-------------------------
6/16/2001

Original text and editing by:
A G Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
"A good slave works with fear alone."

Q of the week:
Q:What is fair?
A:It is fair, according to the president, that the wealthy get a tax cut even though they pay no taxes. Equal opportunity to get rich is not suppressed by law but is such a low probability due to the old boys' and girls' nets of the elite that it may as well be so. To this Bush has responded, "life isn't fair". It seems fairness is only sometimes worthy of consideration.

Week twenty-one:
Distractions:
In order to secure my rights in a democratic society I must defend the rights of others. Does that include the right of the elite to economically enslave me? Is the doublethink paradox so debilitating we can never escape it's wordy snare?


Economy:
Nortel, a comtech giant, lost 19 billion and is pointed to as a reason for the stock market's poor performance. The multi-national Canadian based corporation has responded with an announcement that it will lay of 10,000. If these employees made 100,000 each (highly unlikely since managers rarely lay off themselves, even though they and their masters are the ultimate problem) the savings would amount to 1 billion. Who are they trying to impress?

This is just one more example of abstract economic thinking that impacts real people and our ability to consume and stay alive. The downsizing is designed to impress Wall Street. The gods of spiritual economy are shallow enough that they will never fathom the depths of cumulative effect. The real economy of goods and services that we need to survive is bought and paid for by the sweat of consumers and always ignored by the manipulators of the symbols of wealth.


Education: Law and order:
"Man sues Walmart for brainwashing him." I hope he wins. A million suits against a thousand corporations could put an end to the sickeningly automatonical corporate identities that possess most of us, either directly or by contagion. The problem is epidemic since Microsoft and other giants bought the schools.

Granted, many throw it off at the end of each work day but few escape without some internalization of the condition. For most it only takes a key word or signal, as with the "Manchurian Candidate", to trigger the cultivated response/demeanor suite, even if away from the job.

Try it out on anyone who works for a corporation or the government. Do not do this to anyone you like. Do not try this at home!

[Ed. note: I wouldn't be so cruel to anyone under any circumstances. You can observe as much abomination of humanity as you can stomach if you simply keep your eyes open. Creating circumstances to view, or other more direct participation in this horror is grossly immoral by my standards.]


Energy:
This slot is filled by a guest intellect today.

A few months back, there was considerable talk about a looming gasoline shortage. The Tucson newspapers printed articles about the local price of gasoline hitting $3 a gallon by mid-summer. Now gasoline prices are dropping below $1.50/gallon and the papers say the price drop is due to LARGE INVENTORIES (=abundant supply??).

The state of California has been having electrical power shortages and "Rolling Blackouts." One suggested solution is to build power plants in Northern Mexico (where environmental laws are more lax), so petroleum and coal can be sold to the Mexicans and they can sell electrical power to California. Meanwhile, a power company in NEW Mexico, USA wants to build a 345,000-volt power line from the Palo Verde Nuclear Power plant near Phoenix down to Santa Ana, Sonora, to sell excess power to Mexico. There's strong opposition to that power line running through environmentally-sensitive areas in Avra Valley, AZ.

It seems that to get a straight answer out of certain persons...

Studying a textbook used for History in the northern U.S., it's possible to get the idea that every white person living in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. around 1850-1862 owned slaves. In reality, probably a small minority could afford slaves, and many probably didn't believe in slavery.

It's also possible to get the idea that every non-Jew living in Germany from 1938-45 desparately wanted to kill as many Jews as possible.

IT's possible for another similar misconception to develop in the near future. Several months ago, I saw an article that said that half the population of the U.S.A. now own stock in corporations. If half the population-plus one person-own stocks, then "The Majority of U.S. citizens are stockholders." Then one might further generalize that "The U.S.A. is a country of corporate owners, and their corporations are exploiting the world."

Editorial Comment:
It is more than possible that the economic elite who own more than 90% of all stock want us to be deluded. They want us to believe we own the corporations, especially when some liability arises. The misleading statistic that's usually quoted is: "more than half the stock is privately owned". That begs the question of who owns it and who owns the stock in the corporations that own the remainder? The answer of course is that 1% of the population own 80% of everything and the next 4% own 15% more.

I'll do the math for you. Five % of the population own 95% of everything and we are the slaves that satisfy their greed. Do you want to know who they are? They are one in twenty of us. That's all we need to know. I'll leave it as an exercise to determine which group your beliefs support; whose side are you really on?


Foreign Policy:
George is to share his vision of Russia's place in the world with President Putin. Does patronization always indicate a self-aggrandized fool? I also wonder at the wisdom of pompous posturing in the former Soviet Union and present nuclear peer.

It's one thing to boast about our strengths in our own living rooms but quite another in our neighbors home. Maybe it was for consumption by the American people through a plastic press. Does he really believe us (or anyone) to be such fools? Is he projecting?

I need telephone service and dependable, private network access. If you can help with this or cash donations to assist in my continued existence, contact me:

agkaiser@hotmail.com

Please, copy the "Collector" to an email composition and forward. If this has been forwarded to you and you wish to be added to the list to recieve it directly, put Collector Request in the subject email to:

agkaiser@yahoo.com
Greg Kaiser