May 15, 2008
It’s often noted that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. Some say it’s hard to comprehend that it could be the same man that wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration. I think their time would be better spent in the contemplation of cultural schizophrenia in today’s manifestation of American ideology. We still speak much about freedom and property, while ignoring the poverty created by those free and permitted by zero sum reality (and the indulgence of the elite classes) to acquire it. We make much of individuality, while we remain oblivious to the fact that only a group working together can possibly produce the great wealth, which the rich are then free to label private property and appropriate for themselves. They share enough with their principal ministers: lawyers, bankers, brokers, CEOs and politicians, on the advice of pampered economists, to maintain the illusion that there’s opportunity for all who merit it.
St. Basil -
“The Bread You Possess Belongs to the Hungry”
"They say: Whom do I wrong by keeping my property? What, tell me, is your property? Where did you find it and brought it to your life? Just like someone in the theatre, who had a seat and then stopped those who entered, judging that what lies common in front of everyone to use, was his own: rich men are of the same kind. They first took possession of the common property, and then they keep it as their own because they were the first to take it. If one had taken what is necessary to cover one's needs and had left the rest to those who are in need, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, no one would be in need." - By St. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea in the 4th century.
“14/05/08 Sojourners
“May 06, 2008 - ‘Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism’
“Renowned political analyst Kevin Phillips argues successive administrations have imperiled the US economy by a combination of shortsighted policies and a trend against regulation. These include unparalleled credit card debts, the expansion of financial industries such as hedge funds, ballooning national debts, and deliberately altering statistics like inflation and unemployment to mask the accurate picture." Crisis
“The Challenge Of Modern Slavery” - By Loretta Napoleoni
“07/05/08 ICH -- - Slavery is in our refrigerators. From fruit to beef, from sugar to coffee, slave labor brings food to our tables. “Miguel,” a Mexican slave freed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a US human-rights organization, may have harvested the apples we eat at breakfast. Miguel picked fruit under guard in the United States. He had traveled to el norte to earn the money to pay for treatment for his six-year-old son who has cancer; instead, his employer enslaved him.” Slavery
Not only does the invisible hand fail to check such evil in the background or the fore, the manipulation by mindless greed has painted US into an economic corner. Our economy no longer serves our needs. A duplicitous and repressive morality doesn’t allow US to see the truth of it. The pursuit of profit by the few, through the use of cheap [virtual slave] labor, has reduced the American economy to the superstructure of finance, banking, investment and other non productive services. There’s no sound structure left beneath the pinnacle. They’ve looted it to make themselves richer. Recently, investment has been in the high yield credit market. Neither the liberal economics of Adam Smith, inventor of the invisible hand of each individual acting in his own self interest, nor its neoliberal reincarnation by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, have predicted the inevitable pyramid scam of finance that would destroy our ability to produce the things we need to live. It goes against your training and you will be punished if you have the temerity to see that truth. The conservatives and libertarians also point out that it’s disloyal to be honest about what the free market “individuals” have done to the community. None dare call it mass schizophrenia or treason.
The magic bean market has not only outsourced the manufacture of the goods our lives depend upon. It has offshored food production, as our corn is turned into energy. But not to worry. Agribusiness is busy cutting down Rain Forest and displacing domestic economies the world over to produce crops that can be turned into fuel for your SUV. It works even better in your hybrid if you’re one of the lucky ten percent who profit by the dissipative scam we call an economy.
American inventiveness will save US. That’s the hero the spotlight of entertainment news has focused on today. The president said we need more students to study science and engineering. So why haven’t the scientists and engineers stepped up to save US? Why do we need H1B visas You Tube to fill the jobs of Americans?. Let’s ask the managers who engineered the service economy so that they could increase the profits of investors and, of course, line their own pockets. They say they must do it to remain competitive in the global market. All that they say is part of the scam.
Corporate competitiveness is at the expense of the community. Ninety percent of US are the community that loses, what the greedy few win. And the worthless money they’ve won was all created for the purpose of looting the economy with the debt kite and pyramid scam of finance. But the rich few must make a profit, even if the rest of US are impoverished. Corporations are a better class of people than we. In the 1980s they began to hire foreign engineers who studied here, and then stayed, on H1B visas, to work for less. American engineers and skilled workers were forced into early retirement, which pension funds are being looted by bankruptcy scams today. Or else they moved into management to avoid the pay cut. The domestic students followed the money to business school. Now we really may become dependent on foreign engineers. But the PhD faculties are moving home to teach students there. And the foreign engineers are following the money to China, India et al. Meanwhile the government issues more and more H1B visas, so the rich parasites can cut costs and make more profits.
Why won’t the engineers save US? Are you really made that schizoid by propaganda and other corporate/politician delusional fantasies and wishful thinking? We don’t have the knowledge and skills to make the new technology that can save US. They outsourced that with everything else for the quick bucks they stashed in the Cayman Islands and pay no taxes on. How does Milton Friedman’s delusional fantasy free market, deregulation, privatization, no social spending and tax cuts for the rich play out? The peers of the realm make out like bandits, even if the rest of US starve. Then he didn’t say anything about the new shacks on the hillside that sprung up out of the “Chilean Miracle.” They say shock therapy wipes the memory. [See Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein] Hemingway committed suicide after the treatment. I guess he didn’t want to live when he could hardly see and not touch at all the power of his native mind. The rest of US just plod on. But unless we take back what’s been stolen from US and begin anew to produce at home what we need to live, we won’t plod too much longer. The economy is our means of survival. It belongs to all of US.
She hadn’t understood a word I’d said. The conversation started in the laundromat. She seemed to understand. I explained it all: the undermining of science and engineering (and the rest of the middle class) from academia at the top to the line engineers below. She nodded. Downsizing the middle class had followed close on the outsourcing of consumer goods for a quick buck, which had to be borrowed because the jobs were gone. She nodded. I mentioned the subsidies to oil and record profits since Katrina. She nodded. They further inflate prices and grow the money supply, by making money without producing goods, with derivatives and other “creative financing.” She nodded and agreed to all. Then she flipped a schizo bitch. She referenced the story of Henny Penny and explained to my query that the government took money away from those who made it to give to the “lazy” poor.
Of course the sky wasn’t falling. She’d confused Henny Penny with the Little Red Hen who made the bread. I was incredulous. But I ignored her glaring faux pas. I said the investors are getting all the tax money and Halliburton gets what the government borrows from China. They are the parasites! It’s the workers who do the work that get ripped off. She smiled and nodded knowingly - over and over ad nauseam. Her husband had said little but seemed embarrassed at times. By the time I finished folding the laundry, I knew the lesson was going nowhere. I picked up the basket and headed for the door. I ducked back in for the Parthian shot. I said in a joking tone, “Everyone complains about taxes. I wish I made enough to pay taxes.” They laughed. It seemed somewhat forced. It exuded copious understanding and confidence in their bourgeois superiority. I guess the genuine fraction of the mirth was them laughing at me, the working class fool, not at what I’d said.
Maybe where I go wrong is to speak the truth to conditioned minds that can’t process it. Comedians say it in an acceptable way but does it really sink in any more than my charged tautologies? Maybe the audience laughs at the distortion without attending to the logic of the entertainers’ relaxed syllogisms.
All of the bourgeoisie’s contemplations and the forthcoming offered solutions consider only the problems of 10% of the population. The bourgeois experts care only for the travails of the bourgeoisie. Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC, spoke at Brookings and answered questions on the home loan crisis. After she’d left, the Brookings fellows suggested, as she had, that the problem is loans that shouldn’t have been made. She’d suggested more regulation to see that only the right people get loans. The fellows spent more time suggesting there was so much capital floating that low interest rates were inevitable. Both, the former more than the latter, placed the primary blame on the consumer victims of the scam of finance. Neither could see that the problem is too much profit on too little production and too small incomes for consumer/producers that resulted in too much concentration of wealth and money at the top forcing increased debt at the bottom, while too little investment in domestic real industries took place. All their talk of financial [loan] “products” doesn’t make them any more real than the puppet boy Pinochio. Capitalism is a fraud perpetrated by the rich since its very beginnings centuries ago.
The corporate people owned by the rich are responsible for the destruction of the American economy by their greedy perpetual motion frauds of finance. The sellouts to the elites by the greatest generation of fools who ever lived and those who follow in the older footsteps are in support of the greatest evil that has ever been perpetrated upon the Human Race. You may be only a low level but highly educated corporate clone with no power or mind of your own. However, your stupidity contributes to our common demise by the defense of the wealth of the parasites who afflict US all. I blame you for allowing the irresponsible rich to do this evil to you and to the rest of US.
contact me:
Greg Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
I'll feed myself and provide other necessary resources so that I may continue to write.
A G Kaiser