Corpocracy

Did I watch Conan O'Brien's last Tonight Show? Hell yeah I did! It was fantastic. Neil Young was awesome (Neil was awesome on the Haiti concert too. Is that the first time him and Dave Matthews played together? Did Neil travel back in time at some point so he could have a second career as Dave Matthews?). Plus, and I swear this is true, I had never heard Free Bird before, at least not that I can remember. I'd heard of it, but I'd never actually heard the song. Will Ferrell, by the way, has gotten to the point where I can't tell if he's kidding anymore, but he gets an A+ for breaking out the cowbell (I feel like we needed a little more of it). If I was Fox, I'd give Conan a blank check to go on my network at 11:30 starting in September and do whatever the hell he wants. If they do it right, he'll crush Leno and Letterman. I almost wrote a whole thing about it, but then I thought, who would I be convincing? Is there anyone who would say "no Sean, I don't think Conan has a big future in TV, Fox should just stick with Seinfeld reruns at night"? Of course not, that would be ridiculous.

Speaking of ridiculous, Glenn Beck, my favorite TV crazy person, is at it again. Last week Glenn did a whole special about how communism is bad. Thanks Glenn, that's super helpful. I hadn't noticed all the communist countries failing miserably and disappearing, except Cuba and North Korea, who can't feed themselves. At one point, Glenn teased the next segment as the story of the holocaust that history forgot. That sounded unlikely right off the bat, but I stuck around to find out. Turned out he was talking about Stalin. Ummm, what? Can I get a show of hands from anyone who didn't know Stalin killed millions of people? Seriously, wow, kudos to Glenn for pointing out that Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Che Guevara were all bad guys (I know, people wear Che t-shirts, it's not because they support all the things he did, it's because they're stupid. Glenn, of all people, should understand what that's like).

With whom did Glenn think he was arguing? Does he think people were watching and thinking "sorry dude, I totally disagree with you about that Stalin guy, he seems super cool"? I know we have some communists in America (and that's the good part about America, you get to believe whatever you want, and tell people about it too, and I'm not allowed to send you to jail, or even punch you), but they're not the crazy killing people communists, they're more the sharing the wealth types. I have yet to meet anyone who thinks all America needs is Stalin. And I know Glenn would say that the wealth sharing communists always eventually turn into the killing communists. And if there was a huge wealth sharing communist movement in America and Glenn was talking about them and warning them that it's easy to get carried away, I wouldn't make fun of him.

Unfortunately, Glenn was talking about this because he continues to insist that President Obama and the majority of Congress are, in reality, communists/marxists/socialists/facists; maybe polygamists. OK, I made up that last one. But Goldmember Beck isn't the only one saying this, lots of "conservatives" are. I'm not sure why.

The bank bailout? As far as I can tell, here are the terms we gave the banks in return for giving them an oil tanker full of unmarked bills:
1) You have to pay us back, well most of it, or some, unless you really don't want to. We might suggest a new tax/fee to get the money back, but it'll never pass Congress because, um, you own Congress.
2) You have to come to Washington every once in a while and re-apologize for lighting the economy on fire and using the flames to light your cigars. You have to try and sound really sorry.
3) We're going to use you as a political pinata for a while.
4) There are some things we're requiring you to do with the money to help re-build the economy you broke, and no more huge bonuses (or, if you prefer, boni)...just kidding. Do whatever the hell you want.

Now, you could argue, since we don't produce actual things in this country anymore, that the banks are as much a means of production as anything. I'll buy that, especially because, the way our economy is set up, it's basically impossible to start any kind of business without a loan. But if you'd say that the government controls the banks now, you have a very odd definition of control. It reminds me of that joke about who aliens would think was in charge if they came down and saw us following dogs around and picking up their poop. The banks destroy the economy, the government gives them billions of dollars and they get super rich again while the rest of our economy still sucks. It's hard to argue a lot of government control in that equation.

Health Care?
I don't know what a final health care bill is going to look like, or if we'll get one at all. I do know that Republicans have been crying about a "government take over of health care". What? What part of forcing citizens to by insurance from private insurance companies at basically the same rates we're paying now constitutes a takeover? Believe me, I've argued that a government takeover of health care might be necessary, the way the government controls the military or police, because the private sector isn't doing the job on health care. If the government was taking over health care, I'd be among the first people to say so.

What about the auto industry bailouts?
Well, we're getting warmer at least. I'm not wild about taxpayers owning the majority of GM, especially since by taxpayers I mean the federal government. Because if I owned any piece of GM, we wouldn't be getting rid of the Saturn brand. Soon I'll have to find somewhere else to take my car for service, I don't like change. On the other hand, there are a couple of realities here worth noting. First, if we're going to bailout huge banks, why not also save some jobs for blue collar auto workers. If you'd rather have done neither, that's an excellent point and I couldn't agree more, but that ship had already sailed on the President when he took office. Second, if it takes a little government input to get GM to stop making cars that get 3 miles per gallon and explode whenever they turn left, then so be it.

On a somewhat related topic, last week, the Supreme Court ruled that any limit on corporate contributions for buying campaign ads in unconstitutional. They can't just give a candidate a sack of money, but they can buy all the ads they want (which is what campaigns use money for anyway). Great job Supreme Court, well done. For years, Congress has tried to find sneaky little ways to be corporate whores, now they can do it right out in the open, I'm so thrilled (by the way, Republicans seem to be supporting this decision, I'm not sure why they think it'll be better for them, Democrats can be whores too).

This doesn't really look like socialism or communism to me. It's actually sort of the opposite of socialism, the corporations are running the government. What do you call that? Congressman Clyburn, specifically in reference to the Supreme Court ruling, called it a corpocracy. I knew there was a reason I always liked him. I especially like corpocracy because, if you look at it really quickly, it kind of looks like crapocracy. Is this better than communism or socialism? Probably not. But it isn't socialism.