Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The 1% Create Jobs

The official unemployment rate is still hovering around 9% which is double what is ordinarily considered healthy, and I’m pretty sure the actual unemployment rate is more like 15% or higher.  Even with these facts in the headlines every day, some of the 1% have the audacity to play the “job creation” card.

“It’s simply a fact that pretty much all the private- sector jobs in America are created by the decisions of ‘the 1 percent’ to hire and invest.” — Robert Rosenkranz, CEO of Wilmington, Delaware-based Delphi Financial Group Inc.

In other words, “We are responsible for the fate of the economy. Don’t villainize us for the economy’s fate. We are responsible for the fate of the economy!” And thus the ridiculosity of Orwellian newspeak reaches a new zenith.  If the 1% create jobs, and as we all know they are making something like 6 to 6,000 times the national median income, then there really is no excuse for a 15% unemployment rate? Why aren’t they creating more jobs?

Blame the Rich!

Wealth doesn’t make you a bad person. I’m not going to object to that. But still, it is virtually impossible for a good person to make 1% fuck-you-money on merit alone. You’ve got to be willing to lie, cheat and steal to “succeed” in this game because those are the rules.

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it.” — Jamie Dimon (the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks)

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.” —John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp

As members of the most politically privilged oligopoly in the history of mankind, a private banking cartel which creates nothing but debt, and which profits from indenture, inflation, and seignorage, you are not rich you’re filthy rich from stolen money. It is quite likely that you have never “created” anything in your adult life, and even those products of others’ labor for which you may claim responsibility (as a financier), for each of those ventures you “enabled” or made possible with Monopoly Money, there were dozens more which were excluded from the system of privilege.

Tax the Rich!

But it seems there is some infighting going on, though, as others like that hypocrite Warren Buffet, or Nick Hanauer who’s $6B nest egg was enabled by Microsoft’s patent and intellectual property trolls, argue that,

“Rich businesspeople … don’t create jobs.” Instead, Hanaur says, “Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth.”

Except that there is not one shred of evidence that backs up this ludicrous claim. The baby-boom era’s “productivity”, about which many wax nostalgic, was made possible only by exploiting the third world in order to make up for 50 years of total warfare that ravaged most of the world. This is the Broken Window Fallacy (link to a summary, but I do encourage you to read the full text) on an existential scale, but the lesson is the same: You know what would be better than re-building a bridge? NOT BLOWING IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And this does not even attempt to account for the value of the ~200 million (or more) human lives expended during last century’s conflicts which can never be replaced.

Skin in the Game

The idea that lower-income households, who pay no Federal income tax, have no “skin in the game” is absurd. The only reason I mention it is because it is so wrong that I can’t ignore it.

“You have to have skin in the game, I’m not saying how much people should [pay in federal income taxes]. But we should all be part of the system.” — Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone Group LP , when asked about lower-income U.S. households who pay no income taxes.

This is simply blaming the victim for his plight, like the argument that the poor are lazy and un-industrious, not motivated, dumb, or incompetent. In other words, it is not bad enough that the system has utterly failed these people, no, they should have to contribute their “fair share” as well.

There is an entire movement of people who hate you.  Wake the fuck up.

A disconnect of intellect
Separates 1 sect
Of society that has yet to see,
The reality of tyranny
Terrorizing our liberty
Infiltrating our democracy
By misinforming you and I
With black, bold-face headline lies,
From white papers and men with ties
To planes falling from the sky!
Shrouding us in guided fear,
Blurring what was once clear,
Promising the end is near
Watching middle-class disappear,
While the CEO’s always rising stock
Can feed and house a Detroit block,
Decayed and ruined from financial shock,
Trapped by bars, key and lock.

United we stand behind soldiers who fall,
The willing few who risk it all
By volunteer or government’s call,
The Constitution would be appalled
That this poem need be written at all,
Or, that power is reserved for political pull
Extorting from the Middle East
Black blood’s perpetual profitable feast,
Making war the sustainable beast
Politicians’ worry about second to least
Trumped only by those on Wall Street
Who take pride that our ends won’t meet,
Enjoying poverty in their discrete
Malcontent for our absent greed,
Contempt for those we cannot feed,
While we fight for basic needs,
We’re told to pick-up from the straps
Where our boots and courage overlap
With souls worn thin from wealth’s gap,
Powerless to escape the unnecessary trap

Of political divisiveness
Increasing dismissiveness,
Making people grow leery of alternative theories
The main-stream floods, banks with no hole in its paddles
We’re boat without steam left sinking in battle
No savior near on white mare’s saddle
No magnanimous rider who’s not an insider
Will build a bridge, or damn the creek flowing wider
Forcing us to drown or swim across.
For when we sink it’s not their loss
Since the 1% fit in one yacht,

Whether or not

This is our country! For which you fought,
For the classroom in which you taught
The simple beauty of free thought,
The Achilles heel to being bought.
Though government paid persons bails,
No one human is too big to fail
Or small enough to escape the jail
Stifling justice’s disgraceful wail,
With death sentence or life in cell.
The highest price is paid in blood
By bomb, bullet and nature’s flood.
Not by those who wear white collars,
Who own the banks and political scholars,
Talking heads, confusing words for dollars,
Censoring choices for our selection,
Diluting truth and fair election –
An anonymous, executive, backdoor connection –
Buried beneath its strategic intention
Lay 99% seeking release from the tension,
Without a paycheck or a pension,
Or even an unemployment extension!
Denied by those with luxuries’ leisure,
Free from debt and property seizure,
From war abroad and at home,
To those who can’t secure a loan,
Leasing life, liberty never owned –
In exchange to be left alone.

99% of the blue collar power
Can rebuild towers in hours
If water is fed to withering flowers,
Its pollen and petals kept as ours,
With thorns, stigma, style, and stem,
Its pistil to protect us from men,
Soliciting our brethren,
Be a spring of sacrificial lambs,
Patriots! Die, but live and be damned.
A people misled to understand,
Year by year, wars with no end;
Fear by fear, our rights apprehend.
The use of liberties amongst civil men
Silenced as rogue, political dissent!
Drowned by noise of the absurd,
The banished black sheep of the herd.
Curiosity? Killed, by the cat
For questioning how it got fat,
Why our soldiers still lay flat
By will of the aristocrat,
Who celebrate corporate goals
And the sale of our souls –
Only at a convenient price –
Not the blood of men, but that of mice.

Now is the time to exchange the blood,
Build an Ark and reverse the flood
Of shameless corporate and political power
Suffocating blue into hopeless collar –
Second by second, hour by hour,
We, the People, grow into a beautiful flower.
Black, gay, woman or white,
History is the enemy we fight
Against indifference toward our rights,
Uniquely human versus corporate might.
They may preach peace from private steeples,
But cowards are cunning and often evil,
They lobby to make sure it’s legal,
The 99’s voice is no longer feeble

Because

P.

People

E.

Everywhere

A.

Are

C.

Created

E.

Equal.

Not much has changed since then. In fact, there are so few actual terrorist threats (probably because there are so few actual terrorists) that the FBI has to manufacture its own terror plots, and then take credit for saving the day.

Let’s put things in perspective.

If we get rid of the onerous taxes on the middle class, the regressive taxes that disadvantage the poor, the myriad regulations which hamstring businesses (the right-libertarian does not qualify, but the left-libertarian will probably refine the definition to include “small business, cooperatives, etc. in lieu of capital-intensive, oligopolistic industry) we’ll all be richer.

Depending on the degree of “libertarian” you’re dealing with they may add optional conditions like:

And just for Karma points, let’s stop dropping bombs on kids in Pakistan and funding death squads in South America, and you know what else, it doesn’t really matter if we put another man on the moon…

I’m with you so far [1].  But the argument concludes that we just axe all this stuff and your net income goes up, voila you are richer and then this becomes some sort of justification for the “free market”.

Wrong.

If you are going to be better-off in a free market, it’s not simply because you’ll be “earning more money”.

It ain’t about that 10% or 20% that Uncle Sam takes out of your paycheck every week.

Your nominally “higher” income isn’t going to matter much [2]. There will certainly be discomfort in the short- to medium-term as generations of capital misallocation are revealed all at once. But prices, like water, eventually find their level. So, the fact that you might have “more” money is probably not going to matter.

Nor is it about the paltry few cents that you pay for dozens of programs you probably vociferously oppose, (e.g., public health clinics, welfare for displaced/redundant labor force, mass transit, free birth control for high school kids or low-income people, crappy artwork in public places, etc.) but in the grand scheme of things don’t amount to a hill of beans.

If your primary objection is that the government is ripping you off a few cents on every dollar that you earn, if your strongest talking point is simply, “Well, we could all be richer”, don’t act surprised when people look at you like some bougie sonofabitch who’s just using the rhetoric of “liberty” in order to appeal to that me-vs-the-world selfishness with which you’ve been indoctrinated since kindergarten.

So this is a terrible argument: not only is it objectively incorrect, but it relies on gross exaggerations (if we stopped paying welfare – of course without examining or addressing the root causes of the poverty in society, we’d be richer!), and also because it espouses the very worst aspects of consumerism.

What matters in a free market is the opportunities which freedom presents.

In my estimation it is these intangible effects of such a shake-up that will really improve everyone’s lot in the long-run.

Deep down inside I’d like to believe that we all want freedom, security, a modicum of material comfort, leisure time to spend recreating and enjoying with our friends and families. Money-blind, though, so many have been brainwashed in to believing that these “luxuries” can only be purchased, and the price is perpetual labor & toil to make ends meet and provide for the occasional escape. But that ain’t freedom, and it ain’t security[3] either.  It’s a very, very poor substitute at best.

Imagine the freedom to enjoy your life. Real equality of opportunity. The wherewithal to carve your own destiny, rather than trying desperately scrambling to fit perfectly in to some cookie-cutter pre-fab box that’s been forced in front of you like you’re the next interchangeable and totally replaceable piece rolling down the assembly line of life. And if everyone else could do the same? especially if the poorest & least-fortunate among us could substantially improve their lots as well?

The most important part about a free market is not that you will make more money (because you probably won’t, but that won’t even matter!). It’s the freedom, stupid! It’s working within a society, shaping those institutions which foster the freedom, security and well-being which is what we all really want (not that bullshit illusion of prosperity known as “The American Dream^TM“); a world where it doesn’t take 50+ hours of nose-to-the-grindstone or mind-numbing, paper-pushing, rubber-fucking-stamping “labor” to provide for your family, all the while barely making ends meet.

You can’t buy freedom. And you can’t really replace it.  Understand that freedom contributes to real wealth, not the other way around, and that we need to be working towards freedom as an end in itself and not towards monetary wealth as some proxy or substitute for what we really deserve.

1. Setting aside the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing arguments, of course, viz., some advocate policy with sleight of hand that really means, “Lower taxes for me, but not for thee!” in a close-minded zero-sum mentality; they just want a bigger piece of the pie and they are not at all interested in making that pie bigger. It’s easier to just take someone else’s.

2. Prices (including the price of labor, a/k/a “wages”) might rise because of the psychic effect of “more money”. But they might fall as barriers to entry, previously enshrined in law & tax code, have been removed, and competition prevails.

3. I can’t help but recall Franklin’s famous quote about those who would trade liberty for security. Right now it seems we’ve done just that. And if you look around at the jobless rates or the foreclosures or the number of people on this earth who are starving or living on $2/day or less, well it’s hard to argue that anyone is really very “secure”, either.

They manufactured The American Dream™ and covered it with slick marketing and fancy jingles and bright shiny packaging and taught you, convinced you that it was your dream and then they solid it to you and you f*cking bought it. Hook. Line. And sinker.

This is The American Dream™. It isn’t your dream. Probably isn’t even close to your dream.

It never was.

And the sooner you realize that, the better off you’re gonna be…

What do morals have to do with it?

Edit: A few days later… I thought it couldn’t get any worse. It did (pics of the discussion).

The name of this distinction seems that it might carry some worth, honorees previously included notables like Martin Luther King Jr. and Lech Walesa and Ghandi… but on closer inspection the distinction has been granted to war criminals like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Henry Kissinger, and the two most recent recipients (Obama and Ben Bernanke) are even more of an abortion than Zuckerberg so I probably shouldn’t complain too much.

But I will, anyways.

I don’t wanna say that this distinction is “overdue” for Zuckerberg, because that would imply that he deserved such recognition at some point in time and I don’t think he did. But in any event, relative to the contributions to improve the plight of humanity (made by millions of other mortal earthlings), Zuckerberg is a practical nobody.

Seriously, Time Magazine… There was nobody else in the world more worthy of the distinction “Person of the Year”?

If Bernanke’s nomination last year didn’t fill you with rage, and if there was any doubt in your mind that Time Magazine is completely and totally irrelevant, this should erase that doubt.

Aside from creating the most widely used social media sharing site which connects friends allows advertisers to subtly but more accurately target the herd in order to push more mass-marketed shit down their throats while continually gutting whatever vestiges of personal privacy control its users once knew, just what in the hell has he done other than Facebook which would warrant such recognition?

I guess he donated a bunch of his ill-gotten gains to prop up another failing public school district.

Kudos, you fucking idiot. Kudos.

The last time I flew, I arrived in my hotel only to discover that I hadn’t remembered to separate my toiletries (cologne, toothpaste, deodorant, shaving cream) from the rest of my luggage for the security screening at DTW. I wasn’t pulled aside, so either the TSA goons were asleep at the wheel, or they didn’t care, or it doesn’t matter that you bring a 3oz bottle of cologne on an airplane. I think it’s probably a combination of all three.

Proponents of the new porno scanners and aggressive grope searches like to point out examples like the underpants bomber at Detroit last year. But he was thwarted by more or less conventional techniques: the porno scanners and dick-fondling didn’t exist as a matter of procedure last year. These procedures didn’t exist last month. And the historical record is pretty much the same: nobody has successfully smuggled a bomb on to a flight originating in the US in over 50 years.

I’ve maintained all along that the threat of terrorism is — to be quite frank — not unlike the bogeyman or any other folklore monster, contrived to keep people frightened, timid, and complacent. I’ll admit that the theatric value of blowing up an airplane mid-flight is unrivaled by pretty much anything a would-be group of bad guys could possibly hope to accomplish. In actuality, the only means less discriminate and more extravagantly destructive are available only to state militaries.

The fact of the matter is, as I’ve said previously, if these threats are real, then mathematically speaking there should have been many more successful terrorist acts on US soil.Maybe “many” is three, maybe it’s a dozen, maybe it’s 20 or 100. That’s for some actuary to work out.

Not just airports — although those are certainly soft enough that a coordinated attack could raise serious hell, like a dozen dudes with suitcases packed full of C4 or something in a dozen airports across the country — but shopping malls, sporting venues, etc., where any organization with the will and a relatively minimal amount of firepower, could kill hundreds of people in a few minutes. And comparatively easier (than bombing an airplane) to pull off successfully.

The smart money says that there is no credible threat, because soft targets haven’t been hit, and they’re as ripe for the picking today as they have ever been.

So all this extra “security” isn’t making us any safer.  It might make you feel safer, they’re “protecting” you from a threat that doesn’t really exist.

Family Gets Robbed, Calls Cops For Help – Cops “Help” By Beating Them Up and Killing Their Dog

As he was being assaulted by his armed and dangerous protectors, he begged the officers not to shoot his four-year-old dog, Mercedes.

“While this was going on I said ‘please, don’t point a gun at my dog.’ I begged her. She didn’t need to be involved in this. She was in the yard.”

Police then dutifully proceeded to murder his dog, who as his Neighbor Barbara Wells said, “…did not attack anyone. He never approached anyone. Even as the officers grabbed Sterling the dog didn’t do anything.”

This of course seems to be par for the course in Prince George County. If you think I’m blowing this out of proportion, take a look at Radley’s archives detailing the very colorful history of this department.

• They killed their own mayor’s dog during a botched “drug raid”. How they didn’t know it was they mayor’s house is beyond me. Those officers involved in the raid were eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.
• This is the department which continues to harass and threaten to imprison people for “recording” cops in public.
• This is the department which keeps on its active rosters an officer who shot two furniture movers, killing one of them.
• This is the department which routinely “loses” dash cam footage or other surveillance footage when it differs from the official (i.e., officer-reported) version of events.
• The very same department which has on its roster an officer who has been arrested for drunk driving four-time within 12 months — at least once while in his patrol car. Still on duty.
• And if that’s not enough, yet another officer of PG was drunk-driving his squad car when he hit and killed a 20-year old college student.

These monsters don’t suddenly appear, they grow and are nurtured in an environment and culture which protects its own at almost all costs, almost always. They learn to abuse because they learn they can get away with abuse. For every bad, abusive, dangerous, sociopath cop in the world, there’s at least one “good” cop that doesn’t do a goddamn thing about it. It’s this refusal to bring justice that enables the worst, and they are every bit as guilty as accomplices to these crimes.

I’m not militant. I’m not violent. I would consider myself a borderline pacifist.  I don’t advocate violence as a means to any ends.

That said, the world would be a noticeably better place if that department burned to the ground with everyone inside it.

Dear “Libertarians”,

I notice a lot of you like to say that brown people in third world countries accept low-wage, hard-labor jobs because that’s better than the alternative (namely: subsistence farming). You argue that this is how the invisible hand of the “free market” works.

No, it’s fucking not.

The only reason they are condemned to these choices is because they had the misfortune of being born in some banana republic, some petty dictatorship, or some ass-backward third-world country. Viz., some place you ‘libertarians’ would never — ever — want to find yourselves; you would kick, punch, claw, gouge and shoot your way out. You would climb mountains, cross deserts, or navigate shark-infested oceans in order to find something better.

But when I bring up immigration, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about them. You’re worried that if people emigrate, you might not pull down $18/hour plus benefits to be a high school custodian — as if being compelled by the forces of supply and demand to accept a $13/hour gig instead is a degradation even remotely similar to being locked in some craphole third-world country making $100 shoes for 8 cents a day.

You’re saying, “I’m all for the free market as long as I get to play by a different set of rules [than immigrants and residents of LDCs]“. But that’s not how a “free market” works.

You do not get to exempt yourself from the workings of the free market and still call it a “free market”. The same forces which might compel a migrant worker to pick cherries in Traverse City, or to work ‘illegally’ doing midnight shifts at the gas station, may also compel you to sacrifice that vacation home, or the third flat-screen TV, or the brand-new car for your daughter’s sweet sixteen, or your microbrews, or your Marlboros or your expensive tennis shoes and video games — so that those oppressed and disenfrachised can feed their fucking families.

Take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. You are not an advocate of the ‘invisible hand’.
You are an apologist for the ‘invisible fist’, punching all of humanity in the throat, forever.

Sincerely,

David Zemens