Hell, Circled

Greetings good citizen,

Largely because it’s the middle of the night and I don’t have to go in tomorrow I’m taking advantage of my ‘down time’ to create a new post.

Probably how it will go for the next couple of weeks until I adjust to a ‘regular’ 3rd shift pattern.

That said there have been MANY disturbing news items I have wanted to expound upon, including the typical beating of the war drums surrounding North Korea (and how the hopelessly stupid believe we are in danger of ‘eminent attack’!)

Seriously…but the same thing happened when W was drumming up support for an invasion of Afghanistan, followed thirty days later by a totally irrational invasion of Iraq!)

Which is to return to our main theme…the one where I belabor the obvious and point out the destruction of our civilization by the hopelessly greedy (and stupid.)

But let’s see what the ‘guardians of truth and justice’ have for us?

We’re One Big Team, So Run Those Stairs
By JED LIPINSKI
CrossFit, the workout fitness program, is viewed by some companies as a way to improve worker production and morale.

Yes siree, you are a ‘member of the team’ until it becomes more profitable to ship your job to Timbuktu (where your replacement will do what you do for two cents A DAY!)

Lying corporate America keeps insisting that they ‘value’ their employees until they don’t.

The rats have no loyalty.

Your circumstances hinge largely on their inability to replace you with a competent meat puppet that they will also tell what a valued member of the ‘team’ they are!

As long as stupid keeps getting the work out the door, they will remain a ‘valued member of the team’.

But if they start angling for a better, fairer deal, suddenly they are a ‘liability’.

Although complaining about working conditions will also result in ‘early termination’:

As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester
By IAN URBINA
OSHA, the watchdog agency that many Americans love to hate and industry often faults as overzealous, has largely ignored long-term threats.
Video: A Dangerous Trade
Documents: Investigating a Chemical’s Hazards

Why do workers ‘hate’ OSHA? Because the typical capitalist will terminate employees who complain about unsafe working conditions, often telling the media those workers were ‘unwilling to work’.

In our ‘desperation’ to hold on to our paycheck, many people will throw their would be savior under the bus, ultimately aiding no one.

It’s not until the ‘true blue’ employee loses an appendage and gets terminated for being disabled that they learn who their real ‘friend’ was.

But hey, we have bigger things to worry about:

Oil Pipeline Ruptures in Arkansas
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ 11:16 PM ET
An Exxon Mobil crude oil pipeline ruptured near Mayflower, Ark., spilling as many as 10,000 barrels of oil, the company said.

Somehow I don’t think it is particularly helpful to point out that a barrel of oil only has 33 gallons in it. When it’s 33 gallons of black guk it still mighty nasty business.

But locally two water department employees were terminated for ‘dressing’ deer they had shot at one of the town wells.

Now the paper is saying the town may have to pay a fine for ‘contaminating’ the drinking water along with not reporting the incident to the state environmental protection agency.

MORE LUDICROUS is the fact that the town wells are over 1,500 FEET deep…long way for deer blood to ‘seep’ into a portion of the town’s water supply (and the well in question is just down the street from where I live. So theoretically I’d be drinking ‘contaminated water’.

Mind you, Exxon Mobil probably WON’T be fined for spilling crude oil in Arkansas but two town employees who happened to take advantage of a public water source got fired for letting deer blood run 1,500 feet above the town water supply!

You know what the chances are of that blood even reaching the water table, pretty much nil!

Soil bacteria alone will gobble that stuff up long before it even begins to get under the earth.

So why are our environmental police so stupid?

Oh, that’s right, they don’t have to know anything about biology! All they need to know is law, which is written by equally as ignorant legislators!

Did I mention we have a problem with the ‘maladministration’ of our society?

Which probably explains why this myth persists:

Freed From Its Cage, the Gentler Robot
By ANNE EISENBERG
New factory robots, designed to work and play well with others, no longer have to be fenced in to protect workers from accidents.

Let’s leave aside the reality that robots don’t consume the products they make. Once again the ‘trend’ (driven by the greedy and short-sighted capitalist) is towards ‘total automation’.

You no longer have to keep robots isolated if you eliminate humans from the factory altogether!

Thus do we continue to read ‘happy talk’ about robots learning to operate ‘safely’ around their human counterparts.

How many robots will the capitalists need when nobody has a job anymore?

(Or the ONLY jobs left are in healthcare and law enforcement…) It’s a bit too nightmarish to even contemplate a healthcare environment utterly devoid of humans, sort of re-defines the innermost circle of hell, doesn’t it?

It certainly redefines being trapped with no way out.

And this is from Saturday’s NY Times.

How bad does it need to get good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tragedy

Greetings good citizen,

The cheats on Wall Street are ‘taking a break’ from pushing the Dow (which is mostly bank dominated) higher.

We are supposed to ‘assume’ this condition is natural when nothing could be further from the truth.

The Dow could be pegged at 20,000 TOMORROW and NOTHING would change except the one percent would be richer and YOU’D be poorer…on paper of course.

How sad is it that the ‘back of the envelope’ is ‘as good as it gets’ for most of us?

Once again we must ask ourselves how did we come to this place?

Let’s have a look at our predatory commerce system:

5 Ways Privatization Is Poisoning America
We all live better lives when the common good is not for sale.
March 10, 2013 |

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn't be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.

The free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said "We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money."

With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.

Long recognized as an elementary evil, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the very reason we have/establish government.

How sad is it good citizen that the people who control the printing presses keep selling the rest of us out?

What is the ‘inevitable outcome’ of profits before people? You’ve been living in it’s ‘death spiral’ for decades.

Why can’t Japan ‘recover’ from being robbed by its corrupt?

Predation, plain and simple.

Those who are robbing you blind ‘own’ the government that was established to ‘protect’ you.

This is the thing ‘treason’ (and it’s terrible punishment) are made from.

So…where is our White Knight? Who will rescue us from the nasty, evil predators?

Historically it has been the ‘professional class’ that has led and nurtured revolutions but our better educated rabble now know there is barely a nickle’s worth of difference between the predators and their well paid lackeys.

Why these ‘stupid people’ continue to replace the system they’re rescuing us from with a virtually identical one defies comprehension.

I suspect a ‘lack of imagination’ has nothing to do with it.

In many ways a revolt can be like hitting the lottery for the sublimely mentally deficient.

Which is a big reason why so many revolts are ‘stillborn’ technically dead before they start.

But people are stupid and continue to believe the funny money they’re bought off with is actually worth something more than it really is.

Worse, a reliance on scrip that has no actual value can be a powerful weapon in the, er, ‘wrong hands’.

(Or so argue the gold bugs/hard money crowd.)

Read my lips, ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!

When taken in this context ‘the tragedy of the commons’ is put in its proper perspective.

Usually followed by the, er, ‘swift sword of justice’ cutting down those who would cheat you out of your just share.

Those who would privatize the commons for their own benefit.

How tragic is it good citizen that besides suspending rights you have enjoyed for 900 years our bought and paid for ‘Supreme Court’ has also re-purposed commerce to ‘profit’ the shareowner at society’s expense?

Which is to ask why is there no revolt? (Are the lackeys so well paid this time or have they become so stupid as to be blind to the danger our current course represents to themselves as well as their ‘masters’?

A truly troubling question good citizen.

It can’t be because we’re afraid of dying, those who rob us with impunity have taken everything worth living for!

Government, it’s supposed to work FOR YOU, not for THEM!

Just another painfully obvious point I felt compelled to belabor.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Martial Law

Greetings good citizen,

You know I sometimes complain about how this nation is ‘turning into’ a Banana Republic.

On further diagnosis, we’re already there!

How America Became a Country That Lets Little Kids Go Homeless
Family homelessness essentially did not exist until the 1980s. And the financial crisis has made the problem massively worse.
[snip]
Here's what happened to a family Nilan met in Florida. The parents both worked at restaurants in New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina wiped out their jobs and their home and sent them to Nashville. When "the floods came back and upended them again," they asked their 8-year-old daughter where she wanted to go. "Disney World!" she said. Not a bad idea, they figured, since tourist traps are filled with restaurants where they could find jobs. But when they got there they couldn't find steady work (Orlando has an 8.7 percent unemployment rate). Sometimes the mom had a job, sometimes the dad did. Mostly the jobs were part-time and temporary. To make ends meet, Nilan says, they rented one of the beds in their motel room to a 53-year-old homeless vet. DIY homeless shelter.

Sure, the headline is dramatic and it could be worse…suppose the infamous they took the message of this headline to heart and decided to give these kids a roof over their heads…but just the kids.

Let the parents twist in the wind…

How many of you would let social services take your kids because YOU couldn’t find a job (at any wage?)

Which is to point out that we don’t just suffer from a ‘broken society’ we have a broken civilization on our hands!

So it’s collapse should be considered a ‘net positive’.

The problem, as we are all well aware is how the evil fucks who run things now plan on being the same ones who run things after this clusterfuck does a face plant in the dirt.

And THAT ‘will not do’.

And the struggle to insure that doesn’t happen is what will cause the largest loss of life during the ‘transition’.

Left to you imagination is what we will transition to?

Will the current oligarchy give way to monarchy or will it be something more ‘Orwellian’ in nature. A place with no rules so the term ‘lawbreaker’ can be determined on an ‘as need’ basis?

Um, just so you know, your TV set is already watching YOU. What remains unclear is if it is listening to you too.

If they can rig it so the set will transmit an image while/when it appears to be off or if a remote viewer can see in while you’re watching (a neater trick than you might imagine) it is entirely reasonable to assume they can hear you as well.

Not that it makes a difference. The big danger here is the casual observer’s inability to distinguish the ‘authenticity’ of what they’re seeing.

Or worse, to grasp the context within why the observed person is in an ‘agitated’ state.

To ‘prosecute’ much of what they observe the laws would have to be modified. If we enter into a state of Martial Law this step would immediately become ‘moot’.

Under Martial Law all legal ‘protections’ are automatically ‘suspended’.

The thing to fret about is whether or not they’d even bother to inform you that Martial Law had been declared.

Nothing says they have to tell you.

And today it would be near impossible to tell!

Just one more little factoid that should disturb you deeply.

We may well be under Martial Law right now and not even know it.

And what a woeful thing it will be to learn that your rights have been ‘suspended’ at the same time they arrest you for ‘suspicion’ of (fill in the blank.)

So what kind of society lets small children live in the streets?

One that is centered on the Haves and the Have Mores!

The Reagan Revolution (also known as the corporate hijacking of the US government) has ushered in some decidedly draconian changes in our society.

If we fail to launch an immediate counter-revolt, our children are doomed.

How’s that for putting a ‘fine point’ on things?

Don’t think the danger is ‘eminent’?

Think again.

Kids living in the streets are just the tip of a massive iceberg.

We need change and we need it NOW!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Compasses

Greetings good citizen,

In what can only be described as massive case of cognitive dissonance (although there is the 'only game in town factor’ also in play) markets are generally ‘up’, again, for no apparent or rational reason.

The pending Greek vote, like the upcoming Egyptian elections both appear to be just like the upcoming US elections, already stacked with ‘non-choices’ pretending to be ‘alternatives.’

Because no matter how you choose, the outcome remains the same.

And how friggin’ sad is THAT, good citizen?

In my mind it conjures the image of a captive being prepared for slaughter by cannibals. It doesn’t matter that the captives out number the cannibals by a factor of a million to one, the cannibals have them all hobbled, hand and foot so they can’t resist.

You should seriously take a moment to marvel at how effective just a handful of men with guns can be.

Which raises some other, disturbing social problems and the raging debate over ‘how’ these problems should be ‘handled’:

In his June 11, 2012 op-ed in the NY Times, Paul Krugman goes beyond economic analysis to bring up the morality and the conceptual framing that determines economic policy. He speaks of “the people the economy is supposed to serve” — “the unemployed,” and “workers”— and “the mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming.”

Krugman is right to bring these matters up. Markets are not provided by nature. They are constructed — by laws, rules, and institutions. All of these have moral bases of one sort or another. Hence, all markets are moral, according to someone’s sense of morality. The only question is, Whose morality? In contemporary America, it is conservative versus progressive morality that governs forms of economic policy. The systems of morality behind economic policies need to be discussed.

Most Democrats, consciously or mostly unconsciously, use a moral view deriving from an idealized notion of nurturing parenting, a morality based on caring about their fellow citizens, and acting responsibly both for themselves and others with what President Obama has called “an ethic of excellence” — doing one’s best not just for oneself, but for one’s family, community, and country, and for the world. Government on this view has two moral missions: to protect and empower everyone equally.

In a debate totally void of reason the conservative ‘argument’ over ‘the natural order of things’ smacks so loudly of religious dogma as to be indistinguishable from it.

‘It’s that way because that’s the way it is’ is a mighty ‘feeble’ argument that is only a half a degree removed from the truth, it’s that way because that is how I want it to be!

Which the meat-headed conservative will vehemently deny (if he is not surrounded by his criminal cohorts.)

How fucked up is it that the phrase ‘the poor deserve what they get’ serves as the ‘secret handshake’ for a club any self-respecting human doesn’t want anything to do with?

Funny thing about that particular ‘handshake’, you know what it will buy you under A Simple Plan? It gets you an all expenses paid trip to ‘liberty-land’, that place where you’re ‘free’ to do whatever you like, you can lay claim to the whole place because it will be the only place in our new society where you will be allowed to ‘own’ things.

Sounds like a ‘good deal’ right?

There are a couple of little ‘hitches’…and ‘how little’ are matters of ‘perspective’.

First, we send you on your ‘permanent holiday’ in your ‘birthday suit’ [regardless of time of year.] Since you don’t appreciate the cooperative nature of society/civilization, you will not be permitted to bring anything you didn’t make yourself out of natural materials. Um, there are also ‘size restrictions’, you won’t be allowed to bring the Hogan you built with you either.

For safety reasons, if your only handmade possession is a ‘sharp rock’, you won’t be able to bring it with you because there will be no shortage of ‘sharp rocks’ where you’re going.

You won’t be permitted to bring food with you, part of your, er, ‘rehabilitation’ will be the sharpening of those self-sufficiency skills that you folks prize so highly.

You’re free to hunt, prep and eat whatever comes along…and ‘whatever’ is a literal term.

The people who have been there longer may well include you as part of the day’s menu, so choose your ‘allies’ carefully…

Those who befriend you may have other motives (like not wanting to drag your dead ass to the cook fire.)

Now it sounds a bit ‘harsh’, doesn’t it?

Shouldn’t we show these misguided souls some ‘mercy’?

In answer to that we have to reverse the situation and ask where was THEIR mercy when it came to the destitute?

Who were they to decide who did and didn’t deserve succor in a situation THEY created?

An employer ‘picks’ their employees, hiring no more (and usually less) than they need.

So it comes down to cases…do the poor ‘deserve’ what they get?

Are they truly ‘undeserving’ of respite from their misery because they are ‘immoral’ or is the pig who would pocket the poor’s share for himself the one with the broken moral compass?

Circle logic is often employed to cover self-serving behavior.

The disturbing aspect of this whole line of questioning is why nothing is done when we see these feeble excuses being used to defend inequity?

Why aren’t the defrauders of the destitute prosecuted?

Why aren’t the employers who don’t pay a living wage fined?

Where is the Justice, good citizen?

And ‘I don’t know’ isn’t the right (or enough of) an answer.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Knees or feet?

Greetings good citizen,

It’s nice having extra ‘downtime’ so I can expand the amount of material I comb through for your reading pleasure. Naturally, simply cutting and pasting someone else’s work in this space doesn’t do you any good, you could just as easily find these pieces for yourself.

My job is to add to the perspective of the original writer, make the piece more interesting.

Tonight’s offering is sure to set some folks teeth on edge without reading further than the title.

Where do you suppose I stand on this issue? Do you care or is it more important to know where you stand? Are you a ‘weak, fearful thing?’

[Hat tip: The Automatic Earth]

Americans have become weak and fearful things

Joe,

Today, a friend forwarded to me a news article with this headline: "Fines proposed for going without health insurance." Here are some things I don't get:

1) If folks can't afford to reroof the Old Manse or buy groceries or put retreads on the Jimmy, how (and why) are they going to get insurance, and

2) If they can't afford insurance, how are they going to afford the alleged fine, and

3) Who is the Insurance Police, who's going to rat me out, and

4) Why did The Bastards wait until the whole country is unemployed to pull this shit, and

5) Who elected these boobs -- wait, I have a long-standing soft spot for boobs; make that "idiots" -- anyway, and supposedly to act in our interests? Not me.

My elected representatives so far stand mute on these salient and vexing points.

I tell ya, I'm glad I'm old and won't have to watch much more of this nonsense go by. Although, my Ma's 85 and going strong, still tearing up trees and throwing rocks, I seriously don't think I can take it. I'll blow the beans out of my pressure cooker one of these days.

And you? Well?

Jim

------

Jim,

It's like this ole buddy. Mandatory insurance can be made to sound worse than it is. Especially given that the word mandatory scares the hell out of Americans, even though we already have mandatory drivers license and drivers insurance, income tax, building permits, school attendance, vehicle registration, home insurance for mortgages, personal identification, security scanning at airports, income tax filing, dog licensing, sales taxes, etc. (Looking at this short partial list, I can hear the libertarians locking and loading as we speak.)

For example, Spain, which is now considered to have the best overall health system in the world, has mandatory health insurance. So do many other countries, though they do not think of it in those terms, and though they are often technically purchasing it from the government at very low costs, which they perceive (and rightfully so) as a tax. This helps offset the government cost of insuring retired, poor, unemployed and others who cannot afford insurance. The government covers these people anyway, but must recover the cost. (What a novel idea for running a government! Knowing how you are going to pay for things.)

A U.S. "public option" (we are not even allowed to utter the term socialized healthcare, or even universal healthcare, because anything universal, which is to say fair to all, is a goddamned commie plot -- the cold war lives on in our capitalist state indoctrination) could cover everyone unable to afford insurance by providing it at extremely low cost. So low that even people below the poverty level, and thus qualify for supplemental income tax rebates, would have insurance. It would simply be deducted from their $500 tax rebates or whatever. So they would never even see it being paid for.

The insurance companies love the mandatory part, which would deliver millions of new customers into their hands and let them set the price. But they hate any so-called public option, which would give those poor customers an alternative. So they've done a pretty good job of torpedoing the public option. Good enough to scare Obama off it for a while, even though any such public measure of his would always have been a half measure and still depended upon the insurance corporations to exist. Now it's back, but who knows what it looks like now, or will look like when the fight is over.

And insurance companies especially fear the possibility of a national health card, which inevitably comes with any sort of government sponsored public healthcare. It's just too damned efficient. For instance, in France, doctors have no files, just a card reader and an Internet connection that links to the patient's permanent files and scan images. But it also tracks costs, fees and billings. And in France (or Germany, I forget) if the doctor is not paid within 72 hours, the insurance company is fined. Health insurance companies in Germany are totally non-profit, but sell other insurance -- auto and home -- for profit. They see providing efficient health coverage as a good leader item and a chance to show off their performance to customers. A public option is the first step toward such a system, or something similar. But I suspect we will never see a national health card. These thugs in America would never stand for it. They like to count their money unseen.

Elected officials, the strong liberal ones at least, are mute on this because to say anything resembling the above is political death. The brownshirts who worked them over at town hall meetings at the behest of the healthcare industry would not be so easy on them next time, given what's at stake for the capitalist overclass. Which is to say the healthcare industry's corporate criminal cartel.

And besides, they own the joint. Our government is now a corporate criminal enterprise extorting the wealth productivity of the people. The people are so used to it and so conditioned they no longer know how to ask questions or extrapolate outcomes. They just react in fear of any new public proposal that would change the status quo. [Or so it would seem…]

As for the mandatory part and the fines, that is a red herring if ever there was one. People who have a hard time paying for healthcare (and who doesn't?) get scared out of their britches by such threats. That's why the Republicans put it in there. To scare people away. First you take a good and reasonable thing like universal healthcare, and turn it into a scary authoritarian mandatory thing with grave punishments. Put some stink all over it, something obvious and odious. Make it a burden AND a threat.

That is one of the poison pills for the bill. There will be others to come. After the death panel thing, and the way the people swallowed it, we already know the outcome. Hell, one of the anti-healthcare lies being circulated around here right now is that Obama wants to have mandatory abortions of anyone born with low IQ or is otherwise substandard. Which is OK with me because it would spell the end of the Republican Party.

But whatever they do, there will be no rounding up and fining of the underemployed, unemployed or broke. That's 50 million people these days. Any effort would be mostly a paperwork exercise, at this point. And besides, they do not want your body. They want your money. Thug's work the neighborhoods where the money is, not where it ain't. We live in an extortion based criminal enterprise masquerading as a government, so one shudders to think of the paperwork liens that could be placed on homes, etc. They are paperwork too, but have the strength of law behind them. The commissariat judges who provide the legal muscle for the cartels.

All of which is moot as long as medical and pharma costs in this country are astronomical and still rising, making doctors, executives and major shareholders in the crime syndicate richer than ever. And as long as drone missiles, 400 military bases and two ongoing wars keep draining an already looted public treasury that is forced to run international indebtedness anyway.

Whenever we see something like the mandatory health insurance covered in the media, it is there for effect, not to inform us. It is there to cloud the issue and scare the piss out of people toward the ends of the corporate state. To make them fearfully ask the wrong questions and miss the real issue.

The real question is this: When are we going to rise up against our government and the criminal cartel that owns it?

And with each passing day I am more convinced that the answer is -- never. That takes true inner convictions and ideals, not to mention courage. The real thing, not political rhetoric and ideology. Convictions are measured by actions. And true convictions are arrived at through the clear-eyed self-examination and deep questioning and personal sacrifice of individuals. And defining one's self as something necessarily other than the state. We failed to do so too long ago. We are now state property. A mass of people rallying and surging back and forth in response to state manufactured pseudo events and faux choices. If I still loved this country I would weep for it. But I've watched us too willingly acquiesce to this fate for too long. I don't think we have the reservoir of cultural, moral, spiritual and political strength to turn things around. Or even conceive of what can be, other than what we've seen. Instead, we are issued empty terms as convictions, such as democracy and diversity.

Surely though, the noisy pseudo drama of pseudo choices will go on in a pseudo democracy. If I were a younger man, it might possibly be instructive, in a chilling way. But a guy gets tired of learning the same old lesson year after year, decade after decade. The lesson being that Americans have become weak and fearful things. Ignorant of any sort of real self agency in shaping their country's government.They embrace the notion of "working within the system." Then too, the consequences for doing otherwise are dire. Our corpo-government crime syndicate makes that very clear. In a mob neighborhood, everyone is afraid.

In closing let me say, by all means go ahead and blow the beans out of your pressure cooker. I did. And I found that it left me with a clearer head (or maybe a less cluttered delusion of my own, who is to say? But either way, now the decor inside the old cranium allows me to sleep better at nights). People will call you nuts, say you've gone over the brink. But I find that there is plenty of fine company down here at the bottom of the cliff.

In art and labor,

Joe

PS: I hear on the BBC this morning that the US is still number two (behind Switzerland) in economic output. The difference between the quality and security of our lives and that of the Swiss can be seen as a measure of what is siphoned off by the cartel. Evidently there is quite a bit of wealth being produced by the people left to steal, leaving public amenities and the people to run on pure debt. Thus, don't expect our criminal overlords to let up on us any time soon.

So what do you think good citizen? Are American’s ‘washed up’? Are we so weak and fearful that we all forgot who runs this country…or who defends it? [Our kids! Sadly, commanded by their kids.]

There are all kinds of ‘considerations’ that factor into the larger equation but in the end we return to the same old place that those who battle tyranny and oppression always end up, facing the same old question: is it better to live on your knees or die on your feet?

Sadly, if you live on your knees, you’re already dead.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Capitalism is Dead

Greetings good citizen,

I’m fresh from the hunt and have brought back what should not be particularly shocking news.

Capitalism is dead.

For some bizarre reason, nobody is willing to point this obvious fact out and we can only wonder why?

Understand good citizen that when capitalism was first rolled out, it failed spectacularly!

These first attempts were a stab at ‘capitalist utopia’ where all participants were provided with capital, so they indeed met in the marketplace as ‘equals’.

As one might expect, a society of all ‘Chiefs’ and no Indians couldn’t get out of its own way.

Realizing their mistake, ownership was restricted to a few, thereby forcing the rest to work for the owners (until they had ‘earned’ their way into the ‘upper crust’. No Ponzi scheme is complete without the requisite ‘carrot’.)

This lopsided, one-way, dead end scheme has been in operation for almost 400 years. The ‘end product’ of this arrangement is a mountain of debt that is staggering in its dimensions.

This was due to the need to keep the carrot far enough out of reach so not too many ‘donkeys’ succeeded.

Sadly, the originators of the scheme have produced a considerable number of offspring over the course of 400 years. To keep them all ‘in the chips, the scheme had to grow to mammoth proportions. It is now so large that the economic output of the world can’t support it.

It’s a bit ironic to note that the shoe is now on the other foot. From the beginning, the monied classes have ceaselessly complained about ‘deadwood’…(the principal objection to trade unionism, protected, narrowly defined job classifications.)

Simply put good citizen, our economy is suffering from too much ‘deadwood’…upstairs.

For the past thirty years, the ‘owners’ of our society have been dealing with their ‘deadwood’ problem in the most ruthless manner, they’ve been sending (mostly) union jobs to non-union labor markets.

Naturally, the losses weren’t restricted to union jobs. The mere fact that US workers enjoyed a variety of employer paid benefits like vacations, paid holidays and sick time became reason enough to move ‘off-shore’.

Unforeseen or not, this had the consequence of ‘bankrupting’ their former customer base.

The jobs that remained here paid less than the jobs most workers lost, reducing their capacity to consume.

To add insult to injury, prices continued to climb as consumer’s purchasing power fell off a cliff due to our no longer producing as much wealth as we used to.

This is the ‘trade deficit’ in your face.

Which leads us to a rather obvious question that nobody is addressing…how will we pay off this enormous mountain of debt?

It’s somewhat bizarre to see ‘tea-baggers’ protesting tax increases (for the rich.) Do they honestly think our creditors will carry us forever?

Not only are we not producing enough wealth relative to the size of our population, but our tax base has been decimated…by the same scoundrels that sent our jobs overseas.

The ongoing government bailout of Wall Street isn’t the only thing angering the average American, we know who was behind the ‘big push’ to line their own pockets at the expanse of our nation…the big shots on Wall Street.

Many US industries were ‘threatened’ with having their shares ‘downgraded’ if they didn’t become ‘more competitive’.

Perhaps that by itself is the biggest kick in the gonads the workers of this nation were given as none of this technology was ‘native’ to the nations that now produce the bulk of it.

The Randites can threaten us with ‘going Galt’ all they want because the reality is they’ve already done it!

But wait, it gets better! These traitorous sons of bitches have blown huge holes in our nation’s security apparatus as the now foreign made chips have trojans within them capable of shutting down or disabling much of our military hardware as well as our domestic infrastructure.

Wouldn’t you love to know who authorized that little ‘oopsie’?

Once again, the answer is ‘follow the money’.

Find out who got rich off of outsourcing our vital technology and you’ll find who was behind getting such a foolhardy measure approved.

But once again we are straying off topic. Why is capitalism dead?

Could it be due to the fact that there’s no way to pay back the trillions of dollars of debt the bankers have saddled us with without literally ‘exterminating’ an entire generation worldwide.

Your debts die with you…but the alternative is equally as ‘silly’, levying a 100% income tax for the next hundred years. People without incomes don’t buy anything so what would these workers ‘do’ that wouldn’t be a pointless waste of time and effort?

It would be far simpler to kill the debt itself, and ultimately that is what it will come down to.

Even the capitalists would prefer losses to destruction.

More interesting is they COULD do this tomorrow…but they won’t. They’re going to squeeze as much as they can out of the government while the squeezing’s good.

But imagine if you will what would happen the day after a ‘jubilee’ was declared.

The newly ‘liberated’ bankers would be tripping over one another offering the newly debt free credit…while the folks on the commodity desk would be busy driving the price of everything through the roof.

You may not ‘want’ to borrow…but it’s unlikely you’ll have much choice.

As you can see, absolving debt without removing the criminals from power is only a temporary solution at best.

It should be obvious to everyone that this is how capitalism ‘works’, the object of capitalism is to bankrupt all of the other players…then start a fresh game.

Sadly good citizen, this is not a game this is about survival. No individual or group should have the power to hold us hostage to what we need to live.

We’d only need to rearrange the boxes in a slightly different order to ensure prosperity for all.

To realize that goal we must unseat those who place their own comfort ahead of the common good.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner