I am viewing
a BBC show Graham Norton and the American Actress Julianne Moore is describing
how she took on dual citizenship as a British Subject in 2011 in honor of her
Scottish grandmother. I have to wonder why people needs two citizenships unless
they are hedging their bets and they or their children more likely will need
citizenship other than American to herd onto some refugee boat bound for Europe
in ten or twenty years. Or if you retire in the UK you can get NHS healthcare
allotted to all citizens there. You do not get social security shipped off
shore if you are not an American citizen and do not remain living in the United
States etc. The rich hedge their bets
and arrange for the cheapest taxes. It is all part of the game of life I
suppose.
I have to
wonder when and where this dual citizenship came up in our culture. It slipped
in the back door when Israel, an ally, gave automatic Israeli to all ethnic
Jews worldwide as a means to prevent another refugee bottleneck that happened
in Europe in the nineteen thirties when Jews were denied exits visas from
Germany and denied entrance visas all over the so called civilized world. That
as many as a million Jews probably had the means, but the not political clout,
to leave Germany and Europe when the Fascist ethnic cleansing thing started.
And I have also read that Hitler was never rabidly anti-Semitic until he
settled in Catholic Bavaria and Munich where the anti-Semitic rhetoric was
necessary to build the vote for the National Socialist Party.
That political
expediency for some wealthy paranoid minority dictated that so many millions
were directly targeted by the Fascists. What bothers me at times is that the
Public Relations of the Jewish lobby push the six million deaths of the
Holocaust and few realize that twice that number probably perished in total and
included political prisoners, gays and other ethnic minorities like the
Gypsies.
That when
you hear a rabid anti-Semite Uber-Catholic like Hutton Gibson screaming about
how six millions Jews did not die in Europe, you have to take it with a big
grain of salt as Hutton seems to describe a quarter million of “Them” in the
apartment building next door to his house in Queens NY and realize that
exaggeration and delusion sometimes go hand in hand with any agenda or
political theory.
Indeed,
Hutton eventually moved his big brood to Australia in the sixties to give one
of his sons a loophole edge in terms of being drafted into military service in
the United States. That indeed the bureaucracy of the American military is
large and time consuming. I have many times heard the beginning of that story
in the press about Hutton’s son and have not heard the end of the story as
whether his son did get drafted, refused or just stayed in some limbo moving
back and forth to America to avoid military service in the Vietnam War.
That somehow
the movie actor Mel Gibson spent many years in Australia practicing his Aussie
accent but still retaining his American Citizenship until he became first an
Australian film start and later drifted to American film status over the years.
That Patriotism in the Gibson Family is an issue along with the ingrained
anti-Semitism of Irish Americans. Hutton by the way now keeps a private church
and or following of groupies wherever he resides before he wears out his
welcome everywhere his happy wonderful self is and then shown the town or city
limits by his neighbors. Lol
I so not
mean to dwell upon the Gibsons. They have a right to their religious beliefs in
a traditional sense. The traditional sense has been to keep whatever beliefs of
a religious nature to yourself and in the confines of whatever ghetto or back
alley those beliefs should hide in. Of course, the traditional town square in
America is no longer a real entity except in some places here and there. The
communications of the media and cell phone and the Internet have destroyed
whatever old fashioned sense of self some of us of the older generation still
envision of ourselves. That indeed we all carry the delusion of the village
where we grew up in to the day we die. That this mental image permeates the
older generation in the absence of the real town square and in the present of
the virtual global world not of tomorrow but of today.
That the old
real town square usually had a common space or a park in the center of things.
That ringed around the common or town square was a dominant church, a general
store, a newspaper, a blacksmith’s shop and variety of other buildings that
more or less anchored and reflected the mood of any community. That here in
Puritan bred America, the town church was dominant and that church was usually
a Protestant church up until World War II.
That if you look at the history of America you will find that the first
Roman Church in English speaking America was to be found in the eighteenth
century down a dark alleyway in Philadelphia and only there because the
establishment of the town, the Quakers, were proud of their tradition of
tolerance even fresh out the centuries of warfare in Europe that were generated
after the Reformation.
That many of
the original colonists of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania settled here before
the European countries agreed not to fight wars over religion in the mid
seventeenth century. That the mindset was planted in America of religious
beliefs greatly different from any officially sanctioned beliefs in Europe and dissenting on many counts from that the dominant official Church of
England in Britain.
It is
something about this obsession with religion that the founding father of the
Constitutional United States wanted to wash its hands of. That there be no
official state sanctioned religion and that the state would not pry into or try
to regulate the religion and or “god” thing. That many of the founding fathers
were well read and well educated and self-made men. That they owed no
allegiance to any European institutions such as religion and only in an
abstract way did they give lip service to the King of Britain as the ruling
figurehead of the new North American experiment. I say experiment because in a
loosely formed kind of idea, the King of England granted lands to specific men
or Land Companies to carve out political and trading entities out of the east
coast of North America.
That in the
beginning, the North American colonies were suppliers of raw materials, timber,
cotton, tobacco, dried fish to the mother country. That over time trade became
more sophisticated to the point where the nearest trading partners were not
across the Atlantic Ocean but right next door with the nearest colony and or
colonies. That trade in America was greatly a barter system as first and under
the radar of the traditional economic model in Europe. That coinage in gold and
silver would occasionally float across the Atlantic from England but more than
likely the trade within American was marked by heavy barter and use of Spanish
silver coinage or dollars.
That the
conflict with the King that became known as the American Revolution was a
conflict in mercantile principles. That commodities were easily marked as
imports and were taxed at the ports. Tariffs on goods were the means to support
both Whitehall in Britain and the local colonial Governor and his various
bureaucrats most of whom would have been revenue or tax collectors.
I marvel at
how most history books to date about the American Colonies and the American
Revolution portray the conflict as something idealized around ideas of the
Enlightenment. That the truth is that Britain as a figurehead ruler for one
hundred to one hundred and fifty years, did not rule in America. The idea of
British settlers brought their delusional mindset image of the English Town
Square with them, that the King ruled by “divine right” whatever that really
means and the local tax collector sent off the King’s cut of your local crops
and or taxes to Whitehall for the King to waste on wine, woman, cronies and
eternal wars with the Frenchies.
That the
intercrossed titles of the English with the French King had been the source of
most wars waged by Britain for many centuries. That once the English managed to
lose every square inch of French soil, it took decades and centuries for the
fact to sink in. That the King of England with the joint title of King of France was
only recently in the last century or two been dropped from the long litany of
useless titles claims by the descendants of William the Bastard and or William
the Conqueror.
Most of
America’s wealth and it was tremendous was under the radar at the beginning of
the Revolution. That the British had spent a lot of borrowed cash on fighting
the French in America in the Seven Years War labeled there and labeled the
French and Indian War here. That once that war ended in the 1760s, the British
wanted to raise the cash in taxes paid by the second class Brits that also
sometimes called themselves Americans.
That much to
the military might and strategy of the American Revolution was learned by the
dumb second class Brit Americans serving in the ranks of the French and Indian
War. George Washington as an example. That Washington wanted to buy a
commission in the British Army after that conflict and certainly had the cash
to do it. But he did not cut the British mustard and or muster so to speak.
That Washington with his land and slaves at the beginning of the American
Revolution was surely one of the top ten richest men in the colonies but even
he was not quite “one of us” to the Brit way of thinking.
That someone
like Benjamin Franklin spent something like two decades in Whitehall acting as
an official and unofficial lobbyist for various colonies and colonial
interests. That he managed to get his out wedlock son appointed Governor of New
Jersey speaks of his clout in Whitehall but even Ben was not fit enough to
attain an official rank or knighthood in the midst of the Brits in London.
That many
times I have read how southern planters like Washington spent top dollar on
goods imported from London for household goods, utensils, glass wear, cloth,
only to have shoddy second class materials pawned off on the dumb colonials. How would they know what quality is in
America? It is because of this that people of wealth in America wore home make
clothing or encouraged the beginnings of mills that made cloth to compete with
Europe.
That a
typical Quaker family with some means would arrive from England in the 1680s to
Penn’s Quaker colony and with a thousand acre land grant from Penn begin to
carve out the wilderness in fashion that most historians ignore to this day.
That surely the first commodity was wood. And overnight, everyone had timber
and lumber for export and building. That only so much lumber could be exported to
England and Europe. That local lumber went primarily into local boat and ship
building. That coastal boats for trade and fishing existed along with ocean
going vessels coming from the colonies.
That at the
time of the Revolution there probably was more coastal boating in trade and fishing in America in
all of the United Kingdom. This kind of wealth never got absorbed into the
Whitehall mindset. That the trading and bartering in America for lack of coinage
make it hard to determine how to extract taxes from such primitive local
wealth. That the tax on paper first by the crown "The Stamp Act" was fought tooth and nail by
the colonies and was ended only after riots in all the colonies erupted. That
Benjamin Franklin in Whitehall was not aghast at the tax on paper even though
he was heavily vested in many printing enterprises all up and down the east
coast. The tax on a newspaper was merely another cost of doing business to a
businessman like Franklin. It was the tax on official documents and wills and
such that alarmed the upper crust of American culture that any lower classes could ignore and were merely rioting in the street just for the hell of it and the free rum
passed around by the local town upper class peerage stirring up the political pot.
Also, once Whitehall
could establish taxes on official documents, the revenues might exceed
expectations in England with the numbers of such and an investigation of the
unnoticed real wealth of America would be next. As such, why wait for Whitehall
to figure out how to screw through more American taxes and support the King’s vices.
The argument
of Taxation Without Representation was a valid remote cause of the American
Separation from Britain. Even with a few representatives in Parliament, the
colonies’ influence in Whitehall would have likely been nil even if the
politics of representation were allowed.
That most
colonial governors were appointed by the King and most of them and their
mindset never went beyond the official town borders of the port city that
served as colony capital. That many Governors were natives and recognized the
local untaxed wealth or were just as ignorant as cronies or bastard relatives
of the King sent over the pond.
That
radicals in Boston were the first and the louder of people yelling “victim” but
Boston was probably one of the wealthiest ports in North America alongside
Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore or Charleston.
Boston’s
loudest notes of dissent were genetically born of Puritan religious dissent and
genuine desire for separation from all things religious and or royal.
The French
and Indian War had put treaty limitations on the land that British colonists
could not expand upon. That the population in the colonies was growing and the
lock on the door to expansion put a strain on the economics of the colonies.
Unemployment fed the mobs in the streets protesting whatever flavor of the
month offense by King George and his government along with the funds of the
wealthy that wanted to pay no taxes on their American wealth.
Slowly but
surely, the Tea Party movement in Boston funded by the colonial oligarchs
reached the other ends of the colonies and in a way the dissent that had founded so
many other colonies, the unemployment, poverty or religious dissent in Europe
was a mindset not foreign to the American frame of thinking in the general mix of dissent going around at the time.
That from
many quarters, the colonies had ruled themselves even if some appointed
Governor ruled in a distant capital town. The local town meetings usually held
in the common church on the common grounds of the town square was where the
logic of separation from England made sense because England was to many just a
distant tradition and merely a token of government. That in rural farmland
America, the farmer was master of his land. And imperial tax to wage some
imperial war on the farmer’s dime did not make any local common sense.
He rest is
history so to speak. The Americans with a great deal of luck and some skill
break with the parent country. The excess population floods over the mountains
into lands claimed by France and Spain. The native Indians are displaced in the
land rush to meet white settler’s land needs and white settler’s eco-needs and or abuses. The
conflicts within America regarding the economics of slave driven and wage-slave
capitalism would fester for many decades while the whole economics of the world
change too.
That the
ruling elites primarily in the South had large plantations growing cotton and
tobacco and were populated by slave labor from Africa. That in the early days
of the pre-Revolution, many tracks of land in the North were called plantations
and populated by indentured or slave labor. That after the Revolution, the
North drifted more toward mill economies, using water power to drive textile
mills and such on a growing scale. That once this was set in place in a small
scale, it grew exponentially with the advent of steam power and railroads.
Before the railroads was the Eire Canal as the first transcontinental highway
so to speak to connect the Atlantic to the great lakes and the huge farmlands
of the Midwest around the great lakes.
That the
South lagged behind after the Revolution and merely grew on an earlier estate
model that was more on the model of peers in England than the possibilities of
what America could be. Somehow the plantations of the north got chopped up into
smaller parcels not used for farming but housing for factories and factory workers in the
larger cities. That the miracle of the American Revolution was that in less
than a century from the mid seventeenth to mid eighteenth century the east was
an economic powerhouse ready to take on the British armies sent to contain the
American idea of America.
The American
Idea of America was self-invention and at first this invention was fueled by
the land and agriculture and timber.
The second phase
of American growth comes after the so called War of 1812 where the Americans
could not keep out of the way of the British and Napoleon and with the
Americans preferring to trade with the Frenchies. The after taste of the
American Revolution put Americans against all things British and with the
destruction of the Capitol and White House in Washington DC, the Americans were
in over their heads but they managed to plug along and beat the British in New
Orleans days after that war had officially ended on a calendar in Europe.
That men of
vision, capitalists in New York, saw the necessity of trade with the west and
were willing to raise the capital to reach the great lakes. Men of this same
era saw the need for water in New York City and set aside a major chunk of
upstate New York as a watershed to feed the thirsts of New York City into the present age.
Looking at the present state of dysfunction and disconnect in America, where are the people who have the vision for the country in the next half to full century into the future. Much of what I see is quarter to quarter paper earning feeding not real growth but virtual growth and on some imaginary global spreadsheet. The Robber Barons of a hundred years ago built dams, railroads, shipping, and factories. The Robber Barons of today have yet to shovel their first spadeful of dirt in the creation of anything real.
Looking at the present state of dysfunction and disconnect in America, where are the people who have the vision for the country in the next half to full century into the future. Much of what I see is quarter to quarter paper earning feeding not real growth but virtual growth and on some imaginary global spreadsheet. The Robber Barons of a hundred years ago built dams, railroads, shipping, and factories. The Robber Barons of today have yet to shovel their first spadeful of dirt in the creation of anything real.
So almost as
the Erie Canal is finished, the power of steam in locomotives starts in England
mostly and as a result of their industrial revolution. That is easy for a
younger cousin of America to learn and re-invent the same ideas of that industrial revolution to the needs and resources of the American Continent.
They say
that the Civil War in America was fought over slavery. The truth is that the
war was fought over competing economic visions for the country.
That the
rich elites of the South wrapped themselves in the delusion of the village
where they grew up. The truth is that that village was feudal and not willing
to consider any progressive moves forward in economics.
In a way,
the South had to expand or collapse. That the South had a vision for the
future. That vision under Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was a southern transcontinental railroad to the Pacific to accommodate the Southern feudal
economic system.
Not that the
North’s economic system was much better than the South’s for the common working
man. The expanse of labor from immigration fueled cheap labor to grow the
industrial north in a speed greater than that of the South’s. That a not too
well known fact in the history books is that in 1860, fifty-one percent of all
foreign capital flowing into the United States was from one commodity – cotton.
That with such revenues, it is easy to see that the South could have expanded
and matched the industrial growth of the north. But the emphasis of the moment
was that the south was tired of playing a political game in Washington that it
would eventually lose over the concept of Slavery.
Slavery was
banned in the British Empire. There were the economic factors all through the
Civil War that had the South hoping for political recognition from Britain because
of cotton, America being Britain’s main supplier. The reality of the economics
of it was that the end game strategy of the King George III regime to retain the
southern colonies and say goodbye to the northern colonies was something that
existed beneath the surface of southern economics. That with the blockade of
southern ports by the north, the Brits got by on cotton that got through the
blockade. That the Brits with their worldwide colonial system merely switched
gears and like all good ideal businessmen found other places to grow and
cultivate cotton in an expedited fashion. The source of materials for its mills
was temporarily disrupted but business as usual went on without having to
recognize and support the backward economics of the Confederate States of
America.
One of the
real reasons in my opinion that the South seceded was the fact that Abraham
Lincoln was a railroad lawyer. He was a northern railroad lawyer. That the east
coast northern bankers were willing to fund that northern rail route to the
Pacific. That the building of this rail route continued all through the Civil
War non-stop. The game of economics and not necessarily politics is to be
considered in taking a fresh look at the War Between the States. Slavery is not
to be discounted in that equation btw.
In many ways
the South had a disconnect with reality. They saw strength in their locally
monitored economic and political system. That generation after generation, the
expansion of the European population and the slave population would come in
conflict one day with the mixing of the races etc. once the legal barriers of
slavery were abolished. That the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow
laws separating the races only put off the inevitable. Decisions made centuries
earlier when greed won over the idea of indentured servants versus lifetime
property. That religion played a vital role in this. That the bible in many
parts, as a history book, talks about slavery in the distant past. That people
who think of the bible as some sort of divine instruction manual still cling to
the notion that the bible out trumps any modern laws that negate the obsolete
notions such as slavery.
That people
pick and choose what they want out of the bible. While some would say that
slavery is okay in a global sense because “it is in the bible”(as if by magic
incantation?) they would ignore the old laws that say if your daughter is raped
is worth fifty or hundred pieces of silver in settlement to the property owner of
her father and may even have to marry the rapist to seal the deal to satisfy these old obsolete
economic concepts.
The
disconnect in the present America is happening and has its roots along three
major roads of thought. Those roads are of course Politics, Economics and
Religion.
The politics
in America is stagnant. The old fashioned concept of determining what you need
from government and finding a way to pay for it through taxes is somehow
moot. That rhetoric about Conservatism
or Libertarianism is advocated as a belief system bordering on the dogma of
religion.
Indeed since
the seventies, it seems that communications in the form of TV preachers talking
the bible talk and raking in tax free cash like any other TV hucksters selling
stuff through commercials was and is rampant. That success breeds imitation and
now everybody and their brother is starting a splinter version of the bible.
That somehow the absolute perfect word of “God” can be split any way the local
demographic dictates a profit.
That the
merger of many fundamentalist Christians with local politics seems more like
one political party is a church party than it is a political party anymore.
That concepts or phraseology from the bible are interchangeable with party
platforms these days. That morons like Michele Bachmann can spout any sort of
horse manure in a political capacity but mixed with phrases from the bible or
her version of the Christian religion and we are all supposed to bow down and
worship her political/religious idol. Yeah right.
That
increasingly this church talk from the church ladies is from politicians on the
right who have beaten down all conversation into what “God” wants or what the
founding fathers really meant this about religion when they wrote religion out
of the Constitution etc.
That this
plays on the ears of older generations that still live in the town square of
their youth and or believe that the values of that local town square are still
the only American values that any other American can agree with.
Like it or
not, we as Americans do not have to agree on everything that sounds patriotic
and bible-y.
In many
ways, the many regions of the United States sees things differently. That the
North South divide also has East West dimensions.
That a lot
of what I call a disconnect with reality comes out of various levels of Americans
and their perceptions of the same thing being said. The young do not pay a lot
of attention to the old town square. They never experienced it unless you can
compare Walt Disney’s Main Street in his fantasy parks with the ideal town
square from his youth. Someone else’s version or vision of the town square does
not always work. That the young with their video games, cell phones and social
networking through the Internet are as different from the older generation as
perhaps cats are different from dogs or mice.
In a way, I
started to write this after I saw a display of some soldier (female) in the
Wisconsin National Guard that took camera shots with her cell phone of guards
in various poses about a coffin draped with an American Flag.
That a
disconnect between what her concept of her job a part of an honor guard detail
in the National Guard put her at odds with her selfish personal world of self-indulgence
through social media. That a selfie photo published with words about it’s too
cold for a funeral outside and all they the relatives get is a jacked up flag
puts me in mind of a lack of focus, lack of self and group discipline and a total
lack of empathy and or sympathy for the context in which I would frame her job.
That while I am no flag burner, I understand the right to burn a flag in
protest, it is in the spirit of the Constitution and of late a lot of rhetoric
on hate radio and hate cable TV would defend words that would excuse the
concept of assassinating the American President. That freedom of speech is one
thing and common decency as I grew up to understand it is another.
That the
press tried to play down this incident by first only reporting the words of the
incident. That I had to go to the British Press to get the images tells me that
the American MSM (Main Stream Media) was only going to report this story for
twenty four hours in a cycle and let it die as old news. That something much
more than that was the fact not that many participated in what I consider
desecration of the American flag in this instance to the fact that they were
treated the person who published the photos as the person held responsible for everything.
In a single instance, the person making the trouble, the troublemaker, is also
the whistleblower of this disrespectful act. That whistleblowing about the
truth is somehow a greater crime than the crime itself. That this standard of the young of not
getting caught is not a new standard but it is one where the public morals of
standards of the old real town square are now conveniently swept away with mere
public relation words.
That to
steal billions if a banker or mortgage lender is not a crime. The crime would
be in reporting the crime and making so many rich persons and hangers on and
cronies and lawyers uncomfortable in undoing the display of truth, the
whistleblowing so to speak.
That if the
rich and powerful control the media, the new modern virtual town square, why is
it a crime for some young guardsman to play a sarcastic display of patriotism
into any spin you want to.
Problem with this local thing is that it went global.
Problem with this local thing is that it went global.
Which is why
so much of what is or not wrong anymore in the world or in the public forum or
on cable TV, it depends on geography or your age or your belief systems etc.
There was an
interesting movie with the actor Clifton Webb in the late 1950s called the
remarkable Mr. Pennypacker. It was about the then shocking idea of bigamy, of a
man with two wives. That the story was set in late nineteenth century America
and the main character spent one month in Philadelphia managing his business
and the next month managing another business in Harrisburg Pa., and so on and
so forth until somebody discovers his two lives. When confronted by one of his
wives about the morality of having two wives and two families, Mr. Pennypacker
explains that in the east, a Muslim is allowed four wives and no alcohol and in
the west a man is allowed only one wife and all the alcohol he cares to use.
That morality was merely a matter of geography so to speak. That a crime in one
place is not crime elsewhere.
Which leaves
us with the dilemma of how to describe the present and coming global culture of
the planet. That there are conflicts in how people see things, laws, customs
from how they react to them. In many ways, the so-called war of Islam on the
west is just as easily termed the west’s war on Islam. That the American way to
have one hundred percent of victory means a long slog of driving all of Islam
into a subservient position in the new global order of global culture. That
that new order has to do with Politics, Economics and Religion.
That Islam
is so integrated into the local culture of so many spots on the globe and
sometimes in a unique local fashion, this overlaps sometimes with the economics
and politics too of any given situation.
That
sometimes I think that the global culture worked out on Wall Street is the
predominate one of the moment but it has no real roots in the old fashioned
standards of the past American Town Square. That you use computers and their
robot power to change the rules of the playing fields of life, to fix the game,
but the rules are man-made and temporary. Who of these current paper tiger
billionaires knows the full facets of history and ramifications of jumping too
far ahead of popular and or real culture?
That you can
manipulate currencies, stock quotes, on paper but if you do not build anything,
in the end it is abstract and not real. That only if the younger generation
accepts the absurd reality of the virtual world of present financial gimmicks,
that somewhere down the road somebody has to change a light bulb or change a
tire without a robot filling in for the human experience and when the robots
are no longer fixed or and people forget how to fix the robots, civilization
collapses so to speak.
The
dysfunction in a social setting or a family setting is more often the result of
the loss of a job. That the social cohesion of my youth was built around
factory workers working in factories. The factories are closed. The jobs are
exported overseas. The neighborhood no longer supports business, stores. People
live on welfare and food stamps. The streets at night belong to hookers and
drug dealers. The local churches are now closed and the housing is starting to
decay along with the discarded humanity who now cling to a marginal existence
in the collapse of the local civilization.
The
Corporate Global Spreadsheet has no value for the discarded local humanity.
There might be some value in the land once the houses fall down and the
discarded discounted humanity drifts off to some other dying corner of the
earth. That once upon a time, a factory worker could afford a modest mortgage
and even a modest car payment. That now the state supports two thirds of the
local descending population and the rich do not want to pay taxes to support
the poor. That changing tax codes might bring back jobs and social life but
business now in America is not factories but paper pushing paper, adding fees,
gambling with implied Government Guarantees and that one or two percent increase
of taxes on the now global rich who want to use American infrastructure for
free to accumulate wealth, fuck the prostitute and not pay her so to speak,
they want free lunch just like the poor. Trickle up. Trickle down. Circle jerk
all around. Strange mindset.
The delusion
that paper money profits, virtual money, abstract numbers not attached to real
goods or reality is the new fashion. And everybody is supposed to accept this
BS out of graduate business schools as real business or real education.
The
dismantling of the middle class began I think in the middle seventies. That the
fall of American hard industries in the present so called Rust Belt came when
business men put their hands up and explained they could not compete with
Taiwan or Japan on the price of steel. The steel industries declined. Not to
say we should have put protective tariffs of subsidies on steel. But the consensus
was I think that why invest a bank’s money to get a mere few percent of profit
when you could get greater profits investing overseas. That more than likely
once the steel mill closed down, the workers would have found out that their
pension funds had already been scavenged and that in many local regions the
decline of some heavy industries was a business of sorts for vulture
capitalists that recognized or invented wealth out of the wreckage of an
industry. That such vulture capitalists can sit in leisure in their declining
years surrounded by sponging children and grandchildren who have never worked
or will ever work a single day in their lives.
That this
seeming merger of Economics, Politics and Religion is something that sort of
reeks of a sideshow and not a real show.
Is it a dismantling of all that we have known in the past as a guide to
deal with the present.
That the
joke the other day I heard was with the merger of Comcast Time Warner Cable was
that Comcast Warner as the only cable player in the market should merge with
the one bank left in America, that Morgan Comcast will put us back almost
thirty years ago when Ma Bell was the only monopoly in the town. Maybe they
should merge and maybe a Congress with a backbone with regulate Morgan Comcast
back into a tamable beast much like Ma Bell was regulated and made regular
profits. But god forbid if Morgan Comcast wants to relocate offshore to protect
itself from unwanted taxes or regulations. We will have to talk to a robot in
China or Indonesia to inquire about our checking account, mortgage account or
packaged communication bundle. You just lost your job. Your checks bounced. You
are foreclosed on and this message ….(disrupted - disconnected) – You are now homeless and
grist for whatever mill is roaming the streets at will in shoot em up with
guns, guns, guns America.
Once the perfect
credit rating drops and the plastic card disappears, so do you. Peeka Boo! I
don’t see you.
Where do you
stand on reality? Are you connected? Are you really connected? Or are you just
wrapped in the delusion of the moment supported by all the pundit clichés of
the Main Stream Media?
Are you in
the safe 18-34 year demographic? Do you have equity in your own or your
patents’ house? Can you start a business when you become unemployed on your
life savings or 401k pittance left over from all the fees? Once you reach 35,
there is no age discrimination in America but how will you survive the really
of being too old to work past 35 etc.?
Can you pay
off your $100,000 average student loan before you are forced to retire at age
35?
What is the
perfect credit score btw? How do you spell G-O-D?
.
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