There are ten million illegal immigrants in America, and five million unemployed Americans. Meanwhile, Washington is trying to make these illegal immigrants legal; and all the special interests groups that pay for the advertising that puts politicians in office are sending jobs overseas by the boatload. The only part of the job market that is growing is the service sector. All the good professional jobs are going away. Business likes it. Washington likes it. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. It’s the new American Dream.
Meanwhile, those ten million illegal immigrants are having tens of millions of children, all of whom are American citizens because they are born on U.S. soil. It’s no wonder we have such an unemployment problem now, this illegal immigrant situation has been ignored for so many years – because the powerful construction industry needs the cheap labor – that it’s festered into an ugly situation that threatens class warfare. That’s what happens when special interests have so much power; and when the people have so little. It’s Israel-vs.-the Palestinians all over again, in a hundred different niches, all along the U.S.-Mexico border. And the Department of Defense is planning to shut down 25% of the U.S. bases; most of them in Texas and California ~ who’s play book are they going by?
This whole terrorism deal is giving religious fundamentalism a bad name. Big business likes that. People with shallow convictions and tepid religion are more easily swayed by advertising. That means higher profits with less effort. Religion is counter productive too. It gives people the inner strength to stand up for their rights, to demand equality, and the power to make the filthy rich feel guilty for all the poor sods they’ve gotten rich off of by ripping them off. That’s why the super rich have their own churches, schools, universities, clubs, and even shopping centers. Segregation is back. Contact with commoners like you and I make them feel guilty, so they avoid it at all costs. The ironic part is that we poor people are the ones who pay for their isolationism, because they have all the power. Not even in America, where politicians are elected by the people, do the people have any power because the politicians have all the money from the rich people to pay for the television ads that tell people who to vote for. I hope the Iraqis keep this in mind when they create their new constitution.
Google added a billion new web pages to its search engine last month. With each passing day it gets harder and harder for people to advertise on the web; and more and more costly to reach fewer and fewer customers. Ten years from now there will be so many web pages that people will be paying $1.00 per click. Everybody loves the web though; we don’t mind that 30% of the cost of the things we purchase any more goes to pay for the web. What the hell, Bill Gates Himself owns 30% of Microsoft and we don’t mind giving him $30 for every $100 copy of MS Office we purchase – He needs the money. And besides, they have really elaborate, high tech, exciting, innovative ads on TV. Why not ~ there’s no competition. It’s baffling why they have ads at all, unless to give us the illusion there is competition ~ so they can charge even more for their products.
Just how DO you prevent situations like happened with Chrysler? The government bailed them out of bankruptcy, then built them back to profitability by giving them major contracts to build Army personnel carriers, tanks, and other armaments. Then Daimler- Benz purchased Chrysler and not only got access to all our military technology but also took everything that the American government and the American people had invested in the firm and its future.
Now that Germany is no longer an independent nation, but a state in the European Union, this policy should be re-evaluated. Of course, every corporation in the world is doing that to America now, with outsourcing and every manageable variation thereof. It’s too bad corporate citizens can’t be charged with treason because they sure as hell would be guilty – of terrorism too, most likely.
The American people have paid for all the research and development on our advanced military technology, so it is only right that their companies should be able to benefit too. “Made in the U.S.A.” should become once again a respected trademark worldwide as a symbol of quantity, dependability, and simplicity. If American companies can manage to create superlative machines and materials, surely their market share will increase and profitability will follow on short order. Only mediocre technologies need to depend upon marketing and manipulation of the public to sell their products. Hitler said that, much to the consternation of all the Marxist capitalists the world around.
Much of our military technology has been lost to foreign espionage already – the Chinese have our best nuclear and rocket technologies; the rest of the world all our best space technology via the International Space Station project. We are only wasting money keeping it all ultra secret. Furthermore, the only purpose in keeping these technologies secret any longer is to ensure that the Red Chinese economy will benefit from them; and nobody else. The Chinese satellite launching operations have already practically put the American aerospace industry out of competition (we must pay for decades of research overhead; they have only to pay for espionage in stealing our technology.) Better to get what remaining value we can out of it by letting American industry use it. The military is good at creating new things; but American industry has the ingenuity and creativity to go much farther still. Too bad neither knows it, because everything is classified out of reach. So much for positive reinforcement.
With much of the existing stockpile of classified technology dispersed to industry, the military will then be free to advance our capabilities to the next level. This will spur research and development in American companies too. Our security apparatus is shot with holes already; this will give us the opportunity to start from scratch and build an impenetrable security network to keep this new generation of technology American; always. Student loans should be doubled, with options to pay them back via federal or military service or research for the Defense Department at the graduate level. Likewise, universities will be encouraged to open up as many staff positions as possible to provide students work that is convenient to their studies. Especially foreign students because they pay so much higher tuition. Then these foreign students can go home with their powerful education, and build all the technology that American can’t.
Those who make over a certain amount should be able to designate exactly how they want it to be spent by the government.
Corporations can go further, in designating specific research to be funded a-la Sematech. It’s hard enough to give lots of money away. The least the government can do is give some tangible return on their investment. Accountability will be enforced. Any breakthrough will become an IPO and make the rich richer. Any failure will be a tax deduction and none of the venture capitalists will lose their mansions.
Day trading in the stock exchanges – by either Americans or foreign nationals – should be considered a felony. Investing is a long term enterprise. Day trading is robbery by definition. People who lose money in day trading should not be allowed to deduct the losses from their federal taxes; ditto for gambling losses. They’re both mental illnesses. There should also be an investigation into the role of computerized trading in the extreme volatility of the stock indexes, which happens intraday, day-to-day, and otherwise. The number of shares traded on any given day lately exceeds the number of shares traded in a week, ten years ago back before computer trading.
Every week there’s an outbreak of Mad Cow Disease or Bird Flu that sends stocks reeling. The scientists scratch their heads wondering what could be wrong. Any idiot knows the problem: animals have minds too and if they don’t use them, they go crazy. Apparently scientists will all be going nuts any time soon too, having shown little evidence of using their bird brains but always deferring to their bovine balls; I call it the “military industrial complex” that has endowed them with so much respect for their own inestimable expertise that they can’t possibly imagine they are wrong about anything. We all know what happened to Jesus, who claimed to have done nothing wrong at all . . .
Can we pay off the national debt? It is reprehensible that Congress voted to give a $1.6 trillion tax cut, and $1.5 trillion of it went to the richest 1% of Americans. When you are a homeowner and you have some extra cash you don’t spend it all on a trip to Fiji; you pay down the mortgage or sock away some money for the kids education. Instead they are taking money out of the poor people’s retirement fund, Social Security. Over 80% of the wear and tear on highways is done by the large heavy trucks; yet it’s the little car
drivers who pay for it all. Ditto for how the American system facilitates the rich getting richer; compliments of the penny ante taxes of millions of hard working middle class Americans.
Recently the NASDAQ went from over 5000 to under 2000. Before this happened virtually every major stock brokerage firm, every business magazine, and every business evangelist on TV told investors to put at least 40% of their stocks in firms listed on the NASDAQ. Here in Austin – a hub of the high tech boom – most folks put more than that, trying to support the local businesses. We lost everything. Everybody but Michael Dell and the other senior executives at Dell and the other major firms. I wonder how many of them followed the advice of all the “experts”? They’ve made Martha Stewart’s case into an Inquisition just to warn the tens of thousands of other super rich folks who profited criminally from the tech boom and bust; to dive for cover – and stay there.
The benefits of federal grandiosity should NOT go to those multinational firms that have closed down U.S. facilities and moved any of their operations overseas during the latest recession. They have shown themselves to be unAmerican, and their charter to operate in the U.S. should be revoked. This would probably happen to all the large cap, Fortune 500 companies. Let them fend for themselves in the world market against the European activist community. Americans have always done best with small and mid- sized companies anyway.
The same goes for companies whose directors like Sam Walton at Wall Mart, Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Michael Dell at Dell Computers own such a huge share of the stock that whenever anybody purchases one of their products at least 25% of the price goes straight to the CEO or the Board of Directors. People who can do that with a clear conscience are no longer human beings. Fifty years ago they called that racketeering, profiteering, and put those thugs in jail for the rest of their days. Gates, Dell, et al deserve no less.
Otherwise, the Bush Administration will never create the 3.2 million jobs they want in 2004 if they continue blind support of big business. The large cap companies will just keep sending new jobs overseas where labor is cheaper; or continue to lobby for permanent resident status for the cheap immigrant workers. No, if Bush et al want to create jobs they have to support the small and mid cap companies. They better get going because right now the rate of new jobs being created doesn’t even keep up with the growth of the work force itself.
The economy is like a multi engine aircraft run by a great big rubber band, like the balsa wood model airplanes they used to make for kids. When the economy is booming interest rates gradually increase, giving the Federal Reserve the ability to let go the coiled up rubber band when the economy slows to get it growing again. The government uses taxes for the same purpose – lowering taxes to give people more money that they can spend to prop up a sagging economy. The only problem is that lower taxes means a higher deficit, a less efficient government, and long term a government trapped into higher debt payments. To think that it takes a veritable army of Ph.D. economists to run this exceedingly simple economic system… The only thing that makes it possible for them to do so effectively is because everybody behaves just exactly the same (rollover the image), so by definition we are Borg.
Consumer sentiment is what has kept the U.S. economy afloat for years now – people being hopeful in the face of war, political negligence, wall street thefts, and sundry other transgressions by virtually every institution in the land. Now we are losing faith.
Technology has been our champion – but there is absolutely nothing really new in sight. The space effort is worse than a B-rated movie. New gizmos are more flim than flam. Why? Because everything in the whole technological lexicon is either classified by one government or another, or kept a corporate secret by thousands of Fortune 500 multinationals who use this power to maintain their market share. Microsoft’s monopoly is the rule, not the exception.
The standard response by Washington to excessive economic growth is raising interest rates. Why not do something more productive to slow the economy than pump money into financial institutions, which are already making record profits? A much more productive way to slow the economy would be to phase in energy conservation standards. That makes businesses more efficient, and locks in energy savings long term. Every large business could be required to pass a regular energy audit. With each new business cycle the conservation standards can be increased, so that eventually America would be as energy efficient as our global competition – Japan, Europe, and Asia.
The wonderful thing about energy conservation projects is that they pay themselves off in a few years. So right about the time the business cycle is turning over, and the economy needs a shot of adrenaline to grow, businesses are experiencing a 30% to 60% reduction in utility bills. That is, the utility bills remain constant while the energy conservation projects are being paid off. After that there is an immediate reduction in utility bills. What better way to generate growth in any business than to prop up the bottom line?
Energy inflation is going to be a problem soon. So far it’s counter acted the deflation fears economists have had, because computer applications have increased productivity at such a rapid rate in recent years. Nobody figured that China and Latin America would traverse the event horizon, and start industrializing at a break neck pace. They are getting more and more work from the western nations via outsourcing of every possible kind of job, every kind of industry. Their output per energy unit far exceeds that offered by Americans, OPEC realizes this, and so individual members of OPEC are sending excess output to these areas – to secure a permanent market for their product, in a region which will be able to pay higher and higher prices for oil because their workers are paid such low wages.
America has the infrastructure to compete on equal terms with these markets, because the ability of energy conservation to benefit from complex networking. Sharing power, keeping generating facilities optimally loaded, generating and transmitting power at the most efficient levels – in regions, states, and within buildings – are all highly developed disciplines, proven by countless engineering applications, and applied in as many different scenarios as their exist. Implementing these strategies on a national level will instantly rocket America into competition with any low wage region of the world. We have the capability of using energy more efficiently than any other economy. The problem is that we lack the political will (because of special interests), the public knowledge and comfort level (because of special interests), and the entrepreneurial freedom to implement such a program (because of special interests).
Businesses have a comfort threshold for technology, just as individuals do. Endless viruses and security upgrades that are for ever being over ridden by hackers who are never caught or prosecuted, have taken their toll on corporate board rooms staffed by MBA’s and not engineers. Extant business models cannot cope with the rapid change of technology, the security and other issues.
They outsource these tasks to knowledgeable firms, but these high tech firms are working under such an extreme level of profit expectation by their share holders that they charge outrageous fees for work that is outdated almost as soon as it is complete. Viruses and spam are the land mines of modern business, and those who facilitate or actualize them are no less guilty of heinous crimes against humanity as terrorists who plant land mines on battle fields around the world.
Unless the operating technology of networking necessary for modern business operations can be simplified or made more secure and dependable, then energy conservation will never happen because it depends upon the computer infrastructure as well. A virus in the energy monitoring and control network could deplete energy reserves and that’s one more risk that already tentative business leaders are unable to cope with. Higher energy prices are at least a known, if an uncomfortable one; to them energy conservation holds just as great a risk of causing those prices to increase because of hacking, or malfeasance, or outright incompetence; as they do to cause utility bills to decrease. The downside risk outweighs the upside potential.
President Bush gave a guts-and-glory redneck press conference a couple of days ago. The American people rallied around his arrogant and offensive stand vis-a-vis Iraq. He forgot that many people around the world were watching too, and were greatly offended. They are voting their feelings now, by withdrawing their money from the U.S. stock market. America may be a total dictatorship, but the whole world is still a democracy and people have learned to vote their feelings with their investments. The world has been extremely tolerant of Americans because of all the awesome new technology we have created – the internet, satellite technology, space exploration incentives, and countless other innovations in every realm of endeavor. They have given us cheap oil, freedom to swagger around the world with our military, and turned the other check at all the Washington foibles. Their tolerance is wearing thin, however.
It is easy to see that industries everywhere abuse the natural wealth of the Earth to make a quick profit. A little more subtle – but far more profitable – is how pharmaceutical companies abuse the natural health of the human body to make a quick profit, by breeding dependence on drugs. This natural health includes physical and mental, as well as spiritual resistance to disease. The CDC reports that fewer physicians counsel their obese patients to lose weight ~ of course they don’t because the patients will then just go to another physician. Besides, obese patients have many more medical problems than fit ones and they keep coming back for treatment, and sometimes even require very expensive procedures.
I believe there are many checks and balances created with independent means, to protect the secret of the Borg hive mind vis- a-vis Leviathan. Since 9/11 these have all been integrated – combining the Jew and Scientist regimes – into a single system.
Each element, of perhaps as many as forty independent sensor points, reacts in a pre-ordained fashion, independent of all others. There can be absolutely no contact between any two sections. In fact, the identity of these sections went up in flames with the Twin Towers; that was the plan. The Bush Administration has, meanwhile, driven all others underground or destroyed them all together. So quite literally with my opposition closed down, all forty independent sensors have an all go signal. Because now all the websites that pretend to be the opposition, are run by “The Trust” for lack of a better term. This eventuality was not anticipated in the original planning, and so is not a part of the scheme. This will drive the stock markets extremely high extremely fast, against all possible kinds of bad news. The only remedy will be to expose the whole conspiracy; and, guess what ~ nobody has enough information to even do that. Otherwise their funding source will have to be cut off; but that is the major banks, and only energy conservation can bring them down. With Americans literally hooked on conspicuous consumption, any concerted effort to wean them will be met with extreme force.
Violence sells – people love it, in their movies, TV shows, and even in advertisements. The war in Iraq has pumped up the economy, the administration, and has been a boon to the media. The advertisers in all forms of media are benefiting as well because people like to equate aggression and violence with their products and company images. Hire us and you get a real fighter on your side.
MCI is emerging from bankruptcy and is expected to be able to compete more aggressively because it has a lower debt load. The same thing happens with companies like Wal-Mart and Microsoft and Dell where a select few own upwards of 20% of the stock, making every purchase contribute to this “debt load.” Why is nobody ever concerned about that gross drain of assets? Because short term the effect is not seen in stock prices, but long term the effect will be grievous ~ except by that time there will be no more competition, and the point will be moot.