When a Marxist is quoting Sue Orman, you know things are getting bad.

Sometimes you wonder if congress wants a violent revolution to test out their security apparatus.  Take for example this problem: Orman is getting to the point. 

Make no mistake, we are still in crisis mode. The unemployment rate didn’t drop from 9 percent to 8.6 percent because there were a ton of new jobs for the unemployed to step into. Much of the decline in the rate is attributed to the fact that more than 300,000 of the unemployed have stopped looking for work, so they no longer get counted in the math of the unemployment rate. We in fact added only 120,000 new jobs in November. At that pace it would take more than four years for private-sector employment to get back to where it was in late 2007. That’s not exactly a rosy picture.

Now of course, what will probably happen — though with this Congress who knows — is that sometime between now and Congress’ Christmas recess we will get word that the bickering has subsided enough and that long-term benefits will in fact be extended for 2012. But every day that we don’t yet have a deal is another day of congressional failure to serve its constituency. I am not talking solely about the 5.7 million. This speaks to what we as a nation stand for. I refuse to believe we are a country that wants to abandon our unemployed, or use them as political leverage. Yet here we are.

Concerned at the cost? Well, keep in mind that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has previously noted that extending unemployment benefits packs the most stimulative bang for the buck. Give someone with a job some money (through a tax break, say) and they might save it, or they might spend it. Give an unemployed person assistance and odds are very high that money quickly gets poured right back into the economy. That’s something that benefits all of us, at a time when the economy remains perilously fragile. And most important, it provides some relief for those who are struggling most.

However, this also illustrates something else: the battle between Neo-liberal and Neo-Keynesian ideology and practice, both are ultimately unsustainable.  Why?  Well, quick stimulus can’t address long-term systemic failure. But then just hoping jobs manifest is not a way:  the idea the job shortages are a matter of lack demand in the labor market because people would rather just not work is frankly, objectively, insane.

Sometimes when you red bait, you get a fish that can bite you back…

Now I would say that this young woman isn’t the most articulate Marxist in the world, but given that she is being baited by a stooge trying to paint Occupy as full of inchoate hippies, she does a decent job:

Betrayal: That’s what Democrats are good at

I know that my left liberal friends like to pass around lists about what Obama has done despite our protests, I will remind them to add to that Obama officially has given some truth the accusation by teapartiers that he does not believe in the constitution.  I am no longer of the constitutional cheerleader squad, but our “rights” cannot be trusted in this system:

Notice that Defense bIll has passed the Republican House.  Greenwald is right that much of this is not new, but not it is formalizes this into law. Obama will more than likely sign it according to White House sources. Change you can believe in, indeed.  

Sadly, the opposition is also hysterical: yelling things like “Ron Paul is the answer,” “Alex Jones was right about this all along,”  and various conspiracy theories.   While there are conspiracies in this world, the fact that most theorists know about them few minutes on the internet or from listening to a long discredited radio shock-jock should indicate how serious one would take it.  If the conspiracy these types of infantile reactionaries believed in where real, they would all be dead.  In a strange way, they are a refutation of their own conspiracy.

Honestly, this makes system from a structural standpoint: when cultural apparatuses already work, then go to Repressive apparatuses.  One does not have to be a hardliner Althusserian OR a conspiracy nut to see that.  Gramsci rolls in his grave: well, probably for what has happened in the EU, but it applies here as well