The CEO of Panera Bread, as some kind of do-gooder awareness-raising shtick, is currently attempting to live on food stamps, and not finding it easy. But being dependent on government handouts isn't supposed to be easy. Instead of trying life at the bottom, why doesn't he try life in the middle? In 2012, the top 10 percent were taking home 50.4 percent of the nation's income. That's an all-time record, beating out the 49 percent they were taking just before the 1929 market crash. With government redistributing more money than ever before, we've mysteriously wound up with greater income inequality than ever before. Across the country, "middle-class" Americans have accumulated a trillion dollars in college debt in order to live a less comfortable life than their high-school-educated parents and grandparents did in the Fifties and Sixties. That's banana republic, too: no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the two.
Like to change that? Maybe advocate for less government spending? Hey, Lois Lerner's IRS has got an audit with your name on it. The tax collectors of the United States treat you differently according to your political beliefs. That's pure banana republic, but no one seems to mind very much. This week it emerged that senior Treasury officials, up to and including Turbotax Timmy Geithner, knew what was going on at least as early as spring 2012. But no one seems to mind very much. In the words of an insouciant headline writer at Government Executive, "the magazine for senior federal bureaucrats" (seriously), back in May:
"The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren't Corrupt"
So, if the vast majority aren't, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight percent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that's the good news? The IRS is not only institutionally corrupt, it's corrupt in the service of one political party. That's Banana Republic 101.
What comes next? Government officials present in Benghazi during last year's slaughter have been warned not to make themselves available to congressional inquiry. CNN obtained one e-mail spelling out the stakes to CIA employees: "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well."
"That's all very ominous," wrote my colleague Jonah Goldberg the other day, perhaps a little too airily for my taste. I'd rank it somewhere north of "ominous."
"Banana republic" is an American coinage -- by O. Henry, a century ago, for a series of stories set in the fictional tropical polity of Anchuria. But a banana republic doesn't happen overnight; it's a sensibility, and it's difficult to mark the precise point at which a free society decays into something less respectable. Pace Obama, ever swelling debt, contracts for cronies, a self-enriching bureaucracy, a shrinking middle class preyed on by corrupt tax collectors, and thuggish threats against anyone who disagrees with you put you pretty far down the banana-strewn path.
#2
This sort of dysfunction does not subside until some people who are not linesmen or drunk drivers end up having an unfortunate encounter with a lamppost. Not something that we've had any meaningful experience with here in the USofA. We may have to learn as we go...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
09/21/2013 13:00 Comments ||
Top||
Political oppression of opposition parties - check
Media dominated by ruling party - check
Extensive patronage system - check
Widespread cronyism rewarded from the Treasury - check
Incredible national debt - check
#2
He's just trolling: cause some "conservative" to mention him & bananas in the same sentence---or even in the same paragraph, and leftards will be able to scream "racism" for months.
#4
Anyone remember the graduation speech he hijacked for his Reject Voices of Tyranny speech, just a couple news cycles before the NSA snooping made headline news?
In five short long years, with 1216 days to go....
Posted by: Au Auric ||
09/21/2013 9:55 Comments ||
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#4
Taking advantage of a war-weary American body politic, and camouflaging his retreat from leadership as a new form of global engagement (whatever that means).
Its called SmartPower . Havent you noticed its all the rage with weak leaders around the globe? Theyre not liars you see they just re-define. It allows them to take credit when things go right and blame others when things go south. The reason President Obama has projected his pseudo anti-colonial foreign policy is not because of some deep ideology. Simply put hes just another narcissist with no leadership skills.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
