Case in point: I got up this morning to the headline: "Social Security Checks to Shrink." Surely this makes a slew of Generation Xers cackle with glee. But some of us are trying to stay drunk on that check until our date with a heart attack or one of those death panels the Republicans are yammering about. Since January I've been telling my wife we could expect Social Security to start shrinking. Ever the concerned citizen, she replies "Can't you find another jag to get on? Eight months for god sake!"

To be honest though, I wasn't sure just how the Social Security scam would be run on us. All I knew was that the steady stream of payments into Social Security represents the last big hog still running the woods. Sooner or later corporate interests would gut it.

Corporate interests? Yup. It's like this. Congress and the president hands the public treasury to elite financial corporations, via bailouts, special tax breaks and cash stuffed aircraft carriers bound for their fortified French villas. Then Congress and the administration go looking for some new scheme to the pay for the Congressional Country Club out there in Bethesda, Maryland, the White House heating bill and money to keep Air Force One in toilet paper and armengnac marinated quail breasts.

This newest Social Security shell game is quite a bit slicker than the previous one. The old one consisted of simply ripping the money out of the SS fund, and replacing it with bad paper -- IOUs repayable in up to 100 years. Since our Social Security checks cannot be cut by law, the boys on the Hill had a problem. The solution was to raise the Medicare prescription drug premium deducted from SS payments. Now I ask you, could the old zombie war hero and the semi-slutty Alaskan have come up with anything like that? I doubt it. It takes a Harvard degree in constitutional law and a devil on your shoulder named Tim Geithner whispering the game plays in your ear.

A poster on AlterNet named "monkeywrench" observed that Obama couldn't have handed the corporate owners of this country more if he had been a Trojan Horse candidate. So prescient was the poster that I have highjacked his chain of thought herein. Could Obama be a Trojan horse? Maybe, but it would be a waste of time and effort. Trojan horses are not necessary in a country that has only one political party anyway -- Big Business. The Republicans vs. Democrats mock combats are mere bread and circuses for the sweaty clamoring crowd. Personally, I have no problem with that. I fully understand I was born under a corpocracy. But I do wish our masters grasped the importance of free alcohol in the suspension of disbelief.

Despite the traditional honeymoon, the Obama marriage to the people did not start on a good note. The checking account and all the credit cards were solely in the groom's name. Consequently we had the direct cash handout to Wall Street (smooch, smooch -- married one month and already the guy has another dame!). We howled when Bush did the same on the way out. But when Obama did Bush one better, or actually many times better, we all prayed he knew what he was doing in doing. Which was CPR on expiring bankers. But who knew? Perhaps pumping money into the bloated carcass of klepto-capitalism might revive the old trollop, eliciting those watery coughs and glazed blinks seen in drowning victims. So imagine our surprise when the ailing patient got up and kicked the hell out of the rescuers. "Whadda ya mean help out mortgage victims with some of this dough? Their job is to pay the friggin freight, stay in debt, not get out of it." Just down the beach the stock exchange lay, also flattened by the exploding housing bubble. Aroused by the smell of money, the market sits up for a moment, manages a weak smile, then plops out again. Then sits up, then buckles ... sits ... buckles ... sits ... buckles. This is what you get for 8.5 trillion samolians?