“P. S. I Love You!”

 

P = Plunder

S = Steal

And yes, the insatiable moguls of the big banks and ravenous Oberführers of the multinational corporations love it!

We're talking about people who don't live and think like most of us.  For these folks, 'more' is never a question.  It's an answer!  The only answer.

When the economy crashed in 2008, largely the result of an orgy of speculation and gross distortion of the investment market by the greed of these banksters and corporate hustlers, they were more than happy to line up to plunder the Federal Reserve to the tune of $16 trillion dollars.  Why not?  Money was like manna falling from the heavens into the accounts of major banks all over the world, so that their addiction to casino capitalism could continue without a pause and set us up for the next catastrophic meltdown.

Besides outright theft of fiat money in the form of capitalization subsidies, at another level the plunder takes the form of a lot of acronyms -- NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, TTIP, TISA -- and the gutting of any regulatory oversight.  These so-called "free trade" deals just lubricate the wheels for transferring the wealth and political control from the vast majority of citizens -- the ones who actually work a living, producing things of practical value, products which are markedly more substantial and less diabolical than debt leveraging, collateralization, privatization, and monetization -- to the already ultra-wealthy, ultra-powerful elite.

What will they come up with next?

Corporate greed and plutocratic avarice apparently knows no limits.  As if exporting our jobs to sweat shops in China and Bangladesh putting millions of American workers on the streets; gutting our manufacturing base by shuttering 50,000 factories; pursuing hostile takeovers to gain market share and even monopoly control; promoting predatory lending and liars loans to ravage families and small businesses; destroying unions and driving wages down to the point that a person can't survive any longer working a 40-hour work week; yes, as if abusing the enormous resources and financial power of corporations and their brothers in crime, the Wall Street banks, to relegate the average individual during the long working years of his or her life to the status of a serf weren't enough, now the rich are coming after the elderly.  Giving 45 years of your life to serving the "man" no longer means you are allowed to live a decent, comfortable life in your retirement years.  These criminals are now after employee pension funds.  And because any big pile of money is targeted for a P.S. I Love You blitzkrieg, regardless of who it rightfully belongs to, since 1985 using their pay-for-play puppets in Congress they have been raiding the Social Security trust fund.  Did you get that?  TRUST FUND, as in the fund of all of our accumulated contributions toward retirement, set properly aside and protected so that the money would not be used for anything else.  All the money is gone now.  It funded wars, bail-outs, every variety of corporate welfare and fiduciary abuse which has become standard operating procedure. The money the old folks in retirement homes in good faith paid into Social Security over their lives is just another asset for exploitation.

Just so you aren't deluded into thinking that the mountains of money stolen via all of the unprincipled, anti-social, anti-democratic, coldly callous and cruel instruments of wealth extraction the ultra-rich have ruthlessly applied in the past is ever enough, consider this:

Over the past several years, while poverty rates in America continue to increase, while real wages have barely risen and many are forced to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet, using a rather innocent-sounding device called quantitative easing, $3.5 trillion has been created out of thin air and made available to investment banks and our too-big-to-fail menagerie of casino capitalists.

$3,500,000,000,000!

Is there anyone out there who could use $10,000?  How about $1,000?

Actually, $500 would be a big deal for most of us.

Of course, none of the $3.5 trillion trickled down to you and I -- I assume this is not being read by hedge fund CEOs or any other members of the exclusive .1% club -- au contraire! Instead, it trickled up!

A lot of it found its way into offshore accounts and tax havens.

Plundered . . . stolen . . . socked away.

For what?

More yachts?  More vacation homes?  More private jets?

What else can they possibly buy?

Patience now!  Give them time.

Spending trillions of dollars is not easy.

It takes time and energy.

Arrogance and myopia.

Unfeeling and irrepressible selfishness.

A sense of entitlement and a disdain for the less fortunate.

Callousness, irresponsibility and a total lack of decency and compassion.

Fortunately for the rich, they won't have to plunder and steal to get these.

They already have them in great abundance.



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



“P. S. I Love You!”

TPP . . . just extrapolate and you’ll get it.

 

Because of some trademark or product protectionist agreement or with Bayer, there is no such thing as generic aspirin here in Japan.

They sell aspirin in blister packs, ten to a package, for a little over $8.00 here. As if aspirin is some sort of amazing wonder drug.

Therefore, this bottle which I bought the last time I was in America for $6.99 here in Japan would cost over $240.00!

This is a simple example of how what would appear to be an innocuous patent agreement can dramatically impact the cost and availability of a consumer item.

I bring this up because the public is finally beginning to wake up to the perils of the TPP, a so-called free trade agreement aggressively being promoted by the Obama administration.

The type of arrangement which priced my aspirin in the stratosphere will exponentially expand under TPP.  Of course, this only scratches the surface in terms of the horrifying implications.  TPP is a weapon of mass socio-political devastation.  Here is the entire text.

There are 12 countries included in the TPP:  U.S., Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Chile, Vietnam, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam, representing 11.3% of the world population and 40% of the total economic activity across the planet.

TPP will affect just about everything bought and sold, used by most of us on a regular basis --  food, clothing, medications, movies, songs, cars, smart phones, furniture -- you name it and TPP will be there with its hairy arms wrapped around it one way or another. 

The TPP trade agreement runs over 5,000 pages.  It's been in formulation and negotiation for over three years.  Until very recently, it has been completely kept from the public eye -- literally it was subject to a top secret classification and anyone even attempting to discuss its details was subject to fines and imprisonment -- which alone should have raised major red flags about its contents.  Parts of it were leaked and then finally the entire text of this burdensome document was released.  Now the worst suspicions of those issuing warnings all along have been confirmed.  There is so much to condemn about this diabolical gift to corporations, we could go on for months detailing its egregious agenda and ruthless grab for power.  Much of the analysis and resulting critique is very technical. Most people can be forgiven for having their eyes glaze over and their attention wander.

I offer my simple anecdotal tale to make this complex issue real and accessible.

I submit it as a typical dose of daily life and hopefully a loud wake-up call.

Corporations do whatever they can to maximize profit . . . period!

Corporations are not community-minded or people-oriented.

Corporations are not loyal to countries or their citizens.

Corporations are not in the business of being nice.

They are only in business to make money.  Anything which stand in the way of making money must be eliminated or changed.

We've had NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, WTO.

TPP is now the last in a long list of systematic efforts to fashion the rules, engineer the marketplace, game the system, load the dice, all in the name of making greater profits.  The TPP is a brilliant, if insidious redesign of the macro-economic regime to favor profit over people, corporations over government, faceless multinational corporate hegemony over local community and citizen control.  Please understand . . .


TPP is not an abstraction. It is a genuine threat.

TPP is the worst trade agreement in history.

TPP will crush people under the weight of corporate greed.

TPP will destroy America as a sovereign nation and a functioning democracy.

TPP will destroy any hope for citizens having a say in the future of this country.

TPP will imprison the 99% and make us permanent slaves of the corporate state.

TPP is misleadingly named the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is being sold as a trade agreement.  It in fact is neither.  It is not a partnership of nations.  Nor is it a mere trade agreement.  Designed by multinational corporations, mostly headquartered in America, it is a supra-national framework for destroying the sovereignty of nations and giving citizens of those nations -- that's you and I -- even less say in the industries and marketplace which produce and make available the items we purchase, including the basic necessities of life.

As workers, it gives us less power to improve our wages and working conditions.  Worker safety will suffer, union organizing will become all but impossible.

As consumers, the quality and safety of everything we buy will be compromised.  It will be a race to the bottom, as any attempt at regulation and requiring transparency is challenged under rules limiting and barring practices which interfere with pursuit of profits.

As members of communities, any and all of our efforts, both local and national regulation of environmental conditions -- meaning he purity and safety of our ground, air, and water -- will come under attack, and all of the progress made to improve the environment over many decades will unravel.

The evil step-sister of TPP is TTIP -- the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership -- a nearly identical regime of corporate tyranny targeting the 28 nations of the European Union which is simultaneously under negotiation and aggressively being promoted by our self-described "progressive" president.

Greenpeace just managed to leak 13 of 17 chapters of the most recent version of TTIP.

There have been massive demonstrations and riots going on in Europe against TTIP for quite some time now.  The release of the text of TTIP has heightened tensions even more.

U.S. citizens might just want to ask themselves:  What's all the fuss about?





[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



TPP . . . just extrapolate and you’ll get it.





 

Irony Deficiency Anemia

Our government has become oblivious to the ignominious irony of its policies and actions. Therefore, it blunders on, never questioning why often much of what it does produces the very opposite of either its stated or actual intentions.

Without intended irony, it arms the rest of the world to make it safer. Anyone with a checkbook can obtain weaponry from America. The U.S. is by a huge margin the biggest supplier of military hardware to the international community. We are then shocked when these same weapons end up pointing at us, now in the hands of bin Laden, al Qaeda and other militant extremists.

Without intended irony, it incentivizes corporations to export America's jobs, reasoning that the healthier these corporations are, the sounder will be the economy of the country, evidence of spreading poverty and grotesque income inequality be damned. TPP and TTIP are the latest virulent initiatives toward transferring national sovereignty to multinational corporations, strengthening America by draining it of its self-determination and economic vitality. These so-called trade agreements are NAFTA on steroids. We just hope there's an open seat at future Third World economic
conferences and those countries don't despise us for plundering their natural resources all these years.

Without intended irony, the President declares himself the "environmental president" while promoting the greatest surge in domestic oil and gas production in our history, including the use of fracking and opening up vast stretches of pristine land and fragile offshore sites to ruinous exploration and drilling. The U.S. still refuses to sign the Kyoto Treaty, only marginally participates in world conferences on the environment, and most certainly fails to provide much-needed leadership on issues like climate change and the rapid and dramatic decline in the health of the oceans. The only environment we have protected is a business environment which worships plunder for profit.

Without intended irony, America holds itself up as the beacon of democracy in the world while supporting ruthless despots and grotesque tyranny throughout the world, likewise tolerating the corruption of the electoral system in America itself. Welcome to a world where money buys politicians and the voice of the common citizen is silenced both by oligarchical monopoly of the national conversation and voter disenfranchisement.

Without intended irony, the U.S. promotes democracy in the Ukraine by encouraging the overthrow of an elected government and replacing it in a coup with neo-nazi thugs and plutocrats, who then rig the next election which they of course claim validates their rule, then training and supplying the neo-Nazi National Guard with weapons. As we should suspect, this is part of a bigger plan
which has nothing to do with spreading democracy, and in fact reignites
old antagonisms with Russia and puts us all at risk for World War III.
Nice work, eh?

Without intended irony, the U.S. affirms its commitment to ridding the world of nuclear weapons by spending more now on upgrading our existing stockpiles and R&D on new more destructive nuclear devices, than we did at the height of the Cold War.  With over 4,800 nuclear warheads in its current arsenal __ enough to destroy life on Earth many times over __ we negotiate agreements with our allies to expedite the efficient use and deployment of our bulging arsenals of collective mass suicide.

Without intended irony Obama promised to foster transparency in his administration, yet has increased secrecy, prosecuted whistle blowers at a record rate, has fanatically clamped down on leaks, drastically curtailed freedom of the press by attempting to force journalists to reveal their sources, classified more government documents and communications than any president in our history, has overseen massive and intrusive surveillance by the NSA and other national security agencies of innocent Americans, foreign nationals and even heads of state of America's allies, and continues to
expand the capacity of government agencies to unconstitutionally monitor and record every interaction by U.S. citizens.

Without intended irony, it honors its "responsibility to protect" by attacking other nations, killing a lot of innocent people, creating fear and animosity in the rest of the world, and as a result it fails
its responsibility to protect the people it is most responsible for, American citizens. With our cavalier use of military force, we are more feared, resented, despised than ever. Serious blowback is inevitable. How ironic, eh?

Without intended irony, we scold other countries, like Russia and China, for being bullies, while we ignore resolutions and concerted efforts of the United Nations, refuse to join the ICC or acknowledge its legal authority over us, reserve the right to use our military at any time and place of our choosing, skirt the Geneva conventions by using torture, harass and bomb countries we are not at war with using drones and special ops troops, and talk about needed cooperation among members of the international community while economically strangling with sanctions any country which does not bend to our unilateral dictates.

Yes, we fail to see the irony in all of this. We choose to turn a blind eye to the deceptions and self-sabotaging contradictions. This has indeed made our country sick, an anemic and feckless nation of sheeple, vis-a-vis the noble ideals we once held and now unconvincingly espouse. We struggle with buckling knees in an increasingly futile attempt to prop up the political house of cards we've built of self-deception and delusions.

No house of cards can rise forever. The longer we pile rationalizations and faulty logic on imperialistic hubris and sociopathic fantasies, the closer we come to its ultimate collapse.

It's no longer a question of 'if' but 'when'.

It will collapse.

Let's hope it doesn't take the foundations of our once great nation with it and we are still left with something upon which to rebuild.


[ This originated at the author's personal web site . . . http://jdrachel.com ]