Category: Rants

In my blogging career I have made more than a few comparisons between the changing social, political, and economic structure in the United States since 1980 and the conditions most commonly associated with "third world" countries. I (and presumably others who make the same observations) use some creative license when saying such things. As we eliminate what made our society great we take on the characteristics of a developing country – great wealth concentrated in an ever-smaller number of hands, puppet media, mass incarceration as social control, divide-and-conquer tactics forcing the general public to fight over the scraps of the economy, etc. Nonetheless I understand that the United States is not actually a third world country. We are not a kleptocracy in sub-Saharan Africa, a Central American banana republic, or a rock-strewn post-Soviet hellhole in the Transcaucus. While our socioeconomic profile might be drifting in the direction of those countries, the U.S. has something they don't: functioning institutions of government. From the micro-level (local school districts) to the trillion-dollar institutions of the federal government, we have a government that kinda, sorta, sometimes, usually functions – even if not well – toward its intended purpose.

At least for the moment. Don't worry, Sierra Leone; we're catching up as fast as we can. A few more years of Tea Party governors and we'll be Tajikistan before you know it.

The most important institution of government that separates us from the barbarians we like to condescend is a functioning legal system. This is what We have and They do not. Despite the founders' characterization of the judiciary as the "least dangerous" branch, having neither "the sword nor the purse", it also happens to be the most important. Failed and quasi-developed states have sham judiciaries that make decisions based on fiat.

We do not. Don't get me wrong, our legal system still produces injustice by the wagon load and the bulk of our criminal laws are nonsensical. But our most important courts, the courts of appeal, make decisions based on written law. Justices have different interpretations of what that written law means in a given context, but they are making decisions based on A) previous decisions and B) a constitution and statutes. When that breaks down, and a legal system makes decisions based solely on partisan politics, then the government surrenders the pretense of being a representative one and becomes a dictatorship. Perhaps not a brutal one, and maybe even one that represents some portion of the popular will, but a dictatorship nonetheless.

Take three recent Supreme Court decisions that I personally consider terrible: Bush v. Gore, DC v. Heller, and Citizens United. In each case the majority made a decision based on its interpretation – an interpretation I believe is incorrect – of some aspect of our Constitution: equal protection, the 2nd Amendment, and the 1st Amendment, respectively. The decisions are controversial because reasonable adults can disagree on the interpretation. When does a state's discretion over the conduct of its own elections cross a line and violate its citizens' rights? Is the right to bear arms an individual right? What exactly is the limit of the 1st Amendment right to spend money as political speech? These are valid questions, and I am prepared to make a persuasive argument for my opinion on the correct answers. But people can disagree. The point is, the Court decided these cases based on the balance of competing viewpoints among its members. They didn't just make shit up.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court can no longer make that claim. They've moved on to Straight Making Shit Up in place of reasoned disagreements about the minutiae of the law. That's what Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson alleges in her dissent (The decision is available in its entirety here, with the dissent beginning on p. 31 of the Scribd document). This is not business as usual for any court to call out its own members. As Forbes notes:

It revealed, by way of written opinion, a now 'out in the open' battle between the members of the court wherein the minority opinion bluntly and directly accused the majority of fudging the facts to reach the decision they had already determined they wanted to reach. The minority opinion further alleged that the majority was driven by political motives rather than the desire to deliver a fair and judicious opinion.

In the world of the law, this is beyond huge. This is gargantuan…(t)he notion that a minority opinion would level a charge of judicial cheating against brother and sister members of the court, in an opinion that will now become part of the Wisconsin judicial body of legal authority, is positively remarkable. I’ve read more cases in my life than I could possibly count and never-and I mean never- has anything I’ve seen so much as approached what I read in this case.

Rather than rambling on about the failings of the majority argument (a noun for which it barely qualifies) I encourage you to take the time to read her dissent along with the half-assed majority concurrence from Justice Prosser. Like so much of our political discourse and rhetoric these days, the majority simply begins with the conclusion, cherry picks some facts to support it, completely ignores all of the evidence that contradicts it, and gives the rubber stamp to the ruling cabal's latest ignore-the-law-to-save-it tactics in the other branches of government. With a little creativity and a blind spot the size of Cowboys Stadium, you too can reach the conclusion that while the state legislature may have passed an open meetings act it is not subject to the act's requirements. And that part of the state constitution about all sessions of the legislature being open – well, those just don't apply here. Oh, it's also an original jurisdiction case, which I suppose is why the majority spends so much time rehashing the facts of the appellate court decision that preceded its own decision.

Our legal system allows – requires, even – competing interpretations of facts and the written law. If we're just making up our own facts and shedding even the pretense of making some kind of coherent argument based on the relevant precedent and constitution, then we don't really have a judiciary. And if we don't have a judiciary, a venue to enforce predictability and to provide a means to resolve disputes without recourse to violence, then we don't really have a functioning government. At least not the kind with representative institutions, anyway. With each passing day it becomes more obvious that large segments of the American public, professed adoration of "freedom" and "justice" notwithstanding, are A-OK with that.

(title cf. Brainiac)

The American fascination with the dongs of our elected officials is hard to take. On one hand I can see why the average moralistic (and probably hypocritical, but that's another story) voter would consider extramarital shenanigans to be conduct unbecoming a public official. Anthony Weiner can testify to the consequences, as can John Ensign, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, Vito Fossella, and so many others (although the occasional curious case, like David "Senator Hookers" Vitter, does get a pass for no readily apparent reason). On the other hand, why can't Americans find the same sense of deep moral outrage over Congressional corruption and malfeasance unless it involves the wang?

Yes, the occasional high profile corruption bust happens when an elected official practically gets caught holding giant sacks of money with dollar signs on them (William Jefferson, Duke Cunningham, Operation Tennessee Waltz, etc). But for the most part sex scandals are career enders whereas all manner of trading influence and favors for campaign contributions or schemes that line the Congressman's own pockets is usually greeted with a shrug. I mean, hey, Joe Lieberman may be little more than a paid shill for AIPAC, the financial industry, and insurance companies, but he doesn't cheat on his wife. What a guy. Sure, John Cornyn would support legislation to allow energy companies to strip mine Arlington National Cemetery, but we've never seen his penis, have we? Class act!

Most Americans are far too young or uninterested to remember the Abscam scandal from 1978-1981. The FBI employed the services of a professional con man (which I believe is the plot of a TV show now) to engineer a sting to catch corrupt elected officials. An undercover FBI agent posed as a mysterious Arab sheik who offered large sums of money in exchange for political favors – in this case, granting him legal asylum in the U.S., soliciting wealthy investors for a foreign investment scheme, and helping the "sheik" illegally transfer his fortune into the U.S. To their credit, some members who were approached either declined to meet with him or directly rejected offers of a bribe. Some weren't that bright. Five members of the House and a Senator (Harrison Williams of New Jersey) were indicted and, believe it or not, actually went to prison.

Suspend your disbelief for a moment and suppose that the FBI would actually do something like this today: What percentage of Congress do you think would take the bribes? What percentage do you think would spurn a bribe but accept something like campaign contributions, favors for family members, or other less obvious gifts? What percentage would, as South Dakota Senator Larry Pressler did during Abscam, say "No. Wait a minute. What you are suggesting may be illegal," leave, and immediately contact the FBI? More importantly, what portion of the voting public would be as up in arms about this kind of behavior as they are about "sexting"? Hell, unless the FBI happened to catch the exact same number of Republicans and Democrats the whole thing would probably be written off as a partisan witch hunt.

It's heartening, I suppose, that the voting public is willing to hold people like Anthony Weiner responsible for their behavior. So hooray, we are capable of caring. Now if only we could start holding them accountable for something that actually matters.

Jack Cafferty on CNN is never one to miss an opportunity to be an alarmist for the purpose of stirring the pot and starting conversations. That is potentially a useful function in a media culture that prioritizes cheerleading and the defense of the status quo. Sometimes, though, I can't tell if Cafferty is asking serious questions or merely going for shock value. Every C-list talk radio host understands the fine art of asking something offensive – "So let's open up the phones to hear what you think about my proposal to mark Muslims with a hot cattle brand…" – to generate interest. That may have been Cafferty's motive when asking viewers to sound off on, "What are the chances the U.S. economy could eventually trigger violence in our country?"

Is that a serious question? I feel like treating is as a serious question even if it isn't.

The knee-jerk answer is "Oh yeah, stock up on guns and MREs. It's gonna be all Thunderdome up in here by 2014 – or possibly even beyond Thunderdome." That answer passes the smell test. Americans have more household debt, less savings, less wealth, and poorer job prospects than at any point since the Great Depression. People increasingly feel strained to the breaking point, frustrated, depressed, powerless, and desperate. Those who don't feel like that are fearful of the people who do. Income inequality is appallingly high, and historically that's an excellent predictor of civil disorder. We already have a higher percentage of our population in prison than any other Western nation. Oh, and we're tits-deep in guns. So sure, the ingredients for violence prompted by economic conditions are there.

That said, I tend to think that the prospects for violence are poor for a number of reasons.

1. Americans are too lazy, uninterested, disheartened, docile, or busy supplicating themselves before their economic betters to put together a half-decent protest rally.

1a. The closest we've come to a half-decent sized rally involved elderly, ignorant, porcine reactionaries waving around misspelled signs and screaming for more upper class tax cuts. I don't think we can even rebel correctly.

2. There's no common purpose. Sure, everyone's angry. Maybe even violently angry. At what? Half of us are ready to start a class war and the other half are polishing up their guns to defend upper class tax cuts, shoot at Mexicans / Muslims / black people, and basically form a circular firing squad rather than focusing on the problem. We'd fight about what we are fighting about.
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I can't think of anything more pointless.

3. As individuals get closer to their own breaking point, resorting to crime or lone acts of violence seems more probable than any kind of collective action.

The only thing that makes collective violence seem like a plausible outcome is the sense of a very real, profound, and widespread loss of hope in this country. Does anyone actually look forward to the future? Think that sunny days are on the horizon? Believe that the political system can solve our problems (without 1000 unrealistic "ifs")? People who feel that way probably exist, but either they're very quiet or there aren't many of them.
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The 2008 and 2010 elections both generated a lot of excitement among different portions of the electorate and to say that the results have been disappointing is a rank understatement. Do Obama voters think four more years will bring "change"? At best they consider him the less-terrible of two options. Do Republicans really believe that going to rallies in stupid hats and voting for clueless ideologues who will Go Native the second they enter their offices is going to balance the budget and solve our problems? I doubt it, a small, vocal minority of true believers aside.

The biggest problem is that young people are more pessimistic about the future – their own and of this country – than ever before. If you're under 40, do you even have any long term plans, goals, or hopes anymore?

The short- and long-term pictures are both bleak. We're unemployed, marginally employed, or tenuously holding onto one of the few decent jobs to be had in the short term, and in the long term we can look forward to…I don't know, working until we drop dead. And we'll do it in a country that will keep getting dumber, more dilapidated, poorer, and more like the average Banana Republic than the Super Great Land of Success we were told we live in.

Personally I don't think I'm going to live to see a civil war or mass rioting. I'm not confident that what I will live to see will be much better than that, though.

A friend of mine posted the following on Facebook recently:

After reading that Gov. Scott wants random drug tests for Government employees, and mandatory drug tests for welfare recipients, my cynical response was, "What, does he own a drug testing facility?"

Ha! Funny, but no. Of course he doesn't.

He transferred his $62 million stake in Solantic, a walk-in clinic chain that contracts with employers and government agencies to provide drug screening, to his wife – in a revocable trust, so the moment he leaves office he can regain control of the company. So you see, Rick Scott does not own a drug testing facility. He merely founded a chain of fast food-style walk-in clinics and transferred his ownership share to his wife. (This kind of "share shuffle" is prohibited by federal law and in most states wherein at least the pretense of preventing cronyism and conflicts of interest is maintained. But in Florida it's A-OK. Way to go, Shitshine State.)

Yes, Rick Scott is quite proud of his measure requiring drug testing for all welfare recipients as well as random drug testing for state employees. Finally, Florida will be chock full of personal responsibility. Let's briefly note three aspects of this policy that get ignored in our rush to argue about "welfare" and the morality of drug use:

1. Drug testing in this context – cheap, quick tests administered and performed by someone making /hr with a Med Tech degree from a community college – is a complete joke.
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It has accuracy problems and more importantly it is laughably easy to beat. We see evidence everywhere, from professional athletes to your college roommate "Bongzilla", that testing amounts to an inconvenience to drug users.

They'll catch a few knuckleheads here and there, but this is little more than a moneymaking racket for the for-profit medical industry.

2. People on welfare can still get drunk and smoke, right? So with drug testing in place they can still A) waste money on expensive intoxicants they can't afford, B) lay around shitfaced all day if they are so inclined, and C) exercise a near total lack of personal responsibility.

3. "Well, my boss drug tests me, so why shouldn't blah blah blah…
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" is a false equivalency. Your employer drug tests you because if you are stoned at work and you kill someone (or do anything else legally actionable) they are liable. They are not drug testing you because Nancy Reagan and McGruff the Crime Dog visited them and handed out some colorful pamphlets. They are covering their ass, period.

It does not take much thought to expose the holes in the logic allegedly behind this legislation. That this is stupid and pointless is hardly worth discussing.

The more interesting aspect is that Teatard support for people like Scott and proposals like this (Read the comments on the CNN story. I dare you.) casts the failings of modern American conservatism in high relief. In my opinion, the American flavor of conservatism fails to adhere to any meaningful definition of the term and produces failed policy outcomes for three reasons, one of which is directly relevant here:

First, it is vehemently anti-intellectual. This is inherent in appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Second, it profanes institutions it is supposed to defend. Rather than instilling a culture of respect for the institutions of the state and society – which is a basic, foundational aspect of conservatism historically – it throws them under the bus in favor of defending an ideology. If the Supreme Court makes a decision they don't like, conservative leaders say "Screw the Supreme Court." They undermine what they should be defending.

Finally, it surrenders the moral high ground as a party of individual liberty, because Republicans and American conservatives more broadly believe this only selectively. They will howl like stuck pigs about their own 2nd Amendment rights or the tyranny of their personal tax "burden" but they will sell out others' rights at the drop of a hat. Rather than recognize the troubling 4th Amendment implications of subjecting individuals to a search of their body in order to receive something to which they are entitled by statute, they support laws that infringe upon rights based on whatever combination of insecurity, fear, and prejudice shapes their view of the targeted social group. Sure, conservatives would be shitting white phosphorus if the state decided to drug test them, but man, screw them welfare queens.

We need people like Rick Scott, if for no reason other than to remind us periodically that the ideology he represents knows no limits and has no consistent principles. It's the politics of blood and tribal identity, of defining who is Us and then using the power of the state to lash out at Them.

On January 7, 1973 a young man named Mark Essex, who had shot and killed a police officer a week earlier, walked into a Howard Johnson's hotel in downtown New Orleans and went on a shooting rampage. By the end of the day he had killed 9 people (including 5 police officers) and wounded 13 more. Police from surrounding jurisdictions flooded into New Orleans during the long siege around the hotel.
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At one point a New Orleans police commander noted a group of cops from a small, rural town repeatedly firing their weapons toward the building from a few hundred feet away. "What are you shooting at?", the commander asked them. Their response: "The hotel." The incident ended with Essex going out action movie style, dying in a hail of bullets as he made a defiant charge at dozens of police. The coroner noted over 200 distinct bullet wounds during his autopsy.

These anecdotes illustrate a sociological phenomenon called contagious shooting. Each individual starts shooting because everyone else is shooting, irrespective of necessity and often without even knowing why. It tends to be a problem with police and less so in the military. Soldiers are trained extensively to combat this natural human tendency in a dangerous situation: identify the target, assess the threat, don't waste ammunition, and so on. Police, for reasons about which we could speculate all day, tend to be less judicious and more easily influenced by group dynamics.

On May 5 of this year, police from four different agencies participating in a raid of a home in Pima County, Arizona on a search warrant regarding a marijuana trafficking ring.
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They entered the home of 26 year old Jose Guerena, a two-tour Iraq War veteran. As people tend to do when armed home invaders burst through the doors and windows out of the blue, Guerena went for his personal firearm. Despite the fact that he did not fire, an officer fired at him. A half-dozen others joined in, firing more than 75 rounds in 7 seconds at one suspect from 10 feet away. He was hit 60 times. The police are now going to extensive, questionably constitutional lengths to seal the search warrants and nail down a story that keeps changing by the minute. By the time they finish they'll have turned Guerena into a terrifying mixture of Tony Montana, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Hillside Strangler.

No, this does not happen every day.
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Many police manage to work for decades without unloading on a suspect. But in the highly militarized, War on Drugs, no-knock warrant era of law enforcement it happens alarmingly often. Some cases are high profile: the fifty rounds fired at Sean Bell (including one officer who stopped to reload and emptied an entire second magazine), 41 at an unarmed food delivery man who reached for his wallet, and an 88 year old woman shot 39 times during a high-larious "Whoops! Wrong house!" no-knock warrant incident.

The War on Drugs has changed law enforcement in this country so fundamentally that there is no clear way to reverse the damage.
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Police recruits now enter a culture that has been highly militarized since the late 1970s; even the longest-serving veterans still at work today have never known any other way of doing things. Armored vehicles, military rifles, armor-piercing ammunition, no-knock warrants, tactical gear…it's just the way things are done. You blaze away at suspects like Bruce Willis in Die Hard because, well, everyone else is doing it and that's what being a cop is all about – breaking down doors, smashing through windows, and unloading your firearm at the Scum of the Earth on the other side. Sure, innocent people get gunned down every once in a while, but isn't that a risk we have to take if we have unsubstantiated tips from paid informants suggesting that there might be marijuana in a home?

On the plus side, maybe they'll start using less forceful methods now that we can't resist unlawful police entry into our homes. If it's wearing a badge, obey it.

I feel safer already.

Conspiracy theories about a small, secretive cabal of people – variously referred to as "bankers", "financiers", or "industrialists", which are code words for Jews, Jews, and Jews, respectively – have incredible staying power. Even the most rudimentary public opinion data go back no more than a century, but phenomena like the Anti-Masonic Party or the Know-Nothing movement (based on theories that the Pope was scheming to run the U.S. through an influx of Irishmen and Italians) show that the idea that someone is secretly Running the World is not new in American politics. This idea appeals broadly, too, from simple minded people who boil all of politics down to a Wizard pulling levers behind a curtain to highly educated people who spin elaborate webs of conspiracy centered around an individual (the Koch Brothers, George Soros, the Pope, etc.) or group (i.e., Jews).

Recently I had a conversation with someone highly intelligent who postulated that the difference between presidential candidate Obama and President Obama is so dramatic that the following theory seemed plausible: every new president is summoned to a secret meeting with the (Illuminati / Bilderberg Group / Trilateral Commission / New World Order / Swiss bankers / etc.) who explain to him a dozen topics that are off limits and give him a list things he can't do.
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Over the years I have heard many people muse about this, many of them logical, astute political observers, in an effort to explain the extraordinarily narrow ideological and functional range in which American politics operate.

Why? Why is this such a popular idea? On the most basic level, conspiracies are popular because people like to believe that the world is more exciting and complex than it really is – sort of an anti-Occam's Razor. It's disappointing to think that most social, economic, and political phenomena have very mundane explanations.
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But there's an additional explanation that we too often overlook in the U.S. since the uncoupling of income, class, and politics: policy outcomes are remarkably similar (and serve the interests of the same constituents) regardless of who holds political power.

Take, for example, two pieces of health care legislation passed seven years apart. Medicare Part D (2003) came from a Republican Congress and was signed by a Republican president.

Obama's health care reform bill came from two chambers with large Democratic majorities. Yet the two pieces of legislation are essentially identical – they are convoluted schemes for taking hundreds of billions of tax dollars and funneling them into the waiting, open palms of private insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Part D was a baldly political effort to kiss the asses of the elderly while Obama's bill was a half-hearted effort to follow through with a campaign promise, one that ended up unrecognizable by the time it passed. They look remarkably similar, of course, because the same lobbyists wrote both bills.

While there are meaningful differences between our major parties, the old saying is that there's really only one party in America and it's called Big Business. There is no secret conspiracy or grand explanation, just the grinding, banal reality that our political system and elections are largely theater (Presidential elections are important!

For…judicial appointments, I guess!) while the most crucial issues are met with either elite consensus or more likely are off the table altogether.

Interesting and unsurprising poll data from the Associated Press reveals that substantial majorities of Americans oppose Paul Ryan-style Medicare reform or cuts to Social Security. The public also considers the two programs highly important.

Overall, 70 percent in the poll said Social Security is "extremely" or "very" important to their financial security in retirement, and 72 percent said so for Medicare. Sixty-two percent said that both programs are extremely or very important.

This is the basic dilemma of modern American politics, as you already know.

Large majorities support balancing the budget…and oppose raising taxes, meaningfully cutting defense spending, altering Social Security or Medicare, or doing much of anything else that would bring the budget closer to balanced.

There is almost a temptation to feel bad for our elected officials – damned if they do, damned if they don't. The public howls about the deficit but won't accept cuts to anything except programs that we imagine to be large but are actually insignificant (foreign aid, NPR, etc.) and the usual killing of the draft animals (education, social welfare, etc.) Combined, these cuts make hardly a dent in the problem. The temptation to pity them evaporates when one realizes why they inevitably drift toward "solutions" like these. Even among the unpopular solutions, why would they propose something like Medicare cuts – let's be honest, even the GOP knows this is political suicide – before tax increases, defense spending cuts, and so on?

The answer is pretty obvious: because when the chips are down, they will stab you in the back at the drop of the hat. They don't care about you, regardless of party. You are not important. They would rather try to ram Medicare reform down your throat than to bite the Pentagon and Wall Street hands that feed them or raise taxes on their own income bracket. The choice between cutting Social Security and lifting the payroll tax cap (without which Social Security would be solvent in perpetuity) is no choice at all. The default solution is always, always to throw you under the bus.

You can learn a lot about someone when you force them to make choices, eliminating the natural tendency of individuals to take the path of least resistance and please everyone.

If I have four cats and I tell you I love them all equally, that doesn't tell you much.

If the house is on fire and I can only save one of them, you're about to find out which one I actually love the most. In flush times our elected officials will gladly appease us – doing so is good politics and the path of least resistance. If the money is there to pay for everyone's wants (see: 1950-1970), why not just pay for it all?

When reality demands selectivity, we quickly discover what and who really matter.

Our elites are slowly discovering that they need to touch one of the untouchables: raising taxes, cutting the Dept. of Defense, or cutting SS/Medicare. Faced with three politically unappealing choices, it's quite revealing to see which one people like Paul Ryan and Obama's catfood commission decided to bite the bullet and endorse.

The mainstream media understands its target demographic, or at least it seems like they do. That is the only reasonable explanation of why fluff like "Baby boomers eye adventure, bucket list" qualifies as a front page story – it's guaranteed to attract great interest from Boomers despite causing violent gagging among all other readers. I mean, who doesn't want to read the nauseatingly self-congratulatory description of how the travel industry is accommodating the Boomers' intention to spend all of the money bequeathed to them by the WWII generation before they die?

It's a gripping human interest narrative. On the plus side, the comments are good for major shits & giggles – I think the proper scoring is 10 points for every time some 55 year old says "I worked so hard for everything I have!", 20 for calling everyone under 55 "whiners" for being so bitter toward them. I guess 30-plus years of "I made it on board! Now pull up the ladder!" social, political, and economic policies has robbed them of the ability to appreciate irony. Or perhaps the reactions of others are strange and inscrutable to people who have been so selfish for so long. Check this out:

Another trend? Baby boomers want to cross items off their "bucket list" — the inventory of experiences they've dreamed of doing all their life, be it taking in the beauty of Machu Picchu, bungee jumping in New Zealand or going on an expedition cruise to the Galapagos Islands.

"We all have those things we want to do and then of course as you get older, time is running out," said Don Mankin, an adventure travel expert and author of "Riding the Hulahula to the Arctic Ocean: A Guide to Fifty Extraordinary Adventures for the Seasoned Traveler."

"So you begin to think about, 'Well I don't have unlimited time so what are those things that I always really wanted to do, where are those places that I always wanted to go?' … I think that drives a lot of the travel decisions these days."

Good luck on your quest to fill that big void in your lives with expensive travel, folks! Here's our Bucket List. Before we die, we'd like to:

Be legally classified as a full-time employee at least once

Boy, that would be sweet. Be sure to tell us all about your Napa Valley wine tours; take plenty of pictures from the summit of Kilimanjaro.

At least there are a few honest people posting in the comments (click to embiggen):

Laugh it up, assheads. Just remember: you're not going to outnumber us forever, and once your monopoly on the institutions of the media, economy, and government loosen you're still going to need your Medicaid and your pills and your Social Security and your untaxed pensions – and a cooperative nation to continue heaping these benefits upon all of you self made successes.

(to be continued)