Class confusion...

Greetings good citizen,

Were someone to ask you what you thought (believed) your ‘class membership’ was, how would you answer?

Tragically, many of you would mistakenly identify yourself as ‘middle class’, hell that’s the catch phrase all of the politicians use…(so it must be true!)

If you’re homeless you MIGHT suck it up and admit to being ‘poor’ (not that this helps or proves anything, circumstances change all of the time.)

Unsurprisingly, there is just as much confusion/mis-identification when it comes to accurately classifying the ‘upper classes!

Life Among the Plutocrats -- What Unimaginable Wealth Does to a Person
They control our politics, shape our societies, outsource our jobs.

January 4, 2013 |

Reviewed:Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, by Chrystia Freeland (Doubleday, Canada 2012)

Last year the Occupy movement brought the subject of inequality into public debate, and especially the inequality between those of us in the 99 per cent and the happy few in the one per cent. But Chrystia Freeland has been studying the happy few for years, and has spent many hours talking with some of their most famous and powerful members.

The result is a book full of surprises and insights. Today's plutocrats are the latest variation on an old theme, and at the same time they're strikingly new in many ways.

Societies have supported plutocratic classes at least since ancient Rome, and the Gilded Age of the US after the Civil War presaged our own: A rising class of self-made men, imaginative exploiters of new technology and wider trade. Then it was the telegraph and the railroad; now it's the internet and the container ship.

So, now we have ‘plutocrats’ being (mis) identified by their tychoonish traits rather then their inherited and very much ‘entrenched wealth’.

So Joe Bootstrapper is a ‘plutocrat’ (which is antithetical to the term ‘self-made man’.)

It is not my intention to kick the author in the shins for abusing a term, I regularly do it myself.

My point, such as it is, is how muddy the waters of ‘class’ have become. Most people ‘self-identify’ as being ‘middle class’ whether they are or they aren’t.

Like I said, you only ‘might’ get a homeless person to admit to being poor, just as you’d be equally as hard-pressed to get a ‘well-born’ individual to admit he was a ‘plutocrat’.

S/He’ll readily admit to being ‘upper class’ but vehemently deny being a ‘One Percenter’ (given the amount of bad press associated with the term recently.)

While the real fox in the hen house is the ONE TENTH of One Percent!

What do we call them (besides peckerheads) if not ‘plutocrats’?

Most would agree that ‘plutocrat’ is pretty much interchangable with ‘oligarch’ as both terms exemplify entrenched wealth AND power…both political and legal…(such as it is.)

Perhaps it is my personal conviction that ‘all money is funny’ that is giving me this quaint ‘comprehension problem’…

While money has often been equated in the ignorant person’s mind with power, money is actually meaningless. Tens of trillions of it can be whipped up instantly with the stroke of a pen! (Our failed banking industry has proven that by ‘conjuring’ a quadrillion dollars US into existence out of thin air!)

Just because the bought and paid for corporate owned media ignores this doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Nope, the ‘real problem’ is our house is burning down around us and while we all know this, nobody is doing anything to put the fire out…

Soon all that will be left are ashes…and memories.

Why is this seeming unthinkable thing happening?

Could it be because we have surrounded ourselves with traitors (who are in it for themselves) and our so-called ‘academics’ don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground?

How stunningly stupid is it that the ‘smartest guys in the room’ are running around with their hair on fire?

Re-directing once again, I am compelled to ask how we can expect to solve the problem if we can’t agree on the cause?

The OWS movement put the One Percent into the crosshairs…but failed to pull the trigger.

Now we have works like this one attempting to muddy the waters by calling innovators ‘plutocrats’ simply because they’re rich…

Mr. Zuckerburg is ‘rich’ but he’s hardly the ‘menace to society’ most of his ‘cousins’ at Harvard are.

In fact you have to wonder just how successful Facebook would have been if it hadn’t gotten its start in the ‘plutocracy’ (entrenched climate of wealth and power) that IS Harvard?

Money does not a ‘plutocrat’ make.

In the end it’s about old family ties and the ability to bend reality to your liking that makes one a ‘plutocrat/oligarch’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

First Person Shooter...

Greetings good citizen…

I’m sure many of you are ‘anticipating’ how I will address the most recent wave of violence erupting across our crumbling civilization...

And I’ll repeat what I’ve been screaming about all along…although you’ll now see certain ‘between the lines’ and ‘assumed’ universals (things everybody knows but few acknowledge) brought to the fore.

First let’s look at the ‘culture of violence’ we are expected to shrug off like it doesn’t effect us.

How many of you are connecting yesterday’s gunning down of Connecticut school children with drones killing civilians halfway around the planet (who are ‘posthumously’ labeled ‘terrorists’ by the corporate owned media to justify this ‘murder’?)

But a little closer to home we need look no further than the prevalence of ‘first person shooter’ video games that kids like Mr. Lanza grew up playing.

What doe this do to a child’s Id?

Sure as hell ‘desensitizes’ them to the idea of shooting someone to death…doesn’t it.

And what was one of the headlines on my homepage news feed this morning? How violent video games are the ‘top seller’ at retailers this Christmas.

How much of this is caused by Halo, Call of Duty or Assassin’s creed?

More succinctly, what drove this anti-social loner to first KILL HIS OWN MOTHER and THEN take up arms and drive down to the local elementary school (as opposed to a shopping mall) and open fire?

Do you think we should start mandatory testing (for psychopathy) now or should we wait until a few more thousand are murdered?

Will the next psycho cut to the chase and blow the whole school up?

Hell, we’ve already let the ‘high functioning’ psychopaths destroy the global economy so what’s the senseless murder of a few dozen innocents matter?

When there’s a ‘free for all’ out in the streets it will be too late. The bonds that prevent us from killing one another on sight are wearing perilously thin.

How many times do I need to repeat this before SOMETHING (like TESTING) is done?

Or would we discover that drawing our children from the bottom of a test tube (another crisis that the media purposefully ignores) is adding to what Mother Nature might naturally screen out? (Like the sudden surge in nut allergies and the insane jump in asthma rates?)

But no, we couldn’t possible be talking about the same thing…except we are now coming into the ‘maturation’ of the first generation of ‘test tube’ babies.

And with it nobody wants to connect the alarming rise in the rates of ADD and other ‘socialization’ problems that have been ignored…because the source of every one of these afflictions is…rabid capitalism (profits before people!)

Why are females ‘waiting’ so long to start families? Because they want to establish their careers first…so they go to school and work during their prime childbearing years, leaving most of them barren by the time they make their heap (or say yes to the guy who has been chasing them since they were in High School.)

No money, no family!

What do you suppose our young shooter saw that the fucking asshole corporate owned media is doing its damnedest to ignore?

He saw a system that didn’t have a place for him and determined that no matter how he sliced it, he had nothing to lose!

He killed his mother for bringing him here in the first place and he killed those kids as a ‘favor’ to them. While he’s not here to ask I would bet he believed he was doing them a ‘kindness’ (albeit a left-handed one.)

Which also shines a spotlight on just what kind of monsters we’re dealing with here (and I mean that figuratively because we are factually doing nothing about this.)

So, I have pissed off my female readers and all of the parents in my audience…but like I have said repeatedly, I’m not here to be ‘popular’, nor is it my purpose to tell you what to think.

My ‘mission’ is to provide you with things to think about by offering up a different perspective than the corporate owned media serves up.

Yes, they lie to you religiously and you don’t hate them…(you may catch yourself muttering ‘bullshit’ under your breath a lot but you don’t begrudge them doing you the disservice of lying to you in order to protect the oligarchs.)

Yup, nobody questions that the stacked deck has become obvious just as nobody questions the futility of living from lottery to lottery, hoping you can set yourself free from the debt trap you were born into.

I’ll ask (rhetorically) if our shooter was ‘wrong’ in his assessment of the future that led him to act so…

Rationality is a very fragile thing, what seems senseless to you may appear perfectly logical to someone else.

If we back up a few steps, the society that bred this killer is NOT blameless…

I say the ‘root’ of this disease lies in a predatory social structure that leaves the individual on their own to deal with problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

We would be very lucky indeed if the Mayans were right and this predatory mess we are snared in ‘died’ on 12/21/12…

So what do you say good citizen, are you feeling lucky?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hail Anarchy!

Greetings good citizen,

For the longest time Anarchy has gotten a bad rap under our capitalist society…mostly because our leaders DON’T want YOU thinking and deciding for yourself!

How long would the thieves on Wall Street gone unprosecuted if YOU had something to say about it?

Wouldn’t YOU be screaming for the head of those supposed to be in charge of investigating this sort of thing?

Because under A Simple Plan you can (and will) institute action (that must be answered to!)

Not that the kind of fraud we are seeing today will even be possible under A Simple Plan but the fact that those in charge are answerable directly to ANY MEMBER of the public is a true game changer.

Um, like communism, there are many different ‘varieties’ of Anarchy, A Simple Plan is based on the ‘Rules without Rulers’ variety.

While I have been advised that my, er, ‘type’ of Anarchy is close to a variety championed by Bakunin (who was executed by the Bolsheviks) I am unfamiliar with the specifics of Kropotkinism…

It seems that everywhere, these days, people are talking about anarchism. Now Dmitry Orlov joins the discussion with a 3-part series, “In Praise of Anarchy.” Utilizing primarily the work of the 19th century Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, Orlov argues that anarchy, rather than hierarchy, is the dominant pattern in nature, that hierarchical organizations ultimately end in collapse, and that the impending collapse of the capitalist industrial system presents an opportunity for the emergence of anarchism.

Orlov,(aka kollapsnik at Club Orlov), is probably best-known for his book, Reinventing Collapse, in which he compares the collapse of the Soviet Union with the imminent collapse of the United States. Russian-born Orlov is in a unique position to make such comparisons. He immigrated to the USA when he was twelve years old, and, as an adult, made numerous trips back to the former USSR in the years immediately following the collapse of its political and economic system.

With a wry Russian wit I find immensely attractive, Orlov describes in Reinventing Collapse how people in the USSR were better positioned than are Americans for economic collapse. For example, most Soviet citizens did not own their homes; instead they lived in state-owned dwellings. When the USSR collapsed, they simply remained where they were and nobody evicted them. Compare that with the United States, where people were seduced into signing questionable mortgage agreements for outrageously priced homes, and where, since the economic crisis of 2008, 3 million have been foreclosed upon.

Unhelpfully, this article goes on to compare life in ‘post-communist’ Russia with living conditions in the US just after the collapse of the financial markets.

What this has to do with Anarchy is unclear…although the writer points to Orlov’s background as a naturalist and his observations on nature to reinforce the concepts of Anarchy…

Much like this video explores Darwinism as a justification for the excesses of capitalism…

The video is an hour long and provides a curious window into the mindset that brought us the original Great Depression…

I have not visited ‘Club Orlov’ and it remains unclear whether or not Alternet will run the remainder of the series…I am assuming they skipped the first installment as this one seems to indicate it is the ‘middle’ piece.

I have to give Orlov credit though, he states the Darwin (actually Spencer’s) term ‘survival of the fittest’ is merely the fastest route to extinction…which is to point out that ‘fitness’ has many more aspects to it than the fitness of the individual.

Man’s success is predicated on his ability to pull together with other members of his species to achieve larger goals and to overcome other, more virulent competitors.

So this ‘survival of the fittest’ bullshit has actually had a dampening effect on our social development…so a few could be rich.

Which leaves us to ponder how we protect the bulk of our species from the few self-centered enough to betray the trust of the rest?

I posit that the best preventative here is to place the levers of power beyond the reach of the self-interested…which is what *A Simple Plan does.

[* Part of the testing feature that governs advancement also measures the candidate’s moral compass. You can ace the technical aspects but if your moral compass is broken, you will NOT advance.]

Most psycho paths believe others are ‘too stupid’ to know they are being played…this is a shortcoming in the psychopath…because everyone KNOWS who is a few fries shy of a Happy Meal and that they need to be watched.

The only ones the psycho is fooling is themselves. Everybody else has a ‘good idea’ something’s wrong with the clever guy who talks down to everyone…

But I digress…

This is supposed to be an opportunity to talk up anarchy, and idea whose time is long overdue!

I designed A Simple Plan with certain laws already in place so we could avoid having the ‘I didn’t vote for that’ bullshit that some people will engage in regardless.

The idea was to lay down a framework that enabled us to vote on the laws we want without having to hold critical ballots that preserve our freedoms…like the Human Anti-Exploitation Law.

It’s so basic you can only marvel why it isn’t already a law…but then you take a quick look around and you know the answer.

It’s a ‘choice’ those who are screwing you left and right DON’T want YOU to have.

With that one law as the cornerstone of our new civilization, everything else falls into place.

There is also a law about new proposed laws that forbids legislation that isn’t ‘universal’ in nature.

Which is to say it prevents stupid laws like ‘Only white people can vote’…

Or only the military can be armed…

Seriously good citizen, you have to be extremely careful with what you prohibit.

Protecting the few at the expense of the rest is a recipe for tyranny.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

A Fire Bell in the Night...

Greetings good citizen,

After yesterday’s, er, ‘delays’ I will endeavor to be more timely with today’s post.

I’d like to begin today’s offering by being abundantly clear that there is NO VERSION, however benign, (which is, naturally, an oxymoron) of capitalism that is capable of repairing our badly broken social model.

As I have stated before (repeatedly), the ‘unemployment problem’ is a mechanical one that can be fixed, partly by adjusting the workweek and partly by restructuring the payroll process.

In fact the biggest ‘fix’ to overall ‘social inequity’ lies in the Human Anti-exploitation Law.

How many of you believe we successfully ended slavery in 1863, here in the US?

You would be dead wrong.

Outlawing the ‘bill of sale’ merely made ‘Massa’ no longer responsible for the welfare of the, er, ‘named property.’

It is now up to the property to maintain itself…and if he/she is incapable of doing that on what Massa pays that is NOT Massa’s problem, it is and remains to this day the PROPERTY’S PROBLEM!

Some of you will object to the ‘broad brush’ being used here and you’d be correct, not ALL employers are penny-pinching skinflints. I’ll even take that one step further and ‘opine’ that most employers would relish the idea of being able to brag about how well they treat their people…but Wall Street won’t let them!

Most of you are unaware of this, er, ‘historic event’ but nearly thirty years ago there was a Supreme Court decision handed down on that controversial subject of ‘the purpose of commerce’.

Worse, most of you remain ignorant of what the Supreme Court decided.

Ironically, this goes back to the days (presidency) of Ronnie Reagan and a supposedly ‘liberal leaning’ Supreme Court…although I believe Ronnie had just succeeded in putting an end to that liberal bias due to the death of a noted liberal jurist that King Ronnie got to replace.

But enough suspense…in fact you SHOULD KNOW this.

For reasons unknown the issue of the ‘purpose of commerce’ had again been dragged before the Supreme Court…and this time the court found for the plaintiff!

By declaring unequivocally that the ‘sole responsibility’ of a corporation was to earn ‘profits for the shareowners’.

So a CEO who, er, ‘lavished’ pay and benefits upon their employees could be SUED (by, er, ‘activist shareowners’) for fiscal irresponsibility!

Keep that in mind as we delve into the subtext of this article that was written by a man smart enough to know better but apparently not interested enough in finding a solution to care…

We begin with the first paragraph of ‘tripe’:

The American Jobs Act proposed by President Obama in September includes subsidies in the form of re-employment services, wage insurance, work-sharing benefits and self-employment assistance. Stephen A. Wandner of the Urban Institute and the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research testified before the Senate Finance Committee this month and offered a number of other ideas that have been successful on an experimental basis. Among them are comprehensive job search assistance and re-employment bonuses.

IF the above named programs comprise the ’central platform’ of the Obama jobs program then I, for one, am pleased that they have been blocked!

‘Re-employment services’ do not and CAN NOT ‘create’ jobs that don’t exist…so what are these services being ‘paid’ to do? They are being paid to fit square pegs into round holes.

How will they accomplish this ‘temporary at best’ measure? With ‘Wage Insurance, of course! Naturally nobody is asking what happens when the ‘wage insurance’ fund runs dry. If the worker would have starved to death on the wages the job paid before wage insurance, how is he/she supposed to survive on it once ‘wage insurance’ is no longer available?

Next on the list is an aspect of one of my own proposed solutions…but with a key ingredient missing!

Work Sharing is the only way the unemployment crisis will be solved…but I may be speaking too soon as there are plans in the works to significantly reduce the, er, ‘surplus population’ (via famine.)

It is an ancient curse but effective…and it plays directly to the huge inequity that currently exists…and YOU thought it was all ‘accidental’!

But I digress, back to ‘work-sharing’.

You can, er, ‘subsidize’ workers who ‘share’ a job…the job may pay ‘good money’ but no so good that you could live on half a week’s pay…and therein is the main difference between my proposal and the idea of, er, ‘subsidizing’ people who will ultimately be forced to ‘share’ work.

Work sharing doesn’t float if there isn’t a proportionate reduction in the expense picture!

If you intend to ‘halve’ someone’s pay you had best halve their expenses as well!

Mr. Schiller continues:

The stakes are very high here, and they are not just economic. As anger rises in today’s economy, I’m reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s words about the danger of “angry passions” arising between the North and South over the question of extending slavery to the Missouri territory. In an 1820 letter, he wrote that “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.” He went on to predict, from his observations of such rancor, the secession of the South that was to come 40 years later.

Our country is a much more stable and just society now than it was in 1820. Still, we should regard the current economic dispute as another fire bell in the night. It is important to recreate the sense of a just society, without anger — and an important step in that direction is to ensure that there are enough jobs.

What proof does Mr. Schiller offer that this nation is either ‘more just or more stable’? Just his own opinion, which he is perfectly entitled to.

But I quibble, let us move on.

How many of you have already discerned the reason I chose these two particular paragraphs to close with?

Pretty bright crowd around here! Most of you got it.

Naturally, the ‘tie-in’ comes from my earlier query regarding the ‘alleged abolition’ of slavery.

Just because nobody has a bill of sale with your name on it is insufficient proof that you aren’t a slave.

How fortuitous is it that we currently have the potential to end once and for all vast social inequity (a certain degree is unavoidable but those differences should always be restricted to qualitative rather than quantitative ones.)

The human anti-exploitation law facilitates work sharing by greatly reducing the worker’s expense picture, thereby guaranteeing them a ‘living wage’.

Simply put, the anti-exploitation law prohibits anyone from making their living off of someone else’s labor.

Free a last good citizen! No more landlords, no more utility bills, hell, if it’s a service, it’s free to you (just like it used to be free to the owner!)

And prices will finally ‘stabilize’ because commerce IS NOT AND NEVER SHOULD BE a ‘for profit’ venture.

See good citizen, there IS a sustainable/workable social model available…and we still get to ram it up the 1%’s ass too!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Statistically skewed...

Greetings good citizen,

The next couple of days will tell us whether OWS is dead or just re-grouping.

This has the POTENTIAL to be the spark that ignites a long overdue conflagration…but I don’t get the sense that the 99% understands what’s at stake.

While we wait to see how things will play out in Peoria, er, (Zurcotti Park) we get this evidence that the gulf grows ever wider

Whether their consumers are feeling pressured or flush now, the retail executives indicated they did not expect things to change soon.

“In the U.S., we still do not see, and do not expect to see in the near term, any meaningful tailwind from the housing market,” said Frank Blake, Home Depot’s chairman and chief executive.

“I feel good about the luxury consumer,” Mr. Sadove of Saks said. [He would, wouldn’t he?]

Referring to the Wal-Mart shopper’s dependence on paychecks and government-assistance payments rather than savings, Mr. Davis said that “going forward we really would not expect anything different.”

Understand that the ‘initial report’ SAYS retail sales are ‘up’…but a fraction of a single percent could be nothing more than inflation.

Now a ‘gain’ in the upper end of the retail sector does, by no stretch of the imagination, mean the economy is recovering in ANY meaningful terms.

As an ‘indicator’ this data is totally worthless.

While it is possible to base a business on a particular class of consumer, you had better not configure your economy on the same basis if you don’t want a huge criminal class on your hands.

One of the advantages of ‘civil society’ is a reasonable degree of security and freedom from being victimized by the desperate (who generally wouldn’t exist under a ’well-managed’ social system.)

But nobody is calling the current predatory system we suffer with today ‘well-managed’.

And perhaps that’s what is ‘holding us back’, the common belief that what we’ve got is as good as it gets.

While the criminals couldn’t hope for better, the rest of us can easily imagine significant improvements across the board (without entertaining ‘la-la land’ extremes!)

Hell, A Simple Plan instantly elevates prospects for all ‘non-criminals’ considerably (at, ironically, the criminals’ expense.) It also involves absolutely NO ‘magic or magical thinking’ whatsoever!

Left to our imagination is whether or not the coordinated, multi-city ‘take-down’ of the OWS movement will be the last we hear of the desperate kids who correctly identified themselves as members of the ‘silent majority’, silent because they have had their voices stolen from them by a political system that ignores them completely (and with impunity no less!)

Which may be the least of our problems if Europe erupts into civil war…

Considering the potential outcomes, better there than here.

Because if Europe falls, the US is right behind it.

Oh, and guess what will happen once the banking system collapses? The government will be, ‘dismissed’ and a military junta established to ‘protect’ the guilty from being prosecuted.

The curious part is who will be ‘fed to the wolves’ to placate the angry public?

At the moment it looks like the cops are being served up on a silver platter…(along with the rest of the corrupt justice system.)

Is OWS really protesting Wall Street or are they protesting the Justice System’s utter failure to prosecute ‘White Collar’ criminals?

Few of us delude ourselves, we KNOW our leadership as well as our political system are corrupt beyond repair. What we don’t know is what to do about it…and even that’s a ‘cop-out’, we know what needs doing but we lack the necessary ‘unity’ to actually do it.

Until some brave people martyr themselves for the cause (25,000 died for the 40 hour work week, just as an example) the lack of positive motion will unbroken…and that’s all ‘evil’ needs to thrive.

Ironically, it is the worthless corporate owned media this is preventing people from martyring themselves. Why let yourself be murdered for a cause if no one will ever know?

That is why the initial target should be the worthless media itself.

As Alternet comments, the ‘social media’ pulled off a complete ‘black-out’ of the police action to, er, eradicate the OWS encampments.

So is the ‘status quo’ strangling the baby while it still fits in a bathtub?

Sure looks that way.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are living in a defacto ‘dictatorship of the privileged, the criminally privileged but privileged none the less.

The problem with the criminally privileged is they refuse to recognize law of any kind so they are, by default, ‘out of control’.

Worse, they are ‘in charge’ of this nation’s military-industrial complex (which is how they got away with dismantling it right under our noses!)

But it’s one thing to own something and quite another to bend that thing to your will.

Mercenaries aside, I don’t believe they have cracked the problem of ordering civilian soldiers to fire on their own people…yet.

That’s why the ‘propaganda machine’ has to go first!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What's in it for you?

Greetings good citizen,

After plummeting last week the stock market is in positive territory as far as the eye can see this morning…I don’t need to caution you that a lot can change in a few hours.

For some bizarre reason, last week’s ‘losing propositions’ have, once again, magically transformed themselves into ‘bargains’ as ‘traders’ demonstrate their complete lack of rationality.

What if the whole world was subject to this utterly irrational behavior? Would civilization even exist?

The disturbing answer to the second statement is yes because the only thing that is ‘irrational’ about civilization is the totally arbitrary rules regarding money.

The true mystery is why we continue to tolerate this nonsense.

Sadly, the answer comes in the form of ‘you don’t have a choice’ and for some really bizarre reason, the topic never seems to come up in polite conversation…

I don’t need to rub your nose in the pile of excrement for you to make the connection. You ‘slave away’ for the same thing the assholes gets handed to them by the bucketful for doing nothing.

You want a ‘little more’? You are forced to prove you are ‘deserving’ of more, usually by knifing your co-workers in the back.

The self-serving chiseler that pays you has ZERO incentive to pay you a solitary penny MORE than anyone else…and (s)he pays all of them the least (s)he can get away with.

You know it’s not ‘worth it’ but it’s the ‘only game in town’, well there is another game but it isn’t nearly as much fun…if that’s what you want to call the daily exercise in humiliation you currently experience.

Which brings us to the ‘starting point’ of A Simple Plan, what’s in it for you?

If it takes more than a ‘leveling of the playing field’ to satisfy you then you aren’t going to like this; which is sad because you probably have never considered just how much better off you’d be if only you could catch an even break!

Think about this one for a minute…what if you WEREN’T someone else’s ‘income stream’? How many things are you forced to pay for (most of them perpetually) that should be ‘free’?

Understand that 99% of all personal income is derived from ‘paychecks’, only owners get to pay themselves, er, ‘creatively’.

Is the answer we’re looking for here to have everybody become ‘owners’?

There’s a damn good reason ‘capitalist utopia’ doesn’t exist and the simple answer is ‘market share’.

Here’s our ‘educational thought’ for the day…how many of you are aware that your employer charges more for your services than (s)he pays you? More interestingly, there is a ‘multiplier’ involved…this multiplier varies with the specific industry and in some cases it gets pretty outrageous.

For example Cisco Systems (a few years back) reported they ‘earned’ over $600,000 ‘per employee’…and you know damn well they don’t pay the rank and file anywhere near that much!

Why doesn’t ‘management’ accept the same conditions they force upon you?

If we flip that rock over we arrive at the price issue, how much more are you paying so the management at Cisco can ‘reap’ $600,000 each on every employee they have?

How is this NOT price gouging?

Just a little something to think about; worse, this is related to the ‘goofiness’ that is stock prices!

Essentially, everything is free (to the ‘owner’) and because of this, ‘stocks’ are worthless.

Stick ‘em up!

Which is another way of saying if ‘money’ doesn’t make any sense then working for money makes even less sense!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

A Simple Plan

A Simple Plan
(Reader's Digest Version)

I have a bad tendency to go off on tangents…so much so that people seem unable to grasp the concepts put forth in A Simple Plan

This is an attempt to rectify that tendency.

A Simple Plan is based on a few central concepts

The first core concept is the ‘human anti-exploitation law’. This outlaws anyone from personally profiting from the labor of another. The buying and selling of labor has another name: we call it slavery.

The second core concept is direct democracy. It is vital to the survival/prosperity of a society to remove the law beyond the reach of the self-interested. A vast majority of the laws on our books today exist to protect the interests of the people that sponsored them and no one else…

In order to ensure justice, the law must be the exclusive domain of everyone that lives under them. Anyone can propose a law, as there won’t be a legislature.

To prevent being forced to run to the polls ten times daily, all proposed laws would have to first pass the ‘golden rule’ test before being submitted for a vote.

The third core concept is universal employment, that all members of society are guaranteed employment that pays a living wage.

The fourth core concept is your money is for you (and only you.) All money will be electronic and there won’t be a way to transfer funds between individuals. It will not be possible (nor necessary) to go into debt.


My first attempt at explaining the four concepts resulted in 75 rather confused pages. The second attempt ran 140 pages and was even murkier because it introducing new concepts.

This time I’ll stick to the four core concepts and keep it simple.

I provide the human anti-exploitation law as ‘number one’ because it is the most important piece of the puzzle. It could even be argued that it is the only ‘necessary’ piece, the others are optional.

Your liberty, the freedom to pursue your own destiny resides in the human anti-exploitation law.

If you believe it is your ‘destiny’ to be an employer, a ‘shining beacon of stability’ for all the ‘employee wannabe’s’ out there, you are admitting you are no better then a 18th century planter…a slaver.

The human anti-exploitation law forbids any person or entity earning their living by buying and selling the fruit of ‘anyone’s’ brow.

It goes a step further than that. Since debt would also be illegal (debt is exploitative) there wouldn’t be a way to raise the capital so you could own your own automated factory. (Nor would anyone be able to ‘gift’ you such a sum…for a couple of reasons.)

Buying and selling would also be considered ‘exploitative’ due to ‘uneven access to information’. The seller knows their ‘true cost’ and is under no obligation to inform the buyer.

So ALL buying and selling between private parties (a.k.a. individuals/corporations) would be outlawed.

Naturally, the elimination of commerce’s ability to use you as a beast of burden would, by default, outlaw corporations.

Because all ‘owners’ (save some sole proprietors) derive their living from the efforts of others.

So, who would we work for if we no longer worked for ‘the man’?

Who would cut our paychecks…or would we bother with money at all?

Here we must shift mental gears to address a cruel fallacy perpetuated by capitalists.

You know what they are calling ‘deflation’, that descending spiral where falling wages leads to falling sales which leads to falling employment?

Do you know why this happens? The answer lies in the ‘hierarchy of needs’. There are only a handful of things that are ‘indispensable’. We are constantly bombarded with product offerings but most of them are ‘discretionary’, you can survive without them.

Simply put, the economy is ‘imploding’ because people are no longer buying what they don’t ‘need’.

To the flip side of this we have the issue of jobs. If only the most basic industries offered consistent employment…what would the vast majority of us do to support ourselves?

Thirdly, there is the resources issue…a tremendous amount of strategic resources are squandered producing products that few need and even fewer can afford.

But I’m going ‘off track’ again.

How ‘few’ are our needs? I came up with a list of only 11 ‘unique’ fields of endeavor, I added a twelfth to provide an interface between the original eleven as well as to provide the consumer with ‘one stop shopping’.

If you examine the list of SIC codes, the world of work has hundreds of different niches but most of them aren’t ‘unique’. Rather than create dozens of wasteful ‘layers’ of management (each with its own little narrowly defined patch of turf to defend) it’s best to keep it simple and consolidated from the start.

If you can no longer work for ‘Joe Blow, LLC.’ It’s okay, you are ‘guaranteed’ employment with one of the twelve ‘divisions’.

Why can you work for a ‘division’ and not for ‘Joe’? Because the divisions are ‘non-profits’…they don’t exist to earn money for their owners, they exist to support and advance the ‘common good’.

Your ‘paycheck’ is cut directly by the ‘end –user’ of the products you make and the services you provide, society itself.

There will be no such thing as a ‘central bank’ nor will there be ‘private banks’ as ‘banking’ will be an internal function of the division that employs you.

Here we touch upon the fourth ‘core concept’ where the fact that Mother Nature doesn’t have a cash register means that money is only useful to the individual as a tool with which they can build the kind of life/lifestyle they desire.

Money serves to regulate access to that which is in short supply. First come, first serve does not preserve the supply of highly desirable items that would result in shortages and lead to unrest.

Money is the most effective tool there is to prevent hoarding, the bane of all ‘open’ social models. It is here that the ‘non-transferability’ of funds between individuals is essential.

It’s not too difficult to see how the um, ‘independent minded’ would hoard or steal goods to sell at a premium for their personal profit.

The only reliable way to plug this gaping hole in the supply chain is to remove the ‘customer’ from the equation.

Since the divisions don’t exist to earn profits, prices would be set according to availability. Theft would reduce availability, thus driving up the price for everyone.

Understand that the divisions being non-profit means, by extension, there wouldn’t be a stock market.

We’d all ‘own’ the means of production and our ‘dividend’ would be the ability to buy everything at the lowest price possible across the board, not just on the products your division produced.

There would be multiple other benefits to be derived from not being exploited. The most significant of these would be the elimination of taxes. Perhaps the second most significant benefit would be totally free healthcare and education (society pays these people to do what they do so there’s no need for you to pay them too.)

Then there’s the ‘stack of lumber’. You would no longer be required to either rent or own one. Since the transfer of funds between individuals would be impossible, there is no way for the would-be landlord to collect rent…and rightly so.

There is only one (count ‘em) way to get money and that is to work for it.

The largest single benefit of this arrangement is crime prevention/resource squandering.

There is another huge benefit gained by ‘full employment’…once achieved, the economy automatically ‘balances’ itself and the ‘economic desert.

As you are well aware, unemployment is a tool used by the exploiters to keep wages low. They aren’t interested in paying you a living wage as much as they desire to maximize their profits.

Don’t look now good citizen but these crazy self-serving assholes have already made half of the working aged citizens in this nation ‘redundant’.

But I’m running off the rails again, no?

So I’ll segue into our second core concept as I have already ‘drifted’ into and pretty much covered the third core concept without meaning to.

The second and final core concept is direct democracy. Once we enjoy a true ‘free press/media’ (as all divisions are non-profit and no ‘purse string’ control exists over any of them. They wouldn’t rely on advertisers for funding and new truth in advertising laws would likely curtail advertising volume…)

The news industry is in trouble today due to a severe loss of reader trust. Once the onus of kowtowing to major advertisers and the threat of having their permits pulled by the government were removed, they would be free to serve the consuming public in a responsible way.

I wonder if anyone has a good answer to the puzzle of if we are all in this together, who precisely is the ‘opposition’?

The ‘boogeyman’ of ‘single party rule’ is nothing compared to multiple adversarial parties.

How many times have ‘the Republicans’ blocked legislation that was favored by a majority of the general public?

The short answer is too many. The baffling part is how they consistently get away with this bullshit even when they are not in the majority!

Rather than ‘single party rule’, I propose no parties at all. We would dismantle the party apparatus on both sides of the imaginary fence because, in the end, we are all in this together.

You can do nothing to protect yourself against the machinations of the self-serving if you are not permitted to vote directly on what the law will or won’t be.

Thus do we need the additional safeguard of the ‘fairness doctrine’. Nobody can pull a ‘fast one’ if proposed legislation cannot pass a basic fairness test.

Give it a try, you’ll see just how difficult it is.

Be subtle; try to hide the cheat in the little words…the ‘ifs’ and ‘whens’.

Understand that while leadership has no power to make or interpret the laws, they are the ones that determine if a proposed law is fit to be put to a vote.

Once won, liberty must be zealously guarded.

Here we circle back to the laws regarding money and the non-transferability of funds.

You see, another political change will be the elimination of elections. You will not vote for leadership, the qualified candidates will ‘compete’ for the job.

Since you, the citizen, will vote directly on proposed legislation, there is no longer a need for ‘representatives’. Since the citizen also has direct control over legislation, there is no need for a judicial branch either (as the fairness doctrine covers that base.)

Understand that the biggest single obstacle to enacting the human anti-exploitation law is the bought and paid for judicial branch…how else do you explain their inaction/open hostility to any measure that challenged their mandate to defend ‘private property’ ahead of all else, including the common good.

I think you can see how this undertaking could easily morph into ‘novel length’ work.

There is much more to say but this covers the four core concepts.

The ‘anti slavery law’.

True direct democracy.

Full employment.

Your money is for you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner