No More Pretending

Delusional hope produces nothing of value. Throughout my life I have sought to see things as they are. The past few months have provided me the opportunity to ponder current events against the tapestry of history.
“We have destroyed the Holocene biosphere, and it can never be rebuilt. We have inadvertently terraformed Earth into a different planet. This act cannot be undone; it is thermodynamically irreversible.” Desdemona
I leave it to climate change deniers to explain the recent wholesale collapse of fisheries with the increase in both reef and oceanic dead zones, the desertification of the world’s most productive land and the rapid transition from forest to desert by mega-fires.
The once frozen “methane bomb” has already gone off. The Arctic permafrost is already melting.
Large areas of Earth are becoming uninhabitable to mammals and their food plants. Most charismatic megafauna, such as elephants, rhinos and whales, will become extinct in a few decades. It is entirely likely that humans will follow them into oblivion.
For sure, this will be a bumpy road to total collapse and a few will manage to arrive in luxury SUVs. The rest of us, the vast majority, will see family and friends fall as we circle the drain together.
There are still resources that could be directed towards easing the necessary scaling back of empire and civilization as we know it. Scaling back in and of itself would help a great deal, perhaps forestalling human extinction as we adapt to an Earth that every day becomes more like Mars.
While President Obama takes on the ‘fat cat’ bankers the underlying collapse of the United State financial industry has yet to be addressed. The root problem is an excessive level of debt in the system at all levels, a level of debt that exceeds capacity to pay.
The problem in a nutshell – the banks are still hiding losses – big losses. Very little of the debt securitized by the housing bubble has been written off or yet foreclosed upon.
Loans are not being made to small business people because they have no collateral to pledge. Being asked to pledge personal assets as collateral for a small business loan is standard operating procedure.
With most homes underwater, most small businesspeople have no assets to pledge as collateral. Debt problems go beyond the largest banks.
China bought zero U.S. Treasury debt in October. Now foreigners have become net sellers of U.S. Treasury debt instruments.
The problems began when raw materials producers stopped receiving parity pricing and needed to borrow in able to start a new round of production. A principle method of under-paying, paying less than parity, appears in the form of paying in debased money.
Meanwhile, here we are, nearly a year under a new administration. For feds, more get 6-figure salaries, in an attempt to keep up with debasement of U.S. money.
Seduced And Abandoned
Both Democrats and Republicans demonstrate a history of saying whatever seems required to become elected, seduce the electorate, and upon election conveniently explaining away or otherwise abandoning their earlier promises.
Everyone seems to condemn this behavior between individuals. The victims often appear unable to disengage on their own initiative. If fortunate, their family and/or friends provide counseling and intervention to help end these cycles of abuse.
Yet society as a whole suffers serial victimizations by these two mainstream political parties. Ever since the Reagan Administration identified government as the problem the resulting orgy of deregulation and bureaucratic bloating continues unabated from one election to the next.
Some wish to call them incompetent idiots. Others wish to call them lying frauds. I suggest we make peace and call them incompetent lying idiot frauds.
The system they destroy also provides all the wealth and power expended in the destruction. Literally self-destruction. It seems an entire spectrum of pathologies plague our financialized government.
Narcissism
Borderline Personality Disorder
Characteropathy
Sociopathy
Psychopathy
Witness the unnecessary pain, suffering and death. Unnecessary because it results from a financial services industry that compounds debt exponentially inevitably demands more wealth than the total sum of raw materials entering the economy.
Unnecessary because the government fails to enforce the Prompt Corrective Action Law and administers regulation in the interest of the financial services industry contrary to the interests of citizens.
This occurs simultaneously with a prison industry growing faster than it can expand, militarization of local police forces, the historic first ever active deployment of U.S. Armed Forces within the United States of America, de facto nullification of the Bill of Rights and an overall heightening of domestic security.
I hope you are debt free and likewise free from any form of wage slavery. At least that can give you a running start.
William K Black American Hero
William K. Black wrote about the Prompt Corrective Action Law in Huffington Post on February 23, 2009 in an article titled Why Is Geithner Continuing Paulson’s Policy of Violating the Law?
The Bill Moyers interview of April 3, 2009 catapulted both William K. Black and the Prompt Corrective Action Law into national awareness. I urge everyone to watch this interview as many times as individually necessary to fully understand the discussion.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
William K. Black began writing for Huffington Post on February 10, 2009 with an article titled The Audacity of Dopes where he says
Geithner’s gifts to the bankers that caused the crisis include: a unnecessary taxpayer bailout of “risk capital,” a massive coverup of their banks’ insolvency, gutting the proposed limits on executive compensation, and devising a “guarantee” mechanism designed to hide the expenses of the unprincipled bailouts from the American public.
to convey the extent of the fraud perpetrated at U.S. taxpayer expense. He goes on to indicate how this became possible due to the current structure of the financial services industry. In fact if we do not move to change things the fraud will continue because
Remember, executive compensation is not “merely” a fairness issue. Executive compensation and the compensation systems used for appraisers, accountants, and rating agencies were designed, and served, to create the perverse incentives and ethical rot that caused the ongoing financial crises by producing a “Gresham’s dynamic” in which fraudulent and abusive lending and accounting practices drove good practices out of the marketplace.
that forestalls efforts to redeem the status quo. We are faced with the very real possiblity that the state is irrevocably corrupt and that legal approaches alone will never win justice.
The concept of “control fraud” introduced by William K. Black, see e.g. When Fragile becomes Friable: Endemic Control Fraud as a Cause of Economic Stagnation and Collapse (pdf),
Individual “control frauds” cause greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined. They are financial super-predators. Control frauds are crimes led by the head of state or CEO that use the nation or company as a fraud vehicle. Waves of “control fraud” can cause economic collapses, damage and discredit key institutions vital to good political governance, and erode trust…
Economic theory about fraud is underdeveloped, core neo-classical theories imply that major frauds are trivial, economists are not taught about fraud and fraud mechanisms, and neo-classical economists minimize the incidence and importance of fraud for reasons of self-interest, class and ideology.
Neo-classical economics’ understanding of fraud is so weak that its policy prescriptions, if adopted wholly, produce strongly criminogenic environments that cause waves of control fraud. Neo-classical policies simultaneously make control fraud easier and more lucrative, dramatically reduce the risk of detection and prosecution by maximizing “systems capacity” problems, and encourage crime by making it easier for fraudsters to “neutralize” the social and psychological constraints against deceit and fraud. Thus the paradox: neo-classical economic triumphs produce tragedy…
which indicates why money should be handled as any other public utility instead of for the benefit of a handful of banksters.
Until that time in the indefinite future when we can trust government it behooves each and every individual to limit their exposure to the financial services industry and end dependency upon any business susceptible to their corruption.
This means you need to have control over your income. Control over your income only happens when you run your own business.
I will explore more benefits of creating an online business in future articles.


