Cracked

Greetings good citizen,

Probably just the effects of being unemployed for two years but it seems I can’t look at anything these days without applying the basic principles of A Simple Plan.

The latest to rise to the test is this long overwrought issue:

A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling
By JODI KANTOR

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, is attempting to start a national discussion for women in the workplace with her new book, and a social movement.

How does ASP apply here?

IS (as the capitalists claim) the ‘problem’ with the world’s management team the fact that there aren’t enough women at the top…

Or is it a lack of qualifications, (which seems to me to be the more obvious problem…)

Which is to point out that under A Simple Plan, the most qualified and only the most qualified, regardless of gender, will be promoted to tackle the planet’s top jobs.

(Um, the ‘goal’ of A Simple Plan is to achieve global dominance…fairly quickly.)

Regardless of how they are fixed personally, the world’s top people won’t view the world through their personal plumbing!

Which generally appears to be the source of this ‘gender diversion’.

So let’s make a big deal about the ‘number’ of women in boardrooms and PRETEND that this is the reason the global economy is scroomed!

But lets look at a different piece of the puzzle:

Neighbors Kill Neighbors in Kenya as Election Tensions Stir Age-Old Grievances
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

In less than two weeks, Kenyans will line up by the millions to pick their leaders for the first time since a disastrous vote in 2007, which set off clashes that killed more than 1,000 people.

Um, you know I’m down on elected office in the first place and under A Simple Plan there wouldn’t be any.

How else will we ‘get over’ the human tendency to hold grudges if we don’t select our leaders through comprehensive competency testing?

While the test can’t erase an individual’s color, gender or the, er, ‘supreme being’ he/she believes in, it does ‘eliminate’ the most critical factor, incompetence.

So it is that these people are being given the ‘illusion of participation’ and killing one another over what must be some pretty foul choices.

How sad is it that we aren’t too far from succumbing to the exact same set of circumstances.

Perhaps that’s the hell of it good citizen. Elections merely exemplify our powerlessness to control our situation, especially when the only options are BAD and WORSE.

IF we are to have ANY hope of correcting what’s wrong in our society we first need to get the BEST POSSIBLE Candidates a shot at the job then have the candidates PROVE they are the ones who can get the job done!

HOW do we find ‘the best people’?

The Tests start when you join the workforce and lead to the top job…so EVERYBODY has a chance of becoming King of the Heap!

Every year you step up or move aside, depends on what’s inside you (and how far you’re comfortable with going. Fully 90% of all candidates want no part of the ‘top job’ regardless of the ‘perqs’.

And admittedly, most people want no part of the responsibility that comes with the turf.

Ironically, people who do well in the tests also thrive on the challenges the tests present.
But that’s neither here nor there…but it does raise the ‘better than you’ issue that somewhat haunts our current broken society.

Which is something the tests will be designed to screen out. If power gives you a fat head then you aren’t going to be seeing very much of it.

My but I’ve had a ‘full day’, sorry for the tardy but it is what it is…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Burn

Greetings good citizen,

While some of you are appalled that the problems of the world CAN’T be solved with a spoonful of sugar. Let me offer the comforting thought that I designed the plan more so with an eye towards what most of you WOULDN’T like done to you rather than the conservo-whacko way which is we’ll do this, this and this…but ONLY to BAD PEOPLE.

Weirdly, everybody can get behind castrating a hypothetical stranger…but it’s not such a good idea anymore when you find YOURSELF on the receiving end of the bargain.

This is why A Simple Plan was designed to be ‘HUMANE’. We don’t ‘execute’, er, those who refuse to live by some pretty basic rules. We merely strip them of their right to live among us.

Not that playing ‘defense’ has helped. You either support the plan (which is holistic, it’s ALL or NOTHING) or you don’t.

If you take nothing away from this web page take that. You can’t ‘cherry-pick’ A Simple Plan and get anything even approaching the correct/workable results.

(And if you want the creator here to guide its implementation, you all had better shake a leg ‘cuz I haven’t got a lot of time left.)

Not much of a sales pitch but it is the truth.

Readership would rapidly dwindle to zero if all I did here was pitch A Simple Plan, I’ve taxed your patience enough.

today’s offering tackles the issue of the ‘dehumanizing’ nature of capitalist society.

The human body, with its need for rest, nutrition and hydration, is such an inefficient tool for capitalist production. But while machines are unlikely to replace human workers anytime soon, new technologies can deftly strip workers of their humanity!

The Irish Independent reports that grocery giant TESCO has strapped electronic armbands to their warehouse workers to measure their productivity, tracking their actions so closely that management knows when they briefly pause to drink from a water fountain or take a bathroom break. These unforgivable lapses in productivity impact workers' performance score, which management then apparently uses to terrify them into working faster.

"The devices give a set amount of time for a task, such as 20 minutes to load packets of soft drinks. If they did it in 20 minutes, they would get 100pc, but would get 200pc if they were twice as fast," writes the Independent. Although TESCO denied that bathroom breaks impact productivity scores, one former staffer the Independent spoke with said he got a "surprisingly lower" score when he took a bathroom break.

"Sometimes, management would call staff to an office and tell them they had to do better if their scores were low."

"I had really easy assignments and when I'd come back after a break, I would get a horrendous score and wonder why," he said.

The rational mind screams ‘how did we come to this?’ While the capitalist sees nothing wrong with ‘squeezing as much value’ as he/she can out of their workers.

What’s ‘wrong’ with this picture is why we do what we do.

We ARE NOT ‘machines’, tied to a specific task for certain number of hours BUT that is how our COLLEGE EDUCATED MORONS are taught to treat us.

When we ‘work for money’ the purpose becomes secondary…despite money being an invention, a tool.

It is tool that is all too commonly abused. More often used as a hammer than a reward.

What do you suppose management’s ‘complaint’ was when the employee took a bathroom break?

You’re costing me MONEY! When the correct employee response would be, ‘I was keeping your floors clean which, overall, saves you money.’

(Get a clue fathead, ALL money is FUNNY!)

Yet we are evicted from our homes and have to subscribe to supplemental nutrition programs for a lack of the ‘funny stuff’!

Which is to point out that our social model is broken and headed for collapse…because the bean-counters have decided to see how far they can ‘push it’.

Weirdly, they are pushing for riots in the street.

What would those charged with ‘protecting us’ from exactly this sort of treatment think if they knew what our self-professed ‘betters’ had in store for them?

You KNOW this ends with cops in body bags (more civilians than cops but still…)
All because ‘stingy’ wants to see how much he/she can get away with (and it secretly ‘tickles them’ to wield this kind of ‘raw power’.)

For some reason they don’t believe ‘The Horror’ lurks just beneath the (mostly placid) surface of a (‘desensitized’) modern civilization.

What do I mean by ‘desensitized’?

Let’s just say ‘mercy’ isn’t one of modern societies strong suits.

They have shown none so they shouldn’t be too surprised when they don’t receive any in return.

Somewhat surreal to frame the coming debacle as similar to admonishing a child not to play with matches.

They do it and they get burned for their…impudence.

How sad is it good citizen that this time they are going to ‘burn’ us all?

Thanks for letting me inside you head,

Gegner

PS: (Seems to be a lot of these recently) I have 'updated' and posted a copy of A Simple Plan on the Civics 202 page , my apologies to all who tried to read a Simple Plan and found that unedited mess! It is unforgivable as well as being fixed.

That's what 'cut & paste' gets you!

Pillar 3

Greetings good citizen,

Not much going on in the world today so I thought we’d wrap up our discussion regarding the three [main] ‘pillars’ that make up A Simple Plan.

As I commented yesterday, many of you would be just fine with one pillar, the middle one but that leaves too many ‘loose ends’.

So, how many of you think you know what the third pillar of A Simple Plan is?

Some would argue there is no ‘third pillar’ and others would guess anything from God to Money and everything in between (by filling the void with such nebulous qualities as ‘happiness’.)

While it is my job to ‘make you think,’ it is not my job to ‘jerk your chain’.

The ‘third pillar’ of A Simple Plan is the ultimate goal of the first two pillars (what they SHOULD produce.)

Come on good citizen, how many essays have I signed off, using those three principles linked together?

What do Equality and Justice produce?

PEACE!

How can Peace be a pillar of society? If you don’t know the answer to that question then you don’t understand the point of having all of the firepower sitting around, ready to go.

Without peace there can be no prosperity.

A Simple Plan is designed to ‘maximize’ conflict resolution and as a result, foster a more peaceful and unified society.

How does A Simple Plan promote ‘peace’?

It starts with prohibiting legislation regarding personal behavior.

Now the ‘simple minded’ are already envisioning a wild society where people drive on the sidewalks, either stoned to the bone or too drunk to see straight when the ‘wrong assumption’ here is that anyone will have anything to drive on the sidewalks with!

They are also underestimating the power of peer pressure. The foundation of peace is courtesy and consideration. Which is to point to the pendulum of social values and opine that like in the days of old, you will take great pains not to offend anyone, lest you provoke them to ‘defend their honor.’

Most would agree that we, as a species, have become far too ‘free’ with our tongues. This is why the media acts shocked when people are pushed beyond their limits and the quite predictable occurs.

Out comes the guns and there’s some ‘justifiable homicide goin’ on!

There is a demonstrable ‘link’ between removing the individuals ability to defend themselves and the rise in criminal behavior.

Most of this crap wouldn’t be happening if a ‘smart remark’ or other perceived ‘under-handed act’ carried with it the distinct probability of you staring down the business end of a .45 from ten paces at dawn.

We really should treat one another better but so far ‘legislating’ better behavior has proven ‘fruitless’.

Civility won’t return (nor will peace) until we learn to ‘respect’ one anothers feelings and personal preferences.

So far it looks as though I am advocating ‘trench warfare’ by removing the capitalists boot heel from the public’s neck.

Understand, the reason you get cheated, with impunity, every time one of these deep pocketed, er, ‘rodents’ decides you need to ‘sue him’ for what’s yours. He owns the judge, besides, even if he’s dead wrong it is one thing to be awarded a judgement and quite another to actually collect it.

However, things would be considerably different if Bozo’s ability to cheat you hinged on his prowess with firearms…or any of a variety of armaments (the challenged gets to choose.)

Then payment would be swift and certain, wouldn’t it?

Worse, not living up to your word would carry a considerable social cost. It could bar you from promotion in the tests permanently (even if you ace the exam!)

No easy way to be free good citizen…but it will never happen if you are stripped of your ability to defend yourself.

And that’s what the capitalist has done with his ‘control’ of the injustice system. He’s left you to pay fines YOU can’t afford with money he ‘wishes’ into existence. (Which is to point out that ‘fines’ can’t hurt those who control the money supply…)

Notice all of the ‘fines’ being handed out as atonement for the banks criminal behavior?

Which is to once again put the shoe on the other foot, how do we prevent a repeat of what laid waste to our current civilization?

It looks pretty ‘Simple’ to me…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS: Again I apologize if these pillars offend anyone but we must deal with the world as it is rather than the world some of us pretend to live in.

While there are 3 ‘premises’, they actually unite to create one unbreakable pillar.

Why is this particular pillar unbreakable? It is the pillar of human love and the love of our species. Without that we are just animals being herded to slaughter by the ignorant and ruthless among us.

Chew on that before you point an accusing finger.

Government

Greetings good citizen,

In our ongoing series to highlight how we can change the world we discussed (briefly) the economic changes that need to be made in order to return society to prosperity.

What we didn’t do was touch upon the social ‘third rail’…not out of fear but due to the great degree of ‘ignorance’ that surrounds what politics should be about.

We have a landscape populated with starving, unemployed homeless people and all our politicians can talk about is gay marriage and gun control (along with Federal subsidies to get more cops and build new schools.)

Worse, politicians (and people with political ambitions) don’t see the need to change the conversation from what it was 200 years ago when the hot button was States rights Vs Federal rights.

Our new government, er, (bear with me) will be (as opposed to ‘should be') centered on Human rights.

How did our (Slaving) founders get it wrong? They had to avoid the issue of human rights so as not to offend the ‘monied interests’.

Worse, the founding of the US was seen as the birth of a ‘capitalist utopia’…which they rapidly learned would not work! But you have to give the capitalists credit, they are persistent if nothing else…(like intelligent, for example.)

Here it is two hundred years later and they are trying to pull the same stunt in China (which I predict will go horribly and catastrophically wrong.)

They tried to ‘capitalize’ the former Soviet Union and it blew up! (Just to give you an idea how toxic capitalism really is.)

So if capitalism is so toxic, how have we survived it for two hundred years?

Well, not all of us did. The death toll keeps rising as capitalism continues its death spiral.

Make no mistake about it, 99% of the murder rate is tied directly to capitalism.

And while it (again seems like) I am digressing, I am not. Capitalism is so ingrained in how we manage our society as to be inseparable.

And THAT is what I mean when I point to ‘ignorance in politics’.

Politicians regularly separate politics from commerce when, under capitalism, they are the same thing.

Ironically under A Simple Plan there are no politics…and political parties will be illegal.

I’ll go you one better, the ‘lie machine’ will be shut down too.

People who make their living molding public opinion will have to find a ‘real job’.

But now I digress, the ‘fourth estate’ is the subject of its own essay.

Under the new way of doing things we will have ‘direct democracy’…which means YOU will get to decide what is or isn’t illegal (within reason.)

Understand that our ‘leaders’, who will ‘earn’ their positions, will be in charge of the day to day business of keeping our society running. YOU will get to decide on the guidelines they’ll operate under.

Unlike today, leadership will NOT be in charge of the justice system. It will be an independent body charged with protecting society with a focus on preserving personal liberty.

These days money buys favorable legislation while ‘short-circuiting’ existing prohibitions. That will no longer be the case because we will not have ‘elected’ officials.

Our leaders will ‘win’ their positions by demonstrating they are the best candidate for the job via the tests!

Better! The tests are open TO ALL!* (Yeah, there is an exception that needs to be included here despite this being a far from definitive layout of A Simple Plan architecture.

(* You will not be permitted to test IF you are accused of an exile offense…and since false accusation is an exile offense we would hope nobody would bring such charges ‘frivolously’.)

IF we are to get ‘money’ out of the management of our society we need to put an end to political process designed to make candidates ‘beholden’ to the money interests.

And if we are to put human rights where they belong (number one) we must eliminate the influence of greed that routinely crushes compassion and understanding.

Spoken like a ‘true liberal’ wouldn’t you say?

Makes me wonder how many conservative heads explode reading my exhibits?

Because a true conservative doesn’t care about humanity or an uneven playing field, all a true conservative cares about is themselves.

Well our streets are full of hungry, homeless, unemployed people who are the ‘by-product’ of ‘compassionate conservatism’.

“We’re gonna end these folks suffering by farming out their jobs!”

Then we’ll cut their welfare and let them eat Democrats!

This, good citizen, is what ‘politics’ in the US has devolved into.

If you think it’s time for a change, I’m pointing the way.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS. Just an observation but today's post on 2/12 is number 1212...coincidence?

And no I didn't take Sunday off to make it fit!

Indebted

Greetings good citizen,

Took a mental health day yesterday but the madness just keeps on coming…with the difference being I didn’t write about it.

Hopefully today’s topic will prove therapeutic. Instead of just pointing to the problem, today I’m also going to provide the solution!

So we begin with something that has been drummed into your head since childhood, the concept of ‘debt’…and how others take advantage of this ‘mis-education’.

Thought debtor prison ended in the 18th century? Think again.
February 3, 2013 |

Editor's note: America has a long history of treating the poor like criminals, from legislation banning the transportation of poor people across state lines to anti-vagrancy laws that could land you in jail if you didn't have a job or a home. We've come to rely on the criminal justice system to deal with the poor, even as more and more Americans fall into poverty. The following is part of a series that looks at the diverse ways poverty is criminalized in America, such as laws targeting the homeless, the surveillance of welfare recipients, the re-emergence of debtor's prisons, and extreme policing tactics like stop-and-frisk.

Let’s consider for a moment something you have been taught was impossible, imagine (if you can) a world without debt.

It actually should be easy to do. MOTHER NATURE DOESN’T HAVE A CASH REGISTER!

The (alleged) ‘owner’ of resources doesn’t have to pay for them so why should you?

(Stupid question, the owner makes his money selling what you need to you! (If nobody needs it what’s the point in owning it? Talk about carts and horses!)

EVERYTHING ON THIS PLANET is ‘free’…but it is not ‘infinite’…and that’s where they get you!

Money is the ‘regulator’ that is supposed to insure everybody gets their ‘fair share’…but that’s not how it works, does it?

Especially when money is used to ‘penalize’.

[Note: This can get real confusing quite quickly so I’m going to intentionally keep the variables to a minimum.]

The truly insidious part comes in when pay is linked to the ‘class’ of a worker as opposed to the kind of work they do.

A woman is paid less than a man and a colored is paid less than a white.

When neither one has anything to do with anything except the prejudices of (…mostly, the personnel department!) Why they are not prosecuted for their crimes remains a mystery…

But the desperate need to redefine the term criminal is the subject of another essay!

Possibly the next essay.

So debt is created when one’s source of income does not meet one’s needs. Which makes for a pretty damning statistic when 45% of the nation’s households qualify for and receive SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance…program.)

But this isn’t the EMPLOYER’S problem…it’s YOURS! (For not preventing the employers from buying the politicians...)

And no, that time I didn’t digress.

So who among us treats you like a criminal if you owe them money? It’s the employer’s financial partner, the Banker.

Now the employer owns the politician and the banker owns the employer…which makes for a pretty ‘unholy alliance’ doesn’t it? Remember the politicians control public servants and public servants control the justice system along with who does (or doesn’t) become a judge.

Does anyone else see a problem here…considering current ‘conditions on the ground’?

So how do we solve this ‘daisy-chained’ problem? Lawyers are Judge wannabes and politicians are nothing more than greedy actors and bankers…let’s not go there because there’s no ‘reason’ behind a bankers actions that can’t be chalked up to a single motivation…greed.

Because money makes this whole circus go round, how do we put the brakes on this rampant corruption?

We put an end to ‘elected officials’. They only exist to keep YOU out of the decision making loop!

Now let’s ‘solve’ the debt problem (and unemployment while we’re at it.)

Since the ‘purpose of commerce’ is to provide ‘the public’ (and that means ‘all’ of the public) with the goods and services it needs to live as comfortably as possible. (Yeah, my definition is a little more ‘generous’ than the typical ‘more for me’ capitalist is comfortable with. But that’s what we’re trying to solve, isn’t it?)

Debt should be (and will become under A Simple Plan) illegal. You won’t be able to pay anyone for anything because there won’t be any cash to pay them with.

Which is to point out that we would also ‘solve’ crime in one fell swoop and marvel at why we didn’t do it sooner…and the method is to outlaw ‘cash’ and all of its ‘substitutes’.

If you’re caught using ‘script’ you’ll be exiled.

IOU’s, Walnuts, acorns, seashells…they’ll all buy you a one way trip to the badlands if you’re caught trading them! (Just don’t do it.)

YOUR MONEY IS FOR YOU! You will be paid to do what you do by the profession you have chosen to work for…just as EVERYBODY ELSE will be paid by their profession SO THERE’S NO NEED FOR YOU TO PAY THEM TOO!

The proverbial ‘stack of lumber’ will be a ‘gimme’. Maintained by the people who do that for a living…at no cost to you!

How can we do this? MOTHER NATURE DOESN’T HAVE A CASH REGISTER! It’s all FREE!

We do what we do because it needs doing…why oh why should we allow a few pinheads to get rich while the rest of us bust our backsides to make ends meet?

And it all starts with throwing the politicians out of office! [I’m all for making the lot of ‘em ‘take the walk’ too but throwing them out and making them all get honest jobs SHOULD BE punishment enough.]

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Revolting

Greetings good citizen,

Seems as though the only people visiting the new page are the folks who ensure you’re complying with the terms of service…which doesn’t bother me at all.

Truth be told I ‘catch’ myself (when I’m composing) all the time. The angst that I let flow freely behind the firewall doesn’t like being ‘redirected’ into, er; ‘less provocative’ terms.

However, the time has come (and for my longtime readers I add ‘once again’) to discuss the ‘purpose’ behind this blog.

While I am very ‘opinionated’, I don’t try to tell you what to think. I feel I have my work cut out just trying to provide you with things to think about.

So the focus here is not ‘what to think’ but merely to think…as in ‘at all’.

One of the obstacles I encountered in trying to popularize A Simple Plan was nobody felt the need to learn a better way of doing things. Their parents taught them what to do and they’d teach their kids, worked for them and it will work (sort of) for you.

No irony should be lost on the fact that YOU dear reader, are the first generation (since the founding of this nation) that this strategy WILL NOT work for.

You CAN’T tell your kids what your parents told YOU because THIS ISN’T THAT WORLD ANYMORE!

The now famous “Go along to get along” advice is more likely to get your children killed than to help them move ahead in life.

What advice DO YOU give your children these days?

Sorry, can’t help you out because if WE don’t derail this crazy train there won’t be anything left to save!

Sort of brings us full circle to the need to discuss ‘alternatives’ to the way things get done now.

Your parents didn’t have to worry about such things, survivors of the Great Depression and TWO ‘wars to end all wars’; they know what worked and how to make the world ‘tick’.

But that’s not the world their kids have left for yours.

The New Deal planted a rather insidious seed in the minds of the privileged few…and the fact that they nearly destroyed the world’s economy AND THEY WEREN’T PUNISHED FOR IT wasn’t lost on these people born with a sense of entitlement.

Oh how their parents ‘suffered’ paying those workers all of that money they would have had to pay the tax man! (And that’s the only reason companies ‘competed’ for help…they don’t do it in Banana Republics because the government doesn’t dare tax them the way the New Deal Democrats taxed the Wall Streeters!)

Now it’s a hundred years later and we’re right back where it all began! Only this time there is nobody on the side of the downtrodden and destitute.

Because the One Percent has added a ‘lead lining’ to the go along to get along canard. You either do what they tell you or they’ll find somebody who will (and YOU’LL never work in this town again! A ‘hangover’ from the old days.)

While this tactic is the main ingredient opposing armies are made of; nobody has the backing to field the force these battalions of the ‘dispossessed’ can bring to bear.

Thus do the ‘entitled’ continue to press their advantage.

While whole armies of the dazed and confused remain clueless as to what to do about it.

Because nobody remembers that our government was designed by the very same ‘entitled people’ we are unable to wrest control from now.

Not that most of you need any convincing that we have some dangerous if not downright ‘feral’ people in charge of, well, the world as it turns out right now.

If we, the governed, don’t clip their wings (and soon) we will be unable to.

Although the ‘bad news’ is we don’t have the tools to clip their wings with…and you’d think the people who had just fought a bloody revolution would have thought about that but no. The ones who get to decide what comes next get to toss out any ‘limitations’ on their ambitions!

Thus do we have an empty toolbox.

We shouldn’t feel bad, everybody else has a system modeled after ours…so they’re tool-less to!

Which brings us to the topic of what are we fighting for and what can we ‘replace’ the current broken system with?

Because if we only change who’s in charge, our kids will find themselves faced with the same problems we face today.

It’s not ‘who’ runs thing but HOW THEY ARE RUN that MUST BE changed!

And that’s what the next series of posts will touch upon, an ‘alternative’ to how things are currently done.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Gegner

Greetings good citizen,

Nothing like a trip to the old boneyard to put life into perspective. Um, and that’s as much as I’m gonna say about that particular incident.

Putting things ‘in perspective’ is something humans seldom do on a regular basis, which might account for all of the crazy things we do because the fraudsters among us convince us it’s what we need to do.

If I were to ask you ‘what do you consider to be the ‘center’ of your life?” most well adjusted people would answer ‘family’…like that little old timey jingle Subaru recently adopted to sell it’s cars with…

“When I see you, I see me.”

But those well-adjusted people would be lying…both to me and to themselves.

Sure, the most important thing in their lives may be their family BUT their life is even more focused on supporting that family.

If we were to ask a criminal what was the center of their life, they’d give us the honest answer…money.

It’s all about the cash, sun up to sun down and all of the time in-between; it’s all about the money (because it dictates how your all-important family lives.)

Without the money you’re useless to your family.

And that is just plain wrong.

So, who are these fraudsters I referred to earlier?

Why they are your infamous ‘job creators’, money’s biggest supporters!

They are the very people who maintain that if you don’t earn money that you have no right to anything!

And how do you earn money? By selling your labor to THEM! (Which is why A Simple Plan operates on the human anti-exploitation law basis, which outlaws the buying and selling of anyone else’s labor…(along with the practice of taking ‘em long and deep’ for basic necessities like a place to live and/or the means to get around.)

It’s YOUR labor, only YOU should reap the benefit of it!

But no!

You aren’t given the option of not selling your labor…although the assholes like to pretend you’ve always ‘got a choice’.

You don’t HAVE TO breathe…you can suffocate if you don’t want to pay me!

And the other side of that same coin, If you’re starving to death on what I pay you it’s not my problem, it’s yours!

You know what people like that need?

A ten-pound boulder dropped on top of their head from about fifty-feet up.

Actually, what they really need is exile. (Because a crushed skull is too quick for these suffering loving bastards.)

But I digress; the grocery bill is the trump card they like to claim doesn’t exist. Like you can get food without working for it; and you can. It’s called SNAP and you have to jump through hoops to get it.

And if you stay on SNAP, be prepared to keep having your gonads busted because hey, it’s ‘free food’ so we get to mess with you since you don’t want to work.

And this says nothing of the tens of millions who are on SNAP and DO work (making some motherfucker rich while they can’t afford to eat on what they’re not being paid!)

But for some unknown reason nobody thinks this is a ‘problem.’

In fact, what do the conservo-whackos keep braying about? They keep parroting what the One Percenters’ say about US ‘competitiveness’. How US workers want ‘too much money!’

We have to stop and ask ourselves why don’t these assholes understand that if they want the economy to turn around YOU HAVE TO START PAYING PEOPLE ENOUGH TO AFFORD YOUR PRODUCTS!

In this respect Western civilization is extremely ‘mis-managed’.

Yet our Ivy League MBA’s are taught that they have to earn a profit for their shareowners or they are guilty of ‘malfesance’.

And if you can’t capture more market share, where do you capture the most profit? FROM YOUR EMPLOYEES!

Let’s stop for a moment and ask the question that is just begging to be asked right about now.

How do we change this? How do we ‘educated’ our mis-guided managers and make them realize their myopia is only making the problem worse?

Who the hell is gonna slap Bernanke upside the head and tell him to stop bailing out the bankers because it isn’t doing any good?

Short answer to both questions good citizen is no one.

We can’t get their ear.

Which is to belabor the obvious, it’s not us they listen to. So how, if at all, do we ‘fix’ this run-away train?

Again the answer is obvious, we don’t.

We literally have to wrestle the engine of commerce to a dead stop…then and only then will we be able to ‘make them listen to what they already know.’

Which naturally means there will have to be some executions and more than a few exiles.

Um, just a question here good citizen but are we really going to wait until the sham elections in November to do what should have been done five years ago?

Seriously?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Welfare

Greetings good citizen,

Oh what a tangled web we weave! It doesn’t cease to amaze me how much damage our civilization has suffered at the hands of the new (and constantly improving) ‘unitary executive’.

It’s been almost fifty years now that half of us have believed the other half was clinically insane or at the very least ‘stupid and gullible’. How ironic is it that it turns out both ‘halves’ were correct, not about the insanity but about the ‘stupid and gullible’…

It’s bullshit like this that clears up the mystery of why Hillary isn’t running this year…

Critics of the stringent system say stories like these vindicate warnings they made in 1996 when President Bill Clinton fulfilled his pledge to “end welfare as we know it”: the revamped law encourages states to withhold aid, especially when the economy turns bad.

The old program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, dates from the New Deal; it gave states unlimited matching funds and offered poor families extensive rights, with few requirements and no time limits. The new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, created time limits and work rules, capped federal spending and allowed states to turn poor families away.

“My take on it was the states would push people off and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the law. “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be.”

How ironic is it that all the jobs created during the Clinton years evaporated with the ‘dot gone’ bubble?

And that, good citizen is a rhetorical question, there’s nothing ‘ironic’ about it at all.

Worse, we need to ask ourselves which ‘well-spoken individual’ will be next to step forward and claim the democratic mantle, only to totally sell out democratic ideals?

Closet Libertarians are amazingly adept at this...just as Cyrk Unger pointed out the other day that for a 'constitutional lawyer' Obama acts like he's never seen the document he supposedly 'specialized' in...

WTF?

I mean look at Willy Jeff, he got a mansion in NYC and his wife landed a seat in the Senate! How ‘lucky’ does a guy get?

How much are you willing to bet that luck had nothing to do with it?

Did I mention that our government is a bought and paid for illusion, sponsored by the >One Percent?

Or that our civilization will crash and burn in the VERY near future?

The ‘assault’ has been underway for the past four years, ‘disguised’ as the economic downturn.

Our ‘transition’ to a full-blown Banana Republic is almost complete.

Um, the above tale of ‘financial hardship’ underlines the fact that a rich man CAN live as cheaply (and sometimes even cheaper because of the exemptions they grant themselves) than a poor one.

This, as we are learning, is the ‘cause’ of the current, er, ‘depression’. When all (most of) the money in a society is ‘captured’ at the top of a hierarchical chain, there is no mechanism except revolution capable of restoring balance to the economy.

Notice the indicators, there is (nor has there been) ANY ‘new investment’ because the existing capacity is capable of supplying what is becoming a dwindling number of customers…

Which is to slap you hard in the face good citizen, hopefully to wake you up to the fact that you are, right this very second, being strangled with your own rope!

Understand the trick is to keep you lulled until you are no longer an enormous giant, capable of smashing them to pieces as you struggle.

By the time we organize to fight back most of what we would have had to work with will have been exported.

And there’s no ‘accident’ in play there.

The part that devils them to no end is that they can’t take the ‘bread basket’ with them. (But I think the plan is to cripple that capacity so we can’t use it either…)

It’s shitty little deals like the one in this article that shout ‘class war’ plain as day yet you refuse to believe it…

There is an ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM that is far more efficient and effective but the CRIMINALS AMONG US don’t want you to know that!

And who ARE the criminals, good citizen?

They are the very same people who claim to be the ‘job creators’!

Understand, NO HUMAN has EVER ‘created’ a single job, they ALL come to us directly from Mother Nature!

Without nature, ‘need’ doesn’t exist.

And don’t fall for the Libertarian crap of ‘need doesn’t exist’, they fucking NEED YOU to believe it (even if they don’t themselves!)

Once they convince you that your needs are ‘wants’, you are no longer entitled to them!

You ‘want’ to breathe? Tough! I don’t think you deserve to!

I’m willing to pay more than you will for that air so it’s rightfully mine!

What a fucked up argument to make considering ALL money is funny…but the fucking Libertarian whack jobs don’t realize that!

They’re still little kids, bidding ‘an infinity’ dollars and are then willing to go to the mat over who bid it first!

When an ‘infinity dollars is still fucking ZERO!

How stupid can you get?

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

Stick a fork in it...it's DONE!

Greetings good citizen,

I have used, as a literary device, the idea that when the value of money fell into doubt, people would be startled to find their wedding rings contained enough gold to pay off their mortgages…

ASSUMING you could find a broker willing to pay you that amount.

What people living during these insane times need to learn is the only ‘value’ that matters is ‘use value’.

If you can’t eat it or screw it, piss on it!

Okay, that’s the canine ‘value chain’ but it is far more practical than the one most humans subscribe to.

So, what are we gonna do in a world plagued with high unemployment (although capitalism’s failure to provide workers with desperately needed jobs has become a ‘self-repairing’ problem…as people exhaust their unemployment benefits THEY NO LONGER COUNT AS UNEMPLOYED!)

How fucking ‘convenient’ is that?

Then there is the ongoing, er, ‘drama’ of the debt ceiling impasse being played out against the backdrop of an already ‘insolvent’ government.

But take heart, good citizen! A ‘bipartisan’ solution has been proposed (yet again)

What’s it going to take for these guys to wake up to the difference between famous and ‘infamous’?

The bipartisan proposal from the so-called Gang of Six senators to reduce deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the coming decade — and its warm reception from 43 other senators of both parties — renewed hopes for a deal days after talks between Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders had reached an impasse.

Financial markets rallied on the news. And with time running out before the deadline of Aug. 2 to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, Mr. Obama’s quick embrace of the plan left House Republicans at greater risk of being politically isolated on the issue if they continue to rule out any compromise that includes higher tax revenues.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader who has led opposition to any deal including tax increases, later issued a statement saying the bipartisan Senate plan includes “some constructive ideas to deal with our debt.”

Methinks the pundits who dismiss a government shutdown as ‘political suicide’ aren’t facing reality. Not only is the government ‘broke’, it is also ‘broken’.

Let us take a moment to pause and consider the Elephant in the room, the looming energy crisis…which is a bit of a misnomer as there will be plenty of energy FOR THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD IT!

You’d think ‘alternative energy’ would be springing up like weeds across the countryside but no! If we were to deploy ‘windpower’ it would be, by necessity, ‘imported’.

The other, er, ‘blatant slap in the face’ to the citizens of the US is how ‘our government’ is abandoning its space program while China is launching theirs (with, make no mistake about it, technology developed HERE!)

So good citizen, how do YOU define ‘treason’?

When Atlantis lands Thursday, the famous room will seem even more ghostly. After 30 years and 135 missions, shuttles will no longer need controlling. NASA plans to turn the space into a training venue, mostly for astronauts going to the International Space Station and flight controllers working with the station.

Over the next couple of months, 800 or 900 people in the mission operations division will be laid off, said Paul Hill, head of that division and a former flight director himself.

"As proud as we are of our success ... I have to keep that in perspective with the 90 percent of the workforce that will no longer be part of that effort," Hill said.

Kwatsi Alibaruho, flight director for this final mission, said the specter of so many flight controllers without jobs is "kind of following us through the halls."

So we will have the ‘appearance’ of a space program without the apparatus of a space program. But wait, what’s that on the horizon?

Why it’s the ‘privatization’ of space…and guess who THE ONLY CUSTOMER IS?

We are living with the granduer of ‘privatized’ healthcare (thanks to the fucking Gipper!) have they privatized ANYTHING that has actually saved the taxpayer a single cent?

Short answer…NO!

The disturbing part is the ease with which this nation is being turned into a third world hell hole…because the ‘focus’ of our justice system has been quietly shifted from social welfare to the primacy of ownership.

Well good citizen, I got news for you. Nobody ‘owns’ nothin’!

And despite your best arguments we all, truly are, in this together!

Refusing to recognize your ‘commitment’ to the rest of humanity does not absolve you that responsibility.

Which is to invoke one of the central planks of A Simple Plan: Those who do not appreciate the benefits of civil society will have those benefits, er, ‘withdrawn’ from them.

Increasingly the ‘luxuries’ of living indoors and eating regularly rely on peace. As the world becomes more crowded, the processes that maintain ‘peace’ become, er, ‘strained’.

This brings us back to the basic social equation: Without equality there can be no justice and without justice there can be no peace…

In order for equality to be achieved the playing field MUST be leveled…which means NO ONE can be permitted to profit AT THE EXPENSE OF ANOTHER!

The world doesn’t need profit good citizen. No irony should be lost on the fact that the blind pursuit of profit is what’s tearing our civilization apart!

What the world needs more of is love good citizen.

If you can’t bring yourself to share then you surrender yours…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Where does it end?

Greetings good citizen,

While I usually make the case for our current downfall being centered on Reagan, he couldn’t have done what he did without the groundwork laid by Nixon…who only won office thanks to LBJ’s flat refusal to seek a second term.

Which is to ask if any of these assholes EVER wore ‘a white hat’?

And the answer is likely no.

Sadly, it doesn’t matter.

How we got here is moot compared to the question of how we are going to resolve this issue.

Yes, we need to understand who was behind this betrayal of our nation so we can insure they are incapable of, er, ‘sabotaging’ efforts to restore balance.

A Simple Plan sweeps away the old power structure completely, even the outdated and useless legal structure would be completely abandoned.

No more lawyers, no more judges and no more legislators.

Who polices the police? The leadership.

Better, leaders are NOT politicians, they have no, er, ‘authority’ to create or interpret the laws as they see fit. (Although they will have to prosecute the law to the best of their ability/understanding. Let it suffice to say ‘dummies’ don’t make leader, you have to be sharp to win!)

Laws will be simple and few, making the task ‘more manageable’.

The central premise behind anarchy is ‘rules WITHOUT rulers’ (and not the ‘anything goes’ no rules happy horseshit the conservatives [who live in the land of ‘make believe’ in the first place] generally contend.)

Who makes the rules? Those who must live under them! (And not just a handful who most often exempt themselves from prosecution in the first place.)

Which is to point out that the law would be a very different animal if EVERYBODY had to obey it.

And that’s the way it ‘should be’, isn’t it?

But we (naturally) digress.

The topic du juor is the aftermath of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ also known as ‘Morning in America’.

The article isn’t clear on who is being quoted here but they make a fair point:

Anyways, here is my take on things after being a long-time trickle down economics person. Awhile back, I came across tax data that showed while Reagan cut A LOT of taxes, he was also forced by threats of veto to also sign into law A LOT of tax increases.

These tax increase were by and large closing of loopholes and tax exemptions, which mainly affected richer tax filers. So much so in fact, that people in the higher tax brackets were paying more in taxes by the start of Reagan’s second term, than when Reagan was first elected.

After looking into this, I still haven’t figured out where history got distorted. However, it seems that what happened during the Reagan years to get things “jump-started” was taxing the rich more, and taxing the middle class less.

And that goes against EVERYTHING that “conservatives” say today.

Why the destruction of the nation’s customer base is suddenly ‘big news’ is mystifying to us older folks but if we keep in mind the younger generation doesn’t know any better the reason behind the current ‘shock and awe’ becomes clear.

Hell, there are adults who BELIEVE Clinton is responsible for globalization.

Why do adults believe this? Because they were too young to remember who first proposed the idea, the original (but by no means the first) corporate sock puppet, St. Ronnie Reagan!

Don’t anybody get the wrong idea about Slick Willy, he is a dyed in the wool conservative from the get go who was very adept at ‘playing the game’. (Unlike the current sock puppet.)

The appearance of bipartisanship is exactly that, appearance.

Just as voting provides the ‘illusion of participation’.

Well Bubba, we have to sweep aside these ‘delusions’ if we are to have any hope of restoring decency and justice to our civilization.

We have to have a framework that supports the ‘rule of the people’ (ALL of the people) if we are to avoid extinction by our own hand.

I have often invited (specific) critiques of A Simple Plan and have yet to receive a single specific quibble much less a problem.

The plan is bullet proof, that’s why nobody can come up with a more specific objection than ‘I don’t like it’ (mostly because you CAN’T get ‘rich’)

Naturally, rich is relative. Under A Simple Plan we would ALL be RICH (but we’d still have to work for a few hours a week.)

Are you all so hopelessly brainwashed?

I don’t think so.

Thanks for letting me inside your heads,

Gegner

It IS different this time!

Greetings good citizen,

As the disaster stretches into its fourth year (remember, this shit all started in August of 2007.) we see more and more ‘comparisons’ being made to past economic, er, ‘downturns’.

I belabor the obvious when I exclaim It really IS different this time

A little-discussed aspect of this downturn is that many Americans never fully recovered from the last one before the crash hit. In 2000, before the dot-com bust, a person right in the middle of the economic pack took home $27,833 inflation-adjusted dollars, and since then, that same person has only earned more in one year – 2006 (Excel). By 2008, the median income was a thousand bucks less than it had been in 2000, and then in 2009 and 2010 we saw the largest two-year drop in wages and benefits since 1962-'63.

Depressions don't always unfold in the same way. The bleak period following the 1929 stock market crash has come to be known as the Great Depression, but it was not the first brutal downturn to be characterized as such. Between 1873 and 1896, the big industrial powers went through what was then called the Great Depression, and has since become known as the Long Depression.

The Long Depression never reached the grinding severity of the 1930s downturn; in fact, it was actually two severe recessions that bookended a period of rapid growth in the 1880s. Today, having “lost” much of the past decade, and with the economy looking like it may well head into a second period of recession – or at best a gradual, drawn-out road to economic health – historians may well come to view this period as another kind of Long Depression.

And they’d be WRONG because this time has too many factors that didn’t even exist when the other, er, ‘thefts’ were taking place.

Yeah, it’s been almost forty years of ‘down’, despite the ‘presto chango’ exhibited by the stock market to provide us with the ‘illusion’ of forward economic motion.

Many factors are different this time. During previous economic downturns they didn’t face the exhaustion of the central premise that under pins our civilization, cheap abundant energy!

That alone is a game changer that staggers the imagination with its implications!

The idiots among us believe the exhaustion of fossil fuels will cause the ‘social clock’ to roll back a mere century, when the reality is it will roll back more than a thousand years!

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us that our self-professed ‘betters’ tend to believe unrealistic fairy tales like a return of the more civilized ‘horse and buggy’ era?

There are (roughly) TEN TIMES as many people now as there were then so the ‘logistics’ of the situation both stagger the mind and would quickly overwhelm Mother Nature.

Imagine EVERYBODY trying to meet their basic energy needs with wood? (Understand, in the beginning even the assholes who could afford to ‘buy’ energy would adopt the ‘quaint’ emergency measure of burning wood for fuel.)

You know, for the ‘romance’ of it…until they started choking on the smoke, then the pricks would try to ban the practice on ‘environmental’ grounds…(who cares how many freeze to death?)

And their bought and paid for politicians would pass such nonsense…because the ‘main objective’ hasn’t changed, they are indeed trying to ‘kill-off’ as many of us as they can without a fight.

Weirdly, they consider this ‘natural selection’ when there is nothing ‘natural’ about it.

Mother Nature don’t have no bank vault, she don’t care about money.

Which will likely doom us as a species IF the rest of us are ‘stupid’ enough to let the self-interested get away with it.

But I digress…

There is a third major factor that didn’t exist in previous economic downturns that is causing a considerable amount of despair, do you know what that is?

I’ll give you a hint, it is the primary reason we have gone four years without any improvement.

The term normally associated with this factor is the one thing capitalists deny (because it makes the whole structure of capitalism invalid) and that term is ‘market saturation’.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to expand saturated markets!

Not that ‘demand’ is the primary problem here, not at the moment anyway. (Oh would that it were!)

As I have stated repeatedly our civilization is seriously ‘mis-managed’ (although those who benefit from the current arrangement would vehemently disagree/deny this.)

I can ‘lobby’ for class war ‘til the cows come home but until the reality that the bastards really are trying to kill you sinks in, I’m just flapping my gums.

Oh, and I am not taking credit for having an ‘original idea’ here. Admit it, you’ve had this exact same thought cross your own mind on more than one occasion, haven’t you?

Anyway, under the category of How spooky is that? we have this article on the same topic from across the pond!

(This snippet is out of context as it sits, Demetri’s ‘central premise’ is the same as my own, comparing the past with the present excludes some major game changing factors.

The snippet refers to how his local ‘downtown’ has changed since the 1950’s, where the main square that was once filled wih banks is now populated with employment agencies.)

None carried pension plans and it was clear that there was no question of a “job for life” or indeed much employment protection given the likely nature of the contracts. How you compare this with say in 1951 a reliable factory job with an established firm I do not know and it is still very different from 1981.

What I do not like is the prevailing fear and defensive attitudes of people in the workplace, the uncertainty and the need to compete personally, to deceive and to betray. We may not have earned much at the bottom end of the ladder in the 1950’s but often we managed to laugh and “teamwork” was real and not a formula for controlling dissent or a box to be ticked for the CV for the next job move.

Rather than casting our minds back to a distant and alien past the question should be how should incomes be distributed in a society that is very new and within which we expect a good deal of public provision paid for by taxation.

The answer at present is that nobody has the answers.

At the end he touches upon a topic that I, myself was musing on earlier this morning.

For all of the general agreement in the media that the current system is broken there seems to be very little ‘discussion’ (among those expected to pull it off) about alternatives to the way things are currently done.

Worse, there are precious few non-Ivory Tower alternatives to capitalism and its kissing cousin, capitalism lite known as Communism.

Once political decision making becomes a ‘club’ you may as well re-instate monarchy!

I have devised a viable ‘third way’ with A Simple Plan.

By placing the law beyond the reach of the self-interested and restricting new legislation with ‘the golden rule’ (universiality) further tempered by the Human Anti-exploitation law, we won’t be making a lot of trips to the polls to defend our rights.

Under ASP there are no legislators to buy and no way to buy them, your money is for you, period!

Alterations in the way income is derived and distributed make ASP ‘fair’. (If you have a ‘problem’ with fairness then you don’t deserve the benefits of civil society…and they will be withdrawn from you.)

Energy scarcity brings with it the necessity of living closer to one another, if we are to pull this off we need to make society more equitable and just than it curently is.

Capitalism favors individualism (read selfishness) something our slender resources will no longer tolerate.

This will remain a major stumbling block going forward but exile will eventually ‘weed out’ those who don’t have what it takes to live in a cooperative environment.

Exile is the ‘stick’ that makes ASP work.

There are other ‘safeguards’ that need to be followed because like any system, leave something out and it won’t work ‘as intended’.

It is easy to see this ‘holistic’ plan turn into a nightmare if the, er, ‘self-interested’ are put in charge of implementing it.

ASP is far from ‘utopian’ but is does provide a much more level playing field than has ever previously been available.

The question without answer is whether or not we are civilized enough to implement it.

I vote yes, but that’s just me.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner