posts in most recent order

The Pretend Economy.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

I stopped by a career councillor’s site the other day to see what this career councilor had on offer. She had some testimonials about how people experienced help when they sought her out. I listened closely to a few stories and I noticed that her clients were pretending that we are all living in the same economy as the one that existed in the 1990’s. That’s not the case. This economy is battered, beaten and fake. Taxes and inflation are higher. What worked in the 1990’s won’t work now. Having nostalgia for that 1990’s economy won’t help you to get a job in today’s economy. So I left the website.

Pretending isn’t what I was after.

I hoped the councillor would tell me how to trust this economy of 2024. I got the answer that I expected. Pretending isn’t enough.

The interventionist economy is one where foolish people have imagined that our government can pick economic winners and losers. There are people working in government who try to do that and who believe that boosting on-paper economic performance with government help is a good political and economic strategy. (This won’t work economically because it doesn’t allow competition between political equals to decide the best economic winners by virtue of their economic performance).

The interventionist economy is also one where selfish people believe that MMT can fundamentally change an economy of scarcity (the most essential feature of a real economy) to one with never ending abundance (government money printing can’t produce real value to back the currency).

The interventionist and MMT economy has failed to produce widespread prosperity. It will continue to fail.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Economies do better when they function in the context of beneficial optional exchanges between individuals under a system where rule of law applies the law to all people equally. As economic connection falls away from all of us because of rampant elite criminality in government and the private sector, the economy is becoming a place that excludes most Americans from earning a gainful existence through work.

That’s the trouble with non-prosecution of elite criminals in banking, in healthcare, in courts, in government. People who are in a protected class who can commit crimes that hurt ordinary people in order to get their hands on wealth that they didn’t earn ends the favorable connections present in a virtuous economy. That’s where we are today.

Fake elections similarly erode the beneficial network influence of representational politics.

When I hear about electronic money backing the U.S. dollar, when I imagine how electronic money demand is supposed to allow more dollar printing to keep the wheels of commerce spinning, I know that won’t work to restore economic connections that are virtuous. When I hear about splitting assets into smaller pieces so that the price can go up past what ordinary person can buy in total, I know that that won’t work either. Just more pretending.

Scarcity is a real feature of the real economy. Using MMT to pretend that scarcity doesn’t exist doesn’t change an economy into one with unlimited resources. The complex adaptive system that is an economy has a network of connections that are destroyed when criminals who harm our economy aren’t prosecuted.

As important as networks are in developing computers, it must be obvious to the IT world that these get-rich-quick systems will eventually fail. This will leave all of us who are excluded from the favored criminal network to live on without needful economic connections that will work for us. And the criminals escaping prosecution will not be able to help the economy to prosper either. Look closely. This economy is broken.

Calling All Hands! Policy change can make life better.

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Ever since the Great Recession, there has been struggle in America.

The Federal Reserve instituted policies that made life harder for most of us.

Many people have struggled even to maintain some sort of sanity in their life because of successive job losses during hostile takeovers. Others have struggled on the job front as some businesses closed their doors. Some have struggled to survive and thrive after the Covid Caper, facing challenges from an experimental vaccine requirement either as a recipient with side effects, a griever at the loss of a friend or a family member or a person fired for refusing the covid shot.

As real estate prices have soared, often up 33% from one year to the next, many have struggled to pay their property taxes or have lost their home. Grocery prices have inflated to the point that people have had to resort to skipped meals or the use of money-saver recipes, a strategy that will only temporarily lower the cost of food preparation in inflationary times.

Why call on All Hands to struggle more? Why? Because that’s how life will get better.

Return to sanity…Things to avoid doing: I hope for these things…

No more woke strategies in public schools. No more transgender education in schools. Reduced administrator salaries in schools to bring them in line with teacher salaries. Fewer administrators.

No more deregulated banking without Glass Steagall and with Holding Companies as a trap door to escape fiduciary duty. No more Too Big to Fail Banking (reduce the size of large banks). No more derivatives trading.

No more deregulated communications where Fake News is normal. If a falsehood is published, a retraction and a potential fine. No more censorship or propaganda.

No more regulatory mayhem in transportation with regulations requiring a new kind of car that costs more than people can afford. No more inflating car insurance costs.

No more regulatory quibbling about using natural gas energy to heat homes or cook with.

No more monopoly influence in the U.S. medical, pharmacy, education, banking.

No more woke military.

No more climate change dogma.

No more bribes in Congress to help foreign nations to get the deals that undermine American interests.

No more digital currencies that threaten cash as legal tender.

End unfunded mandates of all kinds. That would get rid of a lot of legislation that requires people to do things that they can’t really afford to do.

No more interventionist Congressional policies to pick economic winners and losers.

End and repeal all previous legislation that exceeds 100 pages. Future legislation will never exceed 20 pages. No more Think Tank legislation. Congress has to write the legislation and each Congress person who sponsors legislation has to justify it based on their constituency.

No more off-shoring tax advantages that lead corporations to invest in foreign rather than domestic labor, causing unemployment at home.

No more federal subsidy for Universities. Allow students to use a new low cost online training system that allows a person to prove competency by passing a basic test that proves mastery. No more tuition. Universities have failed America.

Instead we need so many things that require an All Hands effort:

We need new businesses. There should be a tax moratorium on new businesses with stepped gradual taxation of new businesses after 5 years. This allows new business to form because of new tax free advantages for small business.

Also, new businesses need an end to all regulatory renovation requirements for newly purchased or leased business buildings for the first 5 years of operation. Leaving in place only basic safety requirements, new businesses should not be required to meet a city’s latest huge expense requirement for new plumbing and wiring and many other details that really is all about graft.

Homes should cost what people can afford and therefore, there should be an end of monopoly price interference in real estate; investor ownership of American homes should end.

The wheels of government can do more good if We the People can draft and pass a a new Constitutional Amendment to further limit Congressional power with term limits.

We need less warfare and in that interest I suggest that we should reduce the budget of the Pentagon and DOD and require a yearly audit with no new funds until the audit is completed. We should close foreign military bases. We should bring our soldiers, sailors and airmen home.

We the People need to draft and institute a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Congress should forego any salary payment until a balanced budget is submitted for the coming year.

We the People should put an end to all previous emergency powers. Emergency powers just call for disaster capitalism. Future emergencies without special powers will never last more than one year: no matter what the circumstances, emergencies must end.

People who commit crimes against government while holding government office must be kicked out of office and brought to justice. Their monies if obtained through crime should be seized and doled out to their victims.

We should end vaccine requirements. Vaccines have proven harmful. A new study of vaccines may be in order since the CDC just admitted that vaccines haven’t been properly studied but the CDC shouldn’t do it. Instead of mandating vaccines, we should make sure that they are available if they are safe but there should be no more vaccine requirements.

We the People should end electronic voting. We should also end mail-in voting since it has led to voting fraud. We should make sure voting reflects the public’s votes.

Americans need better than what we have. Neoliberalism has led to an overgrowth of malignant organizational politics and that has harmed individuals. We the people are not grist for the neoliberal mill. We have a dysfunctional unaccountable government. We have banking that’s been subsidized for failures. We have untrustworthy media and censorship. We have overregulation and a broken justice system.

We would all like to see a healthier America that’s prosperous and sensible. Reining in the worst abuses caused by deregulation in the areas of finance, energy, communications and transportation would be a start. That deregulation happened in the 1980’s and 1990’s and it was followed by reregulation in favor of corporate interests. Changing that set of policies would go a long way to improve American prosperity. Stop hurting the little guy and allow willing hands to improve our nation’s economic performance by reregulating towards balanced economic protections that also prevent largescale malinvestments.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Reality check for all of us.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

When I hire someone to do work on my property, I get an estimate. Sometimes I get many estimates. These are bids to do the work. Then I pick the company that I like the best and have the work done. There is an exchange that happens: work done on the one hand that benefits me and then money paid out to workers on the other hand to reward them for their trouble and supplies. That’s pretty straight forward, usually. I write a check on my bank account and I’m done.

Likewise, when my old pair of boots wears out or when I run out of milk, I exchange an agreed upon amount for the replacement items. Pretty straight forward, usually. I write a check or use my credit card and I’m done.

I keep hearing people say that the U.S. debt is increasing by 1 trillion dollars every 100 days. What is it buying? $1,000,000,000,000 should buy something. When I pay my taxes, I give up buying something tangible for my own welfare and pay the government a tax. I expect that tax to buy something. I assume that $1 T is in digital dollars because printing that much in paper dollars wouldn’t be convenient. So, what is $1,000,000,000,000 paying to buy every 100 days?

I know what it is!

I’m going to tell you. Eventually…but first some observations.

I watched the 2020 election get stolen (read my blog posts; I heard video from first hand testimony and expert testimony posted online). I heard about the fake insurrection (on public radio and in blog posts online). I watched the false accusations aftermath and jailing of Americans under fake pretenses. I watched lawfare attacks against Donald Trump (blog stories online). I have watched the Congress and DOJ mostly ignore money that has flowed for political influence to the Biden family. I have watched inflation rising across America (groceries, healthcare, tuition, taxes, energy). I have watched jobs become less plentiful and less rewarding for people’s work. I have read about Americans being attacked in the workplace for their political beliefs and sometimes for their race if they are white.

I have watched people being compelled as a requirement of their jobs to participate in the experimental covid treatment after the danger of covid was exaggerated by lie after lie. I have seen people hounded out of healthcare for telling the truth about covid or for refusing to take the experimental vax. I have observed the deathrate after covid go up (according to blog posts and news stories from the insurance world and also a few people in my own life) because the covid vax precipitated premature death in many (much video showing athletes collapsing on the field). The border is open for most who would enter the nation illegally (in news stories on public radio). I have heard that digital currencies are going to replace fiat dollars (from blog posts and video of bankers speaking). I have heard that Americans will receive a subdermal chip as a condition of life. I have heard that Americans will be experimented upon to launch the new age of cyborgs (the dawning age of transhumanism). The Biden Administration continues to support wars in Ukraine and Israel despite negative public sentiments regarding those wars.

We continue to use the same digital technologies to count votes that we used in 2020. People crossing the border illegally are being groomed to vote illegally in the next election. People arrested for the fake insurrection are still in jail. Donald Trump is awaiting sentencing for a fake crime. Congress and the DOJ are still ignoring alleged influence crimes of the Biden family. No one in Washington D.C. has been arrested for crimes committed against America. Inflation continues to get worse. Jobs for Americans are evaporating. American companies are tangled up in politics and pay far less attention to productivity. Desperation is growing among families. Some have lost a family member to the vax or have gained a new disability in their family. Some have lost a family member to murder by a criminal border crosser. Some can’t pay for their groceries, transportation, healthcare, energy. Broadcast media has become unreliable and partisan.

I know what this is.

This is politics without consent. That’s what the money sloshing around is paying for: nonrepresentational governance.

What I would like to point out is that the federal government isn’t auditing itself to say what it is buying. When money becomes digitized in the government’s spending account, apparently it ceases to buy things. It buys influence instead. It buys the government’s excuse to raise inflation and tax you without an audit. It buys the cyborg initiative. It buys nothing that you or I would want. It is a kind of anti-real, anti-money against everyone’s better interest.

Another point is this: these spending claims can all be fake and still the damage would continue. With no audit, I can’t tell if $1T is being spent every 100 days. It sounds absurd. But uncounted spending seems to be causing damage to destroy our nation, to destroy American families, to end workplace productivity, to murder and destroy America, to end rule of law fairness. The destruction of all of these good things seems to be the goal. That’s what the alleged expenditure of 1 trillion dollars every one hundred days is being spent to buy. How do you like it?

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Thomas Jefferson said: “When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.” (taken from AZ Quotes http://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/tyranny-founding fathers.html).

James Madison said, “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” (AZ Quotes)

Thomas Jefferson also said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” (AZ Quotes)

Benjamin Franklin said, “The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes, the greater the need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance and enable him to plunder at pleasure.” Taken from the Foundation for Economic Education, (https://fee.org/articles/17-benjamin-franklin-quotes-on-tyranny-liverty-and-rights/).

A house costs too much.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

The housing market’s pricing is too high.

There is collateral fraud in bidding up houses to the level that ordinary individual home buyers can’t buy. Exhorbitant pricing is evidence that residential real estate has been bought by investors with deep pockets that have systematically bought and traded up housing prices to drive residential market prices out of the grasp of ordinary people. This is collateral fraud when the misrepresented value is used in sequence to secure serial properties that are subsequently overvalued.

I have recently read that only 23% of the housing market is owned by investors. I wonder if that includes bank owned foreclosures. I must observe here that individual home buyers can’t compete with investors who have access to cheaper and larger amounts of capital.

I have also recently read that when investors bought houses in 2010, putting a floor under American real estate after prices plunged in 2010, they saved the housing market and didn’t cause the ridiculous price increases that we see today. I don’t agree that this saved the housing market. Preventing a market correction is interfering with natural market based pricing. That’s a kind of monopoly power and it’s a RICO offense.

Recently when I was looking at real estate pricing across the nation using the internet, I received a call on my cell phone asking me if I had any property to sell. I said no. I get these calls every week. It isn’t an individual calling me who wants to live in my house. It is an investor’s call center.

I would never have bought a mansion to live in. I always knew that I didn’t want the upkeep that a mansion requires. And I didn’t want to pay the tax-man a huge amount in order to live in an extravagant space. And yet my ordinary home is now priced at what was once considered the cost of a mansion.

There would be an outcry if people’s houses were valued at the new accelerating price for the purpose of taxation. The value of my property has risen already by at least 200% according to the state tax board. This has significantly raised my property tax. But when I do a local real estate search in my area bracketed in that price range, the properties that come up are far more humble than the home I currently own. I think that means that I can only sell my house at this tax based price valuation to an investor who will immediately list this property for $400,000 more. I’m seeing $100,000 price increases yearly for several years serially in many real estate markets across the nation. This rate of price increase will effectively remove most real estate beyond what is affordable for a family to purchase. It’s also why retirees aren’t downsizing. If they sell and buy a smaller property, they can’t harvest a profit from their larger property. The smaller one will cost the same as their larger property’s sale price.

American families can’t buy in this market. They are being shut out of housing by investors. Market forces aren’t pitiless like this but monopoly forces are. The rate of property taxes will likely force people out of housing eventually. Slow but sure. Retired people who live in states that don’t charge property taxes for retired people will still go to ruin under this price scheme because inflation and taxation of other parts of the economy will bleed them. Relentless. Faster by far than water wearing away stone.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

ADDENDUM:

I just read a great article that goes far to explain what is happening in American real estate. It is available here: https://www.coreysdigs.com/u-s/university-migrant-smart-hubs-private-equity-and-the-leveraged-buyout-of-america/ . The title is “University Migrant Smart Hubs, Private Equity and the Leveraged Buyout of America,” and I found a reference to it on Solari.com, the author is Corey Diggs and it is dated June 15th, 2024. Don’t miss this information rich source. Corey Diggs also recommended a book entitled: Plunder, Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America by Brendan Ballou, which is promised to be another information rich source that will clear up your confusions and explain in detail what is happening to real estate accross America.

Welcome the real.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

One of the things that I loved about the 1970’s was people’s willingness to hire anyone who wanted to work. There wasn’t a lot of exclusion for political reasons in the 1970’s. True, you couldn’t talk about your politics on the job. You had to conform to a proper appearance. But you could work and make contributions at work.

Jobs were more stable and the economy was struggling under inflation but people worked. Any body who showed up looking for work would be asked can you do this? Can you do that? Great…you’re hired. There were a lot of jobs that didn’t pay well. But working allowed people to earn a little and move forward in the hope of better times ahead. In the economy new opportunities were coming around all the time. If you wanted to try something new, you could find something that was fresh and new and happening. Because newcomers who wanted to contribute were always welcome.

That is part of what’s missing in today’s economy….there are far too many disqualifications. Everyone isn’t welcome in the 21st century economy. The cancel economy is a failed economy. I can only wonder if turning toward a certain model of politics on the job and turning away from what people can do is all about turning off the economy of the real. But having reality in the economy by letting people make their effort to contribute is what a real economy is. Not just a certain kind of person with a certain kind of attitude, but anyone who wants to work.

If a government subsidy pays to have robots or AI take the jobs away from people by paying robot and AI makers to make more robots and more AI, that isn’t a profitable system. Governments don’t really get to choose economic winners by a process of excluding everyone else who then becomes a designated loser. You can threaten the real economy but you can’t really stop it.

People have contributions to make and those are real. Robots and AI are fake and government money that was stolen from workers and used as a subsidy to offset the extra cost of robots and AI in the hope of creating and controlling a less vibrant economy does not produce an economy that has staying power. You can’t stop the real.

When Mr. Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, that was fake. Look at today’s politics and you can see that Mr. Biden isn’t really acting like he’s the President. He doesn’t act real. That’s why those acting behind him imagine that they are in control, they think they have turned off the real. But have they really achieved that?

Look at the Trump trials that continue to prove that you can’t turn off the real. No one is fooled forever. Real has a lot of power.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism. It’s available at Amazon.com.

Addendum:

Yesterday, I did some more research into AI and it looks like ChatGPT is using neural nets instead of coding to generate the appearance of artificial intelligence. I found this great article to read: https://www.flexos.work/learn/ai-in-the-workplace-how-to-use-ai-for-work-2024, AI in the Workplace: How to use AI for work: Comprehensive 2024 Guide, at FlexOs by Daan van Rossum. This article says that you can use ChatGPT to do searches that can save worktime for higher function activities that require reasoning. Chat GPT is only about a year old and already has a lot of users.

Another Addendum:

As university graduations are happening at this time of year, I’ve enjoyed two commencement speeches that are a repudiation of the idea that things can go on as they have. I read one and listened to the other. The first, I read: “Full Text: Harrison Butker of Kansas City Chiefs Graduation Speech”, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/harrison-butker-speech-at-benedictine, Register Staff/ Nation, May 16, 2024. I watched the video of the second speech, Jerry Seinfeld’s Duke Commencement, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76QV2SrSqgo. Jerry Seinfeld said that whatever your area of study is, with the world changing so fast that area may not be where you find success in the world. He suggested that you go at life with a sense of humor instead of expecting a certain planned outcome. Harrison Butker turned away from woke ideologies and suggested that traditional values and efforts would lead to a better life outcome. Both speakers moved away from an expectation that modern life’s prescriptions will work as we head into the current economic and political headwinds. They both seemed to acknowledge that a new reality is asserting itself today.

Can you speak for yourself?

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Strange events continue to unfold across America. I was struck recently by a video that I watched. It was a video of a completely inarticulate group of students at a university in Georgia. In fact, they were so inarticulate that I don’t know what they were complaining about. The video began with a senator that was visiting a class. Students became upset by something that they thought was worth complaining to the senator about. Rudely. But none of them could articulate a single idea of their own. One by one they brought up their phone screen with text that they could read loudly as they exited the classroom. I still don’t know what their beef was. I wonder if they know.

That brings me to ponder the influence of narratives in modern life. Good stories begin with something real. Hemmingway said to all writers everywhere that the way to write well is to write one good sentence that is true, then expand out into narrative from there. What happens if you can’t do that first part? What if you don’t know what’s true?

That may be the terrible conundrum of those Georgia students. In the deluge of information that is pouring out narratives that mostly aren’t true, it can be hard to know anything that is true. And if you have lost a sense of what’s true for you, if you’ve lost even relative truth, you can’t use relative truth to backtrack to absolute truth that you are confident about. Truth matters because reality matters. Parroting what can be found on the internet doesn’t count as having an informed point of view. Instead, that can be just reading propaganda.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the strategy called “divide and conquer.” If you want to destroy social solidarity, one way to do it is to encourage people to pick one of two opposing sides. In war, that’s easy. Pick a side. Rationalize about which side should win. Then yell loudly for the side you want to win. A long time ago, Sun Tsu (544 BC) said that all wars are based on deception. In 1918, in the U.S., Senator Hiram Johnson said that the first casualty of war is truth. I’m sure others have said this. Will wars go on forever if you can’t find a true reason to stop the war (because you can’t witness any part of it or know whether stories you hear about the war are true)?

Do you ever feel tangled in narratives? I’m against censorship because getting untangled from opposing and differing narratives is easier when people can point out where the story doesn’t make sense or isn’t true. What if young people who have a lot of screen time, don’t know where to begin to untangle opposing narratives? What if they don’t feel that they know enough to declare their own personal position? What if they aren’t confident that they can find a truth that will calm their sense of controvery and upheaval? That would make them feel less powerful and more frustrated. Like the students in Georgia.

Truth is powerful. And it’s easier to find truth when it’s right in front of you. That’s one of my complaints about globalization. Distant wars have a lot of tangled narratives but no way to untangle the lies from the truth or even to recognize what may be true or untrue. I’m not in favor of sending money to distant wars.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Narrative is distorted in non-issue politics also. In U.S. party politics, the Democrat Party and Republican Party have evolved into some extreme positions that oppose each other. Issues such as gun contol and abortion for example used to be called non-issues that would strongly engage the electorate and grab their attention. But the idea of non-issues was only to engage not to have consensus.

Non-issues split the electorate 50% on each side. They are hot button issues. As the role of government has become more intrusive in people’s lives, control has become the goal and moving that way instead of toward consensus is where the pursuit of non-issue hot button politics has led us. Unfortunately. Both the Democrat and Republican parties like people to fight over non-issues because those are issues that divide and conquer the American electorate, wasting political energy. In the meantime, both parties are bankrupting the United States Treasury and destroying the monetary system. Would this have happened if people could articulate a political position without taking an extreme viewpoint that strongly opposes the other 50% of the electorate?

If you feel that you can’t articulate your political position except to say yeah what she said or yeah what he said, you can improve by keeping a daily journal where you write down what happened to you each day and what you thought about it. When you have a question, write it in your journal and go research an answer. Later, when someone asks what you think, you’ll be able to tell them.

Warring against know how in the American workplace

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How many people do you know who have approached their careers with careful attention to developing their competencies only to be bullied out of the American workforce? The answer for me is a whole lot of them.

Almost everyone I know who I respected as a significant contributor who conscientiously and carefully gave their best effort day after day have been pushed out of their job. They have had their careers ended not just by buy-outs but also by a new manager philosophy. This neoliberal philosophy is profit first even if the final outcome is destruction of the enterprise’s good reputation and the end of the enterprise.

I personally know nurses, librarians, managers, teachers, scientists, bank loan processors, retail salesmen and probably others. These employees were pushed out because they insisted on telling the truth about the workplace. Also because they were trying to achieve excellent outcomes. And because they had consideration for fellow employees and customers. They also had good mental attention for doing the job as it was meant to be done as supported by the mission of the workplace. They specifically became educated and trained in order to do excellent work. These kinds of workers have been banned in many American job sites. Knowledge worker competency is no longer wanted in America. In the effort to boost profits and change every policy in the interest of profits American enterprises have been ignoring ordinary good sense and safety and getting rid of people who behave with a conscience.

I haven’t been motivated to write about this before today but I do so in response to a great article that I read. The title of the article is: “Suicide mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane,” by Maureen Tkacik, Mar 28, 2024, from The American Prospect: Ideas, Politics and Power, (https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/?fbclid=IwAR2FGVrz6QFhEcB1nXdBxMUGvt3u9O55w0lfAMt1DS1ploRaw7c3VbmKGuQ_aem_AcX16zTCFmG5LqceRQiYUy96WdT6B6kElQkZ-haDVjcQIA0dmHY0LKwj_pjNkMcF5RY). This article is a great place to start understanding why the new management strategy needs to end.

This article captures the feeling of workplace hopelessness at Boeing that a great thirty year quality and safety inspector engineer named John Barnett experienced. It described his testimony about the workplace policies that made it impossible for him to continue making safety contributions. John Barnett was making a legal desposition about the troubles at Boeing when he was found dead. He didn’t get to give his third day of testimony. It is clear that John described workplace bullying. And it’s undeniable that bullying escalated to a bullet in John Barnett’s temple. Some say suicide and others say murder.

Putting it mildly, I don’t think that this was ok. It wasn’t ok for John Barnett, it wasn’t ok for any of us who want to ride in an airplane and it wasn’t ok for Boeing. It wasn’t ok for the many dead people from two separate total death Boeing plane crashes.

It shows that the new manager style is tragic and terrible and we should stop it. The choice of sacrificing a company in the interest of a short-term manager profit is called the principle agent problem and it is a form of control fraud.

The CEO made money in the millions, the stock went up in price benefitting share holders and the company many once revered and that John Barnett made a huge effort to save, to correct, to improve may never be successful again. John Barnett died while he was trying to tell this story.

I have to say here that I think that stock price increases don’t make up for the losses that were externalized to others. And I would say that is true even if an insurance company can pay off the families that lost their family member. I would say that even if employees that are bullied out can find another job. I would say that no matter what the stock sales buy in the form of lifestyle.

We should also realize that the American workplace has been seriously harmed under this neoliberal policy set. Good workers who could contribute to make enterprises succeed, can’t do that anymore. Also remember the doctors, nurses, firemen, teachers and others that were dismissed because they wouldn’t take a covid vaccine. They were also sidelined because they were good at their jobs and had a conscience.

If you want to learn how neoliberalism got started, where it came from and what its tragedies are beyond the Boeing tragedy, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at amazon.com. I explain how we started with classical liberalism, moved to modern liberalism and now are experiencing the unpleasantness of neoliberalism.

A final comment I’d like to make is that most ordinary jobs in this country have experienced this radical management change under discussion here. While some jobs are under corporations, others are in government. In a fascist system where private industry partners with government, radical destructive changes can remodel the old systems that produced a stable and productive economy in the direction of new systems that have control fraud or that have been redirected towards corrupt political goals. It is hard for work-a-day people to stop this change. Many Americans feel frustrated.

Hope for a better future in the United States

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

I wrote my book, Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism for publication in 2015 after three years of research and writing. You can still order a copy at Amazon.com (https://www.amazon.com/Political-Catsup-Economy-Fries-Opportunism/dp/0996541713).

At that time, most people didn’t talk about neoliberalism as much as they do now. Most people thought that the politic was someone else’s job to worry about. Most people didn’t talk about Washington D.C.’s corruption which is now a daily topic. At the time, I was worrying about harms to our economy and the politic that happened during and after the Great Recession that was caused by derivatives. Derivatives also were undermining the global economy. I was interested in American history as a treasure trove of information about how we got to our then current state of affairs. I was investigating from primary source materials.

I looked carefully to see what influences could be problematic in our great American political experiment. Since then, I have continued observing the politics and economics of these United States. More recently I purchased a copy of Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon Haunted World, because Sagan was proposing that Americans were losing their ability to think using scientific reason and he was worried that powerful groups would use people’s ignorance of basic science to cause harms.

Parts of Carl Sagan’s book are a little dated now because it was published in 1995. Yet, the premise is still good and has proven to be accurate. People in America have mostly lost the skills to understand basic mathematics and science enough to realize that they are being conned in the twenty first century. We were threatened and conned during the Covid years and conned by derivatives during the run-up to the Great Recession and now there is an effort to con us with digital currency in order to steal everything that people have and enjoy. Threats against free speech are happening whenever those who are capable of doing basic math and science or who understand politics and economics try to explain truths to those that others in power are trying to dupe.

We have come a long way since 1995 and since 2015 toward a better understanding about what is causing our problems. Nowadays, you can find fantastic essays describing and explaining what is happening in politics and economics across the United States and globally. For example, T.J.Harker’s essay 2024: “The Stand of the Based Americans,” (from mansworldmag.online) and “Wake Up Call,” an essay by James Howard Kunstler (kunstler.com). These essays are efficient ways to catch up on the worries that beset us all today.

The outrageousness of our position is becoming more clear. We see the corruption in media, monopolies, and in government at the highest levels. So now you and I have to choose either to hope or to despair. I choose hope.

Hope can lead to a better tomorrow eventually. I’m hoping for a future reconciliation between the current bad guys and good guys that have found each other and formed separate alliances. The social predators vs. the social prey have begun to relate to each other differently because of social media, another technology with surprising and destructive potentials that most of us don’t understand all that well.

Social media has proven to be a powerful agglomeration tool to group people with similar interests into camps that don’t see a common social interest because they don’t get the same information and also because there is no assumption in social media that good can exist as a force in the world at all… instead just a kind of venal avarice and hunger to better oneself at any cost. That isn’t a Christian viewpoint but it is a neoliberal one.

I hope for kindness. I hope for a renewal of representative government where elections aren’t stolen and people have a strong voice in their government’s actions which are limited in scope and accountable to the people. I hope for concern and regret about harmful consequences to others. I hope for rule of law to reestablish consequences for harm. I hope for educating people more about how to assemble a better social system that isn’t gamed for the few social predators at control points. I’m hoping for less political centralization. I am hoping for fewer social predators in positions of power since we can see more clearly now the danger that they pose. I am hoping that the addiction to easy money will fade just as I’m hoping that social imbalances will get fixed so that other addictions will not undermine people’s chance to live a healthy and fulfilled lifespan.

In appreciating all the wrong things that are happening today, I am optimistic that we can accomplish certain improvements. Improving how people live together by resolving to care about consequences has been known and appreciated over the timespan of human beings on this earth. You can find concern for the welfare of other people in various world religions. You can find it in rational humanism, the belief that people can choose better outcomes through a rational means. We can find it in open discourse where problems are recognized and discussed and rectified. You can find concern for others in applying the rule of law so that harms have consequences for those that harm others. We can live more harmoniously than we currently are doing.

Reaching for limitless power leads to having less.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Julian Assange has been persecuted by people who imagine that they have infinite power because of the “War on Terror.” Remember the War on Terror. Remember rendition and torture. People prosecuting the War on Terror wanted no limits to what they could do. And still the pursuit of limitless power under the terror watchword continues.

No one seems to be making these power players stay within the bounds of their alotted power as set out by law and no one seems to be making them do their job the way it’s supposed to be done. “Make me.” “Stop me.” And if you can’t make the government do or not do and you can’t stop the government from doing something that is diplomatically and legally wrong then some would think that means the power players have infinite power. That isn’t what it means. Check it out. The United States power gang running the government in Washington has less power now than ever. Less power? How?

When the U.S. federal government decided to use drones to assassinate perceived political threats, that decision undermined the Rules of Diplomacy. The Rules of Diplomacy were developed and modeled on Italian City State policies that enhanced trade. One significant outcome of the application of the Rules of Diplomacy is that during the American Civil War, European powers refused a request by the South to assassinate Northern diplomats visiting Europe. Europe refused to kill those men visiting Europe because of the Rules of Diplomacy. And the Civil War happened which killed a lot of Americans and not any Europeans.

The Rules of Diplomacy evolved after The Peace Treaty of Westphalia that happened in 1648 to stop the Thirty Years War that killed 8 million Europeans. The astonishing amount of death that occurred during the Thirty Years War happened because people fought against a ruling class that wanted to have uniform religious beliefs among its population. If your King adopted a new or old religion, you were supposed to conform to it. Conquered people likewise should adopt the conquerer’s religion. Europeans fought against this notion and after a lot of death and a lot of missed opportunity for better life outcomes, the Peace of Westphalia stopped the fighting and accepted the idea that people can choose for themselves what they want to believe in.

As I watch politicians throwing away the Rules of Diplomacy by shooting down perceived political opponents in far away places with drones, I begin to understand the necessity of those rules. I predict that eventually, if assassination by drone continues, a new technology will come along that will be more portable, accessible and deadly. And without the Rules of Diplomacy, this technology will be used to assassinate many in the political arena. Bang, no more diplomacy. It is a bad and foolish move to throw away the Rules of Diplomacy. How will you conduct peace when all your diplomats are dead or becoming a diplomat is just a death sentence?

Likewise, the use of Social Media to influence and even brain-wash people under the mistaken belief that censorship is a social good and it would be better if people believed the same narratives, however false they may be or become is foolish. Eight million Europeans died to end that the last time it was tried. I am amazed to see anyone try to make everyone think alike now in the twenty first century. If the twentieth century was the Century of War Hubris, the twenty first century may be the Century of the Fool.

As we measure the strength of the United States, I am sorry to say that we have weakened under the War on Terror. We have lost resolve. We aren’t resolved to do anything prosperous. American cities are deteriorating. We aren’t resolved to be a force of good in world affairs. No one trusts the Dog King in Washington. We aren’t resolved to protect children or help them to meet their potential as human beings. And in this way we abandon a brighter future. We aren’t following or listening for what is Sacred in this life. Global Warming fears and protecting Gaia aren’t the Sacred. Fear of death by disease or starvation isn’t the Sacred. There isn’t a single social good that is being protected. Wanton greed has replaced those things that were more powerful and more important. Ego based power and ego based greed can’t help a nation to prosper. It just has no power to do so.

Narratives explaining our Fall from Grace imply that Communists are trying to take over the country. Limitless power is what Communists seek, therefore it must be Communists changing the country in order to take whatever they can and destroy whatever was best. Weaponizing the law in lawfare contests is part of centralization, communism, fascism, totalitarianism and it doesn’t grow power. It just destroys. That’s all it can do.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.

So welcome to the Century of the Fool. We can change back to wiser ways and now it’s clear that we should do so. Why wait? Free Julian Assange. Stop the War on Terror.

The strange 2024 presidential election

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Everything isn’t possible even with cheating. Some absurdities stand out as ridiculous. People who make a perfect political puppet just don’t garner the respect of anyone. Leaving behind the world of voter fidelity in favor of fake elections has now painted Biden sponsors into a corner.

Biden isn’t a serious contender for 2024 because of his mental deterioration which is obvious whenever he tries to speak publicly. There have been too many confounded confusions for anyone to understand what he may have been trying to say. And Biden can’t seem to recall either even if you ask him right after he mispeaks. Or five minutes later.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

As I listened to AM radio this morning, the announcers were suggesting that because anything can happen, (which implies: without vote fidelity and with cheating again) either Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris could become the next President.

I think that the public wouldn’t like either of them, but the previous supporters that installed Biden might prefer either of these two persons to either Donald Trump or RFKennedy Jr., which are both more politically powerful than M. Obama or Harris. Trump or Kennedy both talk about the real world and its problems instead of supporting a capital driven narrative that monopolists, NGO’s, the pharmaceutical industry or the MIC supports. Capital driven narratives and plans to take over the world are running out of steam lately.

When I listen to and look at today’s politics, it seems that the hot air let out by financialization has heated up insecurities that the big easy money winners have about losing it all. Perhaps they would like to secure their gains and expand them. At the very least, the political machinery of Washington DC wants to keep the wheels turning that have been their gravy train for decades of time (in other words, not get fired).

Easy money has done all that it can do and it’s over now. Surprisingly, it didn’t build any real wealth, just a lot of capital. The sick and uneasy feeling that the beneficiaries of easy money have isn’t going away.

Even if the 2024 election ends with another fraudulent outcome, there’s no way to rob anyone else. Our nation’s prosperity is in need of renewal before anyone else can be robbed. I realize that the Cloward Piven strategy is in full play right now and the money system is about to collapse. Some would say this is the moment of ultimate theft. But I think that theft happened a long time ago.