they have buried the economy under mountains of debt to begin with.  
    Then they wreck their case along with whatever fleeting credibility they may be trying to achieve, by claiming that the previous stimulation hurt the economy rather than helped it.  Naturally they know this to be a prevarication because all economists agree that stimulation was necessary.  In fact it was too small.  but at that it was the only thing which kept the economy from going over the cliff these meretricious politicians were resolutely pushing it toward very much the way irresponsible, drunken joy riders do a stolen car they are done with and hope to disguise the whereabouts of from the authorities.  
     Even more cynically, as they are perhaps more cynical than any politicians we have seen before in this country, they say that no stimulation of the economy can ever work.  This is another dissembling misdirection of the Shell Game, proving they really don't want the economy to improve at all.  Having initially wrecked it now they are trying to keep it on life support so they can blame President Obama for the economy they first ruined and since have stood in the way of ever being repaired.  They are like the murderer who returns to the scene of the crime as investigator, steals your gun and shoots the victim six more times so he can blame you for the crime.  Classic Shell Game technique.
     Next they claim that their tax cuts and give aways to the extremely wealthy, which imbalanced the tax code so that the wealthier you are the less the tax burden as a percentage of your wealth will fall upon you, is not the source of the government's lack of revenue!  Though clearly it is.   Yet they persist in claiming that reducing tax rates (though only for the deserving upper echelon, i.e. they and their buddies, their especially affluent friends) creates more tax revenues!  Though clearly it doesn't. 
    Twenty unbroken years of severe deficit spending (to the tune of ten or eleven trillion dollars) under the last three republican presidents, supply siders one and all, rather convincingly destroys the premise of their own theory far better than any profusion of learned economic papers ever could.  Not so, they mendaciously say, claiming that any tax increase - even in letting previous entirely unjust tax reductions expire will be mean and unfair to the exceedingly rich and very hurtful to their tender egos.  Though merely "soaking" the rich as they say, as opposed to actually drowning the poor and middle class like an unwanted litter of cats, is starting to seem like it could be a good thing.  No, they say, this will destroy economic activity ("which economic activity?" one might ask) although, as they well know, the only clear and recent example when this was done proves precisely the opposite of their contention though mere proof, as we have seen, proves no impediment to their calumny.  
     For when in the 1990's President Clinton and the democrats (not one patriotic tax payer loving republican chose to vote in favor of fiscal responsibility then either) voted to repeal part of the Reagan across-the-top-tax-cuts-for-the-wealthier-than-hell, the deficit quickly disappeared and the economy boomed far beyond the anemic record of all the exalted tax cutting/debt building administrations of Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush. Note that the tax cutters for the wealthy and the debt builders always happily happen to be one and the same.
     So the Shell Game continues in brash support of the insupportable that dare not speak its name - Wall Street, Big Oil and Corrupted Politicians.  According to them the incidence of our greatness has not been based on what you thought or have been taught.  It was not scientific innovation or superior educational possibility that served as the underpinning of our great success, it was blathering radio talk show hosts.  It was not upstanding, god-fearing politicians who even at potential expense to themselves put their country above their own destructive partisanship, it was lobbyists and ideologues who controlled these politicians and kept them true to their bribes that led to our unprecedented success. Moreover truth itself is neither constant nor universal nor fact based but an ephemeral, changeable, perceptual, public relations gimmick based on propaganda and manipulated by big money.  No, it was not small business and equality and innovation and daring and change that built our economy it was big banks that funneled investment money into their own coffers for speculation yet produced nothing tangible at all to show for it that has made us great.   
     So the blizzard of delusion and lies builds up like snow around the poorly insulated house, blocking the door and drifting up past the window sills and still it continues to blow and snow and the temperature continue to fall.  Stay tuned as the Shell Game continues and the list of lies drifts and mounts.

The Biggest Sting

     So who's responsible for the Shell Game?  You might know my opinion by now, disguise it as I might, but if I haven't been clear there is an old rule, a tried and true method of determining this - if you want to know who's behind a crime ring look for the ones profiting from it.  Or in the vernacular, follow the money honey.  If you want to find the ones who just robbed the bank of its loot look for the ones around town newly flush with cash.   And astonishingly, as a clue, from 1980 - 2005, 80% of all new income in the country has accrued to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.  It's hard to believe that such an incredible rake of a nation's wealth has ever occurred in a democracy before.  Nor are these particular thieves bothering with subtlety or humility about it.  They believe the rip off will go on forever and they can rob us with impunity because they know with their boys and girls in place in congress and the Supreme Court they can do so with virtual immunity.
    Therefore, our money will continue to rise up this well greased chute into the hands of the wealthiest few percent of our citizens who, like human sponges, will see it never returns to productive purposes.  The nation's hard earned wealth flows upward as if in an inverted funnel, hydraulically, an artificial pyramid scheme superimposed upon democracy, into the soft, greasy hands of those at the top of the economic spiral via their facilitators in congress, the courts, the lobbyists, certain elements of the wholly owned media and the paid propagandists, all working to leech and suck the resources of the nation from both the private and public dry.      
    Beginning in 1980 all the money in the country has only flowed one way, impoverishing the vast majority of us if not actually then relatively against the moving mean, which means everyone but those at the top works far harder now for less reward, while those at the top of the economic ladder work much less for far more. This has sent us the US into a virtual free fall spiral of economic decadence, dependence and decline.
     Finally the very ones that got us into this mess in the first place dare to say "we can't keep doing the same things that got us into this mess in the first place" as if it wasn't them and then as solution propose continuing the exact same things that got us into this mess in the first place, as if you really can keep doing the same things over and over and expect a different result, or keep electing the same shills and cheats and expect good government.
     Meanwhile the money masters and manipulators behind the Great Shell Game have turned our political system and our economy into a giant crap shoot, a three card monte table on a street corner as their carnival barkers and trinket hawkers shout and cry; and we poor suckers and saps try to find the pea of truth in these pods of persiflage or the kernel of integrity in the heart of a congressman, but the hand is faster than the eye, the lie faster than the truth's ability to catch up to it.    
    They may let you win a few, sure, humor you a bit at first to lure you in, speak of things that appeal to you, morality, family, patriotism, religion, national security (terrorists are everywhere!) but it's really only ever been about the money.  They made off with our money faster than Madoff made off with his investors' money (guess where Bernie learned his ethics?) in this pyramid scam, this Ponzi scheme, this Shell Game.
     Capitalism only really works when it is moderated by a strong democracy that channels its raw power into productive purposes which accrue to the greater good of society and the best interests of the nation. But in a weak democracy or when a democracy has been willfully corrupted by bribery and propaganda, amoral capitalism becomes predatory, rapacious, callous and oppressive.  Since it is demonstrably an amoral force, when it runs out of control and is left to its own devious devices, it tolerates no internal self-restraint and will soon brutalize a society to its knees.  Its nominal handlers become insufferable in their own sense of entitlement and greed.  Who can argue that this describes Wall Street and Big Oil today?  And in a more elemental sense who can say that those in government who blindly support Big Oil and Wall Street are not enemies of the people and the best interests of the United States?
    With the Three Shells' working in tandem the downsizing of the American Dream is nearly complete and purposely designed to be irreversible.  These three together, public, private and cartel, act as a massive drain on our economic future and as a cancerous fever in the public brain.  Their non-stop propaganda and disinformation barrage has already indoctrinated a large portion of the American people in the false name of freedom to blindly accept a smaller share of the public wealth as their birthright, a high level of government corruption as a given and reduced stature and less freedom as an inevitable result. 
    Whether seeking the pea of economic justice, personal freedom or sound government, look no farther, the social contract is being ripped apart as we speak, the pea is no longer there, it has long since been secreted up someone else's sleeve.   That's the purpose of the Shell Game.  Like a great unregulated casino, it's designed to be a game at which you can never win.
    The three Shells are as hollow, remorseless and soulless as their counterpart in the simile would suggest.   Having collectively abdicated human piety as a force the shell Game is best thought of as pure, disembodied, unregulated compulsion; thoughtlessly, heartlessly, obsessively running after things it no longer even needs to prosper and survive: money, power and greed like an addict after drugs.  It will continue on this audacious course, growing more and more predatory as it goes until, if it's not stopped, it will destroy not only itself but take us all down with it.  Unless change comes quick, the financial collapse just passed and its excruciatingly long hangover since was not just a passing peculiarity but a pale precursor of coming events.