Five years after 9/11 is too late for counterfeit displays of concern. In the years immediately following the destruction of New York's World Trade Center, Chicago's Mayor Daley repeatedly requested that the Federal Aviation Administration impose a no-fly zone in downtown Chicago, now abruptly the home of the United States' tallest building, but this simple and logical (and cost-free) protection was denied. Instead, obscene amounts of money were spent protecting Mount Rushmore. Three million people live here. No million people live at Mount Rushmore. As I said back then, in George W Bush's America, human beings are expendable. Presidential images are not.
The dubious Sears Tower plot was supposedly foiled by a secret program of financial transaction tracking (WSJ) — emphasis on the word "secret." In other words, the whole story was planted in the media as a head fake to make American citizens welcome more intrusion into their privacy and to forget the secret NSA intelligence surveillance of their phone records in collusion with telecom companies like AT&T.
Obviously, your banking and other financial records are next up for scrutiny.
Here's the real Republican revolution — polarizing and ghettoizing everything in the whole fucking country. They started with how people vote by re-engineering congressional districts and now have even affected how people save. Will we someday have savings accounts in your choice of Red or Blue?
How far can this insanity go? Should you have the choice of mutual funds in all of the following flavors?
Democrat Republican Independent Smoking No Smoking Christian Non Christian Gay Single Gay Married Moderately Sane White Support-the-Troops-Ribboned-SUV Chickenhawk KKK White Supremacist Nonwhite Immigrant Smelly Hippie Other
Let's take the idea a bit further. At mediocre restaurants in strip malls there should also be separate parking sections for each self-identified tribe. After all, what makes the handicapped so special?
Stop! Enough with the divisive identity politics already. Everything from our retirement pensions to our health insurance have been converted to privatized investments like IRAs, 401(k)s and HSAs. It's bad enough that privatization is enabling unwary investors to make stupider and stupider investment choices — "choice" being the code word for really bad idea, or "God's gift to Republicans." And adding ideology and identity politics into the mix makes the choices worse and worse.
The Blue Fund Group's mutual fund is anticipated to cost 1.75% of assets in fees. That's high, and high is bad. So investors will be paying a premium for ideological purity. Is it worth it, or have we up-ended the entire idea of investing? How is it even possible to judge the competence or success of such funds? Can you imagine yourself saying, "My Blue State Fund is down ten percent, but that's okay because it reflects my values"? If so, are you nuts?
I can understand not wanting to invest in Halliburton, but the proper way to fix that is to fix the US government as opposed to creating new investment ghettos as a workaround. Isolationism driven by ideology in personal investment makes no sense. It's a bad idea for bad times.
