It's the Paradigm

Bankia, one of Spain’s largest banks, is needing a €23 billion bailout, to compensate for their over-zealous investments in the country’s late real estate boom gone bust. Throw in a few other teetering banks and the price tag rises to €50. The only way to thrive or even survive in a scenario of irrationally exuberant lending is to borrow more to keep the growth paradigm going. In other words, as long as the value of property is expanding, it’s not necessary to be rational in your investments. But then, as always happens with bubbles, they burst - it is a part of their nature, after all.

There are two ways that happens, though they’re often intertwined. One is inflated prices. At a certain point, prices have to reflect reality. The other is larger economic movements. The general economic malaise that pervades the country depresses optimism and growth. Either way, the loan is defaulted and somebody is going to have to pay.

Spain wants the European Central Bank to bailout the banks directly. That makes sense, since it’s the system, the paradigm, which encourages, almost demands imprudent lending. Used to be you had to put 20% down to buy a house. A buyer who’s accumulated that much cash will generally be a low level risk. However that would also constrict the market and slow down construction so we can’t have any of that. Instead the establishment wisdom is to push the economy to the limit, go for broke, the more growth the better.

The country is also at fault since it could’ve established rules and policies designed more for stability and prudence than growth at any cost. That would not be an easy task in today’s financial environment. There are only so many Hugo Chavez’s in the world who could ignore the dictates of the establishment view.

The borrower, of course, must take a substantial portion of the blame for the broken contract, but ultimately is has to rest with the bank to assume responsibility and take the loss. Banking is about risk; banksters know the level of risk they are undertaking. If you aren’t smart about lending your money, who else is supposed to compensate for your inadequacy?

Actually it’s the taxpayer who coughs up since some type of deposit insurance is essential to a functioning banking system. (But not in Cambodia, here you’re on your own.) There should be no question or hesitation when a bank gets into trouble; it should be shut down and small depositors paid off. There’s no good reason to keep a stupidly or irresponsibly run bank alive. Also as long as the taxpayer is on the hook to insure depositors the government has responsibility to properly regulate to prevent speculation that has the potential to get the bank into trouble. However, since the banksters own the government, at least in the US, we know there can be no changes on that front.

In Europe it may be different, since they have a more socialist, egalitarian political outlook and the people are hopping mad. Still, there’s a very powerful push on the part of the financial establishment for European countries to ‘take their medicine’, that is, to strip any benefits that might aid the 99% so that they’d have the money to feed the banksters.

Still, can you imagine, Spain coughs up €50 to protect the banks at the same time they’re slashing safety net funds in an economy with 25% unemployment? In fact, latest news is that the Spanish government has accepted a $125 billion loan to bailout its banks… anything to protect the banksters.

The European establishment may be forced to change the paradigm but Americans will never get it together if the recent recall result in Wisconsin is any indicator. Governor Scott Walker, who was elected in a Tea Party surge in 2010, started off giving $180 million in tax breaks to business and then discovered there wasn’t enough money to pay public employees. His ultimate goal, unstated in the campaign, was to break the public unions, which he proceeded to do by virtue of Repug control of both houses of state government.

This didn’t sit well with the unions or the progressive community so they fought back with a signature gathering campaign to recall the governor. The got the necessary signatures, all right, but lost badly in the election with Walker sustained in office by a 53% to 46% vote. There are two immediate reasons why the Repug won. The most important was the flood of money from right-wing billionaire assholes. According to the US Supreme Court - which today garners the support of only 44% of the people - money has the right of free speech. The other reason was that Obama gave the campaign neither financial or moral support. The feckless wonder did not stand by the people. The Dem running against Walker had $4 million and was outspent 8 to 1. Obama made $3.5 million in one fundraising event but couldn’t see his way to helping a fellow Dem.

The fundamental reason for the Dem’s defeat is that Americans, at least a lot of them, are political morons. It’s called the Fox News effect: A recent study showed people who watched Fox were less informed than people who watched no news at all. It’s people who rail against socialism at the same time they love their Medicare, that socialist program that would save the country $400 billion a year if it applied to everyone. It isn’t just the average low IQ wingnut dolt that doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. You’ve got Romney and the Repugs insisting on programs of slashing public services to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy as a path to economic recovery when that’s been an abject failure since Reagan.

Once again Americans face a disheartening lack of choice this November, though the country will slide downhill a little slower with Obama at the helm. In the end result, the people get the politics they deserve… unfortunately.

  

Euro Voters Reject Austerity

Voters in Greece, France and even in local elections in Germany rejected enforced austerity in recent polls. French voters narrowly elected the Socialist Francois Hollande on a platform demanding renegotiation of austerity measures demanded by the European Union. Taxes are already high in France so he’ll have his work cut out for him raising taxes enough to make a difference. At least if he can put people to work the country won’t dive deeper into debt and deficit.

In Greece the two main pro-austerity parties, who between themselves have governed the country for the last 40 years, together received less than 32% of the vote. The anti’s however, divided between the far left and right, will probably not be able to agree amongst each other to form a government so new elections are likely soon. But that means they won’t be eligible for additional bailout money and will likely default, though since they’ve already forced creditors to take substantial haircuts, to all intents and purposes they’re already in default. It’s no more than a pretense to think otherwise.

If they knuckle under and accept IMF and ECB austerity - the leftist candidate called those international bodies loan sharks - there’ll be 5 to 10 years of economic pain. If they default, they’re basically facing the same 5 to 10 years of wrenching changes and economic dislocations, but at least their pain won’t be for the benefit of the banksters and 1%.

The one percent’s mania for austerity for everybody but themselves is diving economies ever deeper into recession. If people aren’t working they aren’t paying taxes but are requiring government help for survival. Cutting is the wrong thing to do when a country is in recession, however, if a country runs big deficits in good times there’s no leeway for additional spending during downturns. As mentioned previously, the half of Keynesianism that governments have conveniently overlooked is the need to build surpluses during boom times. It’s too easy to prop up economies and make everything look good by spending money you don’t have. It’s too easy to think you can rely on growth or inflation or something to come along in the future to make the debt easy to manage, because as we are seeing it doesn’t always work that way.

 In any case, almost everybody is missing the point. Last year greenhouse gas emissions grew faster than ever before. Just imagine what would’ve happened if many parts of the world were not in recession and there was no effort whatever to curb emissions. Those record emissions might’ve been doubled. So while my heart goes out to those developed world people in America and Europe who are jobless and suffering, I have to say to those same people, Thank you for being poor and not being able to consume.

What’s needed is a new paradigm where slackers are tolerated if not appreciated and those who live simply by choice are honored; where growth is reserved strictly for non-material plane efforts: knowledge, intellect, beauty and spirituality. The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is promoting a Gross Happiness Index in place of Gross National Product which includes everything that is bad for us as well as good… every time an auto accident causes personal or property damage, it gets added to GNP. You want to help the economy? Get cancer.

We have to retrench. If somebody really doesn’t want to work (and so much of what’s classified as work today is so demeaning and undesirable, who can blame them) why not give them the minimum for survival and thank them for not consuming. Nixon had the right idea with his guaranteed annual income, which, if I remember correctly was pegged at $4000 per year. With a little casual work on the side, that’d be enough (in today’s dollars) to live a simple but decent life. We also need to take France’s lead and shorten the work week along with encouraging deflation to make life cheaper. It’s already happened in the housing market. It’s now much more possible for an average person with a job to afford a home.

Shortening the work week has the added great advantage of tremendously reducing rush hour traffic. Some people would work shorter hours five days a week, others would work a day less. Either way, all transportation systems would have much lighter burdens. Now most people are forced by the eight hour day to come and go at the same time. Shortening the work week would also give people the time to get involved in society and community, not to mention family, self -improvement and pleasure.

The way to deflate the economy is to tax the rich, really tax them, tax the shit out of them. Nothing good comes from the wealthy having too much money. If they have less money to throw around, prices would be forced down. This is especially true in places like New York which are magnets for vast wealth. If people can no longer afford sky high prices for purchasing or renting housing, then their prices will go down, and all real estate prices will follow, benefiting everybody (but the landed wealthy) in the long run.

The current system is top heavy. BBC interviewed a bankster asshole a while back who kept repeating how important the financial community was to the UK and predicting doom and disaster if a small stock transaction tax were imposed. He conveniently ignored the hundreds of billions of dollars the banksters cost the people in bailouts. A majority of people in a UK survey working for the banks said they were there strictly for the money and that they didn’t think they deserved to earn as much as they did. With so many people in finance earning upwards of half million a year, they’ve turned once middle class London neighborhoods into enclaves where only the upper classes can afford to live and by extension have raised the cost of housing for everybody in the city.

The other major change that needs to happen to save the world is to tax advertising, exempting only small businesses. I’m convinced that marketing is the root of all evil, not money. Money, after all, can do good things, while the sole purpose of marketing is to convince people to buy things they might not need or are possibly bad for them. Even if what they are encouraged to purchase through adverts isn’t necessarily bad, the act of consuming is going to consume our planet and people need to be encouraged to hold back, to not indulge, to buy only what they really need. The present path is not sustainable, let alone healthy.

Admittedly I’m way out of synch with prevailing philosophy (it’s not the first time). The idea of applauding slackers and promoting deflation and reduction in place of growth is about as likely in the present political climate as encouraging pedophilia and welcoming pollution-caused cancers, nonetheless that’s where the world needs to go. That it can’t possibly go that way is a sad commentary on the state of our only planet and its inevitable downward slide into catastrophe.  

It Doesn’t Compute

April is supposed to be the height of hot dry season here in Cambodia. The sun is now directly overhead and most years there’ll be few clouds and no rain for months around this time or it may rain once or twice between January and May. This year we’ve had clouds nearly every day with occasional rains which have been very heavy at times. The rain cools things off a bit, otherwise it’d be in the mid to upper 90’s with humidity up around 50% - super sweaty weather for sure. The rain also relieves me of having to water my plants which now takes about an hour every other day.

Last month America experienced an unprecedented late spring heat wave in which not only about fifteen thousand high temperature records were broken but they were surpassed by 20 and 30ºF  margins, even in one case 40ºF - equivalent to 22º C. In many cases overnight lows were higher than the previous record highs.  

And yet, mention of global warming by America’s politicians is either off limits, for those who you believe still have a brain left, or derided as a monstrous hoax by the idiot/lying class of conservative politicos. Besides it’d be too much trouble to actually do anything about it so we’re just going to keep drilling baby drilling. That’s the ‘practical’ option; after all, think about all those windmills and solar panel arrays and geothermal sites that would have to be developed as an alternative. Or how about the great inconvenience to all those people who’d have to conserve energy by turning off lights they aren’t using. No, as long as there’s a drop of oil or cubic meter of gas in the ground, it’s easier and simpler to stay on our present path.

But it’s kind of depressing just the same to think there are no good options on the table, none that would change the present trajectory to destruction. Bill McKibben, leading climate campaigner, has stated unequivocally that full development of the Canadian tar sands spells certain doom since it’s the dirtiest oil on the planet requiring a lot of energy for processing. The Keystone XL (for extra large) pipeline that’s supposedly essential to the exploitation of that oil is planned to bring the oil to the Gulf coast strictly for export, it’s not even for America’s use. Routing the pipeline across Canada to the Pacific Ocean is possible but it would be much more expensive going over the Rockies, besides the people on that route decidedly don’t want it. The Alberta tar sands don’t produce crude oil, rather a thick tar like substance called bitumen. It is highly corrosive to pipelines and a section operating in Michigan has experienced twice as many leaks as a typical crude pipeline.

An oil platform in the North Sea has recently had a gas blowout and copious amounts are now bubbling to the surface. There’s now a two kilometer exclusion zone for ships, four for airplanes and six for any kind of drilling work, otherwise an explosion of magnificent proportions is possible. It could be six months before the leak can be plugged. The methane that is leaking has 20 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is now big business in many parts of the US. In addition to large quantities of methane leaking out when fracking is used to bring oil up from layers of shale, it also causes earthquakes, permanent contamination of groundwater and results in large quantities of toxic liquid waste to be disposed of. The toxic chemicals used in the process are trade secrets so the people are not allowed to know what their environment is being poisoned with. Typical of America where the corporations own the government, but how do the people who run those corpses live with themselves, how do they sleep at night knowing the havoc they are wreaking on the environment?

Now that global warming has reduced summer sea ice, the Arctic is now open for exploration. There couldn’t be a more difficult or more dangerous place on the planet to experience a blowout. If one happened in winter with the sea covered in thick ice,  temperatures of minus 40 or 50 degrees and darkness all the time, drillers would just have to wait until the next summer to even begin to tackle it. By then the ocean could well be beyond repair.

Meanwhile with the developed world in the economic doldrums, demand for fossil fuels there is not growing much, but here where I am in Asia growth is very fast. Cambodia which is growing at 7% is typical of this area. At that rate an economy doubles in 10 years and since we are starting from such a low point, electricity demand is growing 25% per year. India and China, which combined have nearly a quarter of the world’s population, are growing even faster at 8 or 9%. China is adding to it’s wind and solar power production very quickly but at the same time is still adding the equivalent of a 1 megawatt coal powered plant every week. They’re also buying cars like crazy and why not? Isn’t everybody supposed to be rich, to be able to live like Americans?.

It doesn’t compute, the numbers don’t add up, the world cannot continue on its present path. And yet it will, until it can no longer, because the voices of reason are overwhelmed by the quest for profit.

On another note, America’s political left will once again yearn for a presidential candidate who not only represents their own views, but the people at large. After all, it isn’t just people who call themselves Democrats who want a single payer, Medicare for all, health care system, it’s desired by 2/3rds of the population. It isn’t just Democrats who want taxes raised on the wealthy before Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are cut, it’s a large majority of all Americans. It isn’t only radical socialists who want to eliminate subsidies for the big oil companies, the world’s most profitable corporations, it’s the people at large. It can’t happen because of the obscene power of the corporations and because the Dumbocrats who’re supposed to represent progressive policies are feckless crybaby wimps, gutless wonders who have no fight in them.

The Senate recently held a vote to eliminate big oil subsidies, the Repugs said we’ll filibuster, the Dumbos said, Okay great, we give up. Instead why not say, Okay great, go ahead and filibuster, go ahead and spend a week or two or more explaining to the people of America why it’s so important to subsidize the oil companies while you, the masses, face budget cutbacks in all the programs you so greatly depend on for your quality of life.

But I’ve said it all before and I’m having a difficult writing lately because it seems so hopeless. I greatly admire those political, social, environmental campaigners who never give up, who keep pounding at the truth to try to break through the fog of corporate media and hegemony but I find it hard to maintain any faith that any of it will make a difference.

Still I’m heartened by the people’s response to the one percent’s harsh prescriptions on the lives of the rest of us. In Greece, for instance, jobless, homeless people are taking over and squatting in unused public buildings, with many also being used as community space. Some 70 buildings have been converted in Athens. Crises bring adaptability and change, or at least the opportunity for such. FDR took that opportunity and ran with it, to the great benefit of the people at large and the great frustration of the 1% who are still livid after all these years about Social Security, for instance, and the way it keeps millions of seniors out of poverty or at least off the streets.

Obama’s good at talking the talk, but he walks, along with the Congress, with the banksters. He just signed into law the JOBS act. The acronym stands for Jumpstart Our Startup Businesses. It aids startup businesses by exempting them from normal accounting rules and reporting. According to Matt Taibbi, one of the best investigative reporters of the financial scene who writes for Rolling Stone magazine, who coined the giant vampire squid moniker for Goldman Sachs, it’s basically a license to commit fraud. So after financial shenanigans brought down the world economy, the president and congress are eagerly facilitating further fraud.

Meanwhile the Repugs have given Obama a great electoral gift by waging a war on contraception in particular and women’s health in general. Thanks to sanctimonious Rick Santorum who believes that sex should only be for procreation and blubberhead Rush Limbaugh who called a young woman a slut because she advocated for contraception health coverage, Obama now has a 20% lead amongst women. There’s always been a political gender gap in America with men typically voting Repuglican while women vote Dumbocrat, but before the recent conservative tirades against women the gap was a few percentage points. With the manic Repug quest for ideological 19th century purity, Obama is way out in front.

I guess it’s a good idea that the Repugs are shooting themselves in the feet. Though I couldn’t personally bring myself to vote for Obama it’d be good if he gets to appoint supreme court justices and as I’ve mentioned previously he’s a good ambassador to the world even if he’s a mediocre president for the American people.

ECB Showers Banksters with Money

The European Central Bank recently announced that it was going to provide European banks with an additional €500 billion - $700 billion - in loans at a rate of 1%, which is below the rate of inflation. This came on top of another tranche of the same amount given to them only last December. By loaning money at less than inflation the ECB is literally paying the banks to take their money. Money which, by the way, was conjured up out of thin air. Technically, it’s referred to as quantitative easing; basically printing money so there’s lots of it sloshing around the system.

It is said one benefit of throwing money at the banks is that they’ve been willing to lend to sovereign governments like Italy and Spain at lower interest rates than previously, accepting 5% instead of an unsustainable 7% as before. So borrow at 1%, turn around and lend at 5% and make a tidy profit. Meanwhile, those countries get to borrow at a close to unsustainable 5% instead of a totally unsustainable 7%.

But now you’re thinking that this is all very strange. Why not loan the money directly to Greece, Italy, Spain at 1%, avoid the bankster middlemen and make the additional sovereign debt not only sustainable but light as a feather. No, no, it can’t work that way. While the banks are silver-spoon-fed the people have to sacrifice and suffer, that’s the only way to teach them a lesson and get them on the road to fiscal rectitude.

As a result, one of the austerity measures required by the multinational-institution troika - the ECB, IMF and European Commission - for Greece to get its latest bailout at about 3 or 4% interest (Greece fought to have its debt reconfigured down to that level) is that the minimum wage be lowered from about $1000 to less than $800 per month for people over 25 and down to less than $600 for under 25’s.

Now Greece isn’t rich like Germany or Sweden, but it’s not a developing country. Six hundred dollars a month is doable in Cambodia, though nothing like high-living, where one can rent a city apartment or single family house and yard in a small town for less than $150 per month and everything produced locally is very cheap, but the same amount in Greece or even $800 per month is a life of hardship and privation.

Besides, you’re wondering again, how does lowering people’s wages lead to reducing the country’s debt? What’s the connection? Supposedly, if people work for subsistence wages, businesses will eventually come and employ them and the economy will start rolling again. The flaw in that thinking is that people who earn such low wages don’t pay much in taxes and are so poor they still need safety net assistance. They also don’t have the money to be consumers. And like in America, businesses don’t pay much in taxes in any circumstances because that’s what the corporate conservatism that’s taken hold of the developed world in the last thirty years demands. So even if businesses do come because of the low wages, they’re still not contributing much to the tax base.

Instead of relegating large numbers of Greeks to lives of poverty in order to please and serve the banksters, why not use some of that $1.4 trillion dollars to put the people to work at living wages doing things designed to bring the country forward to the future, like building trains and infrastructure and installing windmills and solar electric systems? That way they’d be paying taxes and be able to consume and get the economy moving. It’s free money after all, nobody paid for it, all it costs the ECB is the paper to print it on and the labor to keep the presses rolling. Why is it so easy to feed corrupt and/or incompetent banksters with cheap money, so hard to find the cash to put the masses to work?

At some point printing money will cause inflation so it’s not a step I would take lightly, nonetheless as long as the presses are running freely, why not do something of value with the money besides propping up banks destined to fail anyway, or at minimum that don’t deserve to live?

Yes, but the banksters will answer, if we go broke there’ll be catastrophe. Well, the banksters themselves would suffer for sure, but the people at large are getting nothing from these constant bank bailouts. Far better to close the banks down and take some of that vast amount of free money to cover losses by retail depositors. Then with a few additional spare hundreds of billions new banks can be funded that are designed to serve the people rather than indulge in casino banking and commodity speculation. Historically about 30% of crude oil futures contracts were purchased by speculators rather than end users, today that number is about 65%. Once again, the problem is there’s too much money in the hands of the wealthy who don’t know what else to do with it besides speculation that causes hardship for the rest of us.

The US Fed has been far more generous with American banks than the ECB with their banks, lending trillions of dollars at 0.1%. So borrow one million dollars, pay back one thousand. Sweet deal. Ah, but these bailouts are paying off, we’re told, the recession was over two years ago, the American economy is now growing at 3% and  unemployment is going down. Evenly distributed, 3% growth would be great, but a recent study showed that 93% of America’s income growth in the last two years went to the top 1%. At the same time, the new jobs created are paying less than the old jobs lost. For the vast majority at the bottom of the economic pyramid, it’s all a downward spiral.

All of which is a cause for demonstration, protest and occupy, which is why the US House of Representatives recently passed a bill (HR347) by a nearly unanimous bi-partisan 388 to 3 that would criminalize a large part of what the occupy movement is doing with long prison sentences and heavy fines. The 1% (income over $400,000) which includes almost all of Congress, are scared shitless of the power of the 99% so are intent to crush dissent and turn the country into a police state.

Legislation has just recently passed that gives the president the right to kill Americans, as well as anyone else in the world, who he considers dangerous, without any judicial review. If he says you’re dead meat, his word is law. The US is already infamous for assassinating many political leaders over the years, including ones who were democratically elected, who were deemed bad for American economic interests. Moreover, as little regard as I have for Obama, there is the possibility of truly evil people gaining of the office of president, who might take the right to decide life and death to grotesque levels. Besides being a terrible example to the world.

Have I depressed you enough? Sorry that’s all I can manage today.

Repuglican Circus

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reportedly made a joke recently about the two front runners in the Repug primary… One of the candidates is a polygamist and he’s not the Mormon. Gingrich, the serial philanderer, who was forced out of congress for ethics violations is the darling of the conservatives… they really believe he’s into their small government, family values shit. He swears he’s not a lobbyist, but nonetheless received $25,000 per month from Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, government mortgage insurers, for his services - not to lobby, mind you, but as a historian.

They also like Santorum, a true conservative who equated being gay to fucking dogs and children, who lost the last contest he fought for US Senate from Pennsylvania by a deluge of eighteen percentage points… real popular guy, that. However, lately he’s on the up and up, winning three contests in a row and shaming Romney, the putative frontrunner.

Then there’s Ron Paul, who, true to his libertarian principles, wants to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and any other part of government that might, incidentally, do anything good for average Americans, who is also noted for putting out a little racist mag.

And what about the turkeys who fell by the wayside (but not before offering a few laughs to the peanut gallery)? Like the pizza guy who regularly pays hush money to keep sexual abuse incidents quiet, who didn’t know that China has had nukes since the early sixties. Or how about the dim bulb from Texas who couldn’t remember which three government departments he wanted to eliminate?

The grand prize will likely go to “Corporations are people” Romney. People own them and work for them, don’t they? Yes, but when’s the last time Texas executed one? That’s how you know what a person is. Dumbocrats will also gleefully take his comment that he doesn’t care about very poor people out of context, though even in context it shows how far out of touch he his. He went on to say that they are taken care of by the country’s safety net… except it’s the worst safety net in the developed world and leaves millions of people in desperate straits. But give him credit, he’s the first major politician who’s uttered the words poor people since Lyndon Johnson… except, that is, to berate them for being poor because they’re lazy. Newt would solve that problem by having them work their way through middle school as janitors. Not only would they learn the value of hard work, schools wouldn’t have to soak downtrodden and long suffering middle class taxpayers (who, in the world of America today, have incomes up to $250,000) for the cost of a low end but livable wage for school janitors.

Let me recount a story about laziness and opportunity amongst poor kids. Some twenty or thirty years ago a wealthy New Yorker found himself teaching a ghetto class of teenagers. I don’t remember what brought him there, whether it was purely voluntary or he was required to be there for some reason. He wound up liking the kids so much he offered, on impulse, to pay all costs of higher education for any kid who did well in school. Almost all the kids in that class went on to college compared to almost none in other classes in the same school. Community colleges used to be free. City College of New York where I got my B.A. used to be free. Otherwise I couldn’t have gone since I was a single parent working for peanuts driving a cab. Society should first provide opportunity then talk about lazy poor people who don’t take advantage of it.

Anyway, forget about Newt, he hasn’t got a chance in a million of being the nominee. Though they may love him in their hearts, even dumb as doorknob Repugs know he can’t win against Obama. Though after Santorum’s recent wins, the Repugs might actually rather go down in flames rather than have a chance at the presidency.

So back to Romney. His other glib great-to-take-out-of-context remark was the one about liking to fire people. In context he added; who provide services to me I don’t like. He was referring to medical insurance and, having hundreds of millions in the bank, he does have a few choices. And no matter how big the co-pays he’s not likely to be forced to declare bankruptcy because of them. Seventy percent of Americans are forced into bankruptcy because of medical bills, sixty percent of those had insurance but couldn’t cover the co-pays, a situation which hasn’t changed a bit with Obamneycare.

In spite of the obvious heartlessness and cluelessness of his statements, his sleaziest attribute by far is the way he made his fortune as a vulture capitalist. Putting it in simplest terms, you look for a healthy going concern to buy. You use a small amount of your own money and borrow the rest using the assets of the company as collateral. Once you’ve got it in your clutches you load it down with debt to pay your creditors or you strip it of its assets to pay those debts, either way the company is toast. You don’t care what happens to the company because you’ve made your money by charging exorbitant fees in the process of destroying it. In that way he bought a Florida company employing 700 people with $30 million of his own money and then earned more than $500 million while bankrupting it and destroying 700 jobs.

            Meanwhile he might well be the next president. If the vote is close the Repugs will steal the election and the Dumbos will figure, as they did in the cases of both Gore and Kerry, that if the Repugs are smart enough to steal it they must deserve it so it’s a waste of time trying to fight for an honest vote count.

Anyway, it won’t make much difference to the American people since he’d be governing from almost the same position as Obama minus a few details. The banksters love Romney, but they’re doing really well under Obama, who’s doing his best to burnish his creds with them. Obama’s new chief of staff, Jack Lew, came right out of Citigroup. William Daley, the previous one, came directly from one of the other megabastard banks into the most important position in the white house. Do you think it’s possible that Obama, if he looked really hard, could find one person in the whole US of A to run his staff who wasn’t a sleazoid, scumbag bankster? Evidently not.

            Obama’s justice department is pushing hard for the states to accept a settlement with the banks over mortgage fraud. It’s a total sell-out, free pass, get-out-of-jail-free card. The banks get to pay $25 billion where the damage is up around $700 billion. They get to do that without admitting any wrongdoing or anybody going to prison for malfeasance. The $25 billion is nothing especially since the banks can borrow it from the Fed at close to 0% interest.

As it stands now Obama will have the advantage of saying the economy is improving since it’s been growing at about 2% and unemployment is going down. But when you look more closely at the numbers you see a completely different picture since some 90% of the growth in the economy has gone to the top 10% in the form of rising stock values and the new jobs created pay a lot less than the ones that have been lost. New manufacturing jobs pay only half what they paid just a few years ago. Once again income is being transferred from the poor to the rich.

So where are we then? Well, Americans will have a choice this November between a cool guy who’s a center right conservative and a doltish megamillionare who’s a center right conservative. And the banksters will be shitting their pants with glee either way.

There’s a ‘2’ in My Milkfruit Tree

Every day now for about a week an old-fashioned style 2 appears right around sunset on a lower branch of a milkfruit tree in my yard. (The fruit on my tree has deep purple flesh with a very sweet center; some milkfruit trees have green flesh. Its taste moves towards the chalky as you get close to the skin, and, as you would expect, it exudes a milky white juice.) All other times I’ve tried to see that 2, it’s just a clump of leaves. But then, against a subdued gray twilight background, it’s just above eye level when I’m sitting in my soft chair on my front porch and blares out to me like neon. It can’t last long, at any time a leaf or small branch will fall and my 2 will be history.

What’s doubly remarkable about that leafy message is that 2 is my number. Starting with my birthday which is on the 22nd, it’s been central to my numerical life. I spent a good part of my childhood at house number 20202. My house in Portland where I lived for 18 years was at 722. My Oregon driver’s license, which I’ve had for 40 years, has four 2’s out of a total of seven numbers. The number two signifies duality, the two sides of almost any question or person. Also the two parts that make a whole - positive, negative; male, female; left, right; right, wrong… and I’m as bifurcated as anyone.

About 10 or 11pm last August 21 I stepped out of my car at home after a night out and there was a large spectacular epiphyllum flower in bloom. (Epiphyllum is a spineless hanging cactus with thin flat leaves.) The bud stem had appeared several days before, but never having seen one bloom before (or for that matter since) I had no idea what to expect. Wow, was it showy  - It was six inches across with long blue petals radiating in a circle off a white center. And I’m thinking, Great display for the party tomorrow, but alas it didn’t even last till the morning. What a flash of brilliance to erupt and fade in such a short time. Are they - the milkfruit 2 and the epiphyllum bloom - omens that I’m about to abruptly fade away? Or do they mean my life is charmed?

For certain, I lead a charmed life, but equally, at the age of 70, who can say how fast I’m going to fade? Meanwhile, I’m having no trouble loving my life and having the greatest time of it, so I was set a bit off balance when my brother-in-law, being the brunt of my last post’s humor, took umbrage. Somehow in the process of defending himself he took my mention of my meager pension as an indicator that I was whining and feeling sorry for myself, whereas I meant only to contrast how great I feel with how little money I have.

On the other hand, nobody likes being poor. But being as I’ve spent nearly my whole life in that category - minus two short interludes after I sold my house in Portland and received an inheritance - I’m (relatively) very comfortable without money.

During a two year period living on the commune I had a total of $16 in my possession. Food, shelter and fuel were covered and I did my share (usually) of work around the place to compensate for having no dough. It seemed just natural then to extend that moneyless status out to the road where I did about 30,000 miles of hitching without money (out of a total of about 70,000). Amazingly enough, looking back, I survived quite well sans cash and sometimes even today wonder exactly how I managed those weeks at a time on the road, fed and taken care of by the cosmos, as it were. As recompense for going ‘naked’ I had experiences and insights no amount of money could replace. (Read all about it in my new book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Enlightenment…forgive the shameless plug.)

At the same time, I always took money with me when I had it. More recently I did a couple of quite long hitches around the middle of the double oughts, but had enough money with me to stay in motels and pay for meals. Meanwhile, if the occasion arose, I’d have no problem sticking out my thumb and going anywhere I needed to (in the states anyway) on the spur of the moment, without cash. But once again, I wouldn’t do it voluntarily, so there’s your duality.

Aside from the odd ascetic or monk, nobody who’s poor ever turns away from mammon. There are people who eschew additional money when they already have enough, but even those are few.

Even living here in Cambodia where everything that’s important - food, shelter, clothing, transportation - is dirt cheap, my $800 per month income (Social Security plus writing) is not living high, though it does provide a good and healthy life and still affords lots of good times.

 Bro-in-law pointed out that Social Security is based on what you put in and I had my choice so why was I whining. Maybe there was a little whine there. I worked hard enough when I was working, just didn’t make any money because during the bulk of my working life in the states - 14 years - I was doing recycling, the bastard stepchild of American industry. The US gives a tax break for cutting down a tree but nothing for recycling paper. We also recycled certain materials for the good of it even when they were big losers on the balance sheet. As a result, I never earned more than $11,000 in one year in my life, though for more than half those 14 years, I kept longer than 40 hour work weeks and had a lot of responsibilities. That accounts for my meager pension, which is now, with this month’s raise, $660. 

(Don’t tell anyone but Social Security is part of an income-redistribution, communist plot to steal money from the haves and give it to the have-nots. The person who put ten times as much as I did into the system only gets out three or four times as much as I do.)

Had I been willing to wait till the age of 65 years and 8 months, I’d be getting about $800 now. The average pension is about $1200 per month. That would not finance the good life in Portland, say, but it would be just barely livable with enough to pay for the cheapest one bedroom apartment, keep an old clunker on the road, eat healthy but almost never go out or indulge in any of the dearer foods, drink low-down beers and rarely do it outside the house, always be late with bills because you are juggling your limited resources… well, you get the picture. That’s the way I’ve lived almost all my life, it’s second nature and to some extent I’m still doing it now.

But $660 in Portland? Painful. What if I didn’t know how to live outside the US? Well, I’d be whining for sure. Here I’m very comfortable though it’s still not a cushy life, and, as you might expect, I would like a bit more money to spend… another few hundred dollars would do; in fact, $1200 would be just fine. At the same time I still love my life the way it is and I’ll get along with what I have for sure.  

In two countries that I’m aware of - The Netherlands, Australia - everybody gets the same amount, in both cases about $1400 per month. That makes sense to me. The whole idea is to keep geezers off the streets and out of the poorhouse. And for we old-timers to be able to maintain a little dignity while our life forces are fading. A state pension is a form of insurance in case you made poor choices, were too lazy, indifferent or indigent to save for retirement or maybe had a run of bad luck. Whatever, it’s hardly the life of Riley.

            I chose to work hard for little, and now I’m paying for it, though karma being what it is, you do what’s given to you. It’s your choice but it’s even more a part of the grand plan, so you carry on day to day, month to month, year to year and before you know it you’re 70 years old. If you’re lucky like me you’ve found a place to be comfortable where you can take life easy. Working hard is great when you’re in the prime of life, and it’s good to be able to do it in spurts in your twilight years, but at 70 stress and hard work will only wear down the parts that much faster and shorten your life so once again I’m fortunate to have found my home.

            It’s been ten years since I came to Cambodia looking for work. I had tried to figure out a way to survive in the states, but my prospects were dismal. Like many events in my life, I was forced by circumstances to move on only to discover the perfect place for me.

            And a charmed place at that.

           

Guilt Tripping

I’m beginning to agree with my brother-in-law: My life is too easy, I’m enjoying it way too much. I should be like him: At the age of 80 he’s still working full time doing his part for the American and world economies. There’s not much made in America anymore so the new cars he buys on a regular basis and other trappings of the good suburban life he works so hard for mostly provide jobs for Japanese and Chinese, but what the hell, they need to work too.

Meanwhile, the only endeavor-like activity I can muster lately is a couple hours of writing a day and it rarely involves significant remuneration so my contribution to the world’s economic well-being is mostly limited to my meager pension, so, realistically it’s not much more than negligible. Otherwise all I do all day is putter around with my 250 plus potted plant collection, either gazing in awe at the beauties or fretting about those that look sickly; or riding my bicycle around a pacific tropical countryside or staying informed by reading and listening to lots of news or taking long afternoon naps or hanging out with friends drinking beers in the local bars. Is that any way to live?

I especially feel guilty now that the weather here in Cambodia is as good as weather gets; you know, low to mid-seventies at night - cool enough in the morning for me to want to put on a long-sleeved shirt - and a balmy mid-eighties in the daytime with humidity low enough to preclude perspiration except with serious exertion - I can walk for an hour without working up a sweat. Around April when the temperature here goes up near 100 and barely goes below 85 at night and the sweat pours off of you even when you’re not lifting a finger; well then I wouldn’t feel so bad about old sis and bro-in-law all bundled up against the deep-freeze Minnesota winter, but now I’m just racked with guilt about having it so easy.

Maybe I should assuage my guilt by going back to states and supplementing my $636 per month pittance of a pension by getting a job as a minimum wage Mall*Wart greeter? I’m good at smiling all right, though my weak back might make standing on my feet all day a bit of a challenge. Alternatively, I could always make do in one of the new tent cities that have sprung up around America. I love the outdoors so spending the winter in a tent shouldn’t be all that difficult. Think about hanging around the campfire roasting marshmallows and singing camp songs like Good Night Irene, that’s got to be lots of fun.

I dunno, maybe I should just resign myself to slackerhood and leave the consumerism and concomitant production of CO2 to more upstanding and responsible members of society. I am, after all, an old hippie so it would be kind of fitting to live out my remaining years being counterculturally unproductive, so to speak.

On the other hand, spending my paltry pension here in low-income Cambodia where it actually makes a difference, not to mention provides me a decent standard of living, can’t be all bad, can it? I thought not.

Meanwhile, in the midst of debilitating guilt and remorse while plagued by congenital lethargy and just plain laziness, I have managed to create a blog of news, views and stories from Cambodia: if you’re interested go to http://stanscambo.blogspot.com.