Forum Post: the perpetual debt model
Posted 4 years ago on June 13, 2019, 10:58 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2516)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Is perpetual debt of consumers and our government to those who've made the greatest profits and loaned us their excess a sustainable economic model?
That is a rhetorical question. A real one is why do so few of us see the deadliest flaw of the for profit system? That is: profit is maximized by minimizing costs and maximizing sales. Most consumers are both costs as employees and buyers with the money they're paid. Government services are also costs and sources of income to producers. The conservatives are terrified of paying sufficient wages or taxes and so the economy falters as the money flows to them and stops there ... until they loan it back to us and our government at interest, which exacerbates the problem. When will conservative masters or the slavish fools who follow them see the paradox? Apparently never!
In feudal time the lords and ladies organized our communities for their own benefit. We seem to have gotten into a bad habit of subservience to the few, the powerful, the greediest and most ruthless. It's time for change.
Can we, in our communities, organize ourselves to provide employment, goods and services on a non-profit basis as readily as the for profit corporations and businesses on which we now depend for our lives and livelihoods?
''Usury, or the charging of interest on loans, was an accepted part of the Mesopotamian credit system. Interest rates were high and remained unchanged for two millennia. But Mesopotamian scholars were well aware of the problem of “debts that can’t be paid.”
''Sumerian kings solved the problem of “peak debt” by periodically declaring “clean slates,” in which agrarian debts were forgiven and debtors were released from servitude to work as tenants on their own plots of land. The land belonged to the gods under the stewardship of the temple and the palace and could not be sold, but farmers and their families maintained leaseholds to it in perpetuity by providing a share of their crops, service in the military and labor in building communal infrastructure. In this way, their homes and livelihoods were preserved, an arrangement that was mutually beneficial, since the kings needed their service.
''Ancient Greece and Rome adopted the Mesopotamian system of lending at interest, but without the safety valve of periodic “clean slates,” since the creditors were no longer the king or the temple, but private lenders. Unfettered usury resulted in debt bondage and forfeiture of properties, consolidation into large landholdings, a growing wedge between rich and poor, and the ultimate destruction of the Roman Empire.
''Such has been the fate of debtors in modern Western economies. But in some modern non-Western economies, vestiges of the debt write-off solution remain. In China, for instance, nonperforming loans are often carried on the books of state-owned banks or canceled rather than putting insolvent debtors and banks into bankruptcy.'' - excerpted from ...
respice, adspice, prospice ...
One serious flaw I see in the practice of the for profit system "is" - that it tells itself and everyone else that the aim is to go as high as possible as fast as possible ( going high = raking in profits).
Capitalism/for profit system - used to be SANE = Steady business with steady growth which produced a steady profit. Where a one percent annual growth was not sneered at. Where employees were valued and shared in the growth on that same small scale - but it worked because inflation was equally low and the business worked at providing the best quality to gain new customers as well as retain past customers - and the business kept growing as population increased to meet that population growth. Profits weren't wild, they were steady as was the economy = steady and growing with the population.
WE ALL NEED A JUBILEE NOW!
https://truthout.org/?s=jubilee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11383374/The-biggest-debt-write-offs-in-the-history-of-the-world.html - and finally, pls listen to the words here w/care and consideration ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stviDWgDHMM {= Alison Krauss' version of an old song}
& meanwhile, this is going on https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/14/eye-popping-analysis-shows-top-1-gained-21-trillion-wealth-1989-while-bottom-half by Jake Johnson
caveat - radix omnium malorum est cupiditas!
10,000 years ago we had an environmentally neutral and in every way sustainable [dominant] economy of hunting and gathering that had been functioning for 200,000 years or more. in 0.1% of that time, capitalism is approaching annihilation.
''Sanders to propose canceling entire $1.6 trillion in U.S. student loan debt, escalating Democratic policy battle'', by Jeff Stein:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/sanders-to-propose-canceling-entire-16-trillion-in-us-student-loan-debt-escalating-democratic-policy-battle/2019/06/23/1eed053a-9561-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html
also please consider: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/indoctrinated-econ-101
multum in parvo ...
Bernie does offer a solid plan to finance it. He plans to tax Wall Street for it. & even taxing at only a penny or two per High Volume trades (I don't know if that is gonna be his taxation approach or if it will be a different taxation plan on trades) - that would build up a fortune of excess funds pretty much overnight.
I'm glad Bernie added taxing Wall Street to His campaign - though I think the program could go Much Further - it's also good to see that Elisabeth has done her own version of the idea. I hoped Bernie would move on that idea sooner - like during his 2015 campaign (when I had been putting the idea out to anyone I could think of).
The parasitic disease that afflicts the economy is Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Wall St is the genetic engineer of that plague. Eliminate the cancer that threatens our existence. Tax the billionaire oligarchs and their principal ministers to death! 0 replies 1 retweet 1 like A. G. Kais @AGKais1 Jun 22
Tax the Wall St Oligarchs who enslave all of us with debt to fuel their 100s of years old pyramid scam. Divide their money and property among us all, black, white, red, yellow or whatever. Our communities must begin to serve the majority of the population. Rentier pigs fall!
Interest rates and debts are the blood vessels running throughout the FIRE sector. Credit can be puffed up and popped out in seemingly arbitrary thin air. That's the crux of the parasitic disease.
Most big-ticket items such as cars and houses are bought with credit "hot air." Arbitrarily created fake money driving out good and solid money allows legalized robberies of properties leaving the holders of the credit papers to fight it out resulting in inflation. It's why the economy gets sick perennially. It suffers from the "get something for nothing" disease which is universally contagious. I haven't ever discovered any fiat currency having gained value over the longer term such as 50 years.
In the FIRE sector, we have what the patriotische Pups pledged allegiance to: Farterlang. They knew "real" exstate!
Mom taught us manners so she would have told us to get a napkin in order to have and to hold that migrating dodo turd. It might have left its mark in the Total-Information-Awareness No-Such-A.S.S. collection. Mom! Where was the borehole, in Los Angeles or Way High?
Die Vögel fliegen. Die Lügen folgen. Let rocks their silence break. Dumb as a rock, really? I heard something alright from "Peter."
According to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress must ratify all treaties of the U.S.A. All other agreements have zero value under the Laws of the United States aside from the moral value and credibility bestowed upon them by the parties thereto, which is perfectly fine with the "old-schoolers" but not with the subwar-hacking-fakery hybrid wars being waged around to install the time-travelling Boom-Boom Baby (I saw a magic mushroom growing on a blue-green globe: "press '1' for English," "press '2' for Spanish," "press '7' for magic mushroom.." -- the "terrible two" Bam-Bam Baby grew a bit ¡younger! from dismantling the Doomsday alarm clock and getting some of that greenish "night"-glow from the clockhands and would soon realize what pressing '4' for the bamboo wall meant: "I can't make you, tick, so I'll make you, talk. AETS, Fugushima!") Our dodo turd has the [spiritual] moral value and credibility which everyone who looks cannot see [as God works in mysterious ways] but can "believe" [as faith matters]. The maxim of the wealthy ones was "fake it till you make it" and it does work with "borrowing" other people's money as artificial inflation and easy money will be created [happy easy money days are here again!] to bail out the debtors [the topmost one being the one controlling the money-printing machine, no different from Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and most other countries]. Submit JCPOA, Paris Climate Accord (which is really nothing more than potential shaming but not a treaty; remember the Millennium Development Goals? self-policing and reporting work well; that's why deregulation was so great for improving water quality in Flint, Michigan; hmm, has every U.S. adult learnt how to program their VCR yet? It was an actual millennium "digital literacy" goal enunciated by the Clinton Administration) etc. to the U.S. Congress for ratification or rejection. Rebuild credibility.
Intense intramural competition (between good friends who are also nemeses of each other but still observing fairplay rules) can lead to "surprising" extramural dominance.
Re. Tax Cuts vs. Student Debt Forgiveness - please compare and contrast the following two links ...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/14/eye-popping-analysis-shows-top-1-gained-21-trillion-wealth-1989-while-bottom-half
& https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-and-omars-plan-would-wipe-out-every-outstanding-student-loan/
Your reference to Bernie's notions of a Financial Transaction Tax (Tobin Tax), to offset any Student Debt Jubilee is very important indeed - but then go try to see IF U can find any Corp. MSM references to that!
fiat lux ...
''A specter is haunting Wall Street: the public banking movement, which vows to replace private banks’ influence in public affairs'' - from ...
e tenebris, lux!
The parasitic disease that afflicts the economy is Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Wall St is the genetic engineer of that plague. Eliminate the cancer that threatens our existence. Tax the billionaire oligarchs and their principal ministers to death!
I agree with taxes being used as a dampening mechanism. Maybe a hefty tax on debt-financed corporate takeovers and zero tax on those funded with gold. Gold is a really old-fashioned and ridiculously environmentally destructive form of monetary base but we know assaying as well as purifying techniques from ancient times.
With the perennial creation and expansion of credit faking as gold wreaking havoc worldwide, going fundamental with gold may be the only way we can secure a stable monetary base. It's extremely difficult and costly to create genuine real gold. There are techniques but they are uneconomical, a bit like "the hydrogen economy" espoused by the U.S. politicians before.
I remember something like, "If Iceland can do it with hydrogen, so can we of the U.S., Homeland of the Can-dos!" (Yeah, it's true that the U.S. finished the Panama Canal, now the busiest shipping lane in the entire world but even the Canal Zone, Suez, too, postage stamps from my Dad's many decades-old postcards and mail, which my Big Brother had collected and I had carefully stripped off, flattened, dried, sorted, organized, and preserved in a family-heirloom album have all been stolen, probably due to a youngster's flaunting to his wealthy-neighborhood schoolfriends the stamp and coin collections leading up to a burglary; wealthy neighborhoods' schools likely harbored potential burglars because they spurred the new kids on with social pressure to gain socioeconomic status and also recognized the antique value of a global stamp-and-coin collection; when you leave home to become an independent adult, take everything you consider to have sentimental value from your parents' place; things happen! Grandmothers have a soft spot for a grandson's request to hold and to have the family's heirloom; I lament the loss of my book collection the most; "Never throw a pearl to a sow") Where are we now? Impotent and obsolete. Why? We grew the Retard-I-Cans, Retard-I-Can'ts, which is now just Retards.
Remember the great, great, great replacement for the ACA? Retarded vaporware. Poof - a magical old fart regurgitating its migrating dodo turd !
Bushit mentioned growing sawgrass to wean the U.S. from its oil addiction, too. And there was the poetry of Half-assed Mulatto, sacrificed to Wall Street by the Demonkrapts themselves.
Wow! Iran knows, understands, and exercises an important part of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It is amazing.
The Persian Empire won't come back but there's also no worry ( know though about a fundamental rule of military engagement - according to the CIA Director's Congressional testimony under oath and some Russian [mercenary-death-families-and-friends'] sources { it's likely that Pootin's boar hunt for advantage (dislodge the oil refining infrastructure under the control of the SDF and US Special Ops by promising to give a cut of the oil refining continuing profit to the mercenaries if they succeed in gaining control) in the East-of-Euphrates-Syria muck within a few weeks of the journal article's date of 2018-1-15 went awry in his hush-hush deniable subwar-against-the-West hybrid war's night of terrors with many tanks and aerial gunships firing in the dark after Russian/U.S. deconfliction had failed to include the Russian mercenaries because they were DENIED as being Russian service members or citizens by the Russian force command there, } hundred(s) of Russian mercenaries cut off by a Russian oligarch and transferred to be paid by and perhaps "work for Iran" in East Syria lost their lives on 2018-2-07 over this rule: our Commander-in-Chief's tweet doesn't control the battlefield firepower directly and self-defense against hostile power including the oxymoron "friendly fire" attacking oneself is permitted; after two or three hours after WWIII had been started and engaged in for "obliteration," our Commander-in-Chief would still have 59+ days to prepare for and report to Congress in a Congressional testimony under oath about what had actually happened to cause WWIII! Bam-Bam Baby's sorry butts being dragged into Congress and roasted there in testimony under oath will still smell to me like the nauseating gourmet chicken butts I had eaten far too much of in speed-eating competing against my immature adolescent Big Brother - sickening but probably moot as I would have already died ) about my Mold-overian Blue-Green Algae global strike force attacking to recover the empire that is rightfully mine. We were all vegetables, in the beginning, in the deep, above which God's spirit hovered. "We are all connected," said Angela Merkel. Our First Amendment right is to allow the saying of: Allahu Akbar! (or in Farsí: خدا بزرگ است)
Keep in mind that the mutual shaming by the bickering parents (who had surely been fucking each other before or the so-called "bastards" wouldn't even exist) regarding the "bastards" in-between are sometimes a sign of their mutual concern for the welfare of the "bastards" (but for the strife of their custody fight) so they in fact often share a common ground. Many truly loving and responsible parents can give or take quite a lot to make the lives of their "bastards'" better.
Such as resolving the conflicts in the Middle-East. Remember the Palestinians living in deplorable conditions, de facto open-air imprisonment in the Gaza Strip.
Firstly, student debts should be made dischargeable through bankruptcies as they had been before. Docking someone's social-security retirement income and benefits in old-age for unpaid student debts is terribly inhumane. Disclosure: I came out of college and university with degrees but no debts at all. I worked multiple jobs while studying full-time. It's the toughest time in my entire life (but still lucky me in comparison with what my Dad had gone through -- "peace" in my time!) and my adult weight dropped to the lowest ever. Hence, my calling for student debts becoming dischargeable through bankruptcies has no hidden self-interest. The U.S. Government of Obama's administration even refused to block the payments of millions of dollars of bonuses to the executives of the culpable and otherwise bankrupt financial institutions which had received government bailouts. The government had the share-voting power but it decided to behave as an Uncle Mulatto who carries "the loaded A.S.S," not Uncle Sam who points his index finger at you and says, "I want you." Tolerating Bad behaviors but imposing No consequences is no way to run anything. Governing boards must govern!
Secondly, student debts' interest rates are vastly and very unfairly higher than other interest rates, such as those offered to the already wealthy corporations to "shore up the economy" by "creating jobs." Yep, yet again, "Easy money is here!" If all of those "too-big-to-fail" creators of the worldwide economic crash got the U.S. Government to shore them up and bail them out, it should do the same for those former students who got into troubles and peg the student loan rates at the federal funds rate (the rate at which banks were loaned money to cover their reserve shortfalls.) It will just be non-defaulting former students helping the potentially defaulting former students through the federal reserve system.
Thirdly, cancelling student debts pell-mell is inadvisable because we are already facing trillion-dollar deficits every year as far as the eyes can see. We don't need adding more trillions of dollars worth of red ink. There's something immoral about cancelling student debts when the biggest benefits will go to the people who are coming from very well-off families already. Why should the former medical school students who are charging their patients so much money need forgiveness of their student debts probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars? In order to make the rich richer? We already have a rising inequality problem which may have dire consequences. The new doctors and lawyers earn a lot of money so they should repay their student debts themselves. If we don't subsidize medical and legal education via more government money, market forces may get a better chance to restrain the medical and law schools' rising prices. They are in a sense de facto monopolized professions which should be examined under the light of the antitrust laws.
Fourthly, colleges and universities pumped out many college graduates who couldn't even get decent jobs. Most newly created and abundant jobs nowadays don't require a four-year college education to excel in but require a four-year college degree to get in the door. It's a huge waste of young people's lives as well as much financial resource to warehouse them on college and university campuses. I saw many "marine mammals" warming themselves in the sun on college campuses. The whole thing seems to me to be a 1950s idea that we should try to send everyone to college. It's as ridiculous as telling everyone to move to Silicon Valley because the people working there have very high average incomes. Averages can be very misleading if the variances are great and the costs of living are high. This is not the 1950s anymore when the U.S. had no significant competitors. We've been coasting along for far too long a time, muttering sweet nothings of having everyone get a (surprise? surprise?) college degree which cannot even land one in any job which pays a living wage. Spending so much money and time on a college education should at least get one started well on the path of life. Missing only a few years of working, saving, and investing can ruin one's life in old-age when one couldn't even pretend to be the White Rabbit.
We need structural changes to correct our Homo-education funding system in the interim before the transition from carbon-based lifeform intelligence is completed (in Northeast Asia perhaps with ROK and Japan being the first) through Homo debreeding as is happening in Japan now and will also be happening in the other post-urbanization countries ( high population density and disconnectedness { it isn't paradoxical that one can feel terribly lonely in a bustling crowd and yet absolutely not lonely in a wilderness without a soul anywhere in sight; I experienced both of these feelings myself } correlate with high stress-hormone level and that correlates with the failure to reproduce; a potential solution is blackout fuck-in nights sponsored by the government -- Nature made it work in Shoina in arctic Russia @4:09 via diesel-powerplant's breakdown resulting in a month without lighting and a baby boom. ) In the longer term, whatever the changes in Homo education will probably make no difference whatsoever because Robo programming our Mond children will make Homo education a non-issue. They may be able to learn and remember at nearly the speed of light. However, how many and what quality of Mond children we will obtain depends upon our Homo education revolution. Robos will gain more and more senses and surpass Homos in integration (or yoga) because Robos will have supersenses (8th sense, 9th sense, 10th sense, and so on.)
'''The Cowardice of the Democratic Party' is The Greatest Threat to Mankind'':
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/07/the-greatest-threat-to-mankind-is-the-cowardice-of-the-democratic-party-ocasio-cortez-spokesperson/ .. (says an Ocasio-Cortez spokesperson) &
also see ... https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/democrats-cowards-trump-biden-pelosi-schumer-20190707.html & finally consider ...
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/07/nancy-pelosi-has-chosen-her-war-and-its-with-her-own-partys-future/
PS: I have no idea wTf your novella above is about tbh! Perhaps try brevity and succinct replies.
ad iudicium?
I just didn't quite understand the mechanics of chopping up the discussion threads into separate postings. Besides, I fear the loss of the train of thought which has originally led to and connects the threads. I'll try to chop up novellas into pamphlet-size postings more.
Re. '''The Cowardice of the Democratic Party' is The Greatest Threat to Mankind'':
ANY COMMENT?!
It isn't cowardice - it is planning. This country is being run like a puppet show. The actors take the stage and pretend to be at war, meanwhile they ALL do their corporate bidding. Powerful interest groups, lobbies and the multinational corporation still run this country. They want us to think they are on our side.
I see Democrats doing crazy stuff. In my own city Fannie Mae is giving away $600,000 multi-families (actually for only a mediocre duplex near me that is hardly worth that cost considering I live in a broke crime filled city- wow) to borrowers with barely any money down (11k) on the basis of the rental subsidies the renters can receive to afford rents outrageous enough to pay that hefty monthly mortgage. You can see the deals in the deeds which are public. Plainly you can see how the subsidy is inflating the value. As well as building after building of subsidized housing paid for with middle class tax dollars grants and twenty year tax moratoriums. It is actually getting insane. While I know it is all being driven by wealthy developers - the floundering working class just see it as Democrats taking their money. They are. The poor benefit, the rich Republicans really benefit, (and rich Democrats too let's not be fooled here they love the poor because they are cash cows - notice how they don't care about the middle/ working class?) and the working class in debt up to their hair is getting pillaged.
Instead of rent control or limiting businesses and landlords from buying single family homes or slicing them up into apartments, they are building giant unit buildings and Dems hand out voucher/ subsidies like candy to meet so called luxury market rates. Both Republicans and Dems are in on this game. They divide us on the basis of helping the poor who actually have no economy to climb into and just continue to feed the rich builders and landlords - the entire system is going to go bust because the working class doesn't make enough income to cover it ALL and let's not forget deeply in debt with college loans, no savings, while paying for this extreme inflated housing without any subsidies themselves. Especially since the rich have so many loopholes/ offshore headquarters they pay almost nothing.
40 percent of single family homes were bought by corporate interests like Blackstone this year (so they can rent them out). Americans must demand an end to Hedge funds buying up our housing. We must demand an end to land lording. We must demand a stop to capital gains breaks that invite foreign investors to park their money into housing to avoid paying taxes and to crash our economy when they pull it back out - this is actually a huge threat to national security. Not only are they financially breaking our tax base and middle class which feeds our entire economy - they can crash it at their whim. What is worse than all this is we are subsidizing our populous to live in/ rent them. So we must also demand an end to the subsidies which are feeding our own demise. Yes Democrats must see the bigger picture here as well. Instead of taxes by what would be owners going back in to pay for our cities and schools - the rent money is going into the pockets of the one percent and overseas hedge funds. And Republicans need to start realizing their party is in on it (even though they pretend to hate it - they hate all that sweet sweet middle class subsidy cash - really?)
This is going to destroy our country. While I don't blame the poor for trying to live - I do blame them for not seeing and speaking out against the greater picture. They are part of it - this problem. They need to fight for ownership and an end to corporate ownership of our housing and rent control instead of lapping up the working class subsidies to afford to live in it. In the long run they are making the one percent richer and feeding the beast, what will it be like down the line then as the one percent grows ever more powerful?
There is no left or right - only corporations.
I would also say Republicans are pretending to hate immigration - getting more and more outrageous in their hateful orations (which probably do come from the heart since they don't really value human lives at all especially ones that don't resemble themselves) and hammering down and riling up democrats But if anyone else remembers what was happening with the egg farmers - using child immigrant slave labor to run the farms. Not to mention all the slaughterhouses and farms which employ/ exploit immigrant labor, and they especially want to replace union truckers which ship all these goods with Mexican fleets they even began passing laws under the radar to do so and deregulate Dept Of Transp rules. Trucker are the number one male job in this country. Meaning it employs more men than any other field. So you can see that having a very large UNION workforce would be next on the chopping block. Factory farming is heavy in the pockets of politicians and what they want is cheap immigrant slave labor.
Republicans want a cheap slave labor work force. And they figured out how to get Dems to hand it to them on a silver platter. We are idiots. While I don't advocate what Repubs are doing by any means here what you have to see it the bigger picture and long game the corporate interests are playing at - they will sacrifice morality and humanity to get what they want (even a few childrens' lives are worth the investment to them). Average citizen Democrats aren't really aware of the chess board they are standing on. While we fight for justice and humanity it isn't really the game - the game is getting the cheap labor force they want. It is classic reverse psychology with lots of evil sprinkles on top. Maybe Cortez can see the board but not entirely. And they are attacking her full throttle for just having a glimpse of it.
What would happen if Democrats were suddenly like ok yes let's hammer down on immigration and build that wall (Republicans would be like oh shit - we didn't expect this plan foiled - breaks on).
https://askthetrucker.com/denham-amendment-against-truckers-added-in-the-11th-hour-to-the-2018-faa-reauthorization-bill/
The Denham Amendment is the beginning move to take trucking regulations out of state hands in put it under the control of the Feds which opens the door to Mexican fleets and more lax regulations paving the way for non-citizen drivers.
Bad Cop (Repubs) / Good Cop (Dems). Working together on behalf of Corporations to kill the middle class and do evil here and abroad. They sure love that slave labor. And manufactured consent is their best weapon to get it. Average citizen Republicans wouldn't believe they are complicit in their own demise - your own elected leaders want to replace your jobs - exactly what you fear - your hate is bringing into fruition.
''Ayn Rand .. found in the extremes - her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions; forget about regulating markets and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good. Only billionaires should rule the world, as Trump has suggested.
''Trump personifies this, putting an advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA, an oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. His chief of staff said that putting children in cages (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good. Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.
''Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”
''She, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband, and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.'' - from ...
I totally get your .. ''Bad Cop (Repubs) / Good Cop (Dems). Working together on behalf of Corporations to kill the middle class and do evil here and abroad. They sure love that slave labor. And manufactured consent is their best weapon to get it. Average citizen Republicans wouldn't believe they're complicit in their own demise'' & that both GOP & GOPlite, Dems 'Manufacture Consent' for their corporate tyranny, so it further proves how a 3rd Party For The 99% is so very needed in U$A. After all, both Repugnants and Democraps were born as 3rd Party rebels from the previously extant status-quos! Also please see:
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/ .. for insights into Corp. power & re. economics,
pls see this: https://truthout.org/articles/neoliberalism-the-ideology-at-the-root-of-all-our-problems/
Re."There's no left or right; only corporations"; I contest that The People = Left; Corps. = Right + Wrong!
From which .. "A 2001 American Prospect investigation [ https://prospect.org/article/how-dlc-does-it ] noted that The Koch Industries was a member of the executive council of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1985 by centrist Democrats to combat the left inside the party''! Interesting, huh?
respice; adspice; prospice ...
Note that: ''The Democrats, if they had a functioning political party and were not owned and managed by corporations, could easily displace Trump and demolish the Republican Party in electoral landslide after landslide. From poll after poll, as Charles Derber points out in his book “Welcome to the Revolution,” we know what the majority of Americans want. A whooping 82% think wealthy people have too much power and influence in Washington, with 70% singling out large businesses as having too much power. Nearly 80% support stronger rules and enforcement of regulations on the financial industry. Nearly half of Americans think economic inequality is “very big,” and 34% concede it is “moderately big.” Almost 60% of registered voters and 51% of registered Republicans favor raising to $18,000 from $14,820 the maximum amount that workers can make and still be eligible for the earned income tax credit. A staggering 96% of Americans, including 96% of Republicans, believe money in politics is to blame for the dysfunction of the American system. Close to 80% believe wealthy Americans should pay higher taxes. Nearly 60% favor raising the federal minimum wage requirement to $12 an hour. Sixty-one percent, including 42% of Republicans, approve of labor unions. Sixty percent of Americans think “[i]t is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare,” and 60% of registered voters favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.” Nearly 60% favor free early-childhood education, and 76% are “very concerned” about climate disruption. 84% support requiring background checks for all gun buyers. 58% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
''A genuine populism and New Deal socialism are the only hope of thwarting the rise of neofascist movements. This, however, will never be permitted by the Democratic Party hierarchy, led by figures such as Pelosi, Joe Biden and Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who are acutely aware they would instantly lose their power without the prop of hundreds of millions of corporate dollars. They, and their corporate sponsors, will block all reform even if it means another four years of Trump and the extinguishing of democracy. The only thing they have to sell us is fear—fear of Trump and the Russians. While Trump sells the fear of immigrants, Muslims, people of color and those he brands as socialists. This is a toxic diet.
''Switch off the electronic images. Ignore the media burlesque. The endless political shows, which turn presidential campaigns into mind-numbing, two-year-long marathons, are entertainment. Do not trust anyone in power. We will save ourselves by building mass movements to overthrow corporate power. I am not certain we will succeed. But I am certain that if we fail, we are doomed.'' - Excerpted from ...
''Fear vs. Fear'' ... by Chris Hedges: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/fear-vs-fear/
&/or for an alt. link & font see: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52100.htm
I will try to reply more specifically to your very thought provoking replies above at a later date. Solidarity.
respice; adspice; prospice ...
I doubt very much that "10,000 years ago we had an environmentally neutral and in every way sustainable [dominant] economy of hunting and gathering."
Both Australia and America bear strong evidence that the newly arrived species H. sapiens had profoundly affected their environment.
Exponential growth is indeed astonishing for both creation and destruction.
I think that you may be looking at the long-ago past through rose-colored glasses. Maybe a bit like me loving the memory of my "birthplace of the wooden gods" neighborhood. I was a survivor of living in that neighborhood so it certainly biased me. The good thing about starting at the bottom is that every perturbation is an improvement, as long as "the hope still lives." Do you see the mud or do you see the stars? The choice belongs to the beholder.
Original Sin is the adoption of pastoral and/or agricultural economies that included the knowledge to do the evil we've done in the past 200 years. But they were still too primitive 10,000 years ago to "profoundly" affect the environment. You say shit like that because you're too contrary to accept anything anyone else says.
Pastoral and/or agricultural economies had started much earlier than in the past 200 years. The generally accepted dates are at least from several thousands of years ago. I agree with your Original Sin statement that the adoption of pastoral and/or agricultural economies did evil because it had opened our eyes to the possibility of exponential growth. Frankly, I think that Australia had been torched by H. sapiens, perhaps to drive out potential preys for easy hunting motivated by greed or dire circumstances. Fire was an early exponential-growth phenomenon observed and eventually "controlled" by Homos.
The thing that had in fact supported the exponential growth was the usage and enhanced methods of extraction, processing, and distribution of fossil fuels. It's as if we had discovered a huge inheritance in our name. It's a great opportunity for us to build a sustainable future for all. We must not squander it by succumbing to our greed. Human desires know no bounds but everything is ultimately finite as God had it written in the Bible (itself a product of pastoral and/or agricultural economies so it jibes with the scholarly biblical researches dating the creation of the earth, NOT the planet Earth, to six-thousand years ago when two trees were PLANTED at the center of the Garden [a sedentary idea] of Eden) that there was a natural number for everything, much earlier than the invention of the trans-natural numbers and infinities.
Planting is an idea alien to an ancient hunter. I think that men have aggrandized ourselves in heroic stories such as our hunting mammoths. There are a lot more roots to dig, berries to pick, etc. than mammoths to hunt down by the ancient hunters. Recall the food pyramid from ecology. There are many more little mammals than murderous mammoths around. I would have tried to catch a mouse, a rat, or a rabbit rather than hunt a big mammoth risking my life. Besides, most of the mammoth meat would most likely be wasted even if the hunt had succeeded.
My family like the Bible had an oral folklore, myths, and history. There was indeed at least a grain of truth to all of them. However, due to the deaths of people, I cannot corroborate on all propositions but vaguely, I could perceive the consistency in the different accounts. It's a bit like the various books of the New Testament. I really think that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person and not made up as a deliberate fiction to deceive us. However, I am of the impression that certain attributed phrases were injected deliberately as a stumbling block to deflect the faithful ones from Salvation.
I don't even worship Jesus because idol worshiping is prohibited in the Ten Commandments. Why should I worship Mary then? Doesn't that make me break a Commandment? Doesn't every person have a mother? I have never experienced a counter-example in Homos. I don't expect other people to worship my Mom. I appreciate Jesus as much as I do the transistorized radio and shortwave/mediumwave multiband vacuum-tube radio which my Dad had brought home from overseas. He's the Way. He's the Word. He had "the drycell zinc batteries and the orange beams of electrons in partial vacuum."
In some versions of the Lord's Prayer, there is the phrase, "as we have forgiven those who trespassed against us." Before the Hebrews handed Jesus over to the Romans, they had accused and objected to Jesus for uttering to a woman that her sins were forgiven. I therefore presume that only God can forgive sins but Jesus could not have committed blasphemy as much as a transistorized radio had committed blasphemy.
Then there was also the phrase, "for yours is the glory, and the kingdom, and the power forever and ever" immediately following "and deliver us from the evil one." Are we referring to "the evil one" Satan's kingdom on earth here? There's sufficient ambiguity due to what had gone before the phrase. Salvation via "good work" is suspect. If it were so, the wealthy ones who can spend more to do more "good work" should crowd Heaven because they can buy the Indulgences. Heaven must be similar to an expensive-admission ballpark stadium where the winning teams' championship game is being played. Win! Win! Win!
"Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today. They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"
prolix
Prolific proliferation.
No shit! Get your act together. I said 10,000 in the first place.
Yes. I am of the opinion that our problems with our environment had started much earlier than the Age of Industrialization which had started about 200 years ago.
10,000 might have been a bit on the high side for me but I can certainly agree with you that it was sometime between 6,000 and 11,000 years ago which is the range of my estimate.
Yes, we were headed in a bad direction long before we had any real power to do anything dangerous, except to our spirit. Settled city life and the rise of economic elites (priests and kings) was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. hunter gatherers abandoned the garden to be herders and Cain the farmer killed Abel the herdsman symbolizing the 2nd transition: the one from pastoral to agricultural - and the concomitant evil of rule by elite parasites, such as we still have to this day . 10,000 is a nice round number that approximately coincides with the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth: Jericho, Palestine and Damascus, Syria.
Looking at the pictures of modern Iraq where the mesopotamian civilization was located, you can see that many areas became desert. I learnt from a world-civilization class that a number of cities sprouted up in Mesopotamia because the people there had discovered artificial irrigation and could therefore grow more crops to feed the growing city populations. However, the salt in the irrigation water stayed behind after evaporation if not flushed away regularly by freshwater or rain (which tends to be scarce where irrigation is needed) so after many centuries, there would be so much accumulated salt that plants couldn't grow anymore. Hence, desert arrived, marking the end of the agricultural economy in southern Iraq.
At the other end is the ending time of the Last glacial period about 11,700 years ago. One cannot grow much while being in a glacial period due to the low temperatures and water being locked up in its frozen forms. "Life is electric fire burning slowly in water." Higher temperatures are necessary for a fire to burn at a higher combustion rate (cf. Arrhenius' activation energy.) and water in liquid form provides the medium for the slow combustion. The electric part comes from the anions and cations such as those from dissolved salts. Warm salty water with a mechanism to slow combustion is good for life. Life used a fatty (electrically insulating) membrane studded with protein-based-ion-channels as the mechanism for slowing and control the fire's combustion rate. Agriculture could start after warm water becomes common after 11,700 BP.
By about 5,000 years ago, there were multiple well-established river-based agricultural civilizations worldwide so the transition to agriculture had to happen before that time in these places. Shrinking the bracket of 11,700-5,000 BP (Before Present) a bit to account for glaciers to melt, the agricultural civilizations to establish themselves, and to use fewer significant digits to show some uncertainties gives 11,000-6,000 BP as a possible range for the transitions. I traced the lactose-tolerance mutation which tended to confer great survival value to an individual in a pastoral civilization. It seemed that the mutation had occurred towards the more recent end of the 11,000-6,000 range estimate. Hence, in Eastern Europe, the transition from pastoral to agricultural economy might have been 7,000-6,000 BP. When the transition actually occurred depended on the location, I picked Eastern Europe because the largest linguistic family diverged from there and there were Proto-Indo-European roots of the words today that indicated a pastoral economy.
In agriculture's spread after the Last glacial period has ended, Europe was expected to lag behind the Middle-East due to its higher latitudes so its warming came later.
Without the surplus from production, no élite class is sustainable but as Jesus said that life was more than just bread so the existence of the élites may be socially desirable for some ends.
It's all our community: national, state, local and neighborhood. At all levels the point is: can concentration of wealth be sustained.
What motivates people most is self preservation. What happens when the well being of the wealthiest few threatens the livelihoods of the rest? Try to make concentration of wealth at an exponentially increasing rate and the concomitant debt work. What we are doing now, regardless of the motivation, is unsustainable.
You want more? We all want more. But we all can't have it because in the end Milton Friedman lied. It is always a zero sum game. What they have, we don't!
The wealth inequality gap continues to widen as the whole civilization continues to fall apart, as the wealthy few continue to eliminate jobs & not just by off-shoring them to sweatshop slave labor countries that have little regard for worker safety or concern for their environment (air, land,water) - but also by eliminating jobs completely as they automate more and more processes, which then puts more and more people on the unemployment line.
The end is near. It's time for us to fight or die!
Yes the End is Near if only due to Global Warming and the refusal of Gov & the wealthy few to end the use of fossil fuels and switch over to clean energy production and use in transportation, industries, as well as in just producing electricity.
& it WILL come down to actual fighting - as can be seen all over the world already as the general populations of various countries get increasingly violent as they get shoved further and further into poverty. One SHOULD note the growth of violence here in the USA and then note the growth of poverty that accompanies the growth of the wealth inequality gap here in the USA! There IS a very Visible "Cause & Effect"
Absolutely! Let's appeal to those who want to know the truth and are closer to awakening than the idiot Trump and his hard core moron base.
Many stay in the the conservative camp only because of abortion and LGBT fears. Without those issues only fascists, racists, xenophobes and the rich masters (and their principal ministers like CEOs and politicians.) I'd guess 10% or less of the population, would remain.
About appealing to The People.
I try to do that (as mentioned in my other reply) and just added this one to the on-going practice:
https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1139246461202382848
(edit) Which is EXACTLY why I visit Conservative Office holder's tweet accounts and refute what they say (with no facts presented by them) with attached facts that viewers can access. Wake those who ARE sane and get them to vote those abusive assholes out of government! EDIT: https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1138425919171911680
EDIT:
Which is also why I visit progressives (who claim to be progressives anyway) and forward thoughts and possible actions that could and should be taken: https://twitter.com/DKAtoday/status/1139040793568698369
Again = for those who are looking in.
Yes, Kaiser (I thought that you might be the AGricultural German Emperor,) Your Majesty can have the honor of pressing the Big Red Button for ending unaccountability. I'll show you where it is (Chimerica is a chimera reflected in a mirage. It's anytime now when the Taoist priest cooking the gunpowder will discover the trifecta formula of the elixir for immortality.)
When the machine stalled and became a moron, the software programmer told me that we only needed to press the red reset button. I still remember the Technotrick of Reboot. He was indeed correct, at that time in the caveman age of computing, that nothing bad would happen. He said, "Try anything. Nothing bad will happen!" Meaning involves the context.
Now we can get even closer than a few seconds (or a single vote cast by Soviet vice admiral Vasily Akhipov who had previously experienced the awful K-19 incident, against going near) to midnight on the Doomsday Clock for our lone-habitable planet. Dozens of times having been near there didn't get us all the way there. Maybe we must hold the reset button for a much longer time, press the bouncy el cheapo button many scores of times, or replace it with a {debounced} R-S flip-flop to ensure:
Pr[Reboot] = 1.
we are moving towards extinction from several directions simultaneously. worst case: we all die. best case: the rich live on with robots to serve them instead of we, the docile then dead.
& then the robots breakdown and there is no one left alive who can repair them & the wealthy finally die-off leaving the planet to whatever humble forms of life remain & the Environment slowly heals itself over the following eons....
little will change in the end, because in that case the last humans will also be cockroaches. So .
There's nothing wrong with "humble" forms of life. If you actually take an intense look at cockroaches, they are fascinating creatures, absolutely the easiest pets to keep. My Mom killed a number of the exotic pets which my Big Brother and I kept. She might have had a point of keeping him focused on education and me away from directing Operation Neighborhood Microvampires using the captured micro-submarines.
I vaguely recall that a cockroach was one of the first if not the first earthly organism to reach orbital space, absolutely a space-faring pioneer. According to Wikipedia, fruitflies were the first organisms in space though not orbital space in the 1940s on a V-2 rocket fired from White Sands Missile Range, my childhood memory of what I thought that I had read about space explorations might have been faulty. Being bigger than a fruitfly, a cockroach (Periplaneta americana of course, not the smaller and harder to be hooked up to instruments P. germanica, imported by my Dad in his luggage according to my Big Brother after his research; U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!) in orbital space could have provided the prolonged monitoring of biological signals in the orbital flight environment. Perhaps the cockroach experiment was scrapped in the hurried pace of rushing to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth in the 1960s.
Of course, without amassing enough organisms on a certain level of complexity of the evolutionary-complexity hierarchy, we might lose out on knowing what the higher levels of complexity would be like. Hence, preserving a high quantity of life is important.
Without clean water, I as a preschooler might have died of cholera. My Big Brother was tied up fetching water and Mom boiling water every morning. Without electricity, we couldn't keep food around without spoiling for long so Mom was tied up shopping for fresh food once or twice a day and preparing meals every day. She worked less due to her lack of time from doing the necessary chores. Without her working more though once we had gained refrigeration (one can argue that our so-called new [actually very old! but surprisingly collegiate for me] culture of eating leftovers refrigerated artificially or naturally was an empowering austerity measure,) we couldn't have accumulated the savings to splurge on the transcontinental/transoceanic/transglobal flights to immigrate to New York City.
There are gates that must be opened with a proper key acquired enroute, most often assiduously but at times unconsciously or inadvertently. "Fate" favors the well-prepared ready ones. One can manufacture "Fate" to a certain extent. One also has to cast away now-obsolete traditions and customs which hinder acceleration towards one's manufactured "Fate." It's a bit like a difficult climb against gravity. One probably has to cast away much old "mass" to obey Newton's Second Law in order to maximize acceleration. Space rockets do it by shedding their used-up boosters; insects do it by shedding their exoskeletons; I did it by weaning myself from the cooled boiled water in the Johnny Walker whisky bottle, though not entirely of my own accord when I "gravity-bombed" our white porcelain kitchen sink upon the Periplaneta americana crawling fast up the whisky bottle I was holding and flying away when I dropped it atop the sink. We threw away our kitchen sink before taking our transcontinental/transoceanic/transglobal flights.
Life has been quite an exhilarating and interesting voyage for me. I heard of the story of people flying in airplanes. I saw my Dad's postcard pictures of the big golden sculpture of Prometheus and the statue of Lady Liberty in New York. They are all true!
I didn't fall for having many different flavors of ice-cream for free although I appreciated Dad's effort to provide me with the opportunity to earn some money before I headed for college. I liked ice-cream but not toothache. I also savored eating gourmet chicken butts but definitely not the mere thought of them nauseating me for more than a decade. I wonder whether overloading on saturated fat might have caused my childhood strands of white hair. Connections are important but choosing well is more. Ten kinds of ice-cream (plain vanilla, plain chocolate, coffee-flavored, pink with strawberries, green mint-flavored with pistachio nuts, chocolate chips in vanilla, chocolate fudge in vanilla, M&Ms in vanilla, peanut butter in vanilla, and hazelnuts in vanilla) in unrestricted quantities were both tasty and enticing ( Dad loved the green mint-flavored with pistachio nuts ice-cream the most; I in my childhood generally disliked eating any green things because I associated them with vegetables which tasted a bit bitter; Dad had good taste { I admired this trait of his! He knew the durable classics which could make a person look Great; I once wore a decades-old outfit which I had inherited from him and women were attracted to me; of course, he chided me once before for being a "lazy beggar" with my hair uncombed and my shoes not shiny enough to see reflections! -- yeah, it's the wages of having a freebie fashion consultant; he helped me pick out and buy a brand-new suit so that I could be properly dressed for his and Mom's U.S. citizenship swearing-in ceremony and having pictures taken afterwards } for the pistachio mint-flavored ice-cream because being older and having overcome my aversion of any green-colored food, I concur these days with his preference; pistachio nuts are green but I like their flavor ) but in order to have time for other endeavors, restraining my childish desires was the Tao of moderation.
Mom though, being an education zealot, operated a matriarchal dictatorship upon our kiddie petkeeping pastimes which she took as our waste of time. She killed our pets by stomping upon my Big Brother's black "coffin" crickets and his golden-green wolf spiders to focus him on his studies and education, and dumping the micro-submarines which I had captured from an elderly neighbor's cistern for my Operation Neighborhood Microvampires in which a "good-morning, continental breakfast" Ohio-class submarine may spit おはよ/Aloha!
Our elderly neighbor was living alone by herself next to the bamboo forest which had a yellow patch of the most beautiful chrysanthemums that I had ever seen, shone by the morning sunbeams filtering through the bamboo-grass stalks from across the singing stream which flowed next to the well and the well's adjacent concrete-paved area { previously used for filling vessels with the bucket-fetched-up well water but largely unused due to the switching over to municipal water [as cholera had struck nearby] except for non-potable usages such as keeping watermelons cool, washing clothes and cleaning our front yard; we actually used another well even closer to our home for these non-potable usages rather than this secondary well close to the stream because water is heavy to carry and easy to spill } where I kept my two pet chickens (you might have already learnt how my hand-raised "Yellow" chicken and "Sesame" chicken had ended up after their fattening up inside of a large overturned weaved-vine basket; we are predators by Mom's design, even indirectly [through gifting] and unintentionally [through feasting.]) The beautiful combination is why autumn is my favorite season. It has the best weather for beautiful yellow mums, contrasting colored blue sky, ringing stream of mountain water, and crisp cool fresh air in the forest. I like my "birthplace of the wooden gods" neighborhood far better than the vast Siberia with its many trees, bears, (only the pitbull with his Transgender-lipstick on likes the boar hunt in the muck,) guns, and perhaps even a Siberian Tiger.
Our elderly neighbor was glad that we had "annexed" her cistern as a part of our Monroe Doctrine ( Mom decreed that no more micro-submarines would be allowed there again in new clean potable water and tasked my Big Brother to enforce it with his water buckets, yoke, and labor; my fantasy of becoming the Secretary of the Navy and Space Force of Afghanistan is probably residual from the Mom-killed dream of activating my micro-submarines' おはよ/alohas for my aborted Operation Neighborhood Microvampires.) Although my "Grandma" might not know, she was truly a blessing to me in many ways. After she had died, I figured out death and tried my very silly kiddie bet that I would have died before I had to hand in my homework to school. I've never won the bet, what a loser I was back then. Been there. Never died!
Worst case: everyone dies. Best case: everyone dies. The Cuban writer and revolutionary José Marti lived in exile in New York City for twelve years. It has to be new lives to replace. That's the only difference possible.
Red China had "One country. Two systems." It said that we of the U.S., a foreign country, had "no right to intervene" but apparently Nancy Pelosi had "some left to innervene." Our patriarchal but de facto matriarchal family had "One head [missing overseas]. [But still] Two testicles." We went together to the wedding banquet alright, with "family values." I got urgent with the freshly squeezed orange jew's outburst: "When you've got to go, you've got to go..."
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