Debt Rattle November 18 2020
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Paul Klee Analysis of Various Perversities 1922 • The Coronavirus Is Killing Westerners. Immigrants Are Saving Them. (Legrain) • PA Gov Announc
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle November 18 2020]Good morning Ilargi,
The reference to Katie Porter above is incorrect. That piece should be attributed to Janet Porter. This “mistake” allows me an opportunity to share some of Katie’s recent work.
Note: I am inspired by Congresswoman Katie Porter of Irvine CA. She has positive potential for shaping the future.
Congresswoman Katie Porter Tells the Fed that It’s Got a “Big Problem”
It’s all too little too late. But some like Katie Porter will chip chip chip away at it. Better to go down fighting for economic justice vs looking the other way.
@susmarie
The system as is can not be changed from within, that has long been obvious. The real change will be a bottom up effort.
From another website with regards to QE:
“I keep an eye on assets at the Fed, ECB, BoJ and BoE, and here are the monthly movements (in USD bn) in 2020:
Jan -36bn
Feb +49bn
Mar +1,420bn
Apr +2,232bn
May +1,025bn
Jun +884bn
Jul +805bn
Aug +410bn
Sep +37bn
Oct +576bnThis totals $7.4 trillion over ten months.”
Nope, its not a continuation of 2008, its all the virus. Who would have ever thought that a virus would need soooo much monetary juice. No new hospitals that i know, no N95 masks for the citizens to keep us safe from something that removes all blame from guilty parties. Anyways i’m shocked the numbers are so large. Makes 2008 look like a light drizzle.
@Mr. House – And when Katie Porter shows us we are not WINNING what do we do about it?
Yes, bottom up: Years back (2011-13) I supported the Occupy Wall Street movement nationally and locally with funding, strategy, infrastructure, communications, and supplies. It was an exciting time as “the people” at a grassroots level were taking a stand. Occupy was a force that had an impact – until the banks understood its potential and the corporatists + state rolled us over. There is no doubt in my mind that the oligarchy instigated the chaos that ended the camps. OWS had trouble clarifying its messaging over time; there was really only one voice in the media (FireDogLake blog) that translated the action on the ground into tangible/real-world impact on/for the people.
Like many here I understand that the total collapse of these corrupt systems is the only Way to reform.
I guess that is why Charles Hugh Smith and his POV works for me – as all of the power to make change STARTS WITH ME and is in my hands/Heart.
OK, … perhaps significant?
Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037
Best,
F.S.“It was an exciting time as “the people” at a grassroots level were taking a stand. Occupy was a force that had an impact – until the banks understood its potential and the corporatists + state rolled us over. ”
Which is why i was always suspicious about all of the protests this year, along with the fact that we’ve got a pandemic going on dontcha know
I have been considering this overnight and pre-dawn, so as to give my best explanation.
https://www.johndayblog.com/2020/11/not-our-internet.htmlI studied intelligence and national security for a year , my third and final senior year at UT Austin in 1981-1982.The teacher had worked at the US embassy in Moscow for some years. Interesting guy. Wouldn’t spill beans.
Most signals intelligence analyzed is open-source. In those days TV, newspapers, newsletters and books.
Radio feeds from behind enemy lines in a war zone, and hacking the NSA are different; unavailable to me.
Knowing the interests and intentions of “adversaries” or “competitors” is important. Everything we see was paid for by somebody, for some reason, usually self interest, but not always. I try to find and post information in the interests of other humans and our living ecosystem (yes, that does serve me, too). I’m at some disadvantage,
The disadvantages shift with the tides of struggle between powerful parties and factions.
I see the western financial empire as being overdue for a “correction”, a correction that will recognize that exponential growth of economy is over, due to planetary limits of all sorts, and that energy inputs into economy will rapidly decrease, then keep decreasing as we go forward into less and less oil, coal and natural gas. This is not a new story. One counter to it is that it hasn’t happened yet. It is clearly inevitable that fossil fuel use will fall off.
That won’t happen for altruistic reasons of saving the planet.
The capitalist economic system cannot act altruistically. Digging and burning and killing faster wins every time.
I do not have a ready replacement at hand. It has not been worked out at scale, only in much smaller groups of humans.
I took a political self analysis test online a few years ago; I’m not sure how to find it again. A friend sent it. I came out as “Left Libertarian” on left-right, libertarian-authoritarian axes.
That’s not a thing these days, is it?
It HAS been a thing in history, and almost certainly still is a thing in a few small rural communities in the world. The early Christians seem to have practiced left libertarianism, each giving what was possible and each receiving necessities of life. It does not scale up, because the next level of organization up from the proles takes a skim, and every level up from there also skims, and it is the prerogative of the upper levels to skim, which translates to “ownership”, which is antithetical to the purpose of the communal organizing system.
One comment I have seen, and I forget who said it, is that the commenter favored socialism/communism in the family, Democracy in the community, Republican government at the state level and Libertarianism at the national level.
The flows of wealth and power work towards the absolute power of elites in the system, the “owners” increasing, until the system breaks from oppression, and there is revolution by the people who feel that the time has come to live free or die.
The owners have a new tool, powered by electricity, connected to humans by laptops and smartphones, and with intelligence of its own. This tool allows the owners to program the system to show each human a certain picture, no matter where the human looks within the vast system. That picture becomes the model of reality for that human. This tool has extended the current financial and economic regime by a lot, at least since 2008, right?
The initial promise of the internet was that you could find anything you wanted to know, pretty quickly, for free, or the usual monthly subscription fee. A lot of content got uploaded all over the world, and there it was. In 2000 I had a eureka moment when I was able to find the phone number for the Yokosuka , Japan US Naval Hospital, and dial it directly from Austin Texas, when my Dad got admitted there. That had never been possible before. It is mundane now.
Not too long after that my friend Joe’s hi-fi hobbyist magazine, Sound Practices went bust. “Nobody wants to pay for content any more;
“I can’t sell subscriptions”, quoth Joe. Everybody who knew his mag missed it. You can find the issues online now, but no new content can be created.
Amazon is booming.
Google and Facebook rule.
The internet appeared libertarian at first, but the hierarchy has tamed that impulse so that all information that used to travel laterally now goes to the very top, to be amplified, edited or deleted by artificial intelligence, before it comes back down to peer-to-peer-level. It appears to be a lateral share, but it is edited by AI based on algorithms which serve the top tier owners.
The editing and shaping is invisible, so we assume things are still as they were in the early 2000s. Everywhere we look we see variations on the same story, so that must be pretty close to what’s really happening, right?
That is how I come to be posting news about vote rigging in the 2020 election from various “right wing” sites, some with the look of low production value. All of the money at the top says that there is “nothing to see in this story; Biden won”. To me this looks like 9/11. No story at a, except some rumors at the fringes, the laws of physics suspended for a day, reporting a building fallen while it stood in the background out the window (WTC-7). Still, even in the earlier days of creating artificial reality it mostly worked.
By now, everybody has heard some version of the story that the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives in a controlled demolition, and that the attack on the Pentagon, which killed only the people investigating the missing trillions of dollars from the DoD budget was by a cruise missile, not a passenger plane.
But the overarching narrative to justify the “Global War on Terror” had been established and the war had been prosecuted without much political resistance at home. Brown people in countries with easy to pump oil are mostly “terrorists”. Their economies have to be destroyed so they won’t use up the oil that free enterprise needs to promote democracy.
What I assume about the elite power struggle now underway in the US, the seat of empire (more or less) is that at least two major factions are vying for control of the narrative and the political-economic levers of control as the system careens into collapse. There are “losses to assign”. It’s important to all participants how those losses get assigned from the almost-empty cookie jar.
I’m a participant. I know the cookie jar has mostly IOUs in it, and that the youth and economy of 2030 will not be able to supply to me the retirement which my generation has supplied to my parents. Retirement was predicated on something like 7% economic growth every year forever. The lack of growth has long been made up for by cannibalizing savings, and putting more IOUs in the cookie jar as cookies were removed and eaten. Still, I have a claim on “my” Social Security retirement benefits. I could exercise that option now, and get something today, under the current system, or I can keep working as long as it is possible for me to work. Jeff Bezos has a lot of claims on global wealth now and going forward. In a reset of political-economy on a global scale, my modest claim competes with the claims of Jeff Bezos. Jeff directly works the levers of political power. He gets to be at the table which assigns losses in the world.
I am not at that table. While I still work, I am a small part of a productive economic system. When I retire, I become a “useless eater” to Jeff and the others deciders at the table.
I will deplete systemic wealth in my retirement, which will leave less for Jeff’s competing claims on real wealth. It is in the interest of Jeff Bezos to keep his wealth-draw hidden, and point out to younger working people that they are supporting older retirees lavishly, while they, themselves, almost starve, saddled with debt.
I expect Jeff Bezos to be doing exactly what benefits his interests, which is carving out as much of global wealth for himself, for him to control and expand, as possible. I expect him to keep doing this. I expect Jeff to use the internet to further his interests, and The Washington Post.
I expect Jeff to have AI-driven PR and buy politicians.
I’m a peaceful guy. What does Jeff expect me to do to further my interests, in competition with his interests, when I am old and can no longer keep a job? I’m not much of a threat, but Jeff does need the economy to keep going, and recognizing his claims on wealth. Without the economy, Jeff has no wealth.
Losses still need to be assigned in such a way that there is broad participation in political-economy, or the goose will be dead, and will lay no golden eggs at all. Those who currently control the workings of western global economy will continue to simulate reality for us through AI, and to limit our unfiltered lateral communications with each other, when AI sees that we are joining together in our own (“populist”) interests, against their elite interests. The flaw in their control strategy is their own compulsive drive to always get more at the expense of every other participant in the system. Their inability to relinquish any personal wealth in the interest of systemic health kills the system, same as last time.
FDR dealt with this. Many of his class (Bushes, Harrimans, Dulles family) saw him as a class traitor. They tried twice to kill him before he was inaugurated. Then there was the military coup that Smedly Butler outed when they asked him to lead it.
Fascism was a right-totalitarian movement of the day and communism was a left totalitarian movement in competition. Labor unions started as more communitarian, but became more authoritarian as they grew larger and less local.
Is Trump a class-traitor in the same way FDR was?
I can’t say whether he is or isn’t yet, but I don’t see any other candidates auditioning for that role, either.
Bernie Sanders is still trying to play a supporting role, but he has twice accepted DNC vote-rigging without a whimper.
Bernie would have twice been the popular Democratic Party candidate for POTUS, and would likely have won.
Why is Donald Trump still drawing breath? It’s pretty easy for the powerful to kill somebody these days, and even make it look like somebody else did the deed.
Does anybody who has studied the “science” believe that Lee Oswald killed JFK with a “magic bullet”?
President Donald must also have powerful backers, with the ability to protect him. That’s a lot of power. It has to include some faction within the military industrial (spook) complex. That faction appears to be nationalist, not globalist. We get a lot of propaganda against “nationalism” and “populism”, generally calling them “fascism” and “racism”.
The “left” was the driving moral force against the Vietnam war, but it lost that energy, lost it somewhere in the 1980s, I think.
Now we have this weird pro-war left that doesn’t want to see the burned babies, but will sign off on it as long as they don’t see it.
As long as the paychecks keep coming, we will all keep complying with the directives in our inboxes. We are not prepared at all for anything else. We have no backup plan for economic collapse. We are well trained to comply.
How will we survive if compliance no longer feeds us? That’s a hypothetical question I’ve asked myself a lot in recent years.
Maybe you can help. I’m just trying to get information for us to use, and the most important stuff is often the hardest to get, because it’s not “our” internet.@ John Day
Agree
What you said is what I was going to say but didn’t know how to say it. 🙂
Changing the existing systems is very hard to do for the very reasons that you outlined.
Also, as you noted, creating a new system that will last multi generational is even harder.
Creating a new system that is satisfactory for those that have the most to loose will only be achieved if they think that they will have the most to gain.
Heh, you said that too.
Success depends on secrets and lies.
(synonyms: lie · falsehood · fib · fabrication · deception · made-up story · trumped-up story · fake news · invention · fiction · piece of fiction · falsification · falsity · cock and bull story ·)Dr.Day ( I call you that ‘cuz I know you are prob switching your ‘modes’ and peddling your way to *work*! Ha!) Man o man I wish I could tap my stream of consciousness as eloquently as you do!. Beautiful word flow.
4 election cycles ago my friend Stan was telling me that Obama *gets* us. He’s our man!
Then he let all the wall street snakes slither away and I was sad. I wonder this morn when ANTIFA will turn on Biden and how the media won’t cover it?You wrote,” We have no backup plan for economic collapse”. Why did you say we? Based on what I see in your thought *you* do have a backup plan…correct me if I’m wrong?
@Susiemarie108 said in the end of her post, ” ….as all of the power to make change STARTS WITH ME and is in my hands/Heart.” That wins the AE so far this morn for me. I know she resonates with CHS but is she sure of what came first, chicken or the egg sort of deal, he’s he just confirming her subjective solution to the dilemma of reality or has her thought evolved and emerged into what it is at this moment? She’s a smart woman, she seems forthright and honest and I like her alot. Complexity and emergence theory is fun. Stuart Kauffman will challenge what you think is your intellect!
Quick story then off to work, something that came to mind on this morns dog walkie:
About 50 years ago one of the fellows at our local surf spot had relatives on the border of New Mexico. He would make an annual trek to visit them and would bring back a couple burlap sacks of peyote, For sure it was a black economy deal for him but all the in group could, if the wished, partake in some mind expanding fun, Eating raw peyote is not a pleasant thing, the degree of the depth of the dive is pretty much limited by how much you can stand to eat. I don’t remember any of us ever really going around the bend. Just open hearted loving fun. One particularly beautiful winter morning we arrived at the beach, I had a few hours before my first class at the local JC. Peyote Bob coerced me into joining the fun( never made to school that day!). Through out the day the swell built and wind conditions improved, by late afternoon the waves were what we call ‘perfect’. Nature manifesting in all it’s glory. Of course riding large powerful waves has some consequence, but that afternoon, together, our small band shared in the risk and the reward. I will never forget. So, as the sun was setting there were four diehards, myself include, that were taking this day to its end. We were huddling around our small beach fire, not saying much. I had an orange in my jacket, I peeled it and divided it into four section and passed one to each. No words. The sun was reaching zenith as we huddled close, my gaze dropped for a moment and I noticed a daddy longlegs spider climbing up the leg of my friend Richards sweat pants. I said, ” Richard, there is a spider crawling up your leg”. He looked at it, did nothing and turned his gaze back to the sun. I wish I could take those words back now so many years latter.
Peace
@geppetto
“I wish I could take those words back…”
You just did. For all of us.Greetings,
Humans are not the commander-in-chief of reality; they are cells in the Universal body. The Universe relates to us in the same way we relate with each and every cell in our bodies.
Take some time to ponder this, if you really care about your sanity.@Geppetto
Instead of taking them back, you could repurpose them.
The scene you evoke is a rather nice metaphor for John Day’s exposition.
In the big picture, Capitalism is as much a spider crawling up our leg as it is an omni-devouring monster.
And sometimes we do just need to keep our gaze on the sun a little more.How much time have you spent today showing each and every cell in your body how merciful a God you are?
@ a kullervo
“How much time have you spent today showing each and every cell in your body how merciful a God you are?”
You forgot all your cell helpershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome#Viruses
Humans are colonized by many microorganisms; the traditional estimate is that the average human body is inhabited by ten times as many non-human cells as human cells, but more recent studies estimate that ratio as 3:1 or even 1:1.https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=90&ContentID=P02019
Viruses, Bacteria, and Parasites in the Digestive Tract@JohnDay
Thank you for putting in the thought-work and the writing-work to articulate so clearly the big picture composite of what so many of us have been thinking and saying in small pieces. It is a very very good summary of where things presently stand, insofar as we are aware with a reasonable degree of certainty.Obtaining more ( or better) information under current internet circumstances is unlikely because our sources and channels of communication are so compromised. There is so much lyin’, cheatin’ and stealin’ going on that is ( as we all know) very VERY difficult to winnow the wheat from the chaff.
My suggestion, therefore, is to process and reprocess the information that we already have, looking for new patterns, reaffirming (or changing) previous conclusions, and perhaps discovering those important details which we have certainly missed. Perhaps Battle Plans can be improved thereby. That’s what Generals do on the eve of battles. And in my opinion the fight of our lives is about to shake the earth.
For starters, I’m going to re-read your essay three or four times to see if there is more there than immediately meets the eye. I think it was Paul Dirac who said “My formula is smarter than I am.” Well, I can’t shake this feeling that there’s something in your essay that’s even righter than you thought it was.
John Day;
“Is Trump a class-traitor in the same way FDR was? I can’t say whether he is or isn’t yet, but I don’t see any other candidates auditioning for that role, either.”I would think that plenty of evidence is in. Trump = Tax cuts for the wealthy/big corporations, later bragged about openly at Mar-a-Lago. Cuts to food stamps, unemployment insurance, medicare, medicaid. Zealously carried out deregulation of the banking sector, deregulation of environmental protections, massive selling off of public lands to oil companies, fracking everywhere, fast-tracking the expanded use of toxic pesticides/herbicides, installation of right-wing judges that are anti-union, anti-worker, and anti-women’s health.
Meaningless executive orders that are so poorly written and toothless that even Jared Kushner is openly ignoring them and has started eviction proceedings against tenants in his buildings already.
If he cared about the working class, why isn’t Trump using this time to push Congress for more stimulus? Why isn’t he talking about the loss of jobs, or the way the big companies took all that Covid money and used it to buy back stocks and give CEOs some bonuses – while still laying off employees? Why isn’t he looking into that? (Hint: because he doesn’t care. Mnuchin handed out the money with Trump’s approval, let us remember.) As a matter of fact, if he actually wants to continue being the president, why isn’t he talking about Covid at all? I’m not suggesting what, exactly, he should do about it, but he isn’t even addressing it at all. No remarks on economic relief, no calls for Congress to start testing and tracing and let’s find out what the hell is happening here. He hasn’t even attended a Covid task-force meeting in over 5 months. Hasn’t attended a security briefing since Oct 1, for that matter. So what does Trump want to do with his time should he remain in office? It’s obvious he isn’t all that interested in being president right now, while he is still in power. And sure not interested in being president for those of modest means, much less the poor.
I suspect it would be 4 more years of deregulation and catering to the big banks and big businesses, more QE 4ever, all the while screaming at the “commie, socialist Democrats” and urging his base to rise up against their local officials who happen to be wearing the wrong color hats. 4 more years of building more nukes (including in space), selling more weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia, more sanctions on more countries, etc. Enough time to finally get rid of social security altogether, after making a good run at it already.
He has done nothing for the little guys. I know they don’t believe that, because they believe whatever he says, and he says he “helped” them. But he has done nothing to improve their lives at all, and did not fulfill any of his promises to them. He has shown us who he wants to impress – the big money guys. My view is that there is no point in trying to pretend Trump is better than he is just because we want SOMEONE to be better. They all suck and don’t give a shit.
And, no, there is nobody else who is going to be FDR for now, either. FDR had Wallace for a VP, let’s remember, who was a member of the Progressive Party (that was an actual party back then), and he had his wife, Eleanor, who was a fierce advocate for civil rights, womens’ rights and the working class. They both really pushed him to be a “class traitor”. We, however, are on our own.
Hey, on a positive note, Trump did NOT nuke Iran last week like he wanted to (God help us if he decides to go ahead with that nifty idea), and a group has nominated the doctors of Cuba, collectively, for a Nobel Peace Prize for their tireless work helping with the Covid outbreaks around the world.
You might be interested in this website, which is looking for ways of becoming self-sustaining:
http://stormcloudsgathering.com/
They started publishing around the time of the economic collapse in ’08, then went silent for awhile, but have a new post up now regarding going forward from 2020 on.
@John Day – and night. Appreciate your insight. Do you sleep?
@a kullervo – “the Universe relates to us in the same way we relate with each and every cell in our bodies”. True. This Way forward is a road rarely traveled. Imagine the impact of being open to Universal body – an idea so accessible and magnificent! When we come to KNOW that we are the Soul makers/masters of our lives then there is only ONE CHOICE – we choose to make it peaceful, loving and kind.
@Geppetto – a great immersion in the exquisite moments of ONE day at the beach with dear friends. Thanks for inviting us along. Taking that day to its end was really a beginning. Root causes and all that! Swami’s or Trestles?@teri – well said top to bottom. It’s not over yet..I think he’s gonna pull off another 4 years.
“Hey, on a positive note, Trump did NOT nuke Iran last week like he wanted to (God help us if he decides to go ahead with that nifty idea)”. No doubt this nifty idea is still on his bucket list.
John Day wrote, “I took a political self analysis test online a few years ago; I’m not sure how to find it again. A friend sent it. I came out as “Left Libertarian” on left-right, libertarian-authoritarian axes.”
Go to politicalcompass.org
Some of the questions are defective IMO, but overall they’re quite good. In spite of the instructions, don’t rush to answer. Think a little.
BTW, I’m in the same quadrant as you are.“When we come to KNOW that we are the Soul makers/masters of our lives then there is only ONE CHOICE – we choose to make it peaceful, loving and kind.”
It seems you didn’t quite thought this thing through: there will always be people at war with themselves and their bodies – alcohol and drug abuse, over-eating, self-indulgence, etc.; likewise, there will always be those waging war against Reality and the Universe.
Some people can run faster, some don’t; some people are chess masters, some can’t be so; some people can learn, some will never do. Know yourself and you will be fine.Cheers
Some bugs can’t help themselves but to turn into butterflies;
some bugs will remain as bugs as long as they live.“It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing
It don’t mean a thing all you got to do is sing
It makes no difference
If it’s sweet or hot
Just give that rhythm
Everything you’ve got”
Irving Mills“How much time have you spent today showing each and every cell in your body how merciful a God you are?”
Someone’s been reading my mind, it feels.
“As long as the paychecks keep coming, we will all keep complying with the directives in our inboxes. We are not prepared at all for anything else. We have no backup plan for economic collapse. We are well trained to comply. How will we survive if compliance no longer feeds us? That’s a hypothetical question I’ve asked myself a lot in recent years.”
A people who’ve insisted on being told what to do for food is not likely to deal with figuring things out for itself.
I know this: the nmumber of homeless people is mushrooming. And that’s in a city with high property values and low vacancy.
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