Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. Available in weekly or daily dosage. |
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Oh, but that's different by Kathy Fisher Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK The media is spewing venom about Russia every hour, outright vicious lies. Wonder how would the US president like it if Russia aided Mexico so they could take back territories. Oh, but that's different, right? What safety zone do the CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and MSNBC networks think they will be able to report from when nuclear WW3 breaks out? Are their egos that big that they think this is just another war to report on? They are really nuts! Oh that's right, I forgot, there's a placed saved for them in Iron Mountain and Dubai. Kathy Fisher (klfisher@webtv.net)  You knew that by Heidi Papademetriou Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK US Treasury likely to recapitalize Fannie, Freddie
Also, this just in -- rainwater is wet, sunshine warm. Heidi Papademetriou Economy tanking. Government officials corrupt. Lotsa canned food in the basement. Helen & Harry
An 'event'? by Sherri B. Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK US at risk of cyber attacks, experts say All hail the hackers or a setup for an "event"? Sherri B. Dumber than a stump by Chris M. Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK The plot against liberal America
What "Conservatives want desperately is to maintain a world or society where "rich white men" call all the shots, women stay at home, minorities "know their place", children are seen but not heard and are dealt with by a good beating. A world where if one was wealthy enough, one could do what ever one damn well pleased. A world that has not existed for a very long time and will never exist again. It has been projected by the government that "white America" will be a minority before the middle of this century and this scares and pisses of these sanctimonious, self centered arrogant ass holes no end. And they are willing to go to any lengths -- including murder -- to prevent it. It won't happen because that world, which was more a delusion that real, died quite some time ago.
Usually I think that Spengler is an ass. But every now and then he does hit the nail on the head. Open note to any Russian who may be reading this blog. Americans ARE dumber than a stump!! Most DO believe their own and the governments BS. So do not be surprised when the US makes unbelievably stupid moves. Chris M. Hot war by Intellectual Nudist Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK Rice warns Moscow about its bomber runs off Alaska A new cold war is only half what loonies like Rice want. She wants a hot war on Russia, to go with America's war on terror, war on drugs, war on Afghanistan and Iraq and soon Iran. Intellectual Nudist Please, Herb Ruhs, read this by Xavier Onassis and Nigel Best Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK Re A gigantic protection racket by Herb Ruhs, MD "We are well into World War Three, my friends, and unless we figure out how to pull the plug on gangster capitalism the ultimate cataclysm of total war and total destruction awaits us just around the corner."How to pull the plug: 1. A 1% increase per month in the global money supply, going equally, directly, freely, electronically to every living human being, children included, one account per person. The inflation effect will reduce overpays, the money effect will reduce underpays, and it does so without the cost of assessing fortunes. This method is not perfectly efficient in reducing overpay, but it is very easy and quick to reduce underpay. A 1% per month inflation will make a 1% imbalance, which will adjust, as the underpaid spend more, generating more supply. It is gentle enough to avoid any economic social shocks, and works because the inflation effect reduces overfortunes MORE than the equal share increases them, while it reduces underfortunes LESS than the equal share increases them. The weakness in this is that the overpaid can inflation-proof their fortunes to some extent, especially if the idea is implemented nationally not globally. This approach is easy and quick to set up, it immediately relieves underpay stress and pressures and violence at the bottom. It is the lowest possible, most indirect interference with the overpaid. A regular inflation is very much less inconvenient than an irregular one. The fact is, governments and banks are ALREADY increasing the money supply -- only at present they are giving the money increase to the banks to suck more money off people through loans. Inflation devalues everyone's money. It is a sneaky tax, forcing people to borrow, and in effect making them pay interest to buy back their own money. 2. Making inheritance public instead of private. This will make the overpay shower gently down on humanity over three generations. It takes no self-earnings from living persons, and it reverses the perpetual concentration of wealth and political power in fewer and fewer hands. It counters effectively the natural tendency of money to concentrate unjustly, violently. Yes, making inheritance public instead of private means (almost) a 100% inheritance tax. We are preventing inequality of fortunes from growing to infinity by shoveling overfortunes into underfortunes. We know money automatically, unjustly concentrates endlessly, so any sensible species will introduce a counter to that. The simplest way is having every human being have one account (which governments will be happy to open since it means money coming into the country) into which the estates of deceased persons over US$1 million are distributed equally, electronically, directly, immediately, automatically. Private heirs can share the first US$1 million, (if we choose not to completely eradicate free gratis money). Parents would have trusteeship of children's accounts till some suitable age, say 10. (This will give parents good reason to teach economic sense before the date children take over responsibility for their own funds!) This method is low-impact, yet totally effective. It doesn't take away overfortunes from living persons, yet it will move humanity from extreme injustice and violence to near perfect pay justice and non-violence in just three generations -- the time it takes for all the overfortunes to die. We are the ones we have been waiting for, and what we have been waiting for us to do is to replace unlimited personal fortunes capitalism with pay-justice capitalism. So, how do we do that? Do we cut everybody who is contributing to the pool of wealth an equal paycheck, starting tomorrow? Do we attempt to dismantle the myriad legal thefts piecemeal? Do we abandon the system of private property and profit? Do we need to learn new -isms and -ologies? No. We just learn and teach the principles and utter sanity of pay justice, then take the 2 simple steps I proposed above. To make a difference, you have to go back to the root: the extreme range of wealthpower. You need justice for happiness peace safety. You need freedom from individuals having superpower compared to others. Were the founding fathers wrong when they thought that wealth concentration would mean the end of democracy and freedom? "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" means that the rich are literally getting more and more per unit of work and the poor are getting less and less per unit of work. Do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? -- ie, does money [power] ceaselessly, automatically drift from earners to nonearners or not? Are there very rich and very poor? Is the amount of work people do proportional to their wealth or poverty? Obviously not -- so we know there is injustice, inequality in money and power. As long as a few have most money they are going to have most power, and history is going to be what they decide will happen, and the people will be pawns and cannon fodder in that game. No one does more than twice as much work per hour as the least-hard working person [assuming real slackers get noticed and fired] -- and yet pay per hour ranges from 1 to 1,000,000,000 -- someone gets paid a billion times as much per hour as the least paid. Our purpose is to stop people getting killed...is to maximize human happiness -- and that means to maximize human freedom -- and that requires as little as possible overpay and underpay -- ie, as little as possible theft of earnings, which confers overpower on the thief [power to control and manipulate others] whoever he is, and confers underpower on the robbed. There is theft, there is legal theft, there is hyper-extreme overpay and underpay. Market forces do not distribute money and power in proportion to work -- market forces do the opposite: work drifts one way and money drifts the other. We can retain all the advantages of market forces, of private property, of free market AND correct for the ceaseless automatic unjust thieving drift of money and power. We leave all the capitalist mechanisms alone and we merely establish a figure for the most one person can deserve to be paid by warrant of their contribution to society by their own work -- and spread the overfortune among the underpaid...like taking water that has pooled and re-spraying it over the crop...and thus provide a counterbalance to the ceaseless automatic drift of wealth and power away from the people to a tiny few. If we DON'T do this, there will always be a very few somebody's who are going to continue to make happen what they want to happen, which involves the sacrifice of any and all who stand in the way of their monomania for money and power. Why is it that people have never said: "Hey, I work as hard as you, in fact I work harder than you -- you can't have any more than me." Why has overwealth never been universally condemned by all? Why has no one ever worked out that; transaction shifts money from earners to non-earners? Why is no one even *interested* in the fact that transaction automatically steals earnings from earners and gives them to non-earners? We have the will, the wish, the want. We just have to add the whatever is lacking to bring us to act according to our own universal will, and do the obvious: realize the perfect good sense of those unheard very few wise and awake who always wish to counter the automatic ceaseless drift from justice, freedom, and peace -- to injustice, tyranny, and war...by re-a-justicing wealth. We humans haven't yet realized that there is overpay (taking out more than you put in, pay for no work, pay injustice, theft). Individual contribution to the social pool of wealth is limited, not unlimited. So there is a line somewhere, which, when crossed, moves into overpay. We haven't yet realized that overpay is overpower (tyranny), even though money is obviously power, even though the founding fathers of America knew it, and took steps (prohibiting entail and primogeniture, fixing clergy salaries, warning against corporations) to try to prevent wealth concentration, in order to establish democracy and freedom permanently. They must have had a feeling that the steps they took to establish democracy and freedom permanently were inadequate, because they talked of having a revolution every 20 years in order to prevent wealth concentration (overpay-underpay, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer perpetually). We haven't yet realized that overpay implies underpay (work for no pay). Individual contribution to the social pool of wealth is limited, so the social pool of wealth (the sum of the individual contributions) is finite. (People who think that the social pool of wealth is infinite are confusing potential and actual. The social pool of wealth may be able to grow forever, and, if so, it is therefore true that the social pool of wealth is potentially infinite, but it is, at every stage of its rapid or slow growth, finite.) Since the pool is finite, overpay necessarily implies underpay. The poor get poorer (less per unit of work) because the rich get richer (more per unit of work). We haven't yet realized that, as well as the successful illegal thefts, there are legal thefts -- many legal thefts -- wide-open legal thefts (pay for no work by the person) -- which cause the endlessly escalating overpay-underpay. Money at 10% multiplies by 1000 every 72 years. Nothing rakes nothing. (Half the people in the first world have negative net wealth.) $1000 rakes $999,000. $1,000,000 rakes $999,000,000. It is a giant sucking machine. 1% are getting 98%, $290 trillion a year. We haven't yet realized that overpay-underpay (overpower-underpower) causes the violence (war and crime). A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day, a person with a billion can hire 100,000 soldiers for 1000 days at $10 a day, and they are. The super-overpaid warmonger and cannon-fodder at will, far above the law. Both overpay and underpay are stimuli to violence. We haven't yet realized that overpay is necessarily miserable. With everyone believing that limitless overpay is good, with everyone wanting overpay, the overpaid are under attack from everyone. Plundering is just the beginning of troubles (for example, the whites in South Africa). We haven't yet realized that violence is egalitarian, that violence gets to everyone, from richest to poorest, and decimates -- centimates (reduces 100-fold) -- the happiness of everyone. Violence pollution kills millions times more people than other pollutions. We have even lost touch with the ardent, intense, shameless pursuit of our own happiness. We can read the previous paragraph without noticing that it suggests something which should be very exciting to us, namely that pay justice, reversal of wealth concentration, will multiply the happiness (social order, peace, trust, quietness, safety, stability, sustainability, pleasure, enjoyment, freedom, democracy, education, health, progress, kindness, friendliness) of everyone, from richest to poorest, 100-fold. We have super-extreme pay injustice, and justice causes happiness, so we -- from richest to poorest -- can be super-extremely happier. We have the greatest opportunity for increase of happiness in the history of the world because we have the greatest pay injustice (injury, theft) in the history of the world, therefore the greatest violence in the history of the world, therefore the greatest misery in the history of the world, therefore the greatest happiness-increase potential. Obviously a community in which everyone works and produces plenty (we do) can be made extremely unhappy just by extreme distribution, by, for example, one getting everything, or by 1% getting 98%, as in communism, or by 1% getting 98%, as in present, unlimited-fortunes capitalism. The inequality factor (ratio of highest to lowest pay per hour) was one million in America in the 1880s. Today, globally, it is one billion. Money is the joker good, good for almost all things, and good for essential things, so theft of money (underpay) is the joker injury. Each and every injury causes an endless, escalating, vendetta back-and-forth of injury. Violence causes misery. Violence gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. While violence is concentrated in spots at any one time, it is global in its freedom to turn up anywhere any time. We have pay per year's work from $10 to $10 billion, so every person, from richest to poorest, can be super-extremely happier. Overpay is necessarily very insecure, as history unanimously shows, because every underpay and every other overpay is after it. The rich rob the poor and the poor rob each other. And the poor rob the rich (every plutocracy and empire has fallen) and the rich rob the rich ('kings' against 'kings'). For every up there is a down. Everyone is climbing the ladder, so everyone must be falling. Time spent at the top is necessarily brief, dangerous and arduous. If one person has the property of 1000, he has merely 1000 more pots than he can cook in, and he has 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends. A very negative benefit. And history unanimously confirms this logically necessary conclusion. (History doesn't record the falls with the same vigor it records the rises, so we never learn the lesson of history.) So both overpaid and underpaid win from pay justice. And because we have super-extreme pay injustice, both overpaid and underpaid win super-extremely. This is very hard for us to realize. People know that money (self-earned money, fair pay, taking out as much as you put in, non-theft) is good, so they, understandably but myopically, believe that more money (other-earned money, overpay, taking out more than you put in, pay without work, theft, injury, violence, which is ever-escalating) is also good. So everyone is climbing. So everyone is falling. It is not love of money that is the root of all evils. It is love of overpay that is the 'root of all evils'. We keep pursuing money, and we keep getting violence misery escalation, and a billion offshoot problems. Not just war and crime, but corporate infighting, hostile takeovers, backstabbing, putdowns, etc. Affluenza. Extreme insecurity. Extreme unhappiness. Everyone should go see Scandinavian psychological, social and financial security, peace, ease, democracy, freedom, equality, fraternity, humanity, safety, the nearest thing on earth to the American dream. Or the safety of Japanese streets, thanks to the post-war New Deal egalitarianism the Americans installed. Before the global bombs climax the root error. There is no shame or humiliation in being wrong. We didn't make ourselves. We have come to think of the virtues (and the greatest of these is pay justice) as sacrifice. They are not. They are happiness, practicality, rationality, realism, maturity, clear-seeing, self-interest. With 90% of brains too poor (on less than 100th of world-average pay) to become educated, and 90% of the educated brains we have tied up in the effects of the super-extreme pay injustice, in the military-industrial complex, universities, hospitals, government, legal system and business, we would, with pay justice, have technological progress at 100 times the present rate. Under the skirts of pay justice is a golden age, and she is perfectly happy for us to take it. Using figures from Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income, 1960-1987, Kyklos, 1992, inflation-adjusted, the world-average pay (2007) is $40 an hour for every working person in the world including housewives and students, which is $100,000 per working person including housewives and students, which is $200,000 per two-adult family. Plenty and peace, democracy and freedom, order and sanity, progress and fraternity, education and health, security and kindness. We have climbed the ladder of the bitch goddess 'success', and found all evils. We can lay it flat (twice as much for twice as much work, half as much for half as much work), and feast. Forever. Happiness is horizontal, not vertical. The weakness of unlimited-fortunes capitalism has always been the concentration of wealth, the strangling of consumers-producers. When the legs and arms don't get blood, the head falls too. We can leave all the elements of capitalism, for their benefits, like the 'invisible hand', competition and ambition, and just introduce a counter to the endless concentration of wealth by making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates, and by giving everyone equal shares of a 1%-a-month increase in the money supply. The private heir has done nothing to earn that money and everyone has done everything to earn that money. That method requires only settling up the estate, and electronic distribution. The inflation effect of the second method lowers over-fortunes, and the equal share lifts under-fortunes. These methods require only small bureaucracy, which means high productivity. The cost to poor countries of giving everyone bank accounts is covered by the inflow of money, and by the reduced costs of violence. When the wind piles the sand against the sea-wall, you spread it over the beach again. None enjoy unless all enjoy. We have had none-enjoy for so very long. We deserve a break. If you think the change is too much work, compare it with the much greater work of not changing. And the work of change is divided among 3 billion adults. And the change is just the administration of two new laws. To be rich is not glorious. To aim for unlimited fortunes out of limited work is shameful, ridiculous, wicked, foolish, self-harming. Justice is glorious. Xavier Onassis and Nigel Best Buggers the imagination by Laurie P. Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK SwiftBoat liar Corsi is a nutball of staggering magnitude, but perfectly acceptable to right-wing partisans and mainstream media
It just buggers the imagination the depths to which the right-wing's professional liars are willing to stoop. Laurie P. Nothing will change by geoff422 Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK Re Protests are a waste of time by SirJ Protests against the government are a waste of time, because nothing will change. Protests against corporate interests on the other hand can accomplish their goals, because corporations are afraid of losing money. geoff422 Martial law by Woody W. Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK I HAVE HEARD RUMORS THAT BUSH PLANS TO DELAY THE ELECTION IN NOV. AND HE IS GOING TO CALL FOR MARTIAL LAW, ANY INFO. ON THIS? THANKS, Woody W. I try to pay little attention to unfounded rumors. There's no reliable information on alleged plans for cancelled elections or martial law, and anyone who claims to know anything is just blowing smoke. That said, it's pretty obvious from observing Bush and Cheney that these men have no respect for the Constitution, or for democratic principles, or for truth. As the era of Bush-Cheney ostensibly winds to its end, I'm definitely concerned that they won't leave quietly. Helen & Harry
Pathetic par by Obese Ballerina Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PERMANENT LINK Senators ask Mukasey to delay seizing new power to spy on Americans This is pathetic, which is par for the course in Congress. Why are these Senators "asking" instead of telling, why are they seeking "delay" instead of dumping these new spying powers, and why are they acquiescing to the oddly unAmerican notion that the wildly corrupt Justice Department -- not Congress -- will decide how unlimited its power to spy on Americans is? Obese Ballerina |
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