Wait, Which Scandal??

"How them Mets??", as a friend says when things just too weird to be believed.  That's bit of where I find myself these days.

I mean, everywhere I look the Teapublicans are trying desperately to gin up some sort of scandal to hit Democrats (and particularly the President) over the head with.  For the most part we are left with Representative Issa pounding the table and foaming at the mouth without any substance to his rants.  He won't release testimony because it does not support his position that the President or Democrats have done something wrong.  For the most his oversight committee is a sham at this point.

But, all this nonsense is really a distraction from the real problems that need fixing.  The list is very long at this point.  High on the issues is the need to unwind thirty years of bad economic theory.  "Trickle down" is a mythological bit of nonsense that is destroying the underpinnings of the country.  We need taxes and we need government.  What has made government problematic is the mega trend to privatize every possible aspect of the job it should be doing.  For this we pay enormous sums more than if government hired people to do the actual jobs that corporations are now contracted to do.  Trickle down has created this connection to the oligarchy and continues to take us down a road of worse and worse government capability.  Even privatizing education will have very long lasting effects.  Charter schools and the additional cost such a for profit system creates is ruining education.  It is not the teacher's being unionized that is the problem.  The unions are actually one of the best things about the public education system.  Voucherizing education leads to fewer controls of what education should be about.  It takes away local control for our systems to work well.  No-child-left-behind has meant the dumbing down of the educational system.  This is by no means the worst of what has happened to us.

One of the large things gone wrong has been the privatizing of our National Security.  We now don't have a government entity actually doing hte work of intelligence gathering... we have a variety of contractors, private corporations, collecting and digging around in our data.  The NSA is just front for a scads of companies sucking our internet, phone and other data dry to suss out the bad guys.  Then we get this idiot, Edward Snowden, acting as if we do not have a representative form of government and saying he released information to help let the people decide what was right or wrong about the information being gathered.  He will likely go to jail for a very long time but the real story is that the company he worked for, Booz, Allen, Hamilton (BAH for an appropriate short handle) should be fired along with all the other contractors doing the job that government should be doing inside.

The press has been snowed by the focus on Snowden but has yet to dig into the real problem.