It’s a joke, of course, the whole sub-prime catastrophe. Not really funny, of course, for the poor suckers who are losing their homes in the deal, but since when does America give a shit about them or their sense of humor in the first place?

It’s not exactly news that this culture has the moral values of a collection of cockroaches, but the institutionalization of massive theft is fairly recent. A century ago, robber barons were pillaried in the public press; fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, they were trashed in movies. Today, they have ascended. Today, the general public wishes to be just like them.

Since I am trying to retain some respect for my own immortal soul, I make it a practice to avoid pop culture as much as I can. This accounts, in part, for my ignorance as to the meaning of “Black Friday,” when the term began showing up in headlines recently. Imagine my surprise to learn that it refers to the practice where corporate thugs like Circuit City open their doors in the unGodly early hours right after Thanksgiving in order to drag in the fools who have anything left on their credit cards after paying for the turkey. Tens of thousands of Americans, I guess, standing in lines in the dark. The last time that happened was when the Bush crime family stole Ohio.

It’s the American Dream, that’s what it is. Not the one about freedom, because that one’s been remaindered. The dream, according to our rulers, is about stuff, and the inalienable right to accumulate it. The more junk the better.

These days, pure garbage has grown in value because anything which has actual value has been rendered illusory. Want to own your own home? A few years ago, some banks figured out that they could make a huge profit by loaning money to prospective home-buyers who, let’s face it, had no realistic chance of paying it back. They would do this by conspiring to get high-end appraisals, offering interest-only loans, then “bundling” those loans into investment instruments for other morons to buy. It was a no-brainer in the sense that if you believe anything the banks tell you, you have no brain.

The executives at Citi and Morgan Stanley and the rest of them paid themselves obscene bonuses for this fleecing. The housing market took a turn for the worse. Foreclosures suddenly popped up like toadstools after a rain. Politicians are making speeches. But the end is familiar. Just as in the Savings-and-Loan scandal (which enriched at least one member of the Bush brigade), the criminals will never get nailed. The government will bail out whomever it needs to (with your tax money, sucker). The banks will move on to the next scam.

When you live in a culture which so demonstrably has no heart, no character, no honor, and no soul, you must fill the emptiness with something. In America, 21st century, we fill it with gang violence, alcohol and drugs, electronica, and the relentless acquisition of expensive, meaningless crap probably made in Taiwan sweatshops.

In Iraq yesterday, U.S. troops murdered five more civilians, including a child, by firing into two vehicles at checkpoints. In the Bay Area, a couple of 15-year-old kids shot another kid to death for fun, then joked about it on the ride home.

If you think all of these things are unconnected, you are not paying attention.

Let’s talk about the scum of the earth.

Let;s talk about Allstate Insurance, Farmers Insurance, Progressive Insurance, State Farm Insurance, and even, now, sadly, C.S.A.A., the Northern California auto insurance company which has shipped all of its adjusters – well, all but one, as we shall see – to Utah and Colorado.

Please notice that I draw a very big line between the corporations themselves, and that includes their directors and executives, and the adjusters, who are basically trying to keep their jobs like you and me.

I’m a lawyer. Yeah, I know, the irony of a lawyer complaining about any other group of people is not entirely lost on me. But while there are in fact a few excellent judges, and a few lawyers who answer the higher calling of the profession, when you deal with major insurance companies the exceptions to evil corporate policies are rare.

This state of affairs is the result of two events. The first was the removal of three state Supreme Court justices – Rose Bird, Cruz Reynoso, and Joseph Grodin – maybe a dozen years ago – recalled with the argument that they had reversed some death penalty cases. I guess the public was looking for a little electrocution or death gas to go with its daily news. The facts were a little different.

The Bird Court had a similar reversal record to previous courts... but it had rendered a decision is the famous Royal Globe Insurance case which held that insurance companies could be sued directly for bad faith, and that they could be penalized millions of dollars for treating their insureds, and injury claimants, with flagrant dishonesty. The insurance industry had, for a time, been forced to deal more-or-less decently with claimants after Royal Globe, and this did not please the powers-that-were.

So the industry funded the recall and sold the public a load of lies, and there went Royal Globe. Since then, long-time adjusters were forced out of their jobs and a new batch of fresh recruits were brought in. They have no authority. They are trained to deny claims, stall, low-ball people, and generally make injured people go through hell to get even their bills paid.

The corporations now eavesdrop on their own adjusters. It is routine for a caller to hear this: “Your conversation may be monitored for quality assurance and for training purposes.” Can you guess what they mean by this?

On more than one occasion an adjuster I was working with in an attempt to settle a claim was suddenly “replaced” by someone else, no explanations offered. I began noticing a clear pattern. This always seemed to happen anytime I had managed to create a cooperative atmosphere with an adjuster.

After what happened this week, I think this is not just a paranoid interpretation.

I have a client who suffered a broken clavicle in a bicycle-auto collision. The facts are not in dispute and the driver admitted fault. C.S.A.A., the California State Automobile Association, assigned an adjuster who actually works in California – the last one, it appears – and with whom I’d worked before. I returned her phone call and we talked about the case and also about what had happened at C.S.A.A. recently, which was this:

C.S.A.A. notified their very large staff of claims adjusters that they were closing the state operation and relocating it to Utah and Colorado, and that any adjuster who wanted to keep her/his job would have to move to one of those states. Many actually did this, which is hard to believe but true. Turned out that Karla was the only one left. With 20 years’ experience she may have had a little pull; anyhow, she got to stay.

But after my conversation with her – in less than twelve hours – there was a message on my office voicemail from a new adjuster. Karla was off the claim and the new one – whose toll-free number is the one used from out-of-state – was taking over. Karla had literally been assigned the case and removed after a single phone call and within one day.

It is commonplace now in injury claims for the insurance company to “offer” a settlement for less than the medical bills themselves. Forget pain and suffering or general damages, although the law provides for them. Meanwhile, there are doctor’s bills and ambulance bills and hospital bills which have to be paid and many people can’t pay these if the insurance won’t.

The system supports this widespread, massive injustice because people have been brainwashed enough to make jury trials dangerous. Insurance companies have the funds to hire doctors to say the injured person was not really hurt, accident reconstruction ‘experts’ to say that nobody should be hurt in an accident at that speed, and a crew of paralegals to overwhelm the plaintiff’s lawyer. And over the past fifteen years they’ve run a public relations campaign to convince you that a lot of claimants are fakers and that verdicts have been ridiculous.

I know the p.r. campaign worked because prospective clients sometimes feel compelled to explain that they, themselves, really did get hurt, unlike all those others. I’ve had hundreds of clients over twenty-six years and maybe – maybe – two or three were exaggerating or lying about their injuries.

I shouldn’t complain, probably. After all, as some mobster says to another in Godfather II, this is the life we chose. Still, when you’re raised to believe that the legal system, hell, the political system as well, is a place where you have a shot at a bit of fairness or even justice, it is fucking depressing to see that expectation eviscerated every day.

(Sorry, I think, for laying this bummer on you just before the weekend. Soon, I promise, it’ll be back to more popular matters, e.g. the coming lynching of Barry Bonds.)

There’s something about it that chills me, I’m not sure exactly what. Maybe it’s the big FOR SALE sign attached to everything in the country and the barren spirit it more than implies.

When I was a kid, a lad, a broth of a boy, I’d hear old guys lamenting the changes they’d seen over the years and I’d think, “Not me, I’m not gonna be some cynical, used-up prune of a man, boring the young ones with farcical lamentation, not me.” Change looks pretty good then, especially when one embodies it.

Only I don’t think I’m a prune for feeling this way, looking around.

I’m not at war with money. At a younger and more impressionable age, it seemed to me that people who aspired to piling up cash were among the most superficial of bipeds. Of course, I still feel that way. But it turns out not to be the money but the values that its pursuit endorses that turns my stomach.

In a time when the expression “sold out” had meaning, the great Jim Morrison tossed a television set through a closed hotel window upon being told by his Doors bandmates that “Light My Fire” had been sold to Chevrolet for a car commercial.

Today, selling your name and likeness, your time, and whatever talent you possess, is considered the essential point of it all. It’s so ubiquitous that it does not raise eyebrows or invite much comment when Bob Dylan sells “The Times They Are A’Changin’” to a bank, remarking as he does so that it was never meant to be a protest song.

“Greed is good,” says the doomed character portrayed by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” and in a doomed nation this declaration, once taken to reveal the tragic foolishness of a crazy, heartless predator, is a largely-unspoken but no less universal truth.

I live in the Bay Area, a place elsewhere regarded as a haven for left-wing ex-hippies and other irrelevancies, a fairyland if you will, and even if you won’t, a place which was into green even before Al Gore win the Oscar, a place of “alternative”medicine, yoga, bicycles, hemp fiber clothing, well, you know...

Recently, a committee of the Golden Gate Bridge Board recommended that the span sell its name to corporate sponsorship. So far, public reaction has not been very positive, and so its proponents have adopted a camel’s-nose-under-the-tent-flap approach, maybe let someone put up a sign or something.

Why not? All of the great sporting events have been re-named. It’s not the Rose Bowl game, or the Crosby tournament. Athletes and movie stars now make more money in product endorsements than they do practicing whatever skills they possess. Salaries are obscene, with failed and even corrupt C.E.O.s of major enterprises raking in hundreds of millions. A ballplayer will sign to play for one club rather than another because he stands to collect fifty million instead of forty-eight million, and he’ll say with a straight face that it’s for his family.

I know, we’re all insecure. That’s the nature of life on the planet. Mortality. Temporal restriction. One day: oops. But healthy cultures and healthy people celebrate their lives, find joy and purpose, depth and divertissement, even love. None of that banishes insecurity, but it faces up to it.

I get the feeling that this money thing, its ascendency, its rank, sulfurous permeation of anything that moves, is a desperate, horribly mis-placed lunge for a security that does not exist, a substitute for everything which is missing in one’s personal life and in America’s national life.

A false God does not answer, and it must therefore be petitioned more frequently and at a louder and more insistent volume. That’s what’s going on in America now, and one needn’t be especially clever to figure out what this will lead to.

The early wire has it that several Republicans, eager to “embarrass” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are providing the votes to get Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s resolution to begin articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney to a hearing in the Judiciary Committee.

It’s an interesting idea. Nancy Pelosi, let’s face it, is ripe for embarassment. She’s been making the media circuit talking about how she understands why voters are pissed-off at Congress, doesn’t blame us a bit, but there’s just nothing the Democrats can do because they don’t have a veto-proof majority.

I have bad news for Ms. Pelosi: we are not as dumb as you evidently believe us to be. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, the Democrats can, if they choose, prevent Bush and Cheney from getting any of their sick program enacted. But in order to do that they would have to get serious, take them on, fight back. A little glue in the gears would do wonders, as Mario Savio might say.

But Nancy has her dignity and there’s Hillary to consider, and really, when you get right down to it, everybody’s already in 2008 Election mode, jockeying for money and caucus votes and endorsements. Various states are trying to out-maneuver each other to run their primaries earlier than everyone else, the Democratic National Committee – which wants your donations – has decreed that some of these primaries are now to be boycotted by candidates, which I suppose will show somebody something, although what it shows me is that the bloody bastards are prepared to disenfranchise the primary voters of those states in order to enforce some sort of discipline.

Jesus is not coming back. Conditions are worse than they were the last time.

Pelosi famously said that impeachment was “off the table,” around the same time that Bush and those other madmen were saying that hitting Iran with nuclear weapons was NOT off the table. So, my fellow Americans, who is crazier?

I know plenty about politicians. I used to be one. I have lived amongst them. I recall a time when there were some wonderful ones, some great ones. Young Americans, anyone under forty, will not know what that’s like. It sounds like a fairytale, doesn’t it? They live in an environment more hermetically sealed than that of sports heroes and film celebrities. They are too important to have real lives or many real friends. They believe their own rationalizations; they’ve had to in order to take the bribe money to get elected. How it works. Even the good ones go under after a while. Look at Pelosi.

The Republican move to force the hand of the Democratic leadership is a smart one but it’s a gamble. It’s smart – in that Karl Rove evil genius way – because it forces Pelosi to hammer it down. When she does it, and when the other candidates apart from Kucinich and Ron Paul denounce it, that will drive a greater wedge between the party and people like me.

But it’s dangerous, too. The thing about twistos like Rove, historically, is that their arrogance causes them to overreach. At some point, they miscalculate.

The House Judiciary Committee is empowered to issue subpoenas and to take testimony. It has the power to conduct investigations. It even has the power to drag Cheney from his undisclosed location and force him to answer questions.

Maybe this is not the time. My life experiences have tended to sand down some of my arrogance but I still miscalculate. Maybe the people of this country aren’t ready. Maybe we’re narcotized so perfectly with the consumer culture, the mind-numbing repetitions about “terrorism” and the need to just let the power-mad lunatics “protect” us from “the enemy” that we can’t stand up anymore.

But maybe it’s the time. Maybe enough people, angry at the wholesale abuse of the nation’s true meaning and purpose, at the daily revelations of torture, graft, outright theft, financial scandals, and the killings of innocent Iraqis for reasons which are barking mad, will use the internet to organize and flood Congress with demands so urgent and relentless that it will shake something loose.

Five years ago today, I think it is, a small plane crashed in Minnesota, killing everyone aboard, among whom were Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife and daughter, and three close aides. He was eulogized on the floor of that august chamber where he’d labored for twelve years as “the conscience of the Senate.”

It was Paul Wellstone who said:

“If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.”

It is apparent that in the United States Senate and in the House, among the Democratic party leadership which promised America that its election would change the Hell-bent policies of the Bush Regime, that point has clearly been reached.

But I digress. An old friend is fond of telling me, if I mention the ‘inconvenient truth’ which didn’t win an Oscar – the one about who murdered the President back in ancient history – that it has nothing to do with what’s happening now. There is no relationship between Dallas and, say, the imposition of unconstitutional police procedures against Americans, or various foreign adventures, or the fact that an election gets itself stolen here and there and nobody does shit about it.

No relationship at all.

Well, here’s one thing we may be able to agree on. When evil people, sociopaths with an interest in great political power, discover that they can get away with terrible acts, that the media will go to sleep and the congress will take vacations, and nobody seems interested in stopping them, then they figure, what the Hell, we can do anything at all. And they do.

The Attorney-General designee declines to say whether he believes torture to be torture.

A private mercenary army hired by multinational corporations who are sweeping up billions of dollars in Iraq is able to shoot people on the streets with impunity.

We are told that getting young men and women blown up by roadside bombs is “supporting them,” while trying to end the madness and bring these kids home is “unpatriotic.”

Massive public scams in nearly every available field, from the Savings and Loan travesty to the mortgage disaster result not in prison sentences for the perpetrators but government bail-outs.

It is now in the news, albeit buried, that the National Security Agency, the NSA, tried to force Quest Communications to assist it in spying on Americans at least eight months before 9-11. Does that suggest anything to you?

“If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.”

Paul Wellstone died five years ago. The conscience of the Senate and of the Democratic Party died with him. I don’t recall who said it, an observation by someone who knew him, after another inconvenient United States Senator was shot to death while trying to save his country: the stone is at the bottom of the hill.