Monday, September 22, 2008
Seven Hundred Billion Dollars.... +
I just heard some shill for the Powers that Be on NPR, that's National Public Radio, which has an image of being a more liberal, democratic, thoughtful, sophisticated news source, explaining how, yes, this whole bailout package for the mortgage industry is a lot of money, and yes, it's true, some people in the US might be a little alarmed about a surprise $700,000,000,000 charge showing up on their credit card bill, but hey, it was an urgent matter, and the Bush administration says we need it to avert a terrible crisis, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says we need it too, and he went to Harvard and MIT, and has a lot of experience and knowledge, so we just have to trust him.
Trust Bernanke.
Trust the Federal Reserve.
Trust the Bush administration.
Are you *&@#*ing kidding me? (No, he isn't kidding. He's selling this mind control, confidently expecting that America, Sucker Nation, will buy it.)
Trust us, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so we need to start a trillion-dollar war that could last a hundred years. Trust us, the oil in Iraq will pay for the Iraq war and the reconstruction afterwards, if there ever is an afterwards. Trust us, some needs are just urgent for the health and stability of our country, and we don't have time to get competitive bids. We need to pay companies like Halliburton $594 to do a load of laundry, and $17,000,000 to transport $33,000 worth of diesel fuel from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, and many billions to do nothing for the people of New Orleans, etc etc etc.
Iraq for Sale.
But let's not dwell on the past. Let's just look at a little logic, right here in the present moment.
Do you think SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS might be enough to tempt some people into thinking about possibly doing something shady? (Could it even perhaps be enough money to get some people thinking about a longer-term, well-orchestrated plan, a large-scale swindle, a long con?)
Answer: $700B is enough money to make Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Julie Andrews, St. Thomas Aquinas, Mister Rogers, or Kermit the Frog consider a shady maneuver or two. Imagine them contemplating all they could do for Good Causes with such staggering sums of money, if they just cut this one corner here, and this one other corner over there...
OK, they might think about it and not do it. Some people aren't for sale.
But some people are for sale.
Is the Bush administration above suspicion? How many people do you know who could ask that question with a completely straight face?
How about the Federal Reserve? How much do you actually know about that organization? If you start with the obvious assumptions, like that it's federal, or that it has some kind of reserve... you are already on shaky ground.
Think how hard most people will work just for $50,000 a year. And some of them will take rather dirty jobs at that pay. I did some math... you know I like to do math sometimes in the effort to get things in perspective... At $50K a year, you would need to work for FOURTEEN MILLION YEARS to make $700B.
You'd better get started.
Kleptocracy. Government by thieves, for the purpose of theft.
There has already been talk about how $700B probably won't be enough. It could be a little more. Like a trillion dollars maybe. OK, let's add another 6 million years to your contract. That's 311,000 lifetimes of full-time work. Worth it?
Have you heard the saying, "Never steal anything small?" Elite criminals realize, if you're going to be a criminal, and you have the intelligence, vision, and project management skills to operate on a truly grand scale, then you should. It's not only massively more profitable at those higher levels, but it's also safer. If you can get in a position of power, influence, trust, and authority, sometimes you can steal more than all the common criminals who sit rotting in prison put together, and be hailed as a statesman, a genius, or a hero. Or perhaps you prefer a quieter, behind-the-scenes role; That's fine too, just make sure you're in a position to manipulate the government and the media to all tell the same cover story about what's going on and why it's all completely necessary, and very safe.
It's pretty risky to stick up a convenience store for a couple hundred dollars. You could be arrested, roughed up, jailed, even shot at... and your society will see you in very disapproving terms. People understand what it means to steal $200, or to wave a gun in some innocent person's face, and we understand why that's wrong and needs to be deterred.
Steal trillions of dollars at a time, and who will stop you? We understand $200, but not a trillion. Very few people, if any, can really properly get their minds around how much money it is. It short circuits most peoples' brains. They just can't see how the highest-ranked people in their beloved superpower nation could possibly be stealing hundreds of thousands of lives worth of human productivity right in front of their faces and lying about what is happening and why.
For $200 criminals, we have police. Who goes after the trillion-dollar criminals? That would have to be the Justice Department, the FBI, the armed forces. But trillion-dollar criminals can get themselves into a position to command and control those organizations. And then what?
It's the same with violence. Assault, injure, or murder one person in a private fight, and we have police for that. You can be tried and convicted as a murderer. But create an international conflict that kills hundreds of thousands of people, and it's all in a day's work for national leaders. If that many people got hurt or died, there must have been some redeeming reason for it, right? Surely our virtuous democracy wouldn't undertake a bloody and cripplingly expensive war just for the raw money-and-power ambitions of a few corrupt people at the top.
A sense of reality or proportion is easily lost at an enormous scale that dwarfs any one person's life, or life's work. It seems to be a built-in blind spot in our human minds and social dynamics. Do you think there could be some people who would try to cynically exploit such blind spots, if there were hundreds of billions of dollars at stake? I've had occastion to observe people behaveing quite badly and expending a great deal of energy in order to swindle much, much smaller sums of money.
A healthy and pervasive skepticism about the motives of the people in government was a guiding principle in writing the US Constitution, and would be needed now to make it work as intended. But it appears the masses in the country have been lured and lulled into a more passive acquiescence to authority and the cover stories that authority tells. Millions of people are still skeptical, but the mainstream is not anymore. And I think expecting the US Constitution to function properly without widespread skepticism, questioning and critical thought is like trying to make a 747 fly without wings. It doesn't work. It's a bomb... with a lot of passengers aboard.
History repeats itself. Democracies and republics can flourish for a time, but as they age, they tend to turn materialistic, acquisitive, shallow, and prideful. When the general level of consciousness and virtue falters, such cultures are ripe for transformation into tyrannical empires. I think my country's move into its imperial phase was already well under way by the time I was born in 1967. But in my lifetime, the empire has grown and the imperialists have consolidated their hold on power and influence, with the current presidential administration having achieved a quantum leap in that regard. The Constitution has been gutted by executive orders, the Patriot Act and other such legislation, and by willful disregard from the ever-more-powerful and dictatorial executive branch. We still sing about democracy, liberty, and human rights, but we don't deliver those things consistently, or even as much as we used to.
Trust Bernanke.
Trust the Federal Reserve.
Trust the Bush administration.
Are you *&@#*ing kidding me? (No, he isn't kidding. He's selling this mind control, confidently expecting that America, Sucker Nation, will buy it.)
Trust us, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so we need to start a trillion-dollar war that could last a hundred years. Trust us, the oil in Iraq will pay for the Iraq war and the reconstruction afterwards, if there ever is an afterwards. Trust us, some needs are just urgent for the health and stability of our country, and we don't have time to get competitive bids. We need to pay companies like Halliburton $594 to do a load of laundry, and $17,000,000 to transport $33,000 worth of diesel fuel from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, and many billions to do nothing for the people of New Orleans, etc etc etc.
Iraq for Sale.
But let's not dwell on the past. Let's just look at a little logic, right here in the present moment.
Do you think SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS might be enough to tempt some people into thinking about possibly doing something shady? (Could it even perhaps be enough money to get some people thinking about a longer-term, well-orchestrated plan, a large-scale swindle, a long con?)
Answer: $700B is enough money to make Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Julie Andrews, St. Thomas Aquinas, Mister Rogers, or Kermit the Frog consider a shady maneuver or two. Imagine them contemplating all they could do for Good Causes with such staggering sums of money, if they just cut this one corner here, and this one other corner over there...
OK, they might think about it and not do it. Some people aren't for sale.
But some people are for sale.
Is the Bush administration above suspicion? How many people do you know who could ask that question with a completely straight face?
How about the Federal Reserve? How much do you actually know about that organization? If you start with the obvious assumptions, like that it's federal, or that it has some kind of reserve... you are already on shaky ground.
Think how hard most people will work just for $50,000 a year. And some of them will take rather dirty jobs at that pay. I did some math... you know I like to do math sometimes in the effort to get things in perspective... At $50K a year, you would need to work for FOURTEEN MILLION YEARS to make $700B.
You'd better get started.
Kleptocracy. Government by thieves, for the purpose of theft.
There has already been talk about how $700B probably won't be enough. It could be a little more. Like a trillion dollars maybe. OK, let's add another 6 million years to your contract. That's 311,000 lifetimes of full-time work. Worth it?
Have you heard the saying, "Never steal anything small?" Elite criminals realize, if you're going to be a criminal, and you have the intelligence, vision, and project management skills to operate on a truly grand scale, then you should. It's not only massively more profitable at those higher levels, but it's also safer. If you can get in a position of power, influence, trust, and authority, sometimes you can steal more than all the common criminals who sit rotting in prison put together, and be hailed as a statesman, a genius, or a hero. Or perhaps you prefer a quieter, behind-the-scenes role; That's fine too, just make sure you're in a position to manipulate the government and the media to all tell the same cover story about what's going on and why it's all completely necessary, and very safe.
It's pretty risky to stick up a convenience store for a couple hundred dollars. You could be arrested, roughed up, jailed, even shot at... and your society will see you in very disapproving terms. People understand what it means to steal $200, or to wave a gun in some innocent person's face, and we understand why that's wrong and needs to be deterred.
Steal trillions of dollars at a time, and who will stop you? We understand $200, but not a trillion. Very few people, if any, can really properly get their minds around how much money it is. It short circuits most peoples' brains. They just can't see how the highest-ranked people in their beloved superpower nation could possibly be stealing hundreds of thousands of lives worth of human productivity right in front of their faces and lying about what is happening and why.
For $200 criminals, we have police. Who goes after the trillion-dollar criminals? That would have to be the Justice Department, the FBI, the armed forces. But trillion-dollar criminals can get themselves into a position to command and control those organizations. And then what?
It's the same with violence. Assault, injure, or murder one person in a private fight, and we have police for that. You can be tried and convicted as a murderer. But create an international conflict that kills hundreds of thousands of people, and it's all in a day's work for national leaders. If that many people got hurt or died, there must have been some redeeming reason for it, right? Surely our virtuous democracy wouldn't undertake a bloody and cripplingly expensive war just for the raw money-and-power ambitions of a few corrupt people at the top.
A sense of reality or proportion is easily lost at an enormous scale that dwarfs any one person's life, or life's work. It seems to be a built-in blind spot in our human minds and social dynamics. Do you think there could be some people who would try to cynically exploit such blind spots, if there were hundreds of billions of dollars at stake? I've had occastion to observe people behaveing quite badly and expending a great deal of energy in order to swindle much, much smaller sums of money.
A healthy and pervasive skepticism about the motives of the people in government was a guiding principle in writing the US Constitution, and would be needed now to make it work as intended. But it appears the masses in the country have been lured and lulled into a more passive acquiescence to authority and the cover stories that authority tells. Millions of people are still skeptical, but the mainstream is not anymore. And I think expecting the US Constitution to function properly without widespread skepticism, questioning and critical thought is like trying to make a 747 fly without wings. It doesn't work. It's a bomb... with a lot of passengers aboard.
History repeats itself. Democracies and republics can flourish for a time, but as they age, they tend to turn materialistic, acquisitive, shallow, and prideful. When the general level of consciousness and virtue falters, such cultures are ripe for transformation into tyrannical empires. I think my country's move into its imperial phase was already well under way by the time I was born in 1967. But in my lifetime, the empire has grown and the imperialists have consolidated their hold on power and influence, with the current presidential administration having achieved a quantum leap in that regard. The Constitution has been gutted by executive orders, the Patriot Act and other such legislation, and by willful disregard from the ever-more-powerful and dictatorial executive branch. We still sing about democracy, liberty, and human rights, but we don't deliver those things consistently, or even as much as we used to.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Plenty to say... no time to say it
I turned off my blog for a week or two. It was fairly inactive, and I guess I was feeling a little... private for a while there.
There's so much going on that I don't have time to properly list it all. I will be in San Francisco in another 10 days for the Folsom Street Fair on September 28. If you're in SF, stop by and see us at the Stockroom / Stormy Leather booth, or at the Stormy Leather store.
Also keep an eye out for some interesting changes to the Stockroom site in October.
Today I had lunch with Heather B, our former Operations Manager and 2nd in command at Stockroom. She is now living an idyllic life rather far removed from the L.A. rat race, in a beautiful home in a small village in Bali, where she helps run a yoga school and does yoga for a couple of hours every day. It reminded me there are lots of other places to be, other ways to live. Inside the Stockroom bubble, things are actually very nice for me in many ways, but there can also be drama and stress, and then there is the City of Los Angeles... which needs a bath, cleaning and pressing, lessons in elocution and poise...
(-:
There's so much going on that I don't have time to properly list it all. I will be in San Francisco in another 10 days for the Folsom Street Fair on September 28. If you're in SF, stop by and see us at the Stockroom / Stormy Leather booth, or at the Stormy Leather store.
Also keep an eye out for some interesting changes to the Stockroom site in October.
Today I had lunch with Heather B, our former Operations Manager and 2nd in command at Stockroom. She is now living an idyllic life rather far removed from the L.A. rat race, in a beautiful home in a small village in Bali, where she helps run a yoga school and does yoga for a couple of hours every day. It reminded me there are lots of other places to be, other ways to live. Inside the Stockroom bubble, things are actually very nice for me in many ways, but there can also be drama and stress, and then there is the City of Los Angeles... which needs a bath, cleaning and pressing, lessons in elocution and poise...
(-:
