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.
Kingda Ka, oh baby!
I love my wife’s perspective on America.
She recently drew my attention to Kingda Ka, one of the world’s fastest and probably most frightening roller coasters. It whips riders straight up, then plunges them straight down, in a shrieking, brain-compressing drop of 418 feet. Maximum speed? 128 MPH! You can see from the POV YouTube video at the end of this posting, this ride is most definitely not for the faint-of-heart.
Kingda Ka is one of the main attractions at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, NJ and has no shortage of takers. These would be the same people who like base-jumping from the Eiffel Tower and bobbing for apples in a wingsuit in the jet wash of a 747.
Back to Masumi, my brilliant Japanese wife.
“So . . . America can build a high-speed jet coaster [ roller coasters are called jet coasters here ] but they can’t build a high-speed train?”
Now, this was not America-bashing. Masumi has no particular problem with America — that is, other than a couple of atomic bombs in 1945 and all of the raping and murders that go on in Okinawa because of the U.S. military base there. Despite these minor caveats, she has no repressed antipathy toward America.
It was just a comment, an expression of astonishment at the incongruity of it all, as in: “You can send a man to the moon but you don’t have any way of sewing buttons on a shirt?”
Maybe this comes as a shock to most Americans: But trains as a form of transportation are completely taken for granted in most of the industrialized world. China, Italy, Great Britain, Switzerland, Austria, France, even South Africa, India, Malaysia, and Thailand, and of course Japan, are just some of the countries where I have personally used trains to get around. In most places, trains are like flush toilets, running water, electricity, roads, and now WiFi. They are a standard component of everyday life, just like cars in the U.S. You want to go somewhere? You take a train. Every day around 7:30 am, the trains here are full of kids on their way to school and businessmen on their way to work.
Beyond regular train service, high-speed trains — high-speed is considered being able to sustain a speed of 200 MPH, though many go much faster — are, among other places, up and running in China, Spain, here in Japan, France, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Russia, Finland, and even Uzbekistan. China leads the world with almost 12,000 miles of high-speed rail, Spain is second with over 1,900 miles, and Japan is third with over 1,650 miles.
Yes, this is pretty standard fare. In Europe and Asia, everything is connected. All of the airports, both domestic and international, the trains, the subways, and the buses, are all engineered in vast intertwined and layered matrices to make transportation the least of anyone’s worries.
If you want to get technical about it, Masumi is not entirely correct. The U.S. does have one high-speed corridor. It is part of the Acela Express service between Washington DC and Boston. It’s a 17 mile-long stretch where “theoretically” the train could reach the 200 MPH qualifying speed. But the entire run is on rickety old regular railroad tracks and the train makes so many stops, the average speed for the trip is only around 65 MPH. Good grief! The normal everyday trains here in Japan go faster than that!
As if the U.S. were not already dismally behind just about every other advanced country — and some not so advanced — get this: China and Russia are in the process of developing something called hyperloop technology, a system using magnetically-suspended pods to transport people and products across the expanses of their vast countries at — are you ready for this? — up to 750 MPH! Seat belts are recommended.
“So America can build a high-speed jet coaster but they can’t build a high-speed train?”
Actually, it could. It just doesn’t.
Until you can visit Six Flags Great Adventure personally, I’ll just leave you with the next best thing.