Censored
Update: This post was 'quarantined' on daily kos, this is the second post of mine to be removed from the general reading list in two weeks.
Make up your own mind good citizen because someone on dkos is already deciding for you what you can and cannot read.
Greetings good citizen, although common sense dictates against these exercises in futility, the situation is such that I must persist in doing that which flies in the face of what passes for ‘conventional wisdom’.
So, if reading me in ‘Don Quixote’ mode stresses you out, you may want to bail right now.
Before I go off the reservation let’s examine the facts of the matter:
Let’s go here for a look at the current total consumer debt (Covers most short- and intermediate-term credit extended to individuals, excluding loans secured by real estate.
So the total consumer debt as of October is $ 2,386.5…which doesn’t look like much but that is the number of BILLIONS we owe in unsecured debt.
To this figure we add the national debt which we’ll round off to $ 8, 617 BILLION.
Combined we have a total of slightly over 11 trillion dollars. If we divide this figure by the number of households in the US (rather than by individuals) we come up with a shocking $ 104,761.90 per household.
You can add to that your mortgage/rent payment…utilities, food, clothing, etc…
How many of you are prepared to cut a check for that amount right here and now?
The top one-percent could handle such a piddling amount without breaking a sweat but what of the rest of us? Some in the top five percent may have that kind of ‘liquidity’ at their fingertips if they’ve enjoyed their top earner status for a number of years but what about the average Wal-Mart employee who will not clear that amount in their entire working career?
Most of you find the idea of paying off such debt in one payment ludicrous. It took generations to build up the national debt to where it stands today…even if the National Debt figure has doubled in the past five years alone.
So we need to look at this from a different perspective… what happened to all that money?
Interesting eh? Even more interesting is that this kind of income back in the 70’s would earn you a spot on the Forbes 400 list.
Did you see where some traders are also expected to earn ‘bonuses’ of fifty million?
Now contrast this against the fact that most of us are still earning what we made (or less) than in the 90’s.
Trillions of dollars and Pfft! It’s gone. What happened to it doesn’t matter nearly as much as what’s going to happen when you can no longer whip out your card and walk away with whatever it is you need.
And ‘need’ is the operative word here good citizen, while 60/40 isn’t exactly 2-1 it’s close enough to say that for every one of you that pays off their balance every month there are two who don’t…because they can’t.
But I digress.
The important point to be made here is the snowballing mountain of debt many have no way to pay off.
How many you might ask? Estimates put the figure at over 80 million…(in 2004)
In some places $6.52 won’t buy you a pack of cigarettes. Do you know the significance of this number? It is how much the interest on the national debt costs every working aged citizen (whether they work or not) per…day…seven days a week, interest doesn’t take weekends off.
What could you do with an extra $ 45.64 a week? How about $ 205.38 a month or $ 2,739.80 a year?
Let me put a finer point on this…the US treasury is borrowing the money to pay this interest. If it looks like a viscous circle that’s because it is a viscous circle.
How do you suppose we’re going to get a handle on this?
Remember it’s not only the national debt but consumer debt too.
This is where we separate the kiddies from the adults…this problem is insoluble.
Using conventional wisdom that is. The only way out of the box is to think outside the box!
Once again the operative expression here is ‘pfft it’s gone’…in a ‘that was so yesterday’ kind of way. It’s gone, forget about it, deal with today, nay, make that now.
We live our lives not in yesterday or tomorrow but right here and now, as in this very instant.
It will never be yesterday again nor will it ever be tomorrow…there is only now.
This leaves us in an interesting position because we can learn from yesterday and plan for tomorrow…right now.
WARNING: YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE RESERVATION!
Warning: Exposure to unconventional ideas my lead to thinking in unconventional terms!
TURN BACK NOW!
Well now you’ve done it! You’re off the reservation and are subject to being exposed to non-herd thinking!
A tinfoil hat won’t help you here!
You were warned!
If there is one thing that’s troubling you good citizen it’s the proliferation of zeroes in high places and the conclusion that the boys running the printing presses down at the mint are out of control.
It helps things considerably if you can look at life as a game…because that’s how those in charge of running things look at it, a game.
A very serious and deadly game…a game very much like monopoly and they play to win.
It’s not the only game in town. There’s another but it’s not very popular. It’s called fugitive and most of the time it doesn’t end well.
Many of you already realize that you are playing a game and that’s a good start. Many of you also realize this game has some really nasty consequences for which there are no ‘time outs’.
Which is to say if you get sidelined that’s too bad, you still have to play the game to the best of your ability.
That said, Mother Nature is equally as cruel…but you are no longer playing against Mother Nature here, you’re playing against other humans.
Time once again to point to another annoying fact along the lines of how we live in the eternal now…this planet is our one and only home. If the resources it provides are not carefully managed for the benefit of our species we risk making our one and only home uninhabitable.
This brings us back to our forced game of monopoly and how the resources of this planet are not being managed…thanks to the rules of the game.
Speaking of rules, there are some glaring holes in the rulebook and some convoluted interpretations of other rules that are making this situation worse.
I’m thinking about one ‘omission’ specifically because it makes the whole ‘hooray for me, screw you!’ game possible. It is this single omission that is directly responsible for the…well, ‘irresponsible’ management of our collective resources because it promotes self-interest over the common good.
DANGER! WARNING! RADICAL IDEA ALERT!
My regular readers already have a good idea of what’s coming but in case the uninitiated have read this fair it is only fair to warn you once again.
What I think is so ‘radical’ about this idea is the fact it doesn’t exist already.
We need a law that prohibits any human/entity from ‘exploiting’ [read enriching themselves] the labor of another human/entity.
It may take you a while to grasp the full implications of what this law intends so I’ll spell it out for you.
It makes rent, taxes, mortgages, any type of credit and the employer/employee relationship illegal it also outlaws buying and selling for personal profit.
Predator corporations would be replaced by non-profit management structures where everyone would work for a paycheck. Commerce would be divided along general fields of endeavor rather than by separate competing product lines.
This (not so) simple shift in thinking would return (yes return) our society from being a competitive culture back into a cooperative one where we all pull together as a team rather than breaking our collective backside so someone else can enjoy ‘the good life’.
There are more specifics and you can read more about it here if you’re interested. [Warning…long read, radical ideas.]
Or we can all just wait for Good King Waldo…who will forgive all our debts and promises not to tax us too severely in exchange for our never-ending loyalty to him and his heirs (no matter how rotten they are.)
Want to de-rail the crazy train? Anti-exploitation…now!
We now return you to the reservation…
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
Make up your own mind good citizen because someone on dkos is already deciding for you what you can and cannot read.
Greetings good citizen, although common sense dictates against these exercises in futility, the situation is such that I must persist in doing that which flies in the face of what passes for ‘conventional wisdom’.
So, if reading me in ‘Don Quixote’ mode stresses you out, you may want to bail right now.
Before I go off the reservation let’s examine the facts of the matter:
Let’s go here for a look at the current total consumer debt (Covers most short- and intermediate-term credit extended to individuals, excluding loans secured by real estate.
So the total consumer debt as of October is $ 2,386.5…which doesn’t look like much but that is the number of BILLIONS we owe in unsecured debt.
To this figure we add the national debt which we’ll round off to $ 8, 617 BILLION.
Combined we have a total of slightly over 11 trillion dollars. If we divide this figure by the number of households in the US (rather than by individuals) we come up with a shocking $ 104,761.90 per household.
You can add to that your mortgage/rent payment…utilities, food, clothing, etc…
How many of you are prepared to cut a check for that amount right here and now?
The top one-percent could handle such a piddling amount without breaking a sweat but what of the rest of us? Some in the top five percent may have that kind of ‘liquidity’ at their fingertips if they’ve enjoyed their top earner status for a number of years but what about the average Wal-Mart employee who will not clear that amount in their entire working career?
Most of you find the idea of paying off such debt in one payment ludicrous. It took generations to build up the national debt to where it stands today…even if the National Debt figure has doubled in the past five years alone.
So we need to look at this from a different perspective… what happened to all that money?
Interesting eh? Even more interesting is that this kind of income back in the 70’s would earn you a spot on the Forbes 400 list.
Did you see where some traders are also expected to earn ‘bonuses’ of fifty million?
Now contrast this against the fact that most of us are still earning what we made (or less) than in the 90’s.
Trillions of dollars and Pfft! It’s gone. What happened to it doesn’t matter nearly as much as what’s going to happen when you can no longer whip out your card and walk away with whatever it is you need.
And ‘need’ is the operative word here good citizen, while 60/40 isn’t exactly 2-1 it’s close enough to say that for every one of you that pays off their balance every month there are two who don’t…because they can’t.
But I digress.
The important point to be made here is the snowballing mountain of debt many have no way to pay off.
How many you might ask? Estimates put the figure at over 80 million…(in 2004)
In some places $6.52 won’t buy you a pack of cigarettes. Do you know the significance of this number? It is how much the interest on the national debt costs every working aged citizen (whether they work or not) per…day…seven days a week, interest doesn’t take weekends off.
What could you do with an extra $ 45.64 a week? How about $ 205.38 a month or $ 2,739.80 a year?
Let me put a finer point on this…the US treasury is borrowing the money to pay this interest. If it looks like a viscous circle that’s because it is a viscous circle.
How do you suppose we’re going to get a handle on this?
Remember it’s not only the national debt but consumer debt too.
This is where we separate the kiddies from the adults…this problem is insoluble.
Using conventional wisdom that is. The only way out of the box is to think outside the box!
Once again the operative expression here is ‘pfft it’s gone’…in a ‘that was so yesterday’ kind of way. It’s gone, forget about it, deal with today, nay, make that now.
We live our lives not in yesterday or tomorrow but right here and now, as in this very instant.
It will never be yesterday again nor will it ever be tomorrow…there is only now.
This leaves us in an interesting position because we can learn from yesterday and plan for tomorrow…right now.
WARNING: YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE RESERVATION!
Warning: Exposure to unconventional ideas my lead to thinking in unconventional terms!
TURN BACK NOW!
Well now you’ve done it! You’re off the reservation and are subject to being exposed to non-herd thinking!
A tinfoil hat won’t help you here!
You were warned!
If there is one thing that’s troubling you good citizen it’s the proliferation of zeroes in high places and the conclusion that the boys running the printing presses down at the mint are out of control.
It helps things considerably if you can look at life as a game…because that’s how those in charge of running things look at it, a game.
A very serious and deadly game…a game very much like monopoly and they play to win.
It’s not the only game in town. There’s another but it’s not very popular. It’s called fugitive and most of the time it doesn’t end well.
Many of you already realize that you are playing a game and that’s a good start. Many of you also realize this game has some really nasty consequences for which there are no ‘time outs’.
Which is to say if you get sidelined that’s too bad, you still have to play the game to the best of your ability.
That said, Mother Nature is equally as cruel…but you are no longer playing against Mother Nature here, you’re playing against other humans.
Time once again to point to another annoying fact along the lines of how we live in the eternal now…this planet is our one and only home. If the resources it provides are not carefully managed for the benefit of our species we risk making our one and only home uninhabitable.
This brings us back to our forced game of monopoly and how the resources of this planet are not being managed…thanks to the rules of the game.
Speaking of rules, there are some glaring holes in the rulebook and some convoluted interpretations of other rules that are making this situation worse.
I’m thinking about one ‘omission’ specifically because it makes the whole ‘hooray for me, screw you!’ game possible. It is this single omission that is directly responsible for the…well, ‘irresponsible’ management of our collective resources because it promotes self-interest over the common good.
DANGER! WARNING! RADICAL IDEA ALERT!
My regular readers already have a good idea of what’s coming but in case the uninitiated have read this fair it is only fair to warn you once again.
What I think is so ‘radical’ about this idea is the fact it doesn’t exist already.
We need a law that prohibits any human/entity from ‘exploiting’ [read enriching themselves] the labor of another human/entity.
It may take you a while to grasp the full implications of what this law intends so I’ll spell it out for you.
It makes rent, taxes, mortgages, any type of credit and the employer/employee relationship illegal it also outlaws buying and selling for personal profit.
Predator corporations would be replaced by non-profit management structures where everyone would work for a paycheck. Commerce would be divided along general fields of endeavor rather than by separate competing product lines.
This (not so) simple shift in thinking would return (yes return) our society from being a competitive culture back into a cooperative one where we all pull together as a team rather than breaking our collective backside so someone else can enjoy ‘the good life’.
There are more specifics and you can read more about it here if you’re interested. [Warning…long read, radical ideas.]
Or we can all just wait for Good King Waldo…who will forgive all our debts and promises not to tax us too severely in exchange for our never-ending loyalty to him and his heirs (no matter how rotten they are.)
Want to de-rail the crazy train? Anti-exploitation…now!
We now return you to the reservation…
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
posted by Gegner at 10:51 PM
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