Pick Your Poison
The corona virus economy is hitting my company pretty hard, as I knew it would. I run a small side street business off of Main Street. My “corporate” accounts aren’t buying, so it looks like I will get to become a little domino in the great Main Street collapse, due to our state mandated shutdowns and social distancing practices.
Global Lizard Incorporated has its big government knee on my small business neck and it’s getting hard to breathe. Sales are low and the rent is still too high, and the congress just declined to provide any further assistance, so the math is getting difficult.
It’s Sept 11, 2020 and time is flying.
Bad news abounds. The climate change debate is pretty much over now, now that the entire west coast is on fire. Be sure to notice those who said climate change was a hoax are the same people who now say that the coronavirus is a hoax.
The virus keeps spiking, if you can believe the news, and many people don’t, which is also reported on the news, ironically. We are coasting along with at least a thousand deaths a day, they say, from the virus.
Fake News?
It’s bad enough when the news is bad but when corporate media can’t even agree on what’s true, it magnifies the disorientation and further devalues the truth, and discourages those who seek it.
The corporate media report what they deem is relevant and then we get to choose what to think about it, from either the left or the right side of the officially sanctioned corporate opinion channels.
Alternatively, the internet is full of endless and diverse opinions with no official authority to the truth, comparatively.
The terrorist attacks from nineteen years ago today are a perfect example of the academentia of our era. The conspiracy theories on the internet about that event dwarf the number of the “official” theory videos posted about it.
Most people in real life believe the official theory though, as implausible as it is, because they have not studied the details of the event. Most people polled know very little compared to those who have documented it and posted videos about it.
If you could measure the consensus of those who studied the event and posted videos about it, the truth would become self-evident, despite the subscriber “thumbs up” count.
What is the truth? I’ll post that soon. Suffice to say for now, whatever it is, the result is the same and so is the remedy. We’ll get back to all that, later.
The election season is heating up with the most intense and divisive campaigns I’ve ever seen, which has been more than a few. I remember when Herbert Walker was asked by Bernard Shaw if he would still be against the death penalty if the wife of his opponent, Michael Dukakis, was raped and murdered.
True story, look it up. (aka same question)
Bernard Shaw would never have dared to construct that hypothetical using Barabara, like he did with Kitty. It was shameless.
It was the first question, first debate, as I recall. It was a seriously devious question, never called out by the corporate servants for what it was, like so many other collusions I’ve seen. But let’s not reminisce.
We are less than two months away from the election and the smear and fear is in full gear, cranking up hotter than the stock market. I expect the October Surprises to be played in ping pong fashion next month with a rapid back and forth, of he did this and he did that, and who’s worse than who?
We have reached a new low.
The right wingers are fear mongering with racist nightmare scenarios if Biden wins, and the left wingers are heaping so much dirt on Trump his supporters will need to navigate a fog of shame to vote for him, but they will, many many times.
It’s a horrible system. We get to vote for either Dr. Frankenstein, or his Monster. If the monster loses the election that doesn’t mean he stops his ops. It just means he loses his badges, to some degree.
The protests against the police continue to grow.
A pattern is developing. Videos of police brutality, or worse, keep surfacing, followed by protests that result in more conflict and death.
The shooting has started with no political solutions in sight. The only solutions offered by the establishment are Biden or Trump, and their political parties.
It’s like looking at a menu of bad food when you don’t have any money to order. You know you’re going hungry, either way.
The pandemic deaths are disproportionally killing more people of color, they say, as the markets have fully recovered, disproportionally enriching the predominately white investors of Wall Street.
Forty million people are recently unemployed and the evictions have begun. We’re on the precipice of a huge social and economic crash. I expect extreme division and inequality coming soon, leading to ever-escalating conflicts and unreported tragedies.
All in the name of capitalism.
The Qanon folks are a thing now, for sure. They are the Joker wing from Gotham city, here to provide the republicans with a dangerous and surrealistic ally to help protect and defend the scam, as foot soldiers, deployed as necessary. They’re ready.
Qanon will be supported by a parade of right wing mercenaries and militia groups from around the country with misleading names like the Apple Pie Christians, and what not. They will be popping up here and there, over time, to do battle with the protestors, in a way police can’t.
Apathy by design
Most people tune out the news because their participation is futile, or they are represented by their money so they never need to think about it. Most people have more important priorities.
It’s the people who are left out that are the ones who are the most vulnerable for recruitment into the coming conflict. They are the most likely to protest.
A couple mercenary shills are hired to light the fuse and the next thing you know everybody’s grabbing stolen merchandise because they can, and then the shooting starts. At some point it won’t stop.
The necessary police reforms we need to stop the violence mirror the democratic reforms we need to save our democracy. It’s about apportionment.
Apportionment is the foundation of an honest democracy.
Police should be apportioned to precincts by race, and live in the same districts they serve. Their numbers should increase relative to the population, just as the number of representatives should increase. Law enforcement should be accessible and accountable. They should be the friends and family of those they work for.
Communities have been abused and they’re angry. So it’s not a surprise that they are incited to looting and the like, when they can. It’s predictable behavior due to the indignity of being institutionally abused, along with the inequality from an adversarial economy. It's no wonder they can become volatile.
The shooting starts.
Another black man was shot by an officer, seven times in the back, on video, with no visible provocation. Jacob Blake was his name. Shot at point blank range in front of his kids.
That was followed by riots and two homicides by a right wing vigilante kid who came in from out of state to protect property, supposedly, and killed some people with his assault weapon.
The tit for tat death spat has begun. Until now, it’s been the police getting caught on video killing black people. Now, private groups of opposing forces have started killing each other.
Left versus Right, Black versus White.
More snuff videos are being broadcast. Hooded executions by police and sedative injections are normal and lawful police procedures around here, apparently, to control uncooperative suspects. I hate to mention it because it is so disturbing. But, like it or not, it becomes part of this narrative because it demonstrates the result, and even the intention, of the conflict-based economy.
Our economy is divisive by design, which can be corrected here, theoretically and democratically, to be more inclusive, but that’s not happening.
There are obvious alternatives to drugs and hoods to subdue people who are potentially dangerous, but there is very little discussion about reforms.
For starters, controlled substances need to be available legally, from a doctor, as necessary, at a price that puts criminals out of business.
Drugs should be better regulated and drug addicts should be better monitored for rehabilitation, treated as patients, without the trauma or the fear of being incarcerated against their will, as criminals.
Putting hoods on people is a medieval torture tactic. If that is considered normal here, normal needs to change, right away.
The violence is escalating and it is being encouraged by the president. The left wing pundits say it is an election strategy, which is naive, if not misleading. This is a strategy towards more violence that will escalate, regardless of who wins the next election.
This is an orchestrated conflict with paid combatants traveling to, and for, the fight, centralized for the cameras, attempting to provoke more violence with violence. It’s an unbeatable strategy.
Inequality and violence will escalate in tandem, intentionally, as policy, to profit the conflict-based economy, as always, without reforms.
It would stand to reason that those with the tools to surveil and stop those responsible for the violence don’t, because they are in league with each other.
I expect the violence will continue to escalate now, indefinitely. Our economy depends on it. That’s why the economy itself needs to change and be better regulated to prevent private profit violence.
For those who don’t get how this works, the bad guys secretly contract both sides of the violence and the angry pawns are drawn into the conflict, which validates more law and order, provoking more protests and more appropriations for conflict, resulting in ever-increasing authoritarian crackdowns, inevitably making democracy impossible and solidifying the power of perpetual incumbents
Investors have designed the conflict-based economy to profit themselves, not the public. And it’s working. The divisive policies that extract wealth from the public, rather than accommodate them, predictably increases inequality, public debt, investor profits, and of course, the violence.
It was reported that there's ongoing looting and rioting in Portland with caravans of right wingers rolling into town in their overpriced trucks with their oversized tires, shooting paint balls at protestors with their overpriced paint-guns.
The police allowed this blatant display of lawlessness to go on without arrest, from what I have heard. As if it was normal. It’s not now, but give it some time.
The privileged vigilantes apparently terrorized the protestors without repercussion, proving there is an allegiance between the hooligans and the authorities, allied against the protestors.
Same with militias and the mercenaries, Qanon, and all of the right wingers. They're all against the protestors, they call them Antifa, rioters, looters, anarchists, black lives matter, the radical left, and a few others I'm probably forgetting, democrats, I suppose. Anyobdy who opposes this president, is their opposition.
This is the result of inequality by socioeconomic design. It is a military tactic used against a domestic population to escalate conflict in order to divide and conquer and plunder, for profit.
The intention of the constitution is to promote the general welfare, yet the government continues to give taxpayer money to investors instead of the public in the name of saving the economy. They deprive economic stimulus to Main Street while looting the public treasury, for investors.
And they wonder why there’s no inflation.
The Fed announced they intend to raise inflation, meaning raising prices and devaluing money. As if inflation is a strategy rather than a consequence of what they have already done.
Asset values continue to blow money bubbles while millions of small businesses shutdown, as predicted, maximizing inequality for the national demise.
Institutional Investors will now begin buying businesses with money stolen from the taxpayers through the extraction scam sanctioned by the corporate shills that occupy our government.
Why would anybody believe a word they say? The fed is as dishonest as the president and they serve him with common purpose. They are on the same side of the legalized crime, working against democracy and the common good to protect and defend the scam, for perpetual profiteering.
Wallstreet.gov
The Fed keeping rates at zero indefinitely makes sense to you, right? That’s cool, right? Just ask any investor. They’ll tell you. That’s what they heard from the professionals, we can assume it must be true.
Or, possibly our treasury is being drained by a giant globalist corporate vampire of corruption.
The financial pundits all pretend this is normal despite the business model being blatantly corrupt. They have nothing but faith in the extraction scam because it’s making them all tons of money, depriving taxpayers today and enslaving future taxpayers to a life of eternal servitude and poverty.
The real reason they want inflation to rise is so they can devalue our purchasing power further, as another cyclical extraction tactic to maximize and further normalize the squeeze.
Another consequence beyond the increasing inequality will be that businesses will need to keep revising their pricing to keep up with the Fed’s ever-increasing target inflation rate. Great plan!
They say they are targeting 2% inflation.
Even if you believe inflation is actually that low, and it’s not, inflation will still be over twice as high as the interest rate from a savings account. Meaning you will lose money if you try to save your money in a bank, forcing the “smart” money into the scam.
The problem is they can’t create inflation because they are hoarding all the money to themselves, in the so-called market, for their so-called “growth". The growth is in asset bubbles nowadays, not employment.
That’s the problem.
Investors extract from the markets like a farmer milks a cow. The taxpayers keep giving but there’s no return for the workers because the growth goes to investors. The workers would spend more if they had more which would result in real economic growth, for workers. If most workers make too much money, inflation happens. That's how it works.
Inflation has been relatively low because the money is being extracted from the real economy instead of fueling it. Our economy is currently on life support because most of the money printing and stimulus went to investors to reinvest in market “growth”, not economic growth.
Most people don’t have enough money to spend. That’s why inflation remains low. Though our money is loosing value, it's still valuable because it's scarce, for most people. It’s not rocket science. It is a policy of intentional inequality by political design that should be reversed.
If economic growth was the intent the stimulus would go to consumers and small businesses. If the money the public spent to bailout corporate excess went into the real economy, it would boom.
Our inflation is less than hyper, though, not just because unemployment is high. It’s because inequality is high.
And the corporate lizards must be high, threatening us with stagflation, despite it being the inevitable result of their extraction scam and overcompensated lizard-like lifestyles of excess.
Our economy will suffer if we vote for Biden, they say. Afraid their advantage is in danger and that their privileges might be diminished in some small way, by the democrats. Which is unlikely.
The business model of Wall Street is fraud. It can’t survive without taxpayer money.
If they can’t scam us through inflation they will need to charge us to loan them money with negative interest rates, they say, to keep the extraction scam profitable despite being exposed for what it is.
The bipartisan scam will soon remove its mask of being a legitimate business model and begin charging us for the money they borrow to invest, so they can continue to pay themselves outrageously high sums of money with less reliance on those unseemly bailouts.
The banks will become like a branch of government. They will insure stock market profits with taxpayer dollars to subsidize the corporate lizard class. It will be undeniably divisive, extractive, unethical, and unfair, yet embraced by both sides of the political aisle, and nobody will notice.
Global scams
And it is easy to see that their global trading strategy is simply trading goods across borders to monopolize commerce, for Wall Street profits.
We have created a mountain of debt for some to profit others. To get out of this mess we need either high growth, high inflation, or defaults, Rajan explains in the video. All of which haven’t happened for a long time, he says, without mentioning the taxpayers filling the Fed’s punch bowl.
Our economic “system” is un-American.
Our global economy is a mercantilist middleman fantasy come true. It should be corrected by law, by maximizing domestic production and supply chains. But it won’t happen because investors control our government and use it as a bottomless piggy bank to buy our geography like it’s a board game.
That’s another problem in need of correction.
When Trump declares the choice between himself and Biden, is the same choice as Made in the USA or Made in China, and gets a thunderous applause, it’s because Americans prefer products made in America, obviously. At least they do in theory, but not in reality. It’s an easy applause line, but it’s not really true.
The truth is both candidates support the status quo of global trade, which is Made in China, for investor profits, which is Wall Street, or may as well be.
Metaphorically speaking, Wall Street is China, to Main Street. Give or take a few labor markets and a few corrupt politicians, but generally speaking, we are investing in China, or some corporate equivalent that competes unfairly against Main Street.
China Street companies function as economic adversaries to Main Street workers. Wall Street is China's ally. They work together to undermine democracy, and Main Street jobs.
Consumers love the low prices and investors love the profits, but the workers would like to be compensated adequately, with growth. It’s the right thing to do for economic balance in order to enable democratic reforms.
Both candidates are beholden to the China/Wall Street scam, despite their rhetoric. Most voters support it too, and the workers need the cheapest prices they can get because they lost their good paying jobs to Wall Street, so they’re stuck.
Bringing back jobs is an empty slogan I’ve heard for decades. Like supporting democracy, it doesn’t happen around here. I’ll believe it when I see it, and even if I do see it I know it won't be good enough because it never is.
I’ve seen it said too many times.
This is a Wall Street government and stimulating the economy through market injections to profit investors proves it. It also identifies the problem to be fixed.
Our political system ignores that our political spectrum is an economic spectrum. That problem should be fixed with a new apportionment act.
If money is representation, and it is, it is our representation that is being extracted. They used to say, no taxation without representation. Now we should say, no taxation by extraction. We want growth to pay our bills.
Wall Street is hitting all time highs and reinvesting record profits simply because the government took the taxpayers money and gave it to investors, in a betrayal of the real economy, which is about to crash.
The extraction scam.
By my math, the government took about thirty thousand dollars from every hard working taxpayer, like myself, and is pumping it into the markets for excessively leveraged investor profits.
You’re welcome.
The stock market is up and the economy is down because investors profit from public debt.
The extraction scam of the conflict based economy is likely seen as a normal business model to those who are in it, and profit from it, but it’s not. It’s an unethical monster of taxpayer extraction in serious need of some serious regulation, at the least.
It’s bad enough to invest in worker exploitation, forcing workers to compete for lower wages, as Ali Velshi describes in the video. It’s inexcusably worse to spend taxpayer money to support financial institutions as if they were some kind of government agency, like the military, or the IRS.
They should be, but that’s a different discussion.
Mr. Velshi doesn’t mention that and might even disagree. That’s why news consumers are right to be skeptical about getting their information from the corporate news media, whose primary purpose is to generate profits for themselves and their investors.
Same goes for representatives. The failure of officials to fulfill their rhetorical intentions is self-evident, regardless of the reason.
Congressional delegations should be apportioned to states according to the income of the people in those states to help insure accurate representation and economic justice.
If everybody is poor then all of the representatives should go to the poor. Income-based representation is the logical upgrade to our current apportionment law. It is the logical remedy for the inequality that has crippled our “middle-class” democracy.
With a new apportionment act, “growth” can once again compensate the producers of production appropriately instead of overcompensating those who just “trade" ownership of that production, in an ever-increasing squeeze for more profit, ultimately derived from institutional inequality and taxpayer bailouts.
Those who counterfeit excessive profits for themselves in the scam, are usually the same as those who think we can’t afford a public healthcare option, or other vital services the government could provide if the public's wealth wasn't extracted from them on an ongoing basis, by private interests.