Bernie Madoff could appreciate the symmetry: The filter controlling access to our national-level senators, representatives and, even, President, is shaped like a... pyramid. At the very top is the short list of people our rarified leadership will deign to see. Bottoming the weighty triangle is a much longer, easily ignored list of... us.

To get a foot in the door, or a call answered, requires influence. Some degree of power. And, sure, money...

A distressing trait in our brave, new post-Bush world is that the new juice looks a lot like the old juice - and the proportion of Beltway calls picked up seems to be weighted in favor of the lobbymeisters.

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Advice for anyone looking to perk up their day with a bright ray of sunshine, maybe a Disney tune, all in major chords, and endless fields of blooming flowers: Stay away from Chris Hedges' on the OpEd site. He doesn't see a speck light at the end of the meltdown tunnel. Ever.

And it's hard to argue with him:

The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

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Judging from the reaction in South Asia, Richard Holbrooke is attracting the same clamorous acclamation in his new post as Obama administration envoy that Charles Manson would draw as camp counselor for pre-teen girls.

And, probably, it won't ease discomfort in the tinderbox/powderkeg region that this Clinton Era retread (gosh, who isn't) is dubbed "The Bulldozer." From yesterday's Los Angeles Times:

Holbrooke, who embarks on his first official visit this week, has declared in recent months that the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a longtime American ally, has failed. In opinion columns, he has pointed to "massive, officially sanctioned corruption," along with drugs, as the country's most severe problems... Holbrooke has also called for vigorous action to deal with extremist sanctuaries in Pakistan. He charged that Pakistan has the power to destabilize its neighbor Afghanistan, "and has."

OK, that pretty much sews up the list of countries we've slated for strategic waterboarding this season. Since we've done just about everything short of saw a hole under the office chair of Karzai, and have been lulling Pakistanis with missile-strike targeted assassinations since last fall, shuttling Bulldozer off to these volatile, vital 'stans has really punched the message we mean bidness.

Forget about "change" for now. And cancel the fire extinguishers: The flamethowers have arrived...

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