You Can't Do What Bernie Really Wants To Do...

...With the Democratic Party involved. At least not as that party is constituted presently.

And what Bernie really wants to do is Socialism, of one form or another; something that's quite understandable with the way Capitalism usually treats basic human needs. The problem is, trying to mold Capitalism in some way so as to accommodate true socialism just doesn't work very well; especially when the rest of the world is likely to stick with very competitive Capitalism. You are very quickly put into the position where balancing costs, equitably distributing payment burdens, and still remain competitive, without also controlling profits (without capital then running away from under you), is not something meant for high probabilities of success.

Then you add the further problem of what doing more attempts at reform always do now, put more turbulence into very complex systems; turbulence that spreads out in waves through the multi dimensional matrix we call an economy, causing ever more unanticipated events of collateral damage. Which then create even greater problems needing to be fixed, with further inputs of instability just feeding on itself on growing waves of cascade effect.

My wish would be for such well intentioned, and smart, people like Mr. Sanders would be to step back and consider the larger implications of what is really going on with our problem with Capitalism. The very fact that, as a product of 18th and 19th century typographic thinking (linear, one thing at a time, segmentation; residing in Newtonian, as opposed to Einstein, physical, and meaning, space), it no longer has any of its original validity remaining. Not now that we've infused ourselves into an electro, turbocharged, multi dimensional matrix of interaction, effect, and more interaction.

It would be a system that wouldn't make any sense any more even if it hadn't been mutated by the technology it helped to create. We find that simple fact hard to see precisely because the mutation is resplendent with not only narcotics for every imagination, but with intrigues for every desire, as well as excess beyond any means of resistance.

In point of fact then we need to be rid of it. And the sooner the better. My sincere hope is that people are going to be more and more receptive to this notion. It's up to people in intelligentsia, business, and politics, to help that notion develope.

Bernie Sanders -- Democrats Win If We Mobilize And Educate

More Capitalist Contradictions

LOBBYISTS ARE THE WORST, PART 1000

Tennessee Could Give Taxpayers America's Fastest Internet For Free, But It Will Give Comcast And AT&T $45 Million Instead

30 diggs Motherboard Internet

"Tennessee will literally be paying AT&T to provide a service 1000 times slower than what Chattanooga could provide without subsidies."

Why Can't We Put This Sort Of Thing To Work...

...To help us manage our own management, production and distribution system? As opposed to making our skill as a commodity simply less desirable, and thus all of us, less competitive, as well as more prone to unemployment?

That's the choice we have in either taking things over and working our own operating system, or staying with the current, quite obsolete, economic operating system.

It really is that stark, and that simple. And you'd better make the right choice while you still can.

THE FLOOR IS JAVASCRIPT

This Automated, Package-Sorting System Is Brilliant And Utterly Mesmerizing

35 diggs Technology

This group of smart robots can sort 200,000 packages a day without taking a break.

Fragility. However We Love, Or Loathe, It, We Ignore It At Our Great Peril

Fragility isn't something we normally take to with loving arms, but there are quite notable exceptions. Babies. Kittens. That collector's item, whatever, that is so beautiful, who cares how fragile it is. You get the idea.

In electronics, of course, and especially for the military, however, fragility is to be avoided like the plague. As you could imagine, during the time of vacuum tubes that was a very tricky problem. They did a pretty good job with them, given the circumstances but, as the g forces kept climbing in virtually all situations, you can bet your ass they saw silicon based electron manipulation as a god send.

For some reason, a lot of times when I think about fragility, amidst great outward chaos, I have a very clear image of various scenes from the movie "Sorcerer." And by that I mean the one done in 1977, directed and produced by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou. This was a wonderful production that still holds up quite well I think. It depicts a group of really down and out misfits, in a really backwater, third world country. They are all, barely surviving here, and desperate to a point that is made quite visceral when you watch. The other main plot point is an oil rig fire that must be put out some number of miles away, but for which no means of air lift can be of help.

So. To put out the fire requires a counter blast explosion. The only explosives are not where they need to be and, to make matters worse, they are very old sticks of dynamite that have been sitting in a hot environment, and sweating nitro for far too long. The only thing left to do? Pay some idiots just desperate enough that a, only modest amount of cash to the business folks, would entice them to try and get the dynamite to the fire. Through some very bad ass jungle, and virtually non existent roads, with at least one bridge from the absolute hell of rickety, and ready to break.

It is a pretty stark example of what people can be made to do when they see the least little bit of hope in a sea of abject hopelessness. What's really interesting in this, though, is that this is also how I see where we are today. Only in this case the we are the desperate guys, our country is that bad ass truck they get to custom configure, and the thing we are carrying is our economy. And what we are driving too is a metaphor for what our economy, and our desperation, create together; the next fire that is always there to be put out.

The thing is, however, what really amazes me here is how we so readily seem to accept the fragility our economy has; and in this I am talking about the bedrock idea that Capitalists always refer to when they talk about what markets require: As little uncertainty as possible. What would then be one of the greatest contributors of "uncertainty?" The thing that always makes variables go crazy: Turbulence. Especially turbulence coming from many, as well as unexpected, sources. And as we are now driving through a new information jungle of our own making (in physical and meaning space), which we understand only a little more than squat about, we get a lot of turbulence from a lot of unexpected sources. Which makes the package we carry cranky, unpredictable in its own right, and subject to not putting out enough juice (it sweats it's own form of nitro, which we try to control, with its own problematic degree of success) out for the rest of us to keep this crazy truck going at all, let alone successfully through some really bad bush.

To make matters worse, though, we have to drive our truck around carefully, so as to avoid running into, or make common tracks, impassable, for other desperate drivers of other trucks; each carrying equally fragile cargo.

And so I ask myself again. Why on earth would we put up with fragility worse than the cheapest vacuum tubes of the early fifties? A situation made even worse by the fact that the g forces involved are getting worse (because of all of the big problems we've ignored for so long), even as the economic operating system's fragility increases. Is this not a perfect definition of madness stacked upon even more madness? If it isn't, I'd sure like someone to explain to me how that could be so.

Become better informed. Ask deeper questions. Take peaceful action.

Institutionalizing A Right Wing Ideological Imperative

Can we stop pretending that, just because a guy has great legal technical skills, he is somehow then automatically going to be make decisions on purely technical legal merits? Please?

I know, there is always the possibility that a judge will grow in maturity, protected by the life time appointment, but anyone who thinks that puts high odds on our newest court member should really think seriously about avoiding gambling altogether; as his decision record clearly suggests. You can say this because, once born an ideologue, one tends to stay as such; especially when one may also have rich benefactors who guided them throughout their development. Everybody in Washington DC knows this. No one is going to be surprised at all when the new guy votes very conservatively on matters that come before SCOTUS.

The fact of the matter is that SCOTUS became irretrievably politicized once the Republicans decided that a sitting President did not have the right to have a nominee considered for the court, at all; no hearings. No interviews. No real excuses; other than it's his last year in office. I mean, seriously?

And why stop at just a year, if you really don't like the guy. Why not limit the guy you don't like to only his first 100 days in office? That's when any supposed mandate has its most sense of validity. And after that the rest of the term is just as a lame duck. Why not? It makes just as much arbitrary sense as the last year in office.

What we are talking about here, of course, is just another aspect of what too much money in political life, for far too long, has done to foul it up with the structuralization of assumed privilege; where money itself ends up deciding what is important (especially too it), and what is not. Of how things will be done then, and of how they will not be allowed to be done.

And lest it is also not clear to you, the Republicans in both houses know only too well how incompetent, and/or how crazy, our de facto ex president is. They know this and they don't care nearly enough to do anything about it yet because they think they can cement a good deal more of the structuralization already described into place, now that they control both houses, and, presumably the crazy guy as well. That it hasn't been going so well for them only serves to emphasize just how crazy it is to think you can work with crazy and not live to regret it.

There is also another kind of crazy that is making things hard for the Republicans, however, that I need to acknowledge: The fact of one particular form of Capitalism's own contradictions. Some money people want to embrace the global trade version, leaving local markets to fend for themselves, and others want to try and invent a new kind of bunker-ized, fortress America, Capitalism; apparently thinking we don't need anybody else (any more than we need science, or facts, or face a radically changed world). Which is simply indicative of one big industry group being at odds with another big industry group, and heaven help all of us, down in the trenches, between them all.

And this is just part of the reason why I am advocating the sweeping changes that you have seen described in this blog. I remain convinced that, if you spend even a modest amount of time in researching all of the ins and outs of this mutated monster of an economy, you will too will come to understand the need for change of that depth, breadth, and height.

MAKING ALL THE RIGHT CHOICES

The Society Behind The Conservative Pipeline To The Supreme Court

3 diggs The New Yorker Law

With the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo has reared a generation of originalist élites. The selection of Neil Gorsuch is just his latest achievement.

In An Interum, Transition Government, One Thing I Think We Should Consider...

...Is a variation on our present Legislative branch of government.

[
The transition I'm talking about here would be the one instigated if a new political party -- my
fantasy post on same depicted a Libertarian Socialist party being elected precisely as a movement
to organize a constitutional convention in order to make changes to our constitution, so as to make
an alternative to Capitalism possible -- actually came to power. In order to make all of the other
structural changes (see here for a look into what some of those changes might be), we would need
to nationalize everything, which I posted on here, and here
]

I would keep the Senate the way it is, but I would change the House of Representatives. I would replace it with a nationwide, popular vote; after all, who better to represent us than ourselves.

You could also think of it as simply folding in the idea of citizen initiatives, only in this instance with a chance for a citizen petition to finally come to a full, national vote (which begs obvious questions on how we do that on a new scale, given the chaos of our current voting infrastructure; which certainly deserves an answer, but I won't go into that now), given it passed some combination of preliminary signature drives. And then, of course, you would still have the Senate, with Senators voted in as now, to run a checking balance.

As far as our doing a employee buyout, via an equity consolidation, refinancing (America Inc.), I think I was amiss for not going into enough detail on how everything was going to be managed; especially as the intent was for the Federal Government to do nothing more than set wage, price and profit limits, management wise (only if the situation warranted it of course, as with rationing, or production directives).

The central point here is that this would not be intended as any kind of centrally planned economy; which history has already passed a thumbs down verdict on. No, the idea here would be to set up partnership councils (or "cooperation councils" as I referred to them before) at successive levels, starting at least at the City level, and made up of civic leaders, labor leaders, and company heads. These groups would have to have some kind of voting arrangement, and power for the vote to wield, but I'd hate to try and specify that now; leaving that particular, important detail, to the final negotiation process.

I also don't think I made an emphasis on an unavoidable consequence of such a move. To be completely up front here, a number of industries might likely become superfluous in the turnaround, which would mean a significant number of people out of work. In some cases it would be in the finance industry as debt trading would become problematic, and the stock exchanges as well. For those at the higher wealth levels they'd have the opportunity to start new businesses (which I failed to provide as a possibility, in some way, for the wage earners, initially, and it ought to be there). Other enterprises, in other industry groups might also become quite problematic. That's the bad news.

The good news is that the workplace of America Inc would be a lot more forgiving of taking your time to find  new work; as in any temporary job will automatically have its base pay supplemented (to a living wage minimum) by the Federal government to service the refinancing debt.
Health Care would have the ultimate single payer, and supplier, to keep costs, profits, and wages, under the control of actual limits. And best of all, I've got several, very big, and very necessary, public works projects ( see here, here, and here), proposed that would set about creating, new living space, public power, and transportation, infrastructure, the likes of which no one has ever seen before. Which will mean a lot of work for a lot of people.

All you have to do here guys is start thinking it's possible. Then you can start considering all of the ins and outs of the approach, and come up with your own concerns, questions, and maybe the spur to look into some of the economics aspects here in greater depth. You could come back then and give me proper hell for that "obvious" thing that I didn't see; because it was right in front of me, no doubt.

In any case, though, talking about "Nationalization" doesn't make you an automatic Communist. Any more than it makes you some South American, Socialist state of the past, who put the best industries in the pockets of the Junta leaders, and left the industrialists, and entrepreneurs out in the cold; along with the rest of the proletariat, eventually, of course.

No, this would just be a smart business decision made by the majority of the employees of this working nation. A business decision to give the wealth holders fair value for their property, but make it clear, none the less, that management overall, for at least the last 30 or 40 years, has just made a horrible mess of things; a mess that's simply intolerable for the rest of us. Intolerable for the planet as well. We just do the buyout, and then get to the adult business of running a proper balance between practical matters of efficiency, and a compassionate understanding of what basic human needs are.

Make no mistake here, though. It will be argumentative. Frustrating. And not very nimble at all at first. And difficult though it may be, it will start us down the road of engaging each other more directly as a natural part of everyday community life. Get us to find ways to cooperate even if we don't agree on all hot button, cultural issues, because we don't do that at far greater cost.

What we've done for ourselves, predicament wise, is very easy to illustrate. We have, in effect, put ourselves into a variation of the "frog in the pot" experiment (which I'm sure, many of you already know about). That's where the pot, also containing water, is very slowly having the temperature of the water raised. The frog, in this case, doesn't know anything about making water hotter, so you can count on cooked hopper there. We, on the other hand, have been telling ourselves for years now that the pot is slowly having the temp raised, but we refuse to really (and I mean really) take it seriously. And we remain in the pot, doing the usual stupid things that put us here in the first place, and apparently not giving a damn if we get cooked too, or not.

I vote that we stop being stupid frogs, and get our asses up, motivated, and out of this circular rutt we're getting cooked in, so we can do something about it.

What do you say?

You Got To Pump It Up

And so fakery comes full circle, back to the basics of making something of little intrinsic value have a lot more shine than it was ever meant to have.

Facade products. Facade leaders. Facade issues. And yet we still try to maintain the facade of representational government, when we know a good portion of has been bought relatively cheap.

Getting rid of Capitalism isn't going to rid us of the human propensity for trying to put one over on the other guy, but it would sure go a long way in not having things be such a hot house environment for it; especially with that magic elixir of a fertilizer they call money.

SEC Cracks Down on Fake Stock News