The Self-inflicted KICK ME, Part 2: The Self-Inflicted KILL Me

The Self-inflicted - KICK ME, Part 2:
The Self-Inflicted KILL Me! KICK ME Part 1: HERE

By Phasma Scriptor

What’s wrong with this picture, the one where the dumshitteabaggers join in a chorus of Bronx cheers to put down the extension of tax cuts for the middle-class simply because the dark-skinned Prez is advocating them and not a similar extension for the wealthier Americans? Depending on the statistics you use, the economic pie of the US has a piece that’s bigger than 2/5 of the whole held by 1% of the people, leaving 3/5 for the other 99%; however, the ratio (see The Self-inflicted Kick Me, Part I) is more stark. The families at the top have, relatively, net worth at a ratio of 42.7/1, whereas, everyone else, even that very well off next 1% on the ladder, have their share at a ratio of 57.3/99. That makes the comparative ratio 42.7/.5788, or 73.77 to 1. Of course, remove that 2nd 1% and the comparative ratio gets much worse and when you take into account unquantifiable factors (like the critical mass of high net worth), it’s very, very much worse, into the triple digits. Still, that top 1% with an average superiority of net worth of way more than 70 times everybody else is a graphic reminder of that old investing proverb “You have to have money to make money.” The bleedin’ obvious is that they ain’t giving up that advantage without a fight. Fortunately for the 1%, the DSTs are fighting for them … as planned.

If the ordinary wage-earner gets a cut in taxes, he/she spends it on products that, joined with others who purchase similar items (which are nearly always items in the class of mass production, the priciest of which is, in the range of a middle-class tax cut, a down payment for a car), represents a significant increase in demand for mass-produced items. Even when the moderately-to-extremely-rich decide a yearly tax cut of $100,000 or more (what they’ve been getting on average since the largess of Jr.) is reason to go out and blow the whole bundle (for them, small change) on something to make them feel good about themselves, they don’t go out and buy 100 Gs worth of goods and services the peons would buy. They’re much more likely to purchase upscale, way up, goods and services that have a much lower to no impact on the economy as a whole, such as artwork, antiques, summer houses, imports, vacations in exotic locations, investment counselors, blahblahblah.

So-called unproductive assets of the kind that are out of the reach of most of us have an impact that’s limited to a very narrow segment of the economy since very few people are employed in producing those much pricier goods and services, some of which require nothing more than glorified sales clerks (who prefer to be called brokers or agents, but definitely not pimps) to get them into the hands of their tony clientèle (the upper-crust’s self-congratulatory euphemism for snootiness), especially those items that are either imported or are used in a foreign country, meaning, the labor force for those products is somewhere else, not in the US; that’s outsourcing of purchases, very similar to outsourcing of jobs by multinational corporations and any business that buys from multinational corporations. Of course, the wealthy are far more likely to put a tax windfall not into that which generates the demand for ordinary goods and services (thereby driving the real economy) but into instruments that simply make more money for their already bloated personal balance sheets (what lower-class type has a balance sheet?).

Look at it this way. When the rich spend in places that are exclusive (due to the high prices which excludes poorer people from becoming regular customers, think Julia Roberts on Rodeo Drive in “Pretty Woman”), their effect is like a dart, very pointed, very precise, very quick as to the real people that benefit, but, also, very shallow with short-lived effects, certainly without requiring the resort to what’s known as capital expenditures (e.g., investing in large manufacturing/service infrastructure). When the middle-class and poor spend, the benefits are broad-based, get spread around to everyone, even the rich; that affects the nation more like a bulldozer - slower, requiring the ramping up of large facilities that have major production capacity (capital expenditures, including acquisition of more real estate) which also drives companies that fabricate giant production line equipment; deeper, because of the nature of capital expenditures, written off over several years requiring the belief that demand from the middle-class and poor will sustain the commitment to the purchase of heavy and/or high-tech equipment, leasing space, etc.

The former effect has limited scope as to the velocity of money, the speed with which money circulates through the economy (which increases overall prosperity), since, like a dart thrown at the surface of a pond, the ripples are small and dissipate without spreading far. The latter effect obviously makes an enormous difference; try throwing a bulldozer into the same pond. The sheer mass (the huge majority of middle-class and poor consumers) of the bulldozer forces money through the system, the entire system, and, at full effect, rushing all the way out to all the edges of the pond with large waves and the additional response of the criss-crossing of the waves that ricochet off the entire economic border. Unlike the dart’s ripples, when the process gets started, the bulldozer’s waves move quickly and move huge volumes.

In the milieu of the ongoing revolution in smart-phones (not even close to saturation; see, e.g., Phone Sales Push Profit at Best Buy ), the demand-side of the US economy has economy-sized untapped means to handle and exploit those bulldozer waves more efficiently than in any era in the history of human consumption. The reaction to any source of demand increase will surge more swiftly throughout the whole economy (velocity of money) than even five years ago, smart-phones enabling a significant portion of the commercial transaction process to shrink to near zero as to time required (accomplished at the speed of light), the increase having an exponential component because of the synergy of the large percentage of mobile phones that are “smart”, the constant re-upping of the apps on smart-phones, and the acceleration of the competence of smart-phone users as to the features of those phones, which are way, way beyond what they were only two years ago, having achieved capabilities greater than ye olde mainframe computers ... in pocket-size.

The best way to open this flood of prosperity, which the ultra-super-rich really don’t want for us slaves (and, apparently, neither do the DSTs), is to kick-start the process with federal funding of bulldozer-size projects, repairing the extremely dangerous condition of the nation’s infrastructure, all of it. Crumbling roads (due in many instances to corrupt construction companies having built long sections - usually in corruptly managed urban areas - of the current marshmallow fluff interstates using sub-sub-standard materials), the frazzled electric grid, cracking/leaking dams that threaten entire communities downstream, uh, down-tidal-wave, the subsistence level of renewable energy facilities, rotting underground plumbing (some made with wood, really old wood), etc., ad puking, uh, nauseam, mmm, ad nauseam leading to puking. Infrastructure projects, necessarily joint ventures between private industry and governmental agencies, bring profitability (taxes being profit to governmental agencies) to all sides of the pond with big waves that have societal benefits far beyond the money thing, even though the money thing ain’t bad because the actual costs of repair vs. new infrastructure are, on the writ-large scale, like constantly fixing an old beater vs. buying a new or, at least, newer car, to say nothing of how much safer, more efficient, more enjoyable it is tooling around in a new/newer car. Gee, I don’t hear all those weird rattles, squeaks and clunks anymore.

The monster fly in this ointment; like I've said (see Robin Hood and his Merry Socialists), the ultra-super-rich remain, always, always, always, since the beginning of ultra-super-rich as a tiny class of oligarchs, in redistribution UP mode, socialism for the ultra-super-rich wherein the redistribution is in their favor at the expense of everyone below, a brutal situation the DSTs just don’t seem to figure out, at least, the ones who aren’t on the pad of the super-rich. In the previous posting, the gap between the income (acquired without labor) of the super-rich and the wages and salaries (earned through labor) of the rest of Americans is as chasmal as it was just prior to the Great Depression.

There is no disputation allowed here. This is a case of the numbers bearing the naked reality of what happens when the lower classes, lower than the super-rich, aren’t watching the backstabbing knife that the super-rich, enabled by the ultra-super-rich, since time immemorial (or, at least, from the time of the Robber Barons of the 19th Century) have raised over the serfs they consider unworthy of having a decent life. Amongst friends, I’ve said that CEOs, like Richard Fuld of the defunct Lehman Bros. Investment banking firm (the intentionally-pulled trigger to the near-collapse of the entire global economic system in 2008), are put in place by corporate boards for one overarching reason, “To f**k everyone in sight, without mercy.” If they don’t do that, they WILL be removed and, given the Fuld example of plundering Lehman to the stuff-his-pockets tune of $500 million, that’s a ½ billion reasons to be a good suck-up CEO. Even the bottom line isn’t as important as the all-encompassing screw-over, although, ruthlessness, mercilessness, and downright mean-spiritedness are all pretty useful when trying to maximize corporate profits.

The 2007 documentary film “The One Percent” (T1%) produced, directed, written and narrated by Jamie Johnson, a joint-heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, is a film that started on a very personal note - using Jamie’s own family to launch an inquiry into the mindset of the exceedingly wealthy (of which his family is one) whose kitties run into the billions. The mistake Jamie’s parents made was allowing him to attend NYU, a school with that famous liberal bias, where he probably was inspired to think seditious thoughts, such as, that the concentration of nearly half of the total assets in the US in the hands of a very few people in the top One Percent couldn’t “be good for America.” Hence, his active conscience moved him to make this documentary.

Although T1% has a touch of first-time-out feel to it, the service to humanity that’s provided is invaluable, a peek into upper-crust-think unlike the misleading nonsense of an agent provocateur like, say, Alex Jones whose infantile staged scenes at Bilderberg meeting parking lot entrances with a bullhorn rant are indicative of what he thinks of his audience. Jamie, in contrast, recorded the actual expressions of upper-crust-think because he was one of they and, being comfortable with Jamie, opened up in a way that guys with bullhorns would never and will never elicit.

Perhaps the most revealing of upper-crust sentiment was from Karl Muth, at the time of T1%, a student at the University of Chicago, the school that wreaks of Rockefeller $$$$$ and the cocoon of economics moth, Milton Friedman, the guy who hatched trickle-down theory; it’s what happens when you fly too close to the flame. Muth is currently a graduate student whose writings are already being given top-shelf treatment by various high-toned websites, as though he’s being groomed as the next Nobel winner.

[Note: The Prez taught law at the University of Chicago, but unlike Muth, wasn’t caught up in the kiss-up-to-the-wealthy syndrome; see, e.g.,John K. Wilson: The Times' Distorted Professor Obama, The Huffington Post, 7/30/08]

While taking Jamie on a tour of the battered ghetto neighborhood where Muth’s new, very pricey condo was part of a classic Chicago-style “gentrification” takeover (where robber baron developers, like City-Hall pal Arthur Rubloff, buy wrecked communities several city blocks at a gulp, have the assessors start raising taxes to run out the riff-raff and then build new, pricey condos), Muth matter-of-factly said, not in a gee-I’m-only-joshing tone, “[It’s easier to] cleanse the earth of these people [ghetto-dwellers], send them to the far reaches of the universe, and the mayor [Richie Daley] will build a big police station, build a bunch of townhouses. The yuppies will buy in and 'bugify' [sic] it [make bourgeois] and suddenly we'll have a community. Yeah, there'll be a bunch of people displaced. Yeah, there'll be a bunch of crime problems. But it's easier. We've found the easy solution.” ‘Nuf said, except to ponder the genesis of Muth’s genocidal attitude. Let’s see, that WAS the Rockefellers who sponsored eugenics theorists that found an eager practitioner (not just hypothetical talk, but real life cutting into the balls of Jews) in Josef Mengele and the rest of the Rockefeller stooges in the Third Reich; see, e.g., Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection - SFGate, 11/9/03; Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Antony C. Sutton, 1976 (print), 1999 (online).

Subsequently, Jamie interviewed Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, now a professor in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. What Reich noted was that Charles Darwin, father of modern evolutionary thought, didn't actually, though most people believe otherwise, coin the term “survival of the fittest”; rather, the term originated with Herbert Spencer, dubbed a social Darwinist who supposed that if we just allowed the rich to get richer, society would benefit because, so opined Spencer, we “want to discourage the poor from having a lot of children and basically surviving. ... [That philosophy is] behind much of the social policies we're now seeing [under Jr.’s administration at the time T1% was made]." In other words, socio-economic eugenics as policy from Bush43. Just so you don’t miss it - the advocates of this policy are against everybody in the lower 99 and, although they’d prefer that the colored go first, they’ll throw anyone in the lower 99 under their critically massive financial bus so they can freely breathe the limited resource known as air; go read a few chapters of Bertrand Russell to get clarity; see Schiller Institute "How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man ... for starters.

For you X-Files aficionados, that episode featuring the massive secret vault in an abandoned mine in West Virginia where smallpox vaccination records were stored with associated tissue samples for everyone ever so vaccinated ("The X-Files" Paper Clip (1995), episode 3)? The inspiration was the 1904 edition of the Rockefeller (and Carnegie and Harriman) eugenics project (SFGate, ibid) in which millions of standard issue lower and middle-class Americans (the usual targets - blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Native Americans, but, also, ta-da, dark-haired hillbillies and the handicapped of all races), targeted for deportation, confinement and/or forced sterilization, had their pertinent ancestral and medical information recorded on index cards stored at a facility in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island; Eugenics, ibid. X-Files producer Chris Carter’s shout-out to the Allied spiriting of Nazi scientists into the United States, the real-life Operation Paperclip, was the Victor Klemper character in that episode, who in turn represented the real-life Nazi import, Dr. Hubertus Strughold, hence, the mining facility was, in that episode, called the Strughold Mining Company, with nasty connotations all around. Strughold was accused, almost certainly correctly, of participating in the Mengele monstrosities, but, with the possible exposure of the Rockefeller/Carnegie/Harriman paymasters for Mengele, Strughold, et al., he was never seriously threatened with prosecution.

The origin of the gas-chamber, around the time of WWI, as a means of ridding the Earth of undesirables (way before Muth’s more mo-dern, more hip “solution” of shipping them to another universe) was, another ta-da, here, here … in the good ‘ol USA and that was the most humane mode of eugenicide on the dockets of the Rockefeller/Carnegie/Harriman-financed fermenting medical looney-tunes … oh, yeah, an insult to Daffy Duck. When the great Nazi venture of the super-duper rich failed, eugenics was put on hold … but, natch, not forever.

A final note, before this particularly nauseating tale is put on hold (for another post), the refusal of the Rockefeller’s top boy in the Department of War, Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy (thereafter, the Rockies’ top lawyer fixing their dirtiest business worldwide), to assist in aiding the prisoners in the Nazi death camps (see, e.g.,A Pledge Betrayed: John McCloy; this site also discusses the promotion of eugenics by Daddy Bush as a generational legacy), should be seen with this perspective - McCloy’s refusal kept the Jews (and others) in situ as a plentiful source of human lab rats for the Nazi Frankensteins to cut up.

Of course, it should now be clear from whence Mr. Muth gets the general idea for his fantasy final “solution” to what the Rockefeller eugenicists referred to as “breeders”. Oh, nice. Here they go again, Dr. Muth and his snooty cohorts as cheerleaders for the oven-meisters.

So, what’s the point? All that other Econ 101 stuff is child’s play compared to the genocidal business end of the weapons of the super-duper rich aimed at the poor and middle-class. The DUMSHITTEABAGGERs, who are steadfast in that category of people-you-can-fool-all-the-time, have been given false impressions of FEMA prison camps supposedly meant to incarcerate troublemakers in times of deep societal unrest and violent upheaval. Nothing so overt would ever be undertaken and wouldn’t need to be. The eugenic maniacs of the Rockefeller/Carnegie/Harriman cabal have so many much more technologically sophisticated methods of dealing with undesirables that even the suggestion of such FEMA concentration camps for the suspected purpose is entirely a hoot. Self-delusion does seem to be the hallmark of the DSTs.

One example of easy pickin’s. Currently common monoclonal antibody techniques enable bioengineers, of which the ultra-super-rich have the entire Big Pharma industrial complex at their beck and call, to custom-make super-bugs (for which there is no antibiotic or other palliative) with double-time quickness which, if released in a crowd, would land on everyone and give only the one genetic target the bleed-out blues. FEMA concentration camps? That’s so mid-20th Century. Fuggedaboutit. But even super-tech invisible attacks aren’t gonna happen simply because the DSTs are doing the bidding of the super-rich, the rally for tax-cuts-for-the-super-rich being only one of an entire agenda of policies that the super-rich would want and for which the DSTs have been screaming their approval.

That leads to this one question for the DSTs. Why are they doing the work of the ultra-super-rich (and, only incidentally, for the super-rich), of which the Koch Bros., e.g., are toadies, the Kochs having funded all those silly Astroturf efforts? Sheer stupidity comes to mind, but that’s probably giving them too much credit. In the 1960s, the black-power movement was front and center with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, led by Stokely Carmichael, a firebrand deluxe. When Stokely discovered who it was that was funding SNCC (the Chase Manhattan Bank, i.e., David Rockefeller and Morgan Guaranty Trust; see, e.g., SpeakUp 101 - Hegelian Dialectic - Quotes, Facts, Rants, quoting from The Capitalist Conspiracy, G. Edward Griffin, 1971), he announced the co-opting of SNCC the next day and then, poof!, Stokely was involuntarily opted out. Does any DST have that much integrity and/or brains and/or guts? I don’t think so; besides, for any DST so empowered, the old don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-the-way-out warning would be his/her marching orders from the agents-provocateur running those running-dog-and-pony shows. The DST clowns are having this purity party and think they have all the answers when they have ZERO. They’re suffering from that Pogo effect. We have met the enemy and they … is us. Political and, only in the unlikely event the DSTs figure it out, literal suicide.

The self-inflicted Kill-Me!