Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Sunday, February 06, 2011

"...in capitalism bankrupt businesses go out of business"

...including you. Ian Welsh:

...The bottom line is this: there is one morality for masters and one for slaves. Your lords and masters, who have made you or are making you into a wage or debt slave, have one morality and you have another. The masters don’t just walk away from bad debts, they force other people to pay the master’s debts off or they change the laws so that the masters debts don’t count.

It is, for them, a cold clear business decision. They do what is best for them, no matter what the cost to anyone else. When dealing with the master class, you should operate in the same cold clear fashion: you do what’s best for you and if it hurts a corporation or a rich person, that’s their look out.

Trust me, that’s the way they do it. The cost of the financial crisis is a millions of destroyed lives, including many many deaths. You don’t see any of the people who caused it having moral crises over the fact that they caused a depression, do you?

As the sociopaths on Wall Street like to say, they eat what they kill. What they don’t say is that what they kill, is you. If you’ve lost your house, if you can’t afford your medicine, if your interest rates or the cost of your food has gone up, if someone you know has died due to poor or not health care, odds are high that’s because they made that choice, because that suffering pays for their bonuses, for their foie gras, vacations in the Hamptoms and so on.

It’s you or them, baby, and they’re determined it’s going to be you. So keep acting like slaves, so they can dine off your suffering, misery and death.


Good comments there, too:

...The working class simply doesn’t seem able or willing to comprehend the truly enormous discrepancy in wealth. I mean, they understand “they’re rich, we’re not,” but they don’t seem to understand in a real way what it means that some scumbag on Wall Street earns two BILLION dollars a year for playing computerized gambling with everyone’s money. The numbers are so big, they defy comprehension, but also there seems to be an unwillingness to try, an emotional resistance to even attempt to understand that one person, someplace, is stealing the wealth generated by hundreds of thousands of other people. Easier, instead, to gripe about welfare queens with Cadillacs, or illegal immigrants ‘stealing’ a $4/hour job – those numbers, at least, are comprehensible.

I try to communicate this to people who appear to listen, but they don’t seem to be able to get it. I tell them “The wealthy have stolen SO MUCH wealth from America, that EVERYONE IN AMERICA IS BROKE. The reason you earn less than your father did for the same work is because the wealthy have TAKEN it, and they’re keeping it. The reason that we can’t repair roads and can’t pay for schools, and we can’t keep cops on the street and firefighters on the job is because the ultra-wealthy have TAKEN all the money for that and put it in their overseas bank.”

It falls on deaf ears. It’s like denial is a safer place than facing the fact that we’re being ripped off and doing something about it...


On a cold February day it's much more comfortable to drink beer and watch the Super Bowl ads than actually do anything. That's what psyops are all about: sales of a lifestyle. The lifestyle being sold is slavery, but nobody $eriously calls it that- on the TV, anyway.

But then, there's a lot of doublethink. Ian again:

...it is a category error to say that what we have now is capitalism. It is not. In capitalism bankrupt businesses go out of business.


Pretty soon he'll start calling the good Transylvanian Count a nightwalking revenant, too. Doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime.

Finally, this:

...The most dangerous thing about the sociopaths at the top is not that they’re mean — because they’re not. They are sociopaths — THEY DON’T CARE. And that is what makes them most dangerous. They aren’t enemies, because enemies can be defeated, can be converted, can become allies, can be assimilated.

But sociopaths, and the sociopathic system they have created cannot be co-opted in any way, shape or form. They, and the system, are parasites, doomed to destroy utterly the system they live off of. Now most people would think, “That’s irrational!” And they’d be right, it IS irrational. But why do you think we have the “fairy tale” of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg?

The clearest indication of their sociopathy is not the destruction they rain down upon people, but the fact that they (the elites) are ALWAYS completely shocked when the masses of the poor and starving and oppressed suddenly rise up and start looting and killing. They never expect it, because they simply don’t see the people beneath them as actual living beings, and neither does the system they work in.

They aren’t “mean” any more than a tapeworm is “mean”. And neither are they immoral, any more than a tapeworm is immoral. We have to look at them as they are: dangerous, inflexible, uncaring, spoiled, cossetted, amoral children...


I think of my long lost high school girlfriend who loved me as a well-connected stoner but moved on to lusher parties when I got straight and started getting serious about college. She's now the trophy middle aged matronly wife of a Wall Street hedger billionaire who lost it all in 2007 but is back on top in Nassau county; with no compass, no clue, a fistfull of Xanax, and houses in the Hamptons and Hilton Head; with no regrets the rabbi, the meds, and the analysts can't handle, either...

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