Every once in a while you’re confronted with too many choices as far as commentary goes…which is just ducky if you’re an aggregator, the smorgasbord fills itself.
Even I commonly group related articles but today we are all over the spectrum. From the war drums pounding over Iran (How ironic is it that North Korea has decided to {for the moment} ‘fall back in line’?) to another ‘overly optimistic’ reading of the unemployment situation.
Falling lay-offs DOES NOT mean hiring is increasing! It only means lay-offs are down, period!
But let’s not get sidetracked, shall we?
Anyway, last weeks squeaks about $ 4 dollar a gallon gasoline has give way to this weeks rumblings of $ 5 gasoline! (and circles back to our photos of a US destroyer ‘escorting’ an unknown flagged oil tanker through the straits of Hormuz.)
Would our bought and paid for media be willing to ‘pretend’ (a la Gulf of Tonkin) that the ship, if attacked, was US flagged?)
But that is not today’s story.
Nope today’s ‘common thread’ as close as I can tell is yet another US municipality facing…’insolvency’:
STOCKTON, Calif. — The signs of better times are easy to spot downtown: the picturesque marina on the San Joaquin Delta, the gleaming waterfront sports arena, and the handsome high-rise that was meant to house a new city hall. But those symbols are now bitter reminders of how bad things are here today: on Tuesday this city of almost 300,000 moved a step closer to becoming the nation’s largest city to declare bankruptcy.
During a contentious meeting that stretched late into the night, the City Council decided, nearly unanimously, to begin mediation with public employee unions and major bond creditors in what is widely seen as the city’s last-ditch attempt to restructure its finances outside of bankruptcy. Facing a budget deficit from $20 million to $38 million on a budget of roughly $165 million, the Council declared a fiscal emergency for the third year in a row.
“Right now we are a city that has frankly hit a wall,” Mayor Ann Johnston told the Council and hundreds of city residents who attended the meeting. “If the players don’t come together and agree to a fix, then we’re all in big trouble.”
‘The players?’ There are only three tax ‘divisions’ good citizen, commercial, residential and agricultural. Most cities don’t have an agricultural base to speak of (although farming or what could be called ‘agri-business’ is Big in the nation’s most populous state.
The trouble with Agri-business is it has lobbyists who keep taxes and fees low…not that there’s any real danger of this industry being ‘off-shored’…(not that our politicians are smart enough to realize that!)
Then there’s the ‘struggling to be competitive’ industrial sector of the US.
You can’t raise taxes on them, the foreign competition is already killing them from 6,000 miles away! (Figure that one out if you think you’re so smart!)
It’s a proven fact that workers in the cheaper there would starve to death if they had to pay the same prices the US/Western worker does!
But that’s not what the cheerleaders for globalization report (because to do so would be to point directly at financial fraud [and heavily subsidized food!] for our foreign competitors!
What does that leave? The mostly underemployed (and underpaid) ‘residential’ sector.
You know good citizen, I ‘allude’ to these things a lot (and I’m fairly confident that most of you ‘get it’, most of the time.)
BUT, FUCKING TICK-TOCK GOOD CITIZEN, the hands on the clock are moving ever closer to the detonation point, if YOU don’t shut it off, then KA-FUCKING-BOOM!
Which is to point out that if you let the city you live in sink under the waves, there will soon be nowhere to run…and worse, no place to hide!
Hide from whom, you ask?
Take your pick, they’re both criminals after the paychecks stop.
Which is to say more than a few former law enforcement personnel will put their badges to ‘good use’ long after the agency that issued their badges became defunct.
What the hell, a shakedown is a shakedown even after there are no judges!
Now there is ‘Jefferson County’ in Alabama that very publicly went bust then there was that city in Rhode Island that went under due to public pension malfeasance…(and so far NOBODY has been busted for that one either!)
And now it’s Stockton…although wasn’t there another city in CA that led this whole thing off. They ‘disappeared’ it (the city was dissolved and cut up into pieces, which were ‘absorbed’ by the surrounding communities, whether they could afford it or not!)
Ven something…
Anyway, it is neither here nor there because the end result is the same.
What is that ‘end result’?
A Banana Republic, of course!
Where the rich live good and everybody else, the few that survive, scramble for the scraps or rot in jail for ‘stealing’ (what should have been theirs in the first place!)
Funny how it all starts off with the wealth getting ‘concentrated’ in the hands of the devious few…and by the time things start falling apart, nobody seems to know what to do about it.
Which brings us to where we are now.
Because the next step is a semi-permanent state of something resembling ‘martial law’ where it becomes impossible to distinguish between a cop and a soldier…hey, wait a minute! It already IS impossible to tell!
Let the attack begin!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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