Tons of Anarchy

In following the case against Silk Road, and a quick skim of the purported log of the alleged Keyser Soze Dread Pirate Roberts, my initial kneejerk is to condemn the gubmint for its usual intrusions, this is all about The Man getting his piece of the action and wetting his beak, that they won't be happy until they've corralled all the Kim Dotcom and Dread Pirate Roberts types out there in the cyberworld, lurking in the .onion layer, etc.

But then there's this little gem from way down deep in the log:

Alrighty then. Not sure what's worse, some numbnuts kid trying to push shrooms for cyber-currency and bringing the Hell's Angels in for his wetwork, or him being stupid enough to write it down.

Matthew 16:26 / Mark 8:36

If 85 individuals holding more wealth than 3.5 billion wasn't enough last year, then why would the top 1% having half of everything be any different?

What's pathetic is when your ordinary average maroon steps in to concern troll the numbers, something along the lines of "it's not a zero-sum game, someone else's success doesn't affect my ability to succeed." The thing is, that simple statement should be true, but it no longer is.

The mantra some of us have been preaching -- and it continues apace, and in fact is accelerating -- is that we have more people than we have things for them to do at which they can earn a decent living, much less get ahead. How much of the current economy is predicated on the app lottery system, waiting for some zit-faced, wet-behind-the-ears kid to crank out some bullshit app to help you find the nearest local rub-and-tug or whatever, and then someone else way overpaying for it?

One of the things to consider in this vaunted "post-scarcity society" of ours is the sorts of skills which have been devalued, or are in the process of being automated, and what skills are going to be needed moving forward. Vocational trades such as contracting (including construction, plumbing, electrical, etc.), automotive engine repair, farming, and cooking cannot be automated as simply as so many of the other occupations that have been replaced by robots over the past few decades. Used to be that creative pursuits couldn't be automated, but a trip to your local cineplex should set you straight on how much longer that's going to be true.

Not yet, anyway, but Flying Spaghetti Monster knows they're trying their damndest to automate every possible thing. I don't know who they expect to buy their products, or how, once half the people are out of work and the other half are slaving for peanuts, but in an extreme skew, they can hoard what they have or just trade with each other I guess. Like Jay Gould said a hundred years ago, they're just paying half the working class to kill the other half.

I've given up on the notion of the average 'murkin deciding to do anything about it; as noted above the usual rubes are always too willing to cut their own throats. And there's never going to come a time when these awful people who inherited more money than they could hope to spend in ten lifetimes willingly pay even a cent more in tax. They'd much rather live in their gated communities and mega-yachts than spend one goddamned dime on improving their communities at all.

What are the options, if you're not lucky enough to be hatched into the Wal-Mart Billionaire Club? Well, if we're not going to break out the tumbrels and guillotines, then maybe a strategy of disengaging (from their system) and diversifying (your skill set and income portfolio) is the way to do it. I don't know what the next generations should expect, though -- knowing these greedy assholes, probably ensuring compliance as a condition of being allowed access to resources.

Oversight

Just wondering what it might be like if this country had, say, a governmental agency that provided regulation and oversight on an untrustworthy and reckless financial industry. Even better might be if there was another governmental department that ensured that when financiers were caught doing awful things -- such as rigging currency and interest rates, money laundering for drug cartels, all the other things these fuckers have been caught doing over and over again -- that these crimes which literally affect everyone's lives and wallets would be prosecuted aggressively and appropriately.

When the next financial crash comes -- and rest assured, it will -- I hope Eric Holder understands his direct role in all of it, that his indifference and unwillingness to drop the hammer on these sociopaths only emboldens them. And I also hope that when it comes, and these thieves try to make us all pay for their bullshit again, that instead they are treated to tumbrels and guillotines.

Race to the Bottom

It's in the nature of partisan commentators, in the wake of an electoral blowout, to spend time attributing the loss of clearly better ideas and candidates to the calumnious nature of the opponent, the shameless excess of their bankrollers, and of course, racism. That's the job. And certainly there's an element of all those things in last week's smackdown of the Democrats.

It's not a coincidence that just about the only demographics Obama didn't win in his 2008 beatdown of Poor Ol' Straight Talk were men, old people, and southerners (and he barely won the white vote, 49-48). So guess who showed up to vote last Tuesday?

So rather than whinging yet again about the pernicious (and yes, all too real) influence of the vile Koch brothers, Democrats have to be honest with themselves about why they really lost:

1. Barely a third of eligible voters showed up.
2. The ones that did show up were the usual fucking maroons that can't wait to cut their own throats electorally.
3. Every one of the Democratic candidates spent most of their time showing how Republican they secretly were. Way to mobilize your base, assholes.

Thomas Frank does have a valid point about how the Democratic party has, in general, become the voice of a technocratic, professional-managerial class. They apparently bought into the Clinton-era NAFTA-GATT-globalization gospel, the one that insisted that the Chinese and Indians would make our crap for five cents a week while we all sold each other ten-dollar coffees and optimized spreadsheets and such like.

It's like it never occurred to them that gutting American companies and outsourcing American jobs would actually result in a tiny, insatiable claque of pelf-grubbing weasels, with a slightly larger class of upwardly ambitious (if not actually mobile) supervisors, with the other 90% or so stuck at the bottom. Did these people not attend high school? Or did they know what would happen, and just didn't give a shit? It doesn't matter -- it boils down to incompetence or indifference (at best), and neither one helps.

If Sarah Palin has ever been accurate about anything she's said, it's about the whole hopey-changey thing working out. Yes, there are mitigating factors. Obama could not get the Republicans to work with him -- but part of that was because he didn't make them respect him. The stock market continues to chug along at record levels, but only about half of American households own stock at all (mostly 401(k) plans and pension funds), and the top 10% own 80% of the wealth. And the median wage is still where it was back in 1974.

Greed has ruined this country, and attempted to placate the masses by alternately telling them that poor people are poor because they're dumb and/or lazy, and that they (the peons) can join the rich man's club someday, if they just keep their noses to the grindstone and don't ask too many questions. But the 10%-owning-80% should be the clue, if Americans weren't so bad at math.

If you work in an office with nine other people, and someone brings in a dozen donuts, and one person takes ten of those donuts, leaving everyone else to portion out the other two donuts, what should the rest of the office think about that one asshole? Even if he's the one that bought and brought in the donuts, it's a fucking dick move, period.

That's what the economy is anymore, and neither Obama nor the next occupant can or will do anything about it. It's a waste of time to worry and wonder, as Frank does, about why Georgia, the state with the highest unemployment rates, just elected as governor a man who is proud of his career as an outsourcer. Sometimes people don't understand the obvious until they get one broken off in their ass. So Georgia, and Kansas, and Iowa, and the rest of them are about to find out what that's like.

Maybe the young Democratic voters get off their dead asses and vote next time; maybe the Democrats find better and bolder candidates next time. Maybe the peons, liberal and conservative, old and young, brown and white, get tired of this shell game being perpetrated on their lives, and the lives of their children and communities, and do something that actually makes a difference.

Snowblind

I don't suppose you've heard that there's an election in the next couple weeks. "Both" "sides" proclaim it as the most important evah, just like all the other ones which Changed Everything. If 'murka has a more enduring, precious fiction than the one that claims that the one-percenters who own and run this popsicle stand are suddenly going to cede control because The Peepul Has Spoken, I have yet to hear it.

The fact of the matter is that, unless there is a supermajority in the Senate -- and maybe not even then -- nothing at all will change. It does not matter whether there are 55 Republican Senators or 59 Democratic Senators. It should be clear at this point that the defining characteristic of this particular gubmental body is stasis and gridlock.

From the perspective of the peons, and the media monkeys who pretend to be On Their Side, that is a flaw; from the perspective of the Owners, once again, it is a feature. But up to that supermajority point, both parties have dedicated themselves to the notion of using the mighty threat of a filibuster to cow the other side.

(Of course, the Republicans probably can and will take the simple majority in the Senate, so pay close attention to whether minority Dems employ the same tactics that the Goopers have used for six years straight, or if they fold back into their usual "go along to get along" master strategy of capitulation. That will remove all doubt as to who's "on your side," Monsieur et Madame Six-Pack.)

Enter performance artist and connoisseur of Peruvian flake Larry Kudlow, whose screeds only seem to get screedier.

The Republicans are going to recapture the Senate, picking up more seats than most any forecaster expects. And the House GOP is going to add to its majority. But then comes the big story: The beginning of a new conservative revolution.

....

Obama's head will spin with all the new paperwork on his desk. He may even have to cut back on his golf game. 

Of course, because of his left-wing ideology, Obama may veto everything. But if he does, he's setting up a new Republican agenda for the 2016 presidential race. Either Hillary Clinton completely jumps the Obama ship, or she's pulled way left by the Democratic party's Bill de Blasio/Elizabeth Warren/Sandinista wing. Either way, she's in trouble.
 
And maybe some Senate Democrats vote to override Obama's vetoes, with some even converting to Republicanism. An Angus King or a Joe Manchin may cross the aisle after the likely midterm GOP landslide.

[emphasis mine]

Only a complete moron would still call Barack Obama, with his killbots and surveillance and coddling of Wall Street predators "left-wing." In an era when Richard Nixon and probably Saint Reagan would run as Democrats, Obama is a reliably center-to-center-right hack. Whatever Obama's lofty rhetoric has been on this or that issue, his actions have been predictably centrist, dickless and conciliatory.

Not knowing or caring the difference between confidence and chutzpah, Kudlow blindly trucks on through with his bold assertions and predictions, never minding that the general, reasonably non-partisan consensus predicts about a 52-48 R-D split. Which again, should clarify whether or not there actually is a dime's worth of difference between these assholes and those assholes.

If "taker" states want to proclaim their rugged individualism by continuing to vote against their rational self-interest by voting in the usual Republican clock-cleaning grifters, then fuck 'em. They get exactly what they deserve. You think I feel a bit of sympathy for Kansas? Fuck no. Let 'em choke on it, if that's what they want. They'll figure out the hard way when they've had enough voodoo econ, and then they can fucking well bootstrap themselves out of it. Anything else would be sociamalism.

Every one of those teabagger rubes falls for this "I'mma cut me some pork!" horseshit -- except, of course, the "pork" that turns out to be jobs and aid and gubmint subsidies for their district. Then all that principled rugged individualism shit goes straight out the window. Just try touching fucking ethanol subsidies in Iowa, guaranteed you'll draw back a bloody stump. So, you know, Iowa deserves a burbling fool like Joni Ernst. Maybe Steve Braley should fuck a pig at the county fair, just to convince the locals he's the man for the job.

Back to Kudlow. The balls on people like this clown, privileged shitheads who've never had to answer for anything, who were allowed to fail upward where others would find themselves destitute; who were allowed to go to rehab when others went to prison. Kudlow is the standard-issue limo-lib who converted from SDS to supply-side evangelist when he saw where the money was going.

These people have no principles -- and more importantly, no empathy. They couldn't give less of a shit about the very real consequences of the globalization of capital and labor, of the decimation of the American manufacturing base, of the rampant wealth inequality that continues to undermine what could and should be a very smooth running economy that really would lift all the boats, instead of just the yachts.

But they don't want that, they want it all, every last scrap. The metaphor of the one guy taking 11 of the 12 donuts, leaving everyone else in the office to divvy up the last donut in the dozen, only goes so far. What we forget is that, rather than simply skulking off with their ill-gotten gain and being grateful that the rest of the office doesn't beat the shit out of him, the greedy bastard spends all his time trying to figure out how to get the last donut as well.

And he uses guys like Larry Kudlow to make his arguments for him, because Kudlow has literally no idea what a working-class American does or deals with on a daily basis -- and more importantly, like his owners, Kudlow doesn't care. At all.

This country is finished, and the idea that its agonizing downhill trajectory will alter appreciably if, say, Alison Grimes displaces Mitch McConnell, or Mark Begich keeps his seat, is as fine an example of magical thinking as you might find in the viewers and donors of any given glossolalic teevee evange-huckster.

The Postmortal

*Post title a nod to Drew Magary's enjoyable-if-flawed post-apocalyptic novel. Magary is one of the all-around funniest writers on these entire internets, and I will throw down with anyone who claims otherwise.

So this happened a few days ago -- Esquire magazine takes a break from telling you why you're a soul-raping cultural barnacle for enjoying illicit nekkid fotoz of hot babes, juxtaposed with monkey-spanking American Apparel ads and barely-clothed fotoz of the very same babes, to give us these nuggets of wisdom from schlock 'n' roll grandpa Gene Simmons, as dutifully transcribed by Simmons' son Nick. Apparently Larry King's questions are just too incisive and probing.

NICK SIMMONS: You once said the music business isn't dying — it's dead. What would you say to young musicians and songwriters today trying to navigate this new terrain?
GENE SIMMONS: Don't quit your day job is a good piece of advice. When I was coming up, it was not an insurmountable mountain. Once you had a record company on your side, they would fund you, and that also meant when you toured they would give you tour support. There was an entire industry to help the next Beatles, Stones, Prince, Hendrix, to prop them up and support them every step of the way. There are still record companies, and it does apply to pop, rap, and country to an extent. But for performers who are also songwriters — the creators — for rock music, for soul, for the blues — it's finally dead.

Rock is finally dead.

I am so sad that the next 15-year-old kid in a garage someplace in Saint Paul, that plugs into his Marshall and wants to turn it up to ten, will not have anywhere near the same opportunity that I did. He will most likely, no matter what he does, fail miserably. There is no industry for that anymore. And who is the culprit? There's always the changing tide of interests — music taste changes with each generation. To blame that is silly. That was always the exciting part, after all: "What's next?" But there's something else. The death of rock was not a natural death. Rock did not die of old age. It was murdered. And the real culprit is that kid's 15-year-old next-door neighbor, probably a friend of his. Maybe even one of the bandmates he's jamming with. The tragedy is that they seem to have no idea that they just killed their own opportunity — they killed the artists they would have loved. Some brilliance, somewhere, was going to be expressed, and now it won't, because it's that much harder to earn a living playing and writing songs. No one will pay you to do it.

The masses do not recognize file-sharing and downloading as stealing because there's a copy left behind for you — it's not that copy that's the problem, it's the other one that someone received but didn't pay for. The problem is that nobody will pay you for the 10,000 hours you put in to create what you created. I can only imagine the frustration of all that work, and having no one value it enough to pay you for it.

This is such a conflation of "somewhat right" and "mostly wrong" that it needs to be disentangled a bit. Let's start with his point about record companies and the music industry in general, that there's this beneficent, moneyed, monolithic industry just waiting to help the next great artiste be all they can be, and so much more.

There was indeed a time when record companies were run by rich men who truly enjoyed the bands that were on their labels. But the Ahmet Erteguns of the world no longer run record companies, unfortunately, and in fact, mostly never did. You know what ruined rock music and record companies in general? Thriller. Yep, I said it. Fucking Michael Jackson.

It wasn't Jacko's fault, not directly. But all the noble muzak industry learned from dumping millions of dollars into ramming every bit of that thing up the world's collective ass was that promotion works, and that there's no such thing as over-promotion. But it takes a lot of promotion to create a monster, and only so much money overall available to tap. Since Jackson was on Columbia, which never exactly had a huge stable of actual rock acts in the first place, there probably weren't many rock bands that got short shrift. But you can bet that that wasn't the case at, say, Atlantic or Warner Bros. All they saw was that over-produced dance music was easy to manufacture and dump into the hype machine.

(It should be duly noted that Simmons' band saw their glory days as the only rock band on a disco label. Hmmm. I wonder if Neil Bogart had any vested interest in making sure that Kiss became successful?)

Simmons is correct that many kids now might just look at the prospect of dedicating thousands of hours to learn to actually play an instrument, and regard it as wasted time. I would suggest in response that whatever one's age, if you are looking at a career in the music bidness as a way to get yourself infinite amounts of fame, money, and pussy, you are wasting your time. You literally would be better off getting a law degree, or going to a vocational school and becoming a really good plumber or swimming pool contractor.

Anyone who says that gaining fame and fortune as a musician hasn't always been a serious crapshoot, literally on a par with buying a lottery ticket, doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. You will definitely meet women playing in a rock band, unless you're a troll and have zero game. But you will meet more and better women driving to the club in the Beemer your partnership at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe got you, than in the beat-up Chevy Express van your indie-pop band flogs from one gig to the next on a shoestring and a prayer. And if you're a noob starting up a band to make a living, I have just one word for you:  Don't.

If rock is dead, it is due more to people's tastes changing than to file-sharing (let's call it what it is -- stealing). The time and effort it takes to really learn and master a musical instrument may simply not be "worth it" to a demographic used to getting things quickly and easily. It was easy for me to put dozens of hours a week into learning guitar back in the '80s, because I had a black-and-white TV that got three channels, and no computer and no internets. There was nothing else to do, I'm an insomniac by nature, and slowly became gratified that my incessant jamming along with Rush and Deep Purple records started sounding more and more like actual music. Life is a series of distractions now, and creating decent music takes time and effort somewhere along the line.

There was a time when you could justifiably say that Gene Simmons and Kiss were very important to the development of rock music. They were probably as big in the mid-'70s as The Beatles had been ten years earlier. More importantly, they helped break a lot of hard rock bands that are still around today. They took Rush out of the Great Lakes region for the first time, they took Def Leppard and Iron Maiden out of England for the first time. The first Van Halen album would not have been made at that time without Gene Simmons' direct involvement. Credit where credit is due and all.

But the fact is, the next Eddie wailing away out there no longer needs a Gene to produce a demo and schlep it around for him. Production, promotion, and distribution  -- much like the product itself -- are all now virtually free, in that they require minimal sunk cost invested, just sweat equity, persistence, and an ability to network. Which are pretty much the requirements of being in a rock band in the first place.

Creative people don't need to be told that they need higher motivations than money to do what they do. I'm not talking any highfalutin nonsense about the nobility of the calling or whatever. It's just the cold hard fact that if you try to factor in all that sweat equity of learning and refining your craft, whether it's music or writing or whatever, and figure it as a career or by an hourly wage, you'd give up immediately. And it was even worse when you could go into hock just getting your music recorded, much less promoted.

And Chris Holmes wasn't bullshitting -- touring will take years off your life. Alcohol, drugs, women, fast food, stress, and boredom all combine in a toxic brew that, over extended periods of time, will fuck with your mind and body like nothing else. Getting on stage in front of a great crowd is the closest thing to sex you can have with your clothes on. But that's a few hours a night, in a strange town with nothing else to do the rest of the day, for weeks or months on end.

Anyway, by the time you calculate your practice time as an individual musician, your rehearsal time as a band, splitting the paycheck between the band and manager, gas for the vehicle(s), food, etc., you're probably not making even minimum wage, not until you start playing some real money gigs or selling some songs.

Same with writing -- while a more solitary pursuit and fewer mouths to feed and bad habits from traveling, the time it takes to go through multiple cycles of draft-edit-refine until you have a decent finished product doesn't get recouped for a good long time. The e-book craze has spawned a raft of folks who promise to show you how you can crank out an Amazon bestseller in a couple of hours. And if you're okay with churning out compilations of hastily edited PLR jabber with a GIMP-ed cover from Fiverr, you can. Hell, you can probably sucker a few people into buying it.

But to turn out something of real quality, regardless of genre, it takes time, patience, commitment. There's nothing at all wrong with wanting to make a buck doing what you love, you just have to really love it first, because the odds are against you making a career out of it. Even if you're really good.

The dynamic Gene Simmons laments, before he heads into a weird pseudo-patriotic fugue toward the end of the interview, is the same as it ever was, just a different set of middlemen this time. Last I checked, there is more good rock music out there than ever; it doesn't get on mainstream radio because mainstream radio is run by people who hate music and their listeners. Gene is just pissed because he no longer understands how to turn a buck from it.

Arbeiten Bis Zum Umfallen; Or, The Hunger Games

Boy, the future ain't what it useta be, is it?

The ads are surreal. They sound like an invitation to summer camp, and not just the ones for Amazon jobs. “Feel like a kid again!” and “Hey workamper, it’s time for fun!” are a couple slogans used by recruiters for Adventureland, a theme park in Altoona, Iowa where migrant workers run the rides, games and concessions for $7.25 to $7.50 an hour. Recruitment materials for the beet harvest, with 12-hour overnight shifts in subzero temperatures, refer to the work as “an unBEETable experience!”

This stuff is propaganda, pure and simple. It panders to the illusion that older Americans are free to retire, working only for fun, rather than acknowledging the reality that many folks need to keep bringing in money to survive.

Much of the work is hard and physically taxing. Several people I met dropped out of the Amazon program after a few weeks because their bodies just couldn’t take it. Others suffered from “trigger finger,” a ten­don condition that can be caused by repetitive movements like UPC scan­ner use. Many RVs I visited looked like mobile apothecaries, stocked with Icy Hot pain-relief gel, foot-soaking tubs with Ep­som salts, and bottles of Aleve and Advil.

This is what the Rubinization of the economy, really going back to the reckless financial deregulation of the Saint Reagan years, gets you. People born since 1980 probably don't realize this, but America was, for a brief moment from roughly 1945-1975, a nation of haves and have-nots, in a more egalitarian sense than that might imply. In other words, most working people were able to live comfortably if not extravagantly, take the family on a cheap vacation once a year, camping or Walley World or what-have-ya, and retire at a decent age with at least enough of a stipend that they could send the grandkids $5 on their birthdays, and not have to live on cat food.

Then we became a nation of haves and have-mores, and oh-hardy-har did Dubya's little snicker with his donors drive that point home. The gist was that now we had extravagantly wealthy people, most of them pelf-grubbing financial bookies, corporate swindlers, or Mitt Romney "creative destruction" types, people who literally became hectomillionaires by gutting American companies and sending American jobs halfway around the world. False promises were made about retraining "displaced" American workers, and because American politicians barely bother pretending anymore that they give half a fuck about anyone not in the donor class, no effort at all was made to keep those promises.

So now we're the worst combination of both of those things -- a nation of have-nots and have-mores. You're in one margin or another; you're either a paycheck or two from the street and up to your eyeballs in debt (which, never forget, is always and by definition someone else's equity), or you're a minted member of the owner class. If you're in the former category, your only course of "action" is to vote for Candidate Coke or Candidate Pepsi, and try to convince yourself it made any difference to your bottom line. If you're in the latter category, you've ensured that voting will not make a difference to anyone's life but your own.

There's your future -- traveling around the country in a 15-foot Airstream and hoping to hell you don't get sick, until you've finally had enough and check out. Awesome.

Free Willing

Interesting op-ed from Rolling Stone's Tim Kreider on the effects of the freebie economy on creative occupations, especially writers, especially journalists and article writers. We covered other aspects of this brave new economy a few months back, and to be sure, the pissing contest between Amazon and the traditional publishing houses still has some thrashing to go before the dinosaurs finally sink into the tar pits.

To recap the high points from before on these various types of professional and creative media:

• Music is now a loss leader rather than the central product. It is tacitly understood that, since at least a plurality of consumers know or expect to be able to download it for free, the producers hope to use it to get consumers to actually purchase swag, concert tickets, etc.
• Books are still a product, but Amazon has created an economy of scale and a royalty scheme that flattens the landscape for self-publishing, and disintermediates all the middlemen of the traditional industry. As more people get used to electronic reading, especially when coupled with the ease, portability, and capacity of devices, they have become accustomed to lower prices.
• Short-form factual writing -- again, informative articles and journalism -- are simply clickbait. The revenue model for websites is strictly ad-based, usually with some combination of Google Adwords or AdSense, Kontera or some such, or even just privately contracting ad space on your website to various buyers. The barrage of cheap and easy "[#] Ways [noun] [verb] [object]" (one typically ludicrous recent ClownHall example is titled "15 Ways Liberals Are Like Bratty Kids") has resulted in a simple go-to template that has been abused practically to death, but shows no signs of abating.

The last example in particular speaks to how and why people like Kreider, who can actually write and provide context and analysis, get hit up for freebies everywhere they turn. Since consumers seem content with the bare minimum, and just about anyone can Google a random subject and generate a list in a short amount of time, listmaking has become a handy substitute for analysis.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of that dynamic is that, while musicians and authors can at least theoretically pin their content either to cross-promotional products, or scale up their audience on Amazon, the journalist has no such options. What we've seen happening is basically your HuffPo model -- create and run your own portal, sell a shitload of ad space (again, the actual product at the end of all this) and then try to corral writers who don't mind trading valuable time for a slim chance at name recognition.

This is one of those issues I keep trying to chicken-egg, back and forth, over and over. Does the lowest common denominator shift because content is cheap and easy, or is the content curation model simply giving people what they wanted all along? In the aggregate, it seems now that too many people are ready and willing to consume a news-like product, devoid of nutrients and context, and unwilling to figure out the context on their own, from, I dunno, a history book, or even a longer article.

It all comes back to asking oneself why precisely we want to inform ourselves, if it's actually to understand how the world works and to make informed decisions based on that knowledge, or just as affirmation of imaginary grievances, or just to be a part of ephemeral cultural phenomena, to anonymously register our impotent outrage on some network news chat board, as if it had any meaning or use.

Ultimately, this is where talented writers like Kreider will lose out, if he's unable to suss the new paradigm. I think his former RS colleague Matt Taibbi has a better grasp of what the new journalism model is for people who actually do journalism, as opposed to people who just want to be a cable news anchor. By complementing his journalistic output with well-researched, topical books, and shrewd, acerbic TV appearances, Taibbi may just be carving a path for a noble but dwindling breed.

Misdiagnosis

So now that Very Important People are showing how aware they are of this inequality thing, alarums have been raised, and remedies proposed. Here OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria throws some ideas into the ring for consideration:

Main remedies are activation policies, meaning get services in the governments that will get the people who are unemployed or seeking for employment with the job opportunities.

This is not being done enough. The United States spends one-fourth of what the rest of the OECD countries spend on this particular service, getting the unemployed or seeking employment with the employment opportunities.

Second, skills, education and skills. There’s a big mismatch between the skills and what the market is demanding. Therefore, your — you have people have diplomas, but they can’t do very much with it. Third, use a tax structure and use a budget in order to support companies that may be providing jobs or better opportunities.

And last but not least, remember, this is a problem that is affecting the capacity of the United States to get the people at the lowest revenue levels and at the lowest education levels to get up in the ladder, in the social ladder, in the ladder of opportunities.

Ah, the fabled "ladder of opportunities," esteemed tool of the privileged class who long ago pulled it up after using it. Look, Angel, chanting "jobs" and "education" like some oligarchist mantra means nothing at all when there are few jobs worth having anymore, far too many individuals chasing all of those jobs, and higher education is a fucking racket.

The implicit promise of the "jobs 'n' college" evangelists is that those things work hand-in-hand to improve the lives of individuals. And that's how it should work, certainly.

But the reality of it is that rather than a promise, it's more of a threat -- that if you don't go to college, and set yourself up for 10-15 years of indentured servitude in order to pay off the costs of said college, after which maybe you can start making real money, if there's enough jobs in your area, etc., etc., you're screwed.

These rackets serve not only to enrich the coffers of those who run them and profit from them, but they serve an ancillary purpose -- the masses of people who are herded into these rackets, and get on the financial hook, are instantly rendered compliant, complicit in the racket. They now have a vested interest to not be disruptive, to not ask too many questions -- or the wrong questions, such as why wages stagnated while productivity doubled, why the only people to profit during the so-called Great Recession were the already wealthy, why the "practical" thing to do with the one life you've been given is to be some indentured wage slave to some bastard who will fuck you over at the first opportunity, if it will make his stock portfolio go up a quarter of a point.

They don't want you asking questions, or protesting your ration of crumbs -- not that it matters; should you find the sack to get on your hind legs and say something out loud they'll just send Erin Burnett or some other water-carrier down to make fun of you, marginalize you before your plaint even gets a fair hearing.

They would prefer that you either go along to get along, or just say "fuck it" and give up your eternal tilt at an indifferent windmill. I don't think it can be overstated, how little the elites give a red-hot monkey-fuck about you, your families, your communities, your country. Make no mistake, as far as they're concerned, you're either a tool for them to use, or an impediment to their efforts. That is the extent of what you are to the people who actually run this country, run the world.

Serious People jabber about this condition of persistent, escalating inequality, make modest proposals, hem and haw as if this is some trick of the tail, a logistical impossibility to correct. Folks, it is almost heartbreakingly simple, and it does not have to involve tumbrels and guillotines (though you'll get no argument from me should it go in that direction).

The mechanics of a capitalist society, to the extent that we still live in a truly capitalist society, are premised on carrots and sticks, incentives and disincentives. Ideally (heh), the carrots and sticks should be applied as needed, regardless of the situation. From a purely systems analysis perspective, it's not supposed to be a question of who applies those carrots and sticks, so much as what applies them. In systems dynamics, they are applied to optimize the overall efficiency of the system.

In the post-World War 2 era, it worked that way for a few decades. Americans of that time realized that an empowered working class spent its money on goods and services, thus enriching the companies who produced those things. Rich people paid taxes, and paid their workers a wage they could live on and spend money on. It was tacitly understood by all that incentives and disincentives would be applied by the system to keep the machine humming.

But as you may have noticed, it no longer works that way. Rich people and corporations get carrots, everyone else gets sticks. There is nothing resembling even application. This is because the system is no longer run and maintained by systems people, relatively non- or bi-partisan people who understand the utilitarian notion of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

In deregulating the finance and lobbying industries, Saint Reagan essentially sold the system to the elite money class, who of course simply run it for their own benefit -- and everyone else's detriment. It is not enough for them to gain, everyone else must lose in the process. Saint Clinton continued this new dynamic and globalized it, put the final nail in the coffin with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Bush the Lesser drove the cock home with the jackhammer fury of a thousand Ron Jeremys, Obama has done jack shit to remove said cock, and if you think either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush will ever consider not doing whatever Wall Street tells them to, you should really stop huffing industrial solvents.

On and on it goes. It will continue, probably worsen for most. It will not change, no matter how much you wish, no matter how fervently you participate in the useless voting ritual. It is true that only one party wants to get rid of the EPA, Department of Education, the minimum wage, a woman's right to choose, and so on. But it is also true that neither party will ever stand up to the people who have perpetrated this economic monstrosity that pervades everything else, not even a little bit.

I feel like a broken record most times anymore, bringing up this topic. Not because I'm bored with it -- far from it. I'm utterly fascinated by this tiny claque of transnational merchant princes, who actively -- deliberately, mind you -- are on an open mission to fuck this country over, and everyone in it. I'm fascinated by people who have more money than they could ever spend, and yet it's still not enough for them. I'm amazed by people who look at the millions of lives they adversely affect as some big fucking game.

I'm fascinated by the poor people that these soulless fuckers rook into voting against themselves, an enormous swath of chickens who can't wait to enthusiastically show their support for good ol' Colonel Sanders. How could you not find these people interesting. how could anyone not watch this dynamic and be compelled by its narrative, by its inevitable outcomes?

And people like Angel Gurria fascinate me perhaps most of all, because Gurria probably thinks he means well. These dogsbodies of the merchant princes, they should know better -- I mean, they do know how to read fucking spreadsheets and charts, right? But they seem sincere in their convictions that if "we" just made "opportunities" available for "them" to bootstrap themselves, the problem would solve itself. No matter how much evidence over the last generation is available and observable, they faithfully hew to their standard "remedies" -- go through the "higher education" racket, get balls-deep in debt so you can get a better job (doing what?), spend most of your working life trying to repay that debt and not get your job shipped to Asia. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

So I mentioned that this situation is simpler to resolve than the Serious People make it out to be, and it is. But there has to be willingness to use carrots and sticks on everyone, not just carrots for the owners and sticks for the peons. Incentivize keeping companies stateside and not exporting labor. Incentivize paying a living wage. Disincentivize screwing your workers, the way shitheel companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's have become accustomed to doing. Make corporations pay their fucking taxes. Disincentivize offshoring profits. Disincentivize overcharging for college education. Start a massive infrastructure work project, like Eisenhower did with the interstate highways. Enact a 1-2% redistributive tax on the "high net worth" assholes, say, anyone with over $10M in wealth. Spread it around. Institute a one-time debt jubilee, paying down either a certain percentage or amount of interest-bearing debt on people's homes and educations (which are usury and overcharging in the first place). The Masters might be surprised at how quickly the economy surges from such measures, and everyone, including the owners, would actually profit from these measures. After all, if the peons have more money, they will buy more stuff. Shocking, I know.

Obviously none of this will ever happen, but what's really pathetic and disheartening is that no one with access to the corporate media would even consider mentioning such things. If there's a system that's incredibly self-regulating, it is the system that manufactures "official" opinion and consent. And the pillaging of the rentier class will persist for exactly as long as the peons are willing to put up with it.

Frustrated Incorporated

What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years, at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane? -- Steve Buscemi, Con Air

As we head into the middle of the second decade of this blessed new century/millennium, there are some clear issues that societies will have to deal or cope with, if they are even to continue, much less progress. Almost all of the major ones -- water, climate change, health care, extended longevity, resource consumption, habitat depletion -- revolve around population (or more accurately, overpopulation).

Add into that mix the notion of work, as defined as the performance of productive duties and tasks, in order to secure an income by which one may survive, and even participate in the greater economy. This is an issue I've been dancing around here and there in recent months, but I reckon I'll spend most of this year teasing out ideas more and more as they occur, as events necessitate.

One such event that just took place was the rejection of UAW unionization among workers at the Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What's peculiar about this, as Ed points out in the link, is that not only is VW pro-union, but the Chattanooga plant is their only one without a union workforce. In other words, this was not the usual instance one sees in American sweatshops, where the threat of moving jobs overseas, in response to unionization, is more explicit than implicit.

No, what happened was an equally usual combination of cheap politics and ingrained cultural assumptions regarding the uselessness and corruption of unions. (As opposed to the mighty corporate bootstrappers of the world, who have never goldbricked or bullshitted their way through anything, no sirree Bob.)

This is what fascinates about this issue more than anything. Although I obviously have written a lot about economic issues over the years here, and I believe that the observations and occasional predictions have been proven correct far more often than not, I have no real specialized knowledge of economics. So I don't know or necessarily believe that Chattanooga is some sort of bellwether for American labor unions, in general or in particular. Obviously unions have massively declined since the '70s, in conjunction with globalizing labor and capital, and all those things are important factors in the concurrent median wage stagnation and the accrual of income and wealth to the very highest economic strata.

So the fascinating part is how willingly -- indeed, eagerly -- the worker bees have embraced the insect overlords who have systematically destroyed their lives and communities for four decades running. Anecdotally, one of my oldest friends, whose parents had union jobs, "shared" some bullshit anti-union graphic the day after the Chattanooga vote, with the smug surety that could only be possessed by someone who didn't think about their own childhood. Given the lack of self-awareness or intellectual consistency we see from the average 'murkin on virtually any issue of note, it's probably safe to say that this idiotic sentiment is the norm, rather than a statistical anomaly. An entire generation of right-wing radio loons has desensitized the proles to even basic reflection and common sense.

It's very difficult to feel any sympathy or pity for people who so consistently vote and rant against their own rational self-interest, time and again, and then are surprised to reap the exact consequences which they sowed. But the thing is, not only do those consequences affect everyone, as the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, but they will continue to hit harder.

Overpopulation in globalized "emerging" markets obviously exerts downward wage pressure across the board (except, of course, for our wondrous job creators -- o bold transnational merchant princes!). This is what we have been seeing the past two generations, and the pace has increased the entire time. At the same time, technology and innovation have served to automate and commodify routine jobs, workflow processes, and entire jobs and production lines. In other words, whether you are building Volkswagens or flipping burgers at Mickey D's, you are only doing so until a robot can be developed to do your job.

So your best options become either to be the person who maintains and repairs the mechanical lines of production, or to spend 4-6 years and $100K or so to get into the manager class and "optimize" those operations. You don't have to be a whiz with numbers to intuitively grok that you only need so many folks to perform either of those functions.

Imagine what things will look like in 10, 20, 30 years, even without increases in, say, extreme climate events and patterns, or water scarcity. More humans to contend with, and by definition, the increased efficiencies in producing and distributing commodities will be disruptive, to say the least, to the normal mechanisms of commerce. You don't have something for x number of people to do, but you need them engaged in the economy at some point, purchasing things that are produced and move through supply chains. Proposals for guaranteed minimum incomes are being discussed, and will out of necessity be implemented on some level at some point, probably sooner rather than later.

How much do you pay this x number of folks to essentially do nothing (or at least nothing that adds direct value to the aggregate economy), and how will that square with (again) consistent downward wage pressure on people who do perform necessary tasks? There is a point of equilibrium for any set of multiply competing dynamics, so there is certainly one here.

In short, what price-point will Joe Average have in this future workscape, where his options are circumscribed by participating in the "higher education" racket, meaning (in the best case scenario) years of indentured servitude paying down his overpriced tuition, versus being someone who can just kick back and collect a stipend that, once the externalities of the "traditional" career path are accounted for, may end up being comparable?

Another recent event that highlighted this coming paradigm shift was the announcement from the Congressional Budget Office that a labor effect of the Affordable Care Act will be a large number of people leaving the conventional workforce, to trade in jobs they hate or are just tired of, but were hanging on to for the necessary health-care benefits, to pursue their entrepreneurial or creative dreams. Of course this is tragic news to the class that has a vested interest in keeping their work staff cowed and compliant, but again, it also begs the question of what those folks will do.

There will always be something to do, don't get me wrong. You can't automate every single thing, can't commodify every single experience. This is something the optimizers didn't really think through, as all these technological blessings and productivity gains began accruing mostly to the top of the food chain. Sure, it's been neat to be able to get those nifty electronic devices from Chinese sweatshops at bargain prices, but there's only so many teevees and iPhones you can buy, and there's only so many line-waiting dunces to buy the same thing with new bezels every year.

We can't all make each other $5 cups of coffee, or self-publish e-books (though FSM knows I've given the latter my best shot). The more entrepreneurial among us will come up with more and better scams and rackets by which to grift the poor and gullible; exploiting the vulnerability of others is, aside from fouling our own nests, probably the most charming of all innately human characteristics.

Of course, once enough people realize that their Tinkerbell economic system is largely smoke and mirrors and imaginary wealth in the first place, subsistence will be the job, and just about everyone will be employed at it.

I Got Your Stimulus Package Right Here

On the fifth anniversary of the "stimulus," it's not unfair to ask what precisely it stimulated. You can see pretty effective breakdowns of ARRA funds here and here, itemized and tabulated six ways from Sunday. There are descriptions of plenty of beneficial projects.

But it's also important to look at results, to ask why, for example, if over $98 billion was spent on transportation and infrastructure, so many of our bridges and highways are on the verge of collapsing. Why, after spending nearly $19 bn on health care, is the health care system still such a monumental clusterfuck, an issue that essentially works out to a 20% productivity tax, where wealth is extracted and siphoned upward for shareholders and exec bonuses.

Speaking of extracting and siphoning, how is it that after putting over $41 bn in stimulus money toward "energy," presumably at least some token efforts toward conservation and efficiency, the best this administration can point to is fracking, and pipelining tar sand bitumen? Does this sound like a tremendous bang for your hard-earned tax dollar?

Surely jobs were created and preserved by these and other efforts, so even as a stopgap there is some efficacy. But I said it at the start, and nothing has happened to change my mind -- at least some of the stimulus should have gone to households, rich and poor alike, some flat amount across the board, say $50,000 per household. You would have seen an aggregation of activities centered around three main goals -- spending, saving, and eliminating debt.

That last one is the killer, as our debt ratio has skyrocketed, with no way to get it back down to where the average person can save, or even have discretionary income to put back into the economy. This is a situation that I strongly and sincerely believe is not accidental or coincidental. It is by design -- the owners continue their accrual without missing a beat, while the rest barely manage to hang on, making them even more desperate to cling to whatever straws are left, to accept the few crumbs that still fall from the table.

It's a patronage system, so the stimulus pelf was going to patrons regardless of which party supported what policy. But imagine for just a second how much more successful it would have been to have at least part of that money go directly to taxpayers and consumers, rather than finance weasels who pulled the money at 0%, hoarded most and lent the rest to the peons at interest -- or just rigging the interest rates in the first place. Nice racket you got there.

{Update 2/21/14 20:00 PST:  Looks like The Krugster had the same bright idea there.]

Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Part Duh

One might at least creatively, rhetorically, make the argument that certitude is not bulletproof and absolute about, say, how precisely the universe "began," or the exact process by which species of biological organisms have developed over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. I wouldn't want to bother to engage in any sort of intellectually honest "debate" with such a person, because right away their motives would have to be in question. But it's at least theoretically conceivable that a person could raise some (again, intellectually honest) questions as to the specifics of such theorized processes.

But there's no excuse for this, there's no rationalizing how a grown-ass adult, even if English is not their first language, cannot understand how the sun appears in the east every morning, and disappears in the west every evening. We are supposed to be beyond the times where we told ourselves and each other various stories about that process. There is no chariot, pulled by celestial beasts and driven by a heroic mythical demiurge, laboriously towing the giant golden ball across the sky in slow motion day after month after decade after millennium.

As easy as it would be to drum another cynical eye-roll about how stupid these "1 in 4" are, this pseudo-statistic (and while I believe that 2,200 is too small of a sample, any contingent is still too large, on a subject like this), larger questions are begged, if we pull back far enough. One question we might ask, in the context of, say, "who the hell is educating these people, and how?" is what we expect our educational system to do, in the most general sense. In other words, if we expect our archaic Prussian model to merely churn out compliant workers, people who dutifully vote and pretend it made some difference, then hell, that's what you got. Keep on keepin' on.

But if we harbor notions of "greatness," however one chooses to define that, whether "continued" or "restored," we have to revisit that model, and its extenuations, accordingly. For one, even if we did decide we simply want our compliant-worker-drone model, one must ask, doing what? Considering the factors of overpopulation, leveraged comparative advantage in emerging markets (that is to say, cheap labor in overpopulated Third World countries), productivity gains (accruing primarily to owners, almost completely at the expense of labor), automation and commodification of routine tasks, and hypermobility of capital, the irrefutable issue facing Americans is the cold fact that there are simply more people than there are things for them to do to secure a living.

So what do you do with them, what do you "teach" them in the institutions of learning, the highest of which have devolved into a naked racket, a system of indentured servitude where one rolls up six figures worth of loans, and scrambles to pay them back down, in 10-15 years (of their prime years of life) if they're lucky (and they frequently aren't)? What is to be expected of such an "educational" system, frankly, when there are fewer and fewer options for them as employable drones?

I observe the experience of my daughter, who is in seventh grade, and I can only wonder, what is the point? To take but one example, her math class is something called Common Core. There is no textbook, only a series of worksheets that comprise the homework. "Notes" are taken in class, but for some reason are collected afterward by the teacher, presumably to show the accrediting body that notes are being taken.

However, as any of us who have learned a new concept already know, things like notes and textbooks are useful for reference, a way to preserve those oh-so-valuable experiential moments in the classroom for future study and guidance. It is a persistent assumption that those experiential moments cannot be replicated by the mere hunting and compilation of data, that there are interactive and interpersonal dynamics that must be internalized to attain true educational self-actualization.

There is some truth to that assumption; there are experiences in bonding, socialization, and team-building that are difficult or impossible to transfer to a wholly online paradigm. But again, a live interpersonal experience that mostly involves the mindless ticking of boxes, without understanding how the process of learning continues apace, becomes, while not completely valueless, certainly a process with diminishing value. Rather than instilling a love and appreciation for the edifying experience of learning a useful skill or idea, one learns how to navigate a bureaucratic maze posturing as a learning institution; instead of mastering a concept, one learns how to pass the test.

So we have to decide, at some point, probably when it's too late, that we would rather not be a society that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, that while the things we can optimize and quantify and goal-seek on a spreadsheet have and add some value, they do not comprise the entirety of that value. They do have some value, don't get me wrong. But we have been misled to believe that it's the be-all-end-all, the ultimate goal of the process. And in a world where the knowledge is free, if you know where to look for it, if we can pull up a Khan Academy or Academic Earth video and learn something cool, what the hell are we going to "school" for, and worse yet, paying for an experience that has less and less meaning and value?

1 Timothy 6:10

So plutocrat performance artist Tom Perkins, apparently trying to leave no doubt amongst the proles as to whether he really is an asshole, lobs this little polemic:

In order to vote, [Perkins] proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should have a million votes."

Perkins demurred afterward, claiming that he had "intended to be outrageous and [he] was," but it was probably the truest expression of his beliefs about society at large -- and by association, the beliefs of many of his pelf-grubbing peers. These beliefs are simple, and pervasive, and borne out by the things they say and the things they do.

They believe firmly that poor people are poor not because of luck or circumstance, but because they're lazy and/or stupid, that they're basically children of a lesser god, and only by the benevolence and forbearance of their betters, and an occasional crumb from the table, can they be truly managed to a level of competence that is tolerable to the elites. They believe that they comprise the sum total of "greatness" this country still has to offer, choosing not to look back and see what really made the US great, a true world leader, for a considerable period of time. They have the luxury of being able to fuck things up, and then to sit back and complain about it.

To be (somewhat) fair, you have to give Perkins this much:  he's not an entitled idiot who walked into Daddy's money and just assumed he hit a triple. He has degrees from MIT and Harvard. (Then again, George W. Bush has a coveted Harvard EmBeeAyyy, doesn't he?) Still, Perkins does at least seem to have (or did at one time in his life) a marketable skill. The problem is that he thinks that skill gives him some sort of helicopter view over the rabble, and the right to exercise it as such.

Coming from a guy who weaseled out of a fatal yachting accident with a measly $10K fine, the whole thing is, pardon the expression, too rich. It's all just so terrible for them, the ingratitude of the peons. Not quite enough to change places, mind you, but terrible nonetheless. They have it all, but it ain't enough. They need us to love them, apparently, or at least admire their swagger and fortitude.

But that would be like a rape victim sympathizing with their attacker; the family of one of Ted Bundy's or Richard Ramirez' victims sympathizing with the animals that slaughtered their loved ones for the thrill of it all. There's Stockholm Syndrome, and there's mental illness catalyzed by extreme trauma.

The one-percenters, in their inexplicable defensiveness, have chosen to fight fire with stupid, to lash out at the least fortunate with the most despicable plaints. The peons need to organize enough to grab Perkins and his scummy ilk by their custom silk lapels and say:  Listen close, motherfucker. You won life's lottery. You and your children and grandchildren will never know for a day what 99% of us know every day of our lives -- that life is struggle; that we're lucky to cadge a paycheck-to-paycheck living doing something we can barely tolerate through the best years of our lives; that we're one bad break, a job shift to China or a health-care scare, from the street.

It barely merits pointing out that, since the political system is already owned lock, stock, and barrel by rich assholes like Perkins, that the "one dollar, one vote" principle he espouses is already in play, has been in play as long as any of us can remember. I don't know what system he's talking about; the system I know is one where rich people (like Perkins, who sits on Faux News' board) pit poor people against each other with imaginary distractions.

These idle rich fuckfaces use the system not just for their own benefit, but for their own amusement -- while you try to figure out how you're going to make it through the next week or month or year, they look for a new toy to play with, something else to keep score. It really is a game to them, and my long-standing contention that "Wall Street hates Main Street" couldn't possibly be clearer now. Although it does overstate the point; to hate something you actually have to care on some level, and they don't care. At all. At all. At all.

One assumes that Perkins' greatest expense, aside from taxes and stepstools to plant his nose up Danielle Steel's ass, is a team of minions to help him get his pants on around his giant fucking balls every morning. It's a toss-up at this point whether a more satisfying fate for him would be for him to be rendered destitute by some random ill fortune, or just to see his head on a pike.

Either way, Perkins is 82, so he'll be dead, sooner rather than later, but not soon enough. And some stray three-legged dog will stroll by, and piss on his headstone and take a massive dump on his grave.

Kristallnot

Here's an idea that is only part polemic:  the next whiny, thieving billionaire asshole to complain about Obama being Hitler, should get the literal result of his assertion -- that is, stripped of all valuable possessions, herded on to a boxcar, trundled out to an isolated work camp, starved, beaten, tortured and forced to fight to survive, until being loaded into a fucking oven. Hokay? Enough of this shit already.

It's just beyond disgusting, this incessant whinging from these slimeballs who have everything they could want, and it's still not enough. Apparently they need the admiration of the peons as well. Well, fuck you, Tom Perkins, Steve Schwartzman, et al. Do the world a huge favor and kindly fuck off and die already. We don't need you and the nothing you produce, but expect everything in return for.

I sincerely look forward to the day when enough people realize how badly these assholes have ripped them off, and have added insult to injury, and we finally get the guts and brains to bring the tumbrels and guillotines on to Wall Street, and we put an end to this self-serving bullshit once and for all. Better yet, an economic collapse that evaporates their paper profits, catapults them and their useless skill sets into a Mad Max hellscape, and forces them to do something worthwhile to survive, would just about be worth it. Many of the rest of us are already on our way there, thanks to their shenanigans, so might as well lean into it.

Risk / Reward

The meritocracy strikes again:

JPMorgan Chase, after a year marred by scandal and stiff regulatory penalties, has decided to award its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $20 million in compensation for 2013, an amount that will further inflame the debate over the accountability of senior bank executives.

The award, announced in a company filing Friday, is 74 percent higher than the $11.5 million that Dimon earned in 2012. By approving a hefty raise, the bank's board is signaling that it remains firmly behind Dimon after 12 months in which JPMorgan suffered several bruising legal setbacks, including a record $13 billion settlement with the Justice Department over soured mortgage securities.

In justifying the $20 million package, which includes $18.5 million of JPMorgan stock as well as a base salary of $1.5 million, the board said that JPMorgan had advanced in many ways under Dimon. And to many on Wall Street, as well as some other long-serving chief executives, Dimon wholly deserves the raise. "I think he's worth more than that," Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, said. "Overall, I think the shareholders of JPMorgan and the American people should be happy that Jamie Dimon has been running the bank over this period."

Yes, peons, be grateful that your superiors have given the most visible member of their class an eight-figure sinecure of stock options, in exchange for paying record fines for hosing shareholders and banks. You would go to jail for such things, but in the other America, you get rewarded for risking other people's money.


Almost six years into Obama-dom, and the "sociamalism" drumbeat continues apace. Either that word no longer means what I thought it did, or he's pretty damned bad at it. If Obama's a socialist, then I'm Ron Jeremy.

Rising Tides, Sinking Boats

It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone being surprised by the report that 85 individuals now possess as much as half of humanity. Now, there are qualifiers of sorts -- if you're even an average schmuck in the US or Europe, chances are that in terms of assets and income, you're ahead of a healthy chunk of folks who live on a dollar or two a day, and don't own a pot to piss in. The average American frequently forgets (or doesn't even know) that 1 in 3 people live in either China or India, and 1 in 2 -- half of all human beings -- live in Asia.

Still, as the Krugster points out in what has become more or less a weekly homily to be ignored by our betters (or bettors), inequality is increasing everywhere, here as much or more than anywhere else. This seems to be mathematically at odds with the supply-side mythos, the Reaganauts who spoke wistfully of "trickling down" and a "rising tide lifting all boats." There is only so much stuff even magnificently wealthy people can buy and own and use, so it gets hoarded or "invested," usually overseas in both cases so's to avoid paying even a percentage point or two on their precious.

I politely suggest that if you find yourself on the short end of the stick, your options are few and far between. You can bend over and take it for the rest of your life; you can talk about how much it sucks, as if Barry O or Elizabeth Warren will actually do anything about it. Sooner or later someone, or some group, will choose the violent insurrection option, but the problem there is that usually an ineffectual or flat-out wrong target is chosen. Political figures operate at the behest of their owners; they have little choice but to dance with them that brung 'em.

Which leaves identifying properly the operators of these collectively ruinous enterprises, the soulless bastards who would rather dump a kajillionty dollars into astroturf teabagger propaganda efforts, than to put the same money -- or even less -- into something that benefits someone other than themselves. The animals Krugman describes, the smug, vile pricks who want to be Leo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, always get away with it, leaving their rented dogsbodies in DC to take the abuse and hyperbole, while they scuttle off to the Hamptons or the Bahamas and hoard their pelf.

Obviously, not every single wealthy person is a shiftless douche who inherited every dime they have. But many of them are, and act like it, or act like they're the only ones who have ever worked for anything, and everyone else is just some worthless combination of dumb and lazy. Worse yet, even among those that earned every cent they got with no help from anyone at any point in their lives, they mostly (Warren Buffett being a notable exception) persist in avoiding any and all taxes if they can help it.

As we always say, this is not politics, it's math. Increasing inequality by definition means reduced opportunities and mobility for everyone else. To the people who refuse to say anything bad about them because they hope to be them someday (just read the LA Times comments, if you can stomach it), all you can tell those folks is, good luck with that. They might as well spend their entire next paycheck on Powerball tickets, for all it'll get them.

So let's get after these assholes, once and for all. Properly identified, one then has the option of bringing out the tumbrels and guillotines, or better yet, developing ways to disintermediate them. Their worst nightmare, the unproductive rich, is for their rackets to no longer work, the idea that they might actually have to work for a living. Refuse to participate in their system. This is why Bitcoin is starting to attract so much scrutiny, as is Silk Road, Kim Dotcom, and other players and aspects of the parallel system. They can't stand the idea that one day, enough of us might come to the realization that we can do just fine without them, that we never really needed them in the first place.

Money and value are, after all, simply tacit agreements on what things are "worth" for trading. What would happen if enough people decided that they no longer agreed with that collective understanding? As the Orlov article points out, even a 10% hit would cripple them. It would cascade downstream -- but it already has been, and will only get worse anyway. Might as well have at least some control over our fates, right?

The Golden Rule

Can't deny that Obama gives a hell of a speech, when he chooses to do so. So what? Does anyone seriously think anything will come of this, that suddenly the industrialists and financiers and rentier scumbags that own fucking everything are suddenly going to have a come-to-Jesus moment on their lives of hoarding, grifting, and accumulation?

Please. This is like Lucy with the football for poor ol' Charlie Brown. Maybe the minimum wage gets bumped up fifty cents, or even a buck. That would almost give it the purchasing power it had in 1968, while gas and food typically go up what, four or five percent per year in some cases? Is that going to take even a nibble out of the 1% owning 40%, of 6 Wal-Mart heirs being worth over $100bn, just for picking the right parents?

Everyone talks a good game about the virtues of hard work, and the promise of economic justice and opportunity. But who gets rewarded? Spreadsheet-diddlers and influence peddlers. Wake me when the talk turns into walk. There is zero credibility, and zero chance that anything actually gets accomplished that will return even a smidgen of the stolen pelf to its rightful owners.

When any name politician finally screws up the nerve to tell Jamie Dimon and his ilk to go fuck themselves already, then you'll know that you're finally getting on the right track.

Slumpbuster

So the smart set is still trying to figure out how to monetize an inert economy. Maybe it's the usual revolving door of Geithners, Rubins, and Summerses back-and-forthing between the Treasury Department sinecures and Wall Street sinecures, trading roles between thief and enabler as easily as most people draw breath or take a dump. Or maybe it's the new boutique proposal of "eliminating poverty" by giving everyone a monthly stipend.

Or -- and this is just a thought, mind you -- people could start keeping their eyes on the ball, and seeing how substantial sectors of the American economy are just rackets designed to fleece masses of sheep. Health care is just the most obvious of these rackets, and the way you know that the Obama administration and its supporters are in on (or at least complaisant to) it is that in all the drama about broken promises and higher premiums, at no point has either side talked about the usurious costs the racket soaks its market with.

Throw in other rackets such as finance, higher education, the way tax and corporate policies have allowed the creation and maintenance of massive individual sums of wealth, at the financial expense of millions of wage slaves, siphoning ever more money from bottom to top, getting rid of the haves and leaving a handful of have-mores in their gated communities and insulated lives, surrounded by seas of ungrateful have-nots. Maybe doing something, anything, about any of those situations might change the conversation.

When people are seriously proposing that we should just get used to a semi-permanent economic slowdown, and that we should go ahead and pay people to do nothing, it sounds like a doctor deciding to treat gunshot wounds with band-aids.

 I mean, it's not that I have a huge problem with bread and circuses per se, it's that it seems like there used to at least be more bread.

Stockholm Syndrome; Or, Serfs Up

I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that at first glance, I thought this was an Onion parody. Nope, just a grotesque, sloppy blowjob to the takers who pretend to be makers. Apparently the line forms to the right and extends around the world to orally gratify the fine upstanding rentier thieves. (Fantastic takedown of the article here as well.)

And that's really what these assholes are -- they're bookmakers, racketeers. They don't produce, or even truly invest, in anything. They take bets and skim the vig, regardless of the outcome of said bets. They borrow money from the government interest-free, and lend it to the peons at three, or six, or ten percent. That's not industry, it's usury.

It's bad enough that animals like Blankfein and Dimon are allowed to plunder at will in this wretched, Rubinized clusterfuck of an economy, this teetering wigwam of rackets and machinations, undue political influence and hyper-disparity. It's somehow even worse when someone is so lacking in self-awareness, or even basic human decency, that they can so shamelessly defend them, and shit on people who actually work for a living.

As long as working-class mutts continue to be willing to be gulled into voting against their own rational self-interest, as long as they're content to be the proverbial chickens voting for Colonel Sanders, it's going to be like this. One holds out hope for the tumbrels and guillotines, for the thieves and their soulless propagandists, but it won't happen, not until things crash and get too far beyond repair, if then.

As I've become fond of saying more and more lately, I hear Costa Rica is nice. Life is simply too short to waste in fighting the few who own everything, and their highly-aid dogsbodies. Somehow this bullshit system has bamboozled otherwise intelligent people into cutting their own throats, miring themselves in perpetual debt and wage slavery. At this rate, I'll probably spend the rest of my life paying interest on $200 textbooks, in exchange for a worthless degree.

Maybe living in a hut on the beach, swimming, surfing, playing guitar, is the way forward from the worker's paradise we've created here, where people spend most of their time sending each other silly meme generators and tweeting racist babble. There's no better day than today, no better time than now. It's a worthwhile goal. Let's all check out, see how the masters' spreadsheet-diddling works out for them.

Money for Nothing

So Larry Summers is out, and maybe Janet Yellen is in. I'll believe it when I see it, but it really doesn't matter much anyway. What's she going to do, stop giving interest-free money to the banks to lend to the peons?

Since we have Asians to make our shit for us, our economy is predicated on a few people keeping everyone else in perpetual debt and wage slavery. There is nothing else; no Fed monetary policy change is going to affect that. The "jobless recovery" will continue to be defined by more min-wage mcjobs and more people forced to make money on the side just to survive. Green grass and high tides forever.

The pernicious issue of wealth/income disparity could be solved tomorrow, either with some sort of (at least partial) debt jubilee, a bailout of the working class, or some combination. But that won't happen no matter who helms the Fed, whether it's Larry Summers, Janet Yellen, or Noam Chomsky. This machine operates under certain rules of political physics, and they are unalterable.