Titanic Trio of Tyrannical Terpitude Two

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y-u0UnKZ_

Quite a while ago I wrote the first installment of T4, (the titanic trio of tyrannical terpitude), about government. In that entry I mentioned how governments operate under identical protocols as corporations, and are funded by banks and taxes collected a la Al Capone to pay for what we already have or will most likely never get. I was going to write one about banks and a separate entry here on my blog about corporations but it is so hard to keep them separate I have decided to, with the massive assistance of the right honourable Bernard Sanders, turn this into a sort of two part trilogy and deal with the banks, (which are in no way run any differently than standard corporations), and the corporations themselves in this single post.

If you are not really clear on what I mean when I mention the corporate strategies which all three of the T4 use I urge you to watch the very well done documentary entitled, "The Corporation." Just google Topdocumentaries. It's either .com or .org but you will find it there. Or you can watch Bernie's speech I have provided a link to just above. Or you could just continue reading while I reproduce some of his main points for my busy blog readers. It IS almost a half hour vid.

Bernie notices that Americans are angry. If I may, this is one of only a few points I might edit in this speech. Traditionally when the constitutionally well-armed American is angry he/she shoots somebody. Fortunately, or maybe UNfortunately things have not yet arrived at this historically emancipating juncture. I believe the feeling in the US to be one similar or identical to one I have described inadequately on this very blog. That very emotion that finds me just a few more T4 sodomisings away from packing my bags and flying overseas in search of Bhutanese citizenship. Bhutanian? Bhutani? Bhutanish? I will have to do some studying before I can pass the citizenship exam.

At any rate I believe this extremely common sentiment Bernie has noticed is more of a dark, gothic, lugubrious recalcitrance that combines the anger he speaks of with the harsh fact that there is little we can do about it. Well little within our T4-induced and perpetuated states of appeasement. A dude once went to the woods to live deliberately with only the bare essentials sucking the marrow out of life to see what he could not learn from it and not, when it came time to die, realize that he had not lived. That dude said most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I see it as a kind of voluntary muting of our pre-birth, child-like, artistic, playful, essence in exchange for societally imposed goals, the reaching of which can never approach the joy you had before that essence was surrendered. I think it's all the same. It is a terribly disappointing way to live! But it is all part of the tyranny and terpitude of the titanic trio. Bernie brings up some of the details of how they pull it off in America. It holds true all around the world.

There are a lot of people out of work, broke and suffering through a recession that Sanders says was caused by the greed,recklessness and illegal behaviour of the people on Wall Street. Who does he mean by this? The banks and the corporations. He compares their behaviour to playing at a casino. Staked, of course, by the American tax payers. They have been "de-regulating" or privatizing Wall Street. So many things in the States are now privatized and it leads to some pretty bizarre exhibitions of avarice. I recently read of a judge who had summarily sentenced guilty AND innocent people to jailtime in order to fill up some empty, privatley owned prisons, and was well paid to do so. Well he got greedy so he got busted. Now he is paying back millions and he'll be getting to know some of his clients a little more intimately than he'd care to I'd bet.

One of the more shocking stats I have ever heard, and I trust most or all five of you, my readers have as well, was the 700 billion dollar bank bail-out that happened not so long ago. I know that if any more than a handful of Americans could actually wrap their heads around that figure it would have been revolution time. It certainly wouldn't take that much to wipe out the 15% real unemployment Bernie talks about. At the time I remember thinking and blogging that not much if any of that dough will "trickle down" to the folks who need it, but if it were given directly to them, most, in fact eventually ALL would trickle UP to the T4. And it would be more of a deluge than a trickle. Unbelievably the number of zero interest loans Sanders says that were given to financial institutions was actually more like a brain busting 16 TRILLION! Once numbers get that high I just can't understand them any more. But what I, and Bernie, DO understand is a fraction of that in zero interest loans to private citizens who really need it, and not to banks who don't, and pretty soon the people ain't angry any more cuz they ain't flat broke. But no that's not a viable solution because of a word we've been socialized to fear. Oh geez I almost just said it there. So like Mr. Mackey the banks,corporations and government will continue playing keep-away with that money from the average American joe because helping them out by sharing it would be socialism and children, socialism's bad mmmkay? Socialism's bayud.

Okay so to avoid that Bernie suggests a kind of Keynesian rebuilding of shoddy roads and bridges and infrastructure and transforming away from fossil fuel dependancy. This would create jobs while making America cleaner and more internationally competitive WHILE appeasing the citizens' anger. Mmmkay no. No children that's bayud... mmmkay. It's just bayud? So don't do it? Mmmkay? It's only bad for the T4. They import 300 billion a year in oil and if you read my last post you know about the coal. Screw the common good. Screw the country. WE want more to throw into our massive cash piles. Of course the "we" are the top 1% in America who own 40% of it and make 93% of all new income and are using it to buy the rest. This is the movement toward an oligarchic economic/poitical control Bernie Sanders warns of. We see giant campaign contributions made by corporations like, oh I dunno Monsanto, and look at all the key government posts TO Monsanto, like agricultural affairs, that are filled by former Monsanto employees.Government can now be bought. And then the people who need them least can legislate themselves and their corporations some pretty sweet tax breaks. The rich are paying their lowest tax rates in decades and in the Cayman Islands alone there is estimated to be some 18,000 corporations sheltering themselves from about 100,000,000,000 bucks a year of taxes. I don't know if Warren Buffet pays less tax than his maid, all I know is if he has a maid his income is pretty solid so he is probably not the guy any government should be taxing LESS than others. I think I even heard of Buffet saying the rich should be taxed more and that they wouldn't mind so much.

Here in Canada it couldn't be much simpler. While the oil pipelines that our government is trying to cram down our throats WILL create jobs and bring money to Canada, it is environmentally irresponsible of them to even suggest pumping crude oil through those lines. Look at the news of just the past week! Oil spill in northern B.C. "Produced" water spill in northern Alberta. That's contaminated and toxic water created by the oil industry. We already HAVE spills. At least build some refineries in Canada which will employ untold numbers of people in making the product that flows through the pipelines safer. Then when, (not IF), we have spills, they won't be totally gutting to the environment.

Right here where I work Alberta Health Services fired a 10 member board for not obeying the Alberta Health Minister's directive to cancel some 3.2 million in bonus payments to executives. And to show you how integral to AHS they were, the ten of them were replaced by one chick. Fred Horne, the Health Minister, said that this board was made up of businesspeople running the health service like a bottom line corporation. If we could only get rid of these jerks where they are screwing things up all over Canada like that! Like the education system. Total corporation! And as stated before, our government itself. (Hey maybe AHS can use some of the 3.2 mil they saved to pay my salary if I get the job in the mailroom!)

And WE need to really commit to some alternative sources of energy too. How much wind is blowing across the prairies unharnessed? How much water and geothermal power could we take advantage of in Canada. These are the ways to employ people and make money in North America. No children that's bayud? Mmmkay? Medicare, education and social security cuts? The-the- these are good? Mmmkay?

So that is pretty much what the vid says. But do yourself a favour and watch his Larry Davidesque delivery. This guy is cool. And I don't say that about politicians ever. All I will add is that this whole vid/blog post is not just about America, it's about the whole world! This is how things need to change so we can start recovering from the stank we've been slappin' outta our planet for so long. And we can make some huge strides towards recovering a lot of the lost joy as well. There's a political economist named Gar Alperovitz who thinks that the next revolution in America will be the regular folks demanding some equality. He reckons that if the money were divvied up evenly every family of 4 would pull in 200,000 bucks a year. I think there are a huge majority of folks in the States who would be upset to know that. Maybe upset enough to get to the point of revolt. And that might not be so bad a model for the world to follow. Leastaways that's what Bernie, Gar and I reckon.

P.S. For all of you who have EXTRA time, (yeah right!), here's an article that deals with much the same things as I just wrote about. It calls the banks, governments, and corporations, (who are not ALWAYS co-operating with one another), the "transnational capitalist class." More scary stats here. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16965-global-power-project-part-1-exposing-the-transnational-capitalist-class