Friday, December 2, 2011

Vagaries of Capitalism





Thinking about the Dem's TV ad which does its best to shoot down Mitt Romney as an inconsistent flip flopping idiot with his defense of TARP brings me to this observation about the entire enterprise of the hideously corrupt Capitalism we now see before us.  So yes, if you happen to be an executive at Goldman Sachs you are, in the words of Ayn Rand, your goddess of wisdom, a corrupt mediocrity.

My first thought is that in order for this bloated form of Capitalism to go at all, huge amounts of money must be given by Congress to the largest corporations.  What Mother Jones calls the Hog Trough.  And these constant infusions of cash must be increasingly larger and more frequent.  So the last time it was $700-800 billion, not counting the 7.77 Trillion which the Federal Reserve gave out under the table.  Whatever outcry of Tea Partiers there was at $700 billion --- now imagine the pissing and moaning at the news that the total sum was unimaginably bigger.  So now those institutions have more or less repaid the loans, but what about the next crisis.  And be not fooled.


  • There will be another crisis.
  • Immanently.
  • Much bigger and more terrible than the last one.

What capitalists need to do is actually read Karl Marx and see how Marx called the shots.  How he predicted with every little twist and turn of Capitalism. And Marx was writing back in the mid-19th Century.  His predictions are almost eery in their accuracy.  Capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries will inevitably fail and fail with increasing frequency.  And Marx was not even talking about the effects of the overweening greed of capitalists, which now we can see so plainly. Banks which once offered cheap dinner plates and watches if you would just please open an account with them have now changed their tune to

"GIVE ME YOUR MONEY!  PUNK!"

And they are now in the business of real estate and have made it their business to evict each and every person from their home and they don't seem to care whether they do this legally or ill.  In fact it seems that several attorneys general will be taking several banks to court now.

But they can't stop what the banks have done with their appalling policies of fraudulent foreclosures.  The problem is that the banks understand --- as the American public does not--- that money is about to have considerably less buying power than it does now, which is a way of saying that it will soon be worthless as the Deutshmark was in the 30s in Germany.

Lotte Lenya told the story of how she was once paid one million marks for her performance.  She said she wanted to keep the check as a reminder of how she was worth so much.

So given that the dollar is about to collapse through the floor, banksters are trading worthless dollars for houses.  Houses are always going to be worth something. So what if the real estate bubble has burst sinking prices and value below the horizon, so that many homes are now, as is said, underwater.  The banks simply warehouse the properties until the prices of real estate come back and then they sell them for the inflated value.

Just doing business.

heh heh...

It would be nice to think that this corruption is limited to capitalism.  But it isn't.  The fault is in the human beings who work it.  Any and all systems are inherently good in the beginning and bad toward the end.  Until, like capitalism, it has become so intolerably corrupt that it either collapses of its own weight or something like the 99% Occupy Movement arises.  Socialism and Communism are as vulnerable to mediocrity and Oligarchical class-ism as capitalism.


As I recall that was the favorite explanation of the Mafia whenever they whacked somebody.  Nothin' personal youse understand.  Just doin' business.  Meanwhile your favorite uncle lies at the bottom of the Hudson River wearing cement shoes.

So the banks are the new Mafia.

Just doing business.


As Gautama Buddha said, the key is moderation in all things.  Given the current condition of human kind, and the fact that greed and gluttony really are deadly sins, no system is going to come along and solve all our problems.  So the answer to it all, as far as I can tell, is a matter, finally, of human decency.

   

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The Trouble with A Randian's



As far as I can tell the people who are so moved by Atlas Shrugged that they want to be an Ayn Rand follower, are missing several very important points.

  • They are not John Galt and never will be.
  • They are not Ayn Rand  and never will be.
  • Ayn Rand would most likely call them to their faces, "corrupt mediocrities."
  • Ayn Rand may have despised the negative aspects of collectivism but she was also an authoritarian and insisted that everyone believe as she believed.
  • Her followers are just that, Followers; 
  • Ayn Rand hated people who followed other people.
Ayn Rand's Followers are authoritarian Followers.  That quality of being a Follower is easy to identify.  They brook no criticism of their chosen deity, or totalitarian dictator, seeing no difference between the two.  At the slightest hint of disagreement an authoritarian follower goes into attack mode with the ferocity of a Pitt Bull.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

On Killing Occupy Wall Street


  ♦   

Please raise your hand if you didn't know that the 1% percent was and is conspiring against the Wall Street Occupiers.  And it's not a clean straight forward sort of conspiring either.  Nothing like offering to come forward, get together and talk.  No, this is cloak and dagger bigtime treacherous strategy from the deep of the heart, for lack of a better word, of  the GOP.  Needless to say it's designed to kill.

And to lie.

And to kill careers.

And to lie.

And lie...

The idea is to kill not only the movement, but, Hey! Who knows? A few human bodies might turn up floating face down on the cold waters of the Potomac. Yes, the party of NO, has a long history of somehow, very conveniently not being around when an airplane crashes and a witness who was about to spill certain beans to Congress happens to be in it  and, --- surprise --- he dies.  Oh. dear.

Quite a lot of that sort of thing went on under Bush-Cheney-Rove.  You didn't really think that JFK Jr. was the kind of pilot who would go and bungle so badly he'd  crash his plane with his celebrity girlfriend beside him did you?  That actually had earmarks of a Mafia/CIA operation.

Oh dear.

Then there was the matter of Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone's death just before the election. Oops!

Oh dear, indeed.  Click here if you think I indulge in too much paranoia.

There several other notable crashes with similar earmarks that were mentioned in Republican owned media and then it all disappeared. And for some reason, one's grip on reality was called into question if one mentioned it. Here is one more significant and unsolved plane crash which killed Bush White house IT Guru, Mike Connell.  OK, planes do crash all the time.  But rarely does the universe time it so that it coincides with these circumstances: He knew a lot about what was going on in side the Oval Office, did not approve of it, and was on his way to tell Congress what he knew.  What all of this amounts to, for me, is that the 1% are killers; and if you get in their way you'll be offed in a twinkling.

So now the strategy elucidating at least one of the 1%'s probably many strategies, has been leaked by former aides of  Republican House Speaker, John Boehner.  And one very good outcome is that now we know where at least some of it is coming from.  And where it is going.

Right here is a big difference between the 1% and the OWS:

  • OWS is way out front. 
  • No hidden agendas 
  • Populist
  • Patriotic without being nauseating.  
  • Peaceful.
  • Lovers of Truth.
If we happen to think of it, you'll know about it right away.  Compare that to the Republican style.

  • Dark, craven, memos delivered mouth to ear; whispers, footfalls and lurking around corners of the halls of Congress.  
  • The GOP hatches plans just like slithering cobra moms leaving their newborns to fend for themselves.
  • Elitist
  • Unpatriotic, but gives lip service when backed into a corner.
  • No respect for the US Constitution.  Regards the US Constitution as a dishrag to be pulled into any shape they want.
  • Republicans love lies and hate truth.  They believe their wealth can create any reality they want.
•  •  •


So the other shoe has dropped, as it were, and we have the satisfaction of a response, albeit an illegitimate one.  At the same time it tells us that the other side is every bit as engaged as we thought.  The silence now is broken in more ways than one.  The Washington, DC lobbyists and PR firms have been working late guttering not only the candles but their minds as well in the right wing's fevered attempt to nullify the good effects of Occupy Wall Street for the American People, and the bad effects for the GOP; and therefore, the crafty, champagne sipping 1%.  Its funny to read their descriptions of the OWS people: not only are they unwashed, but also, gasp, they use drugs; not only medicinally, but also recreationally.

Oh dear.

Wasn't it George W Bush who was famous among his friends and family for filling his nostrils til they bled snorting excellent blow? AKA cocaine.

The video below reports on merely one of the many likely strategies likely to be floating around National Republican Commitee Headquarters. (whenever I think of RNCH, I have to smile remembering when Ken Melman, the head of the whole shebang, turned out to be gay, and also, he wanted to be forgiven by his gay peers.)  

Here is a word of wisdom to all the people who have told me  that to rail against the government was at worst psychotic, and at its best, useless, because the government is us.  Well, that may once have been the reality of government in days of yore, but now, it seems that the government is not only not us, but, really, not even a friend. The federal government, it turns out wants --- if not to destroy us, the 99%, at least it is dedicated to the proposition of keeping us asleep --- snoozing in our chains.  How is that different from the movie, The Matrix?

Answer: it isn't...    

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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Brutality of Oakland Cops



There will be REPRISALS.  Eventually this crisis will sort itself out and the most belligerent and egregious of the cops everywhere in America, not to mention the mayors who who conspired to use brutality against peacefully assembled citizens, will find themselves no longer in power.  Kaput!

Out of work.

But they may very well find themselves in serious trouble.  

  • And the reprisals will come from us 
  • and they will be just.  
  • Unlike the Power Elite we will abide by justice.
We will win back America and return it to being a nation of law.  This will happen or we will fail as a nation.  Simple as that.

Obama could have prevented this.  All he had to do was bring a sense to his administration that he would support America after the horrible blot on the pages of history as a result of the eight years of the Bush-Cheney Administration.

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Friday, November 18, 2011

It's Morally Indefensible And They Know It



They’re not John Galt, not Steve Jobs, and not helping.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Suspicions of Conspiracy Validated



So what we suspected all along, namely, that there's a strong conspiratorial aspect to the nationwide police crackdown on the Occupy movement, is true.  It turns out that 18 cities nationwide were in on the secret.  The police were told by the very top dogs that if they wanted to receive some large cash federal grants they would turn the protesters out of the parks; and feel very free to use unrestrained violence.  Just don't use real bullets.  Other than that, do your worst.

Several big question arise:

  • In which agency, and in whose fevered little right-wing brain did the vile, albeit well coordinated conspiracy originate?
  • Why were the mayors so easily led into being puppet operatives for federal agencies their hearts had to tell them were criminally motivated?  Why so apparently eager to violate the US Constitution with treasonous action?
  • Why were the rank and file police officers, themselves, so agreeable to be exploited as the tools of repression?  Traitorous, downright anti-American  action does not necessarily go with the territory as far as fulfilling one's duties as a cop.  
  • What are we going to do about it? 
And that is the $64 billion dollar question.  Finding out who had the motivation to suppress the first stirrings of dissent among the American people, who have just rolled over and over as the 1% has robbed them of their wealth, the social position in the Middle Class, and their homes, and finally their jobs.  

And now they are saying ouch!

And somebody up there in 1% land is such a control freak--- added to all the other neuroses, starting with narcissism--- which are so eminently visible in the most wealthy and most powerful, that they must have it silenced immediately and for all time.  

My own inclination is to want to look very closely at the International Banksters, perhaps the Rothschilds; but even as I write this it becomes apparent that Goldman- Sachs also fits the profile.

    Tuesday, November 15, 2011

    NYPD Destroys Occupy the Future




    How I wish that people would stop saying ridiculous trash such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement has already accomplished its goals.  That is just plain wrong.  It has allowed itself to be pushed around and made an absolute patsy.  It has now failed miserably.  The one overarching goal was simply to occupy and make life difficult for the 1%.  And for everyone who joyfully pays tribute to the 1%.  Falling all over themselves, to bow, indeed, to prostrate themselves, before their masters, those who adore and worship the Lords of Greed, have utterly erased their lives and their true happiness.

    And for their part, the 1% has decided to reassert their absolute control over the world.  As long as Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, The Kock Brothers, Mitch McConnell,  Baron Phip de Rothschild and the rest of the sorry lot of psychopaths who are so possessed of greed that for them it feels like the normal way for a human being to be.  It is not for nothing that the Middle Age Roman Church classified Greed as a DEADLY sin.  Greed kills everything it touches--- including the soul.  The clues are all around.  Read, for example, the story of King Midas.  The story has survived because it has enough Truth in it that we must keep it as a warning.  Of course, you won't discover that your soul is missing until you die and that event may come sooner than you think.

    Sorry, fat cats, but you may have those shit cakes you call wealth and treasure, but you lose your soul in the bargain.  Goethe was a genius into human nature, and when he wrote was right. and  the parable of the modern man, known as Faust.  I am not saying that you will go to Hell, but I am not saying NO, either.

    Like the story of King Midas.  breathes, the world will be in peril.