Congratulation on President Obama 2nd Inauguration

"Success is knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others." -- Unknown

What is known is the purpose set forth by our country's Constitution regarding our president's and our Congress's roles in our lives. In order to reach the full potential vested in their respective offices, they must remember they are there to serve, and to seek out the common ground and work towards for this country's Greater Good. Let us begin then, on this auspicious day, the 2nd Inauguration of President Obama, we wish them success and a new spirit of cooperation to move this country forwards. And a grateful nation will remember the legacies they leave behind.

Let us also give thanks, on this day, to the legacy the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King had left on the country’s honor roll of men and women who have contributed greatly to the betterment of our countrymen.

An Apologist Poem for Emma Lazarus

Too often in our recent history, our Congress has forgotten the true spirits of America as incarnated in Emma Lazarus' famous poem: to care for the poor, homeless and huddled masses on our own teeming shores.

The cynical among us will dismiss all these as a Lotus eater's pipe dream, a Pollyanna's rosy lens view of our world. It is a Utopian world that cannot be achieved in this earthly realm. Ideals are half-awaken ideas of a daydreamer, they say, conceived out of the hazy mist of their REM sleep.

To these I offer a contrarian view. If you look through the window of history, you can see the domino-falls of Dictatorship, once deemed an impossible dream by the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. You can see a parade of dictatorships, may it be religious, imperial-colonial, monarchial, Fascist, patriarchal, sectarian, genocidal or plutocratic, all fall and will eventually fall before the march of Democracy. Sometimes these daydreamer's ideals do come true.

However, a true democracy can only survive and be sustained through an Informed Democracy, a democracy where an informed, educated and participatory public are actively involved in their country’s electoral processes. A democracy without an informed and educated public to adopt sensible egalitarian laws is a mob rule. A democracy where the minority voices are silenced is a dictatorship by arithmocracy. A democracy hijacked by special interests is tyranny imposed by a few on the country’s multitude. The antidote to anti-democracy undercurrent is a well-informed, educated, participatory public.

It was no wonder whenever a dictator came to power, the first thing he wanted to seize control was the mass media, the very incarnation of the Freedom of Speech. And now, his present-day equivalent, a demagogue, fears the most is his followers' exposure to the truth and contrarian views from the mass media; that is why you will find him frequently assaulting the mass media as not representative of his imaginary "Silent Majority".

Show me a "Silent Majority" and I'll show you a mute opera singer. They don't exist!
A majority may be silent in actions at first. A social quake is always preceded by a lot of disgruntled rumblings before it erupts into protests and riots. Any government should be well advised to put their fingers on the social pulses.

But most of current crop of lawmakers are too convicted of their own moral certitude and/or too intoxicated with lobby money to have the empathy for the average, disfranchised Americans. Our government, as it stands now, is a virtual plutocracy. Look at the influence our big corporations, big money and lobbyists exerted on our Congress.

So, to borrow a few words and spirits from her famous poem, I wrote the following doggerel to show the current political ethos of the voters:

Rise! You disfranchised, working-class thrall,
You tired, over-taxed masses must address
And stand with one voice to command our Congress:
"Give us your coin-tossed, poor lawmakers all,
They surely will not like what is in store,
We hold the key to the Congress's Exit Door!"

Butterfly Effect, Fiscal Cliff, Wall Street and Representative Government Redux

Even though our esteemed Congress has just passed a stop-gap measure, America will continue its slide down the Financial Graph Curve towards the Fiscal Cliff, dropping off into an Economic Crevasse and hitting the Monetary Debt Ceiling on the way down, finally winding up through a spending-cut Sequester Wringer.

The “do-nothing” Congress finally did something. Why? Partly because they don’t want to lose, comes next election, the perks and prestige their jobs bring. And partly, I think, some heavyweight fat cat moguls of various stripes and BMIs, after watching with terrifying alarm as their investment portfolios start shriveling up like their little johnnies after a 4-hour Viagra high with their favorite "street-walker interns", called up their indentured representatives in Congress. (Personally, I have more respect for these streeters than some Wall-Streeters, at least they make their hard-earned money the old fashioned way, through manual and uh . . . physical labor.)

In another arena, the same pressure was also mounting for some top brasses in the Pentagon, this Sequester thing was giving them some gastrointestinal problems; this would greatly affect their under-the-table lobbying they were doing for some defense contractors. Now if they couldn’t deliver a bigger slice of the Congressional spending pie, this would give them an anal-explosive complex in addition to their attendant occupational hazard, the military-industrial complex. No amount of psychoanalysis or therapies will solve that. Well, forget about Freud, they decided to take the anal-explosive matters in their own soiled hands and picked up the hot-line, a direct link to their cohorts in the Congress.

The masters summoned and the Congressmen or women obliged and performed their well-rehearsed, two-steps-forward and one-step-back bargaining dance, "Gangnam Style”, around the Cliff’s brink, temporarily slowing the slide. Now they are congratulating and patting each other on the back for their virtuoso performance for saving the day. To them it was all song and dance, but it was a bad imitation at best and a corrupted version at worst, of the inimitable master, PSY. And they know it. They are supposed to be our public servants, but instead they have become indentured servants to the fat cats.

As for the real tax-payers, they are completely psyched out, after holding their breath in suspense for so long and watched the one-trick dog and pony show in Washington with amazement, disbelief and disgust.

Meanwhile, the fat cats’ Wall Street cronies have a more pressing problem. This fiscal stress also gave them an anal problem. But they got the worse end of the complex spectrum deal, the anal-retentive complex. This gives me a reason to suspect that the much discredited Freud might be partially right. The potty trainings must be radically different for these two archetypes during their crucial formative years. So these Wall-Streeters will continue their pants-wetting (liquidating their hedge fund derivatives). And from time to time they will let out a collective, knee-jerk fart (dumping some of their self-appraised, value-inflated, stock portfolios). Those are some spittle and a lot of smoke, to be sure, but no cigars. What is a fella to do with all those private unwanted holdings? I'm not talking about stock and commodity options or pork and beans futures here. Well, nothing much. One can only sympathize. But I'm digressing.

Anyway, this letting out of hot airs from Wall Street will give rise to gale-force wind warnings in the rest of the financial world. These little puffs of smokes emanating from Wall Street will gather strength and become a series of jet-stream blasts of tsunami winds, riding the Occidental Arctic Express, made more severe by global warming (don’t get me started on that now) to buffet (et tu Warren? Just say it ain't so!) the rest of the world. These north-easterlies will suck up and freeze-dry any liquid assets in their paths. You have heard about the air guitar players, some of these Wall-Streeters are basically air stock players. They are playing some investors for gullible fools.

The antidote to all these is simple, plug up all those fart-holes, I mean all the loop-holes. That means reform Wall Street, modify the tax codes, enforce strict restrictions on political lobbies, nullify the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United Vs. Federal Election Commission” decision and clean up both chambers of the current Congress, nooks and closets all!

Now you tell me, if these are not the real "Butterfly Effect", America’s economic prowess and "representative" government in action or what?

In the "mean"time, have a happy and a preposterous New Year! Uh, I mean a pre-prosperous New Year for now, until these tsunami winds blow over!

With regards, PFJChow.