SRF Heavy Industries

Mr. President,

I imagine when you decided to get into politics, it was in an attitude of service — the proverbial “ask what you can do for your country” scenario. I think it’s probably the same way for most elected officials. I think it’s probably the same way that people who decide they want to become police do so at first because they want to help, to intervene, to protect the defenseless and provide some hope for justice for victims. Like for police, however, I expect there is also some amount of jadedness, some amount of confronting the actual realities of how people behave with respect to one another, the realities of needing to fund worthwhile projects, the realities of needing to collect money for campaigns and such, that makes the idealism that propelled you into the arena take a backseat.

Our Bill of Rights concerns rights that do not come from any government document, but rights that we should have, nationless, as human beings. The abuses that people are suffering trying to exercise their rights of assembly, of speech, of confronting their government and demanding redress — these rights should be SUPPORTED by the government, not opposed in some sort of adversarial process designed to back people into a containable box so that administrators can carry on with business as usual. That is completely counter to the purpose of the Bill of Rights, which exists to recognize those rights and make room for their expression.

You, of all people, must be painfully aware of how broken things are right now. The middle class has been eradicated and the powers of government are owned by people and corporations that embrace no ideals beyond increasing their own wealth at everyone else’s expense. It is your duty as one sworn to uphold the constitution to protect the rights of peaceful protesters across the nation so they may assemble and converse and design the next steps forward that the elected government has shown itself to be incapable of contemplating in the legislature.

I beg you to think back to your beginnings and speak up for — and defend — the rights of your fellow idealists who want to bring healing and prosperity back to your nation. They are part of the process, as designed by our constitution. I beg you to do your duty as Chief Executive and as a fellow human being with the same rights as myself.

Sincerely,

Me (again)

[*]

The goals:

And here’s how:

1) Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933 as enacted June 16 of 1933, removing the damage done by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. Investment banks and commercial banks should be separate so that Wall Street can’t gamble with our checking and savings accounts. Bank holding companies should also be banned, since that’s just another way to use what should be stable funds to cover bets and gambling and speculation.

2) Investment insurance and credit default swaps and other ways to hedge against risk should be limited to parties who are actually involved in the investment and cap payoffs to the amount being risked. YOU should not be allowed to bet $10,000 to be paid back $1,000,000 if I default on my $150,000 mortgage — because then you would be sorely tempted to find some way to make me default. I can insure my mortgage, or the bank can, but it’s really nobody else’s business — and the insurance payoff should not be so high as to be more attractive than finishing paying off the debt, for the same reasons.

3) Speculation for the purposes of investment isn’t a bad thing across the board, but it should be tremendously curtailed in commodities and currency markets. Don’t buy grain futures if you’re not prepared to take delivery of a warehouse load of grain to resell. Don’t buy a country’s sovereign currency unless you plan to do business in those amounts with the country in question. Cornering the market in food you can’t eat and money you can’t spend literally starves people.

4) Break up the monopolies. If your industry can support twenty competitors and there are four of you, then you either have to submit to pricing and service oversight or split up. No more super-mergers of banks, of airlines, of telephone carriers, of media companies, etc., without abandoning market freedoms.

5) If a corporation makes money from US labor, resides on US land, uses US agricultural resources, manufactures products or improves materials to be later used in production in the US, provides services to US residents using US infrastructures of road and pipes and wires and satellites, excretes wastes into US environmental resources of land or air and water, then it should pay taxes to the US people for the use, upkeep, and repair of the commonwealth and its valuable infrastructure. NO EXCEPTIONS. Practices allowing shuffling of assets overseas to prevent paying owed taxes should be banned, with fines for infractions set at at least double the amount originally owed.

6) Donations to a political party or political campaign — ANY political campaign, local, state or federal — should be capped at $1000 per ACTUAL HUMAN BEING OF VOTING AGE and -$0- for any group, club, or incorporated entity. Any corporation or organization that distributes funds to individuals for the purposes of being further donated on its behalf is to be guilty of money laundering. Organizations or PACs that collect these funds should be registered and tightly monitored.

7) …and it should be exactly the same for lobbying. If you accept money to produce material designed to sway public opinion on a matter of policy or potential policy, or, more explicitly, the opinion of a legislator, your income should be capped at $1000 per actual human being of voting age that is donating, with -$0- coming from corporations, businesses, organizations, or clubs.

8) End conflict of interest. If you have income coming from a company or a sector of industry, you should not be allowed to legislate or judge or enforce policy that affects that company or sector — concurrently or within five years of having served in an office that affects that company or industry.

9) If having an ethical business and financial sector makes us uncompetitive with businesses and markets abroad, then create tariffs on imported goods and services to be levied against companies and markets abroad that behave in ways we know are unethical. And stop loaning countries money if they’re going to be competing with us unfairly and undermining our standards — or embargo them altogether.

10) Nationalize or re-nationalize government infrastructure industries that have no business making a profit. The prison industry. Mercenary organizations. Police protection and law enforcement. The Federal Reserve Bank. And yes, this should include healthcare. If the industry earns money at the expense of producing, spreading, and extending human misery, then there should be no profit-minded motivation to try to grow the industry. Additionally, at no point should government powers be delegated to private business.

An addendum to #10 there, in case it’s not obvious. Causing misery is the government’s job. And we should limit it by funding it with tax money, because everyone wants to pay less taxes or spend what we collect on cooler stuff. If someone else does it for profit, then they’ll find a way to justify the results so they can make more money. It’s that simple.

Good enough for a first pass, I think.

[*]

Newton just won’t die.

First of all, God bless the man. Our mathematical approach to the universe produces all kinds of infinities and infinitesimals in our equations, and without his work, and the work of Leibniz, and I’m not getting into any discussion yet on who deserves the real credit for creating differential and integral calculus, we’d have been stopped dead scientifically for a really long time.

But his assumptions of a Platonic reference frame as a basis for all motion and concepts for mass and distance and inertia and gravity has stymied us all for more than three hundred years. That’s all broken.

Since the discovery of light’s nature as a wavefront people have been trying to get a grip on what the hell medium, what substance, light is a wavefront in, since you can’t have a wave without water. Sound is a wavefront we can detect in air (and other substances that are allowed to vibrate), for example. So when people thought of light as a wave, they tried hard to imagine — and to detect — the medium through which it travels. For a while they postulated aether as the substance. And that wasn’t a bad guess, all things considered.

Two hundred years after Newton left us all screwed up about inertia and gravity, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set up a huge interferometer to try to detect Earth’s motion through the aether. It was sound in theory — create a wave source and as the boat moves into the wavefront, look for how it contracts or lengthens the distances between peaks and troughs depending on which direction you’re heading. It kind of screwed things up a bit when they couldn’t see any difference at all no matter which direction they looked. Lorentz swooped in to try to save them by offering them an equation to describe how the aether itself must be compressing in the direction of motion, but in the end, everyone had fits and just took a giant step backward, deciding it was the concept of aether itself that was the problem and that it was the Platonic framework of time and space itself that was compressing and stretching.

And for that, Einstein deserves his own dope-slap.

There’s only one word in the above that makes it horribly, horribly wrong, and that’s framework. Spacetime isn’t the graph paper that we draw everything on, they showed. And making it all rubbery really was just a step in the wrong direction, as frameworks go. Like you’d think. What good is a ruler that stretches and twists?

The aether answer was closer, frankly. If we equate spacetime and aether, conceptually, and leave out any possibility of an absolute Platonic framework, however stretchy, we’ve got a nearly workable solution. Spacetime is a substance, a measurable quantity with, you know, heft, and density, and distribution. A compressible fluid, gaseous, plasmid, viscous, sticky — with respect to actual void, at least.

It’s so hard for fish to talk about water. If you are a fish, and you’re in water, you can eventually figure it out. Water brings you currents and eddies of pressure and warmth. It offers resistance to movement and something to push against. It provides friction. Insulation. It provides some way to measure distance, by finstrokes at the very least. Pressure in it increases as you swim downward. It carries heat and sound and diffuses and refracts and reflects light. You can make it change phase and viscosity. And if you get a good run-up and jump, you can leave it behind.

Spacetime is a substance in which we are suspended and dissolved. We each carry our own with us, every separate one of us with our own viewpoints. It gives us what we take to be mass and energy and inertia and gravity. And the easiest way to know about spacetime is to leave it and look at its absence.

Everyone knows E = MC², but no one seems to look at it properly:

 
All of the capital letters up there are just numbers. And there’s some simple algebra. All of the magic happens when you put in the units and look at what happens.

There’s an energy term out front, in joules for convenience, and it’s proportional (says the equation) to a measure of mass in kilograms multiplied by a somewhat more complicated term of spacetime in square meters per squared seconds. Hell, we don’t even know how to think about square seconds. But all of that is just algebra. You can solve that equation for any term — joules, kilograms, meters, seconds — and see that they are all introconvertible into one another.

It may help to know that the final term is in the same units that people who map the surface of the earth use to measure and map geopotential — a measure of the force of gravity. As you know, the measure of the acceleration force due to gravity changes depending on your depth in the gravity well, and changes additionally due to the distribution of the mass beneath you. Practically speaking.

But there you have it: energy and mass and gravity all existing only with respect to each other, only existing as an expression in terms of spacetime. But that’s not the only way of looking at things.

It worries some scientists that at the quantum scale that it’s really hard to detect anything like a gravitic force. For that matter, it’s hard to figure out which way the arrow of time points, too. Energy and particles are borrowed from the future and put back at whim as long as the numbers are small enough, borrowed from the foam of spacetime itself, expressed as “virtual particles” that can be made to do a little work before they disappear back into the water like leaping fish. Just about all of the transitions and transformations mapped by Feynman diagrams can happen in any direction. Space has different rules, too, with the usual idea of barriers not applying at all when particles change states via “tunneling”, popping from one allowed value to another without at all appearing in any excluded region where their existence would not be allowed.

We can see these virtual particles made permanent near black holes, where, when particles are produced in pairs, one of the two falls into the black hole and the other escapes. In a very similar way, time’s arrow appears on the quantum level, when it appears at all, due to the disturbance of a small amount of a large number of transitions, ordinarily reversible and actually reversing, under the influence of a not-entirely-uniform accelerating field — the same way a game of marbles would be a much different game if it took place on a playground slide. A debt can’t be paid back if the payment window keeps moving, accelerating away.

Does that make time a side-effect of an interfering non-uniform accelerating field, a translating force that creates distance between particles that were once close enough to revert to quantum foam, creates split-seconds between them so that they miss their appointments? Time, and space too. Spacetime is added to individual particles by translation of energy, by decay of mass, by imparting momentum. Distance in time and space is created by impact, destroyed by attraction — or, rather, translated into or out of mass or energy.

But all of that takes place in deep water. To actually get outside of the gravity/mass/energy-bound pressures of spacetime, you have to cancel the fields, create a special neutral arena where the chance of finding mass or energy or momentum or distance or differences in time is zero — or close enough to zero that Heisenberg is satisfied. A dimensionless condition of being where all kinds of things are permitted — except time and space and mass and energy and inertia. Perhaps a region where fields are excluded by a new kind of Faraday cage. Or a region cleared by cavitation, where the fabric of spacetime is stretched enough that it wears thin and tears.

This is the place that needs exploring — these holes between spaces, these dimensionless gaps outside of space and time — where new kinds of infinities and infinitesimals thrive, before the beginning and after the end, where everything is when it’s between moments. We must be like fish that are aware of water, that can experience air when we jump, that can imagine vacuum and what can exist within.

[*]

Air sucked through tubes always puts up a struggle. I’m not sure why that is. It’s springy, spongy stuff, and it judders and vibrates as it is pulled and pushed, tugged like hot taffy along a poorly greased table. It’s never quiet about it. You hear it going through your nose, your sinuses, in and out of your bronchial plumbing, and all of that is loud enough. Anything we’ve ever done to extend the system, SCUBA gear, building heating and air conditioning registers, rubber pipes, copper, tin and galvanized steel boxes, just makes it all noisier. Piccolo to sousaphone to 130-foot pipes in a pipe organ.

There ought to be a way to grease the air molecules, something to slip in with the nitrogen and oxygen and miscellaneous other gaseous rubbish to make is all less sticky-tacky so I can breathe quietly. Or maybe there’s some texture, some super-slick Teflonish coating — or maybe something in the other direction, some fractalized texturing that holds the air so well it only has friction against itself, and as long as it moves slowly enough that viscosity causes no cavitation…. Or maybe combinations of all of the above.

Whatever it takes to make it quiet in my own head.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s just noise. It’s ever-present. How can I even stay aware of it long enough for it to annoy me?

There’s a trick to it.

The shape of a cavity governs the resonant frequencies that can possibly live within it. It’s the science of acoustics. Hold two seashells, one to each ear, and you can hear the differences between them. Each speaks with its own voice relaying the stories of the ocean. You can make cavities to trap all kinds of fields and physical phenomena, tuning them for the frequencies of vibrations you care to allow. Make the shape of the void right and only the right thing can fill it. And because the universe is infinite, the thing that will exactly fill the void has no choice but to appear.

It sounds like ten kinds of sorcery and a hundred kinds of bullshit, but it’s true.

The shapes of the holes in my head, the cavities and sinuses and associated plumbing, trap old sounds I’ve heard before, sounds I’ve made before, and repeat them to me with each breath. The shapes of the spaces shape the only sounds I can make. Possibly that sounds like more of a limitation than it is — you’d be surprised at some of the sounds than can come out of a clarinet, for instance. Or a rabbit. But it’s a limitation all the same.

And the sounds of the air going in and coming out — it’s an aggregate sum of all of it. Every sound I’ve ever made and will ever make. If a giant were to make an ocarina out of my skull, it would add nothing to my repertoire. I’m drowning in the white noise of it. Off-white. Colored by the individual seashell shapes I carry inside. The void demanding to be filled by the waveform that fills it exactly, unchanging.

Maybe what I need is a new hole in my head.

[*]

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana

It’s been mentioned (to the equivalent of preaching) that we had the benefit of a World War to help bring us out of the Depression, and maybe there’s a little truth to that. Back during World War II, weapons and munitions and transport and tanks and planes and bombs were built in US factories using US labor, and also military action killed off around 420,000 soldiers we would have had to find jobs for.

Maybe that’s why the neocons were so hot for getting us into wars — they knew that with the deregulations that started post-Carter we’d need some bolstering. But all of our milspec labor is performed by robots these days or farmed out overseas, which means that the money just went into the pockets of the 400-500 super-rich that much faster, giving those few more financial leverage to pay for more favorable legislation. Also, thank God, we don’t expend nearly the same amount of soldiers — but that means we have to employ them when they come back and find their jobs gone … to robots, and to cheap overseas labor.

But we know that’s not really the case. World Domination is good for business — as long as that business is building global monopolies for themselves and their buddies.

And here we are in the throes of a second Great Depression — only it’s an engineered one. We have economic growth, but the scales are tipped so that all the income flows into the wallets of people who don’t do any work. They just own things and use the weight of that idle money (and the magic of loaning many multiples of what they have out at interest) to torque the machine to dump larger and larger percentages into their pockets. But it’s a Great Depression just the same for the bottom 99%. There aren’t enough jobs and unemployment ranges from 9% to 25% depending on whether you use the figures the wealthy have lobbied to make and keep the official ones or the actual ones that measure how many people can’t feed the kids and pay the bills no matter how hard they work at however many jobs they can hold down simultaneously.

The official unemployment numbers leave out graduating students (high school and college) who have never had a job. It leaves out those who have collected all the unemployment payments due them. It leaves out those who have worked for years in situations where no unemployment insurance payments were collected on their behalf. And it leaves out those who bust ass at minimum wage, or not much better, maybe even for two or three jobs, and still don’t earn a living wage. And those are just averages, which, for the most part, means white people. If you’re a black male, for instance, the official rate is much closer to 20% than 9%, varying regionally by how racist the population remains.

That also leaves out the 1% of the US population currently in prisons and jails — I’m sorry, sold into slavery to the Industrial Prisoner Commodity Exchange. We imprison seven or eight times the rate as the European average, and, incredibly disproportionately, minorities. A cynic would argue that the system is weighted to imprison minorities at a greater rate than whites out of fear that those people, if free, would vote Democrat. And that cynic might be right. But the numbers are clear. According to one source, there are more African Americans in prisons, in jail, under probation and parole, that were enslaved in 1850. According to the same source, the USA imprisons a greater percentage of its black population than did South Africa at the height of apartheid.

The US has 5% of the world’s population yet imprisons more than 23% of the world’s prisoners. And since imprisoning prisoners is an out-sourced, for-profit industry, some private corporations, who, of course, are happy to hire their own lobbyists and make huge campaign contributions, earn better than $25,000 per head per year on all the prisoners they can get their hands on. Is it a coincidence that incarceration rates started their spike right around 1980, when the deregulators won?

Or maybe we should just imagine how much sooner things would have come to a head if 2,000,000 more Americans were on the streets, voting, demanding jobs at a living wage, and agitating for change.

This second Great Depression, or, as I like the call it, the Great Screwing, has been engineered by those who have learned huge amounts from the first one. The one thing it is not caused by is ignorance — at least not on the part of the manipulators. It is, however, facilitated by your own ignorance, and by fingers-in-the-ears la-la-la-la denial on the part of people who don’t want to know how close to the cliff’s edge they really are — or how quickly the burden of everyone else’s weight will drag everyone over, seeing as we’re all roped together.

The height of the US standard of living was in the post-Depression, post-WWII decades, and that ascendancy was a direct result of the amount of attention the majority of the US population paid to the ideals described in the following speech:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.

For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

— President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union address, Jan 11, 1944, often referred to as his proposal for a Second Bill of Rights

Turned around to make it make sense to those of us who have no choice but to live in a more negative mindset, due to anger and loss of hope, these turn into the following:

The right not to get screwed out of our homes and health and fair wages and earned advancement and retirement savings and every opportunity for success by those who hold unfair monopolies on employment and land and utilities and food and education and critical services and cash itself — the wealth created by our own goddamn sweat and blood.

Roosevelt called that security, but that word has been taken from our vocabulary and treated to a painful, twisted death, thanks to mall security who will take away your camera and eject you if you take a picture of your daughter in the food court, and transportation security that will steal anything valuable from your luggage they think they can get away with and humiliate you at whim in front of your fellow passengers. No one needs any security tainted by that crap.

What we need is a government we can trust to work in our best interests when our backs are turned, because we work too damned hard to have to babysit our police and our legislators and our judiciary when monopolistic megacorps tell them they can keep a percentage of the money they pull out of our pockets to put into theirs and can make good on their promise to protect their purchased officials from the consequences, as well as themselves.

The impunity — a word that means can-get-away-with-it-ness — with which our financial masters act is in no way different from the lords of the drug cartels that rule Mexico. Anyone who gets in their way loses everything. Vanishes. And usually it’s nothing personal — it’s just what has to happen to keep things going, business as usual.

Too many people now have nothing left to lose. It’s time for the end of business as usual.

[*]

You know what? I’m not pro-abortion, and I don’t know anyone who is.

Abortion isn’t a recreational activity or a hobby. I don’t think there’s a single woman on earth who would ever say to a lover, “You know what? Knock me up. I haven’t had a good abortion in at least six months.”

I think abortion is a horrible procedure. So does everyone forced to resort to it. I’d love to make elective abortions — not done for the sake of preserving the health of the mother — a thing of the past. So would everyone.

I’d get rid of the bulk of abortions, if I could, with sex education from an early age and do away with the unconscionable prudery that keeps sex from being a valid topic of discussion between parents and teachers and children. I’d abolish rape — and date-rape too. I’d agitate for any publicly funded research to make contraception cheap and easy and 100% effective and available to anyone who isn’t ready to be a father or mother. (While I’m at it, I’d advocate busting ass to eradicate STDs the way we finally ditched polio and small pox.) Contraception should be the kind of thing you can do, for both genders, in those times when people are thinking clearly and not forced to try to think of it in the heat of the moment.

Oh, and I’d sure as hell get rid of that domestic abuse thing where sometimes women are beaten for getting pregnant.

I’d also love to pour some money into research to find ways to make embryos and first-trimester fetuses harvestable so they can be implanted in the wombs of people who can’t have their own babies — and I would include in that set MEN who are so all-fired convinced no single potential human life should be wasted, so they could take one for the team and carry a fetus to term themselves.

I’d also advocate for a bit more fairness and latitude for women who would have to leave work for a chunk of time to deal with all the peculiarities of giving birth and supporting and caring for a new infant. Now that every household has to have two earners busting hump full-time in order to support any children at all, that kind of help has to be available.

I’d also like to dump money into research to minimize all of those preventable chemical and environmental and genetic factors that would cause debilitating birth defects and decrease the quality of life of any potential child.

We could have been working on all of that stuff for the past sixty or seventy years if people had really been interested in eradicating the bulk of abortions, and frankly I find it horrifically hypocritical that the pro-life (except for, you know, the death penalty and wars and stuff) contingent hasn’t been voting to fund and support EVERY POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE to elective abortion possible.

Anyway, after all of that, the need for elective abortions would be fairly frickin’ minimal.

BUT EVEN SO I’d prefer the option for elective abortion remain easily available to anyone who wants it just in case any of the rest of the available alternatives can’t be stretched to fit the bill. Life is complex and you can’t count on some charitable person or organization to step in and help if you need it BECAUSE YOU BASTARDS JUST AREN’T CHARITABLE ENOUGH YET TO RULE OUT THIS PARTICULAR OPTION. You’ll help a family member, if you can, if you have the resources — if you don’t disown them or beat them or emotionally abuse them instead. Maybe you’ll even help a close friend or a church member. But you really haven’t shown that you’ll step in and help a complete stranger, someone from a different culture or race, and your screwed-up priorities on science and research and medicine and education has actively DISCOURAGED the development of viable alternatives.

If you really are as anti-abortion as you say you are, I heartily recommend you actively assist in the development of any and every alternative to abortion that could ever be possible. And then, after however long it takes for them to become available, you’ll see abortions dwindle down to nothing and fade away. Until then, you have no right to outlaw whatever procedure is necessary to prevent at least two lives from becoming a living hell.

I’m done.

[*]

Congratulations. You broke everything.

In a single generation, which has to be some kind of record, you’ve eradicated all progress for our nation since the Great Depression. The Land of Opportunity needs a new name now.

I could give you my own sob story — wiped out retirement funds from decades of labor, a marriage shattered and drained dry of love and hope from economic hardship and struggles to find employment, a house rescued from foreclosure twice by huge sacrifices and finally lost when it went down for the third time, a forced relocation thousands of miles away from aging and ailing family to find whatever scraps of work are available, no better off than I was when I left home at 17 to go to college, too old in my middle age to start the family I’ve always wanted and too close to my end years to save enough to retire unsupported — but there are a million stories that are worse. What’s the point of telling you these stories? You are incapable of sufficient empathy to feel anything for those whose fortunes you have strip-mined to add ludicrous layers of padding to your own filthy nests.

You don’t work. You don’t. You stockpile money and claim to make it work, not for you, but for the stockholders — but you are the stockholders. I, and everyone remotely like me — we’ve had to cash out of every last share to be able to eat and have a meager roof. And some of us don’t even have that. You make money for yourselves and yourselves alone. You bought up our shares when we sold them for food.

You don’t employ people — at least not in America. Thanks to the global communication networks we built for you from the prosperity of two generations — including the fruits of a once-great space program that put men on the moon in the technological equivalent of a Studebaker strapped to the top of an enormous missile — you can employ people anywhere in the world where they will be grateful for a mere handful of dollars per day. It’s small businesses — operations owned and run by those in the middle class who have made investments in themselves that pay off — that employ Americans. It’s those people that work, not you. You just sit there and own things. Compare yourselves to them for a moment.

Perhaps that’s where you got your own start: a high school diploma from the best public schools in the world, maybe even a degree or two for which you could pay the tuition with the proceeds of a ten-hour-a-week part-time minimum-wage job, and that got you a decent starting position in the middle ranks. But now the United States is 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science — and a crippling 25th for mathematics. And that’s just high school. It’s cheaper to buy a house than to pay for an advanced degree now. That path is also closed. You broke that too, sucking the money out of the government and the economy that would have paid to keep our schools effective and current.

Or maybe you started without any of that and invested fifteen or twenty years working your way up from the mail room or janitorial staff. But you don’t have mail rooms anymore — our public research and decades of hard work during the good times have eliminated the need. You have an army of temps and part-timers and no fifteen- or twenty-year paths to executive excellence. A five-year stint in a corporate job is exhibiting exceptional staying power. The path of working your way up from the ground floor is closed. You broke that as well.

Or maybe you just had it all handed to you by parents and grandparents who spent all of that sweat on behalf of your feather-bedded backsides.

Barely tapping into your hoarded wealth at all, you buy up small businesses for rights to the patents, to the business models, to the intellectual properties, to the clientele and consumers — and you jettison the human beings that built those tools for you. You perform mergers and efficiency sweeps and you outsource and you squeeze until you no longer have a workforce and are left with pieces of machinery for scraping what shreds of money are left into your festering stockpiles. From which you pay yourselves hugely. For your “hard work” on behalf of your “shareholders”.

And you’ve won.

You’ve won the game — by paying lobbyists and bribing congressmen with campaign funds to draft and pass legislation to make it illegal and impossible for you to lose. You did so by way of your hard-bought 14th Amendment rights protecting ex-slaves and corporations from being deprived of “life”, “liberty”, or property by dint of being “born” or “naturalized” in the United States. Perhaps later you can lobby for the right for your corporations to vote when they turn eighteen, or get driver’s licenses, or marry other corporations (of suitable gender where required by law), or register for the Selective Service, or be jailed or even executed for their crimes, or pay their fair share of taxes — if you ever found a use for any of those rights. But bribery is now protected Free Speech for our new corporate citizens — that have protected rights, but no balancing duties or responsibilities by which to earn those rights, and that serve no greater purpose than to shield their members from legal and financial liabilities.

And then you broke the game, too.

You know it. Look out your windows. Find binoculars, if you have to, to see what’s going on on the sidewalks below you. Look.

Listen to your own body right now. Feel that sick lump in the pit of your stomach that tells you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you have done something bad, something for which there is no repair and no forgiveness. Outside your window, however many stories down, your victims gather, those that have the strength, not belly-up and submissive but injured and angry and preparing to balance accounts. The game suddenly means nothing, for you or any of the other remaining players, because the real challenge now is going to be surviving the next couple of years with a hold on any assets at all. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, they say, and the bulk of what you possess now are numbers in a computer somewhere. Same as anyone else. Numbers, as abstracts, have no weight. No intrinsic value. You’ve been using those numbers — numbers that mean groceries and medicine and clothes and transportation and housing to other people — as just a score in your private game.

That lump in the pit of your stomach — that’s the start of guilt, and of fear, and, in health industry parlance, that lump is inoperable. You’ll deal with that nauseating lump in your own way, each of you, but it will follow the same path for all of you: denial, then anger, then bargaining, then that inevitable sickening downward slide….

You’ve broken the game for all of you — and somehow you’ll find that to be worse than breaking the hopes and dreams and lives of millions. And that’s why I hate you — and why I’ll cheer when you succumb to that growing, pustulent, inoperable lump.

If that seems to lack compassion, so be it. I believe it’s fair, all things considered — especially considering the singular lack of compassion you have shown in wrecking the American Dream upon which you yourselves have thrived — and for the numerous deaths you have caused from depression and suicide from loss of hope, from induced poverty and hunger, from medicine and health care procedures that could no longer be afforded, from increased violence that occurs naturally when privation is rampant, from cutbacks in safety and environmental standards or from complete disregard of those standards as people who actually work continued desperately to make their operations at least break even or even yield you profits. These deaths are murder, and unless you try to claim horrendous negligent ignorance, premeditated murder.

You will be held accountable.

[*]

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Just now submitted to be emailed directly to Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, via http://www.occupytheboardroom.org . Go visit and find your own penpal!

The natural state of being for any collection of primates is an impoverished heap with a few of the wealthy and powerful on top, glutting and rutting to satiety before anyone else gets any little thing they need, with their greasy buttocks and toesies cushioned from the harshness of reality by a thick, lush carpeting of peons.

You can achieve this state in any clump of humans by removing the concept of one simple set of laws that applies to every human equally.

You can tell where you are on the spectrum by how often you hear the cry “You can’t do that to me! Don’t you know who I am?” — and how often it works to allow the speaker access to a different set of rules, whether it’s by show of force, waving a holy book, or peeling bills off the top of a stack of cash.

Once things have slipped too far, there’s only one way to fix it. Unfortunately, the apes on top of the heap hardly ever relinquish power voluntarily.

In the natural state, we have the circumstances that led up to the Great Depression — and what’s going on right now. When things are better, we can go to the moon on a whim — in a Studebaker strapped to the top of a missile.

People lobbying for “smaller government” — at the behest of the apes on top — are buying a lottery ticket for a shot at being one of those apes. But those on top hate competition. The game is rigged, folks. You’ll never get there.

The words aren’t “Liberty for All”. It’s “Liberty and Justice for All”. The same laws — and the same consequences — for everyone.

[*]

I understand that the US’s public education system has failed millions of people, especially on the score of mathematics and the sciences. Tempers are high, exhaustion is rife, and people don’t think clearly under those circumstances — especially when they’re being told by some snot-nosed punk that everything they know, everything they’ve been brought up to believe, is wrong.

Apparently truth is passed down from generation to generation, and it stings when some kid tries to tell you that everything your father — and his father before him — said about sweat and hard work is wrong. It’s easier to believe kids are lazy. Weak. No ethics or backbone. Stupid. Irresponsible. It is easier to believe that, apparently, than it is to do a little math.

Math skills used to be passed along from generation to generation too, but apparently not anymore.

So I’ll tell you what. I’ll put this in terms any second-grader can understand, and if it looks like you’re falling behind, I’ll wait for you to catch up.

The whiny kids out there are saying there’s no jobs. You know it’s tough, but you have a job. You’ve taken pay cuts. Picked up something extra on the side, maybe, to help make ends meet until things are better. Maybe the wife has picked up more hours too, with her thing, and although it’s tough you’re hanging in there. Well bully for you. Keep sweating, keep your toes dug in. It’ll get worse before it gets better.

But here’s what the kids mean when they say there’s no jobs: For every single damn opening, and there are a few, there are six or seven applicants. Your advice: “Lower your sights, keep plugging away, and eventually you’ll get in somewhere. You’re white kids, young and energetic. Hide your tattoos, take out the weirder piercings, and eventually someone will let you in. Someone will give you a broom somewhere and you can work your way up. Like I did. Like my dad and grandfather did. Show some spine and some humility and be prepared to sweat your ass off and someone will pick you instead of those other six guys.”

Since math isn’t going to work, lets play musical chairs. You know the rules. Ten chairs, eleven people, when the music stops, everyone elbows their way to a seat and one chump gets left standing. He or she’s out. Remove a chair and play again.

We have to make the rules a little different for this round. To reflect the reality of the job market.

Let’s set up ten chairs and put 67 people in the room. That’s the current ratio of jobs to applicants, considering every job opening from CEO to grocery bagger. The music stops, and everybody makes a mad rush for — wait.

Wait. I left out a bit. An important bit.

Each chair is guarded by someone. Call the guard “employer”. In order to get a seat in the chaos, you have to convince the chair-guard you’ll be the cheapest and at least bare-minimum experienced ass to put in the chair of the dogpile you’re trying to get past.

Training takes a lot out of an employer. They’re all running lean anyway, or else there’d be more jobs. So if they’re hiring, they’re for damn sure shorthanded. They don’t want to waste training-time on someone they’ll just have to replace in a week because they can’t hit the floor running fast enough. But they also don’t want to give up the seat to someone who will be asking them for raises too soon or has too much brain for the work and will burn out under the drudgery. They don’t do charity work.

Chairity work? Anyway.

Replacing a bad fit is another couple weeks of someone else’s time (already shorthanded, remember?) to do the training, a metric fuckton of paperwork, and preparing for the onslaught of another dogpile of applicants if they have to fire and start over.

So ten of the most desperate, hardworking, connected, and craftiest with their resumes get a seat and 57 are left out in the cold.

And what do you say to the 57? “Keep trying, you slack bastards. Shoot lower. Grab a mop and a bucket and wait for someone who’ll pay you to mop!”

And sure enough, because sometimes people die, or retire, or sign up for the military and get shipped off to war, or get caught and go to jail, or take leave to have a baby, or quit to take care of sick and elderly family members, positions open up. But a couple of those people will join the 57, looking for another job. But also, a few more babies will graduate school and need a fucking job to stop freeloading on struggling parents. Some will quit high school because they’ve seen how useless degrees are — it will keep them good and cheap and better to compete for your job, should you have to get out of your chair for any reason.

But in the end, there will still be ten chairs open, and 67 — or maybe now 68 — asses looking to sit down when the music stops. And, if you haven’t noticed, that ring of chairs continues to filter out those with too much experience and too much education because the chair-guards can’t afford to pay an employee too much money when they can get the work done for cheaper. The brainier and more experienced are left standing and salaries go down.

When there aren’t enough jobs to go around, the slack is taken up in the amount of time it takes to find a job. When there’s enough work for everybody, applicants take as much time as they need to make a good choice. When it’s two people for every open chair it can take a month to get in somewhere, and that’s an average. Depending on luck, or connection, or how much or how little you’ll allow yourself to lie on your resume, it could be half or double. Right now we’re on the wrong side of nine or ten months average, so for some it can take a year or more. And God forbid you’re a bit slow, or have frequent absences to take care of kids or aging parents, or in some kind of minority people just don’t seem to trust much, or have a noticeable physical weakness, or have anything that looks like it could eventually turn into an expensive health problem. But way more important than that, never look like you might be smarter or better qualified than the person hiring you, or they’ll fear they’ll eventually lose their own seat to you some day. And anyone doing the hiring right now knows exactly how bad it is out there now.

Those 57 people who couldn’t get a seat? Those are the ones downtown with pickets. They brought their laptops and iPhones, so I guarantee you while they’re down there costing your city a few bucks in overtime for your underpaid cops, they’re still applying for jobs. Interviewing, even, since three quarters of that goes over the phone and email these days.

But quite literally, while they wait their nine or ten months for a shot at a chair to open up, they have absolutely nothing better to do with their time.

The very instant the first of the muzzles came off the banks, things went to hell and it suddenly became impossible to raise children without a two-earner household. That was the very minute things stopped working the way your grandfather knew they ought to. Women joined the workforce, mostly out of desperation, demanding lower salaries than men, and productivity went way up, especially in terms of what employers had to pay their workers. There was a ghost of a boom, but prices went up too to soak up their extra earning power, until any appearance of extra wealth — for twice as much sweat — went away.

The latest series of crises, starting with 2001 and going through the most recent nastiness of 2008 and after, is what turned your father into a liar. The unmuzzled banks make money in good weather, but they make it even twice as fast in bad weather. Now, even while those desperate people, like you, bust ass to keep productivity up for the last companies standing in the multinational corporate monopoly slugfest, the economy is actually growing, and the hugest are making money hand-over-fist, and so are the last remaining megabanks and superfunds. Sweat doesn’t earn you any more money — it earns it for your company, or your company’s investors. If you are lucky and well-liked, they’ll give you a cut of that that isn’t anywhere near the share you’ve earned, but it’s better than nothing, isn’t it?

The truth is it’s not better than nothing. It gives them more power to bully Washington into making your share even smaller, lobbying for higher taxes for you but not them, for less of a share of your healthcare or education for your children, for more ability to gamble with your retirement funds and less money to cover your future bouts of unemployment. For lower minimum wages. For abolishment of collective bargaining. But you have to eat, so you take it anyway. For now.

While the economy is currently growing, we’re in an artificial Great Depression established by the unbridled greed of those who are the only ones who could possibly profit by it. And they won’t care when the USA becomes a wasteland because their corporations are multinational. Towering stacks of cash are welcome on any nation on earth. The lights are already out in Cincinatti, in Detroit, in Pittsburgh. What will they care when Los Angeles and Chicago and New York go dark? Bermuda is awesome this time of year. Skiing in Switzerland is excellent! Who cares if the federal government that ties the states together collapses entirely? Euros and yuan work just as well as dollars to pay rent on the villa.

Their first twinge when all governing rights revert to the states will be when they remember Alabama is a nuclear power.

[*]

The Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America was, at it’s peak in 2008, $14.119 Trillion. Here, see for yourself.

SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS WAS GIVEN OUT IN SECRET BY THOSE WHO MANAGE THE FED TO BANKS THAT PAY THOSE MANAGERS BONUSES. (Source: http://sanders.senate.gov/)

Raise your hands if you have any idea how much $16,000,000,000,000.00 is.

Here’s a quote from the link, just in case you don’t have the time:

“For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed’s board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed.  Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed’s emergency lending programs.

“In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds.“

What nails my head to the wall is that this shows that the people in charge of the Fed don’t understand money at all. Money has no intrinsic value. It’s what money does that has value. It’s money in motion, like a moving electrical charge, that creates value.

Sixteen TRILLION dollars is around $43,000 for every man, woman, and child in the USA. If that money had been given to US, as it probably should have been, seeing as it’s our missing share of the GDP for the past THIRTY YEARS, the vast bulk of us would have used it to pay down bloated mortgages, pay off debts and student loans, invested in our own small businesses to employ people and provide missing necessary infrastructure — and all of those options end up with the money IN THE BANKS, and THEN they can pay themselves their goddamn bonuses. Even the people who’d have blown it on crap would have bought things, employing people at the factories. Sure there’d have been some inflation, but not too bad if we kept an eye on price gouging.

Instead they built up a thirty-year wad of charge and SHORTED IT STRAIGHT TO GROUND instead of running it through the machine that creates value for money. And we won’t get it back unless we burn down the banks.

You think things were bad before? Wait until you see what happens when we try to get that money back.

[*]