Counsel

Greetings good citizen,

Only eleven more shopping days until the end of the world as we know it! While the stations owned by Fox News are still trying to make a story about bit of cosmic weirdness left behind by a long defunct civilization, others have written off the doomsday predictions when tangible proof of inevitable doom failed to materialize over the summer.

Not that said ‘doom’ isn’t going to happen! We are hurtling towards a disaster that can’t be seen with a telescope or measured with a seismograph yet it will destroy our civilization just as surely as it has destroyed every (human) society before ours.

Which is to point out that even the Mayan predictions of eminent doom are expected to be ‘survivable’, the question, as always is what will rise from the ashes?

And for some fucked up reason, people keep letting the ‘opportunists’ take the reins…and down the same old path we run!

Um, since we are at the tail end of what passes for ‘civil society’ the following is an incomplete picture of how we got to where we are:

The 6 Economic Facts of Life in America That Allow the Rich to Run off with Our Wealth

Do you ever wonder why it takes the average family 47 years to make as much as a hedge fund honcho makes in one hour?

1. The super-rich are stealing our fair share of productivity. The U.S. economy is enormously productive. Since 1947, the amount of goods and services we produce per hour of labor has risen by nearly 300 percent. That's because as a nation, we blend together a potent mix of effort, skills, technology and organizational capacities.

2. Americans really want a wealth distribution more like Sweden's. First, virtually all Americans greatly underestimated the degree of inequality in our economy today. They had no idea how extreme the U.S. wealth distribution really is -- which goes to show you what a good job the super-rich have done in mis-educating us.

Second, when asked to construct an ideal distribution of income, 92 percent of Americans preferred radically more equality – on a par with the social democratic state of Sweden! What’s more, it didn’t matter whether the respondent was a Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Everyone wanted more economic fairness.

3. Everything we hear about government debt is wrong. Right now, the biggest target of public mis-education is the government debt debate. And the biggest spender on the mis-education of the American public is billionaire Pete Peterson.

4. We are under-taxed, not over-taxed. The super-rich want us to believe that taxes are too high and that those taxes are harming job creation and economic growth. It's a fabrication.

5. Government jobs are just as good as private sector jobs. Another major con job concerns the attack on public employees. The greedy rich are trying to pit public and private sector workers against each other in large part because public employees still seem to have benefits the rest of us have lost (and they have unions…

6. Wall Street needs to be shrunk (until we can drown it in a bathtub.) The function of finance is simple: moving our savings into productive investments. By doing so, money supposedly moves to where it will do the most good for our economy. This function is considered so simple that most economics textbooks ignore Wall Street entirely.

Does anyone else see the irony in the use of Grover Norquist’s famous quip about government being applied by the writer, who is a champion of ‘saving’ predatory capitalism from the scrap yard of history (where it belongs.)

Perhaps not and perhaps it is this same blindness to hypocrisy that dooms us to repeat the mistakes of the past.

But I digress.

These bullet points do not constitute the whole article and my removing them from the main body of the text has likely altered their intended meaning.

Suits me fine, maybe not so much if we were to ask the writer…

Whatever.

The main thrust of this article is mis-information that is foist upon the rest of us by a ‘for profit’ media (which we need to do away with ASAP!)

Here’s a case where we see the problem but are powerless to fix it because of our ‘attachment’ to money.

It’s going to be more fucked up when we’re all starving to death thanks to ‘insufficient funds’ (which actually has nothing to do with nothing…except perhaps gross mismanagement.)

Which brings us full circle with the selective blindness thing, that which we see but choose to ‘ignore’.

Casting into doubt the assertion that ‘ignorance can be fixed’ (sometimes people don’t want to be ‘cured’.)

How about you good citizen? You are wise enough to seek counsel beyond your peer group…what you do with that counsel is entirely up to you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner