The Heroes Act: What is the Holdup?

I was a bit confused earlier today about the holdup the US politicians seem to have been experiencing in regards to the latest Coronavirus relief plan. The GOP is saying the Dems are "holding the relief funds hostage," Mitch McConnell calls it a "liberal wish list," it's been called a "socialist giveaway plan," Trump says the Dems want stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with Coronavirus at all, and back on May 16, when the Heroes Act passed in the Democrat majority house, Trump threatened to veto it.

So it confused me that now, almost three months since it was passed, NOW there is urgency on the part of the Republicans. Where was this urgency for the past three months when we all knew the original CARES relief funds were dwindling? Now the Republicans are saying they WANT it passed so let's hurry, hurry, hurry! They say the Dems are stalling it at the expense of the people of America who guys like McConnell, Trump, Mnuchin and Jay Powell care about so very much. As we covered in no uncertain terms last post. Is this what's REALLY going on, or are people playing politics with American lives? Is it the Democrat Heroes Act, or one that has been revised? I think you can anticipate the answer to that. But it's quite interesting! I've learned a lot through a few hours of research today! I like it when I use the internet for good instead of evil.

Let's go back to the beginning because I (and Inigo Montoya) believe that's the best place to start. But we're not looking for the Man in Black, we're searching for what might be the major sticking point in negotiations between the parties. So it would help to investigate the FIRST Coronavirus relief  package, the Corona Aid Relief and Economic Security Act, or the CARES Act. It was the original 2.2 trillion dollar relief package passed jointly (and I doubt there is much else these two parties have done jointly in the entire administration) back on March 25, 2020. At the time it was the largest ever, but the new one could be more. It was divided thusly: 300 billion in one time cash payments to individual Americans; 260 billion in increased unemployment benefits, 350 billion in "forgivable" loans to small business (later increased to 669 billion but as we'll see, precious little actually went where it was meant) 500 billion in aid for large corporations who don't need it and 339.8 billion to state and federal governments who don't deserve it. I don't know how they come up with 2.2 trillion, but government math is always complete bullshit.

Here is a fantastic article by Kathryn Judge who judges (ar ar) that the major flaw in the CARES Act was that "too much support is going to large companies when it should be going to the small ones." Hardly a surprise when you consider that the Republican Senate agreed on it and Donald Trump affixed his cardiac arrest EEG autograph to it. The act authorized treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin to spend the 2.2 or whatever trillion bucks THROUGH the Federal Reserve. Did you know that? I didn't until just a few hours ago. The US FED. as they are known, are the (choke, cough, hablah) regulators whose job it is, ostensibly and nonsensically, to ensure that Steveyboy doesn't funnel the funds directly into the purses of the businesses that he or the Trump administration might favour, or, you know, have been bought by. I'm being fairly glib, but if you read on, you'll see why I, and Ms. Judge, think this is like telling Trump to distribute taxpayer's money fairly. Oh. Geez. That's not what it's LIKE, it's what it IS. Ha ha! I couldn't come up with a simile any better. If you had asked a fox to guard your henhouse, I could then say, "Well that'd be like asking Donald Trump to distribute taxpayer's money fairly," and it'd work. But the simile just doesn't have the hyperbole in reverse, does it? At any rate, you'll see what I mean. Read on McDuff.

Ms. Judge explains that small businesses (those with 500 employees or fewer) contribute 44% of GDP and are 49% of the private sector of America. These are the most vulnerable businesses in times of crisis like these, and will more likely have to declare bankruptcy if they run out of money. As we saw in 2008, some businesses and banks are too big to fail. They transcend pure capitalism. Small businesses aren't and they don't. Liquidation destroys good companies and good jobs. The better jobs in the country because small businesses pay better than the large corporations. This is how killing small business can be claimed by politicians (and always is) as "job creation." Kill a business where 500 people earned 30 bucks an hour and make 1000 new jobs for a larger company that pays 15 bucks an hour. Job creation. Seemples.

But even before the CARES Act was ratified, the FED allocated 750 billion of the 2.2 trill. for the largest corporations. Not just because they love them so much, but because through decades of strategic lobbying and legislation purchase, the FED has been able to establish bureaucratic rules and regulations that they can fall back on and say, "Can't help it. Legal constraints. Nothing we can do about it." Hannah Arendt had a great quote about this and I'll just paraphrase. She reckoned bureaucracy to be the worst kind of tyranny because in a bureaucracy, in which all are equally powerless, we have tyranny without a tyrant. Specifically, section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act says loans in "unusual and exigent" circumstances must be adequately secured and credit risks limited. Ironically, as near as my research can tell, the Federal Reserve Act, passed into law in 1913, didn't have these amendments until 1991 or possibly even 2008 when inadequately secured loans were positively in vogue! The banks were encouraged to make them, but the FED was seemingly the only entity legislating AGAINST them. Hmmmm….. that seems fishy. But let me stall my tinfoil hat reaching hand for a moment. Is there more?

Why yes! Aside from the serviceable argument that, "Sorry, we HAVE to give all our dough to the financially stable big boys," there was also the excuse that credit rating are "difficult" to assess for smaller firms, whereas they can be readily assessed for larger companies. Another provision was that, even where grants would be wiser, only loans were available from the FED.

And there is one more that I find fascinating! When a company declares bankruptcy, the company and the workers are the first to be protected financially, while the shareholders take their lumps. So in an emergency, to protect the Joe Average workers, a company going out of business in a crisis could declare bankruptcy, get some help from the Federal Reserve Emergency Relief Fund and not have their workers hurt so badly..... IF anybody gave a shit about the measly working worms. The FED also adopted a policy to never make loans to bankrupted entities. They were covering their asses and the asses of the (rich) shareholders. So who are these heartless fiends? Well, I'm glad I asked that. This is good!

Remember that name you may not have recognized earlier in this post, and if I can go ahead and flatter myself, you Googled as you read - Jay Powell? I hadn't heard of him before my research. He's the head honcho at the Federal Reserve. What they call the chair and has been since 2018. He's a Republican, big surprise, and was appointed, or I guess nominated, by Donald Trump himself. Before I tell you any of the bad stuff I found in my brief search (I'm sure there's LOTS more) I'll tell you one good thing I found about him: he was an MLB pitcher drafted by the Padres in 1990! SOOOO, if he ever becomes president, you ain't gonna get any embarrassing, hanging honorary first pitches. He'll offer up some sweet chin music! And to be more serious, even though he's GOTTA be a money-worshipping hawk of phlegm, I bet he's a really nice guy to talk to and you or I would have an easier time sharing a beer with him than swapping his eyes with his testicles.

Okay, now for the bad stuff. On March 11, 2020, he made the decision to print half a trillion dollars to provide short-term loans for "distressed borrowers" on Wall Street. The next day - another half a trill! Created out of thin air! Dollars are, after all, Federal Reserve Notes. They can DO this shit! That's why all the debt in the world is, to use a financial term, completely bankrupt of verisimilitude! It's just fake pictures on paper that are cranked out to give to, who else?, the rich. Well, I suppose there are a very few poor people on Wall Street trading stocks, but that percentage probably equates to the percentage of the globally super-rich who are the only people who are allowed to make the preferred trades, get the best free shit, and receive all the fake money the fake financial institutions can shit out, even though they need it the least.

And even though he raised interest rates (which I've recently explained, helps the poor, not the rich) and Donald and he exchanged hatred, since Covid, he hasn't enjoyed his job and, you guessed it, lowered interest rates to ZERO!

Steve Mnuchin - Republican. Another Trump flunky. Former investment banker, hedge fund manager and movie producer. With Goldman Sachs for 17 years. The third Goldman Sachs veteran to hold the treasury secretary position in recent years. Bought a bank. That's right, he bought a bank called IndyMac and changed the name to OneWest Bank. His bank became known for quickly foreclosing on borrowers who fell behind on their mortgages. Before that he was a partner in Sears and sued for "asset stripping." He is still embroiled in several pending lawsuits. One lawsuit that, luckily for him, timed out, was one over his involvement in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

The very best of the bunch? His "Dune Capital" was one of a group of lenders, including Deutsche Bank, who were sued over the financing of a skyscraper in Chicago... by Donald Trump! He sued his own treasury secretary! Only Trump!

He was also Trump's finance chairman for the 2016 campaign, so he knows, maybe better than anyone, who financed Trump and who Trump owes.

He was instrumental in the 2017 tax "reform," a 320 billion tax cut for corporations that eventually totaled 1.125 TRILLION in net benefits. This added around 2.28 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

Richard Clarida - Republican Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve. Probably another Trump appointee. Until 2018 was global strategic advisor for PIMCO, a global investment firm worth about 2 trill. Hedge funds, pension funds, corporations, etc. "Asset allocation." So he moves money around. Large amounts of it. Another advantage for the rich. It's better than working and far more lucrative!

Randy Quarles - Republican Vice Chair for supervision. Another Trump nominee. He is a private equity investor. Founder and head of Cynosure Group and former partner in the Carlyle Group. Former rep. for the US in the IMF. Dealt with financial responses to crises in Argentina and Turkey. Also in 2005 at the G7 meting in London, he negotiated an historic debt "relief" agreement for the world's poorest countries. So, a vulture capitalist.

Lael Brainard - DEM!!! Administrative Governor. Started with Mckinsey & Company, a financial advisor to corporations, governments and other organizations. This company is associated with many scandals including the Enron collapse in 2001 and the 2007/2008 financial meltdown.

And last, but not least, Miki Bowman - Republican. Trump appointee. Former Sr. staff position on the federal emergency management agency under president George W. Bush. That's FEMA folks. And George W? That's Hurricane Katrina. Member that clusterfuck? Well after that, you're promoted!

If you can, read that Kathryn Judge article again. Now that you know the people through whom the CARES Coronavirus relief money had to flow, is it any wonder Judge judged things the way she did? I had to use that gem one more time. So nice, I used it twice! ;-)

So, with that background, let's move on to the Heroes Act, which was passed in the House May 16, 2020. That's almost three months ago. The Dems who drafted it knew that the original CARES stimulus package would be running out by now for the average American. Especially if they were aware, which I'm sure they were, of the stuff I just wrote above. Not a lot of the 2.2 trillion landed in the hands of the people who needed it. What did most people get, 1200 bucks? And it had to last them 3 months? The country is BROKE right now! At least a large part of it. And they knew it would be if the virus lasted this long, so they came up with a 3 trillion dollar aid package for hazard pay for essential workers, postal service and local and state governments who still don't deserve it. One of the sticking points seems to be the extra money for local and state governments. I guess Dems feel that the politicians got enough with the first relief package.

But here are a few interesting things about this new Heroes package: It was called a "socialist giveaway plan" by Republicans; Mitch Blocker McConnell called it a "liberal wishlist," Trump and McConnell both say the Dems are "holding the relief hostage:" Trump said that the Democrats want stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the Coronavirus; AND when he first heard about it (or had somebody sum it up for him) he threatened to veto it.

This is where we started. But now it may be a little more obvious what's going on, no? Let me throw another article link at you...

This article talks about the PPP, the paycheck protection program portion of the original Covid relief package that does not require routing through the FED. Here's what the erstwhile Ms. Judge had to say about that: The one important bright spot in the CARES Act is the PPP, a program designed to help small businesses and their employees which does not require the Fed’s involvement. The support takes the form of a low-interest loan, but it gets converted into a grant if the recipient uses the funds to retain employees. Yet even within PPP, shifting from conception to execution reveals some similar challenges. The program was massively underfunded from the start, so the full $350 billion allotted to it has been used up even though the great majority of small businesses—including many that were working hard to get a PPP loan—got nothing from the program. Making matters worse, 40% of the funds were used for payouts in excess of $1 million and many banks favored clients with loans outstanding, so much of the money went to larger small businesses that may have been better situated to get funds elsewhere.

A lot of the money ended up in banks, who don't need it. Not small businesses who did. Another one of these political shenanigans the average person just never sees. And it won't see the light of day in anything but the most honest, and probably most underfunded of media. Now read the beginning of the new link. "Extending the Paycheck Protection Program and expanding Federal Reserve lending facilities — could be on the table in negotiations with the Senate." Extending the PPP, which doesn't use the FED and gets money to small business, and expanding the FED lending facilities, by allowing them to lend to people other than the rich, could be on the table. This is what Ms. Judge suggested. If you continue reading the article there are other things that actually help the REAL people of the United States, not the rich.

Is it just me? Or does anyone else think that when Donald Trump accuses the Democrats for stalling and delaying much needed help it's the pot calling the kettle black?

Could it be Trump trying to LOOK like he's fighting the Dems to get the suffering citizens (who he doesn't give a crap about) some money a few months before the election to get votes? Could it be that he knows that about 4 months after the election taxes will be raised to pay for this relief? Even if he's miraculously re-elected, by then he'll have almost 4 more years for the people to forget this double-cross. It's a win/win! He's even threatening executive actions that he can't make! Does he really, REALLY give that much of a shit while he's putting out on the 13th hole at the expense of these people he's ostensibly fighting for?

I just don't think so. I think the issue is the same thing as party lines demand: Republicans are fighting for the Corona stimulus to be used to help the people who gave THEM money, and the Democrats are fighting for the Corona virus stimulus to be used to help those who gave THEM money... and maybe a little bit to the poor and middle classes.

I have to ask myself why the Dems don't just get this out into the open. Why do they seem to be keeping this desire to help the majority of the country while the Republicans are only trying to help the rich a secret? The answer is, THEY are probably not totally on the level either! If it were as one sided as I've suggested in this post, surely we'd know about it by now! I just haven't figured out the Democrat angle yet. They're usually less obvious than the easily predictable, money-grubbing GOP.

The sad, sad lesson to be learned here seems to be that even in a life or death situation, these two parties, which can't even legitimately be considered parties, are just interested in division and contradiction. That first Covid package was proof that it doesn't have to be like this. Too bad it takes a worldwide pandemic for these talking jackasses to put aside their party lines and help the country. But this is what happens when money takes control of politics.

What a shame!

Has The United States Learned Nothing?

Here's an article from May 2020. It's about the so-called "super spreader" in Korea. Some dude with Covid 19 went to Itaewon, a Seoul neighbourhood where I used to live and still go from time to time. He will be exhibit A. When it was learned that he had the virus and that he had gone to some clubs in Itaewon, some gay clubs, in an area where foreigners are known to congregate, South Korea sprung into action!

Exhibit A didn't know he had the virus. He was diagnosed days after his weekend of clubbing. But as a result of this one guy, phone records were pulled, CCTV cameras were studied, messages were sent to people who were traced to areas in which they could have come into contact with Exhibit A telling them to get tested, thousands of people were tested (most anonymously), clubs were closed, and across the nation, Koreans were somewhere between high alert and panic. To give you some idea, I wasn't in Itaewon during the two-week danger period, I was showing no symptoms, but I had visited a nearby neighbourhood within a few days of the danger period. I was ordered by my employer to get tested. That said, this incident gave us a really good chance to see both good and bad in the culture.

I have dealt in this blog before about the Korean blood obsession and devotion to cultural "purity," so I won't accentuate the bad parts any more than to say that Exhibit A made things tough on foreigners and gay people in Korea for a while, and with the hasty law enacting that invariably accompanies such public hysteria here, the effects could be felt for many years to come. This despite the facts that Exhibit A was a Korean, not a foreigner, and the results of the phone records showed that only 10-11% of people in Itaewon that night were foreigners. He may not have been gay, but he was clubbing in the gay club area.

I'm not so sure the pulling of the phone records was a "good" thing either, but all of the 10,905 who were discovered to have been in the vicinity of the super spreader's night on the town were contacted and told to get tested through text messages on their cell phones. Some were sent in English to the 10-11% who were not Koreans. I am trying to avoid saying that the concern wouldn't have been the same if this had been any other neighbourhood and any other bars, but in my opinion it wouldn't have. Although there were some cases of positive test subjects being exposed, losing jobs, or being "outed," Korean officials tried to keep the testing anonymous. This seems to suggest a concern more with safety and less with blame. And I think this was good!

There have been other similar pockets of cases not involving gay or foreign people and they've been handled well. I chose the above because it was the most extreme example of, I'll call it vigilance, on the part of Korea to combat Coronavirus.

Now, let's compare Exhibit A - the Itaewon Super Spreader, to Herman Cain, who I will call Exhibit B.

The question was "Do you think he caught Covid in Tulsa AAANNNNDDD are you doing anything to follow up on the tracking?" Well Mackaninny answered the first part with a highly scientific, "We'll never know." Trump himself said, "No, I don't think he did." So they're both very concerned with the blame, and sluff it off without any clear evidence, but McInaney actually says Cain did a LOT of travelling, but STILL didn't even take the logical next step that a normal human being with an ounce of giveashit takes when considering a person who is known to have a highly contagious virus -  concern for everybody he came into contact with. Not even mentioned. Though both blathered on about how much they loved Cain and how great a man he was and how much he will be missed, to obscure the main issue obviously. MacSilly even went so far as to say she is not going to "politicize" the death of so fine a man. Oh that's what it would be to show concern for everybody else, TRUMP SUPPORTERS mostly, who came in contact with him? Politicizing his death?

Let's... Holy LORD I'm laughing my arse off just thinking of this... let's try to imagine this same thing happening in Korea. Let's say a mouthpiece for President Moon Jae In were called to a press conference on what will be done about Exhibit A (the Super Spreader). Let's just imagine they'd even waste that much TIME here in Korea. A reporter asks the very same question, "What will be done about the tracking of people who've come into contact with him?" So the mouthpiece says, "Well, the Super Spreader was a fine, upstanding member of our society and a Democratic Party of Korea member. We're pretty sure he wasn't gay even though he went to those gay bars. He was a pillar of heterosexuality who ate stamina food regularly and took no inordinate amount of pleasure in giving or receiving a dong jim. He started as a humble goguma salesman, then rose to fame through his hit Bong Jjak album, "Kimchi Perfume." His fame earned him the Democratic nomination for the Gwangju riding and I don't want to cost his family or his legacy any face by politicizing his memory in such a way. It is inappropriate at this time to do any tra… excuse me, please get off the stage... to trace any... excuse me, excuse me, can we all just calm down now? We need to just - oygoo shipal - who threw that? Plea - hey, I am just giving you the message that I received - HEY, HEY, HEY!" And what would follow -no doubt- would be a lynching of epic proportions.

You see, Koreans are less concerned with the blame. They don't give half a sack of shit where the Super Spreader caught the virus. They care more about protecting the rest of the country and keeping the virus from spreading. I've never been one to overstate the general intelligence of the Korean people, but this is what intelligent people are concerned about. Kayleigh Mackafuckface went to HARVARD!!!! She'd be a HERO to almost any Korean just for that! And yet somehow this entire country has outsmarted her. How do you suppose that happened?

Could it be that her job is to disregard intelligence and stick to party lines? Lines that are drawn by her highly UNintelligent boss, Donald P.W.M.C.T.V. Trump? I don't think the party lines are drawn by that bozo, mind you, just hers. The lines are clearly drawn by the bosses of the party, and let's be honest, as Noam Chomsky says, "The Republican Party is not even a party. If it were there'd at least be SOME disagreement." It's an entity that has been purchased by wealth, to manipulate the people politically, into accepting what is best for only those very wealthy people. They have bought the people who make laws and legislate the behavior of private citizens and they have paid a great deal of money to purchase the hearts and minds of those same people. That's the money that pays the salary of Kayleigh MacNonsense and Donald Snakeoil Trump. It also pays the salaries of those in the propaganda - excuse me - media industry.

So not to put too fine a point on it, it's money. Filthy Lucre. Is there anything else that could make people behave this way? They sing the praises of Herman Cain while refusing to even acknowledge the hundreds or even thousands of lives he, like our Super Spreader, unintentionally put in danger. Ostensibly because any concentration on the harsh realities of this virus would undoubtedly draw attention to the colossal failure it represents to the Trump presidency and campaign to extend it. In a word, fuck all those people! Do I need to pull out an old, dusty Uncle George once again? I think I do.

"They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you. At all. At all. At all." Can't make it much clearer. And before you think I, myself am following party lines, I think the only Democrat who might have been an exception to this would have been Bernie Sanders, the guy Americans are overwhelmingly in favour of as their leader. But he can't get elected because he's not a Democrat.

Obedient workers! That's what these rich cocksuckers who've been "elected" are being told to make of you by our "owners." Those are the silent upper fractional percentiles who have more money than we can possibly imagine. I don't say that lightly because we can imagine a lot of money. But when you look at old Trumplestiltskin posing as John Baron, press agent to Donald Trump making a phone call to Forbes Magazine saying, "I basically... whoops, I mean Donald Trump basically owns all of Fred Trump's stuff. Yeah, he signed it over to me. My Dad is filthy rich, dude! I mean Fred Trump is a rich dude. Tremendously rich! The richest! He's got like a hillion billion dollars! He really should be on yer list! No, but I mean whoever he left his fortune to should be on your list. Of course he left it to me, John Baron. Uh, that is to say, NOT me, but Donald Trump, who I'm not." He was only trying to pose like he had a billion so he could get on the Forbes list and use that as collateral to borrow money because he actually DIDN'T have enough to qualify for loans.

The REAL owners of you and I aren't on the stupid Forbes 400. If they are, they've tremendously downplayed their wealth for the simple reason that if we knew how rich they ACTUALLY were, we'd revolt immediately. They scoff at a measly billion! If they had their way there would be billion dollar bills so they could carry wallets full of them! It's an exclusive club. And you ain't in it! Neither is Trump. He's just a wannabe. But he has his uses for the rich folk now that he's been put into power.

They want us to be obedient workers. They want us to obey them without knowing them. So they have these people posing as our leaders who can relay messages from the top. Ideally, people we respect and will obey. But in a pinch, Trump. Their latest message: Get back to work! Get the kids back in school! The Coronavirus is not that bad! Nothing is fucked here, dudes. Nothing is fucked.

If they traced the contacts of Exhibit B, we'd find people who've contracted the virus and then we'd have to trace them and so on and so on and so on... can't we just forget about this pesky virus and get back to making the rich people richer? Use whatever euphemism you like, but that is the "narrative from the top," those are the "party lines," and if we have this "unwanted downtime" for much longer, people are going to put two and two together and realize it's not so hard for the rich to afford. So after the "get back to work and school" message is obeyed, they've probably already got a "coronavirus cost the world economy a lot" message and a follow-up, "you (or laughingly WE) all need to tighten our belts to dig ourselves out of the Corona hole" message. Or maybe there will be a cure or a vaccine that will make the owners exponentially richer and it'll be more of a "This vaccine doesn't cover our losses from the virus so keep on working" message.

But these will be messages delivered in the new 2020-2024 term. Let's hope it's not still Trump relaying these messages.

All I was really trying to do when I started this post was to point out the GLARING difference between America run by pure greed and represented by Trump, and a country that still has a little bit of decency. I badmouth Korea from time to time, but the day I stop that is the day I just stop caring. In this instance, despite the ulterior motives, Korea is head and shoulders above the U.S. In fact, most countries are. It's not that great an achievement to obey the experts and do what the doctors say in case of a virus. It takes a monumental mental monument to slack jawed, knuckle dragging, cavernous stupidity or a dutiful lackey to the disgustingly amoral rich to disobey the experts and NOT do what the doctors say. Or, in case of this special yellow-headed cheesy poof, a fine blend of both.

And let's not forget our K-Lay McWhinneyninny! She's just the perfect spokeswoman, isn't she? Young. Trying to make a name for herself. Probably deep in debt from her education. She knows Trump's days are numbered. How many days till election day? What she needs to do is show her obsequiousness and prove to be a super-sycophantic ego stroker so that she'll be highly employable in her future. She's a Harvard girl. Don't be fooled into thinking she believes any of the shit coming out of her face-hole.

At least I hope she doesn't believe the discharge she's secreting. It would ruin one of my spank bank fantasies. Oh come on! Don't tell me you haven't noticed. She's gorgeous! And clever enough to play the bad girl? Rowr!

Oh now there I've done it! I've gone too deep and dark haven't I? But before you judge me too harshly, I'm certainly not the first or the last. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. And lest you start to expect from future posts, the sordid depths 2020 has forced me into, I offer a similar comparison that is on an unimpeachably superior intellectual plane. Look at this video. It's recently done by a guy in the UK. It's uncanny how the Spanish Flu, and the reactions of American people to it, compares to what they are going through these days! Almost as if they learned nothing!

This Whole Statue Thing

The many, many followers of this blog may have noticed that posts have been fewer recently even though Covid has kept me close to my computer and I am now officially on staycation. I really SHOULD be posting more, so in an effort to right that wrong, here comes my second post in two days.

I'm also curious to see if the lack of spacing between paragraphs continues. If you had a bit of trouble with my last post, I apologize. It's annoying and it has come and gone a few times before. There seems to be nothing that I can do about it. But hopefully this post it will disappear.

Here's a video that makes a few suggestions on replacement statues for the statues of Americans who fought for the south and slavery that were put up in parks for public viewing. Now, ahem, while most erections for public viewing in parks, or anywhere for that matter, are not good ideas, the point that statues honouring treasonous killers of their countrymen just might be a bad idea, is a valid one.

You might have heard the spurious argument that this desecration of heritage monuments is equivalent to theft of history. You may have heard it from the constantly flapping head hole of Captain Spurious, Donald Jumpin' Jackass Trump himself.

And since saying, "I get my history from books, not statues," could be an argument for either removing them or keeping them, maybe replacement is the better tactic. As covered in several previous posts, modern day plutocrats are revered for making untold amounts of money off the sweat of their fellow man/woman, but there is a difference between them and slavery proponents of the past: they still haven't killed anyone in a civil war to maintain the situation (although I hope and think that day is coming). You could mount a very good case, and many have, (perhaps the best being Noam Chomsky) that every war was at least in part plutocrats killing people to maintain their power, but there haven't yet been the civil wars we need to unseat them. YET. I'd better post something to back THAT up...

How about just listing past presidents of the United States and the wars they have supported. Surely not all of them are guilty! Are they? Ummm…

And which of these presidents does NOT have statues, airports, monuments, libraries, schools etc., etc., named after him? So, it could be argued very effectively that the good ole U.S. of A. has made a veritable habit of honouring and memorializing bloodthirsty warmongers. Why attack just the monuments to the civil war? Sigh... Is it any wonder the United States is overwhelmingly considered the nation that is the largest threat to mankind? Although you'll never hear that from the media/propaganda controlled by them.

But let's narrow things down to statues, and possible replacement statues, related to slavery. If, for nothing else, in the interest of brevity. And for that same reason, I will only suggest one, though there could be many statues of this one person used as replacement statues all over the US. His name was Cassius Clay.

NO! Not THAT one! There are already lots of statues of him. Although Ali's former name WAS Cassius Clay, I'd go as far as to say he wasn't half the badass the Cassius Clay I'm referring to was! Intrigued??? Read (and watch) on, my friend...

Muhammed Ali, when asked about changing his name, referred to Cassius Clay as his "slave name." That leads me to believe maybe even HE hadn't heard of the guy I'm about to tell you about. While there is no doubt he did a great deal to help the civil rights movement in America, his influence probably wasn't as great or heroic as Cassius Clay's. Ali refused to fight in Vietnam stating that white people at home in America were his enemy. When referring to the Viet Cong, he said, "Shoot them for what? They never called me 'nigger.'" But that was just the beginning of his list of struggles black folks regularly suffered at the hands of their own fellow Americans. Cassius Clay was a white American, but he wouldn't have done those things to Muhammed Ali either, so I don't think he'd have had a quarrel with his namesake. Although, it would have been a blockbuster of a fight!

Cassius Marcellus Clay was a wealthy, white planter from Kentucky and a Republican political minister to Russia and Cuba. You just, you COULDN'T start from a worse place to get a civil rights activist to make a statue of! But why not watch instead of read?

The Lion of White Hall? What kind of badass grew up in a house with a name? Well just look at the lean and hungry look on yond Cassius. He might not have that look because he wanted to stab his buddy in the back though. Maybe cut off an ear or nose, or gauge out some eyes, or stab someone in the FRONT all while having a bullet lodged in his chest, but...

Have you ever seen a statue of this man? Why the frig not? Let me ask you this: have you seen a statue of anyone more worthy of a statue? This is yet another example of how selective public knowledge is. A guy KILLED HIMSELF rather than face him in a duel! A war hero, killer of criminals even at the ripe old age of 89, survivor or more duels than any other American, and the guy who might have convinced Lincoln to enact emancipation. That should warrant a statue right there! But he also donated the land for Berea College to be built on.

It was the first interracial and co-educational college in the south. It was also FREE! Tuition free that is. Let's not get TOO carried away. Believe it or not, it's still free today to promising, low-income applicants. How many of us wish we'd gone there?

So, who among the readers of this post can imagine a more worthy man of whom to build a statue? Why, I'd like to see his lean and hungry visage chiseled into a mountain somewhere! What do you reckon?

Jaggerian Lucritis

Have a gander at this. It's an article from January 2020 that suggests a minimum 22 thousand dollar income for Canadians to end poverty and shrink inequality.  The article makes clear that it will come at a cost. 134-637 bill. That's quite a range! Immediately the right wingers start with their "free money" complaints. "Take money from the supposedly hard-working rich and give it to the supposedly lazy poor." But that's not the way things are in Canada. Has it ever been that way? If people are genuinely concerned with the dispensation of free money, Evelyn Forget, a University of Manitoba prof. interviewed for the article points out,

“But what this report also shows, is that we give people free money all the time through the tax system in ways that aren’t really very efficient,” she said.

“We say we want to do something about poverty. And yet we give away $122 billion worth of tax expenditures every year to people who aren’t anywhere close to the poverty line. This report says it’s time to have that conversation.”The report defines a basic income as “an unconditional cash transfer from government to individuals to enable everyone to meet their basic needs, participate in society and live with dignity, regardless of work status.” That 22 grand is after taxes, by the way, and is based on a lot of numbers crunched by StatsCan in their Social Policy Simulation Database and Model. If the top 10% of earners see their disposable incomes drop by an average of 8.5% to pay for the added equality in the country, the obvious questions should be, what do they get for it and is it worth it? But MY first question was, "What about the hundreds of billions Canadian rich people have hidden in overseas tax shelters?" My second was, "And what about the tens of billions in taxes corporations routinely dodge every year?" If the CRA sacked up and collected on just what they KNOW ABOUT, while cancelling the 122 billion mentioned above, the 8.5% could be significantly lowered. At any rate, rich Canadians will be able to clearly see what they are getting for their taxes. The instance of most crime will significantly drop immediately since crime is undoubtedly income-based. The enrichment of the lower and middle classes, who are not going to invest the money or save it, will also be an immediately visible impact increasing the economy, jobs, and, yes, increasing the incomes of those rich probably enough or MORE than enough to offset that 8.5% extra tax payment. How long have the poor been promised that if the rich were given tax breaks, surely some would trickle down? Well if we could find a government with the minerals to try this, for once the rich would be promised that if the lower and middle classes were given tax breaks, surely some would trickle UP! Only difference being, some WOULD trickle up. So the rich win yet again! The system is rigged in their favour. Nonetheless, this way everybody would be happy! In short, it'd be a nicer, healthier, wealthier and happier Canada. Well worth it, no? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this to happen. It's the simplest and the best solution, but it's the least likely to happen.Now, just in case you've forgotten, Canada's CERB payments are 2000 bucks a month. After taxes, that'd work out to about 22 grand a year. This is what it costs to live a life of dignity in Canada. That's why the number was chosen. If this just became a permanent thing, to help all Canadians live lives of dignity, It really wouldn't hurt the rich that much. But as I said, this is terribly unlikely to happen. There is already speculation as to how Canada is going to have a hard time digging itself out of this "Covid hole." The Central Bank of Canada, which is a complete sham, newly appointed mouthpiece, Tiff Macklem assures us that Canada is in a deep hole and it will take a long time to recover. He says the Central Bank will keep its interest rates low, 0.25%, to "help." Well as we SHOULD know but don't seem to, this will only help investors. The rich. For everyone else, this just raises inflation and there will be NO employers who won't use this disaster as an excuse to freeze or even LOWER wages, so that's one way the little guy is gonna get fucked. Here's how THAT works.Statistics Canada also noted that foreign investors bought $49 billion in Canadian securities in April, the largest monthly purchase on record. You can bank on May, June and July being similar because low interest makes money cheaper. The rich, who can GET loans, are investing more. They're not worried about Covid19. But like Tiff Macklem, they're already starting to PRETEND to be. Another way low interest rates screw the poor and working class.My point is, in these times when people are trying to rush us back to work saying things like workers are getting lazy and the economy is in dire straights, don't believe a word of it. This is the rich people trying to talk their way out of paying their fair share. And they've been highly successful in Canada to this point. There's no reason Canadians shouldn't expect prices to go up, wages to go down and probably a new tax to be added to pay for the CERB. In short, a not so healthy and wealthy, more miserable Canada. But Canadians have become accustomed to this sort of treatment. We are the Uncle Toms of taxation. We've become what Frederick Douglass calls "restive" in our national ability to put up with crap from our government, mostly in the form of taxation. We've accepted the "hedonic treadmill of consumerism" like good little lab rats. But we're still human and I have a feeling if things get too bad, maybe these Covid days will yet be a blessing. Maybe they will mark a turning of the tide for us in Canada.

If there's anyone more quotable than Bertrand Russell, with the possible exception of Oscar Wilde, I don't know who it might be. He (Bertrand) won a Nobel Prize in 1950 and I'd like to offer some fascinating points from his acceptance speech as food for thought. These observations of his, you'll find, despite being 70 years old, are quite timely.Russell posits that man, unlike lab rats or other animals, has some desires that are "infinite" or cannot be fully gratified. It may not be disagreeing with this statement to say that I believe not only CAN man learn to subdue urges of gratification, but we must in order to deserve titles like "civilized," or "gentlemen." I think he's saying the urges will never completely go away. He lists four of them in an order that I believe has changed since 1950, but are as follows: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power. I believe the first, which Russell considers the weakest of the four, has risen to the top to be at least equal to the love of power or stronger.

Hendrix may not have invented this quote, but he's probably WAAAY cooler than the person who did! I believe the opposite to be true and so probably does Bertrand Russell. This is a bit confusing. While there are those who don't mind us fighting each other, these people, a very few, very powerful people, want peace. Peace between us and them that is. So I am sure Russell would agree with me that it is more accurate to say, "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, there will be violent revolt that leads to peace." We'll get to that. Russell says that man will gladly and cheerfully face impoverishment to secure a rival's ruin. I dunno if this is any longer the case. In fact, nowadays it is said that the best way to annoy your enemies is to let them see you succeed. Money pretty much equals success in the minds of the majority as we can tell by all the cultures that revere the rich knowing full well how they came by their ill-gotten gains. He says that what vanity needs to satisfy its "look at me!!!" impulse is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power. Again, maybe not as easy as in 1950. I think that acquisitiveness has longsince overcome vanity though it must be said that one must think incredibly highly of oneself to not be embarrassed at being a multi-millionaire. A billionaire? What kind of swollen ego do you need to believe you DESERVE to be a billionaire? But there have always been these narcissistic egomaniacs who believe they are that much better than others. Mental weaklings, but revered in spite of THAT by most cultures as well.The love of power is where it gets very topical. Russell says this is especially the vice of energetic men. This was in 1950 so let's just assume all his "men" and "man" meant women as well. No matter how despised, you gotta admit that a lot of filthy rich people had to work awfully hard. Even Donald Giant Douche Trump is said to only sleep 4 hours a night. This, I imagine, is because boredom doesn't keep him in bed. We'll come back to that too."The causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency." This explains how the shit rises to the top. Energetic people who love power can put a lot of hours into making sure they get it. This energy may come, paradoxically, from the flight from boredom, which leads to too much excitement, which causes desensitization, undermines the health, and dulls the palate for all types of pleasure... causing boredom. This explains why the rich and powerful are so very often complaining about being bored and are now pharmaceutically fleeing it. Bertrand Russell stated that, "...at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it." (boredom)A certain power for enduring boredom is essential to a happy life. This is one of the things that should be taught to the young. Russell, like a Taoist or Buddhist, believed that only in an atmosphere of quiet can true joy live. He coined the term "fruitful monotony" which invites inventiveness and imaginative play in children. Passive pleasures should be kept to a minimum. Children should extract pleasures from their environments through some effort and creativity. Not through Ipads.Imagine what he'd think of modern man walking down the street transfixed by a glowing rectangle in his hand. He'd call them a generation of little men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase. Cut flowers in a vase. Uncle Toms. The "restive." It's exactly what a very few, very powerful people who run things and basically own us want. Domestication. It makes us easier to earn from. Getting back to Canada, you're gonna start hearing all kinds of propaganda, I mean news stories, about how much money has been lost by this company and that. You're gonna be asked to return to work long before it's safe because every minute you're out of the ratrace, you are closer to self-actualization. Violent self-actualization. Embrace the boredom of Covid19. Use it to learn about yourself and your environment. Maybe to break free of the chronically futile "hedonic treadmill of consumerism." You're gonna hear how the country is suffering, and it's true, but not the rich. They're doing fine. And they're right now, as they are wont to do, planning a barrage of belly-aching that will make you feel it's your patriotic duty to tighten your belts and save the economy. Really, they are the only ones who can do that. And it wouldn't be hard and they wouldn't even lose money. But because of 4 symptoms of their pathological lunacy, they don't want it that way. And they hafta get what they want. Even though it is never enough. If I may, I'm going to choose a name for this pathology. I'll call it Jaggerian Lucritis. It only affects those Lucritians who have way too much filthy lucre and much like Mick Jagger, they can't get no satisfaction. Boo hoo…In closing, I'd like to offer an alternate solution that, believe it or not, was offered by the great Bertrand Russell himself. "Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting... I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. More seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought." Words for any teacher to live by. I mean possibly without the sharks. And the canoes. Though canoeing is good, just not over waterfalls. But for tyrants and megalomaniacal CEO's and politicians, yeah, the waterfalls and shaky canoes and sharks. Especially the sharks. Maybe with lasers on their heads.

Overinvesting

I was drinking a Caesar one evening. This being a drink more common to Canada, I'll explain in case you haven't tried one. It's vodka with tomato juice, W... sauce, Tabasco sauce and spices. The rim is sometimes wet with lime then dipped in salt or spice, but mine wasn't like that. I had found some Clamato and mixed that with seasoned salt, pepper, W sauce (I can't spell Worchesterfieldshustershire) and, of course, vodka. I lamented the fact that I didn't have Tabasco, but it was not bad without it. I had the W sauce, but no T sauce. That'll tell you how much heat I like on my food.

At any rate, there is one extra ingredient almost always found in a proper Caesar: a celery stick. I like the celery so my Caesar had two. As the Caesar level in my glass lowered, the celery sticks got shorter. About 3/4 of the way through, I picked up one of the celery sticks and the other stuck to it momentarily as I raised them both out of the glass. The second celery stick came unstuck and splashed back into the liquid, which was perilously close to my face at the time. As my luck would have it, a splash of Caesar went under my glasses and directly into my left eye. Tomato juice! Pepper! Salt! Right in the eye! Man did it smart for a while!

This should really not be something worth sharing, and it wouldn't have been if not for the diabolically implanted thought that rambled across my busy brain even while it was working hard to send explosions of pain to my left eye: "I'm sure glad I didn't have Tobasco in this Ceasar!" I was disgusted with myself!

If you are concerned by the title, this is not going to be a post about Wall Street or stocks. All I know about either is that I don't want to know about either. The type of investment I'll be talking about is a kind that we've all made. You might be thinking that you've never made any investments in your life, but you have. A majority of us make them every day. But they're abstract, so the return on investment, ROI, is not measured in money, and is therefore more difficult to assess.

I'm talking about investments we make in ideas, opinions, beliefs, or increasingly often just the people from whom we hear these ideas, opinions and beliefs. Due entirely to social media, it is possible for the average person to observe total strangers aggressively airing their investment portfolios on a daily basis, and to give them some positive or negative ROI. It's fun and it's free!

Well, that's what I used to think too. But I've started to realize that this kind of investment is nothing so new as social media. It's been going on for a very long time. What we used to call "propaganda," we now call "social media." I'm not Winston Smith, folks. I haven't worked for "The Party," or the "Thought Police," but I have heard some Winston Smiths who have risked room 101 to enlighten us all. They tell us what's being done to us, and it makes us angry. We SHOULD be angry! We NEED to be angry! But, to mix literary allusions, we are happy taking our Soma.

The Soma is often in the form of, "That's just conspiracy theory!" Or, "That's fake news." Or, "Take off your tinfoil hat and come down off your soapbox, you whackjob!" As the bad news increases and becomes MORE bad, the world has gotten itself very concerned with deflecting that bad news, whether it's true or not. I'm sure I don't need to post any of the dozens, nay hundreds of examples of memes people post about getting negativity out of their universes or seeing only the positivity they force themselves to see. I've railed from post to post right here about the "well-at-least" mentality I see weakening, not to say domesticating, our species. The beginning of this post was an example. But for a very good illustration of the Svengali-ish, Somafying, de-escalization of our human nature I intend to vilify in this post, here is roving reporter, Walter Sobchak:

"Nothing is fucked here, Dude." Do you ever feel like the Dude? Do you ever feel like there's some Walter trying to talk you down in the face of great negativity by saying, "You're being very un-Dude here!"? I constantly feel this way and rather than mellow out, I go the other way and allow it to piss me off lest I lose the natural instinct of anger the world is trying to suppress. So when the Dude tries his hand at telling someone the same pacifying drivel that worked on him, it's not so successful. That kind of crap is usually not successful on me either. In that way, I'm more like the Big Lebowski in this next clip:

 

 

"Nothing is fucked? The goddamned plane has crashed into the mountain!" I mean, say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, at least it's an ethos.

 

 

One Lebowski quote too far, no? I got carried away. However, as you will see, it all converges like a KKK Grand Poobah, to a point. And if you'll indulge me one more, I myself dabbled in pacifism once. I have great respect for Ghandi and Jesus, but I fear the problems of our world just don't have time for their approach, if we have time for any. And our greatest enemy is notoriously unreceptive to this approach. As they have always been.

 

"Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.
As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.
The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present ruler.
Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.
Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor." Frederick Douglass

This is a quote from the speech, "What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?" Oppression makes wise men mad. In both meanings of the word. Angry, and crazy with anger. If they are not wise, they become RESTIVE under this treatment.

Folks, he was talking about slavery and there were slaves who just got used to being slaves. Surely THEY were some of the "well-at-least" est people of all time! "I have an owner who takes all the money for the work I do, I'm not free, can't marry who I want, my kids are taken away from me, I'm regularly raped and beaten, I'm not even considered human, but at least I can sing!" Uncle Toms made wise, rebellious slaves so angry, they made up a name for them. The slave owners spun a different tale telling their slaves that they had it great! And the slaves submitted to it like a drug. Like Soma. Nothing is fucked here slaves. You're being veeery un-Dude!

But the wise knew that something was fucked! They knew the goddamned plane had crashed into the mountain! And they got MAD, as Frederick Douglass says. And they united with like-minded non-slaves and revolted. Violently! And it worked... sort of. At least it worked better than pacifist actions would have. Did I just go all "well-at-least" on your asses? Dammit! Well, there was revolution. There was independence and a civil war. And things changed a great deal, specifically for the slaves. It was attained through violence as was the independence of the very nation only 76 years before Douglass's speech. In the highly quotable words of Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Unfortunately, there was a limit to the change. The traditional limitation that Douglass calls the unvarying characteristic of tyrants that goes all the way back to the Pharoah oppressing the Jews of Egypt 34 or 3500 years ago. Money, possession, ownership of property and the greed and corruption that comes along with the power it yields. It is no easy match for VIOLENT opposition, let alone passive resistance.

Let me give you one more fascinating example that ties in very nicely to what I'm talking about:

It's well worth it! It's 17 minutes you can afford. Trust me.

"He had crushed the German labour movement and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism." Orwell, a socialist, might well have argued, "Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it's an ethos!"

You can easily guess how the author of "1984" could have actually gotten inspiration from Hitler for his book that was released only 9 years later. Hitler was in many ways Big Brother. But the main point of his write-up is the fascinating point. We are violent by nature. In a lot of ways, denying that nature and suppressing violence denotes virtuous behavior. As in the example of slavery above, as well as the suppression of Hitler in WWII, using that violence to overcome evil can also be a virtue.

Chuck Palahniak has written about this phenomenon at length and far more entertainingly. You may have read his book or seen the movie "Fight Club." I agree with Orwell. I see this as a very real part of MY nature. I also agree with most of what the narrator in the video above says although I'm not sure about his characterization of Orwell as the greatest prophet atheism has ever produced. The books behind him reveal that he just might have slightly Christian-supporting opinions. I also think he strays into the conservative, churchy side of what to do with this fascinating tidbit. I don't think we should concentrate on the small struggles that we are engaging in both worldwide and in the US. I think there is a Marvel worthy villain that we need to focus our innate violence on and conquer. Who or what is that villain? It's in the review! It's in Frederick Douglass too! But we constantly and Pavlovically ignore it as the narrator does in this video. The property-owning classes were willing to forgive him for anything. Hitler was financed by heavy industrialists who saw him as the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. Here again is that unvarying characteristic of tyrants. If you want to give that Marvel villain a name, it's Mammon or Richie Rich or Filthy Lucre. Big money is the goddamned plane that has crashed us into the mountain!

Exploitation of the earth and wildlife by greedy corporations is undoubtedly what has caused Covid 19 and many viruses before it, yet we concentrate on vaccines and argue about the virtues of mask wearing. Protection of the "opulent minority" against the majority was the original purpose of American government penned by James Madison back in 1787, and for almost 250 years, it's remained unimpeachable in its performance of precisely that. Do you think other governments differ? The majority of Canadian and American tax is collected upon fraudulent promises that our income taxes would be temporary, but we still bicker about carbon caps and inheritance tax while WE can be charged with tax fraud for not paying this fraudulently levied taxation... and not once since shortly after its perpetration has it been a part of any complicit politician's platform to even review it. The income gap increases, the rich get richer and poor get poorer, yet we call that (as the narrator did) a "booming economy." The prices of everything have risen dramatically while our wages have stagnated or dropped. Yet we mistrust the victims of this plight and revere its manufacturers. Our "leaders" endlessly lie and let us down, yet we vote as dogs salivate whether we're given sustenance or not. The US and Canada (and a lot of other nations) endeavor to perpetuate the oligarchy of the World Bank, Big Business and their political buffers, yet the peons bear our dispossession gracefully and peacefully.

Any of these points alone is enough to make a wise man mad. Taken together, it is inexplicable to me why there are still so very few whispers of revolt worldwide! America and Canada have recently celebrated their country's independence days, rich and poor alike. As peons, though not yet slaves, we can still relate to Frederick Douglass when he wrote, "To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

Is it just that we have really REALLY good Soma? Well, it's time to consider the title. How often on social media do you see someone soundly defeated in an argument not surrender? It's such a common occurrence that it's been given a poker nickname. An apt nickname because it's something that happens frequently in gambling and... you guessed it, investing. Doubling down. I'll go to the teeming well once again. When Trump is doing something stupid, that he KNOWS the majority hates, does he stop and apologize? No. He has OVERINVESTED in his narrative/behavior. So he doubles down. In fact this link actually says he TRIPLES down on his unpopular divisive language.

My assertion is that the majority of the world have accepted our base positions in life and our meagre portions of the proverbial national pies and have expertly transformed our mentalities to accommodate them. We are the domesticated livestock we've been indoctrinated to be. And if we're really not, we've spent far too much time and effort justifying and rationalizing to self-deprogram. I think this is why revolutions are dependent upon the young. However, the young seldom have the wisdom to make them mad, in the Frederick Douglass sense. I think this is why our education is diminishing instead of developing.

As for myself, I hope I never stop pulling for the underdog majority in our epic struggle against our IMF masters. (International Mankind is Fucked) Nooooothing is fucked here Dude. Nothing is fucked.

But I feel myself drawn to the peace and restive state of surrender more every year I live to see all the rage of the world misdirected instead of concentrated on the few who have more than earned it. I wonder if my resistance to change is nothing more than my own personal overinvestment in revolt. Maybe someday, like Bernard Marx of Brave New World, I'll give in and put myself in a zoo where I self-flagellate and starve for the entertainment of the rich. I'm part way there already.

Or maybe I'll triple down and go all Jonathan Swift (A Modest Proposal) and instead of eating poor children, I'll start eating the rich. Low carb, low in sugar, and Atkins approved! Ahhh I'll flip a coin.



 

Sons of Bitches All!

Yet another brilliant meme! I won't blame it on any of my friends or family, but I DID see it on one or two of their Facebook pages. I took this from Ted Nugent's page. I am rarely in agreement with him, but still like to see what kind of nonsense the right wingers are force-feeding their flocks.

I posted a comment, "The brakes on your car fail from time to time but the other parts are working fine. Your kid has this habit of killing neighbourhood animals but other than that he's fine. Your blood sugar is 600, but you're healthy as a horse otherwise. Why choose to concentrate on the bad stuff?" Am I doing this positivity thing right?

Here's what can happen if even ONE person (if she's white) is assaulted (allegedly) by another person (if he's black). Anybody ever heard of this? People in TULSA haven't heard of this. That makes a strong point on its own! Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white elevator operator. He was 19, she was 17. Do you suppose that 99 years ago there were no people telling the angry, white mob that trashed Black Wall Street, "Hey, why choose to see this one boy? Look at the thousands of other GOOD black people around here!"?

Here's another look at the story.

In the end, Sarah Page did not wish to prosecute. Dick Rowland wasn't caught on camera kneeling on Page's neck. He was believed to have tripped and grabbed Page's arm to stop himself from falling. As shaky as that sounds, why did Page, who must have been under tremendous pressure to do so, NOT prosecute? Whatever the true story may be, this account of black on white assault ended in 800 injuries, 35 confirmed deaths (but possibly as many as 150), 1256 residences destroyed and 35 city blocks burned to the ground. There were refugees, shootings, even bombings from private planes! The protests we are seeing now have sometimes been described as "war zones" but back in 1921, Tulsa WAS a war zone.

And who remembers this literal war? Not many. This brings up the subject of history whitewashing. There are many stories hitting the media these days about relics of the past that are rooted in racism. The "Black Lives Matter" protests ARE changing things. My favourite couple of examples is Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Here's an article on Aunt Jemima that is very interesting. The photos, like her image on the syrup bottle, were removed because they could be considered offensive by some. These brand names were, " built on a racial and cultural stereotype that is widely regarded as offensive," says this article. I didn't think I was offending anyone when, as a kid, I ate pancakes with my second favourite maple syrup on them (Log Cabin was my fave), or when I ate Uncle Ben's rice or even when I dressed up as Aunt Jemima for Halloween. But I was. I didn't think I was offending anyone when I picked sports teams as a kid with the "Eenie meenie miny moe, catch a nigger by the toe," rhyme either. But I was. Calling brazil nuts "nigger toes," eating the licorice candy black babies, calling any brown skinned person a "Paki," these were all things we did IN CANADA when I was a kid less than 50 years ago! So I don't want to hear anybody saying that we in Canada don't need to educate ourselves about the past and learn from it. I was ignorant. I had no idea where those words I was saying and food I was eating came from. Now I can understand the connotations of inequality, oppression and violence they are charged with. While I don't necessarily believe we should erase all the items that have such connotations, I accept such actions as attempts to fight the inequality, oppression and violence that could be present now and in our futures.

While we're on Canada, I'd like to post a link to a good example, but I can't. It's blocked on my internet here in Korea. I can only view the story if I turn on my VPN. I won't even start in on whitewashing history from a Korean perspective because that would be a MUCH longer post than this. The article I'd like to post, but can't be viewed here in Korea for some inexplicable reason, is an opinion article written by an Inuit Canadian about a statue of John A. Macdonald on Prince Edward Island. He says folks are talking about removing the statue with Macdonald on a bench, because he was terribly racist against natives. He was our first PM and was instrumental in passing the horrible "Indian Act of Canada." But the author says, "Why take it away? Keep it up to remind us of our racist past so we can learn from it." I see his point.

I also see the points of people who say some statues honouring slavery and racism should be taken down. As this article suggests, it's just silly to say history is being removed. Maybe putting a statue of Dick Rowland or Breonna Taylor beside it might be better? Hard to say.

Since I can't post that article about Macdonald's statue I mentioned above, here's one about the same topic. I post it because it is a clear link between Canada and the US in learning from our histories where this aggression of white police on black perps originated. Note the chalk on the sidewalk. The creation of police forces to keep indigenous Canadians and to keep black slaves "under control" in our respective countries of Canada and the US, makes me a little more educated and allows me to understand the division that was fostered by politicians, and enforced by police, based on skin colour, from the very beginnings of politics in our countries. I see it as something we DO need to be reminded of and a LOT of us don't know.

I support "Black Lives Matter" protests. But as usual, I think I crave MORE! I am excited to see the people becoming hostile but wish that hostility were increases and focused more efficiently. The pitchforks and torches could be black people and white people or indigenous people and white people. In the cartoon it could be guns and knives. The manufactured division is all that concerns the king. The police aren't even in the cartoon. The "Black Lives Matter" protests haven't reached far beyond the police forces just yet, though I have hope for them. The political leader is the ginger with the salad bowl hairdo and the king, the person against whom I dearly wish the whole world would launch full scale violent protests, who is he? He represents a very small group of people, a secret empire, or monarchy if you will, that, as yet, remains unaffected by its plebeian, riff raff chattel. Us. The owned. The livestock that keep them kings. In this respect, which is impossible to prove, hence the term SECRET empire, NO lives really matter. We are a bit unequally inconsequential, but that really shouldn't matter. We're ALL inconsequential consumers and workers. We're dollar signs to our owners.

But who the hell are they, this secret, global empire? I'd like to know too! You've seen this before but it bears repeating:

The secret empire.

In this little cartoon, the huge corporations of the world are blamed, most of them American and most of their logos are as recognizable as our own faces. But have we ever seen the faces of these corporations? The loans are arranged at the World Bank, or its sisters (IMF) but who are the people who operate the source of all the world's money? Has anyone seen them? Of course not! If we knew what they are doing, we'd lynch them! So in this way, the above cartoon is a bit inaccurate. Those "kings" would never show their faces to the angry mobs of scum they own. Us.

The secret "kings" in this video are referred to as "a few very wealthy people."


This one is long, but well worth it.

It says the animation is funny, but I'm not laughing. While watching this, it's hard not to think, "Conspiracy!" Go with that thinking because it IS a conspiracy! One that the last US president to ever oppose it probably lost his life over. JFK called it a "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy."

In the vid, Thomas Jefferson says that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The tyrants are the very few wealthy people. The only ones who benefit from the unsustainable world economy we have right now.

Some of us feel comfortable. The "At least" justifiers. At least I have a home and a good salary and blah blah blah. "Those who would sacrifice freedom for comfort deserve neither." Why is anybody satisfied with the least? Because we've been slowly conditioned to be. Like frogs being boiled alive in pots. When I watch "Black Lives Matter" protests, I see frogs waking from their psychosocialized stupors and saying, "WT ribbit F? This water is hot!" and jumping out of the pot to attack the sons of bitches who are boiling them. The attacks, at the moment, are admittedly on the lesser sons of bitches, but they could eventually lead to a battle like the one at the end of this cartoon.

I hope I see it in my lifetime, but have my doubts. I hope we win. I KNOW we can! Our owners know we can too! Why do you think military and police forces are so well armed? Not for the minor protests we are seeing now, but for the ones they lead to. I say bring 'em on! Then maybe someday we'll be able to say, "some lives matter," then a bit later, "most lives matter," then finally, "our lives matter."

Keep protesting and keep educating. We'll get there! Our true enemies are a handful of people. Probably less than .001% and they'd love it if we maintained the mindset of the initial meme. I hope we're not that weak-minded.

The George Floyd Effect

I think it's starting to happen. The whole world has flipped its lid. And it's been slowly rolling around for years, let's face it. With the ubiquitous corruption we all encounter on a daily basis even if we're trying like gangbusters to avoid it, we're all just a bunch of latent looters, arsonists and vandals anyway, (or as the largest single cause of this situation might say himself, "or worse."), aren't we? Are we as far removed from our primitive urges as we pretend we are? Or do we just need the right catalyst to revert all the way back to our primeval roots where brains were undeveloped and violence was the solution to almost everything?

Maybe Covid isolation and cabin fever has hastened this collective mental eruption. Not sure. But I, for one, have been awaiting anxiously, praying for this sort of thing. Not just for George Floyd or corruption and racism within police forces, though I am glad to see it. I've always been a HUGE Floyd fan. Ar ar. Too early to joke about? Well then you're gonna hate this:

 

Black lives DO matter. I'm 100% behind that! However, there are a number of things we need to watch out for. A number of things that could send righteous indignation spiraling out of control into the exact same thing those righteous people are indignant about. Let me give you an example. An obvious example. I hope I don't get any opposition because it seems like an obvious example to me, but then, I might not be so emotional and illogical about this situation as some otherwise very intelligent people I've seen doing, saying and posting things that aren't very smart. You have probably seen it too. You may have even seen this meme:

I shot Martin Luther King Jr. So did you if you're white! We should feel guilty about this. Because we're white. That's the message behind the meme. Well I don't feel any guilt about my skin hue because it wasn't my choice. I don't claim any part of the shooting of MLK Jr. because when it happened, I wasn't quite a year old yet. I couldn't even operate a spoon let alone a gun. And having studied the man, and grown up to support virtually all of his major messages, I am confident that I wouldn't have shot him, nor would I have supported his shooting in any way. In fact, I would have protested it. But I need to feel guilty! Why don't I understand? My skin makes me a murderer! It sounds absurd when it's said like that, doesn't it? But the absurdity is exposed through logic. Sometimes logic is blocked. Sometimes purposely. I don't know, but maybe this meme was put out there with the purpose of creating the very same violence Dr. King opposed so vehemently, only in reverse. It doesn't matter to some people whose vested interests are to create separation, segregation and fighting as a form of distraction from more important things that they don't want people protesting about. Black people hating white people is just as good as white people hating black people. As long as they don't land in the middle, they'll keep fighting.

This is undoubtedly the kind of thing MLK Jr. would oppose. It's just flip-flopping a very bad thing. You can't convince me that he wanted black control over America. He certainly didn't want black only schools, restaurants and drinking fountains, whether the good ones were for the white people OR the black people. To tell you the truth, I LIKE the back of the bus. I never understood the Rosa Parks story. But do you think it would matter whether the black section were the front or the back? Of course not! The separation doesn't matter to certain people who enforce it, so long as it's there. It can be flip-flopped, and this is sometimes, in these situations, what happens. People get emotional, caught up in group dynamics, peer pressure and protestor power and they go too far. When they get what they've fought for, they keep on going for more.

Not being from the U.S., I have no skin in this game, but having lived in areas of Canada with high concentrations of Indigenous people, (who we still ignorantly call "Indians,") I can tell you that over the years when they went from having their land stolen and even getting killed by the white man, to having special rights and freedoms, it hasn't brought about harmony. We no longer call the Inuit Eskimos, but insisted on calling the Native Canadians Indians until very recently. The tone deaf fact that they are still referred to as "Indians" in most or all the legislation that has been drawn up to deal with them, should give you a clue that there has never been any intention on the part of the lawmakers and politicians of Canada to create equality between Canadian natives and other people. I dream of a day when natives and other Canadians realize that we're equal, the Canadian government has screwed us all! To borrow a familiar phrase, separate, but equal, the government has screwed us separately, but equally. But I think that realization is precisely why we are strategically kept at loggerheads. If we were truly equal, and how hard could that be to bring about, honestly, we could unite against the common enemy: the people who own us all.

Did you know that native Canadians were not considered Canadians, nor could they vote until 1960? And the sexism! Until only a few decades ago, when a "stutus" "Indian" woman married a "non-status" man in Canada, she lost her native status and privileges whereas if a Swedish, ginger woman married a "status" Canadian "Indian," she got "status" and privileges. I know a girl named Zoe of Swedish heritage who married a native and had her housing, food and education entirely covered by the Canadian government. And nothing is ever covered by the Canadian government, it's covered by the Canadian people. Do you think for half a second that the drafters of the laws that enabled this situation DIDN'T anticipate the jealousy, resentment, hatred and conflict that would result from them? Of course they did! That was their major purpose!

The "calculation of Indianness" is a thing in Canada! STILL! I don't know if it includes comparing your skin colour against swatches like you're trying to choose a dark beige tone for the living room drapes, but it might as well, eh? This is just one of many examples of the state of ugliness that exists right now in Canada. Here is a long and ghastly summation of it. It was the result of intentional overcorrection, and this is what happened in some other areas in Canada as well. People from other countries have a lot of advantages in investment, government assistance and other areas. This does the opposite of creating equality or harmony. We like to portray ourselves as a happy, multicultural country, but the government is constantly fighting against that by creating inequity in employment laws, business laws, and many of the basic things that make up Canadian citizens.

I can very easily see this happening in the US. This current situation will be abused by those who want division. Look who you have running the country! He's the one I referred to as "the largest single cause" of recent escalation in disharmony in the US. As if you didn't know...

I'm trying to think, if I were a lifelong pacifist, left wing, socialist who believed strongly in the equal treatment of all citizens in my country, saw what happened to George Floyd and many before him, chose to protest against racially-based violence, had a passion roiling inside my whole life, found a voice in a protest, a strong voice, in massive numbers... would I power trip? I don't know. It seems unlikely, being a lifelong pacifist, but who's to say? However, if I were a scumbag looter, arsonist, car-flipper, mugger or whatever, ANY large exhibition of social unrest and civil disobedience looks to me like a green light! For another example from Canada, when the Canucks lost the finals in 2011, I seriously doubt it was just hockey fans doing the rioting. Perhaps the scumbags who came out to join and escalate happened to be Canuck fans, but that wasn't what made them crazy. That's my opinion anyway. I've lived in Vancouver. There are lots of assholes there who don't need much of a catalyst. I'm confident the same could be said for the cities where the protests have gotten out of hand in America.

But, here's another thing to watch out for, and I've seen some keen-eyed Americans already doing so: those with vested interests in creating separation and conflict within your society are just like the looters, they don't need much of a catalyst either. I have seen pictures and read articles about conveniently placed piles of bricks along protest routes.

Now who do you suppose put them there? Those who want things to escalate so that they can write off the entire group of protestors as a pack of asshats. The same thing happened back when people were marching on Wall Street and getting closer to what they really SHOULD be protesting in America. The media showed the worst of the protestors (who may not have been conscientious protestors at all) doing drugs, acting erratic, and by association wrote off all protestors demanding very real and urgently needed social change in the country.

In summation, I think it's great, the protesting I'm seeing in the US and around the world. I'm worried that it might get carried away, and I'm even MORE worried that it might, by design, distract us from other things that are far more worthy of our efforts. Indeed, if we protested with such gusto, the things more worthy of protest, and WON, I think police corruption, a lot of racism, and other things that keep us from harmony, would all melt away. Unfortunately, I don't have the links or examples or proof of what I believe is true for the whole world, likely never will, so I would be written off as a conspiracy theorist with the aplomb of Wall Street protestors and current social activists being written off as thugs. I maintain that someday we'll all figure it out and get really angry and protest in throngs that dwarf the examples we're seeing on social media these days. I say, "we," but doubt it will happen in my lifetime, if at all.

At the very least, this is good practice. I hope the protestors won't be considered rioters and their message won't be buried by the media. I believe there ARE some things FAR more worthy of protest, and I would definitely advocate angry, violent protest in those cases, but in this case I hope the indignation will suffice. And I hope equality can result, not reversed inequality in which black Americans are considered superior to other citizens. Reasonable heads. That's what I wish upon my American friends and neighbours now in this trying time. At the very best, I hope they will prevail and I hope the success proves to be a catalyst to encourage other more urgent social change in the US and worldwide. I am actually encouraged to see this and I'm behind the protestors! This could be a turning point that may in future be called something like the George Floyd effect. If it is, let the dominos of corruption fall!